Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a Sawyer Seminar Lecture at UC Davis featuring Isabelle Stengers and, responding to Stengers, Donna Haraway.  Although they’ve been influencing one another’s works for years, this was one of only a handful of public appearances they have made together.  Adam Robbert of the world renound Knowledge Ecology posted recordings of the lecture HERE, and for a good overview of the topics covered, check out his notes HERE. 

Following the other lectures in this Sawyer Seminar series, the topic of the lecture was the problem of indigenous cosmopolitics.  I say problem because they were note proposing answers or uncontested definitions, but were opening a series of questions.  How do cosmopolitical proposals for  a global or universal collective of humans and nonhumans relate to indigenous lifeways, for which politics is embedded in local places?  Is “indigenous cosmopolitics” an oxymoron?  If it exists, how?  And so what?

Stengers focused on indigenous cosmopolitics by way of an encounter with “the challenge of animism,” which she connected with the challenges of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, citing Starhawk on withcraft (feel the smoke of witches burning) and citing David Abram’s sense of an “ecology of magic.”  The main point for Stengers is simply this: ideas are actual participants in the craft of cosmopolitics.  They are, as Haraway put it, “cosmopolitical critters,” actors in the risky “speculative fabulation” (sf) that defines the craft of cosmopolitics.  

Our challenge is to learn the craft of building lures, the craft of animating and being animated by abstractions.  Indigenous cosmopolitics enrolls narrative and memory in practices of reclaiming (not to restore, but to reformat and reactive) the metamorphic power of ideas, bringing them into an open space of participation where humans and nonhumans can (just maybe) co-constitute a world where, as Zapatistas put it, “many worlds will fit,” including the worlds that we call “ideas.”

I finally got around to attending to some of the wonderful essays in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (Columbia UP, 2011).  Incidentally, this is one of about four of Clayton Crockett’s books I’ve read in the last year.  I’ll have more to say about his work later.  For now, I’ll just say that this book on Hegel is a must-read…for Right-Hegelians, Left-Hegelians, post-Hegelians, anti-Hegelians, etc. 

For all of those who are stuck in an interpretation of Hegel as a totalizing thinker who appropriates and assimilates all difference and alterity into his own absolute knowledge, this book would be a great place to start loosening up—reopening your interpretation of Hegel and letting go of that overused straw man argument. 

It turns out that Hegel is not an extremely constipated thinker who appropriates reality into himself without remainder, nor a coprophagic thinker reappropriating that remainder.  Hegel is much more open-ended, radically affirming the irreducible contingencies of the real.  Žižek makes this abundantly clear in his chapter, “Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation.” 

The matrix of the dialectical process is not that of excrementation-externalization followed up by swallowing up (reappropriation) of the externalized content, but, on the contrary, of appropriation followed up by the excremental move of dropping it, releasing it, letting go. (p. 231)

The move of letting go is like the movement of God, letting go of divinity in the process of incarnation, which is an act of emptying (kenosis).  This letting go opens a space for inquiring into religion and the complex political relationship between the sacred and the secular (where the secular is the sacred letting go of itself).  This movement of letting go (in the vernacular, “shitting”) also “opens up an unexpected space for ecological awareness,” a scatological ecology according to which nature is experienced “as something to be left to follow its inherent path.”

“What critics of Hegel’s voracity need is, perhaps, a dosage of good laxative.”  True as that may be, as I recall, William James let go of some anti-Hegelianism with a dosage of nitrous oxide, not laxative. …in any case, a dosage of good something… 

Becoming integral is a way of life.  It is the light touch cultivated in the art of becoming inaccessible…

I think often of Carlos Castaneda.

“The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible,” he [Don Juan] said.  “In the case of that blond girl it would’ve meant that you had to become a hunter and meet her sparingly.  Not the way you did.  You stayed with her day after day, until the only feeling that remained was boredom.  True?”
            I did not answer.  I felt I did not have to.  He was right.
“To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly.  You don’t eat five quail; you eat one.  You don’t damage the plants just to make a barbecue pit.  You don’t expose yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory.  You don’t use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love.”
—Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Washington Square Press, 1991), p. 69. 

“But don’t overdo it,” he went on.  “The touch of warrior-travelers is very light, although it is cultivated.  The hand of a warrior-traveler begins as a heavy, gripping, iron hand but becomes like the hand of a ghost, a hand made of gossamer.  Warrior-travelers leave no marks, no tracks.  That’s the challenge of warrior-travelers.”
—Castaneda, Active Side of Infinity (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 146.

In the process of moving, I’ve come upon a small number of scraps of paper that give me pause, and I wonder whether I’ll keep the paper or consign it to recycling.  I’ve said some intolerably short goodbyes to some very old and dignified friends.  Adieu. 

The sequence with which I discover the scraps is, to my surprise, the most consistently important factor shaping my decision.  If the scrap is part of an interesting series, I’ll keep it.  Here is an example of a series of two…and I’m still waiting for the third.

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” (Emerson). 

“It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary” (Whitman).

I’ve been thinking about Bruno Latour’s term, “geostory” (from his Gifford Lectures), which refers not just to stories that humans tell about Earth but refers to the implosion of the categories of the semiotic and the material, the sign and the thing in itself, history and geology.  If geostory is a story of Earth, “of” should be read as a double genitive, both objective (story about Earth) and subjective (story belonging to Earth, i.e., the narrative unfolding of Earth itself).  In any case, what really strikes me here is how many people have already proposed concepts that resonate with Latour’s proposal for geostory.

Consider an example from Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979).  “Now I want to show you that whatever the word ‘story’ means [...], thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses.  Rather, if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones [...], the evolutionary process through millions of generations whereby the sea anemone, like you and me, came to be—that process, too, must be of the stuff of stories.” (p. 12).

I’m also reminded of one of the working notes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968).  “In fact it is a question of grasping the nexus—neither ‘historical’ nor ‘geographic’ of history and transcendental geology, this very time that is space, this very space that is time, which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh” (p. 259).

Finally, I’m reminded of The Universe Story (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry: “There is eventually only one story, the story of the universe.  Every form of being is integral with this comprehensive story.” (The Universe Story, p. 268)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish between the relativity of truth and the truth of the relative in their concept of partial observers.  Unlike claims of a relativity of truth, for which truth is relative to different subject positions of human observers, the truth of the relative is inhuman, constituted by the experimental/experiential forces of the things themselves.   Consider their conceptualization of perspectivism in light of quantum physics. 

Heisenberg’s demon does not express the impossibility of measuring both the speed and the position of a particle on the grounds of a subjective interference of the measure with the measured, but it measures exactly an objective state of affairs that leaves the respective position of two of its particles outside of the field of its actualization, the number of independent variables being reduced and the values of the coordinates having the same probability. [...]  Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them in its system of coordinates. [...]  In short, the role of a partial observer is to perceive and to experience, although these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied. […] Partial observers are forces. […] Partial observers are sensibilia.  [What is Philosophy? (1994) pp. 129-131]

[C]ontrary to conventional wisdom, black Americans have not been indifferent to environmental values; there is, in fact, a rich tradition of black environmental thought.  Du Bois and many other black writers–including Henry Bibb, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Caver, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes–had a great deal to say about how slavery and racial oppression affected black Americans’ relationship to the land, and their arguments offer valuable insights into humans’ relationship to nature in general.  Their works belong in the canon of American environmentalism.

Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (University Press of Kansas, 2007), p. 3.

HERE is a pdf of a recently published review that I wrote on Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought, by William Hamrick and Jan Van Der Veken (SUNY, 2011).   This is one of multiple reviews I’ve written for one of my favorite journals, Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology (published through Brill).

 

For about a year, I’ve been slowly developing a pop analysis (Deleuze and Guattari) of the music of Tool, particularly with reference to Nietzsche’s hope for a Dionysian future of music.  The good people at Nomos Journal have published a short piece I wrote on that topic (thanks, Seth).  You can find it HERE.

While I have read everything of Deleuze, I am not always convinced he is so useful in my empirical enquiries. I am impatient in this otherwise beautiful book, What Is Philosophy?, with the way philosophy’s role is exaggerated beyond any recognition, and also by the fact that on religion he has nothing much to say.  Deleuze is not my all-purpose philosopher.  Also, and that’s a disagreement I have with Isabelle [Stengers], I don’t see him as a good writer, and for me the writing is very important, the crafting of books with very specific literary strategies that embody very specific theories.
Bruno Latour, “Interview with Bruno Latour,” in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, eds. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 24.

I agree with Latour’s assessment of Deleuze’s writings, and more than that, I agree with his problems regarding Deleuze’s lack of attention to religion.  Although much has been written lately appropriating Deleuze into theological and religious discourses, Deleuze himself did an extremely poor job of accounting for religious truth.  Accordingly, it’s easy to say almost anything about Deleuze’s religion.  Is it a this-worldly Hermeticism (Joshua Ramey), a helpful source for Christian liberation theology (Kristien Justaert), or a Gnosticism that is neither this-worldly nor helpful for concrete emancipatory practices (Christopher Simpson)?   

I couldn’t agree more when Latour says, “I consider that philosophies that don’t deal with the truth production of religion are as incapable of dealing with real thought as those who can’t deal with the truth production of science or the truth production of techniques.  This is why the whole current of anti-religious thinking, which is very strong in much French critical thought, I find unhelpful” (ibid.).

That Latour said those words over a decade ago is an indication that he has been concerned with religion long before the “new enquiry into natural religion” that he is presenting in the current Gifford Lectures…even long before his work on Iconoclash or his articulations of “factish gods.”  Indeed, as he says in the interview I’m quoting here, “I started with religion and was a theologian first, exegesis more exactly” (ibid.).  I’m sure a book of Latourian theology is forthcoming.