sphaleotas

If The People Are United They Will Never Be Divided

http://savemdxphil.com/2010/05/28/i-occupied-middlesex/

Make Professor Esche’s day

Sign the petition for an academic boycott of Middlesex University until such times as it restores its philosophy programme, here.

Prophet Muhammad Finally Successful in Bid to Locate Art Garfunkel

First they came for the department the general approach of which to the intellectual legacy of Frege’s critique of Psychologism I didn't much care for...

Patrons are reminded that, with the closure of each Philosophy department at the hands of garagistes, Malcolm Gladwell prospers and the preponderance of journalistic references to John Gray and Alain de Botton as ‘philosophers’ increases by twelve-and-three-quarters per cent.

In which connection, it is vital that you sign the petition ‘Save Middlesex Philosophy’. Remember: all that is necessary for the Power of Thinking without Thinking to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

A Cultural Misunderstanding

This goal [“to put the reader to work: to the work of hearing all the different meanings in what people say and write and to the work of deciphering meanings that are not at all evident on the face of things”] does not necessarily excuse all the obscurantism that Lacan indulges in and that Sokal and Bricmont justly point out. They seem to neglect, however, that what works in France—talking over the heads of one’s audience and seducing them into doing background reading on the authors and technical terms mentioned—does not work quite as well in the English-speaking world. Lacan could easily assume that his faithful seminar public—his audiences numbered up to 700 in the 1970s—would go to the library or the bookstore and “bone up” on at least some of his passing allusions. To spell out every glancing reference and elaborate at length on every analogy (scientific, mathematical, philosophical, linguistic, or whatever) would have put part of his audience off, leaving them with the feeling that they were being talked down to, infantilized—after all, a number of them were accomplished scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and writers. The English-speaking lecture-going public does not, for the most part, operate in the same way, preferring to be spoon-fed rather than to be left to fill in the demonstration.

— Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading ‘Écrits’ Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 130.

Jan Palmowski’s Academic Vision

Concerned that this British Petroleum-sponsored coprophage stands set to inflict his chromosomally-enhanced agenda of ‘Gender and Sexuality’, ‘Global Politics, Identities, Cultures’, ‘Cities, Communities, Cultures’ and ‘Digital Cultures’ on King’s College, London, Sphaleotas urges readers to sign the petition before it’s too late.

Cretinous tirade

Graham Harman writes...

I was going to say “somehow I missed this,” but it looks as though LEVI JUST POSTED IT.

You can read it for yourself, but I’m in general agreement with the notion that a successful philosophical paradigm is one that creates plenty of work opportunities for other people. And I say this not only on the basis of practical observation, but for philosophical reasons. I’m fond of quoting Aristotle as saying that a substance is what supports different qualities at different times; it follows that something is more substantial the more it allows for non-dogmatic variation and distinct personal approaches, as long as the underlying style is the same.

Levi mentions phenomenology as a successful example. Phenomenology is out of fashion in today’s continental environment, I realize, but it had and continues to have a good run. It appealed to atheists as well as Catholics, Paris hipsters no less than German scholars, and was useful both for precise academic technicians and for freewheeling novelists.

Another example Levi didn’t mention, but with which he would surely agree, is Bruno Latour. The breadth of his impact is stunning. Almost any field can take something from Latour, at least in the humanities, and I’m generally in awe of the people who are found at Latour lectures and events: young, brilliant, working in just about any field, and also extremely gender-balanced. Actor-network-theory has snowballed well beyond Latour’s own use of it, and he has built a good-natured empire of thousands of followers. This was really brought home to me during the period when people were requesting my Prince of Networks manuscript via email. Among the many requests was one from a Department of Fishery Science.

My favorite sentence in Levi’s post is the last sentence of the following:

“The emerging phenomenologist could always contribute something new, if only in a small way, but it’s difficult to see how Badiou has created a democratic philosophy that opens new paths of research. What we instead get is dogmatic discipleship. This situation is aggravated by his celebration of axiomatics that forecloses novel paths of investigation. It’s impossible to imagine a Badiousian Lingis.”

And I also agree with this:

“The trajectory of the scientistic materialist strains of SR are pretty predictable. Here what we’re going to get are increasingly reactionary, epistemological (and superfluous) apologia to various branches of the sciences (in particular, neurology and quantum physics) that contribute little to these sciences (because they’re just doing epistemological grounding work) and that contribute even less to the various branches of the humanities. Not only is this variant of SR mostly a militant-boys-no-girls-allowed-in-our-club-house style of thought (you can thank Mel for this characterization)– the tone is pretty macho and insufferable –but the inevitable consequence of this trend is a scientistic celebration of the hard branches of the sciences that provides little in the way of the cultural sciences.”

The word “superfluous” is on target here– the sciences don’t need this. And I agree about the insufferable machismo of the tone much of the time. The culture that is growing up around that side of SR often has a nauseating sort of “tough guy” tone to it, as also mentioned yesterday in my reference to Mel Gibson’s “Passion.” But to some extent that problem is simply adopted from the culture of analytic philosophy more generally… A female friend of mine, a very talented philosopher initially in the analytic style, bailed out on one of the top analytic Ph.D. programs after a year despite doing just fine. Why? Because she was simply sickened by the let’s-tear-each-other-to-shreds-on-the-basketball-court-and-then-smoke-cigars intellectual lifestyle of that Department. There’s none of that around Latour, for instance (despite his love of cigars).

My sense is that those strains of SR will simply drift further and further from philosophy altogether toward outright (and superfluous) commentary on the sciences. Initially the interest in that quarter, for me at least, was the interesting balance struck between the hard sciences and recent French thought. But the balance has been rapidly disappearing, and it’s turning into plain old Science Wars thuggery, which is the main reason I won’t be reading Collapse as avidly as before.

Further examples of Professor Harman’s hard-hitting prose can be found in his forthcoming volume, Circus Philosophicus.

Collapse may be purchased online.

Collapse Vol. VI: Geo/Philosophy

About this Volume

Following Collapse V's inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus' deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy poses the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy's task to escape the planetary horizon?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as an (or the) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract 'world' that is the condition for a 'whole' of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions presents us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth - these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI brings together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of 'planetary thought'.

Contents

ROBIN MACKAY
Editorial Introduction
NICOLA MASCIANDARO
Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
Introduction to Schelling's On the World Soul
F. W. J. SCHELLING
On the World Soul (Extract)
GREG MCINERNY, DREW PURVES, RICH WILLIAMS, STEPHEN EMMOTT
New Ecologies (Interview)
TIMOTHY MORTON
Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger and the Beautiful Soul
F I E L D C L U B
How Many Slugs Maketh the Man?
OWEN HATHERLEY
Fossils of Time Future: Bunkers and Buildings from the Atlantic Wall to the South Bank
EYAL WEIZMAN
Political Plastic (Interview)
ANGELA DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN
A Given Time / A Given Place
MANABRATA GUHA
Introduction to SIMADology: Polemos in the 21st Century
REZA NEGARESTANI
Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay
ROBIN MACKAY
Philosophers' Islands
CHARLES AVERY
The Islanders: Epilogue
GILLES GRELET
Theory is Waiting
RENEÉ GREEN
Endless Dreams and Waters Between

buy online

Sphaleotas was shocked to read hurtful and wholly groundless insinuations of anti-Semitism levelled against a respected philosopher by a prominent television celebrity.

And yet, guided by the insight of thinkers as diverse as Pythagoras and Nietzsche, Chrysippus of Soli and Heraclitus of Ephesus, Gautama Buddha and Jules Henri Poincaré, is there not consolation to be had in the fact that, in a sense, we've all been here before?

Doctor’s orders

Fellow Christian Gentleman Dan Cruickshank has drawn my attention to a solo exhibition mounted by erstwhile spiritual advisor to Màlik Yimayama, Kristen Alvanson.

A keen student of all matters numerological, Sphaleotas urges your attendance.