lightsinthedistance-modernlife

A three thousand word essay for Claire Colebrook in a day. The best was a 7000 word essay for New Literary History (hi Rita!) in three hours.

"My own experience confirms this. Here's our profile: healthy family of 3, with good income, living in NY, with both spouses now self-employed. We have been without health insurance for the past 2 years, since the best we could do was $3000/month for a basic plan through Blue Cross. 3000 dollars a month (that was the cheapest non-catastrophic plan, too)! Who could afford that? Anyhow, last week I called up the NY state agency to check prices through the exchanges and was quoted prices of between $400-$650/month, depending on the plan and whether it was Silver or Bronze. I literally couldn't believe it. Clearly this is tyranny, fascism, socialism, the purest example of dictatorship I have ever witnessed, an affront to everything that is holy and American. But I like it." --comment on the Obamacare rates on one of my favorite news sites today

 I like how the tank becomes military here.

A think tank is just a fake university run by conservatives or neoliberals to confuse people. Look at this for instance . The chap spreading the wrong about Obamacare is   an “adjunct scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. In other words he is supposed to appear a part-time, innocent eager beaver pursuing truth. Whereas his fee for the “research” alone is probably double or triple what an actual adjunct professor would be paid for teaching one class.

Continued from the last post: I can't tell you how awkward it was to be pathologized as one of these apocalypse mongers on numerous occasions, perhaps most intensely at U Wisconsin Madison last fall. Especially since like Latour (I say it all the time, in a slightly different register), my belief is that the apocalypse has already occurred.  I was pathologized thus simply for stating a physical fact: at the rate we are going, by 30 years from now we will have emitted five times more gigatons of carbon than is necessary to, ahem, "transform" (I believe I used a coital verb) Earth beyond all recognition. An arche-fact, if you like, one that doesn't depend on a correlator to make it real.

Modernizers are extraordinarily good at freeing themselves from the shackles of the archaic, provincial, stuffy, local, territorial past. But when the time comes to designate the new localities, the new territories, the provinces...toward which they are migrating, they content themselves with utopia, with hype, and great movements of the chest... No wonder they never paid any attention to where they were headed, obsessed as they were to escape from attachment to the old land. Good at detachment, they seem quite naive when the question is how to reattach themselves to a new boat, how to delineate a new nomos... Funnily enough the more progress-oriented modernizers are, the more they are ready to deny that ecology could even be an issue. The more rabid is their contempt for they call “prophets of doom,” “apocalypse mongers.” If you push them a bit more they will even tell you that all the talk about the end of time, of the inuption of Gaia is nothing but so many schemes to exploit the po...

“ Hello!   You are receiving this because you are in some way connected with me and my book Hyperobjects , which is due out on September 23 .  Hyperobjects are things such as climate and radiation, not to mention Earth itself. Things that massively outscale us, things that are massively distributed in time and space.  Rather than do a book launch--one place, one time, didn't seem appropriate--I decided to call 9.23 Hyperobjects Day.  We will celebrate Hyperobjects Day in a necessarily rolling, phased way, because we are living on a gigantic thing that rotates.  We will celebrate Hyperobjects Day in a contemplative manner.  I wondered what the simplest thing to do might be to acknowledge the looming presence of at least one of our beloved hyperobjects.  On Hyperobjects Day, on the hour of 10am wherever you are, I want you to take your shoes off for one minute.  When you take your shoes off, you notice you are on Earth, for a moment. Two of the fami...

That parallel with Latour is strange. I wrote Hyperobjects in fifteen days in the summer of 2011. Latour gave the lectures in 2012. Presumably he was getting them together in 2011 too. Thinking is sometimes distributed such that you wonder whether there is such a thing as a zeitgeist.

Watching the Gifford lectures in preparation for the American Academy of Religion, I"m struck by how when writing Hyperobjects  I was thinking the same thoughts as Latour, a fact that has often been pointed out to me by our mutual editor Lindsay Waters of Harvard. Several points of contact include our enthusiasm for the term Anthropocene  (and damn the humanist hand wringing), our rejection of the concept Nature, and our thinking of what comes next (for Latour it is called Gaia) as like the "only a god can save us now" of Heidegger, in a strange ironic way. I'll post some excellent lines of his on why Anthropocene  is a very good term.

Oh yes I think so. A growing number of architects are into it. These were suggested to me as prototypical examples of it , and I'm thinking about it right now. Very beautiful essay on Harman and possibilities for OO architecture. More on that soon.. Judging by how many architecture and design journals and conferences I've worked for of late (and also Graham), I think yes of course. And it's crystal clear that to be an architect you need to think about relationships with humans and nonhumans such as stones, sand, skid steer loaders and people heaving bags of groceries. And futurality.

This piece by Ian Bogost is just excellent.

Jeffrey Cohen was sending off some proofs today. I had forgotten to read them. So I thought the most efficient way to get them to him would be to tweet them--which turned out correct.

If you are a small animal, time passes slowly --strangely like in Spiderman ... Thanks Cliff Gerrish...

Trying to take into account all the possible entities in an action such as making bacon and eggs, a blog post or a journal article. Actants, a neutral term for these. This is Professor Yates's description of actor network theory, in an undergraduate masterclass he's doing here today. I'm the professor of record. He has placed an orange on the table and he is asking the students what they have made recently. A fact of making things is that you unmake them. Yates reads from Pandora's Hope . "Whenever we make something we are not in command--we are slightly overtaken by the action...constructivism uses a vocabulary of mastery that no construction worker would agree to." This is all in the line of talking about poetry as  poiesis . Politeness and welcoming is required. Making things is messy and you need a messy description of it to maximize the number of things. There are cascades of irreversible events. You have to make better and more inclusive lists. Yates doe...

A rather wonderful mathematical object drastically simplifies calculating the scattering of quanta. And suggests that spacetime emerges from things, as I've been banging on about for ages now. Thank you Cliff, once more!

Dawn happens here somewhat later than it would in northern climes such as England. It's quite noticeable, having been in the UK for nine weeks. It's still dark out here as I type this at 6:50am. In London by now it's pretty bright. Dawn is also a lot faster. In the next fifteen minutes, it will be day. It reminds me very much, and in a good way, of the time I spent in the Amazon in this biology research station quite a long time ago. Sometimes it gets so humid that the air just seems to precipitate rain about three inches above your head. It doesn't fall out of the sky so much as begin to surround you. Alphonso Lingis writes somewhere about how you get directives from the “levels” emitted by things--I call them zones. You can feel for instance that the Antarctic is your real home, as strange as that may sound to someone else. It feels like that in this subtropical place without doubt.

"Imagine not having any health insurance at all."

More than 300 scholarly citations now for Ecology without Nature. I was wondering when that might happen. I'm not sure whether it's a lot. But it is a bit more than the other ones. I think perhaps because there is a lot of art, music and literature analysis in it. And it topples over a pile of dominoes that needed to be toppled over. And it's quite historicized, as they say.

In Bourges .  Ghost Nature  is a group exhibition based around the strangeness of the natural world. As contemporary philosopher, Timothy Morton posits in his book,  The Ecological Thought  (Harvard University Press, 2010) ‘nature qua nature’ no longer exists as an “over there” place. Humankind is wholly integrated within its “mesh” and as such, the Romantic desire to commune with a landscape beyond the scope of humanity is impossible. Nevertheless there remains an inherited desire to so. It is a glitch. The tickle of a phantom limb. A desire forever unfulfilled but nonetheless maddening. Artists Sebastian Alvarez, Irina Botea, Marcus Coates, Every House Has A Door, Milan Metthey, Rebecca Mir, Katie Patterson, Tessa Siddle, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and collaborative duo, AOo will install, perform and screen works that explore the dynamic between human and non-human spheres. As with Katie Patterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth or Rebecca Mir’s Long Distance Relationship with the Oce...

As it is a hologram it changes depending where you are. Like a hyperobject!