lightsinthedistance-modernlife

Dipesh welcomes all of us. What a fantastic chap he really is.  What is fascinating about climate change is how different disciplines have to scale the problem up or down and do different things with their tools.  While David Archer will talk about 100 000 year scale, some will talk about global warming archive Then economists speak of decades until the end of the century Politicians will speak of electoral cycles Scalar aspect of the problem: Tim Morton’s expression of feeling “outscaled” I represent a discipline that is not particularly useful, history (!), there are some who are even less useful (literature) (!). (Of course Dipesh doesn’t agree.) Sahlins: “just look at U Chicago. We don’t do anything that is fashionable or useful.  Climatologists who think in terms of millions of years. They don’t obviously lend themselves to policy decisions.  David Archer: is it possible for human beings to care beyond three generations? Can you care for humans who com...

At the International Byron Conference in London .  “Byron's Nonhuman” At several points in his magnum opus  The World as Will and Representation , Arthur Schopenhauer quotes Byron. These deeply sympathetic citations have to do with a feeling of being immersed in things, a mystical sense of being at one. What are the physical and phenomenological conditions of the state Byron evokes? They are far from obvious and far from straightforward. In this talk I shall be arguing that Byron's poetics is in part an attempt to think these conditions, which have to do with the basic coordinates of the experience of beauty according to Kant, Schopenhauer's predecessor. These coordinates have to do with some kind of unconditional intimacy with at least one other entity that is not me. Beauty thus provides some kind of zero degree of relating to another entity, a relating that is not prefabricated or conceptual. Yet it is precisely this relating that disturbs the Hegelian logic under which ...

Things Are Fuzzy Ecological awareness requires that we rethink what it means to be a thing. This is necessary because it isn't clear that the things ecology cares about—frogs, meadows, clouds—are things at all! I shall argue that to be a thing is to be necessarily fuzzy . This means that you are made of things that aren't you, thus violating a fundamental rule of logic. If we want to think ecologically about things, we need to relax some of the logical rules.  There are deep consequences for art in so doing. One consequence is that it becomes clear that the idea of Nature is not useful at all. For historical reasons, this is also the case.

So today, off to Chicago. As well as seeing the excellent Dipesh Chakrabarty, I shall also hang out with old friend Mark Payne, who is in Classics. Then to London, and then Sussex for the lecture there on Tuesday and a seminar on Wednesday. Then to The Hague for Yes Naturally. Then to Rotterdam for a lecture and a seminar. Then home from Amsterdam. I haven't done one of these rather complex journeys since I went Australia--Chicago--Taiwan (and various places in between) in 2011.

I set out on a hike today in search of anything neat I missed during yesterday's hike, which I started too late to take full advantage of the daylight. I made it through the entire trail today, and had quite the detour along the way. I stopped by a dead Sycamore tree to look for beetles, since I found a neat species of Osmoderma beetle in it last year, but no dice this time. I trudged on, arriving at a small area with some fallen trees, and decided to stay a while. I quickly noticed that there were wasps flying around EVERYWHERE. Thankfully, these were Ichneumonid wasps in the genus Megarhyssa , which are harmless to humans. A male Megarhyssa sp. wasp. There were dozens of males like the one above flying around and landing on the fallen tree I was examining. Some were larger with vaguely different markings, indicating that I had at least two different species around, which seems to be normal for the genus, I usually see groups of more than species. The males were gathered to find...

Thank you Dirk. You know this already--humans are sets of things that aren't them. But this spells it out quite powerfully .

From here .  In  Hyperobjects , Timothy Morton brings to bear his deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects to propose a new way of looking at our situation, which might allow us to take action toward the future health of the biosphere. Crucially, the relations between Buddhism and science, nature and culture, are examined in the fusion of a single vision. The result is a great work of cognitive mapping, both exciting and useful. — Kim Stanley Robinson, author of  Shaman ,  2312 , and the Mars trilogy