lightsinthedistance-modernlife

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...