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3. The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaia | Series 2012-2013 | College of Humanities and Social Science
In spite of its reputation, Gaia is not half science and half religion. It offers a much more enigmatic set of features that redistribute… -
Begins with comparison between Lovelock and Galileo.
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The view from nowhere – disembodiment.
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Gaia brought the earth to the centre and made us responsible.
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A ‘curse’ attached to the Gaia theory.
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Attempt to ‘lift it’.
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What people under what conditions through what agency.
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People of Gaia not the same as people of ‘nature’.
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Just because entity named after god does not necessarily act as one (and vice versa).
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Gaia: most secular entity.
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Gaia and Lovelock vs. Medicine and Pasteur.
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Comparisons in approach. Quoting from both now.
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At stake in both: war and peace.
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Performance, attribute and ‘trial’ before name.
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Politics follows from performance.
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Lovelock calling on similar actors to Pasteur: http://pic.twitter.com/oTq8gY3Y0c -
Every item in the scenery of ‘nature’ interrupted and rendered mobile by invisible characters.
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Inert agents magically awoken and now ‘fiercely’ alive!
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Earth processes vs. Fermentation. Everything made to move.
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Still riffing off his Pasteur work here…
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But is it reductionism or vitalism?
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That is reduction to a ‘sentient being’ or goddess (Gaia).
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Gaia as ‘providential engineer’. Need to explore.
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But no holistic nature to Gaia per se.
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Organisms curving environment to own needs. Manipulations changing its own world.
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Yes! Lovelockian-Latourian litanies!
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Waves of action that do not take notice of any categorisations (inside/outside, scale).
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Life as more messier than economists and neo-darwinists suppose.
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Oxygen as extended consequence of an event: http://pic.twitter.com/Y8XeIWxAzt -
No scalar relationship here. Only a historical result of connections between creatures.
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Space makes an entry. No empty container. Human Geographers rejoice. #blgiff
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Narratives rising or falling on strength and weakness of actors re: Pasteur’s microbes, Lovelock’s Gaia components.
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What to call this? History/Her-story. Distribution of agency. Gaia-story? Geo-story?
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Geostory of a planet -no harmony. A ‘contingent cascade’. No unity. Turmoil of geostory.
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And that’s it. #blgiff.
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More questions follow.
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Q: Can Gaia be extended to other planetary entities, instances?
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Yes, in short. Lovelock does necessarily identify earth and earth only as existence of Gaia.
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Meant to be does NOT.
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Q on interdisciplinarity in academia.
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Latour: Lovelock’s Gaia theory reverses the move to cosmic unity created by Copernicus and Galileo and invests earth with renewed uniqueness
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What as the successor? Geostory as a part of it. Human Geographers rejoice (pt. 2), I guess. #blgiff
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Geostory was put forward with a chuckle by Latour. Not meant egotistically!
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Another Q on possible disciplines in Latour’s hypothetical university. Would there be geopyschology?
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Yes, as long as there are connections.
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Q on scale, parts and wholes. Nice. Contingency and necessity. Fragility and solidity.
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Will again ‘storify’ so all tweets are together. Entertaining again from Latour. #blgiff
Category: Performance
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Some old mapping films
via iRevolution. This one was made by the US car company Chevrolet.
And a US Army tutorial film:
Parts 2 & 3 are available on YouTube here and here. From the description:
“Explains the theory of mapmaking, and illustrates the methods and techniques used to produce maps; planning, surveying, compiling, and reproduction.”
US Army training film TF5-4523
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Stuart Elden links to a review of Thomas Nail’s Returning to Revolution (2012). Worth reading alongside some of Nicholas Tampio’s work on Deleuze and revolution too.
Thomas Nail’s Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismois reviewed at NDPR.
We are witnessing the return of political revolution. However, this is not a return to the classical forms of revolution: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat or the leadership of the vanguard. After the failure of such tactics over the last century, revolutionary strategy is now headed in an entirely new direction. This book argues that Deleuze, Guattari and the Zapatistas are at the theoretical and practical heart of this new direction. Returning to Revolution is the first full-length book devoted to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of revolution and to their connection with Zapatismo.The first 50 pages of the book can be downloaded for free.
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Railways, ticketing and digital technology
The second article is from BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent on the implementation of a new ticketing system on the Swiss railways. People in the UK will be familiar with a general diversification in ticket purchasing over the last few years, and you can typically buy in advance online or via smart phones. This alongside the traditional methods of both purchasing tickets at the station and on the train itself. However, the latter method has been abolished in Switzerland, which has led to some annoyances. Imogen Foulkes who writes the article gives three examples of the resulting confusion:
Take, for example, the young man with a ticket which must be date-stamped by a machine on the platform. The machine is out of order, so he carefully writes in the date by hand, gets on board, and is fined by the conductor for not having a valid ticket.
There is the pensioner, out for a day with his grandson, who kindly bought both their tickets on his mobile phone, but it turns out you are only allowed one e-ticket per person, so poor old granddad is fined.
And then, there is me. One frosty morning I arrived at my local station to find that the ticket machine was broken. No matter, I thought, I have got a smartphone, and I hurriedly set about buying my ticket that way.
In her own personal example she discovers a significant set of obstacles:
This was not as easy as I had hoped, fiddling between credit card and phone with freezing cold fingers, but, by the time I got on the intercity to Geneva I had an e-ticket and I proudly showed it to the conductor.
Unfortunately she was less than impressed and told me in no uncertain terms that my ticket was not valid. Why, only became clear several weeks later when a letter arrived from Swiss railways euphemistically named “revenue protection service”.
The good people there tell me the formal payment for my ticket from my credit card company arrived four minutes after my train left the station. That means, they say, that I bought my ticket on the train – and that is not allowed.
So, in using a mobile device to purchase her ticket she sidestepped the queues at the station – a reason many people are late for trains, and a general annoyance for all. But in doing so she also shifted the work of finding and paying of it back to herself from any clerk or collector. Coupled with the rather chilly Swiss weather, this wasn’t – it seems – a particularly easy task to perform. After being left to ponder why her ticket was invalid, she finally discovers that due to a delay in the processing of the payment her ticket was technically bought after the train had left the station. The administrative inference being that she had bought the ticket on the train (although actually impossible). Although Foulkes doesn’t go into the details I’d guess there was an issue with having a ticket for a specific train (the 11.10 rather than than 11.23) and that there was a price difference between the two. Thus she was ‘cheating the system’ by buying a cheaper ticket for the later train than the one she was travelling on. In effect then, she was travelling on the train without the correct ticket and thus liable to be fined the rather extortionate amount of 190 Swiss Francs (£133!).
The reason why I found it interesting was two-fold. Firstly, it was her use of a mobile device to purchase a ticket. Secondly, it was a technological delay outside of Foulke’s control that created a very real and financially problematic effect. Both point to the distributed mechanics and agency of everyday mobility. Would it be at all within Foulke’s rights to blame her debit card processor for the fine she received? Presumably Swiss Federal Railways would require evidence for this delay. But how would she provide evidence for this? Could she contact her card processor and trace the temporal actions of her ticket purchase? Say, by linking the exact time she pressed specific icons (‘conclude payment’, ‘confirm purchase’ etc.) to the time it took for her to receive her e-ticket. Presumably most payments process within a certain timeframe (4-5 seconds?) – so what if her’s took longer than expected? Where would the liability lie? At the door of the card processing company? Swiss Federal Railways for commissioning a clunky ticket application? Or the software company who coded it? Or, of course, with Foulkes and similar train passengers, who in her own words have simply ‘done their best to buy a ticket’.
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Walking the world’s megacities
The Guardian have a started weekly series on walking in the city. The first instalment was Tokyo. The second is an audio slideshow of New York. As I’ve just finished Rebecca Solnit’s classic Wanderlust: A History of Walking it seemed apt to post links to it. The video above is an extract from Michael de Certeau’s much referenced book The Practice of Everyday Life, from the chapter ‘Walking in the City’. Another famous writer of a specific kind of walking was Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist movement and inventor of the concept of the dérive or ‘drift’. These unplanned, experimental walks were meant to re-envisage the urban environment for the participant, and was a way of resisting against the formalisation of the modern city by urban planners and architects. An early article on The Theory of the Dérive (1958) is available here. Tim Ingold has also written extensively on the cultural dimensions of walking. ‘Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet’ is a particularly interesting account, and is free to download from the Journal of Material Culture, here.
Sam Hind 