Tag: The Semaphore Line

• Moved…

  onto Latour’s ‘Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence’, again, available to download on Latour’s own website. It really is just a biographical account of how he ended up where he his. He talks through his various encounters with scientists, ethnographers and philosophers, as well as his early life as a ‘militant Catholic student’, and the development of his projects. Here’s a nice quote Latour pulls out when talking about the effect Isabelle Stengers had on his work :

  ‘Even Pasteur’s microbes, even Aramis’s magnetic couplings, the automated subway system, even Michel Callon’s famous scallops, all of them undeniably present, actants and movers, glittering with reality, still didn’t offer, in Stengers’ eyes, a sufficient guarantee that we had pulled ourselves away from the text, the social, the symbolic. To manage that, we would have had to grasp the world without dragging through it human subjects and their obsession with knowledge conceived as the relation between words and things.’

  Latour (2012: 15)

   

  2012.09.24

• Latour Day!

  Today is offically Latour Day! At least for me it is. This morning I really struggled to start writing anything, despite getting up early, so I’ve designated today to be a Latour day. Think I’ll read through some articles I’ve never come across or indeed not read for a while. I’ll post some public links up throughout the day, starting with ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – An Introduction to Making Things Public’ which is available to download at Latour’s homepage. I’ll also post a ‘killer quote’ that encapsulates that article’s main argument, so here is that quote from Dingpolitik:

  ‘The point of reviving this old etymology [of thing or ‘ding’] is that we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement’.

  Latour (2005: 13).

  There’s also another classic Latour passage but I’ll save that for myself.

  2012.09.24

• ontological ‘is’ and political ‘ought’

  Can a distinction between ontological existence (‘is’) and political desires (‘oughts’) be bracketed apart and hence exist as separate concepts? Levi Bryant thinks so over at his blog Larval Subjects, and it’s proven to be a sticky argument over at Alexander Galloway’s facebook page (pretty much a public one here – he comments on a lot of things). I don’t know whether this is indicative of SR’s reputation of the philosophy for the digital era, but Ian Bogost then summarises the lively debate over at his blog in a post entitled ‘Let’s talk about politics and ontology again!’. If you’re still keeping up, Bryant then responds in another post (‘War Machines and Military Logistics’) at Larval Subjects, and Harman jumps in with a short post over at his OOP blog here.

  If this is all a bit tl;dr, then let me summarise some key points to the argument. Bryant suggests, in short, that whilst ontologies can indeed be produced through political means (say, in the form of ideological bias), they are in themselves apolitical as they concern ‘being’ (or ‘what is’) ipso facto are factual concerns. He (says he) makes no claims to an idealized or preferred state of things in this passage (an ‘ought’ rather than an ‘is’).

  In a relational form, then:

  ontology/ies (‘is’) ——–> politics (‘ought’)

  His critics in the fb post on Galloway’s wall, again, in summary, suggest that by making this claim of a partitioned apolitical ontology, he is in fact making a distinctly political claim. In the process one of the commenter’s charge him and other SRs with having a ‘depoliticizing stab at a new realism’ (see Jairus Grove’s first post).

  Imho, I think the people who are responding to Bryant on Galloway’s page are making a few cheap shots, and Bryant himself actually underplays the construction of ontology which might have helped in get away from the criticisms angled at his approach to ontological and political separation. I probably agree on the points made by Grove especially, but argue that this doesn’t necessary detract from SR/OOO’s aims. I think Bryant would do well to accept the political nature of ontological claims (notice the small p) but be happy in refuting the Politics of ontology (with a capital p) on the basis of needing to act on a broader, transindividual plane that works with some (more?) solid claims (immutable mobiles, say?), i.e. an ontological basis. So it’s whether you give credence to the solidity of ontological claims as being ‘true’ as to whether or not you can agree with Bryant on this one.

   

  2012.09.17

• The interface effect

  Alexander Galloway’s new book, The Interface Effect is out now on Polity. Straight from the publisher’s site, then:

  Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today’s discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable.

  Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer.

  Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation –  the interface.

  I probably need to finish reading Stiegler’s Disorientation (which is also the sensation I get from reading too much by him) and Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine (there’s only so much data one can compute on just how flawed, disorganized, reckless and hubristic the CCP was in the 60s), otherwise I’m going to be wading through three books at once. Although at only 200 pages it looks tempting.

  2012.09.13

• Vegetarian ethics

  A little off topic for this blog but this really piqued my interest. The NYT ran a competition on the ethics of eating meat, picked 6 finalists and – with a panel of judges – named a winner. Each essay was only ~600 words. FYI I wholeheartedly agree with their final choice. Available here.

   

  n.b. it’s an article from a few months ago; still, an interesting read.

  2012.09.05