The Speculative Turn

re.press has posted the preliminary advertisement for The Speculative Turn.

call for papers

Just received this, and it may interest some of my readers:

Call for papers – Educational Philosophy and Theory

Special edition on: The future of educational materialism
Edited by David R Cole, University of Technology, Sydney.

This edition of the journal will attend to emerging developments in educational materialism by bringing together international scholars in this area. The basic questions that this edition of the journal will address are: How do educational materialisms work? and: What are the relevant theoretical variations on educational materialism and what are their practical applications?

As a starting point for this discussion one might take this quote from Ray Brassier: “While transcendental orthodoxy wastes time staving off the imminent liquidation of reason, sense, and life, transcendental materialism celebrates the deterritorialization of intelligence.”

There are a least three inter-related strands of educational materialism that this special edition will interrogate:

1. Materialist dialectics: Deriving in main from the work of Karl Marx – the basic thesis behind this strand of educational materialism is that teaching and learning systems are directed towards the manipulation of capital. Schools deliver human capital to the markets – that assess and place qualifications, social status and individual capabilities in terms of capital. This situation has been further accelerated and complexified due to the global use of electronic markets and the emergence of virtual capital. This strand of educational materialism may include work on social capital that is often theorised using the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu.

2. Transcendental materialism. The second theoretical platform for understanding educational materialism is derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This strand accepts material dialectics, yet intensifies and broadens the scope in the ways capital transforms situations. This is because capitalism also acts on an irrational level, and this can be clearly seen if one analyses advertising or takes into account the ways in which media systems manipulate emotions. Transcendental materialism looks for escape routes out of situations that might lead to internalisation – and in the case of education, this includes putting contemporary practises such as examinations under erasure.

3. Speculative materialism. This recent development in materialist theory reconciles materialism with realism – and avoids the potential for duality between materialism and idealism. The essential thesis of this strand of educational materialism stipulates that the designation of ‘the human’ or ‘the subject’ defines limiting criteria that restrict research. The path to forthright understanding of education therefore requires the elimination of phenomenology or any ‘mentalism’ that might contain and lock up the possibilities of material agency.

Interested scholars should send a 500 word abstract in the first instance to David R Cole at david.cole@uts.edu.au by December 1st 2009.

Kindle image

Here’s the Kindle title page for Prince of Networks, a book that I still do not own in any medium (image courtesy of Michael Flower).

I’m still a believer in the ultimate dominance of these devices. It may not be the Kindle in particular, and it may look different from anything we expect. But even the Kindle already has too strong a foothold to vanish as a passing fad. And more importantly, there are good reasons why it exists.

I realize there’s a lot of attachment in our profession to printed books on paper. And I can even understand that attachment. But I don’t share it. If I could immediately have someone take away my 1,600 books and give me an electronic equivalent thereof, I would consider it a great liberation to have them all instantly accessible on a single lightweight device (with the exception of a tiny handful of paper books that have great sentimental value). There are still a few problems with the new platform (hard to take notes, etc.), but I’m always surprised that those problems are not viewed as utterly temporary.

Does anyone really think that paper books are going to be the primary medium of intellectual life 50 years from now, let alone 100 years? If I had to dump all of my MP3 files and go back to vinyl and cassettes, it would be horrible. I don’t even go back to the c.d.’s much anymore, except to copy my favorite songs into MP3 format. I expect to be saying the same thing about paper books in the waning days of my career.

Finally, I expect the new medium to force people to write better, which can only be a good thing. The current book genre allows one to get away with miserably boring prose that I expect will be less appealing on handheld reading devices, just as it already reduces readership in the blogosphere. In the blogging medium you have to keep things punchy and get to the point pretty quickly, and most importantly you have to make some sort of immediate contact with the reader’s interest. With books, you can sometimes look more serious the more boring you are. That has to stop.

final post of the night

To sum up… We have gotten stuck in the rut of critique, and whatever the wider cultural roots of this disease, there are clear philosophical sources for it as well.

So often, there is the assumption that the more we sneer, the more we take a distance from every positive claim, sticking every one of our sentences inside of parentheses or quotation marks, the more we debunk and abstain and withhold, then the more intelligent we are.

This equation has so much staying power because, I suppose, it is half-true. A good half of enlightenment was about stripping bare the temples of superstition and alchemy and showing that many of the contents of former beliefs could be reduced to “nothing more than” X, Y, and Z (generally a physical substratum of some sort). The intellectual became a denier and a liquidator, fumigating the mere beliefs of the gullible. The intellectual could say any number of things, but the method always had to be that of critique. This might involve an intellectual movement of negation, or it might involve an ethical movement of “transgression,” deflowering the pieties of others in public.

This having become such an overwhelmingly global picture of what the work of the intellectual consists in, it followed that any distaste with this strategy would look like “reaction,” like a return to what had already been successfully debunked by liberated critical thinkers.

Of course, that was never the only alternative. The real alternative is “to make things more real, not less real” (Latour), to find previously unknown realities with which we were entangled all along, without knowing it. In some ways it is surprising that science has been associated with critique, because science has been the greatest creator of new sincerities that the world has ever known… We don’t believe in less than primeval hordes of hunter-gatherers did, but obviously believe in much more. I believe in distant galaxies, the Big Bang, and what science tells me about the composition of the earth’s core. We believe in Einsteinian curvature of space-time, even though everyday life does little to ratify this belief. We spend many hours reading histories and biographies about long-dead people, and are fascinated by the lives of viruses and the grammars of dying languages.

So many realities shape our environment that I believe that the cynical attempt to withhold oneself from all reality is even the clearest sign of a cookie-cutter pseudo-intellectual. Trolls and grey vampires are merely two of the most unpleasant symptoms of such an attitude, which by now has become fairly rampant.

What we need is more innocence and enthusiasm in intellectual life, not more sneering critique and labyrinthine qualification and complexification.

what we forgot about

It’s not like I was a huge Michael Jackson fan (except in 5th grade, around 1979) so I don’t want to make endless posts on the subject any more than I want to bore people with endless passages from Gibbon (though there will still be plenty of those to come).

However, following on Shaviro’s point… if you want to reduce Michael Jackson to some sort of locus of commodities and commodification, you’re going to have to convince me why THIS is not an incredible performance worthy of nothing but human admiration and joy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MichaelJacksonMoonwalk.ogg

I wish we could have kept this Michael Jackson for a lot longer.

If you’re in the mood for the full version, it’s here. I haven’t seen this in well over 20 years, and am in awe watching it again now. The highlight, which the Wikipedia clip contains, comes starting at around 3:30 of the longer video:

Shaviro’s post

SHAVIRO HAS HIS OWN MICHAEL JACKSON POST UP.

I agree very much with Shaviro’s points about race, and I must say it’s been shocking (I honestly didn’t realize this) to read in the Jackson obits that early MTV featured an all-white lineup before Jackson took over. For various reasons I was an early hater of the music video as a genre, and so I was never watching MTV in the early years or any later year, and didn’t really know who they were showing. To this day, I may have seen fewer music videos than anyone my age who has not been imprisoned or in a religious cult on some island somewhere. I just don’t like them, though I won’t try to spell out my reasons here as to why.

My favorite part of Shaviro’s post was this:

“So I think that everything Greil Marcus criticizes the Michael Jackson juggernaut for could be said with equal justice of Elvis and the Beatles as well (and also of the Sex Pistols, although their niche-marketing and publicity-through-scandal strategies were ahead of their time, and put them in a slightly different category). Of course, none of this would matter, really — it would just be another banal self-evidence of our everyday lives, alongside Ikea and Facebook and the iPhone — if it weren’t for the beauty and the genius of all of these artists’ performances, of their music and their self-presentation to their audiences, and their overall personas. That is to say, of their aesthetic singularities, or of what Bloch or Jameson would call their ‘utopian’ dimension. The modulations of Michael’s voice, the sinuous movements of his dancing, the way that his musical arrangements took disco and r&b and gave them both a smoothness and a slightly alien sheen, so subtly that one could say with equal justice that the sharp edges of mournful or joyous black expression had been ‘mainstreamed,’ or that the very ‘mainstream’ itself had been alluringly or insidiously carried away, exposed to a strange metamorphosis, allowed to blossom into a new aestheticized state in which pop crassness had itself become a rare, almost Wildean, delicacy.”

If there is anything I most dislike in intellectual life, it is the tendency to turn every non-political, non-economic experience into some ultra-critical, ultra-reflexive discourse on commodities and oppression. And more and more, I worry that many of the philosophical defenses of correlationism are designed purely to defend this sort of culturo-political besserwisserei that for some people is the very essence of intellectual life. When people say that Speculative Realism claims politics is nothing, what they really are complaining about it is that it says that politics is not everything. Which, in fact, it is not.

another thing I’d like to write someday but possibly never will

The whole day is devoted to that tedious but necessary exercise of figuring out what to do with all the e-mail that piled up during 10 days away. I responded to most of it on the fly while traveling, but a number of the messages demand actual work, and they all need to be gone through again to make sure I missed nothing important, which is easy to do while blowing through them the first time. (And if you’re like me, there’s a strange tendency to mentally add or remove the word “not” from certain key sentences, with the result of thinking someone said exactly the opposite of what they really said. That’s why I usually read all e-mails at least twice, separated by a decent interval.)

At any rate, here’s something that would be worth writing… A sort of historical portrait of the pre-Socratic environment. Books obviously already exist on the Archaic Period, and plenty of scholarship exists on the pre-Socratics. But for the most part these are just words to most of us. We don’t have a good intuitive feel for what that period was like.

As a trivial-seeming contrast, take the mafia, or cowboys. Some of what we know about them is undoubtedly silly stereotype. But I’ll bet if you spent some time around mobsters, you’d probably find yourself thinking “man, these people are like something out of a mafia film!” We have a certain feel for the habits, table manners, and style of speech of these people, not to mention their ways of intimidating others or taking revenge. The same holds for cowboys. We have some intuitive idea of how they get from place to place and what they might do on a typical or atypical day.

Granted, these people are much closer in time to us than the pre-Socratics, but I know of no really thorough attempt to bring to life the landscape on which philosophy was born. I’m not even entirely sure how one would do it, or even whether a book is the appropriate medium. But it’s an important era for our profession, and one on which we have a fairly poor handle, for the most part.

the power of finite numbers

Couldn’t think of a better post title than that, but it’s probably not precise enough. Here’s what I mean.

At some point while flying yesterday, I was thinking about what a familiar experience it is. I’ve flown so many times… But then I wondered how many times I’ve actually flown on a commercial aircraft. Probably not more than 500, if I estimate it. That may sound like a fair number of flights, but take them away and I am left with zero, no experience at all.

The same thing when I was landing at Cairo Airport last night, which now seems like such a familiar homecoming experience. But how many times have I actually landed at Cairo Airport? When you get right down to it, probably less than 50.

I suppose what got me thinking about this topic was my apartment in the center of Belgrade. I would only enter and leave it a few times per day, and other than sleep I was only spending 2-3 hours there per day. But over the course of five days, that was enough to make it feel like home, to the point that I really miss it and am mentally still living there, walking through the place and down the adjoining streets outside.

Or a typical semester… You feel like you know your students pretty well by the end of a semester, but it’s still, what, just 40 contact hours?

My point is that we actually tend to learn things and make decisions rather quickly. You might easily fall in love with someone after less than 5 contact hours. You might reach unshakeable decisions about the nature of a friend or colleague after just 4 or 5 meetings, and be right more often than not. You might grasp the essential feel of an author after 40 pages.

Whenever they speak of how many hours of flying experience a certain pilot has, I always find myself feeling that the number sounds alarmingly low. Somehow, you want the number to be “infinity” flying hours for the pilot. But that’s a needless dissatisfaction, I guess, because we really are able to pick up skills after a finite number of repetitions that is lower than believed.

Unless you’ve been married for a good many years, your greatest amount of interaction has probably been with your mother. (It’s hard to surpass those tends of thousands of hours in the early years.) If you’re like most people, you probably feel like you know your mother fairly well, and to a certain extent you do. But there have still been a finite number of contact hours between you.

There’s a more general point here that is eluding precise definition for me at the moment, but it has something to do with the surprising speed with which things take shape. Do something 3 or 4 times, and suddenly it’s a habit. My only “long” stay in Istanbul was for five days in 2002, and since then nothing but airport layovers, and yet I have a rough map of the city burned into my head and certain routines I always follow just as if it were my hometown.

prizes for underrated continental philosophy

Incidentally, everyone has been in such a rush to proclaim the desirability of ending the analytic/continental divide in philosophy. But I find myself wanting to intensify the divide, namely by means of an improved continental philosophy. So, I’m no longer feeling as interested as I was, say, 5 years ago, in having everyone dump the term “continental.” The key analytic philosophers should not be ignored as much as they have been on our side of the fence, and I also enjoy the self-confidence and precision of the better analytic work. However, there are still things about the analytic culture that I not only find difficult to stomach, but which I find to be intellectually erroneous (such as the aforementioned article of faith that the argument is all that counts, and everything else is mere cosmetic ornament).

However, all of that is merely prologue to some awards to be passed out by this blog.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the Past 20 Years

BRUNO LATOUR

He hasn’t been underrated in other humanities fields, where he is a major star and very much gets treated like one if you have the chance to see him in action on his home turf, as I have. Analytic philosophers also seem to know who he is (though it usually comes out as the American anti-Latour bias of calling him a “social constructionist,” the opposite of the French bias against him that treats him as a crusty reactionary realist).

I call Latour underrated not just because his work is too good to merit his being ignored by “continental philosophy” circles, but because he has much to say on a number of topics that those circles already debate, but with inferior richness and precision.

In future decades, I expect Latour to look like one of the major philosophers of the 1990’s and neighboring decades, and it will take a very subtle historian to prove the unthinkable fact that Latour actually wasn’t recognized as such until after the fact. In America we weren’t touching Latour in continental philosophy departments; we were cutting through second-growth deconstructive scrubland and kinda sorta getting on the Deleuze bandwagon.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the 1945-1980 Period

XAVIER ZUBIRI

Zubiri really is that good. Ignore the initial impression of dismal neo-Scholasticism. That’s not what it is. He can change the way your brain works. Or at least he did it for me.

Most Underrated Continental Philosopher of the Early 20th Century

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

This may sound questionable, since Whitehead isn’t really a “continental philosopher” at all. The reason I give him this prize is that the failure of the leading German thinkers of the phenomenology era to take Whitehead seriously, and the ensuing French failure to take him seriously enough (Merleau-Ponty’s engagement wasn’t big or deep enough, and Deleuze’s not technical enough) set continental philosophy back 40 or 50 years from where it would now be. We wouldn’t even need Meillassoux’s polemic against correlationism if Whitehead were already a bigger ingredient in today’s mix.

Rasta Tetris

In preparation for Ian Bogost`s upcoming visit to Cairo (more again about his work very soon), I`ve been reading his book on the Atari, co-authored with Nick Montfort. I`m going to do a post or series of posts on my own, non-expert reaction to early videogames. But for now, while killing time waiting for the bus from the new campus back home, I`m reminded of a slightly flippant but strangely durable videogame wish I always had.

You`ll all remember the game Tetris, and how it was closely associated with a Russian theme. This was even more true on the very nice Mac version, which had grainy black-and-white Russian illustrations to go along with the Russian music (which was far more haunting on the Mac version than in the Disney-like Russian music of the arcade version).

That always gave me a wish, for some reason, to own an alternate Jamaican-themed version of Tetris. No, this has nothing to do with “smoking” (hee heh hah, how transgressive). It has to do with a wish to unlock the subtly different emotional resonances that might be unleashed in the game by shifting the implied scene of action elsewhere. (For similar reasons, I have long been hoping that someone would stage a complete Wagnerian Ring Cycle in the Caribbean.)

I had the whole game planned out, including the illustrations and the music. Level One would be a slow instrumental version of “Roots, Rock, Reggae.”

The first “fast” level, maybe Level five, would get “I Shot the Sheriff.” Followed by “Could You Be Loved” near the end, again even a bit faster in tempo than normal, and it`s already a pretty fast song.

It wouldn`t only be Marley. I had Burning Spear`s “Marcus Garvey” in the mix somewhere as well.

If you are a game programmer with a lot of time on your hands, please make this happen! If you do, I will try to write you in as a character in Circus Philosophicus II, assuming there`s enough demand for a sequel (and I think there will be; who doesn`t like Platonic dialogues staged at offshore oil platforms?).

For some reason this reminds me of the far weirder idea dreamed up at around the same time by my lovably sleazy boon companion of college years, Alex from Hong Kong. Alex dreamed of opening a strip joint featuring atonal music. Though it`s probably a bad idea on any level you can think of (moral, legal, aesthetic), my favorite part is trying to imagine the sort of clientele that could conceivably keep such a place in business. Now there`s your intellectual avant garde for the coming 22nd century dystopia! And Hong Kong might not be a bad place to start it.