The Paul Ennis INTERVIEW WITH IAN BOGOST IS NOW POSTED.

“Speaking of Zizek, I’ve had a silent fear for some time that he might someday discover videogames, and then there goes the neighborhood. But the more I think about it, it seems unlikely. He’s got film already, that old, tired medium of the 20th century. He wouldn’t want to come out and play.”

p.s. on cinematic instants

p.s. And by the way, I do not believe in cinematic frames of time. I simply don’t think they deserve to be ridiculed, as happens as a matter of course these days. Everyone is vaguely united in assuming that isolated anything is a reactionary relic of yesteryear in philosophy. Everything is now dynamic, interconnected, and multiple. But this risks becoming just as big a cliché as the “reactionary” philosophies it overthrew. Only by seeing the great power of the occasionalist objections to causal relations and temporal flow do we see how badly they need to be intelligently countered, not simply dismissed.

Remember, I’m not saying: “there’s no use, nothing can touch anything else, we need God to do it.” That was occasionalism. I respect it deeply, I just don’t see the philosophical merit of letting one special entity do what others cannot do. The fact that it happens to be God in occasionalism is immaterial to me. I object just as strongly when human experience is made the site of all relations, as in both Hume and Kant, those upside-down occasionalists.

German book

Word has reached me of a Speculative Realism anthology to appear in German. I’ll leave the details and announcements to the prime movers of this project, but will certainly link to them whenever they are posted somewhere.

Latour, Bergson, etc.

event mechanics has another post up about Prince of Networks, this one very brief and less critical than the others (there’s hardly any room for critique, it’s so short).

But I have to say candidly that I think it misses the point. A few samples…

“It is clear that in his book Prince of Networks on Bruno Latour and on his blog, Harman is trying to make room for a concept of time as a series of cinematic-instants.”

It is Latour who makes room for it, by stating explicitly that time is produced by punctiform actors. He doesn’t use the word “punctiform,” but does say that “everything happens in one time and place only.” An actor is completely rooted in a single instant for Latour. Argue against isolated instants all you like, that doesn’t change what Latour says in Irreductions.

“He argues against an allegedly Bergsonian conception of time in Deleuze’s work that is organised around duration.”

The Bergson/Deleuze link is beyond all dispute. It is proverbial. Why, then, the word “allegedly”? This would be like saying: “he argues against an allegedly Aristotelian theory of substance in Aquinas.”

“One of the things that struck me about Reassembling the Soical was its distinctive Deleuzian tone. From Latour’s Reassembling the Social:”

I omit the passage he cites, but it’s strangely irrelevant to the rest of his post. The passage he cites from Reassembling the Social is all about networks, not about time. In fact, the word “time” does not occur even once in that very long passage.

From the fact that Latour learned something about networks from Anti-Oedipus (which he freely admits in conversation) it does not follow that he has a Deleuzian conception of time.

It would be possible to pick out a few Deleuze/Latour similarities here and there, but their differences are far more glaring. The obvious best comparison for Latour is not Deleuze but Whitehead, and Latour will not hesitate to tell you that he thinks Whitehead was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

abolish academic copyright?

That’s what THIS HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR RECOMMENDS. (I found this article thanks to a tweet by Open Humanities Press, or “openhumanities” in case you want to follow them on Twitter.)

The professor makes the following points:

1. Royalties barely exist for academic work anyway. True. We get nothing for articles, and except at best for a minuscule tier of superstars, very little for books. I won’t specify how much money I’ve made in my life from book royalties, but I can assure you the amount is paltry compared with even one year’s salary from my university. In fact, insofar as there has been any “financial” reward for my books, it has come indirectly by way of academic tenure and promotion. This is a very typical experience. Amazingly, I’ve had a couple of relatives who seemed to think I must be rich from my books. Ha-ha-ha-ha!

2.If academic copyright disappeared, more people would read the publications. This is also true. We can probably all think of cases where we sort of wanted to read something but were put off by the price tag. I’m still fuming a bit over an old Martinus Nijhoff book that I absolutely had to buy for an outrageous price– around $95 for a wafer-thin paperback. There was no alternative in that case. (No one wants to send interlibrary loan books to Egypt, and I can’t blame them.) Furthermore, most academic authors wouldn’t care too much… You might lose a few thousand dollars in royalties every couple of years, but in return you would gain many impoverished student readers.

3. But if academic copyright disappeared, publishers would not be able to recoup costs, and hence would not publish anything. Yes, common sense.

4. Therefore, universities should pick up the costs of publication. Agreed. Large library budgets already exist, and what will probably happen is that university libraries will turn increasingly into publishers themselves. Makes sense. Why should they continue to get reamed on overpriced hardcover books when they can all publish their own books much more cheaply? And you don’t need giant printing presses and distribution systems anymore, just the sort of crafty desktop technology in which university libraries already excel.

In fact, the University of Michigan already seems to be thinking along these lines. They are the driving force behind the various soon-to-be-born book series at Open Humanities Press, where Bruno Latour and I will be co-editing the New Metaphysics series. More about that series in a week or two. I also read somewhere that University of Michigan Press is going entirely to electronic format, with print-on-demand paper books also available– which is exactly how OHP will be handling its books.

As I’ve seen pointed out on the web somewhere, our current publishing system is designed to solve a problem that no longer exists: how to efficiently distribute information to the widest number of people. It’s fairly easy to do that now. We just don’t have the right institutions yet to capitalize on it.

If you’re, say, 25 years old at the moment, you will face a completely different publishing situation from what anyone of my generation faced.