in my anthropologies

Rabbit hole detour into speculative realism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:06:00 +0000

Sometimes I have those days where I wonder if I know anything, anything at all. Then there are other days where some of my wandering falls together in odd and interesting ways. The past couple of days have been a trying and emotionally turbulent roller-coaster, for a number of reasons. But amidst the turbulence, there has been one rabbit hole that has landed me in a potentially fruitful position.

Speculative realism, the vanguard of contemporary continental philosophy, in its object-oriented dispositions may help to tie together some of the disparate strands of my research I have been vainly trying to weave together using a collection of ideas that, at times, seem completely at odds.

I have yet to really dig too deeply, but I am fruitfully seeing links between Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things and speculative realism, in a way that makes meaningful sense to me. My problem has thus far been the nagging feeling that there is or are questions and ideas that require address before I dig into my own research. Not mere contextualizing or situating, this feeling of a constant beforehand has been plaguing my writing. Who was it that was always after the First Principles? Well, perhaps my feeling is something like that, with an added sense that I am anthropologist so do I have a business messing about in philosophy? Or perhaps the question is: how can I not do the due-diligence of exploring where the research takes me in philosophy considering my bread-and-butter is the real, the actual, the lived and the practiced? What is more apt than lived life, practiced ritual, or the sensuality of sense of both humans and things, inanimate and animate, technical, vegetable, mineral, and so on, for dipping a toe into the speculative realism pond?

Down the rabbit hole

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:10:00 +0000

Do you ever have the sensation that no matter how rigorously you position your situatedness in the worldings that give way to your research that there is always another ontologically prior position? What I mean is, to what lengths should we go to position ourselves in research philosophically? I'm always mulling over the idea of first principles: where am I staring? What is my ontological understanding of the real within which I find (create/enact/perform/cite, etc....) myself? How far down the rabbit hole must I go to feel that I am contributing something to a world-in-the-making that is 1) unique from what has come before, 2) interesting and not merely navel-gazing, self-congratulation, or self-flagellation, 3) ethically and politically disposed to social change-in many forms, 4) not completely insane.

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories, has this great bit about telling (and re-telling) a story of creation where the world sits on the back of a turtle. An audience member, no matter the location or age of the audience, always asks: what's beneath the turtle? To which he responds, another turtle. It's turtles all the way down. Down the rabbit hole it's turtles, small, large, and variously adorned ontological turtles. That's the way I've been feeling lately. Like I'm trying to map a pile of turtles, ad infinitum.

RSAnimate - The Paradox of Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:12:00 +0000

An interesting animation of the relationship between late capitalism, social change, and choice: could the relative pacification of publics be a problem of choice and the internalization of loss?

An interesting suggestion, no doubt. I know I've felt completely frozen examining a shelf of similar products in the attempt to choose the "best" one. Equally confounding is the experience of selecting an item from a selection that contains little choice- as though there aren't enough options to choose from. On a broader scale I wonder if that sense of confounding choice leads to a kind of routinization-like voting for a particular political party, just because that's what you've always done and not necessarily because you believe in their politics. Choice (leading to social change) also demands attention and participation, which, considering the intense anxiety and stress part and parcel of everyday life, brought on by the increasing demands of capitals machinations, is wrapped up in fear. Fear of the results of systemic change that despite best intentions are, at best, uncertain. What is social change were somehow unmoored from choice (if indeed it is tied to it), what would it look like? I'm thinking more of re-conceptualizations (of the idea of choice) than some kind of elimination of choice altogether (which would of course be quite contrary to the tenets of equitable social change in the first place). Puzzling idea.

New Feminist Materialisms

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:40:00 +0000

What seems to be an emerging trend in STS and remotely perhaps in anthropology, is a move towards New Feminist Materialisms. With recent publications from Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, an edited collection from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Karen Barad's 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Whatmore and Braun's, Political Matters: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, and what looks to be an interesting addition by William Connolly entitled, A World of Becoming, and no doubt many other books and articles (I'm thinking of Latour and Haraway specifically), New Materialism is poised to encourage a serious rethinking of the relationship between humans and nonhumans beyond or building out from what we have seen before.

It is without doubt reframing the way I'm writing my dissertation, seeing as I consider very seriously the relationship between people and things (machines) in the concept or ritual/worship practice. So far this rethinking has led me to consider aspects (and possibilities and politics of) material agency but I have been struggling with the inherent dilemma of anthropomorphism even in the attempt to decenter the human in this story. It has been exceedingly rewarding however to read and write through some of these perspectives as they just begin to gain momentum. My hope is that my work will contribute a little something to the process.

Walter Benjamin on writing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:59:00 +0000

Came across a great blog that included a post on Walter Benjamin's advice on writing. Taking some of it to heart... though perhaps not all. It's seemingly a real slog to get though endless chapters for this dissertation (especially on grey days like today). Not discouraged though, just taking my time.

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

From “One-Way Street” (1955; slightly ed.), Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 80-81.

modular essay

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:05:00 +0000

The modular essay.

A bit part composition
That frames the shored up snows that creep through
And into the assemblage of parts.

It's plane extends as pieces begin to collect, it's dimensions shift and take up new configurations.
I am surprised by its tenacity to cause a frictive sense of generation.

Benjamin was assembling Passagen-Werk. The quotes and scraps cobbled into the famed montage, then the dialectical image. I think of the snowy streets of Paris and the sheltered arcades. The juxtaposed revelation and deceit.

I came upon a modular home one day: it's cubical connections and array of spaces seemed so organized. A veritable spatial neoliberalism.

This two-bit composition: a modelled modular, confirmed through transductive geuss-werk- a veritable political irony.

On refrains and melodies stuck in my head

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:38:00 +0000

Play inside Deleuze and Guatarri (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1987:350).

"Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final end of music, release it in the cosmos-that is more important that building a new system. [the gestural notes of bodies arising from sleep... how does the refrain territorialize itself? What fleshy boundaries must it pass and also fix to create qualities, signatures? How do melody's establish themselves?] Opening the assemblage of sounds to the Machine that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up [the rhythm captures, is an apparatus of capture- even in becomings, sometimes]: black holes, closures, paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations [the house awakes in the morning, groaning as the rain makes it swell and shift], Schumann's madness, cosmic forces gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you" (1987:350).

The melody that pursues, becomes lodged, the catchy song: caught up in morning bird-songs where melody's are becoming-expressive as sonorous, guttural, cracking, stretching movements herald a new day.

On waiting for words.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:43:00 +0000

I sit down to write. Staring at the screen, waiting for the words to form, thoughts to congeal, sentences to miraculously leap from my fingertips to the bouncing cursor on the page. A research proposal, the last step before leaping into fieldwork, is on my mind. On my mind, waiting. The fog rolls in as I look out the window. Lapping the window pane it hauntingly fills the street. The sun is about to rise. I'm still waiting.

Drought

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:35:00 +0000

it's a drought you know

that consumes more than flash floods

the tense winds of whips and quips

that fly along barren 'scapes

it's the lack, the without, the beginning

of an end that you see

from the start

a precipice that you shy from at every breath

it's a love you know

that carries waters

like leaves on trees wind-swept and torn by time

it is the failing light and the sun that disappears behind the clouds

it's time, an imperceptible movement of seconds, moments

with no signifier, no reference point

to hold sway against the passage of beat upon beat

of your heart

it's a drought when water does not quench

words do not abate the barren days

nor reach the stone in your chest

that sits like a wayward symbol of disdain

the flood is the moment revealed, you know,

when the street lights illuminate only

the ground below, looking up does not blind,

nor burn, nor starve for want of water.

machines of such precision

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:14:00 +0000

I stood between
the towering shelves
of third-world labour
in the local Dollarama.

the shelves grew towards the ceiling
saturated, angels dripping melting macabre faces down on decorative demons, the shaping of worlds in twisted lethargy
anxiety grew,
fellow shoppers became hogs grunting in the muck, rolling in the excrement of exploitation.
then they were machines
filling their baskets
in mechanistic harmony
rote shopping etiquette.
the shelves seemed alive.

Religion as Pathology?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Having just finished another book for my second comprehensive exam I'm seeing the theme of religion as pathology emerge. Mara Einstein's 2008 book: "Brands of Faith: Marketing religion in a commercial age", is based on a numerous assumptions, too many to review in great detail, that undermine what is seemingly the main theme of the book: religion has become subject to the same marketing principles as other industries in the neoliberal economic market.

Einstein treats "religion", by which she means Christianity and Judaism, all other faiths are labeled "New Age" (which is problematic enough to inform a rapacious critique), as a means to incite uncomfortable, self-flagellating reorientations of the self. Take, as an example of this thinking, the sentiment that "religion isn't supposed to comfortable, and it is through discomfort that we find new parts of ourselves" (Einstein 2008: 210). While a disciplinary perspective on religion and its affective bio-power smacks of a "Foucault effect", he doesn't ever grace the pages of Einsten's analysis. Instead, the reader must be content with assertions that distract from what could be a meditation on the "commodification of the self" (Einstein 2008: 199 quoting Rindfleish 2005) but what ends up being a rage against the dissolution of religious purity by immigration, economic principles of profiteering, the "self-help" movement, and New Age spirituality; under which flows the assumption that religion is pathological, a social ill, the famous opiate and has been subsumed under the other social ill, an economic logic of fee-for-use services.

While my intention is not to discount these ideas, there is no reflexive mention nor contextualization of the links between religion and the economy, made famous by Weber, but well known regardless cross-disciplinarily. Einstein treats "religious consumers" as dupes, as social agents with no agency, no capacity to comprehend the social and economic maelstrom of religious devotion in an era of neoliberal market reform in (nearly) post-welfare economies.

These are unfinished, incomplete thoughts. More later.

New in a community near you: a gas-fired peaker-plant!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 13:49:00 +0000

A new power plant has been proposed by the Ontario government through the OPA (Ontario Power Authority) for northern York Region. Instead of conservation programs, household power monitors, graduated time-of-day power use charges or green energy sources, the OPA has advocated for the construction of new 1960's technology gas-fired peaker-plants. Instead of planning for a near future where non-renewable forms of energy are depleted the OPA has instead decided, in conjunction with surely very powerful energy concerns, to build big concrete polluting plants that will further degrade the quality of our air, climate, and local ecological system.

Public consultations, mandatory opportunities for local residents (the real stakeholders) to air their grievances, have proven that the provincial government, in cahoots with energy developers, have little regard for the ecological future of our area, and are concerned solely with increasing and expanding settlement in farming and agricultural areas which will require new power sources. So misguided is the thinking of the OPA that they claim that little ecological damage will result from new gas-fired plants (check out the OPA website, it's all there: misdirection, private sponsored studies, and environmental assessments that say that air pollution falls around the perimeter of the plant and no further). What happens when a power plant is located in an agricultural, farming area? Who wants to eat the vegetables saturated with low-lying ozone and high levels of toxic chemicals? So much for the organic farms.

The illusion, the veil, of democratic process is wearing thin for those local residents who have formed groups and coalitions to fight the OPA. The always already failing hegemony of democratic ideology is threadbare here: public consultations were only a nod at due process and diligence, meant to keep the local public satisfied. Stakeholder consultations have been a lame attempt to keep up the curtain of democratic accountability. The OPA knows, of course, what the ecological result of these plants will be, just as we do. We know that in the process of 'keeping up appearences' that any rights we thought we had to contest these controversial plans come a very distant second to the power and pressure for expansion from the provincial government aligned with the various buisness sectors that are looking for more area to convert by way of "development". Development discourse is not just a post-colonial tune sung by the IMF and World Bank choir, it is local (however you want to characterize that), poingant and knocking on your back door. How will we answer? Who precisely decides what constitutes "development"?

In repsonse to plans for power plants and increased "development", local groups, composed of residents, in each of the areas where a plant is potentially slated for construction have mobilized and continue to educate, speak out, and protest these plans. Local residents are giving voice to protests for our air, our water, your water, your air, your health, our health. They are giving presence to the understanding that speaking is a political act.

Radical action starts with conversation and debate. Give voice to these veiled threats against your health, your safety, the health, saftey and viability of our agricultural areas. Future generations will call on us to account for our actions now.

Contact our energy minister, George Smitherman Contact the Ontario Power Authority

Good Things Exploding

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:24:00 +0000

Imagined Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:15:00 +0000

05/29/06

Call it what you want
the placating drone of monotonous voices,
of repeat and repeat and repeat,
rhetoric replete like cascading tomes of
hate hate hate

Call it what you want
a war, a slaughter, an invasion
of persuasion, a coercive
combination of minds that bend
for more to blood to spend
an empty recitation of the mantra
of democratization

The moans of ringing phones
of hands, of questions
mothers tears shatter the monotone
in staccato sobs that pierce
cool, clean night air and take
babies in arms

Those bringers of arms
marching macabre of unified uniforms
so alike, indistinguished lock step
locked breath, bullet proof vests and chests
heave when babies are not bulletproof

Grave diggers for bags of bones, for tombs that are filled,
as tears fall, as words become dull
and drown the pierce through the heart as blood spills,
as from lips as condolences,
as respite for a soldiers number of kills,
and well-wishing patrons of the imagined nation
offer just cause through the seething of their
black blood, the virus of the infected,
the moral of their invective.

The parceled, compacted, contracted
lies, the simple words, flourish of flies, rhetoric
of the right
of the mighty morality of destruction
of the seduction of reconstruction
the betrayal of the silent night.

In folds of feeble diatribes, swaddled
in the veins of the righteous unrighteous
the imbibed morality of criminality
the justification for annihilation
of babies born on the wrong side
of the imagined nation.

When we were old

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:18:00 +0000

When I was older I decided that manacles are not in fashion. I tried to slough off the chains of the hegemony of union politics. This history saw streets of disgruntled graduate students begging for change, drinking caramel macciatos, wearing designer knowledge and prada flip-flops. They sobbed, in staccato stutters, that they wanted everyone to know just how much their sprightly thoughts are worth. When I was older I made a nest of discarded philosophies, insulating my home with the pages of my favorite leftists. It sure was cold that winter with only radical, fractured philosophies, arguing dissenters, and dunce caps to provide shelter from the storms.

When I was old I knew that knowledge was commodified: the neoliberal, knowledge economy was a political wet dream from which we cannot seem to wake up. But yet, within it we could slice and slip into the institution through the (relative) autonomy of teaching: talk day after day on the state of the educational nation. It sure was difficult to teach, talk, experiment with thought separated from the space that makes it possible. When I was older I smashed my soap-box and became a riverbank preacher/teacher. When is it time to wake up from these histories? If I were younger would I ask Gramsci, Foucault and Bourdieu to dance round my unionist fire? Would I think that the revolution is coming? For now, the union chains seem far too tight.

Musing in the morning on beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:07:00 +0000

If I were to connect today, this moment, with another in time, I would call back to song-filled days in our commune of the creative, belligerent, undone, brilliant, cast of musing few. We sat singing, playing, writing furiously; passionate to transcend just that moment to get to the next resonant enlightenment. Questioning the social, philosophical, humanist, neoconservative/liberal state(s) we found ourselves in, we strove to push through the cloud of textbook misdirection and parroting petrification. Late in high school life changed. Trying to do Plato and his wall proud, before we knew his name, we asked questions we couldn't answer knowing something was not right with the world we knew.

It was a small place, on a main street, in a small town. Central, yet never so. We went the world over, never leaving a few rooms. No phone, a payphone around the corner was were I would call home, a sometimes distraught mother answering with numerous questions I couldn't answer in all truth. My heart now breaks for all those small deceptions. But, it was our time to make way for histories of the future.

And here we are. So, for clarity's sake, who is "our" and "we" anyway? We were a small band of bonded high school despots, on the fringes and in the middle all at once, we worked at being the fringe, working the margins into and out of line with the so-called "mainstream" stream of right(wrong)-wing currents that threatened our marginal shores. KRC, JB, HC, KE, and me, and of course the roving few who entered the fray with us for our very brief time in those rooms. It was love, laughter, anger, angst: a struggling becoming that yearned for substantiation.

That time, made histories in this future: a re-membering of activated notes, harmonies that register shocks and resonate as KRC plays guitar in the morning. And, is the muse again. Twelve years (give-or-take) separates those days from these, yet I feel them through the years and their accretions of memory, composed of loving happiness and frustrated despair, as though they were a moment ago.

I now think I found a trace of where I wanted to go with life in those rooms with our chosen few. I didn't know it then. Nearing a decade in post-secondary school has occasioned some time for reflection and attribution. I can re-member those those days as an aspect of the montage of moments that made my eyes anthropological, before disciplinging gave them legitimacy.

Anthropology, for me anyway, is poised as the arbiter of subtle revolutions, the modest catalyst seeking to open up ways of seeing, exposing the accretion of sedimented knowledge, the striated space, allowing for the lines of flight that follow from chance paths taken when the uncanny rocks our worlds.

This is a blog about my journey in and through anthropology. Welcome.