Friday 23 April 2010

Examined Life



Examined Life is a 2008 documentary film directed by Astra Taylor. The film features eight influential contemporary philosophers walking around New York and other metropolises and discussing the practical application of their ideas in modern culture.
The philosophers featured are Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler, who is accompanied by Taylor's sister Sunny, a disability activist.

source: Wikipedia

"Nature is not a balanced totality that humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes where we profit from"

Saturday 17 April 2010

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans*

*Woody Allen


"AT A DECISIVE MOMENT in the film The Dark Knight, when Harvey Dent transforms into chance-obsessed Two Face, the Joker, clad in a nurse’s uniform, looms above the maimed politician’s hospital bed. “Do I really look like a guy with a plan, Harvey?” he asks. “I don’t have a plan. The Mob has plans, the cops have plans.” He continues, reflecting on the plans at work all around them: You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just dothings. I’m just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans: schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer; I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are."
Nathan Schneider, Divine Wilderness. In triplecanopy

[Image: From The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan, courtesy of Warner Brothers].

Saturday 10 April 2010

unknown unknowns

>after this the unknown unknown has been forever aligned with the inability of one to imagine utopia but only dystopia. The image of the future becomes the image of death, fear and terrorism. This whole idea of this double negation can also be explored through the banned "kinder chocolate eggs" in 1960's. It was from the unknown unknowns that the youth should be protected... A whole society wasn't able to confront surprise... and unfortunately this surprise in the contemporary world has been aligned with FEAR!

OOO // Object Oriented Ontology II

"The issue I have is not with either Levi's onticology or Graham's OOO as it is with the general perception (a perception I don't think I've gotten from either of them, but from others) that "object-oriented" philosophy, as a kind of generic term, is a new and important development within Continental philosophy. Used in this broader sense, especially with the "-oriented" attached to the "object," one can't help but to think this means "object" in the everyday English sense of the word. And when I get asked (as I have been) why I'm interested in this trend, it's difficult for me to answer that, because the term sounds too much like "objectivity," "objectivism," and all the other things the word "object" has been philosophically associated with.

The general answer others might give, I imagine, goes something like this: it's a move away from X (subjectivity, perception, phenomenology, correlationism, Kantianism, relationism, or whatever else) and back to the actual real THINGS that make up the world. (That of course sounds, unintentionally I'm sure, a lot like Husserl's "Back to the things themselves!" The difference is that here it's the actual things, not our perceptions of those things. But I'm not willing to concede that we can purify the world of our perceptions.) While I can't pinpoint where I've heard this, it's still made to sound too much like a swing of the pendulum from one side (subjectivity, relationality) to the other (objects). And I dislike that both because I'm tired of swings of the pendulum, when what we need is more integrated accounts of how all these things (objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) work together, and because I think it will have a hard time doing much work outside the limited circles of (mostly) young Continental philosophers who use the term now. So my issue is really a strategic one."


extracted from a blog-post let a thousand objects bloom

Friday 9 April 2010

State of emergency


"Just as the school, in Foucault, was merely preschool for the learned behaviour necessary for a laboring life on the factory floor, so games like State of Emergency are training tools for life inside the protocological network, where flexibility, systemic problem solving, quick reflexes, and indeed play itself are as highly valued and commodified as sitting still and hushing up were for the disciplinary societies of modernity. "

Galloway, A., Thacker, E.(2007) The Exploit. University of Minnesota Press, London
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