Welcome My Son

Cliff Gerrish makes a good point about Aetna insurance: 

You mistake those words for a message from a human making a statement about a state of affairs. Rather it is a representation in words of a state in a database. That data has been attached to the network identity of your son.

Pink Floyd said it this way,

"Welcome my son, welcome to the machine. Where have you been? That's alright, we know where you've been." 

Yes. Except I reckon the lyric should in this case be "That's alright, we think we know we're you've been, although this only corresponds to the database state Cliff mentioned. You bought a guitar to punish your ma, etc. etc."

American Medical Insurers, You Are Ignorant as Well as Brutal

…obviously. But you just couldn't be more absurd. Obamacare's website not quite fast enough? That's nothing. Nothing. Consider this letter from Aetna, just opened:

"Dear Simon Morton [a 4 year old boy whose doctor is at Texas Children's],

…we've designated your primary care physician's Steven S. Alley, MD practice [note the horrifying grammar] as a Patient Centered Medical Home practice for our network."

1. What does this mean?
2. Is this a sentence?
3. What does it have to do with my son?

Answers: 1. Nothing. 2. No. 3. Zip.

What a waste of trees, brain cells and my money.

A Thing Is Less than the Sum of Its Parts

Nice one Graham. May I achieve this intense clarity within this life.

Critical Theory Reading List

Thanks Graham. Oh gosh I think I owe these New York based chaps an interview.

NSA vs Target

"It's cool that my local department store knows that I'm pregnant before I do. But it's not cool for the NSA to know that I'm planning to blow you up."

Discuss.

Professor Morton's Guide to Tropology 1: What Is a Trope?

A trope is an algorithm for generating a certain kind of meaning.

For instance:

1. Choose a noun.
2. Choose a cause of that noun.
3. Swap 2 for 1.
4. This is called metonymy.

Example: Prefab Sprout, “The King of Rock 'n' Roll.” What a joyful and sardonic song, mixed together in such a perfect blend. As a fan of chord clusters, you have to admit, etc.

Reminds me of my days at NYU!

The chorus…

Highly Recommended

Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal. Just out.

One of the very best things of 2011 was going around Australia and New Zealand with Doug, talking in dialogue with him about hyperobjects. This is what he was working on at the same time. It's the same topic, isn't it?

Oh Go On, You Know You Want To

Look at your basic mind, just simple awareness which is not divided into sections, the thinking process that exists within you. Just look at that, see that. Examining does not mean analyzing. It is just viewing things as they are, in the ordinary sense. --Trungpa Rincpoche

Agrilogistics Explained

Oh dear.

Happy Yule Y'all

Why do I get excited by the Solstice? I just do.

My Interview with Jeff Carreira

Is online.

"Often, Ruefully Funny"

Douglas Armato on Hyperobjects.

Extraordinaryflakes

These snowflakes are good. Thanks Rick Muller!

Turning Nihilist

Long time correspondent Nick Guetti (hi Nick! I owe you an email!) writes: 

I just had a long FB conversation with an old friend of mine: permaculture teacher, ecofeminist, grassroots organizer. Or she was, years ago. She's gone nihilist. Completely burned out. "Maybe you should ask yourself if the world is asking to be saved." She thinks taking action and responsibility is all about ego and it doesn't really matter. Everything she said is like a textbook example of what you've said/written about the apocalyptic, happy, hypermasculine deep ecology failing to sustain people through reality.

Bad Loops

Thank heavens the FDA is getting on the case of antibacterial soaps. They are also anti-batrachic, ie they make frogs die.

"Long-time TreeHugger readers will rejoice at this news; it is an issue we have been covering since 2006, when TreeHugger Emeritus and chemist John Laumer first introduced us to the problem, way back when the pictures were small and the posts were short. Reviewing the series of posts starting seven years ago is seriously depressing; everything the FDA is finally asking now has been on the table for years. And they haven't even banned the stuff yet, they are just asking the companies to justify its use. This is appalling."
--Treehugger

Bad loops: the attempt to be clean results in a further twist in the web of fate.

OOO and Art

So I'm off to the Menil Collection, which is this excellent, excellent art museum around the corner. Literally two blocks away from me. I'm going to talk with one of the directors there about OOO, as he's organizing an exhibition around it.

Yes

I like this theory. I just do, and have done for years. It's funny to see it on the front page of the Huffington Post. Just in time for Yule?

OOO doesn't tell you how many objects there are. We're not the object police.

But this explanation really fits with OOO. There is a withdrawn entity whose sensual manifestation is the universe with its dimensions, gravity etc. These things are illusion-like, yet inseparable from the withdrawn entity whose manifestation they are.

Of course it also fits with Vajrayana! The universe is Vairocana. A small piece of the universe is Vairocana. A collection of pieces is Vairocana. And so on. Just as a small piece of a rose hologram is also a rose.

When you visualize in Vajrayana, you are supposed to see the deities as holographic. The Tibetans used reflections of inverted thangka paintings in water (surrounded by candles) to achieve the correct rippling-with-nothingness effect. And the deities have tiny tiny deities in them emanating out of every pore etc.

I like the headline: "Shock." It's a Kantian shock. There are phenomena, and there are things, and you can't quite tell the difference. It's also nice after all the months of "shocks" about the NSA etc. etc.

And I can't help liking David Bohm.

Ocean as Hyperobject

Yes! By Steve Mentz.

Nonhumans in Comedy

Happiness is…giving episode 1 of The Mighty Boosh series 1 to your buddy Cary Wolfe, who agrees with you that comedy is the highest art form.

JLiat book

It looks good! And reminds me to send him Hyperobjects -- he's in it!

Anthropocentrism and Marxism

Saying that ontology should be non-anthropocentric is not the same as saying humans should not act to change their material conditions.

It's just that we are lazily used to our ontology coming with an easy to discern, snap on ethics or politics--and vice versa.

Discuss.

Jeff Carreira on Our Interview

Posted here.

Ring Puppets

I love me a puppet.

STEMming

Stem: the central shaft.
Stem: a branching shaft.
Which, really?
To stem from. Implication of something prior, despite the attempt to assert centrality. Strem-trality overwhelms the implicit content.

Are You a Romantic? (Interview)

Yes that's right pale faces of sad sack rage, I am a New Age consumerist, ish! This was actually a very good interaction, between me and Jeff Carreira, the presenter.

Yes Henry Warwick

…that's the opening few seconds of “Close to the Edge” sampled at the start of “Lights in My Brain.”

Phantasms

Very good DJ Spooky. You didn't have to be so very kind about my book--thank you sir. This is one of my favorite Spooky things, a remix of Ultramarine's “Lights in My Brain.” When I first showed up in the States the band did these gigs with Meat Beat Manifesto and Aphex Twin, called Communion. I went to a couple naturally. This is one of those remixes that's better than the original, which is really saying something. Voice is Robert Wyatt, another favorite.

Bills, Bills, Bills

That's nothing, NYT. With my heart beating too fast I was driven one block to hospital in Philly. The bill was $13000.

7 hours of monitoring in hospital came to $11000.

Inside the Fear Is the Sadness

Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. --Trungpa Rinpoche

Petrolepathy

Great title for a talk this Wednesday by Tom Cohen, who is visiting Rice. I'll be introducing.

Situational Aggression

Two somewhat distressed undergrads just told me, in my capacity as director of undergraduate studies. There is a Facebook page on which Rice Engineering majors scoff at Humanities majors.

Yuck. Why?

"I hope he fails"

No it isn't single payer. I'm still into it.

Dub Philosophy

With the help of my awesome consumerism students and TAs (Larry Butz and Derek Woods) I reiterated today my oft repeated claim (repeated by me for about twenty years) that Blake is more like a Rasta than a hippie. A moody apocalyptic urbanite trapped in Babylon, thinking a mystical consumerism and connection to a personal divine rather than a return to (mechanized, though disguised) nature.

Blake is a dub poet.

He made dub books, expanded, remixed unbelievable books.

And OOO is dub philosophy:

How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight clos'd by your senses five?   (Blake)

Hey, FBI, I am the sky--who are you? (Lee Scratch Perry)

Badly Myelinated Neurons

“One of the hallmarks of that millennial profile is an inability to acknowledge mistakes,” the staffer said, sounding equal parts bemused and exasperated. “Everything is right and nothing was a mistake, and they can spin it any way they want.” (source)

Secret Agents ov Gaia (MP3)

My talk at the American Academy of Religion, November 23, 2013. Thanks very much to Adrian Ivakhiv for convening the panel, “Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things” featuring Bron Taylor, William Connolly, Sarah Pike, and Daniel Deudney. Adrian transcribed the talks and the Q&A and is going to upload them as soon as he can get online. It was a good show with about 120 people attending, a strange grey void of a non-place to talk in though!

Tardis

Isn't this nice? On the 50th anniversary of a certain show. From my theology student Ross.

I think objects are Tardises.

Ecological Awareness 101

This is the title of what I'll be sharing with the undergrads across the disciplines at Loyola in New Orleans in February. I hope you can come to it.

Remorseless Gentleness

Thanks Kate! The juxtaposition of terror and peace is all too delicious.

Another Blow to LEM

…or the Law of the Excluded Middle. We have Neanderthal DNA. Neanderthals have DNA of an unknown humanoid ancestor.

Foucault and Mental Health

Thatcher and Reagan used Foucault to justify their closing of mental hospitals.

The Nonhuman Turn

I just got my images together for Richard Grusin's collection of essays, which promises to be quite groundbreaking. There are an awful lot of very interesting contributors to it including Brian Massumi (whose new book sounds excellent), Erin Manning, Ian Bogost and Mark Hansen.

Interview with Doug Lain

Doug is good at playing back and forth with sentences. I was looking forward to it ever since we set it up. And was not disappointed! It is about Hyperobjects.

Waiting for Someone to Die

…given the urgency and the other options, is in fact startlingly patient and nonviolent.

Prisoner's Dilemma Leaflet Drop

That would be a way to do it. Just have the air force drop millions of leaflets on the Prisoner's Dilemma across the country. The entire USA is going through a somewhat oblique lesson in Prisoner's Dilemma style tests of self-interest theories. The other prisoner you can't see or talk to is another citizen in need of heath care. It would be in your interests to include them in your reckoning. Look: 

Of course we also have that special group of picky customers who want highly customized insurance policies. The NYT treated us to an example of such a person last week, Lori Gottlieb a 46-year-old psychotherapist living in Los Angeles.

Ms. Gottlieb is quite upset. After already having a child, the medical expenses for which were presumably covered by insurance, she does not want to have to pay for the expenses that other pregnant mothers and new parents incur. Under Obamacare she will no longer be able to buy her cherry-picking plan.

So this gets us to the meat of the problem. Obamacare is about ensuring that people will be able to get reasonably priced insurance regardless of their health. There are some healthy people who want to bet on their continued good health and tell the less healthy to get lost if it means paying somewhat more for their own insurance. It should not be asking too much of members of Congress to stand behind Obamacare and against the Lori Gottliebs of America. (From this)

Excellent Hyperobjects Review

Right here.

Wrong

Nope. You take a bunch of carbon compounds and some other stuff, and some cyanide, and inject some electricity. Fairly shortly you have amino acids.

Pass It On

I'm sure this TPM commenter won't mind you tweeting his ready mades:

1/6) FACTS-Insurers knowingly CHOSE to change grandfathered plans&sell ineligible ones post-3/2010 w/out disclosure; now using ACA as cover.
2/6) Now they’re rushing folks into pricey plans b4 folks can see all options. (Letters with Nov30 “deadline” make the scam pretty obvious…)
3/6) FYI, “Grandfather” facts: http://tinyurl.com/lbku9mj (Oh, and G Kessler, limiting hikes to a point ABOVE med inflation isn’t onerous)
4/6) Admin “knew” there’d be cancellations over time because they knew insurers cancel&change plans EVERY YEAR, esp in indiv market.
5/6) Admin’s big mistake? Not realizing their ACA “partners” would be so slimy; should’ve (loudly) added disclosure req to gfather clause.
6/6) Obama didn’t lie; insurers are doing what they’ve always done; and this is the most shameful chapter in media history since Iraq.

Onward

Next up, Adrian Ivakhiv has assembled a bunch of weirdos to talk about Bruno Latour's Gaia at the American Academy of Religion.

Mine is called “Secret Agents ov Gaia.”

Bristles (MP3)

My talk at Contact Ecologies, MEMSI. It would be difficult to imagine a better intro than the one Jeffrey Cohen so kindly gave. Great questions include Jane Bennett's.

Bristles

Thank you Jeffrey Cohen

What an incredibly nice time I've had at George Washington University, courtesy of Jeffrey Cohen. I just finished a delightful breakfast chat with him and Lowell Duckert. These scholars exemplify what it means to be a scholar for real, and with such sincerity and sweetness. Thank you sirs.

Yesterday was an extraordinary feast of knowledge courtesy of MEMSI. Bruce Holsinger was there, my old mate! And Jane Bennett frequents these medievalist gatherings--how lovely to see her as ever. Art historian Anne Harris gave a pathbreaking talk about objects and echoes. Kellie Robertson brought the Aristotelian noise and Steve Mentz did something very similar to what I've been thinking about concerning the Anthropocene--you start to see how geological periods would better be described via catastrophes in general.

The graduate students in Professor Cohen's class were extremely intelligent and lively. It's a credit to the momentum he's built around MEMSI and these courses--you could feel his good energy everywhere. Great great day. I'm lucky to have been taken under their wing.

Nineteenth-Century Studies CFP

In Houston! I'm talking! Email Professor Lynn Voskuil (lvoskuil@Central.UH.EDU).

John Tavener RIP

He is able to reach an unspeakable region.

Karen Jacobs

At Rice this Friday!

This Looks Right

Nice one Graham.

We Are Already Dead

Thank you for that Roy Scranton! Your thoughts are very congruent with mine. Look at this: 

Geological time scales, civilizational collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and contemporary metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans?

Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?”

--especially the “we are already dead” line of thought. That is the right depth.

That Was Nice

An interview with Doug Lain, host of the renowned Diet Soap podcast.

I love to do interviews. They are like jazz: thinking and talking as listening.

What I'm Saying These Days

Horror is the telepathy of flesh, taking telepathy to mean strictly passion at a distance, the susceptibility of a thing to another thing. Easy Think Substances are lumps of extension separated in time and space. No wonder it is difficult to imagine causality in a careful way given this separation, despite the scientistic cleanliness of the underlying things and their mechanisms as the little metal balls in an executive toy, clunking back and forth. The attempt to stave off action at a distance results in unsustainable paradoxes (paging Zeno). No respectable scientist thinks this way, but it is still somehow unacceptable for a humanist to state in the baldest way possible the formula for action at a distance, which just is the one sentence to which you can compress my study of causality, Realist Magic: objects are telepathic.

--from my talk this coming Friday at Jeffrey Cohen's place

Go Figure

10% of the total sales of my books since I published the first one have been in the last month.

Plant Sensing

A good place to start to find out about it.

40bn Earth-like Planets

You think there might not just be human subjects out there?

Notes on Divining Transhuman Space

Featuring Caroline Picard. Looks very promising.

I Believe the Correct Phrase Sounds Like "Grace-ist Brother Clucker"

Read it and weep.

Annise Parker

She's the first openly gay mayor of a US city and she lives round the corner from us. And was just reelected. Nice one!

Some Upcoming Talks

“Bristles,” George Washington University, November 15. See Jeffrey Cohen's pages for details on this. 

“Secret Agents of Gaia,” American Academy of Religion, Baltimore, November 23–26. 

“The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Emergency,” Rice University, February 18. 

Jeff Kripal

Boy oh boy my friend and colleague Jeff Kripal can write. His Authors of the Impossible is the first humanities book I've read that has been optioned for a movie, and you can see why.

My Interview with Brooklyn Rail

Greg Lindquist is an artist very keen on objects and ANT. It was nice talking with him.

The interview is about Hyperobjects.

Tom Cohen at Rice

On December 4. With a fascinating sounding talk, "Petrolepathy." 4pm in Sewall 309.

Bingo

"People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them."

Degenerate Art

Bartok insisted, to his credit, on being part of the Degenerate Art exhibition of the Nazis in 1937. It's in the news as a cache of "degenerate" paintings has been found. (Good slide show)

Lynn Cheney tried to make a list of wrong humanists, post 9/11. Of course me and my buddies all tried to insist that we should be included in that list.

Well This Is Interesting

I wonder whether, given this talk, neoliberalism is a kind of monotheism of the hyperobject, where there is only one true hyperobject (the market). To counteract that, of course, requires not necessarily atheism but non-theism or something like polytheism.

Zurkownian Blogsmithery

By the extraordinary Derek Woods. Watch out everyone! He is my and Cary's Ph.D student!

Another Whacky Chart

1. Hyerobjects.
2. Dialectic of Enlightenment.
3. Patrick Goggins, A Reader's Guide to Reza Aslan's Zealot.
4. Barthes, Camera Lucida.
5. Zizek, Less than Nothing.
6. Brooke Noel Moore, Critical Thinking.
7. Candide.
8. Hyperobjects (Kindle).

(Amazon Criticism List)

The Whackiest Chart

1. Kafka, Metamorphosis.
2. Eric Pepin, Meditation within Eternity.
3. Elisa Medhus, My Son and the Afterlife.
4. Bachelard, Poetics of Space.
5. Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes.
6. Elisa Medhus, My Son and the Afterlife (paperback).
7. Stephen Williams, What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know.
8. The Complete Works of Plato.
9. Hyperobjects.

(Amazon Metaphysics Chart)

Rules of the Road

UK: There are rules, which is why I had to run you over with my car. I was going at the speed limit.
California: There are rules. But I don't want to be seen enforcing them, even by myself.
New York: There are rules. Outta my way!
Colorado: You are not going to immigrate onto my highway. Nope. Gonna slow down to 50 just to make sure you don't.
Texas: Are there rules? Maybe there are…This stop sign looks like it might be a rule...oh wait, there isn't one right now--oops, maybe there is one.

Zero Sum Gaming

I hope Krugman continues to ignore the absurdities issuing from a Harvard historian who fancies himself adept at economics. And continues in this vein instead.

Will This Turn Texas on to a More Rational Healthcare Policy?

…one in a hundred in my area get yellow fever by 2085, because of global warming.

Consumerism Blogging

Go on, you know you want to. More heartbreakingly beautiful prose from my undergraduate students. Read the one on STEM courses. And the others!

Will It Break Capitalism?

I'm not sure. But WWII for sure broke a certain phase of imperialism. One wonders whether the gradual realization that we are in the Anthropocene will have a similar effect: is it the viral sentence to capitalism's logical coherence?

Alternate Currents Blog

Joseph Campana (Rice) has started an awesome blog on energy and ecology and the humanities.

Salt Sugar Fat

It strikes me that one thing this book reveals is how the taste map of the tongue is in error. There is a gigantic forest of sweet receptors for instance, throughout the mouth.

The mouth is a withdrawn thing and this fact makes that clearer. The old tongue map makes the appearance fit nicely over the thing.

Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems: Zurkow's Presentation

Latour litanies! A fantastic list of directives at the end!

Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems

That's My Class!

In the inset picture top left. Click for more detail.

Nazi Nature

Oh Banksy, friend of my father.

Bruno Latour

Started writing me. He is into Realist Magic and wants to know about hyperobjects from the horse's mouth. He is very very nice.

Marina Zurkow: "Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems"

At Rice today (slides to follow!):

Permian Basin: NM plus TX, major amount of oil 
drawings to trouble her own bias; drove around West Texas January 2011
deep connection to oil 
dark polemical apocalypse of sketches needed to be discarded
in order to connect; to be honest about intentions and be open to what you would find
friendliness; metta; Pali; maitri = benevolence, good will, active interest in others
metta meditation: may all beings be protected from harm, be happy, be healthy, be free from suffering
>> brahmaviharas
we think we’ve lost a time of enchantment
but is affective force of enchantment >> modern world; cultivate generosity?
“a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies”
(Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life”)
to be struck
one must be enamored with existence
Latour ANT--objects are part of social networks, endure translations 
nonmodern world not culture versus nature
is this a nonessentialist animism? 
beyond anthropomorphism: human as weaver of morphisms (Latour)
not making the world in our own image
passive and vibrant binary; places below threshold active power; “lively streams of chemicals” << landfill
Stanislavski; “what if” “What if were in the same situation as my character?”
to imagine a nonhuman umwelt; what does nonhuman sense? what does it want? 
is a gross change of relations desirable and possible? 
how can enchantment help?
Zurkow found the sinkhole using Google Satellite
steadily growing since it opened in 2002
not that exceptional but anthropogenic; flushing too much water << oil drilling
“ecological collateral damage”
geological force of humans; small eg
Earl Williams; local naturalist; “all nature abhors a vacuum”
Veronique Rossier; software that treats all the elements as actors including the water, clouds, rocks
then times of day and year <> probability >> animation
one minute of screen time = one hour of our time

somewhere between real natural history and flights of invention
Jack Collum “Nature is slow, people get bored”
nature is incredibly boring when you’re in it! 
hazmat workers << YouTube like choreography
rotoscoping; tracing over video

underground
map of what is below the big empty
what does a drill bit see? 
modern visualization tools are rather lifeless and flat
NeoGeo
looking at infinitely receding rock strata
deep time -- earth having a history
the liquidity of rock

The Inside Story of Modern Gasoline (1946) >> her piece
loop (nb nb!)

repeatable structural unit: -mer; polymers
PMA, PVC, PS, PU,  PIB [rubber],  HDPE,  LDPE
nurdles; tiny plastic resin beads, precursors of things
mimicking plankton; consumed
microplastics outnumber zooplankton 6 to 1
persistent organic pollutants (POPs)
endocrine disruption
immune disfunction
nurdle eating turtles; bottle eating babies
plasticity of petrochemicals >> Jesus candles and water bottles
>> Petroleum Manga
vertigo; endless amounts of things <> manga
strange notion: hydrocarbons want to become
by becoming plastic hydrocarbons can live forever
printed with solvent ink on Tyvek, made from HDPE (thermoplastic)
plastic regrind: objects ground back down into pellets
book on petroleum manga coming out soon! 

Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, Critical Design FAQ 10 “But isn’t it art” 
“we expect art to be shocking and extreme; critical design needs to be closer to the everyday”
“if it is regarded as art it is easier to deal with; but if it remains as design it’s more disturbing”
so why not put design directly in your mouth? 
Mark Dion “we live, breathe and eat our field of investigation”
food doesn’t shout I am an art project
>> Outside the Work
BU sustainability exhibit
hydrocarbon formation <> kitchen techniques
Berg iceberg water: they will go to waste anyway (!) is their argument
honey plus maraschino cherry dye (processed in bees); taste like twizzlers
“it was amazing, and awful” 

Immortal Plastics New York May 1-4
trained hydrocarbon assessors! examining hang tags on clothes etc 
to ascertain total amount of personal plastic
leave with inventory and jar of plastic containing the weight of what they came with
people love strange rituals in which they quantify themselves
performance art or DIY science or sloppy green nonprofit
SUM QUOD ERIS; QUOD ES, IPSE FUI (Petrus Alfonsus) [haha, the name]

The Thirsty Bird, 2012

Some steps towards haunting and enchantment
to ask with imagination and bodies what we want of them and what they want of us (Bennett)

“Queer Ecology”; working with intimacy
Marina Zurkow makes a list of directives: 
put the questions in your body
Get it all over you, make it personal and intimate
don’t scale up, possibly make it replicable
ruffle it, trouble it
invite questions, rifts, holes and escapes
use wonder as a gateway to complex relations
use complex relations as a way to induce wonder
make time do funny things

Q&A:
Q: How did you get in to the community? 
A: I was very truthful at Wink, and we had meetings where we laid guns down at the door as it were. I sent everyone links to the work. I hooked up with a secret eminent domain activist. She was very paranoid. I was suspect no matter who it was, right or left! I’m very clearly an invasive species when I do these projects. 

Q: Can you talk some more about the responses to the works? 
A: My work is all online and so for me to explain my work seems banal. I want to extend my intentions. I get a lot of responses along the lines of “you leave so much to interpretation” as if that’s a bad thing. There is a need for a solution like agitprop or propaganda, which I’m totally not for in my practice. What the value proposition is in even engaging with enchantment. Can art really contribute to paradigm shifts? I don’t really have answers. 

Q: Thinking about enchantment. What is the relation to haunting? Is haunting a means or is it its own goal or moment? 
A: Haunting tends to have more negative connotations. There is a lot of value in haunting. Emptying your bag into a bin. Eating and encountering petrochemicals. I was haunted by accumulating all my plastics in my living room. Enchantment tends to be lulling. Bennett issue. A lot of my work was positioned after a crisis in the past; there was a calm to it. People criticized me for creating too much around these issues. I don’t feel fully articulated about it. 

Q: How did you get into this? Connections with other people working in this area and 1970s? Last time there was all this interest. Beuys 10 000 oaks and so on. 
A: I follow threads. They are not really linear. 2006 was a watershed. I have a studio in Brooklyn, sub-garden level. My studio started flooding from excessive rain. I had to swab the studio. It was so vivid; the water ended up under my computer chair. I then received hurricane evacuation maps. Inconvenient Truth came out. You can’t hide anymore. The petroleum thing was a whim. I can’t believe I’m still working on it--it won’t let me go! Talking with DiverseWorks about making a mesocosm in West Texas...I’d have to think more about the 70s connection. 

Q: I have a question about time. Human time, geological time; but also machine time, computational time. Does this time bridge the human and nonhuman aspects? Or does it make it even more artificial? 
A: I don’t think it bridges. I think of it as another kind of time functioning. Is it even or uneven? 
Q: I don’t know. 

A: I refuse to deal with machines. Bogost on cameras--I lose interest! I privilege living in a way! It’s almost like a blind spot. 

Who or What Is Marina Zurkow?

Let Derek Woods, ruler of lichens, tell you.

Marina Zurkow at Rice Monday 4pm

“Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems.” I shall be introducing, with Joseph Campana.

Are You Experienced?

Reggie Ray turned me into a Buddhist. Well I was a meditator already but he performed the refuge ceremony, at a winter retreat in the Rockies in January 1997. There was six feet of snow.

Reggie emphasizes the emptiness aspect, while Pema Chödron (another Trungpa student of yore and my friend Alan's meditation instructor of yore) emphasizes the compassion aspect. In a very physical way.

iTunes >> Store >> Dharma Ocean

We Have Exited the Holocene

This data point seems rather shockingly vivid in that regard.

(When) Does the Cynical Reason Take Over

...in this Chipotle advertorial? I reckon even Adorno would have found it hard not to like the detourned Willy Wonka. Thanks to Larry Butz, my consumerism students are exploring this.

Sabotage

How hard would it be for a hater to make a bot that signed up for accounts and passwords on healthcare.gov over and over and over again? And is anyone investigating that possibility?

Wrong Senator Inhofe

My uncle was just treated for a stroke in the UK. Very very well. He spent ten days in hospital.

The only difference between here and there is, he didn't have to declare bankruptcy afterwards like my mom in law has had to do, twice.

And Obamacare isn't "socialized medicine."

Other than that your nasty little squib is accurate. Not.

Automatic Nothingness (MP3)

My talk at Performing Objects. So good to see Rob Jackson and João again.

Automatic Nothingness

High Art/Low Art Is Now OOObsolete

Gosh I wish I'd been able to say that in the Q&A just now. There was a very good question that I answered by talking about indigenous cultures and modernity. But another way of thinking about some of the issues that the conference goers understand really well is that they suffer, as performers who use paper, puppets and “things” like that, from the denigration of “kitsch” or low art.

OOO gives you a way to see the high art/low art distinction (cf the art/craft and artist/artisan distinctions) as unworkable products of modernity that are not simply socially invidious, but ontologically unsustainable and ecologically dangerous.

This is why the makers of automata and puppeteers at this conference understand implicitly what I was saying in my talk, better than the kinds of words about it that come out of my mouth! They get that when you do art you are messing with causality and they get that love and a kind of sincerity coded as unsophisticated and childlike (and denigrated as such by high art and the cynical reason that underwrites it) are a way out of modernity.

In his talk João Florêncio was using high art examples precisely to say that even here, in sophisticated art, there are relations with nonhumans going on that transcend the “anything you can do I can do meta” syndrome.

I often wonder whether some of the reaction to Harman's thought is a displaced reaction to what is denigrated as kitsch and “low” by the avant-garde, who are, as he keeps insisting, fighting yesterday's war.

OOO shares with deconstruction a love for going back to the old philosophical jazz standards of the past and reworking them into really interesting tunes. And so do the makers of automata and children's books find interesting things in “old” aesthetic phenomena.

I wonder whether it's a kind of snob reaction, at bottom.

The Tea Party Speaks to the World on the Current Crisis

"We have lost the war. But we are determined not to lose the battle."

Delegitimizing the First Black President

If you haven't seen this yet--especially if you're wondering what the heck is going on over here, this is now required viewing.

Object-Oriented Feminism (MP3)

From SLSA. Packed room and a very enjoyable set of papers. Frenchy Lunning's was amazing, I feel. It was on overlaps between what Harman says about sensual objects and what Kristeva says about abjection.

Ada Lovelace Day

Happy day, celebrating the first programmer of computers.

Why Haven't I Received Hyperobjects Yet?

...probably because the first edition sold out before it appeared in the stores. Have patience given this rather surprising fact.

Interview Today

For Brooklyn Rail, about Hyperobjects. Greg Lindquist is a very interesting writer who has put together, for instance, this piece about object orientation and earthworks art.

It's Horrible How Wrong You're Getting This, BBC

So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.  --Paul Krugman

Can Movies Make Us Healthier?

My colleague Kirsten Ostherr rocking it at TEDx tomorrow.

TEDxHouston 2013  - The Other Things At Rice University, on September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy made a speech in which he declared that we would land on the moon within a decade. On that day, in our great city, Kennedy bravely announced: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." 2503 days later, we achieved that audacious mission, stepped foot on another  world for the first time, and firmly established ourselves as universal explorers. This tremendous and difficult challenge took the combined efforts of thousands of creative, motivated and audacious individuals, and inspired many more to imagine their  own “moonshots.” Now...what about the other things? On October 12, 2013, 51 years and 1 month since that day, Rice University will host the fourth annual TEDxHouston. On that day, in our great city, we will listen to, engage with, and be inspired by The Other Things. We will explore what things are changing the  world as we know it, and what other things have yet to be accomplished. TEDxHouston is a full day conference featuring some of Houston's most innovative thinkers, leaders, and doers. Join us on this mission to explore a bold new world. LIVE SIMULCAST - Rice University Date: October 12, 2013 Time: 9am - 5pm Location: 100 Herring Hall, Rice University   Each year, TEDxHouston strives to provide as much access to TEDxHouston as possible. In a city of 4 million+ with limited seating at the main event space, we're looking to expand our reach by offering TEDxHouston viewing parties across the city. Rice University has come together to welcome the extended Rice community and TEDxHouston community to attend a simulcast event at Rice University. The event at Rice is free to attend (though parking is not covered) and is first come, first serve. We hope TED fans, students, and newcomers alike will come celebrate Houston's local speakers and ideas. For a list of available local simulcasts and how to register to attend, please  visit http://tedxhouston.com/2013/events.php PLEASE REGISTER FOR THE RICE SIMULCAST: http://tedxhoustonrice.eventbrite.com/. The School of Humanities is proud to announce that  Dr. Kirsten Ostherr  Professor of English and Director of the Medical Futures Lab will be presenting at TEDxHouston on October 12th!  Dr. Ostherr teaches film and media studies, focusing on ephemeral film and historical and contemporary visualizations of health and disease in photography, film, television, animation, advertising, and medical imaging. In Fall 2011 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for  Medical Humanities, at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX. With the support of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, she is currently pursuing a Master of Public Health degree at UT-Houston, and is also a Fellow in The John P. McGovern,  M.D. Center for Humanities and Ethics, at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX. Dr. Ostherr’s current research is focused on accelerating the uptake of media theory in health communication platforms to enable providers and patients to optimize their use of mobile health technologies. She is Co-founder and Director of the Medical Futures Lab, a collaborative center  linking Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and UT Health to train the medical media innovators of the future through creative, hands-on critical thinking and design. A cornerstone of the Medical Futures Lab is the Medical Media Arts Hub, a program that joins Rice undergraduates  with Texas Medical Center healthcare providers to solve information, communication, and visualization problems through a collaborative design process involving providers, patients, and students. For more information about the schedule and a full list of 2013 TEDxHouston speakers, please visit: http://tedxhouston.com/2013/speakers.php.

OOO + Feminism

My talk “Weird Essentialism” is about that, by the way, as is my other talk, “All Objects Are Deviant,” which I shall soon post. It was good to do that one, on the third year of the Object-Oriented Feminism panels.

Puppetry

“At a press conference Thursday, House GOP leadership announced the new strategy, one day after Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham admitted the group will ‘give the speaker some flex on a short-term debt limit increase’, in order to extend the shutdown over Obamacare.” (link)

Getting Ready, World?

I do so wish the BBC would stop reporting this whole thing as a tiff. Nicholas Kristoff isn't the greatest but he gets it right here:

The House Republican hard-liners lost their battle against Obamacare in the democratic process, just as President Obama lost his battle for an assault-weapons ban. But instead of accepting their loss as Obama did, members of the Gang of 40 took hostages. Unless Obamacare is defunded, they’ll cause billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.

The G.O.P. claims to be the party particularly concerned by budget deficits. Yet its tantrum caused a government shutdown that cost the country $1.6 billion last week alone.

As for the debt limit, the costs of missing that deadline could be infinitely greater. Already, interest rates are spiking for one-month Treasury bills to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, calculates that the 2011 debt-ceiling confrontation will, over a decade, cost American taxpayers an extra $18.9 billion.

And that was the price tag for a crisis in which the debt-limit deadline was eventually met. If this deadline is missed, the costs in higher interest rates in the years ahead will be billions more.

Members of the Gang of 40 are unwilling to pay for early childhood education, but they’re O.K. with paying untold billions for a government shutdown and debt-limit crisis? That’s not governance, but extremism.