Locked In The Coronavirus Event

(The following was posted to the Empyre mailing list, in response to Simon Taylor's sharing on the list of 'A World Is Ending' by Levi R. Bryant from the journal Identities - #12 in their Lockdown Theory series)  

Reading this, and other texts written in the last few weeks by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, I can’t help also thinking about the ‘trap of the event’. In letter to Jean-Paul Sartre of 18 July, 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has this to say about the relation between philosophy, politics, writing and events:

 

I have in no way renounced writing on politics… What I have decided to do since the Korean War is a very different thing. I have decided to refrain from writing on events as they are unfolding. This has to do with reasons that belonged to that period, and also with reasons that are permanent. … I have suggested a number of times that what the journal [Les Temps Modernes] should be doing is not take hasty positions, but rather propose lengthy studies. ... What I had in mind was to act as writers, a type of action that consists in a back and forth between the event and the general line, and which does not simply consist in confronting every event (in imaginary fashion) as though it was decisive, unique and irreparable. This method is much closer to politics than your method of ‘engagement continue’ [continuous engagement] (in the Cartesian sense). Indeed, precisely in that sense, it is more philosophical, because the distance it creates between the event and the judgement one passes on it defuses the trap of the event...

 

Interestingly, Wendy Brown quotes this passage from Merleau-Ponty in her chapter on ‘Moralism as Anti-Politics’ in Politics Out of History. To the ‘trap of the event’ and the ‘terms of “the event”’ she adds the ‘trap of existing discourses’.

Flatten the Curve, Build the Care: A Resource for Organizing Efforts Around Coronavirus

For a resource for organizing efforts around Coronavirus, see 'Flatten the curve, build the care': http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/

It's part of the Pirate.Care.Syllabus collective project of my colleagues Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, Maddalena Fragnito and others:

https://syllabus.pirate.care

The table of contents for 'Flatten the curve, build the care' reads as follows:

An invitation to join the collective note-taking
Flatten the curve, grow the care
A common health care crisis
A combined crisis of care, work and environment
A crisis of domesticity
Organizing for an alternative future
Sessions
Further reading

How to assist people in home isolation
Through a feminist lens
Kids in quarantine
Those who can't go home: prisoners, refugees and homeless
Conviviality without proximity
Mutual aid for those who have lost work
Coronavirus and the planetary environmental crisis
Tech and Science in the time of COVID-19
Resources and texts on Coronavirus 

Spanish translation of Timothy Morton's Realist Magic from Open Humanities Press (OA)

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of a Spanish translation of Timothy Morton's Realist Magic (an apposite topic perhaps for these difficult times). Like all our books, it is available on an open access basis. This publication is part of our continuing efforts to branch out beyond English-language texts.

The English-language version is also still available. Please see blurbs for both versions below.

Best,

Gary, Sigi and David

************************

Timothy Morton: Magia realista

Traducción de Román Suárez, Laureano Raló

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/magia-realista/

La ontología-orientada a objetos (OOO) nos ofrece una forma novedosa y sorprendente de pensar la causalidad que toma en consideración los desarrollos de la física que se inician a principios del siglo XX. Para la OOO, la causalidad es estética. En este libro, Timothy Morton explora lo que significa afirmar que algo advenga a la existencia, que persista, y que deje de existir. Tomando ejemplos de la física, la biología, la ecología, el arte, la literatura y la música, Morton pone en evidencia el poder explicativo elegante, aunque contrario a la intuición, de la OOO para explicar cómo opera la causalidad. Traducción a cargo de Laureano Ralón y Román Suárez.

Timothy Morton ocupa la cátedra Rita Shea Guffey de inglés en la Universidad de Rice. Es autor de Ecología oscura: por una lógica de la coexistencia futura (2014), Hiperobjetos: filosofía y ecología tras el fin del mundo (2013), El pensamiento ecológico (2010) y Ecología sin naturaleza (2007), entre otros, además de ochenta artículos sobre filosofía, ecología, literatura, alimentación y música. Escribe con frecuencia en su blog Ecología sin Naturaleza.

************************

Timothy Morton: Realist Magic

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic/

Author Bio

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2014), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), seven other books and eighty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at Ecology Without Nature. 

Attention, Habit, Becoming in India’s Platform Ecologies

Attention, Habit, Becoming in India’s Platform Ecologies

This presentation of on-going research considers participatory action research on the political economy of India’s media ecologies, or what I will also refer to as a decolonising political ecology of media. My interest here is in practically diagramming an antogonistic domain of platform monopoly, information control, value extraction, dispossession, and exploitation, and also digital piracy, technological tinkering and repurposing, and collective lines of autonomous flight and social reproduction that techniques of control attempt to capture and revalue: this is  the simultaneously global and singular domain of the reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation of attention and habit today. In recent studies, the political economy of media has expanded beyond ‘Western’ capitalist intellectual property regulatory regimes and complexified beyond the (post)human; in these researches ecological thought has become more materialist and processual. These new materialist methods shift our focus from the social construction of fetishized, reified media platforms (film, TV, radio) toward the actually existing infrastructures of communication and information, their complex processes of value and sense, their vector-tendencies of resistance and violence within which all forms of media are co-evolving today. This presentation considers the practices and discourses surrounding 'jugaad' (everyday workarounds) and social media platforms in India in relation to recent articulations of political theory: Invisible Committee's Now (2017) and Mario Tronti's Workers and Capital (1965). 

Dr. Amit S. Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has also taught critical marketing studies and business ethics. He is author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, Power 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2002) and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Florida State University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Lorton Maximum Security Prison. His current research touches on critical management and organizational studies of the creative and cultural industries in the UK and India, the gendering of affective labor in social reproduction in India, media practices of commoning, and hacking and piracy ecologies in the UK and South Asia. His monograph on work-around practices in Indian urban digital ecologies, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India, was published in 2019 by Duke University Press. 

Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures: new book from Open Humanities Press

We are delighted to announce the release of Bernard Stiegler's Nanjing Lectures (2016-2019), translated by Daniel Ross.

Nanjing Lectures 2016-2019 address the relationship of Platonic metaphysics to the age of ‘post-truth’, the shift from biopower to neuropower in platform capitalism, and the need for a new epistemology, one that would be neither materialist nor idealist but hyper-materialist. 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/nanjing-lectures/ 

Sigi, David, Gary

In this series of lectures, delivered at Nanjing University from 2016 to 2019, Bernard Stiegler rethinks the so-called Anthropocene in relation to philosophy’s failure to reckon with the manifold and indeed “cosmic” consequences of the entropic and thermodynamic revolution. Beginning with the Oxford Dictionaries’ decision to make “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, and taking this as an opportunity to understand the implications for Heidegger’s “history of being”, “history of truth” and Gestell, the first series of lectures enter into an original consideration of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (and of tragic Greece in general) and its meaning for the history of Western philosophy. The following year’s lecture series traverse a path from Foucault’s biopower to psychopower to neuropower, and then to a critique of neuroeconomics. Revising Husserl’s account of retention to focus on the irreducible connection between human memory and technological memory, the lectures culminate in reflections on the significance of neurotechnology in platform capitalism. The concept of hyper-matter is introduced in the lectures of 2019 as requisite for an epistemology that escapes the trap of opposing the material and the ideal in order to respond to the need for a new critique of the notion of information and technological performativity (of which Moore’s law both is and is not an example) in an age when the biosphere has become a technosphere.