Science versus the Feelies in the post-400ppm Era

Another wonderful assault on the madness of global warming denial by Potholer54. Very funny in places, especially the graphs, and well worth circulating.

Climate Change is Simple

A pithy and powerful TED Talk intoduction to climate change - or, more specifically, global warming - by David Roberts. A more affecting remix of the talk, with imagery and music, can be found here.

Shamefaced

I'm re-blogging this from Feminist Philosophers, as I was somewhat ashamed at not knowing the name Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. I was similarly shamed by my seven year old daughter a couple of weeks ago when, at bedtime, she asked me to name ten women who had discovered or invented something. I think I did somewhat better than she expected, rolling off Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace and Rosalind Franklin quite quickly (atlhough I didn't get Franklin's name quite right either), but it was painful not being able to do it and even more disheartening that at the tender age of seven she expected me to fail. So, dad will be endeavouring to do a better job of this in the future.

Time And Relative Dimensions In ... Gender

A well-conceived and enjoyable mix of alternate history, feminism and fandom is available here. Probably best appreciated by Brits, this is a parallel television universe that I would love to be able to tune in to. I think all of the choices map very well on to their male Gallifreyan counterparts. Of course, if there is a television series that captures the crossover between speculative and weird realism for me, it would be the 1979-1982 BBC series, Sapphire and Steel. Withdrawn objects, vibrant matter, time as an object and agentival, a being that exists in every photograph ever taken. Scary, weird fiction/realism at its televisual best.

Philosophy as Spiritual Ordeal

For any philosophers, academic or otherwise, who have bracketed or repressed the category and practice of “spirituality” from their thinking, I would strongly suggest that you consider looking at Joshua Ramey’s new book The Hermetic Deleuze. I won’t try and summarise a book that I haven’t read in its entirety yet, but there are an excellent series of discussions of the book at An und für sich here, here and here (and also here, here and here). In part the book is concerned with the hidden role of hermeticism and, more broadly, esoterica and spirituality in Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre. But the scope is certainly broader than this, extending to an all too frequent awkwardness with and denial, erasure or suppression of the “spiritual” in much philosophical discourse and practice.

Suffice it to say that I have found this provocative and troubling. Why? Because I have certainly engaged in such a process of self-censure with regard to spirituality myself. While a lot of my earlier years were spent reading esotericism, gnosticism, hermeticism and occultism, I have been incrementally distancing my philosophical self from such potential contaminants to reason for twenty years now. And this is despite teaching both philosophy and contemporary incarnations of such esoteric traditions at university. I only started to forcefully question the viability and value of this bracketing quite recently: first when I started to revisit and then teach Daoism after a long absence, then when I came across Isabelle Stengers surprising, pragmatic Marxist and pro-Deleuzean engagement with feminist witchcraft, and also when I was called out on the issue in a book review of my Goddess as Nature by Sarah Penicka-Smith. I’ve been dodging my discomfiture with “spirituality” and its relation with philosophy for too long, and Ramey’s evocation and prescription of philosophy as spiritual ordeal may be an idea that I can accept.

Not a Smart ALEC

As an interested observer of the US Empire/Plutocracy, who tends to alternate between morbid fascination and abject horror, I was  suitably shocked by Joe Romm’s coverage of the American Legislative Exchange Council here. This year it seems that ALEC are pushing forwards with bills to promote the teaching of climate change denial in the public school system.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - known by its critics as a “corporate bill mill” – has hit the ground running in 2013, pushing “models bills” mandating the teaching of climate change denial in public school systems.

 

January hasn’t even ended, yet ALEC has already planted its ”Environmental Literacy Improvement Act“ - which mandates a “balanced” teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms - in the state legislatures of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona so far this year.

Ah yes, the joy of the balanced curriculum. Is this the false balance that promotes all perspectives as equal, no matter what the justificatory and evidential weight behind them? Can one expect a nice Flat Earth narrative to balance out those annoying Spherical Earth stories, so beloved of globalization theorists, one world government types and tree-hugging ecologists? Can one expect some good old Moon landing denial to create some balance to that flag planting, technological triumphalism in the history books? Unsurprisingly, no - once again, if you follow the money, it seems that some people might actually have an economic interest in certain ideas being promoted rather than others. Who would have guessed?

 

Anyway, in a similar vein, here is a good recent takedown of Moon landing denialism, with some useful commentary on similar types of denialism at the end.

 

Departitioning AUFS and OOO [UPDATE]

I’ve finally added AUFS to my list of Favourite Blogs. Why should such a minor event warrant comment? Well, bizarrely, this decision has been rather a long time in the making. On the one hand, I have been reading and lurking around AUFS for three or four years, typically checking in several times a day to follow the latest posts and comments (so much so that it has been pinned to my browser toolbar for more than a year). It is, therefore, fair to say that I find it interesting, stimulating and intellectually challenging. There is also an academic rationale for this. My educational biography is grounded partly in theology. While my undergraduate studies straddled Religious Studies and Philosophy, I subsequently went on to a Masters in Feminist Theology and then a PhD on a topic that combined religious studies, philosophy and theology in a somewhat volatile cocktail. Moreover, I undertook my doctorate at an institution that was, at the time, almost entirely oriented towards Biblical Studies and Theology, and where I was the only postgrad with any interest in religious studies (never mind feminist paganism and contemporary Goddess religions, which were the focus of my doctoral research). So, I have a relationship with theology, albeit one that I have trouble labelling, and my interest in AUFs is relatively straightforward in this regard.

On the other hand, though, a few years ago I also began to immerse myself in Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. I found that I liked a lot of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant’s materials and then I progressed to the works of Morton, Latour, DeLanda, Bogost, Bennett and many others. It was also at this time that I started blogging. Now, to be honest, this blog has never become quite what I intended; it seems that children/family, online laziness and an ‘interesting’ teaching workload have intervened rather too often to prevent this. But, despite this, in my own mind at least, the site has retained some affinities and sympathies with SR and OOO, despite its drifting towards climate, ecological and crisis of civilization related content more recently. What is the relevance of this with regard to AUFS? Well, in one respect, I have kept many of my interests off blog, and one of those bracketed guilty pleasures was AUFS (‘lets not complicate the Favourite Blogs list with a theological outlier’, I thought). However, another more substantial issue has been the amount of online heat that OOO has generated. I have watched with morbid fascination, and a wide range of other emotions too, the various attacks, barbed comments, discursive conflagrations, flamewars and other supercharged online interactions that have arisen around OOO in recent years.  For much of my time my sympathies have been with the OOO crowd, but I’ve also witnessed reactions and responses from them that have seemed odd, overblown or ‘dickish’ too. In all of these circumstances one could psychologize and theorize the behaviour. The recent discussions about the ‘psychopathology of blogging’, the ‘victimology of groups’, the ‘masochistic joys of the internet’ are representative of some of these explanatory possibilities. Moreover, one can deploy one’s personal experiences with the various parties to some effect too (e.g. I’ve had very happy interactions with Graham, Ian, Levi and Tim, online and in person), while recognising that other people will have had different encounters with them. Trivially, people are pretty multi-faceted and can rub against each other in whole range of ways; and I’m generally convinced that online media do indeed amplify, exacerbate and distort these interactions in various awkward ways. None of this really gets us anywhere useful, though, and I’m starting to ramble a little here.

To be blunt, the point I arrived at during the last week is one where I have simply stopped giving a damn about some of these divisions and spats. When I read Graham Harman’s recent post on Laruelle I had a very similar response to the one initially mentioned by Anthony Paul Smith in his reply to said post, namely: “tiredness”. I had a view about what had sparked the initial post, I was pretty confident of the likely reaction to the post, and, my sympathies were on the AUFs/APS side this time, just as they have been elsewhere on other occasions. But the main point with this is that I was tired of it. Some disagreements matter to me, but these ones no longer do. I may lament that Levi and Anthony are frequently talking at cross purposes (or unproductively), especially as an outsider who can see the parallels in their writings on ecology. But it is probably for third parties to draw out those commonalities, rather than unreasonably expecting them to sort it out. In most ways that are important to me, I believe the OOO and AUFS crowds are composed of decent people; there are personality quirks, historical disagreements and theoretical differences aplenty that have them bashing heads, and they may continue doing so for years to come, but I’m tired of it. Any partitioning of AUFs at this backwater of the blogosphere, then, is over, and it can now sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Climate Progress, Larval Subjects, and the F-Word, just as it does it in the rather less well managed and convoluted contours of my mind.

[UPDATE: *#!! I take a fence down and O M G]