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Philosophy After Nature

Philosophy After Nature

Rosi Braidotti | Rick Dolphijn

(2017)

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Abstract

The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.

Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her most recent books are The Posthuman (2013), Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011) www.rosibraidotti.com

Rick Dolphijn is Assistant Professor in Media Theory/Cultural Theory at Utrecht University. He published work includes Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (2004) and (with Iris van der Tuin) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012).
When philosophy talks about nature, too often it is only through its own idea of nature – the physical, living, world is forced to fit the ends of philosophy. In Philosophy After Nature, we see a radical inversion being performed, one where the idea must follow nature, where philosophy is forced to think alongside matter in all its vital unruliness.
John Ó Maoilearca, Professor, Film and Television Studies, Kingston University
Philosophy after Nature provides an indispensable introduction and guide to current transformative thinking about nature today. In the context of climate change, globalization and a logic of advanced capitalism, it brings together a number of outstanding contributions, in which components from the history of philosophy are retrieved from neglect. These components are then deployed to help make sense of an unprecedented crisis in the relation between human beings and the context they have become used to thinking of as ‘natural’.
Joanna Hodge, Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University

What have we done? Why did we do it? Against cynicism, the philosophers in this volume stand out for the originality of their analyses of our ties to nature. They encourage us to seek solutions beyond greed, spectacle and division. The strongest thread running through this impressive collection is that we can think innovatively; we can work together with nature.
James Williams, Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover 1
Half Title i
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Contents v
Chapter One Introduction: After Nature 1
Modernity and Nature 1
Beyond Dualism 4
And After? 7
Notes 9
Bibliography 9
Part I After Matter 11
Chapter Two Information and Thinking 13
Four Universal Rules 13
Information, Something New 14
Ancient Networks 15
Matter and Information 15
The Cave Streamed With Light 16
Sweet Night 17
From Rotating Revolutions to an Expanding Universe 18
Matter and Mirrors 18
Notes 20
Bibliography 20
Chapter Three ‘Die Natur ist nur einmal da’ [Nature Is There Only Once] 21
Eindeutig, Eindeutigkeit, and so on 22
A Hundred and Twenty Years Later 23
Determinatio and Bestimmung 24
Digression 25
Das Gesetz Der Eindeutigkeit and Einstein 26
As a Conclusion: Equivalence, Sameness and Difference 28
Notes 28
Bibliography 30
Chapter Four Generic Mediality: On the Role of Ciphers and Vicarious Symbols in an Extended Sense of Code-based ‘Alphabeticity' 31
Hors-Là 31
How to Address the Spectral Space of Massive Conductivity? 33
Technicity Rather Than Logistics: The Vicarious Space of an Electric Circuitry 36
Assessing the Potentiality of What-Has-Not-Happened 38
Spectra, Depicting Magnitudes That are Genuinely Simulacral 41
Speculative (Spectral) Phenomenology, Physics of Mediated Communication 42
Channels, Keys and Ciphers (Code Systems as Manners of Discerning No-Thing-At-All) 44
Two Kinds of Technics: Concentrating on No-Thing (Equational) and Being Concerned With Some-Thing (Functional) 45
Abstractions That Prolong Rather Than Cut Short: Articulating What is Unthinkable 47
Notes 48
Bibliography 53
Chapter Five The Resonance of Disparates: Spinoza, Damasio, Deleuze and the Ecology of Form 55
The Building (Brain), or ‘That Which Feels as One’ 55
Another Humanity 59
The Ascent of Gothic Stone 62
The Many Lives of Stones 65
Notes 66
Bibliography 67
Part II After Machines 71
Chapter Six Media Entangled Phenomenology 73
All Media are Measuring Media 73
Medium as Measurement 74
Media Time-Criticality 75
Time-Critical Media Measurement as the Performative Hinge Linking Micro- and Macroworlds 79
Hyperobjects and Hyperobfuscation 79
Measurement as an Originary Phenomenon 84
The Ethics of Climate Simulation 89
Notes 94
Bibliography 97
Chapter Seven On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism 99
Bounded Posthumanism 99
First- and Second-Class Agents 101
The Norm-Grounding Problem 105
Deontic Statuses and Deontic Attitudes 107
The Interpretationist Defence 110
Unbounded Posthumanism 111
Notes 113
Bibliography 117
Chapter Eight Circuits of Desire: Cybernetics and the Post-natural According to Lyotard and Stiegler 121
Systems 122
Entropy 124
Negentropy 127
Metastability 128
Notes 131
Bibliography 133
Chapter Nine History as an Ecological Niche: Beyond Benjamin’s Nature 137
The Breath of Capitalism 138
Roots and Problems 140
History as an Ecological Niche 141
Notes 144
Bibliography 147
Chapter Ten Nature, Technology and Conscious Evolution: A Post-human Constructive Philosophy 151
Cosmogenesis and Individuation 151
Metaphysics of Conscious Evolution 152
Evolution and Psychological Praxis of Sri Aurobindo 154
Social Praxis and Technology 155
Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology 157
Mcluhan: Media Technology and Consciousness 159
Simondon’s Process Metaphysics 162
Orders of Individuation: Simondon and Sri Aurobindo 163
Dynamics Of (Trans)Individuation 166
Transindividuation, Technology and Collective Yoga 167
Utopia or Dystopia? 169
Notes 171
Bibliography 174
Part III After Man 177
Chapter Eleven Being without Life: On the Trace of Organic Chauvinism with Derrida and DeLanda 179
Trace, Space and Time 180
The Sticky Question of Creation 181
Late-Stage Vitalism 183
Non-Linear Darwinism 184
Iterability, Again 186
Concern Concerning Concern 186
Island Living (and Dying) 188
Neither Vital Nor Mechanical: Spectral 190
Notes 191
Bibliography 193
Chapter Twelve Returning to Text: Deconstructive Paradigms and Posthumanism 195
Deconstruction, Materialism, ‘Text’ 196
Deconstruction and the Post-Human: Wolfe and Morton 199
Deconstruction, ‘Text’, Posthumanism 201
Notes 204
Bibliography 206
Chapter Thirteen Primary and Secondary Nature: The Role of Indeterminacy in Spinoza and Bartleby 209
Bartleby’s Indeterminate Provocation 210
Spinoza and The Natural Tendency to Division 213
Indeterminacy and Resistance 217
Abbreviations 219
Notes 220
Bibliography 220
Index 223
About the Authors 227
Editors 227
Contributors 228