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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 Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.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 |