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Monthly Archives: June 2015
Thinking without the ‘circle’: Marine plastic and global ethics
Marine plastic has received significant attention as a spectacle of consumer waste and ecosystemic fragility, but there has been little discussion of its ethical implications. This essay argues that marine plastic poses a direct challenge to the basic frameworks of global ethics. These frameworks are dominated by the image of the ‘circle’, an abstract boundary intended to separate ‘humanity’ from the rest of the universe and insulate it against harm. However, this article argues that marine plastic undermines the ‘circle’ in two ways. First, it embodies conditions of ‘hyper-relationality’, including entanglement and the properties of toxicity, that penetrate the boundaries of ‘the circle’. Second, it exerts ‘forcefulness’, but at scales that radically exceed the dominant spatio-temporal dimensions of ‘the circle’. By virtue of these features, marine plastic thoroughly penetrates the boundaries of ‘the circle’, making it impossible to expel harm beyond its boundaries. Although this essay focuses on marine plastic, its core argument can also be fruitfully applied to other phenomena that share similar material, scalar, spatio-temporal and relational features (for instance, atmospheric particulate, nuclear waste and nitrate pollution). The essay concludes by exploring the alternative ethical possibilities that marine plastic and similar phenomena prompt: in particular, a responsive ethos based on a sense of shared vulnerability and exposure.
via Thinking without the ‘circle’: Marine plastic and global ethics.
The OPM Infobomb Explodes
Mark my words: This infobomb is a catastrophe.
Word bytes. and Zen fights.
it is tempting to read essays and books about and of contemporary thought and how this thought is a move from that thought, this idea dismissing the past-ness of that idea,and see some sort of progress taking place, as we might be getting somewhere. But when you remove the implication of your death from the impetus of reading, it is more like watching a wave form of a song; the jagged picture says nothing but that sound is occurring.
Do the waves crashing on the shore go anywhere? Does the shore get some place better?
How to see the world: Understanding our visual culture
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF, a media, culture and communication professor at New York University, wants to justify the study of visual culture by describing, accessibly, how strange our visual world has become.
This has been done before. In 1972 artist and writer John Berger made Ways of Seeing, a UK TV series and a book. This was also the year that astronaut Harrison Schmitt took the Blue Marble picture of Earth from Apollo 17, arguably the most reproduced photograph ever.
By contrast, in How to See the World, Mirzoeff’s mascot shot is the selfie taken by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide during his 2012 spacewalk. This time, Earth is reflected in Hoshide’s visor: the planet is physically different and changing fast. Transformations that would have been invisible to humans because they took place so slowly now occur in a single life. “We have to learn to see the Anthropocene,” writes Mirzoeff.
via How to see the world: Understanding our visual culture – environment – 22 June 2015 – New Scientist.
Beyond Narrative: Systems Theory and the Unveiling of History
In other words, our basis for such statements, if there is one at all, is merely stories about stories. Or perhaps stories about ideologies. And we speak of these ideologies (Marxists, Christians, Islamic, Feminist, etc) as if they presented a material force, as if they themselves are fixed and certain, as if they are within themselves causes within the world, sometimes we even speak of them as if they had agency themselves, or as if we are actually saying anything at all, beyond fabricating a myth from whole cloth. And to a great extent we are, but what is the sense in which ideologies do present a material force? How is it that wholes and large scale groups function, in chaos certainly, but how at all?
Only by looking toward emergent, non-linear, or open systems can we even hope to find a way.
via Modern Mythology: Beyond Narrative: Systems Theory and the Unveiling of History.
Local truth and revelation
Perhaps God speaks to us via our minds, and His revelations are filtered and interpreted by our own thoughts, which would explain the differences between the local truths of revealed religions. Of course, our interpretation of God’s message is also colored by cultural influences. In the time of Joseph [Smith], revelations from God were culturally acceptable, but that isn’t always the case today. Therefore, in our time, a person who receives a revelation encoded in thoughts, feelings and vivid intuitions, may not consider it as a revelation and describe it in a philosophical essay – or maybe a science fiction novel. The “Words of God” in Douglas Preston’s scientific thriller Blasphemy, described and praised in my previous essay, might have been inspired by the voice of God after all.
I prefer to refrain from speculating about Truth, because science and engineering don’t need it – they work perfectly well with local, knowledge dependent models of reality that have proven good enough FAPP (For All Practical Purposes, ref. Bell) in a well defined scope. When a model is unable to cope with an extended scope (e.g. very small, very big, very fast…), scientists look for a more accurate model and engineers use it. That’s good enough for me. Also, there is the possibility that the process of model discovery never ends (truth is an ever receding infinitely zoomable fractal.
syndax vuzz 