In the beginning, there was nothing. No ground. And then things began to come together – literally come together. Through the forging of relationships, beings began to compose themselves and one another. Began, as well, to join together in new and ingenious ways to compose beings more complex and more diverse than before. If there is [...]
The following quotes come from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez (co-written, supposedly, with Ed Ricketts, but he is not credited on my edition): “… the Mexican sierra has ‘XVII-15-IX’ spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our [...]
What do we make of two of the major tragedies that occurred in the US this past week? One in which two men violently ripped into the vulnerable flesh of people who wanted nothing more than to enjoy a day of peace and joy (as well as the rush to judgement based on superficial factors [...]
In the recent discussions on vulnerability (also, see here for Andre’s excellent contribution), the terms “vulnerability” and “precarity” (the latter coming primarily through Judith Butler) have been used more or less interchangeably. However, I want to throw a bit of a wrench in that. Precarity – when I think of precarity or the state of [...]
Making the world better for everyone (struggle) requires us to recognize that our own visions for a better world are 1) incomplete and 2) only one way of making the world better. Our visions are incomplete because they are models – simulations without real world correlates, and different ontologically from their actual enactment. Because enacting [...]
I just came across this article by David Graeber titled “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse.” Since the ideas expressed in the article have much in common with the project of Struggle Forever, I thought I would share some key excerpts and add a few thoughts of my own. First of all, Graeber [...]
I’m sitting outside now. It’s a beautiful spring day. The air is slightly chilled, but it’s warm enough to not have a jacket. The sun, when it shines through the scattered clouds, warms my back and neck. I’m sitting here watching the world go on around me. Birds fly from tree to tree to fence [...]
Saturday, February 23, 2013
I’ve been preparing lately for a conference on Monday about the use of multiple models in evaluating water quality on the Chesapeake. I’m part of a panel that will be discussing the social and cultural implications of multiple modeling, and the gist of what I want to present is that models don’t simply represent or [...]
This post is, in part, a request for help. I’m trying to understand the relationship between Isabelle Stengers’s concept of “practice” and an “ecology of practice” and the practice theories of Bourdieu, Ortner, et. al. Does anyone have any leads on this? I see many similarities and many differences, but I’m trying to understand the [...]
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Slogans are important. They capture the imagination of the public and make the message of a movement easily transmittable. This is why I’ve adopted Struggle Forever! as the key idea and slogan for my philosophical/theoretical/practical approach to my practice in anthropology and more. “Occupy” as a slogan was powerful. It caught attention rapidly and motivated [...]
