Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“It’s what I like to call ‘retrospective induction.’ Working backward from your experience all the way down in nature. So [the question is] can you find dimensions of your experience spread out through the natural world all the way down to the lowest level of things, whatever they are? […] And the answer is, yes,…
“The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. When I sprain my ankle, a stout stick may help me walk, and I…
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…
“What often slips away in our quests to out-think the problems in our environments is that thinking itself is an ecological habit, a shared vocation between humans and non-humans. We have inherited the sticky myth that thinking happens in our heads, that creativity is a mental thing, and that if we pushed ourselves a bit…
“Not all propositions, religions, or sciences are equally true. But any of them that may be communicating something, not nothing, we need to hear. Any, therefore, may enrich the fabulous multiplicity of the creation itself. If our truths, even truths about “the creation,” matter now—then they may materialize carefully, not from nothing but from the…
“The ideology of modern capitalism is an expression of the deficient mental structure’s repression of the time element, of creative becoming. Instead of recognizing the importance of the dialectic of history and the ongoing and entangled processes of natural and social transformation, capitalist economic theory insists that the present arrangement represents the “end of history”…
”Whitehead wanted to give some explanation for how it is that in a world of process we nonetheless are able to recognize and identify definite characters or entities. We are out at sea and glimpse a whale just before it dives under the surface. A moment later, it explodes into the air. “There it is…
“During an evening walk with a close colleague of Bohr’s, Einstein once asked: “Do you really believe the Moon is not there if nobody looks?” From Barad’s perspective, it isn’t that the Moon isn’t there when we aren’t looking, it’s that when we do look, a new Moon, and a new me, emerge in the…
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…