Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Butler on Whitehead, Stengers, Latour
Judith Butler gave a really great lecture on Whitehead at a recent conference at Claremont (care of the Whitehead Research Project--who knew?). In "On this Occasion..." she also has a few remarks about Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and a couple others (there is a knockdown discussion of Freud and melancholia in the Q and A section--condensing her arguments elsewhere and putting them in a different frame, as she does in general here with her previous work via Whitehead). The link here will open up iTunes, where the lecture is available in podcast form--I'll put up a more direct link if I find one.
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5 comments:
Thanks for the links. I will go for the Butler conference, for sure.
XXX
Miriam
Thanks for this lecture.
Butler asks some important questions at the end of the lecture regarding relevance relative to other subjects.
"We apprehend that there are lives that aren't recognizable according to the dominant forms of recognition...What pulls us in the direction of that apprehension"?
I would simply say it's a matter of distance, and this in regards to Butler asking about war and which lives are relevant or not and coming to some conclusions such as nationalistic identity creating the value of a life.
While not going into what she earlier addressed regarding the fact that what we traditionally conceive as objects , are just as much affective as subjects, I would say that the exclusive case of humans comes down to not just a spiritual or nationalistic difference, but actual physical distance. Basically, I can't feel the pain of starving children or genocide in Zimbabwe because I simply don't live there, nor do I have the time to empathize with it, and even if I did have the time to empathize with it, would it really be genuine if I didn't throw my entire life into it? I think there's more danger in possibly "altering recognition" to some mild albeit consistent empathy with something that is of such a physical and logical distance, than to admit to oneself that they really don't care about what is not right in front of their eyes at all time. With this in mind, there's more of a chance of "throwing your life" into something where other lives are "truly" recognizable than having a passive concern for it, no matter how many people become "informed by this passive concern. It all really comes down to a matter of time and high/low degrees of action which stem from the fact that I'm always in a place that is always distant from another place. I think what's important though is not to think that dominant forms of recognition would somehow expand by expanding ones knowledge, without expanding ones bodily presence into a place where that knowledge occupies.
Thanks for this. I heard she was going to give a a presentation on this, and was really curious.
I really shouldn't take the time to listen now, but I am (because she just to non-human actors, near the beginning).
I know I did this to you already, but is there a strong pay off for me? Does she get around to talking about animals or about the construction of humanness?
Anyway, I'll listen to it shortly enough. Thanks very much for it.
I just went ahead and listened to the whole lecture tonight. So, nevermind. Thanks so much again for the link, very happy to have this.
Wow, thank you so much for giving us directions to such an amazing find! When I hear Judith Butler speak I often think that we are amidst the beginnings of something anew, that she apart of something that is at work 'to come' (l'avenir). I am also astounded by her ability and willingness to open her work to revision, or maybe more properly, to modification in order to open up herself/work to more dialogue and like "tentacles" move in any possible direction.
She specifically noted towards the end how her work has been "dyadic" (but not always she continues on) and also dares to say imply that Whitehead is such a revolutionary (working outside of an anthropocentric view of things) that he speaks (along maybe with Deleuze and Guattari) of multiplicity and not simply of the 'One-to-One'. You can rarely find such refreshing honesty and refusal to engage in intellectual parlor tricks in order to shore up some petty ego, some lame tautology of identity being criticized requiring some sort of defense.
Another point on Butler was the fascinating moment she spoke on "the unequal distribution of precarity". I was wondering if anyone might have anything to communicate regarding this word - does Butler 'intend' that we locate this as a phenomenon or a concept, and/or both, and which is prior? Also, how is this related to precariousness?
However, this "unequal distribution of precarity" which she connects up in a Marxian manner affirming seriously Marx here, I am wondering exactly how one might seek to think this unequal distribution within the proletarian and bourgeois subjectivities and how far is she willing (or able) to take up the issue of precarity as a modification (an opening-up) of the very dynamics of Marxian dialectic and class conflict in order to re-vitalize (life and humanlife) Marx and revolutionary politics. Any thoughts?
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