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Friday, 15 August 2014

The posturing and positioning of 'realism versus idealism'

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What if we non-idealists, realists (or whatever) thought to ourselves not 'idealism, what an absurdity!' but rather 'idealism, w...
Wednesday, 13 August 2014

What is the contrary of 'cosmos'? What, then, is 'cosmopolitics'?

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Isabelle Stengers' cosmopolitics is one of those concepts that is oft-cited but rarely examined in any detail. I won't try to explic...
Tuesday, 12 August 2014

The felinocene(?!) -- Cats as invasive species

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From a paper published in Nature last year but featured by the BBC today : Cats are one of the top threats to US wildlife, killing billio...
Friday, 8 August 2014

'We Moderns' versus 'The Moderns'; or, The weight of our ancestors

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One persistent source of disagreement during the AIME project was the precise meaning of 'Moderns.' This was captured most notably b...

Clive Hamilton and Toby Tyrell on Gaia

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Clive Hamilton made two wonderful contributions to the final AIME colloquia/diplomatic summits held the week before last. Both have now be...
Thursday, 7 August 2014

The focus of thought: 'positions' versus 'problems'; of turf-wars and earth-wars

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One thing that the AIME workshops encouraged me to think about a little more carefully was the status of the 'problem' as that which...

Lovelock, Singapore and Techno-Superorganicism

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James Lovelock's most recent book, A Rough Ride to the Future (2014), backtracks from his previous apocalypticism and, to some degree, ...
Tuesday, 5 August 2014

When 'men of science' became 'scientists'

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There is a  very interesting post  by Melinda Baldwin, author of  Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal  (due out in 2015), at ...
Friday, 1 August 2014

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt"

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The hype around Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is rather excessive for a film that isn't due out for several months. However, it...
Thursday, 31 July 2014

Blogging after the ether: knowing your audience

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Prior to the past week and a half I had met only a handful of people who read this blog. It was interesting, then, to find that seemingly ab...
Saturday, 26 July 2014

After the summit, the fatigue!—A first reflection on the final AIME workshop

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This past week I was fortunate enough to participate in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence 's final Diplomatic Writing Workshop . I do...
Sunday, 13 July 2014

Diplomacy as theory; theory as diplomacy—excerpts from Constantinou's On the Way to Diplomacy

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Further to my last post , which provided some excerpts from Costas Constantinou's On the Way to Diplomacy  on the subject of diplomacy ...

'Diplomacy does not exist'—diplomats are servants of the diplomatic frame

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From Costas Constantinou's On the Way to Diplomacy : […] diplomatic representation functions through simulation, for simulation is tra...

Sloterdijk on the non-existence of 'Religions'

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From You Must Change Your Life : European Enlightenment—a crisis of form? An experiment on a slippery slope, at any rate, and from a globa...
Friday, 4 July 2014

Diplomas, diplomacy and theory – the folding and unfolding of objects

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The diplo - in ‘diplo-macy’ derives from “the ancient Greek verb diploun (to double), and from the Greek noun diploma ”[1]; “ diplo = fold...
Monday, 30 June 2014

"Resetting Modernity" in Paris

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I've just received a flurry of information for the forthcoming 'diplomatic summit' to be held as the conclusion of Bruno Latour...

'Designing out crime,' panopticism, etc. etc.

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An interesting article  today in the Guardian  on 'designing out crime' by modifications made to the built environment through plan...
Wednesday, 25 June 2014

On habits and habitats

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There's another great write up on the AIME Group blog . This is my favourite bit from chapter 10 on 'Learning to Respect Appearances...
Sunday, 22 June 2014

More on Clive Hamilton on optimism

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Reading the pieces mentioned in my last post reminded me that I've had Clive Hamilton's Earthmasters on my bookshelf for a few wee...
Friday, 20 June 2014

Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the 'good Anthropocene'; the rough edges of political aesthetics

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An important article by Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the so-called 'good Anthropocene': [...] almost...