Environment, ontology and PhD rites of passage

The PhD programme is a remarkably unstandardised institution. It varies wildly in its duration and parameters between countries, universities and disciplines. In the UK, scholarships are usually for 3 years and submissions are expected within 4 (when studying full-time). In many places, there is an 'upgrade' process where the candidate moves from the initial MPhil registration to the full PhD once they can demonstrate that they have what it takes to meet the full standards.

At my institution (Aberystwyth University, International Politics), we have no 'upgrade' as such (although there are endless 'monitoring' forms to be filled in each semester). As a less formalised but nevertheless highly invested rite of passage, we have instead what we call the 'IPRS' (the International Politics Research Seminar). This is a weekly event usually hosting guest speakers from outside the university; however, around this time of year, PhD candidates in their third years present their work to the department.

And so, this past Thursday was my turn.

I basically attempted to present the entirety of my (as yet only partially written) thesis, section by section.

This was building on my other (shorter) presentations of previous years.

I won't try to summarise the argument here (not least because it is a work in progress). However, it starts with Isaac Newton's use of the word 'medium' and the association of this with the idea of a cosmic aether or fluid underpinning physical forces of various kinds.

The 'medium' then becomes the French 'milieu' – a key term in both eighteenth and nineteenth century science (though for very different reasons). However, before getting to the English 'environment,' the thesis also takes a long look at the concept of climate as found, for example, in the works of Alexander von Humboldt.

Well-known in certain scientific circles from the 1860s, the English 'environment' had been popularised, at least among literary and technocratic elites, by the start of the twentieth century.

The objective of the thesis is, then, to discern and distinguish the complex (and often forgotten) nuances of these many layers in their specificity, thus more precisely informing (and perhaps troubling) contemporary articulations and interpretations.

What I'm still figuring out is how this history speaks to what I called (in the second slide, above) 'the problems of the present.' Environment circa 1910 is not, of course, precisely the same concept as that which we know from the 1960s onwards. It is not invested with the same moral force, nor does it entail the same conception of human agency.

However, it is, I think, precisely in the reversal of the distribution of agencies found with this concept at this time – 'environment' circa 1870 being something that subordinates and, circa 1970, something that is subordinated – that is really the key thing.

This, ultimately, is what I am trying to develop in terms of 'historical ontology' – an understanding of how terrestrial relations of possibility are conceptually articulated and, moreover, how conceptions that seem rather diverse when taken in terms of 'domains' or 'fields' can be made to speak to one another (or, rather, to speak to one another again).

I'm going to rework variations on this presentation over the coming months – in Oxford in February, New Orleans in March and probably several more times through the coming year (intending to submit the thesis by the summer).

A work in progress, then, though, I hope, an interesting one even at this stage.

PhD diary #5: 29/02/2016

Coming into this PhD project five months ago, I had a clear (albeit speculative and provisional) plan for what I wanted to do. I had it worked out down to a chapter structure:

1. Earth and Cosmos
2. Geopolitics and Environment
3. Spherology and Fortification
4. Diplomacy and Territory
5. Possibilism and Possession
6. Geohistory and Geodesy

The basic idea was to have each chapter concentrate on a particular group of concepts and then the flow of the thesis as a whole would work these things through historically, reaching a synthesis by the conclusion.

It is perhaps most telling that I found it easier to work out this structure than to write a title. The interconnections between these concepts and their historical trajectories remains what interests me. However, I have had to – and this was entirely expected from the beginning – set aside or background one or two ideas and rejig the rest, while at the same time identifying a particular and singular common thread and purpose running through the whole apparatus. (I finally managed this, I think, about six weeks ago.)

Abandoning, then, the idea that I would structure the chapters around concepts, I have instead decided to configure them in an historical sequence such that each chapter approximately follows from the previous, while each also has a focal point that develops the ideas crucial to the overall argument. It looks something like this:

Introduction: Traces (1610/1964)
Chapter 1: Cosmos (1798-1859)
Chapter 2: Life (1855-1911)
Chapter 3: Travel (1874-1942)
Chapter 4: War (1915-1956)
Chapter 5: Revolution (1956-1984)
Chapter 6: Earth (1957-2018)
Conclusion: Epochs (12,700 BP)

The title: An Historical Ontology of Environmental Geopolitics. It is, then, a history of the relationship between conceptions of environment and of geopolitics, not only tracing these words and ideas in their genealogical specificity but, at the same time, situating them in relation to various sorts of crucial world events – geopolitical, geological, scientific, technological, and so on. The key concept tying this together is that of ontology as the distribution of agencies.

By understanding these intellectual historical changes, on an abstract level, in terms of variable distributions of agency unfolding over time, I think that it will be possible to better understand certain political and philosophical questions (raised by issues such as the concept of the Anthropocene) without either underestimating their novelty or obsessing over it. In other words, it is a matter of better understanding the past in order to better think the present – this present, I would suggest, being rather maltreated in this respect of late.

PhD diary #4: 29/01/2016

"An Historical Ontology of Environmental Geopolitics." This is the title that I seem to have settled on. By "ontology" I mean "distribution of agencies." So, in contrast to Michel Foucault or Ian Hacking, who have employed the same phrase in the sense of "an historical ontology of ourselves," I mean to understand this not so much in the sense of subject-making as in that of world-making, in a thoroughly "material" way (this term will also require some explication).

In adopting this sort of historical project, I am unavoidably drawn to the concept of "conditions of possibility." However, I think that it is entirely possible to put clear blue water between this and any Kantian transcendentalism. But also from any unreformed materialism. Material, as I'm using it here, is taken to signify that which is a substantial precondition of some process, practice or procedure. It is therefore a relative term – more a sociological concept than a metaphysical one. Clay is material to a brick-maker; bricks are material to a brick-layer.

The crucial concept, philosophically, here for me is what Alfred North Whitehead calls a "cosmic epoch." In Process and Reality (1929), he writes:

"Evidently new propositions come into being with the creative advance of the world. For every proposition involves its logical subjects; and it cannot be the proposition which it is, unless those logical subjects are the actual entities which they are. Thus no actual entity can feel a proposition, if its actual world does not include the logical subjects of that proposition. The proposition 'Caesar crossed the Rubicon' could not be felt by Hannibal In any occasion of his existence on earth. Hannibal could feel propositions with certain analogies to this proposition, but not this proposition." (259)

The notions of proposition and epoch are explicated here in terms of language. However, precisely the same conceptual apparatus is applicable to electrons and neutrons, the experience of colour, and so on. We might recall the unfortunate fate of the dodo bird in these terms. Nothing in the cosmic epoch of the dodo prepared it for the invasive Europeans and their predatory pets. Nothing in what these entities proposed could make the dodo "feel" the response "flee!"

As Richard Grove has written in his Green Imperialism (1995), the colonial appropriation of small tropical islands and the co-emergent proliferation of botanical gardens, populated with the produce of these same trade routes, were crucial to the development of ecological thinking in Europe.

Somewhere in all these connections, I am in the process of drawing out a thesis.

The epistemological rupture and other stories

Catching up with the Eagles of Death Metal back catalogue. Seems only right.

Just finished reading Ursula Le Guin's City of Illusions. Deeply affecting.

These are inchoate, distracted, fragmented, tired thoughts (aren't they all?).

I am presently characterising my research project as an 'historical ontology' but this presents me with a problem – how far can or should I attempt to dissociate this term from its origins in the works of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking?

Pointedly, what if the famous 'epistemological rupture' were a myth (more pointedly still: a bad one)? Or, more specifically, what if many of the problems currently encountered in thought were the result of assuming history to be a succession of more or less wiped-clean slates? Ruptures and revolutions? What if these events, not doubted per se, were susceptible to overly enthusiastic identification?

As Isabelle Stengers puts it in her book on Alfred North Whitehead, most encapsulatingly: "critical consciousness admits so many things without criticising them." And do not revolutions leave so very much in place?

I am thinking of much writing on 'resilience,' particularly the more scathing kind. So often the critics buy wholly into the propaganda of those they are criticising – that this is a wholly new way of thinking; a brand new set of techniques clearing away all that came before it, destined to take over, to sweep over and cover the planet like a blanket.

No more safety net or security cordon, just bounce-back-ability – the knocking opportunity found in the dull, distant thuds of an other's tragedy. There is certainly truth to this image. Neoliberalism and all that. The vultures do swarm.

But still there are nets, cordons, walls everywhere (a favourite world-making device of Le Guin, as it happens; particularly in The Dispossessed, chronologically the first in the Hainish cycle of books, which City of Illusions follows, a few thousand Terran years later). Walls growing like long, flat bamboo, cutting right through the land – but selectively, oh so precisely. Bringing a whole new meaning to 'land-locked.' There's security for some. It is the means of delivery and the extent of the coverage that is really in question.

And while walls are certainly enrollable into techniques of resilience, they surely echo and issue from a far older place. So why the blanket, as if such all-covering ruptures had actually occurred?

What does the built landscape of our collective abstractions look like if not a succession of semi-blank slates, temporarily stable states, rebuilt upon like neat, compressed strata? What is the proper image of such historicity. What forensis for this landscape?

Our thoughts, our categories, our abstractions – an ancient conurbation, continuously inhabited. No edifice persists without maintenance, without struts and strappings, without repetition but, for all that, we should not confuse the ages, conflate the epochs, prematurely compress the sprawling, soaring pulses of life, love, ceramic and aggregate. The architecture of our abstractions is less pristine palace, clean lines and geometric domes, than a reclaimed, hard-won, be-decked and bedraggled; ancient edifices built over, reused, repurposed – repetition, yes, but persistence nevertheless.

Some of every thought is the newest of the new and it surely cannot be otherwise. But some patterns aren't easily shrugged off. It is easier to hear them than to resist them…

The problem of history. It is not a storage crate to be picked through at leisure. It is not a layer cake that needs re-separating.

Perhaps 'historical metaphysics' would be a better term. An historical metaphysics born of speculative pragmatism. I need only show that neither of these phrases are contradictions in terms but, in fact, elements of a necessary tensegrity.

Back to the music. Damn, that's a riff.