tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5793281955790022007..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Climate/Weather/Responsibility: Mandeville's TartarsCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-61405222109233299022011-03-30T11:41:33.374-04:002011-03-30T11:41:33.374-04:00Karl: you do know that the self-doubt--
"is ...Karl: you do know that the self-doubt--<br /><br />"is this totally nuts?"<br /><br />--is always a sign you're onto something interesting?<br /><br />The commentary here is SO rich and I want to respond further, BUT: I have a sabbatical report to write this morning and then have to teach and then prepare for a trip to NYC tomorrow--yay!<br /><br />More soon!Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-60331853859109776282011-03-30T10:11:53.778-04:002011-03-30T10:11:53.778-04:00Hi Karl,
Confession: I'm far too literal-minde...Hi Karl,<br />Confession: I'm far too literal-minded to totally know what's going on here. But as I read, it seemed to me that in your initial post here, maybe you were digging in the direction of a philosopher who writes on moral responsibility, and (in his view) the lack thereof. The last few chapters of his book attempt to mull over how we should respond to the fact (if it is a fact) that we have no free will, and aren't genuinely responsible for our actions. If it interests you, here it is:<br />http://tinyurl.com/65yuug4<br /><br />The book is pretty analytic though, so I don't know if that style of writing works for you. (I don't mean that to be insulting; I speak as one who has attempted to read Of Grammatology two or three times, but gave up each time after the first few pages had me totally lost.)Ruben Reuben Rubinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34960087103956249372011-03-30T10:02:43.164-04:002011-03-30T10:02:43.164-04:00Climate is good for thinking big, but there's ...Climate is good for thinking big, but there's much still to be done with weather as a physical & intimate experience, our most tangible contact with change, as Andrew Ross wrote some time ago in a book *Strange Weather* the title of which I shamelessly stole for an essay on *Lear* (Shakespeare 6:2 [2010]). Some modern & early modern biblio there too.<br /><br />I also wonder if it's possible to come in out of the rain, in any final way. Surely that's a non-ecological thought, to borrow a phrase?Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58423544254089774162011-03-30T09:46:11.880-04:002011-03-30T09:46:11.880-04:00It sounds, well, not nuts but a bit like this:
It...It sounds, well, not nuts but a bit like this:<br /><br /><i>It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they’ve got the time-span all wrong. From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.</i><br /><br />Which is Terry Pratchett, <i>Equal Rites</i>, p. 136 in the UK Gollancz paperback.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-83618844019605313522011-03-30T09:22:19.649-04:002011-03-30T09:22:19.649-04:00...does this sound totally nuts?...does this sound totally nuts?Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-78156071406651368672011-03-30T09:22:09.330-04:002011-03-30T09:22:09.330-04:00Climate is more complicated, more global, operatin...Climate is more complicated, more global, operating at a different time. In a climatic model, the Tartars are bad like the climate is bad. What can we do about it? What should we do about it, where "it" means the very nearly unmappable character of climate and Tartarian badness? To push at this maybe: to respond adequately to the climate, we have to change our time; we have to change ourselves, abandoning our culture perhaps (our populations, our mobility, our food, ourselves?). It may not be possible to respond to the climate and remain, at all. This may not be sufficient, and it may look monstrous. A response that is an act of terror.<br /><br />Again, this is all incipient, part of a way of thinking for my Wolf paper that I have until August to figure out. The take away from now is that I think it may be impossible to imagine a non-local ethics. I've suggested here and twitter and elsewhere (my AVMEO talk for example) that all ethics is parochial. For better or worse. One of my tasks this Summer will be to figure this out, by reading more deeply in Latour &c.<br /><br />A related thing, inspired by my rereading your AVMEO talk this morning: ethical discussions often (do they?) call for us to slow things down. <br /><br />If we slow things down enough, and look to our heterogeneous polyselves, we'll find something like what Auden did in his 1969 <a href="http://thelib.ru/books/auden_w_h/selected_poems-read.html" rel="nofollow">"A New Year Greeting,"</a> which starts:<br /><br /> On this day tradition allots<br /> to taking stock of our lives,<br /> my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,<br /> Bacteria, Viruses,<br /> Aerobics and Anaerobics:<br /> A Very Happy New Year<br /> to all for whom my ectoderm<br /> is as Middle-Earth to me.<br /><br />Happy New Year bacteria! What can I do for you?<br /><br />But why not speed things up? <br /><br />I'm saying this relatively cognizant that it sounds like the cliché of all tyrants: "history will judge us." I'm not however suggesting that we "speed things up" to rush to meet a foundation waiting for us somewhere in the future, where "history" stands for the absolute. I'm instead suggesting that speeding up in another way to get inhuman; that we need to try to think ethics from an inhuman vantage; that we need to recognize that our time, as <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/your-obsessive-love-or-hatred-of-me-means-nothing,19707/" rel="nofollow">Justin Bieber</a> says, "when viewed within the context of the geologic timescale, wherein chronological development is measured by evolutionary and stratigraphic events over countless eons rather than transitory human experience," does not "truly matter." Or, as he should have said, think of the other, inhuman matterings there are when we speed things up: to what are <i>we</i> the briefly living bacteria? What ethical obligations or openings do we present to them once they slow themselves down for us? <br /><br />At certain thresholds of slowness or fastness, an ethics of and for humans gives way altogether. Ethics will not have been lost, but we will be, rendered nothing more than an afternoon's flurry in the larger, open system of climate.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-91048210108285157362011-03-30T09:21:29.454-04:002011-03-30T09:21:29.454-04:00Caveat: all that I say about climate and weather i...Caveat: all that I say about climate and weather is said with only this knowledge: that climate concerns trends and weather local conditions. Climate is all around us; weather comes from somewhere (a rain cloud on the horizon; a warm front moving in; fog rolling up from the river). I need to read more (or at all) about this distinction, so important for understanding global climate change (and resisting the deniers who so often conflate climate and weather).<br /><br />So I'm revising the statement that the Tartars are bad like the weather is bad. They might also be bad like the climate is bad. Or like the climate is. Period.<br /><br />The weather model of responsibility allows us--commands us--to do something definite (and note that I'm not using the word 'responsibility' freighted as Derrida freighted it). We don't want to be the chickens too stupid to come in out of the rain, who drown looking at the sky. The weather has us do something. Responding to the bad weather of the Tartars, we can rescue the cats and dogs. We can rescue ourselves from them if they grow anthropophagously restive. We are, so to speak, putting on a raincoat, or wearing sandals.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-49238231576204289592011-03-29T19:37:06.796-04:002011-03-29T19:37:06.796-04:00Makes total sense, Karl, and if there is a model t...Makes total sense, Karl, and if there is a model to be gotten, these distinctions will be essential to it. Paul Dutton's work is great on this, and Jeffrey has very kindly accepted my proposal for a session on "Medieval Weather and the 'Natural' Order" for NCS 2012. Why isn't it summer 2012 now, dammit?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58930545276456682092011-03-29T19:33:42.076-04:002011-03-29T19:33:42.076-04:00Karl: your thoughts here are really provocative, b...Karl: your thoughts here are really provocative, but I also want some more elucidation from you. Are you saying that responsibility, similar to climate, is in some sense beyond being just about "us" [humans]? That ethical responsibility, then, gets hooked into "climate conditions," which, similar to Timothy Morton's hyper-objects, are already "out of the gate," as it were, and un-mappable? But isn't ethical responsibility, at the same time, always "local," regardless of contingent [and possibly vastly over-determined] circumstances?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-35105638402813069472011-03-29T18:04:24.773-04:002011-03-29T18:04:24.773-04:00"stantoro" that + the "it rains&quo..."stantoro" that + the "it rains" discussion in Bennett (which I read, absorbed--or adsorbed!--without recalling it), likely inspired my realization.<br /><br />Let me explain a bit more what I mean about weather vs. climate as models for responsibility. Weather is the local thing; what we observe about our particular situation. It's pretty simple. It's raining. It's dry. It's 'caused' by winter or summer or mountains or whatever, and we think we know it. Climate on the other hand is VERY complicated. Climatologists can work on knowing what it will do; its long term trends and history (as there's no 'short term' climate, is there?); and its heterogeneous and sometimes excessive causes. We can adjust for climate, and we can affect it (so long as we believe in anthropogenic climate change) but <a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/03/herewith-some-thoughts-ive-been-sharing.html" rel="nofollow">climate is so much bigger than us.</a> It's hard to pin down responsibility for climate or evade it. It's not a simple matter of putting on a raincoat, as we would for weather.<br /><br />Does this distinction between climate and weather give us a model for thinking responsibility? And justice? And blame?<br /><br />Not sure, but this is as far as my thinking will take me at the moment.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-38344203055333460632011-03-29T14:56:46.504-04:002011-03-29T14:56:46.504-04:00You'll find more to chew on in Bennett's c...You'll find more to chew on in Bennett's chapter "A Life of Metals," where she takes seriously the "it" in the expression "it rains" by looking at Deleuze's notion of <em>a</em> life.<br /><br />That's a long way of saying that you are onto something here: the impersonality of life within a vibrant materialism.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86865575267415884582011-03-29T07:02:55.826-04:002011-03-29T07:02:55.826-04:00The mention of deaths by lightning at the end woul...The mention of deaths by lightning at the end would seem to bear out your idea. They eat a lot of meat, lightning kills a lot of them (and the animals too!), as is the natural order of things.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com