tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5004825429539257603..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Phenomenology of LandscapesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54079030817462991502008-02-02T12:32:00.000-05:002008-02-02T12:32:00.000-05:00Thanks, Nicola: will definitely check both out.I o...Thanks, Nicola: will definitely check both out.<BR/><BR/>I often go back to your own stony musings:<BR/>http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2007/05/unlock-stone.htmlJeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-4610431943561817912008-02-02T08:47:00.000-05:002008-02-02T08:47:00.000-05:00Jeffrey,Another stone phenomenology book you may b...Jeffrey,<BR/><BR/>Another stone phenomenology book you may be interested in:<BR/><BR/>John Sallis, Stone (1994).<BR/><BR/>Also, there is an interesting poem by Szymborska called "Conversation with a Stone."Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54624849494702318322008-01-02T06:45:00.000-05:002008-01-02T06:45:00.000-05:00There are many non anthropocentric models of histo...There are many non anthropocentric models of history - they tend to come from fields where history rubs shoulders with the sciences (such as archaeology, economic history, environmental history including landscape studies and so on). Indeed much of my own training back in the 70s was in such fields. Just recently I have been put in touch, (by Bruce M. S. Campbell professor of Geography at QUB), with a journal called the 'Holocene' which is a marvellous repository of entirely non anthropocentric studies of the relatively recent past. <BR/><BR/>So, for a while, Karl I was puzzled by the nature of your problem. My world is so full of non-anthropocentric models, how could you find them so difficult to uncover? But now I more fully understand that you are interested in the subjectivities of non human others and their emotional life (if they have one...etc). So when I talk about landscapes/buildings/objects possessing <I>agency</I> you translate this into a human-centred understanding of the term and immediately want to replace it with something less emotively powerful (your <I>inert potential</I>).<BR/><BR/>The non-anthropocentricities that I am familiar with never, I think, consider the subjectivity of strains of wheat or the emotional intelligence of climate systems. I wonder whether there is any possible confluence between their world and yours? I encounter both negative and positive responses to this kind of question. Can it only be on the level of the broader philosophy of knowledge (such as phenomenology) that such interdisciplinary discussion can work? What work might be done with the actual content of their studies and yours?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-64991672353490456322007-12-30T10:05:00.000-05:002007-12-30T10:05:00.000-05:00Thanks for the additional context JJC and especial...Thanks for the additional context JJC and especially Sarah, who fills in a whole institutional history that's otherwise entirely unknown to me. I should say that I don't mean to dismiss Tilly entirely: it's more that he's being used as a way for <I>me</I> to think through problems I'm trying to work out, and my frustration with him is more my frustration with my own thinking. As for talking before the firing squad: thanks very much for your kind words, but believe me, I'm more smart mouthed than smart in such circumstances. It's a wonder I'm still in this world.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14438017569025527912007-12-29T16:09:00.000-05:002007-12-29T16:09:00.000-05:00being on the road I don't have access to the right...being on the road I don't have access to the right books but from memory I would argue that Tilley is indeed <I>relatively</I> anthropocentric - yes - but that this is in part because he is reacting to an earlier school of archaeology (processualism - epitomised by Renfrew inter alia) which was radically an-anthropocentric. Have a look at Renfrew's <I>Arch & Lang</I> where he more of less argues that a particular variety of wheat willed cultivation by humans, and so brought settlement, trade, language and power relations into existence. <BR/><BR/>Renfrew and other processualists (at their peak in the long 60s) were in their turn reacting against dominant historical explanations of cultural change (and so the wheel turns and keeps turning).<BR/><BR/>Although Tilley is reacting against processualism by reintroducing an anthropocentric perspective, he still retains enough of their influence, I think, to see objects as much more than inert (a term I cannot imagine any archaeologist employing about mattter).<BR/><BR/>Anyway Karl, if I could have anybody with me on the wall it would be you. Either your smart talking would get us out of the tight spot, or it would be so smart that I could handle the martyrdom. <BR/><BR/>---<BR/>And on another tack here is a quote I cannot resist sharing with ITM from my current reading on Plato by the philosopher Simon Blackburn: 'I find it easy to tiptoe past large tracts of history, here at least following the early 20th century Platonist Paul Shorey: "We need not recur to the Middle Ages further than to add one example of medieval confusion of thought and of the way in which the Timaeus of Plato exalted their imaginations and confounded their ideas".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37022550050811454292007-12-29T13:36:00.000-05:002007-12-29T13:36:00.000-05:00Thanks, everyone, for your comments -- and thanks,...Thanks, everyone, for your comments -- and thanks, Sarah, for your context. <BR/><BR/>MKH and Karl: This passage by Tilley from near the end of the book may help, since it makes clear how he sees the interrelation of objects and humans:<BR/><BR/><EM>Persons make things and things make persons. This book has attempted to explore the multiple ways in which prehistoric social identities were created or sustained, reproduced or transformed through the agency of stones. The argument in a nutshell is that social relations are simultaneously relations between material forms. Since the meanings and significance of artefacts and places, landscapes and representations are intimately linked, separations between them are inevitably of an artificial character. . . Social identity is always experienced and enacted in specific contexts. Having a processual character, it always requires specific concrete material points of reference in the form of landscapes, places, artefacts and other persons. It is therefore constituted through various forms of subject-to-subject and subject-to-object relations, giving it a transactional and performative character. The contexts in which identities are experienced, reproduced or transformed may be conventional and familiar, in which persons know how to act and carry on, habitual and routinized, or less familiar, requiring a much greater degree of discursive reflection with regard to what having a particular identity might entail. Material forms may thus act as key sensuous metaphors of identity, instruments with which to think through and create connections around which people actively construct their identities and their worlds.<BR/> </EM> (217)<BR/><BR/>I don't have time to unpack it fully, and it obviously doesn't address everything on Karl's list, but it does give a good indication of the kind of work Tilley accomplishes -- mostly through close readings of specific kinds of stone monuments (e.g. menhirs in Brittany). Often the stones have been acted upon (transformed into towering monoliths), but he insists that those who do the transformation have already been touched by the world of which the rock forms a single component, and that the monument becomes an active agent within the machine it forms. Still, if the phenomenological world is a kind of vast organism for Tilley, the heart of this organism is *always* a human being.<BR/><BR/>Another way of putting this: Tilley is no Bruno Latour, whose notion of a "democracy of objects" goes much farther than Tilley's admirably mobile approach to materiality and temporality. <BR/><BR/>OK, kids are waiting to go to the Corcoran. Maybe more later.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-76825063768515927852007-12-29T12:36:00.000-05:002007-12-29T12:36:00.000-05:00I guess you can pretty well forget about that vow...I guess you can pretty well forget about that vow.<BR/><BR/>I am generally pretty allergic to analyses that use the word "theory" or words that include "ology" (as a historian I can get away with this) but I find this blog very stimulating. A few sentences here made me think of my last book "Deeds of Arms" and the embodiment of chivalry.<BR/><BR/>CheersSteve Muhlbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18136005762428407135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37621293885083175222007-12-29T12:21:00.000-05:002007-12-29T12:21:00.000-05:00SRJ writes: In answer to MKH I think that the argu...SRJ writes: <I>In answer to MKH I think that the argument is that all material objects or landscapes can be considered as having agency in producing a world with meaning.</I><BR/><BR/>From the summary, I would say generally inert potential instead of agency. To clarify: generally inert to us (more on that "us" or "our" soon). Although #6 speaks of "potentially animate" "field of phenomena," this field becomes animate--at least to our perception/bodies--only through our contact with it. It's the disclosure of the field itself that animates it <I>for us</I>. <BR/><BR/>And to what degree is it animated? What are the ultimate boundaries of our engagement with "plants and animals, landscapes and artefacts"? It's the human <I>umwelt,</I> the subjective sensory limits of our bodies (decide here what you might want "body" to mean). The limits prevent us from knowing, for example, the emotive life of an octopus, or whether or not "emotive life" is even a fit question to put to the life of octopedes; they prevent us from knowing the phenomenological impact we make on other beings with dissimilar bodies and selves. I think here, also, of a recent post at <A HREF="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/divergent-series/" REL="nofollow">Larval Subjects</A> that finally asks:<BR/><I>The question, then, is whether this is the circumstance in which we find ourselves, or whether there is no some minimal transcendence that allows us in certain circumstances– not all–to surmount the limits of our embeddedness in context to encounter some minimal otherness of the other. In encountering others, do we only ever see our own reflection in the mirror?</I><BR/>To a degree, phenomenology stirs up "embeddedness in context" by reminding us of how the context--the self, that is--always changes through contact, how, in short, contact is always dispersing and reforming the self (which means we need another concept for self, a new language). But what are the final limits of that dispersal? I'm tempted to believe that the transformative encounter with the other through our senses is one tethered to our sensory limitations. Even if the "us" is shifted, even if, to speak deleuzoguattarianly, becoming coagulates differently, there's a limit, and because of that limit, the disclosed phenomenon is always, ultimately, translated into an us that is, yes, always shifting, but shifting like an amoeba: within limits, and through assimilation.<BR/><BR/>And losing sight of that limit, and assimilation, means losing sight of power. So, when SRJ writes <I>you can shoot me for saying this - phenomenology can be criticised for having little to say about power,</I> I want to join her <A HREF="http://www.artofeurope.com/goya/goy5.htm" REL="nofollow">on the wall.</A> After all, Tilly's project, as it's described here, remains anthropocentric, even if it's a phenomenologically inflected anthropocentrism. "[P]lants and animals, landscapes and artefacts" disclose themselves to an us that remains resolutely human Do only we creatures with "similar bodies" count as "other persons"? I see no evidence that Tilly means something else. This anthropocentric phenomenology continues to exercise <I>specular</I> power in which the world seems a theater of being for and through us. I'm not saying that it's possible to have an an-anthropocentric project, but it should be possible, even while celebrating a postcartesian mobile subjectivity, to remember what limitations phenomenology discloses, and what ethical effects there should be from these limits. At least, however, phenomenology, because of its attentiveness to embodiment, demands that we not lose sight of the human <I>umwelt</I>: not as much can be said for other epistemologies, other ontologies.<BR/><BR/>(JJC: you might like to see <A HREF="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/deleuze-on-simondon-and-individuation/" REL="nofollow">this.</A>Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14776422023359794482007-12-29T04:41:00.000-05:002007-12-29T04:41:00.000-05:00So glad you are reading Christopher Tilley. As I e...So glad you are reading Christopher Tilley. As I expect you know he is one of the most famous archaeologists/anthropologists who have pioneered postprocessualism in Archaeology. His collaborator is Michael Shanks (now at Stanford) and there is also Ian Hodder. (And, incidentally, they have all produced textbooks of archaeological theory for undergraduates).<BR/><BR/>Archaeologists have been interested in objects as language for a long time, though. Colin Renfrew (one of the innovators of processualist theory - briefly that the environment determines human culture) wrote one of his first books on Archaeology and Language. He argued that environmental evolution determined and shaped the emergence of human language and power structures. A less discursive, flexible, multivalent and human-centred approach to that of the postprocessualists, but recognisably influential all the same.<BR/><BR/>In answer to MKH I think that the argument is that all material objects or landscapes can be considered as having agency in producing a world with meaning. Roberta Gilchrist has particularly focussed on monasteries. She is also a leading exponent of feminism in archaeology. (Like much post modern criticism - and you can shoot me for saying this - phenomenology can be criticised for having little to say about power).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34507955635111580512007-12-28T17:45:00.000-05:002007-12-28T17:45:00.000-05:00Fascinating stuff here -- no time to linger with i...Fascinating stuff here -- no time to linger with it this evening, but given that the CU library has a copy of it in electronic form too, I have no doubt I'll return to it. As you point out, JJC, this definitely has a lot of impact on the project I'm trying to define for my dissertation...I'm moved to wonder what kind of landscape might form a text, and vice versa, or if we might speak productively of a kind of environment that includes texts as actors (I obviously think we can -- and I'd say monasteries in the Middle Ages are as good a place as any to think about such a thing).<BR/><BR/>One thing I find too intriguing to leave behind: <I>The move is from considering things as representing the world to us to things as producing that world for us. It is a move from the cognitive sign value of things to the embodiment of things, from the code of the world to the flesh of the world, from symbol to action. Producing human meaning in the world is all about establishing connections between ourselves and the disparate material phenomena with which and through which we live, the plants and animals, landscapes and artefacts that surround us, and this is the work of tropic language, of metaphor and metonymy.</I> My query here would be his use of the word "for", in that landscapes produce the world for us. He seems to move later in the part you quoted to an idea that it's the connection between human and landscape (through language) that produce "meaning" -- but there's also the fact of the body (which he's gotten to in the numeral-ed portion you cited above) -- which is itself <I>part of the landscape</I> as it were. I think I'm drawing on Latour a bit here -- "intertwining" still implies separateness, and I'm still not sure I want to make that kind of a divide so concrete. I may be misreading -- I should confess that due to WFU being closed for the break at present I've yet to get to the library since arriving home and so have not gotten Merleau-Ponty quite yet, and so I might be missing a lot of the discussion I need to understand in order to iron out these things in my mind. So -- more next week when I've gotten to the library again!Mary Kate Hurleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14892991966276345782noreply@blogger.com