Moments

Some colleagues and I at Western State Colorado University were interviewed by one of our students, Justin Sutton (Communication Arts major/Philosophy minor) for a mini-documentary.  I think he did a great job with it, and I was honored to be involved




I write so much about space, that time can sometimes be overlooked.  I think I'll have to remedy that soon.

Good news!

It's official!  The article I've been working on, "Posthuman Topologies: Thinking Through the Hoard" will be published in Lexington Books' upcoming anthology Radical Interface: Transdisciplinary Interventions on Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman!

Here's an abstract of the the chapter:

No matter how deeply we push into posthuman explanations of technology as an underlying epistemology or ontology, “interface” remains a fundamental difficulty.  It represents a seemingly insurmountable topological space which exists between the human and the technological artifact which the human manipulates.  Posthumanism’s tendency to subsume the technological into the self as an epistemological or ontological modality reveals its vestigial humanist conceits:  (I know) through technology; or (I am) technologically.  To fully emerge from the humanist shadow, we must rethink “the human” as a function which occurs across substrates, non-anthropocentrically distributing cognition/selfhood/being through our topological environments.  Being, thinking, etc. are as contingent upon the spaces we occupy as they are upon the biological wetware of the brain.  This radical re-imagining of being requires us to start with a posthuman perspective and move on, rather than characterize the posthuman as the destination. 

To achieve this, we must -- perhaps counterintuitively -- re-emphasize technology as an artifact on equal discursive footing with the ontological self or “mind.”  When we start a posthumanist analysis of interface with the “object” or “artifact” rather than the human using it, we can more readily achieve a discourse of the “distributed self,” which takes the shape of the environment it occupies; a self which morphs across a spatio-temporal continuum and is as affected by phenomena traditionally considered “outside” of it as it is by the biological processes which sustain it.  In such a scenario, “interface” is rendered moot, and becomes a signifier for arbitrary and shifting designations of that which is and isn’t the self.  

I'm really excited about this one!  The collection is under contract right now and I'll post more details as to a publishing date and availability as soon as I know them.  

The intensity of things -- a quick update

I apologize to everyone for the long gap between posts.  The truth is, I've had two very major things going on that have taken up all of my attention:  my application for tenure and the article I've been working on for an upcoming anthology.  The deadline for tenure was a month ago and the deadline for my final draft of my article was today.  Add to that my regular duties at my University and it made for a very hectic few months.

I'm keeping mum on the article until everything is finalized, since even when there is a press and contracts, things can shift unexpectedly.  I'll know more about the final status of the article in a few weeks.  As for tenure, I'll know the final result of that in the Spring.

I never take anything for granted.

But based on what I have written, I've been thinking a lot about "intensities" lately.  And that's the term that I've been orbiting around post-article.  I'll be thinking a lot about that through the next couple of weeks -- not just in the the scope of the intensity of objects.  I'm thinking more of the intensity that objects can help foster, or instantiate.

Yes, more about that is coming in my next posts -- and I promise there won't be such a wait for the next one.