Blog posts
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A Hackers Manifesto, verze 4.0, kapitola 4.
By samotar, 10 January 2023
Alfred ve dvoře čili Poznámka k pražské hetero-utopii
By samotar, 10 November 2022
Trnovou korunou a tankem do srdíčka
By samotar, 2 July 2022
Hakim Bey - Informační válka
By samotar, 26 March 2022
Jean-Pierre Dupuy: Do we shape technologies, or do they shape us?
By samotar, 6 March 2022
Václav Cílek: Záhada zpívající houby
By samotar, 15 February 2022
Guy Debord - Teorie dérive
By samotar, 21 January 2022
Jack Burnham – Systémová estetika
By samotar, 19 November 2021
Poznámka pod čarou k výstavě Handa Gote: Věc, nástroj, čas, fetiš, hygiena, tabu
By samotar, 13 July 2021
Rána po ránech
By samotar, 23 May 2021
Na dohled od bronzového jezdce
By samotar, 4 March 2021
Z archivu:Mlha - ticho - temnota a bílé díry
By samotar, 7 October 2020
Zarchivu: Hůlna-kejdže
By samotar, 7 September 2020
Center for Land Use Interpretation
By samotar, 18 June 2020
Dawn Chorus Day - zvuky za svítání
By samotar, 30 April 2020
Z archivu: Bílé Břehy 2012 a Liběchov 2011
By , 3 April 2020
Z archivu: Krzysztof Wodiczko v DOXU
By samotar, 26 March 2020
GARY SNYDER: WRITERS AND THE WAR AGAINST NATURE
By samotar, 20 March 2020
Podoby domova: hnízda, nory, doupata, pavučiny, domestikace a ekologie
By samotar, 17 March 2020
Michel Serres: Transdisciplinarity as Relative Exteriority
By samotar, 5 November 2019
Pavel Ctibor: Sahat zakázáno
By samotar, 22 September 2019
Emmanuel Lévinas: HEIDEGGER, GAGARIN A MY
By samotar, 19 September 2019
Atmosférické poruchy / Atmospheric Disturbances - Ustí nad Labem
By samotar, 13 September 2019
Erkka Laininen: A Radical Vision of the Future School
By samotar, 10 August 2019
Anton Pannekoek: The Destruction of Nature (1909)
By samotar, 21 July 2019
Co padá shůry - světlo, pelyněk, oheň a šrot
By samotar, 30 December 2018
2000 slov v čase klimatických změn - manifest
By samotar, 2 November 2018
Vladimír Úlehla, sucho, geoinženýrství, endokrinologie, ekologie a Josef Charvát
By samotář, 22 September 2018
Lukáš Likavčan: Thermodynamics of Necrocracy - SUVs, entropy, and contingency management
By samotar, 20 July 2018
Tajemství spolupráce: Miloš Šejn
By samotar, 27 June 2018
Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) Trevor Paglen
By samotar, 2 June 2018
KŘEST KNIHY KRAJINA V POZORU: THE LANDSCAPE IN FOCUS.
By samotar, 18 May 2018
Případ zchudlé planety:Vojtěch Kotecký
By samotar, 22 April 2018
Rozhovor na Vltavě: Jak umění reaguje na dobu antropocénu?
By samotar, 10 March 2018
Skolt Sámi Path to Climate Change Resilience
By samotar, 10 December 2017
Brian Holmes: Driving the Golden Spike - The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space
By samotar, 22 November 2017
Ohlédnutí/Revisited Soundworm Gathering
By samotař, 9 October 2017
Kleté krajiny
By samotar, 7 October 2017
Kinterova Jednotka a postnatura
By samotař, 15 September 2017
Ruiny-Černý trojúhelník a Koudelkův pohyb v saturnských kruzích
By samotar, 13 July 2017
Upsych316a Universal Psychiatric Church
By Samotar, 6 July 2017
Miloš Vojtěchovský: Krátká rozprava o místě z roku 1994
By milos, 31 May 2017
Za teorií poznání (radostný nekrolog), Bohuslav Blažek
By miloš vojtěchovský, 9 April 2017
On the Transmutation of Species
By miloš vojtěchovský, 27 March 2017
Gustav Metzger: Poznámky ke krizi v technologickém umění
By samotař, 2 March 2017
CYBERPOSITIVE, Sadie Plant a Nick Land
By samotař, 2 March 2017
Ivan Illich: Ticho jako obecní statek
By samotař, 18 February 2017
Dialog o primitivismu – Lawrence Jarach a John Zerzan
By samotar, 29 December 2016
Thomas Berry:Ekozoická éra
By samotař, 8 December 2016
Jason W. Moore: Name the System! Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative
By miloš vojtěchovský, 24 November 2016
Michel Serres: Revisiting The Natural Contract
By samotař, 11 November 2016
Best a Basta době uhelné
By samotař, 31 October 2016
Epifanie, krajina a poslední člověk/Epiphany, Landscape and Last Man
By Samotar, 20 October 2016
Doba kamenná - (Ein, Eisen, Wittgen, Frankenstein), doba plastová a temná mineralogie
By samotař, 4 October 2016
Hledání hlasu řeky Bíliny
By samotař, 23 September 2016
Harrisons: A MANIFESTO FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
By , 19 September 2016
T.J. Demos: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Gynocene: The Many Names of Resistance
By , 11 September 2016
Bratrstvo
By samotař, 1 September 2016
Neptunismus a plutonismus na vyhaslé sopce Bořeň
By , 14 August 2016
Murray Bookchin: Toward an Ecological Society/ K ekologické společnosti (1974)
By samotař, 31 July 2016
Metafory, endofyzika, manželé Themersonovi a Gordon Pask
By samotař, 15 July 2016
Anima Mundi Revisited
By miloš vojtěchovský, 28 June 2016
Simon A. Levin: The Evolution of Ecology
By samotař, 21 June 2016
Anna Remešová: Je možné představit si změnu?
By samotar, 20 June 2016
Jan Hloušek: Uranové město
By samotař, 31 May 2016
Josef Šmajs: Složí lidstvo zkoušku své racionální dospělosti?
By samotař, 20 May 2016
Manifest The Dark Mountain Project
By Samotar, 3 May 2016
Pokus o popis jednoho zápasu
By samotar, 29 April 2016
Václav Cílek: Antropocén – velké zrychlení světa
By Slawomír Uher, 23 April 2016
Nothing worse or better can happen
By Ewa Jacobsson, 5 April 2016
Real Reason we Can’t Stop Global Warming: Saskia Sassen
By , 18 March 2016
The Political Economy of the Cultural Commons and the Nature of Sustainable Wealth
By samotar, 12 March 2016
Jared Diamond - Easter's End
By , 21 February 2016
Felix Guattari - Three Ecologies (part 1)
By , 19 February 2016
W. H. Auden: Journey to Iceland
By , 9 February 2016
Jussi Parikka: The Earth
By Slawomír Uher, 8 February 2016
Brian Holmes: Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions
By Stanislaw, 7 February 2016
Co číhá za humny? neboli revoluce přítomnosti
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 31 January 2016
Podivuhodný osud polárníka a malíře Julia Payera
By , 23 January 2016
Red Sky: The Eschatology of Trans
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 19 January 2016
#AKCELERACIONISTICKÝ MANIFEST (14. května 2013)
By samotar, 7 January 2016
The Forgotten Space: Notes for a Film
By , 7 January 2016
Rise and Fall of the Herring Towns:Impacts of Climate and Human Teleconnections
By , 25 December 2015
Hlubinná, temná, světlá i povrchová ekologie světa
By , 22 December 2015
Three short movies: Baroque Duchcov, New Lakes of Mostecko and Lignite Clouds
By Michal Kindernay, 21 December 2015
Lenka Dolanová: Umění mediální ekologie
By , 21 December 2015
Towards an Anti-atlas of Borders
By , 20 December 2015
Pavel Mrkus - KINESIS, instalace Nejsvětější Salvátor
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 6 December 2015
Tváře/Faces bez hranic/Sans Frontiers
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 29 November 2015
Josef Šmajs: Ústava Země/A Constitution for the Earth
By Samotar, 28 November 2015
John Jordan: The Work of Art (and Activism) in the Age of the Anthropocene
By Samotar, 23 November 2015
Humoreska: kočky, koulení, hroby a špatná muška prince Josefa Saského
By Samotar, 13 November 2015
Rozhovor:Před věčným nic se katalogy nesčítají
By Samotar, 11 November 2015
Lecture by Dustin Breiting and Vít Bohal on Anthropocene
By Samotar, 8 November 2015
Antropocén a mocné žblunknutí/Anthropocene and the Mighty Plop
By Samotar, 2 November 2015
Rory Rowan:Extinction as Usual?Geo-Social Futures and Left Optimism
By Samotar, 27 October 2015
Pavel Klusák: Budoucnost smutné krajiny/The Future of a Sad Region
By ll, 19 October 2015
Na Zemi vzhůru nohama
By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015
Upside-down on Earth
By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: What’s wrong with the Global North and the Global South?
By Samotar, 17 October 2015
Nýey and Borealis: Sonic Topologies by Nicolas Perret & Silvia Ploner
By Samotar, 12 October 2015
Images from Finnmark (Living Through the Landscape)
By Nicholas Norton, 12 October 2015
Bruno Latour: Love Your Monsters, Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children
By John Dee, 11 October 2015
Temné objekty k obdivu: Edward Burtynsky, Mitch Epstein, Alex Maclean, Liam Young
By Samotar 10 October 2015, 10 October 2015
Czech Radio on Frontiers of Solitude
By Samotar, 10 October 2015
Beyond Time: orka, orka, orka, nečas, nečas, nečas
By Samotar, 10 October 2015
Langewiese and Newt or walking to Dlouhá louka
By Michal Kindernay, 7 October 2015
Notice in the Norwegian newspaper „Altaposten“
By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015
Interview with Ivar Smedstad
By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015
Iceland Expedition, Part 2
By Julia Martin, 4 October 2015
Closing at the Osek Monastery
By Michal Kindernay, 3 October 2015
Iceland Expedition, Part 1
By Julia Martin, 3 October 2015
Finnmarka a kopce / The Hills of Finnmark
By Vladimír Merta, 2 October 2015
Od kláštera Osek na Selesiovu výšinu, k Lomu, Libkovicům, Hrdlovce a zpět/From The Osek Cloister to Lom and back
By Samotar, 27 September 2015
Sápmelažžat Picnic and the Exploration of the Sami Lands and Culture
By Vladimir, 27 September 2015
Gardens of the Osek Monastery/Zahrady oseckého kláštera
By ll, 27 September 2015
Workshop with Radek Mikuláš/Dílna s Radkem Mikulášem
By Samotářka Dagmar, 26 September 2015
Czech Radio Interview Jan Klápště, Ivan Plicka and mayor of Horní Jiřetín Vladimír Buřt
By ll, 25 September 2015
Bořeň, zvuk a HNP/Bořeň, sound and Gross National Product
By Samotar, 25 September 2015
Já, Doly, Dolly a zemský ráj
By Samotar, 23 September 2015
Up to the Ore Mountains
By Michal, Dagmar a Helena Samotáři , 22 September 2015
Václav Cílek and the Sacred Landscape
By Samotář Michal, 22 September 2015
Picnic at the Ledvice waste pond
By Samotar, 19 September 2015
Above Jezeří Castle
By Samotar, 19 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 3
By Tamás Sajó, 18 September 2015
Ledvice coal preparation plant
By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015
pod hladinou
By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 2
By Tamás Sajó, 17 September 2015
Cancerous Land, part 1
By Tamás Sajó, 16 September 2015
Offroad trip
By Dominik Žižka, 16 September 2015
Ekologické limity a nutnost jejich prolomení
By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 16 September 2015
Lignite Clouds Sound Workshop: Days I and II
By Samotar, 15 September 2015
Recollection of Jezeří/Eisenberg Arboretum workshop
By Samotar, 14 September 2015
Walk from Mariánské Radčice
By Michal Kindernay, 12 September 2015
Mariánské Radčice and Libkovice
By Samotar, 11 September 2015
Tušimice II and The Vicarage, or the Parsonage at Mariánské Radčice
By Samotar, 10 September 2015
Most - Lake, Fish, algae bloom
By Samotar, 8 September 2015
Monday: Bílina open pit excursion
By Samotar, 7 September 2015
Duchcov II. - past and tomorrow
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Duchcov II.
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Arrival at Duchcov I.
By Samotar, 6 September 2015
Poznámka k havárii rypadla KU 300 (K severu 1)
By Samotar, 19 August 2015
Michel Serres: Revisiting The Natural Contract
Michel Serres je přední francouzský filozof a matematik humanitních věd epochy posthumanistické kultury, Jeho texty jsou řazeny do předpolí současného uvažování a intenzivně a z perspektivy planetárního rozměru sumarizují podoby i podstatu krize a paradoxů života v 21. století. Serres se proslavil filozofickými "výlety" do oblastí jako jsou termodynamika, teorie komplexity, nebo teorie chaosu ve vědě, technice a praxi, Serres v řadě knih, včetně "Hermes, Genesis, The Troubador of Knowledge, The Parazit, Rozhovory o vědě, kultuře a čas a The Natural Contract/Smlouva s přírodou popsal dějiny fenoménu, který sám nazval "world-objekt/objekt-světa". CTheory má tu čest zveřejnit anglický překlad dokumentu, který Michel Serres přednesl v Institutu humanitních oborů na Simon Fraser University v Kanadě 4. května 2006. "Přehodnocení smlouvy s přírodou" vychází ze slavné Serresovy publikace vydané v roce 1990 "The Natural Contract",
Arthur a Marilouise Kroker, editoři CTheory
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=515
Ecology
This word appeared in the French language for the first time around 1874, following the German usage proposed by Haeckel in 1866; however it seems that the American philosopher Thoreau, had already invented the word in 1852. Since then ecology has acquired two meanings:
1.It refers to a scientific discipline, dedicated to the study of more or less numerous sets of living beings interacting with their environment. The discipline of ecology started with a comprehensive study of the Mont Ventoux, in France, and about the same time with the development of limnology or the science of lakes, with studies in the vicinity of Madison, Wisconsin. In studying the interlinked totality of living beings and inert objects, ecology relies on the combination of both traditional and recent disciplines, mathematics (differential equations), thermodynamics, biochemistry etc.
2. Ecology also refers to the controversial ideological and political doctrine varying from author to author or group to group that aims at the protection of the environment through diverse means.
History and Philosophy of Law
Published in 1990, and written in the previous decade, The Natural Contract does not use the term ecology once. Why not? because it deals with the philosophy and the history of Law, and in particular with the question of who has the right to become a legal subject. For centuries, only adult males who belonged to an upper social class could introduce and defend a legal action: Greek and Roman citizens, nobles, bourgeois. ... excluding slaves, foreigners, women and children, the poor and destitute.. Little by little, some form of emancipation enabled the latter to become legal subjects, that is "of age" in the eyes of the law and other public institutions. I am ashamed to say that I was taught in my youth about the establishment of universal suffrage while women only got the right to vote in my country in 1944; they even needed their husband's signed permission to open a bank account.
This entire history ends at least theoretically, with the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, decreed during the French Revolution, and at the end of the last war, with a similar but universal Declaration published by UNESCO. Thus, everyone is a legal subject today. My book argues that this Declaration is not yet universal as long as it does not determine that all living beings and all inert objects, in short, all of Nature have in turn become legal subjects.
Who signs the contract?
The main objection to my book consists in asking the author: who will sign the Contract since Nature does not have a hand with which to write nor an understanding capable of any such intention. I am neither so dumb nor so animistic to think that Nature is a person. I could also answer that the same objection was leveled at Rousseau's social contract; no one has ever signed this contract in a ceremony the date and circumstances of which could be documented. The General Will has as few hands as nature.
Therefore these Contracts must be conceived as preconditions. If we live together in such and such a way, everything occurs as if we had signed the Social Contract. If today we protect certain endangered species, it is because we acknowledge their right to exist, at least virtually. During the British colonial period, the hunters in Bengal did not recognize the rights of tigers, even to the point of extinction. We are beginning to conceive the possibility of lawsuits that, for example, oppose polluters and this park or forest or that mangrove swamp. Such lawsuits are only possible because of the tacit acceptance that these "things" are legal subjects.
Our present behaviors, even our sensibility now take into consideration the fragility of things, and so presuppose that Nature is slowly becoming a legal subject. Despite differences between epochs, traditional Western philosophy attempts to discover a place from which one can simultaneously observe scientific reason and legal reason, the laws of the physical world and the political laws of human collectivities, the rules of Nature and the rules of Contracts. This is why the terms that designate those principles are the same in the major languages.
This is true of Plato and Aristotle, Lucretius and the Stoics; it applies to Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Middle Ages, Spinoza and Hobbes, to the classical age, and closer to us, Kant and Hegel. In search of such a place, The Natural Contract deals with the philosophy of knowledge and action in relation to problems posed by contemporary science and technology.
The New World-Object
Heat and the world-objects
As soon as human technology started using heat, vaporous mixtures expanded everywhere in all directions and at random; recent core sampling of glacial inlandsis have been able to date the beginning of the bronze age almost to the year, thanks to traces of the first effluents emitted by archaic ovens in the Middle East which were dispersed everywhere and carried by snowfall to those high latitudes. Who would have thought that globalization started as early as our prehistory? The industrial revolution generalized and propagated thermal techniques which accelerated the rise of the local towards the global, the causes or consequences of which philosophy has not yet studied. Since I frequently described this rise in previous books, The Natural Contract begins by simply mentioning it. Our know-how has been dedicated in recent times to the production of world-objects, a concept that I defined twenty-five years ago in Thanatocracy (Hermes III, p. 101), taking as examples ballistic missiles, fixed satellites and nuclear waste. By world-objects I mean tools with a dimension that is commensurable with one of the dimensions of the world. A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet for space, and nuclear waste for time...these are four examples of world-objects.
What is an object?
What then is an object? In the literal sense it is: "that which has been thrown or which one throws in front." Are world-objects lying in front of us? The global dimension that characterizes them eliminates the distance between us and them which in the past defined objects. We now live in those world-objects as we live in the world.
Traditional technologies, tools and machines form units with a local range of action in space and time: the sledgehammer drives in the stake, the plow cuts the furrow, in sum, they define an environment where few humans worked, for example a family living on a farm. Such a division of the world into localities allows for a philosophy of mastery and possession, because we can define what we dominate, how we dominate it and who is meant by this we. As the range of action of the objects increased, so did the number of humans that produced or used them; but also vice-versa in a kind of feedback. Smelting furnaces and airline companies do not mobilize the same groups; the concentration and size of subjects condition those of objects. However, the reverse also takes place.
Little by little globalization forms a new universe based on thermal techniques and developed further by the quantitative increase of world-objects. We see these now as technical, physical, and we will soon see them as human and legal as well. Can we still call these things objects, and the people who use them subjects? Are our communication networks objects?
Dependency and possession
It is perfectly possible to master a given place in a short period of time and to become its possessor; in the final analysis property is the occupation of a niche and thus the demarcation of a place. But we do not know the ins and outs of global mastery of the universe. Because our philosophies are dedicated to difference and distinction, they can only achieve accurate definitions at the local level. As a result they handle categories of totality with difficulty. The Cartesian adage concerning the possession of nature does not define the conditions of mastery over such a vast "object."
On the other hand, that same recommendation of mastery is inscribed in the slow historical displacement of the old stoic division between things that depend on us and things that do not. Again, what "things"? In a second Cartesian act, those "things" that at first did not depend on us suddenly do now, and increasingly so; but, in the third act, we ourselves suddenly depend, and increasingly so, on things that depend on actions that we undertake. Our survival depends on a world that we create with technologies whose elements depend on our decisions.
To the Stoic division, and the Cartesian mastery now succeeds a spiral where mastery and dependency interact and retroact and where obsolete, solitary subjects, are mingled with outdated objects. Thirty years ago already, I wrote that today mastery of the world must be replaced by the mastery of mastery.
The world or nature: homo sive natura
We do not know what the world is like today; we are only beginning to know it and this knowledge differs from our knowledge of a circumscribed object. We are just beginning to act on the world and this practice differs from our action on circumscribed objects.
Therefore philosophy's task is to re-examine ancient concepts such as the subject, whether individual or collective, the object, knowledge and action. Those concepts developed over millennia, at least in the West, under the prior condition of local divisions which defined a gap between subject and object in which action and knowledge operated. The measure of that gap conditioned them. Local division, distance, measure... this whole production of theories and practices is falling apart today as we enter a broader scene. Older categories of totality such as being-in-the-world become concerns of objective knowledge, relevant to the problem of politics and technical action. Thus they go from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to action, from ontology to responsibility, from ethics to politics.
A certain nature, not in the common meaning of the term, but in its purely etymological sense, is being born which is new for our globalized knowledge and acts. This nature returns as a condition of knowledge, action and even survival, now that the new subjects are encompassed by it as soon as they act upon it.
Homo sive natura
Objectivity: The Whole Earth
1.Perception: thanks to photographs taken by the astronauts, we see the whole Earth. This view is different from ancient visual perceptions that presupposed the Earth as an unseen background. Being-in-the-world never saw the world before.
2.Transmissions, information and knowledge: through the Web and e-mail we communicate with the entire Earth. The consequences for knowledge and the human community today transform our living conditions. Being-in-the-world never before heard the world.
3.Practices: through our techniques and their effluents, we act on the entire Earth, the climate and global warming. As soon as we act on it, it changes and we change and we no longer live in the same way. All we can do is bet on the consequences of those actions for our survival. Being-in-the-world never acted on the world before.
Subjectivity: Humanity
1.For better and for worse, information and communication, with their intermediaries and powers, traverse the entire Earth and its inhabitants, defining new communities, a global "we."
2.Today communities of audiences, spectators and contributors emerge, creating a global public opinion, which at first is scientific and technological, and no doubt eventually political and moral.
3.To the whole Earth there corresponds humanity, no longer abstract, sentimental and potential, as in the past and until fairly recently, but present and soon to be fully realized. A certain humanism is reborn, resting on the new Grand Narrative of our paleo-anthropological origins.
Collectivity: New Object-Subject Distribution
The subject becomes object: we become the victims of our victories, the passivity of our activities. The global object becomes subject because it reacts to our actions like a partner. The earlier Rio and the more recent Kyoto meetings on global warming show the progressive formation of that new collective global subject which is situated facing or inside the new natural global object.
The cost of knowledge and action
Classical Western philosophy never calculated the cost of knowledge or action but considered them to be free of charge. However, as soon as work appears, everything is subject to the martial law of price. The yield of work is never one on one; there are always residues and garbage. As long as work remains cold and local, price is calculated in terms of profit and loss. As soon as heat enters work, the productivity of the thermic machine is calculated. When world-objects are in operation, the cost becomes commensurable with a world dimension. Local, negligible waste is succeeded by global pollution of the world.
Legal Conditions of Knowledge and Action
Things and causes: the archaic and the new Contract
Let us return to things themselves: for the Western linguist and historian, causes or cases precede things and the first known subject is the legal subject. The contract precedes knowledge and action.
The French word "cause" designates an objectivity; it is indeed derived from the Latin causa, a legal term used to designate what is at stake in a lawsuit, or the lawsuit itself. The thing originally then appears as something about which there is a debate, a suit, the decision of a court, something about which there will be a contract. Knowledge of the thing flows from the establishment of a legal authority that names both the agreement and its object. Similarly, the English thing is derived from a term of Germanic law. In our European languages then, the emergence of a thing is always accompanied by a social contract: does it constitute the group or does the group constitute it? We will probably never know which preceded the other. In any case, objectivity appears at the same time as a collective and this appearance takes place under legal conditions.
Subjects, objects, knowledge
Similarly, the first known subject is a legal subject. For that reason, The Natural Contract deals almost exclusively with the question: who has the right to become a legal subject? Western history shows the progressive increase in legal subjects: slaves at first, then children and women, the recent date of whose inclusion shames the West.
The whole question concerns first and foremost the status of subjects, and then that of objects. Some thought it was crazy to propose a contract that would commit us to an object and through which it would be committed. The same objections were leveled at Rousseau; the Social Contract was never signed in known or knowable history by any human or collectivity because in his work it designates the sine qua non or transcendental condition for the formation of societies. Bacon could have been criticized in the same way: whom does one command, whom does one obey, in his famous adage according to which one can only command Nature by obeying it?
And yet, as with any change in scale, globalization progressively and profoundly transforms the respective status of objects and subject, as action and knowledge strive towards the universal: the objective status of the collective subject changes because from formerly active, it becomes the passive, global object of forces and constraints that result from its own actions; the status of the world-object also changes as, from formerly passive, it becomes active, from formerly a given, it becomes our de facto partner. Thus we can no longer describe the scene of knowledge and action with the medieval couple of subject-object; the terms are changing as well as their relation.
Concerning this relation, I know of no knowledge that does not start out from legal conditions whose impact in the history of science increases at least as fast as the conditions of globalization. Every body of knowledge requires an agreement or a consensus that must be established by an authority in fact or by right. In education we must present ourselves to examiners for graduation, competitions or publications. Before saying anything, whether it be true, false or probable, even before saying that this or that is or is not an object of science, such and such authority deliberates and decides in an adversarial process.
Legal subjects proclaim the rights of objects.
Case History
Those legal conditions have not always prevented fatal outcomes. Everyone cites Galileo's trial as the exceptional action that founded modern science in the West. Not so! I do not know of any Greek scholar concerned with objective science, astronomy, physics or medicine, who was not on some occasion called before the court on the charge of neglecting the political affairs of his country. They all risked or lost their life for having interrogated the stars or the plants. The Greek history of important trials testifies abundantly to the fact that the thing emerges with the case. Fairly rare in the Christian area and era, a trial like Galileo's seems rather a remnant of that distant history.
As I noted at the beginning, the fact that the great western philosophies (from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel) attempt to discover a common place from which to think both science and law at the same time, seems to me a significant trace of that origin. Why do we designate both types of law with the same term, why do we say or not say nature for the world and for humans?
Today we must conceive a new object that goes far beyond the status of local objects, because if we treat the world as an object we are condemned in turn to become the objects of that object. To think this new situation, we need to return to the original legal gesture. This newly emerging object enters thought with a new Contract that simultaneously establishes the new global object and the new global group that thinks it, acts on it, and whose debates reveal it, whose actions make it react and the reactions of which condition the very survival of the collectivity that thinks it and acts on it. For more than twenty years, we have been speaking and debating about this, and establishing the basis of what I have called, the Natural Contract.
Philosophers for whom neither the world nor science exists have criticized me for dealing with these issues; however that seems to me a very small price to pay compared with the treatment I should have received. Certainly, the fact that the politicians themselves are taking these problems seriously renders such criticisms obsolete. The legal debate has started, the global collectivity has noted the existence and status of the new object that, for lack of a better word, we continue to call nature, and by conferring about it, our leaders have de facto signed the Natural Contract.
The task of philosophy is to anticipate the future.
Knowledge and exchange: the given
I promised to speak of the partnership. The relation between the subject of knowledge and its object has never been thought in terms of exchange; instead it was understood that that the active subject took information from the passive object.
The use of the terms "data" and "given" in philosophy thus reveal that the objective or external world gives for free and asks nothing in return. Consequently, the knowledge link becomes parasitical. The subject takes everything and gives nothing while the object gives everything and receives nothing. Knowledge is then treated as disinterested in turn. The active or technical relation to the world exploits it and that is all. We did not know we were acting as parasites or predators. What appears normal, usual, commonplace in knowledge or action becomes scandal and abuse as an exchange. But if legal processes lie at the origin of knowledge, some kind of equilibrium should be established in the exchange; hence the necessity of a contract.
All pedagogy consists in making the little human who starts out as a parasite into a symbiotic partner of a fair exchange. Since he takes, he must give back in return. In a certain sense, this involves signing a contract of exchange with his environment, as if he started out his human and civil life by learning the non-written law. So every pedagogy presupposes a Contract.
The law that founds symbiosis
Consequently, we must collectively educate the scholar, the technician, the politician and the consumer just as we educate our children, individually from the very start of every education. Late in life, we are becoming adults of knowledge and action. The relation to knowledge changes today because of the need for symbiosis with the new object. Exchange is prior to knowledge. A Contract is required to make this exchange equitable. Knowledge starts with the law, whose laws precede any discovery of laws; similarly, technological action starts with the right of exchange. And thus begins the symbiosis of the global world-object and of the global human species-subject.
Any change of scale requires an adjustment of concepts.
Master and slave: concerning ancient death
The 20th century built global world-objects but could only think in terms of the old local philosophies. Remember how these philosophies spoke of power: Hegel calls "master" he who gets closest to death and "slave" he who stays far away from it. What death are we talking about? Only the earliest kind, the ancient one. This concern indicates the obsolescence of philosophies that knew nothing of the lesson of Hiroshima, the possible collective death of the human species. What can we say about power, that is to say, politics, when exercising it endangers not only the knight with his amour, or his family, his tribe, his group or nation, but all of humanity, the planet included? Here too, the scale has changed. The question of power concerns not only war and politics, but also technical action and its tools. And as usual, the law follows death.
The law I propose follows the new death. Certain elements of world opinion and politics during the next years of the 21st century will be linked to these legal questions.
And so I prefer Goya's painting the description of which opens The Natural Contract to the master-slave dialectic. A pair of enemies are fighting in quicksand. With every blow dealt to the adversary, their legs sink into the sludge, ever deeper as the energy spent in combat increases. Since the dawn of history, we have only seen the belligerents in the grand spectacle of the battle and have only been interested in the question of who will win or lose, who will become the master by subduing or killing the slave?
However, the game is no longer played by two parties, but by three; no longer two subjects, but a pair and the object. Which object? not the local object of a now trivial debate, but the global habitat; no longer the individual case, but the universe of things reacting strongly to the conditions of the struggle. In the past, we signed temporary peace treaties between belligerents; today we must sign contracts of symbiosis between the global Earth and the totality of actors. For, in spite of their hatred and the force of their blows, these actors actually struggle, in agreement and in unison, with their habitat.
Na malbě "Souboj palicemi" ze série "Černých obrazů" lze vidět Goyovo dramatické využití různých odstínů modré a červené v krajině s dvojicí mužů zápasících s bahně. Zatímco v původní verzi obrazu zápasili na louce, po poničení malby během převozu do Prada byla malba přemalována a autor posílil děsivost scény a bezvýchodnou situaci soupeřů: v souboji zapadali postupně do bažiny, nebo do tekutých písků až do výše kolen a nemohou tedy uhnout vzájemným úderům palicemi..
Epiphany – Frontiers of Solitude
Dům umění Ústí nad Labem
September – October 2016
http://duul.ujep.cz/
An exhibition and symposium created within the framework of the international transdisciplinary project Frontiers of Solitude.
.. there are many, many other worlds, yes, but they are all hidden within this one. And so to neglect this humble, imperfect, and infinitely mysterious world is to recklessly endanger all the others.
Earth in Eclipse-an Essay on the Philosophy of Science and Ethics
David Abram
Aside from its biblical, gnostic, or metaphysical meaning, the term epiphany also raises issues concerning the relationship between humans and nature and the boundaries of thought, belief and epistemology. Where does the sacred lead and where does the profane begin? Where does the revealed come from, and what does it consist of? The idea of revelation and its embodiment affects our relationship with the sacred, as well as our neighbors, and also our sense of belonging to a physical world, which we are increasingly remaking in our image. What kind of image is it? We will need to reevaluate our technological approach to the environment, which we understand reflexively as an inexhaustible deposit, a source of energy, as a free reservoir for exclusively human use.
A criticism of “disenchantment,” of the alienation of humankind toward the biological world, is found in different areas of contemporary science, humanities, religion, philosophy, economics and art. It is becoming evident that this is a dangerous and complex cluster of values, interests and assumptions, providing the elites with access to unimaginable wealth, and sacrificing the rest of the biosphere, edging us nearer to the environmental extreme of physical survival.
The project Frontiers of Solitude develops this discourse. The exhibition and the accompanying program serve as an attempt to outline the relationships among the cultural, economic, and ethical issues of the environmental challenges we currently face. In 2015, Frontiers of Solitude launched three separate expeditions to ecologically threatened areas of Europe. In addition, the project has offered a series of exhibitions, meetings, workshops and symposia. The expedition “Into the Abyss of Lignite Clouds” took place in the Most lignite coal basin in the Czech Republic. The participants researched the morphology and the history of this region -- a landscape that has been heavily transformed to a depth of several hundred meters by industrial exploitation. The toxic Black Triangle, which is defined roughly as a carbon-rich area between Sokolov, Litvínov, Bad Brambach and Katowice, has softened its boundaries somewhat since 1989, and, on the whole, has grown.
The exhibition presents several works that were produced by artists participating in the project - Elvar Már Kjartansson, Pavel Mrkus, Robert Vlasak, Martin Zet, Vladimír Turner, Julia Martin).
In this extended form, the project focus shifts to both local and global contexts through a selection of works by several Czech and foreign artists, whose approach resonates with issues that the project raises: Steina Vasulka [IS], Layla Curtis [UK],, Michal Kindernay and Paul Chaney [UK]). These works are enriched by a few contextual interventions and artifacts, such as a selection of apocalyptic documentary photography from the series of Ore Mountains landscapes by Josef Koudelka (Black Triangle-1990-1994), as well as a stage-design-like intervention by JSD - Peerless Brotherhood of the Holy Nurture from The Universal Psychiatric Church 316a (UPSYCH) in Kuřivody.
The exhibition outlines the cross-connections among various social, psychological, mythical, economic and cultural landscapes. The works reflect the process of a larger-scale globalization and touch not just upon the perspectives of geology, meteorology, energy and ethics, but also try to penetrate into the lower depths of the demonology of the landscape of the 21st century.
An accompanying program and an interdisciplinary symposium will be dedicated to the problems of Art and the Anthropocene, and is scheduled for October 19, 2016.
The schedule and program of the symposium The Landscape in Focus will be announced as soon as possible.
preliminary program see Krajina v pozoru/The Landscape in Focus
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