The event horizon is a term used to describe the threshold of a Black Hole, beyond which gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape. The event horizon defines the black hole's limits, where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light.
But it is not clearly marked. Physicists think of it as imperceptible. A hypothetical astronaut entering a Black Hole would not know (s)he had passed it.
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To bring climate change under control, the atmosphere must be brought under some form of common governance This would require the establishment of a moral community and committment to some form of justice. To protect the resource and to protect themselves, the parties would have to grant each other the right to a fair share, and accept enforcement of a mutually agreed limit. The concept of the Anthropocene is founded in part on the recognition of human impact on the planet and the distinct possibility of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change…
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construction of World Trade Center 1968, with the “bathtub” slurry wall
‘it is important to realise that the truth of the Anthropocene is less about
what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave behind’ (Bronislaw Szerszynski)
Humans are now primarily an urban species, with about 55% of the population living in urban areas. By mid-century, about 7 out of 10 people are expected to live in cities and towns. In terms of urban land area, this is equivalent to building a city the size of New York City every 8 days. Cities account for about 70% of CO2 emissions from final energy use and the highest emitting 100 urban areas for 18% of the global carbon footprint. The accelerated growth of cities is perhaps now the most characteristic geo-physical feature of the so-called Anthropocene-in-the-making. Although it is the infrastructure of cities, including its road and electricity networks that are the most visible expression of human influence and inhabitation on the Earth from space, the most visible constructions on land may nevertheless be the most transient when subject to forces of erosion Like a giant footprint or burrow preserved in the rock record the massive trace fossils of cities will probably be made up of the subways, sewers, conduits and infrastructures presently below ground. (see technofossils) As sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski sums it up: ‘it is important to realise that the truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave behind’
In Provisional Cities, Renata Tysczcuk “touches on what it means to dwell within an unfolding disaster of human making, a world without stability — and yet continue to attempt the fiction of a settled life.” (p.8)
Philippe Petit 1974
The type of rock that makes up Manhattan Island is more intrinsic to its existence than anything else. Without Manhattan’s stable bedrock, the looming skyscrapers that are often conceived of as an integral part of its identity would not be supported enough to exist. Knowing that Philippe Petit walked between the towers and survived, but that the towers subsequently collapsed adds poignancy to this image. Perhaps it illustrates Tysczuk’s argument about provisional cities and the “shaking of being:” How should humans act when they have so little stability on offer?
In Provisional Cities, Tysczcuk calls the Anthropocene a period of greater unsettlement than our species has ever known. “This unsettlement refers not only to the fracturing and displacement of human lives, but also to the disjunctures and shifts of a dynamic Earth.” (p.223) “Urban poverty”, she goes on to explain, “magnifies geological, technological, and climatic hazards — these are disasters waiting to happen”
”In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city. These are the cities of tomorrow. The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation. Let’s look at these places as cities.” Killian Kleinschmidt, UNHCR. (quoted in Tyszschuk, p.239)
Zaatari Camp Jordan
above: The subversion of Zaatari camp's plan through daily urban practices initiated by refugees
“Strategies of resistance, cooperation, adaptation, and resourcefulness may prove to be especially important in a fragile and fraught world of both diminished human agency and more-than-human agency gone awry.” Recent convulsions of earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, wildfires, drought, and conflict across the world have demonstrated the convergence of two different earthly mobilities: people moving across the Earth’s surface through economic and forced migrations, and the shifting ground beneath our feet. (Nigel Clark)
In an article entitled “Anthropocene Time”, Dipesh Chakrabarti discusses some of the differences between human-historical time and the time of geology as they relate to the concept of the Anthropocene. (History and Theory 57, no. 1 (March 2018), pp. 5-32) For Chakrabarti, “…we are passing through a unique phase of human history when, for the first time ever, we consciously connect events that happen on vast, geological scales…with what we might do in everyday life.”
Read More"In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistable decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. " (Walter Benjamin, Origins, pp 178-9)
Komar - Melamid, Scenes from the Future: The Guggenheim Museum, 1974.
Proleptic views of “future ruins viewed through an intact present" have a history that extends at least as far back as Neo-Classicism, Piranesi, and the painter Hubert Robert, whose two contrasting views of the future of the Louvre illustrated both his hopes and his fears for the future. The latter possibility can be seen in his Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796), showing the museum in ruins, while the former is illustrated in his Projet pour la Disposition de la Grande Galerie, of the same year, showing the former palace transformed into a national museum. Joseph Gandy would make similar opposing views of the Bank of England, one pristine and the other in ruins.
Hubert Robert, Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (1796).
“Nature is no longer the backdrop to human creation; our human world has become the backdrop for things of nature. The natural world will survive humankind. Whether it will re-create the means of life necessary to our species, or to beings resembling our species, is not within our ken. .. The environmental catastrophe we think of as the ruin of nature is in fact the ruin of human nature, the end of our sustainable life on earth.” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson p.270)
In the ruins of collapsed civilizations, surviving parts tend to be simple and inert, like the scattered stone blocks that once cooperated to define a building or monument. in the ruins of collapsed, the more complex, dynamic parts of the civilization – buildings, institutions and cities –often cannot maintain their existence if the larger system they helped define ceases to exist. (Haff)
There have been five major extinction events, each one leading to a profound loss in biodiversity in earth’s history, and there is general consensus that we are in the midst of a sixth. Some of the previous ones took place in the late Ordovician period, some 450 million years ago, when living things were mainly confined to the water. The most devastating event took place at the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago. It came perilously close to emptying the earth of life altogether. The most recent — and famous — mass extinction came at the close of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, and wiped out the the non-avian and marine dinosaurs. (see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction).
The possibility, in fact the inevitability of human extinction informs speculation about the future of humanity in the Anthropocene. Humans seem to be actively reducing their chances for survival as a species. Will their technoscience produce descendants in the form of machines? Will they modify their gene pool sufficiently to thrive in the conditions of a new world?
Big Guys: US Supreme Court Justices
Big guys: Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts at the Supreme Court
Governance is the exercise of authority -- the decisions, regulations, and enforcement that determine how we will act and who will benefit. Governance refers to a condition in which those governed are embroiled in the apparatus that exercises political control to an extent that they are not outside it, but the means through which it is exercised.
Democratic governance implies the participation of those who are governed in the decision-making process -- either directly, through representatives, or both.
Big gal: Ursula von der Leyen, President of EC
According to public choice theory, public decisions are particularly likely to be bad when concentrated and well-organized groups with stable, substantial, and well-identified interests face off against diffuse groups with high information costs whose interests, while enormous in the aggregate, are individually small.
In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel traces the changes in the American democratic ideals from a republican political theory of self-governance that emphasized the formation of civic virtue and the common good, to a procedural republic, designed to guarantee toleration, fair procedures, and respect for individual rights, without taking any particular position on the good.
Republican theory, in its various forms from Aristotle to Jefferson and up to the beginnings of the free labor movement, sought to further the public good through the cultivation of virtue its citizens and to actively define the good life of political association in relation to their moral character. In this conception, freedom, or liberty, depends on shared participation in self-government, and it requires moral bonds between citizens and the community.
Modern liberal theory, on the other hand, holds that government should be neutral on the question of the good life. It defines freedom as an individual's right to unfettered choice without prejudice to the choices of others. It is more concerned with right and equal justice than with the good. According to Sandel, both conceptions have been part of American political philosophy from the outset, but the latter forms have come to define the contemporary American state, its laws and their interpretation, and its political economy of growth and distributive justice rather than citizenship. Political economy engages the foundations of economic life: what kind of wealth an economy produces, how it distributes that wealth, what kind of freedom and equality it promotes, and what provision it makes for the future.
According to Sandel's account, the triumph of the voluntarist concept of freedom coincided, paradoxically, with a growing sense of disempowerment, resulting from the fact that the liberal self-image of the freely choosing, independent self is sharply at odds with the actual organization of modern social and economic life (p.202). This sense of disempowerment results as well from the corresponding decline of the republican civic tradition, which cultivated solidarity and civic engagement.
In Down to the Wire, David Orr links the cynicism and apathy symptomatic of the decline in public confidence in political institutions as encouraging malfeasance in high places. If the legal system had already been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry by the middle of the nineteenth century -- at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within society -- in the postwar period of the twentieth century, "government became increasingly shrouded in secrecy and organized to accelerate the exploitation of natural resources, subsidize corporations, treat the symptoms of environmental problems without touching their root causes, alleviate some aspects of poverty without solving deeper problems, and protect the interests of the wealthy." (p. 15) Echoing Sheldon Wolin's descriptions in Democracy Incorporated, of the "inverted totalitarianism" that marked "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Orr claims that "We have had neither an open and honest political system that effectively encouraged public participation in major decisions nor one particularly distinguished by its competence -- partly the fault of self-fulfilling prophecies from those who said they wanted to get government off our backs." (ibid) In a call to "repair and enhance the capacity of government to do what only government can do," Orr reminds us that "Markets seldom act for the enduring public good; governments can and must."
Wendy Brown documents the rise of Antidemocratic politics in the west in her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.
Socrates first discovered the concept, or eidos as the relation between the particular and the general and as a germ of a new meaning of the general question concerning being. This meaning emerged in its full purity when the Socratic eidos went on to unfold into the (transcendental) Platonic "Idea." (see also essence) The eidos is absolutely and eternally real, but in respect to each single realization, it is the possible, its potentiality.
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GAIA: The hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock that the earth is a living organism. It is an organic world picture as opposed to the mechanized world picture of the scientific revolution. (see machine) The name Gaia means Earth Goddess and was suggested to Lovelock by William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. Leaving aside the anthropological element, the central element of Gaia theory is that the earth is a self-regulating system in which biological life does not simply adapt to conditions which happen to sustain life but in fact ensures the stablity (homeostasis) of those conditions. It is a form of coevolution between organism and environment.
Read MoreEcology, from the Greek ‘oikos’ (‘house’), is a relatively new and integrative scientific discipline focused on understanding interactions among organisms and their environments, including the ‘food chains’ that connect carnivores, herbivores, and plants; the spatial patterns of plant and animal populations; and the biogeochemical fluxes (transformations or flow of materials) among organisms and their abiotic environments.
Read MorePolycentric organization is a social system of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules … in which participants enjoy the freedom to make individual and personal contributions. Polycentric organizations are usually organized around abstract ideals, such as objective truth or justice, that embody their values and provide criteria for success.
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Wundercabinett
Wonder is a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cabinets of Curiosities (Wunderkammern) were private collections of notable objects and were at the origin of museums. They displayed natural wonders alongside works of art and various man-made feats of ingenuity. Modern terminology would categorize the objects they included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. But in the earlier collections, the wonders of God were spread out cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing: the Wonder of God.
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Barbara Kruger
The Nature / Culture distinction is one of the most visible of those "marked" oppositions in Western culture, that attribute a superiority of one term over the other. The unmarked category is the category present to itself, the category of identity. The marked category is the category of " otherness," of value defined by another. Of course, sometimes the latter term is used in the critique of these dualisms -- held up as a superior term (perhaps under another set of conditions)...
Read MorePhase space: (or state space) Allows representation of the behaviour of a system in geometric form. The number of dimensions required for the phase space is a function of the "degrees of freedom" of the system.
A dynamical system consists in two parts: the notions of a state (the essential information about a system) and a dynamic (a rule that describes how the state evolves with time). This evolution can be visualized in a phase space. Phase spaces can have any number of dimensions, corresponding to the “degrees of freedom” of the system. The figures drawn in the phase space that describe the system's behavior are phase portraits.
A singularity is a kind of discontinuity. It might or might not be interesting. A vaguer use of the term is simply "a point where something happens" (although this equally describes an event.) Deleuze and Guattari are fascinated by singularities because they are points of unpredictability, even when deterministic. They are thus the sites of revolutionary potential.
As used by mathematical physicists, a singularity means a place where slopes become infinite, where the rate of change of one variable with another exceeds all bounds, and where a big change in an observable is caused by an arbitrarily small change in something else. (cf sensitivity to initial conditions). It is an actual point of infinite density and energy that's kind of a rupture in the fabric of space-time.
Astrophysics describe the centers of black holes as singularities.The Big Bang is considered to be a singularity.
A phase singularity is a point at which phase is ambiguous and near which phase takes on all values. Time at the poles of the earth is an example.
For Robert Smithson, architecture depends on the repression of entropy.
"The dream of architecture is to escape from entropy." (Informe: Mode d'Emploi )
In the late nineteenth century speculation about entropy intersected with the culture of colonialism, with the uneasy relations between technological progress (primarily through the heat engine) and a sense of cultural pessimism. Thus for Oswald Spengler, entropy "signifies today the world's end as a completion of an inwardly necessary relation." (see Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise, Energy and Empire )
In 1852 William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, predicted the death of the earth from heat loss in an article entitled "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy." In it he wrote that "There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent amount of dissipation, is impossible...and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature." "Within a finite period of time...the earth must again be unfit for the habitation of man as present constituted." (quoted and commented upon in Hayles, Chaos Bound, pp 39-42)
Japanese Tea House
“Blank space in painting and architecture and ma (interval) between sounds are very important factors in these arts in which yojō is respected.”
At least in part, the concept has functioned as a way into the question of Japan-ness—of what can be considered distinctively Japanese. As such it becomes implicated in issues of “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism” as ways to imagine an “other”.
Read More"It is the theory that decides what we can observe." (Einstein)
"It is more important that a theory be beautiful than it be true." (Paul Dirac)
In Greek, theoria originally meant a looking at or viewing and theoreo, a spectator. In this sense, theory and Visuality are metaphors of each other.
Is the theoretical attitude is that of the disengaged observer? Does theory require a distinction between the illusionless observer and the gullible participant, or to put it more mildly, between theory and observation? Does theory always entail what John Dewey derided as the "spectator theory of knowledge"? Perhaps to theorize is to create the impression of something that existed already (or, even better, always already) (see metaphor) In the Pragmatic tradition, theory is the critical reflection on "belief." William James calls it "an appetite of the mind," what Frank Lentricchia calls "the need to generalize" and "to obliterate differences." (quoted in Cary Wolfe, Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" )
But according to the Greek conception, theory is not a knowledge but touching (thigein ).
Read More"The question, at which point we draw the line between living and non-living is not a scientific question.The line between living and non-living at the beginning of evolution is arbitrary, just as the line between human and non-human primates at the end of evolution is arbitrary.The task of science is not to define the exact position of the line but to understand how it came to be crossed."
Read MoreThe etymological origins of "abstract" are the latin abs trahere , to draw away from. Thus the abstract is separated from body, object, or application. It can describe qualities apart from any object or thing. In Archaic Greek art, the genre of particular things outweighed their specific, individual qualities in artistic representation. Hence abstraction, expressed through the geometricization of natural forms, dominated Archaic art. A Greek polis , when understood as a particular pattern of life and not just a geographical grouping of people and their belongings, was essentially an abstract conception, just as a nation "is today. (see J.J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece.) When we describe a culture in terms of categories such as "religious," "economic," etc. we are not describing real subdivisions, but are making abstractions for our convenience. In the study of "structures" the practice of analysis consists in constructing "models" that replace the study of concrete phenomena by that of an object shaped through its definition.
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