timespace coordinates: (retrofuturistic) Victorian London >Lisbon >Alexandria >Paris
Poor Things is a 2023 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara. It stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, and Jerrod Carmichael. Based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, (wiki)
imdb // rt // brain transplant
spacetime coordinates: Original Timeline: 1955 US > 1987 Tokyo > 2013 Baltimore, Maryland > 2015 Chechnya, NY > 2016 Manhattan on the day of the Chinese New Year > 2017 (the M5-10 virus kills 7 billion people) > 2030’s Western VII Quarantine Zone / Spearhead > 2041 – 2043 Project Splinter // Alternate 2015 / 2043 // Third Timeline: 2016 <> 2044 // Fourth Timeline: 1925 – 1944 US – 1950’s NY / 1961 East Berlin / 2044 <> 1971 – 1975 US / 2044 <> 2016 / 2020 Spearhead / 2044 // Fifth Timeline: 1852 American frontier / 1891 London / 1917 – 1922 (fr) <> 2045 <> 1940 France / 1953 Hope Valley / 1989 US / 2046, 2047 / 2163 / 1491 /// Titan (a massive time-traveling industrial facility) __detailed timeline here__
12 Monkeys is an American television series on Syfy created by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett. It is a science fiction mystery drama with a time traveling plot loosely adapting the 1995 film of the same name, which was written by David and Janet Peoples and directed by Terry Gilliam, itself being inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 featurette La Jetée; the series credits Marker and both Peoples for their original works.
In the series, Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull star as James Cole and Dr. Cassandra “Cassie” Railly, two strangers destiny brought together on a mission to use time travel to stop the destructive plans of the enigmatic organization “Army of the 12 Monkeys”. Kirk Acevedo, Noah Bean, Todd Stashwick, Emily Hampshire, Tom Noonan, Scottie Thompson, Alisen Down, Brooke Williams and Barbara Sukowa also star. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1890 – 1891 London / Paris / Switzerland
Sherlock Holmes is a 2009 period mystery action film based on the character of the same name created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The film was directed by Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law portray Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, respectively.
Eccentric detective Holmes and his companion Watson are hired by a secret society to foil a mysticist’s plot to gain control of Britain by seemingly supernatural means. Rachel McAdams stars as their former adversary Irene Adler and Mark Strong portrays villain Lord Henry Blackwood.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a 2011 period mystery action film directed by Guy Ritchie. It is the sequel to the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law reprised their roles as Holmes and Watson, respectively, alongside Noomi Rapace as Simza, Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty, and Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. Although the film follows an original premise, it incorporates more closely elements of Conan Doyle’s short stories, including “The Final Problem” (1893) and “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). In the film, Holmes and Watson travel across Europe with a Romani adventuress to foil an intricate plot by their cunning nemesis, Professor Moriarty, to instigate a major European conflict.
I very recently (this year) discovered the following study and this discovery has made me very happy – indeed it has brought me back full circle to other pursuits I have followed these last years. It has been a daunting but also incredibly satisfying and slow-moving adventure to unravel Whitehead’s organic philosophy year by year. I have read ANW in German, English and Romanian and I am grateful to these translators and editors and popularizers of his works. I am thankful for all those that have listened to and communicated on the margins my continuing yet uneven advances – Gabi, Julia, Nae, Felix, Akira, amongst others. This post deals only in its end section with the above mentioned book in trying to add more context to A N Whitehead’s process philosophy and panpsychism. In the end I point out why I think The Outward Mind adds (for me) a few important missing ingredients that allow for much larger historical width.
check the original on Goodreads blog
There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and their (later) systematized traditions.
Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits – odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the well known works of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact, nor is he a direct succesor. In Science in the Modern World (1925) he jumps directly to a phrase from the founder of scientific method – Francis Bacon(1561 – 1626). These remote references are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy almost by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying.
He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, twisting and upgrading a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their incipient striving and lacunae more than what they would have ever admit.
He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the ‘final draft’ or settled into a recognizable and canonical Tractatus. With this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with others and kept involved with their inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (somehow detached fron his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord, it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion – feels much more important.
He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed with insistence and detail the most complex metaphysical project to date – responsive to the most relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics).
I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW’s mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc) and the philosophical idiom he uses.
One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by genuflection in front of such a heavyweight philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics.
His polemics (if they exist) are not so much with authors, but with certain aporias of Western thinking. His engagement is a long shot wrestling with meta-theories of mindmatter or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.
Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is the philosophia prima for him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly contemporary) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but somehow they are related to him.
What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the bottom is tbe new up perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from?
Another unusual convergence allows him to share these preoccupations with various philosophers of mind. Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably) needs engagement whatever they might say. Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo’s Error) by fellow panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that according to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.
It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”.
What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others.
Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. One can get lost mired in his verbiage or become outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice. If mentioning him one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know – it seems.
What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get doomed by mentioning him repeatedly or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or careful tip-toeing , a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.
I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of slight superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality or an impetus from a completly different set of theories.
In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead’s arguments at a distance and up close.
I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical) to chose from. A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.
For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely ignored or only alluded to free speculation anchored in embodied research. It smells of a long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible, diffuse and active affect, “sensuous knowledge” (like in Adorno or Ranciere). Instead of ignoring the body and objects it sees them as affecting and being affected, prolonging scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let’s say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James’s (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in empiricism, physiology, embodiment, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolutionary view of mind.
Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of inquiring mind towards the possibility of other minds existing inside yet also outside the preferred bipedal cranial boxes.
Consider this: in order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike?
Yet this ability of inhabiting the elementary should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this granularity, this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual, ‘mere’ and primary.
Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, insular or put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored semi conscious avenues of feeling and becoming.
Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished by other domains. It interested with the new, becose it is growing out of or exploding the bounds of a much larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history).
What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this relevant and disconsidered (till now) historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast and proves to be a laboratory of philosophical ideas & stimulants.
Here I place this recently discovered wonderful study – with a role in filling in these gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.
Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental and materialistic aesthetics, but at the same time, ANW is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed & engaged with a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about.
This book, I think, reconstructs a missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate and conflicting(even paradoxical) interests with developments from the physical sciences, mathematics etc or concerns with the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher and contemporary of ANW that somehow willingly obscures this Victorian background noise. He is closer to the Critical Idiom in his refusal to engage with these scientific pursuits, since he often openly disparaged technology and science. In a sense his own anti-scientific stance manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual climates that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany (since Helmholtz) and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.
Benjamin Morgan Introduction sums up numerous such cases in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for this sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the two cultures split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the vastness of a newly discovered universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor. All these necessarily fresh additions have been osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane into art theory. One such example is the lecture “What Patterns Do to Us” by Scottish art theorist Clementina “Kit” Caroline Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921).
spacetime coordinates: Borneo in 1839
Edge of the World is an adventure drama film directed by Michael Haussman and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the British soldier and adventurer James Brooke (1803-1868). Edge of the World is a co-production between the US, the UK, Malaysia, and China. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 2000’s Mexico, Cuba, Australia, New Zealand, India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, USA, China, Japan, Italy, Morocco, Spain, South Africa, UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia
Around the World in 80 Gardens is a television series of 10 programmes in which British gardener and broadcaster Monty Don visits 80 of the world’s most celebrated gardens. A book based on the series was also published. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: The Flying Train, Germany, 1902
timespace coordinates: A Trip Through New York City in 1911
timespace coordinates: A Trip Through Paris, France in late 1890s
timespace coordinates: San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906
timespace coordinates: A Trip Through the Streets of Amsterdam, 1922
timespace coordinates: Laborers in Victorian England, 1901
timespace coordinates: Views of Tokyo, Japan, 1913-1915
timespace coordinates: Moscow, Tverskaya Street in 1896
The oldest recorded video, timespace coordinates: “Roundhay Garden Scene”, England,1888
timespace coordinates: 1895 – France, Lyon, place des Cordeliers, – Factory outlet, France, Lyon, Monplaisir, chemin Saint-Victor (today rue du 1er Film) – The Landing of the photography congress in Lyon,
1896 – Launch of a ship, France, – Switzerland, Geneva, National Exhibition, Swiss Village, – Westminster Bridge, Great Britain, London, – France, Lyon: Quai de l’Archevêché, – Panorama of the Grand Canal taken from a boat, Italy, Venice, Grand Canal, – Arrival of a train in Perrache station, France, Lyon, – Broadway, United States, New York,
1897 – Jaffa Gate: east side, Jerusalem 1897 – The pyramids, Egypt, Giza – Panorama of the Golden Horn, Turkey, Istanbul – Camel caravan, Jerusalem, – France, Lyon, place du Pont – Japan, Kyoto, Honshu,
1899 – Biarritz: the beach and the sea, France, Biarritz, – Grande Plage, – Bad weather at the port, Italy,
1900 View from a whaling boat in motion, France, Hyères – Panorama taken from a sedan chair, January 25, 1900, French Indochina (now Vietnam), village of Namo, Annam
1902 Fort-de-France: market, Martinique, Fort-de-France, French Antilles
TimeSpace Warps 