A side project

The Girlfriend and I have been working on a webcomic for the past few weeks and now feel ready to make it public. Called Mammoth and Mastodon & Friends, it chronicles the adventures of Mammoth (based on me) and Mastodon (based on her) in Chicago. All the artwork is done by The Girlfriend, and the scripts are mostly based on our conversations. A special highlight is our extended parody of Watchmen, based on a brotherhood of TV neighbors, and readers of AUFS will likely be very interested in our defense of the humanities.

If you like it, I encourage you to link to it and otherwise promote it by all appropriate means.

Appeal for Research Assistance

Update: Dennis Hou has been kind enough to provide me with a copy of the scan. I’ve uploaded it to Scribd.

I’m trying to track down an obscure text and I’m wondering if, by some strange chance, any of our readers know of a copy. It’s by François Regnault and bears the title Dieu est inconscient. études lacaniennes autour de saint Thomas d’Aquin. Any help is appreciated and I’d pay for shipping and/or copying costs.

Concrete Practices

According to my version of Firebug, if you are reading this page from the United Kingdom it took approximately 2.63 seconds for you to receive the 63.4 kilobytes of data that constitute this page, with an empty cache. Doubtless there are numerous proxy servers and caches between myself and the WordPress.com server which may make the process faster, but according to Traceroute giving me raw data, the server of WordPress.com is in Chicago, Illinois in the United States. This is 3862.10 miles away as the crow flies but it is important to note by request does not travel a direct route. There 17 servers between myself and the WordPress.com server, and between the sixth and eighth hop on its journey, the data transfers from a server in Hampshire in the UK to a server in Frankfurt in Germany before returning to the UK for a few hops before going from here to one in Atlanta, Georgia in the US. This journey from Hampshire to Frankfurt is approximately 1,078 miles by road and would take you seventeen hours to drive – it takes 0.4 milliseconds. Our transatlantic jaunt takes 88.3 milliseconds or 0.0883 seconds, before heading out from there, after a spell, to New York, then finally reaching its destination. During this process there was 0% loss of information, the packets I sent from my computer here arrived in Chicago in perfect condition. This does not recognise the fact that another traceroute to this site could go by another route,  and does not include all the other operations that are part of my receiving of the webpage, for example, getting the images for the avatars from Gravatar.com, which apparently has some servers in Los Angeles, California, ten hops away.

Now, WordPress.com, which runs this site, runs on the GNU/Linux operating system (and Gravatar.com), the Nginx server using a robust version of WordPress MU, that depends upon both the PHP language and a MySQL database. In turn, the compilation and assembly of all these piece of software depend upon some kind of compiler, in this case, more than likely gcc, the GNU Compiler Collection. The browser I am using is Mozilla Firefox, the operating system Mac OS X, which has a kernel based on elements of FreeBSD that is called Darwin, all of which were compiled by this same compiler (note: Apple’s attitude to their kernel is problematic, there is no doubt). Everything I have mentioned in Open Source with licenses at varying levels of freedom, many of which are under the ‘free as in thought’ GNU license. In running Nginx, WordPress.com is unusual, but the open source software Apache run the majority (47.12%) of web servers on the internet. Let’s just take on example, WordPress MU. WordPress MU has 203,636 lines of code, but is being dissolved into WordPress itself which has 207,547 lines of code. Every line of this code has been written by a human being, an every line itself as been revised, checked, edited, refined. It is the product of literally thousands of developers, working together towards a common and freely available project. How is this not a community, with its difficulties, splits, problems, ethos and meetings both virtual and actual? Extending these estimations outwards to embrace every other element of open source software created in this single internet transaction makes the numbers dizzying. In 2001 Red Hat Linux 7.1 contained 30,152,114 lines of code, estimated to take a single person 7,956 years to complete. This number, by 2010, is probably far greater. Just as an example, in 2001 the Linux kernel was 3,377,902 lines of code, in February this year it is 12,990,041 lines of code. This does not even begin to consider the communities that came up with the TCP/IP protocol, XHTML, the PNG format – I could go on.

Now, tell me, how are any of these things, from the establishing of servers that allow internet transactions, or more vitally to the community practices that facilitate these examples of open source software, more often than not divorced from any profit motive, not ‘concrete’ practices of work in the same way that some kind of hand waving ‘localism’? Are they not at least as interesting and incredible versions of human interaction as running a back to the land farm?

A quick thought on the continuing child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church

I think everyone can subscribe to the sentence, “The abuse of children by priests was terrible, and the bishops were wrong to cover it up and transfer known abusers.” If you’re at all inclined to follow this up with a sentence beginning with “but,” however, or if you find yourself thinking that people who follow it up with “but” have a point, I think you might need to go to confession.

In Defense of a Grey Ecology: Think Biospherically, Act Ecosystematically

The last post on this topic was largely polemical and so I thought I would expand on some of the concepts presented in concentrated form there. Let’s focus on a well-worn maxim of environmentalism, “Think globally, act locally”. It is important for people to understand that there is a disconnect between the political environmental movements and the science of ecology. The two sometimes overlap, of course, but there is a lot of work to be done to bring them together in a more fruitful union. This old environmental maxim hints at that disconnect for it overcodes the scientific via the political. Global and local are not strictly speaking technical scientific concepts, they are metaphors that are appropriated from the spatial approach to politics and this leads to all sorts of ideological coloring of environmentalism. Some can be quite nefarious, for instance the recent Red Tory appropriation of “localism” aims at a kind of “greening” that’s been common to the Conservative party since David Cameron came up with the idiotic slogan, “Vote blue, go green”. Again, there is no respect here for ecosystem science, as the conservative localist isn’t concerned with the actual ecotones (the corridors that mark off a kind of porous boundary from one ecosystem to another), but only with a crude notion of the parish. This localism pushes a return to parish boundaries without any regard for what that would mean ecologically, but still make use of a green veneer. In short, the environmental movement needs to begin to take more from the science of ecology, to make some kind of peace with its scientific character (which often offends the environmental steward), and from there, with that knowledge, we can begin to create a more rational, more human, and ultimately successful political ecology.

Last Minute Conference Collaboration

I will be reading two papers at the Midwest Region AAR meeting tomorrow (at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL), and would love to meet up for lunch with any AUFS lurkers if they will be there, or go see their papers if they are presenting. I would have posted something earlier this week, but I have been fighting a sickness and was not certain I would make it. I will begiving a paper entitled, “Christology After the Death of God: Incarnation and the Rise of Secularism” (Session 3:4, 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m.), in a session on the Incarnation with Even Kuehn and Nathan Crawford giving papers on Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key, with Samuel Chambers responding). I will be in another session giving a paper on John Milbank and Jeffrey Stout: “Theopolitics After Secular Liberalism, Theological Traditionalism, and Incomplete Pragmatism: Assessing Jeffrey Stout and Radical Orthodoxy” (Session 2:2, 8:30-10:15 a.m.).

As Part of a Neverending Meditation

I think it’s fairly well known that I’m in a different station of life than either Adam or Anthony. Where they either have their foot very firmly in the door to academia, or are still rather politely knocking, I have opted for a desk by the window, my foot aching from being both crushed by the door in which it was lodged and unmercifully kicked by people I could never get a good look at. For now, I’ve opted for a kind of labor that is neither manual, managerial, or executive (and yes, this post is going to myopically concern itself only with a certain type of worker, and fails to consider those whose workplace is non-negotiable on every conceivable level — sadly, these workers are usually also the ones too exhausted to blog), and as a result regularly wonder who really gains from me showing up at my workspace in the northwest corner of the eighth floor of a building whose inspiration is most roughly akin to that evoked by reading (or, depending on your disposition, writing) an obituary?

In Defense of a Grey Ecology: The Amphibology of the Greenest Green and the Blackest Black

It is probably narcissistic to think that the last paragraph of Owen’s recent Guardian piece is due in part to a conversation we recently had when he was visiting Nottingham, but during that conversation I talked to him about the importance of a militant urban ecology for facing the current ecological crisis. In truth I shouldn’t say crisis, because in a time where there is nothing but crises and crises that the capitalist system feeds off of we risk losing our bearings, we risk distraction, and the kind of hysteric worry that comes when one is assured that there is no real hope of coming through the crisis. This is not a crisis, it is but a spur, a spur to think more rationally, more humanly in the generic sense, towards a kind of disinterested, unalienated earthly humanity. So what follows is a bit of a note on Owen’s piece in an effort not just to combat the usual stupidity of the comments that litter CiF, but the stupidity of the “green” movement itself. That stupidity that thinks the answer to the ecological crisis is hair shirts, apologies to Gaia for being human, and the working towards the death of millions in the name of some kind of “respect for nature”.

“Ecstasies before bunnies’ burrows”

In a certain way, I think the likes of Herman Herman — for whom “‘though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright” — might very well agree with the cynicism, much bemoaned & beloved, expressed by Michael Houellebecq about nature.

I have no time for those pompous imbeciles
Who go into ecstasies before bunnies’ burrows
Because nature is ugly, tedious and hostile;
It has no message to transmit to humans.

How pleasant, at the wheel of a powerful Mercedes,
To drive through solitary and grandiose places;
Subtly manipulating the gearstick.
You dominate the hills, the rivers, and all things.

The forests, so close, glitter in the sun
And seem to reflect ancient knowledges;
In the depths of their valleys must lie such marvels,
After a few hours you are taken in;

Leaving the car, the irritations begin;
You stumble into the middle of a repugnant mess,
An abject universe, deprived of all meaning
Made of stones and brambles, flies and snakes.

You miss the parking-lots and the smell of petrol,
The serene, gentle glint of the nickel counters;
It’s too late. It’s too cold. The night begins. The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream. (via Collapse IV)

Reading this today, I most immediately thought of Lewis Mumford’s wonderful bit comparing Ralph Waldo Emerson and Melville:

Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship.  Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down.

Where the lesson of one such captain, Ahab, drunk with monomania if not drink, was that the “pasteboard mask” covering such truth might ultimately be there for a reason, and that one should strike through it with care; it seems to me that Houellebecq exemplifies one possibility of what becomes of us when there is no mask at all, when it, perhaps, has already been stricken.

New issue of Political Theology

A new issue of Political Theology is out. In addition to a continuation of the Zizek-Milbank debate (paywall), its freely-available features include my review of The Monstrosity of Christ (PDF, as are all subsequent links), Dan Barber’s review of William Connolly’s Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, Clayton Crockett’s review of Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology, and responses from both Connolly and Johnston.