Papers by Joey Aloi
Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, 2014
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Relations, 2018
Across Central Appalachia, you can see the message scrawled across bumper stickers, protest signs... more Across Central Appalachia, you can see the message scrawled across bumper stickers, protest signs, and billboards: “Coal Feeds My Family.” The metaphor of coal feeding families is one that stresses the economic importance of this extractive industry to the economy of the industrialized rural mountain South. This essay examines the change in land-human relationships through the lens of food. A contrast is drawn between homesteading’s cultivation of life and coal’s energy economy of the dead. The energy economy of the preindustrial Appalachian farm is shown to be a slight alteration from the energy cycles of the Appalachian forest. The industrial energy economy of coal, on the other hand, severed Appalachian people from their traditional agricultural energy economy, from the results of their production, from the sources of their consumption, and from the very thing, the sun, which made the preindustrial economy possible. The coal energy economy was not only made possible through various technological innovations in production and consumption, but also by certain social relations and political structures. These relations and structures remain relatively intact, in spite of the rapid disintegration of the coal economy, and their inertia explains the popularity of the slogan “coal feeds my family.”
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Propaganda has a long history in the industrialised North as a disreputable method of communicati... more Propaganda has a long history in the industrialised North as a disreputable method of communication and persuasion. I adopt the definition of ‘propaganda’ elaborated by Ross (2002). The people of Kivalina are being forced to relocate their village due to the effects of climate change. This is an instance of environmental injustice. They maintain that certain actions of fossil fuel companies, amounting to civil conspiracy, are at least in part responsible for these effects. I argue that these actions of the fossil fuel companies are propaganda. Accordingly, understanding propaganda is crucial for the environmental justice movement.
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Doctoral Dissertation by Joey Aloi
dissertation, 2020
Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general ... more Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature. Thinkers such as Arnold Berleant and Noel Carroll emphasize the environmental character of aesthetic appreciation of nature, the way in which one is embedded in multi-sensory environment. In particular, these ambient theorists emphasize that “we do not yet have a language that can easily express” these experiences (Berleant, p. 5). Other thinkers, such as Yuriko Saito and Allen Carlson, argue that aesthetic appreciation of nature is enhanced and enriched by certain narratives – usually narratives based on scientific knowledge – which these theorists deem relevant to the natural object or environment encountered. Certain narratives encourage correct appreciation, while other narratives direct one’s attention to aesthetically irrelevant features.
In an important paper which analyses this debate, Cheryl Foster emphasizes the distinction between these two approaches and the difficulty of bridging the gap between them without doing violence to either. In her “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics,” she argues that understanding both approaches is necessary for a full accounting of our aesthetic experiences of nature. However, she admits that it seems difficult to merge the two approaches into one theory of nature appreciation. In particular, she is most worried about environmental aesthetic theories which reduce the ineffable multi-sensory qualities discussed in ambient theories to a mere inchoate prelude to more a robust narrative experience. She writes: “A potent source of value in the ambient dimension of aesthetic appreciation of nature might be the ways in which our encounters with the natural environment redirect us from the need to theorize the world overtly and instead encourage is to experience it in a more diffuse and unified manner” (“The Narrative and the Ambient,” p. 207).
In this dissertation, I attempt to explain how these two approaches are related by drawing on the resources of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially on the aesthetic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The most important Gadamerian resources for environmental aesthetics are: his phenomenology of play, his revival of practical philosophy, and his emphasis on the interpretive character of all understanding. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Furthermore, human playing is a participation in the play which is always already happening in nature.
Drawing on this phenomenology of play, I argue that any aesthetic appreciation of nature involves a participation in the play of nature. In this sense, aesthetics is a type of practical philosophy; in the moment of aesthetic appreciation, I need to concretize the scientific and other types of knowledge from narratives by synthesizing them with my sensuous experience of a place. Merely articulating our understanding of natural environments through narrative is not sufficient for an aesthetic experience of nature, and the champions of ambient appreciation of natural environments are correct to emphasize this fact.
But certain narratives about nature, including scientific narratives, do indeed grant access to types of play which would remain inaccessible to the uninformed. These narratives are able to provide this access because our aesthetic experiences of nature, and the practical knowledge they produce, are not walled off from our other lived experiences, not even from our encounters with narratives. For Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. In this sense, narrative theorists are correct; knowledge gained through narratives, including scientific narratives, is often crucial for aesthetic appreciation of nature because what Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
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Conference Presentations by Joey Aloi
Steven Vogel’s arguments about “the silence of nature” can be read as a direct, polemical, respon... more Steven Vogel’s arguments about “the silence of nature” can be read as a direct, polemical, response to the work of David Abram on “the speech of things.” But a closer reading of the two authors’ works shows that Vogel does not deny that animals are expressive and communicative, nor does Abram claim that the more-than-human world engages in deliberative dialogue as a form of social practice. This paper ties these two positions to each other, using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work on practical philosophy and Albert Borgmann’s work on information theory as mediating forces.
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This paper explains how scientific knowledge is relevant to aesthetic appreciation of nature by d... more This paper explains how scientific knowledge is relevant to aesthetic appreciation of nature by drawing on Gadamer’s observation that all understanding “is to be thought of ... as participating in an event of tradition.” Allen Carlson argues that scientific knowledge enhances our aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. This is true, but not because ‘applying scientific knowledge’ is a step in a methodical approach for appreciating the beauty of nature. Rather, to experience nature aesthetically is a way to understand something about nature through understanding the tradition in which this experience occurs. Science is a crucial part of this tradition.
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Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived ... more Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived time and of narrative, writing “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). In this essay, I draw on Ricoeur’s analysis of the relation between time and narrative in order to discover the way in which our lived experiences of place can affect our narratives of place, and vice versa. I conclude by drawing on Scott McClannahan’s Crappalachia, in order to see how the narrative of a place grows out of experiences of that place across time.
Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative.
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ABSTRACT: Ambient theories of environmental aesthetics emphasize the embodied and multisensory ch... more ABSTRACT: Ambient theories of environmental aesthetics emphasize the embodied and multisensory character of aesthetic experiences of nature. I argue that this experience is well-articulated by Gadamer’s phenomenology of play: environmental aesthetic experience is a participation in the play of nature. This participation is made possible by, and contributes to, our background knowledge of nature. This knowledge, in turn, is rooted in social practice and tradition.
PROPOSAL: What Cheryl Foster calls “ambient theories” in environmental aesthetics argue that aesthetic experience is one of becoming somatically & synaesthetically embroiled in the natural world. In these accounts, the value of aesthetic experiences of nature lies in dwelling in this multisensory experience, paying attention to the connections between one’s sensing body and that which one's body is sensing – not in actively and consciously creating and maintaining this connection. There is something ineffable about this experience, and many ambient theorists claim that one properly experiences nature by releasing oneself as much as possible from categorical thinking. This ineffability makes ambient experience notoriously difficult to articulate, and ambient theories of environmental aesthetics difficult to expound.
In this paper, I draw on Gadamer to attempt to articulate the character of aesthetic experience as described by these ambient theorists. Ambient aesthetic experience can hardly be understood as a subject appreciating a natural object; instead, it should be understood as a being carried away by participating in a natural event of play. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Human playing is a participation in that play which is always already happening in nature. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Gadamer often draws attention to this participatory character, reminding us that “the act of playing always requires a ‘playing along with.’” (The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 23). I claim that our ambient aesthetic experience of participating in the play of nature gives us knowledge of a landscape in the way that Gadamer attributes to taste.
Unlike many ambient theories, however, for Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. The sensuous, environmental engagement important to the ambient approach to environmental aesthetics is itself a way of knowing something about nature, and it is a way of knowing oneself as engaged in nature. Perception is always interpretation. What Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (Truth and Method, p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
This type of environmental self-knowing is available to us not merely as sensing bodies, but as whole persons who are simultaneously sensing and participating in centuries of tradition. Whenever we understand anything, even aesthetically, we do so from within that historical tradition to which we belong. Even our most ineffable moments of ambient involvement in nature’s play are influenced by the concepts, practices, and traditions of our history.
My finding a landscape beautiful is made possible by certain social practices – the establishment of aesthetic standards, the establishment of the societal practice of aesthetic appreciation of landscapes – and it also makes it easier for others to find the same landscape beautiful. Much of this is established through the common practices of looking at the same landscapes or the same types of landscape, but much is merely established through the everyday operation of language.
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Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived ... more Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a certain reciprocal relation between our experiences of lived time and of narrative, writing “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (p. 52). In this essay, I draw on Ricoeur’s analysis of the relation between time and narrative in order to discover the way in which our lived experiences of place can affect our narratives of place, and vice versa. I conclude by drawing on Scott McClannahan’s Crappalachia, in order to see how the narrative of a place grows out of experiences of that place across time. Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative.
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Inspired by the distinction between fieldwork and lab work in the sciences, Field Philosophy begi... more Inspired by the distinction between fieldwork and lab work in the sciences, Field Philosophy begins and ends with the real-life philosophical problems which crop up in professional settings or in social movements, turning to the disciplinary resources of academic philosophy only when these are called for by the problems at hand. Because this approach is inherently transdisciplinary (or de-disciplinary, as some scholars have written), it more easily integrates philosophical problems and frameworks with the theories and research of other disciplines. This is especially the case with regard to a field like Appalachian Studies, where so many of the research programs and academic problems are already drawn from the lives and problems of Appalachian people. This paper begins by describing the approach of field philosophy, contrasting it with similar projects like Applied Philosophy. It then moves on to argue that this approach to the discipline of Philosophy is one that works well within Appalachian Studies, inasmuch as it is able to gain purchase on non-academic issues without sacrificing the rigor that only serious study can provide. Finally, it ends with a series of examples from the author's own work that provide color and proof of concept to the arguments.
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Digital Worlds, April 21- 23 2023,
Presented by The Center for Collaboration and Ethics at the Un... more Digital Worlds, April 21- 23 2023,
Presented by The Center for Collaboration and Ethics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Co-Chairs: Ian Werkheiser and Michael Butler
For links to sessions contact: digitalworldsworkshop@gmail.com
For more information, including full papers, visit: digitalworldsworkshop.wordpress.com
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Life, Freedom, Ethics: Kropotkin Now, 2021
Even if we were to end all carbon emissions today, the 21st century will be one beset with climat... more Even if we were to end all carbon emissions today, the 21st century will be one beset with climate-change-related disasters and ubiquitous threats to our methods of ensuring well being for all. Furthermore, climate change will exacerbate all pre-existing environmental problems — endangered species will become less capable of recovery, degraded ecosystems less capable of resiliently dealing with new threats like invasive species, crops and fragile water systems more susceptible to drought and algal blooms. And unless the underlying social causes of environmental injustices are addressed, we can expect that these disasters and the long tail of industrial pollution will fall most heavily on those most harmed by capitalist inequity, rather than those most responsible for the degradation, or even those most equipped to cope.
The ethical philosophy of Peter Kropotkin is uniquely suited to guide our communities through these trials, when we know that the capitalist class will not do so, and the state cannot do so. First, Kropotkin’s naturalistic approach to ethics differs from more mainstream approaches to ethics because (a) it emphasizes the evolutionary origin and advantageousness of human communities and human morality while simultaneously (b) situating this morality in a long linage of animal mutual aid in conditions of extreme environmental conditions. Second, Kropotkin differs from other moral sentiment theorists in his emphasis on the centrality of struggle – both communal and individual – to ethical behavior. As our environment changes to become increasingly hostile and disruptive of our current modes of procuring our basic needs, our lives will be full of struggle, and full of need to dramatically rethink our social organization. Because Kropotkin’s ethical theory arises from thinking on the long history of mutual aid in the face of a hostile environment, it can best serve as a guidestar in these times.
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Digital Worlds; University of Texas, Rio Grande, 2021
After six and a half eventful years, the Facebook group Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular M... more After six and a half eventful years, the Facebook group Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes (UUUM) was deleted by the social media platform. What originally started as a group where a few friends originally from South Louisiana to stay in touch and mock internet culture became a group of well over 300,000 people dedicated to creating and displaying esoteric and purposely convoluted images for laughs. The real-world effects of this group have been notable. Romantic relationships have started and ended, people have moved across the country, people have gotten jobs, and at least two children have been born because of the community created through these useless memes. But the deletion of the original main Facebook group, and the subsequent loss of conversations and visual touchstones for the community, drastically changed the manner in which these relationships continue. It also underscores what many of us already know about the internet as it has come to be in the last ten years – it is difficult to experience the world-growing and community-building power of the internet without using a platform created and run by a powerful global corporation, and yet these corporations have little interest in these living communities, let alone incentive to help cultivate them. In this respect, the internet is little different from the real world.
This paper looks at the rise and fall of Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes through a few philosophical lenses. First, I argue that what made the group work was a cohesive aesthetic sense – a set of aesthetic and, to a lesser extent, ethical values that were much more rooted in humanistic practices like taste and judgment than in the rule-based type of moderation that Facebook uses. To explicate this sense, I draw on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, both in his emphasis on practice, or phronesis, as central to human understanding, and on his work in Truth and Method on “the guiding concepts of humanism” -- taste, judgment, Bildung, and common sense. Next, I examine the way in which both the platform of Facebook generally, and the UUUM group particularly, are examples of what the Philosopher of Technology Albert Borgmann refers to as “devices” – they each have a “sharp internal division into a[n opaque] machinery and a commodity produced by that machinery.” While Facebook reaches for transparency with its loquacious – yet sporadically enforced – pages of written “community standards,” the UUUM administrators invented the deity Uuumos and a Council of Elders to interpret Uuumos’ will. This mythology, and its accompanying set of aesthetic guidelines and models, is perhaps not exactly what Borgmann meant by his term “focal thing.” But it is an example of a non-technological practice that, even on a highly technological platform, can create a sense of communal meaning and orientation.
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Aesthetics in the Age of Environmental Crises: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics (IIAA) 14th International Summer Conference, 2021
What Cheryl Foster describes as “the ambient dimension of environmental value” is one where we ar... more What Cheryl Foster describes as “the ambient dimension of environmental value” is one where we are encouraged to dwell in our multisensory experiences, attending to the sound and smell of nature, attending to the connections between one’s sensing body, and that which one's body is sensing. Thinkers as diverse as Arnold Berleant, Jack Turner, and David Abram have defended this sensuous aesthetic engagement with nature, arguing it can help move us past the disruptive prejudices inherent in our tradition – provided only that we allow the experiences themselves to speak, and hold in abeyance the narratives of tradition. The jarring character of an experience of ambient aesthetic engagement in nature disrupts unhelpful narratives. This paper describes ambient aesthetic experience using terms borrowed from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phenomenology of play. It argues that any aesthetic appreciation of nature involves a participation in the play of nature. Ambient aesthetic experience can hardly be understood as a subject appreciating a natural object; instead, it should be understood as participation in a natural event of play, even of being carried away by that play. Furthermore, sensuous participation in natural play is a necessary element in any aesthetic experience of nature. This participation in nature’s play is how aesthetic experience can lead to care for specific natural environments, objects, or events. As we join along in the natural event of play, we become part of the natural community, and feel a sense of belonging with specific places. The challenge of climate change to this dimension of aesthetic value is the manner in which the climate in general – and its human-induced warming in particular – is almost entirely imperceptible in these multi-sensory moments of engagement. Accordingly, the narrative dimension of aesthetic experience must come into play, encouraging us to see, for example, the sublimity or horror of a hurricane as an instantiation of climate change. But in order for this narrative element to not intrude upon and disrupt the ambient experience, it needs to remain in the background of the experience, as what Gadamer calls a “productive prejudices” from which the circular movement of aesthetic understanding begins. In order for an understanding of climate change to become internalized and backgrounded in this manner, I suggest we follow the advice of David Wood and work to understand ourselves as geologically human.
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Michigan State Food Justice Workshop, 2014
In a recent article in The New Yorker, Evgeny Morozov analyzes the socio-economic tensions of the... more In a recent article in The New Yorker, Evgeny Morozov analyzes the socio-economic tensions of the contemporary maker movement. The maker movement seems, at first glance, to be a radical response to the increasing alienation most of us have from the material sources of our survival. Unfortunately, Morozov claims, this maker movement has been co-opted by powerful forces uninterested in liberating labor – or anything else. The relevance of these meditations to the contemporary food movement is striking. Desires for food justice, food sovereignty, and food security can easily be watered down into celebrations of the deliciousness of locally grown kale and the soothing effects of backyard gardening. Fortunately, the self-understanding of many movements for food sovereignty and local food networks draws on the resources of the North American Agrarian tradition. Agrarianism has almost always drawn connections between the health of the land, the health of its people, and the health of their institutions. Current agrarian thought makes these connections even more clear. But I would like to suggest that the thoughtful investigation of technology and its relation to food is not exhausted by the ability to imagine new technologies which mesh with our economic, political, ecological, and agricultural desires. Rather, agrarian thought has the resources to paint a picture of the good life that can challenge the prevailing device paradigm and reveal a world in which we are more at home.
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Much work in the field of Appalachian Studies seems to require the assumption that there is somet... more Much work in the field of Appalachian Studies seems to require the assumption that there is something that it is to be an Appalachian person. This paper draws on Paul Ricoeur’s account of personal identity as narrative identity to attempt to understand what Appalachian identity is. Ricoeur argues that, although there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize the many different heterogeneous elements that make up our lives into a coherent whole. In creating the narratives that are our life stories, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives.
From this account of Ricoeur’s, I move on to discuss the way that narratives about Appalachia form and inform a concept of identity. I then compare and contrast this account of Appalachian narrative identity with other accounts of identity formation. I argue that we can only understand Appalachian identity as a type of narrative identity; it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand what it means to be an Appalachian person or institution. I then turn to the work of Edward Casey on place to sketch out the way in which the lived experience of place intertwines with and informs narratives. I conclude with an account of Appalachian identity that accounts both for the narrative formation of identity and the place-based nature both of these narratives and of the experiences which inform them.
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MA Thesis by Joey Aloi
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Papers by Joey Aloi
Doctoral Dissertation by Joey Aloi
In an important paper which analyses this debate, Cheryl Foster emphasizes the distinction between these two approaches and the difficulty of bridging the gap between them without doing violence to either. In her “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics,” she argues that understanding both approaches is necessary for a full accounting of our aesthetic experiences of nature. However, she admits that it seems difficult to merge the two approaches into one theory of nature appreciation. In particular, she is most worried about environmental aesthetic theories which reduce the ineffable multi-sensory qualities discussed in ambient theories to a mere inchoate prelude to more a robust narrative experience. She writes: “A potent source of value in the ambient dimension of aesthetic appreciation of nature might be the ways in which our encounters with the natural environment redirect us from the need to theorize the world overtly and instead encourage is to experience it in a more diffuse and unified manner” (“The Narrative and the Ambient,” p. 207).
In this dissertation, I attempt to explain how these two approaches are related by drawing on the resources of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially on the aesthetic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The most important Gadamerian resources for environmental aesthetics are: his phenomenology of play, his revival of practical philosophy, and his emphasis on the interpretive character of all understanding. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Furthermore, human playing is a participation in the play which is always already happening in nature.
Drawing on this phenomenology of play, I argue that any aesthetic appreciation of nature involves a participation in the play of nature. In this sense, aesthetics is a type of practical philosophy; in the moment of aesthetic appreciation, I need to concretize the scientific and other types of knowledge from narratives by synthesizing them with my sensuous experience of a place. Merely articulating our understanding of natural environments through narrative is not sufficient for an aesthetic experience of nature, and the champions of ambient appreciation of natural environments are correct to emphasize this fact.
But certain narratives about nature, including scientific narratives, do indeed grant access to types of play which would remain inaccessible to the uninformed. These narratives are able to provide this access because our aesthetic experiences of nature, and the practical knowledge they produce, are not walled off from our other lived experiences, not even from our encounters with narratives. For Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. In this sense, narrative theorists are correct; knowledge gained through narratives, including scientific narratives, is often crucial for aesthetic appreciation of nature because what Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
Conference Presentations by Joey Aloi
Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative.
PROPOSAL: What Cheryl Foster calls “ambient theories” in environmental aesthetics argue that aesthetic experience is one of becoming somatically & synaesthetically embroiled in the natural world. In these accounts, the value of aesthetic experiences of nature lies in dwelling in this multisensory experience, paying attention to the connections between one’s sensing body and that which one's body is sensing – not in actively and consciously creating and maintaining this connection. There is something ineffable about this experience, and many ambient theorists claim that one properly experiences nature by releasing oneself as much as possible from categorical thinking. This ineffability makes ambient experience notoriously difficult to articulate, and ambient theories of environmental aesthetics difficult to expound.
In this paper, I draw on Gadamer to attempt to articulate the character of aesthetic experience as described by these ambient theorists. Ambient aesthetic experience can hardly be understood as a subject appreciating a natural object; instead, it should be understood as a being carried away by participating in a natural event of play. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Human playing is a participation in that play which is always already happening in nature. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Gadamer often draws attention to this participatory character, reminding us that “the act of playing always requires a ‘playing along with.’” (The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 23). I claim that our ambient aesthetic experience of participating in the play of nature gives us knowledge of a landscape in the way that Gadamer attributes to taste.
Unlike many ambient theories, however, for Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. The sensuous, environmental engagement important to the ambient approach to environmental aesthetics is itself a way of knowing something about nature, and it is a way of knowing oneself as engaged in nature. Perception is always interpretation. What Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (Truth and Method, p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
This type of environmental self-knowing is available to us not merely as sensing bodies, but as whole persons who are simultaneously sensing and participating in centuries of tradition. Whenever we understand anything, even aesthetically, we do so from within that historical tradition to which we belong. Even our most ineffable moments of ambient involvement in nature’s play are influenced by the concepts, practices, and traditions of our history.
My finding a landscape beautiful is made possible by certain social practices – the establishment of aesthetic standards, the establishment of the societal practice of aesthetic appreciation of landscapes – and it also makes it easier for others to find the same landscape beautiful. Much of this is established through the common practices of looking at the same landscapes or the same types of landscape, but much is merely established through the everyday operation of language.
Presented by The Center for Collaboration and Ethics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Co-Chairs: Ian Werkheiser and Michael Butler
For links to sessions contact: digitalworldsworkshop@gmail.com
For more information, including full papers, visit: digitalworldsworkshop.wordpress.com
The ethical philosophy of Peter Kropotkin is uniquely suited to guide our communities through these trials, when we know that the capitalist class will not do so, and the state cannot do so. First, Kropotkin’s naturalistic approach to ethics differs from more mainstream approaches to ethics because (a) it emphasizes the evolutionary origin and advantageousness of human communities and human morality while simultaneously (b) situating this morality in a long linage of animal mutual aid in conditions of extreme environmental conditions. Second, Kropotkin differs from other moral sentiment theorists in his emphasis on the centrality of struggle – both communal and individual – to ethical behavior. As our environment changes to become increasingly hostile and disruptive of our current modes of procuring our basic needs, our lives will be full of struggle, and full of need to dramatically rethink our social organization. Because Kropotkin’s ethical theory arises from thinking on the long history of mutual aid in the face of a hostile environment, it can best serve as a guidestar in these times.
This paper looks at the rise and fall of Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes through a few philosophical lenses. First, I argue that what made the group work was a cohesive aesthetic sense – a set of aesthetic and, to a lesser extent, ethical values that were much more rooted in humanistic practices like taste and judgment than in the rule-based type of moderation that Facebook uses. To explicate this sense, I draw on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, both in his emphasis on practice, or phronesis, as central to human understanding, and on his work in Truth and Method on “the guiding concepts of humanism” -- taste, judgment, Bildung, and common sense. Next, I examine the way in which both the platform of Facebook generally, and the UUUM group particularly, are examples of what the Philosopher of Technology Albert Borgmann refers to as “devices” – they each have a “sharp internal division into a[n opaque] machinery and a commodity produced by that machinery.” While Facebook reaches for transparency with its loquacious – yet sporadically enforced – pages of written “community standards,” the UUUM administrators invented the deity Uuumos and a Council of Elders to interpret Uuumos’ will. This mythology, and its accompanying set of aesthetic guidelines and models, is perhaps not exactly what Borgmann meant by his term “focal thing.” But it is an example of a non-technological practice that, even on a highly technological platform, can create a sense of communal meaning and orientation.
From this account of Ricoeur’s, I move on to discuss the way that narratives about Appalachia form and inform a concept of identity. I then compare and contrast this account of Appalachian narrative identity with other accounts of identity formation. I argue that we can only understand Appalachian identity as a type of narrative identity; it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand what it means to be an Appalachian person or institution. I then turn to the work of Edward Casey on place to sketch out the way in which the lived experience of place intertwines with and informs narratives. I conclude with an account of Appalachian identity that accounts both for the narrative formation of identity and the place-based nature both of these narratives and of the experiences which inform them.
MA Thesis by Joey Aloi
In an important paper which analyses this debate, Cheryl Foster emphasizes the distinction between these two approaches and the difficulty of bridging the gap between them without doing violence to either. In her “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics,” she argues that understanding both approaches is necessary for a full accounting of our aesthetic experiences of nature. However, she admits that it seems difficult to merge the two approaches into one theory of nature appreciation. In particular, she is most worried about environmental aesthetic theories which reduce the ineffable multi-sensory qualities discussed in ambient theories to a mere inchoate prelude to more a robust narrative experience. She writes: “A potent source of value in the ambient dimension of aesthetic appreciation of nature might be the ways in which our encounters with the natural environment redirect us from the need to theorize the world overtly and instead encourage is to experience it in a more diffuse and unified manner” (“The Narrative and the Ambient,” p. 207).
In this dissertation, I attempt to explain how these two approaches are related by drawing on the resources of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially on the aesthetic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The most important Gadamerian resources for environmental aesthetics are: his phenomenology of play, his revival of practical philosophy, and his emphasis on the interpretive character of all understanding. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Furthermore, human playing is a participation in the play which is always already happening in nature.
Drawing on this phenomenology of play, I argue that any aesthetic appreciation of nature involves a participation in the play of nature. In this sense, aesthetics is a type of practical philosophy; in the moment of aesthetic appreciation, I need to concretize the scientific and other types of knowledge from narratives by synthesizing them with my sensuous experience of a place. Merely articulating our understanding of natural environments through narrative is not sufficient for an aesthetic experience of nature, and the champions of ambient appreciation of natural environments are correct to emphasize this fact.
But certain narratives about nature, including scientific narratives, do indeed grant access to types of play which would remain inaccessible to the uninformed. These narratives are able to provide this access because our aesthetic experiences of nature, and the practical knowledge they produce, are not walled off from our other lived experiences, not even from our encounters with narratives. For Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. In this sense, narrative theorists are correct; knowledge gained through narratives, including scientific narratives, is often crucial for aesthetic appreciation of nature because what Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
Although, Ricoeur argues, there is a pre-narrative quality to human life itself, a narrative is required to synthesize these many different heterogeneous elements into a coherent whole. As narratives are created, we draw not only on the pre-narrative character of life, but also on larger social and historical narratives. Just as it is true that it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand the character of the place, it is through our lived experiences of this place that we gain these narratives. And just as the narrative draws on our lived experiences to be created, there is a sort of pseudo-experience which takes place whenever one understands and interprets a narrative.
PROPOSAL: What Cheryl Foster calls “ambient theories” in environmental aesthetics argue that aesthetic experience is one of becoming somatically & synaesthetically embroiled in the natural world. In these accounts, the value of aesthetic experiences of nature lies in dwelling in this multisensory experience, paying attention to the connections between one’s sensing body and that which one's body is sensing – not in actively and consciously creating and maintaining this connection. There is something ineffable about this experience, and many ambient theorists claim that one properly experiences nature by releasing oneself as much as possible from categorical thinking. This ineffability makes ambient experience notoriously difficult to articulate, and ambient theories of environmental aesthetics difficult to expound.
In this paper, I draw on Gadamer to attempt to articulate the character of aesthetic experience as described by these ambient theorists. Ambient aesthetic experience can hardly be understood as a subject appreciating a natural object; instead, it should be understood as a being carried away by participating in a natural event of play. Gadamer writes about play as a natural process of purposive self-revealing, a process with no purpose beyond this self-revealing. Human playing is a participation in that play which is always already happening in nature. Play is not a process dependent on subjective human choice and action, but one in which individual humans participate, sometimes even without consciously choosing. Gadamer often draws attention to this participatory character, reminding us that “the act of playing always requires a ‘playing along with.’” (The Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 23). I claim that our ambient aesthetic experience of participating in the play of nature gives us knowledge of a landscape in the way that Gadamer attributes to taste.
Unlike many ambient theories, however, for Gadamer, the aesthetic and epistemological realms are not separate and mutually exclusive. The sensuous, environmental engagement important to the ambient approach to environmental aesthetics is itself a way of knowing something about nature, and it is a way of knowing oneself as engaged in nature. Perception is always interpretation. What Gadamer says about understanding and art is equally true of understanding and aesthetic appreciation of nature: namely, that “only when we understand it, when it is ‘clear’ to us, does it exist as an artistic creation for us” (Truth and Method, p. 79). Only when we understand a landscape does it become aesthetically experienced as the natural landscape which it is.
This type of environmental self-knowing is available to us not merely as sensing bodies, but as whole persons who are simultaneously sensing and participating in centuries of tradition. Whenever we understand anything, even aesthetically, we do so from within that historical tradition to which we belong. Even our most ineffable moments of ambient involvement in nature’s play are influenced by the concepts, practices, and traditions of our history.
My finding a landscape beautiful is made possible by certain social practices – the establishment of aesthetic standards, the establishment of the societal practice of aesthetic appreciation of landscapes – and it also makes it easier for others to find the same landscape beautiful. Much of this is established through the common practices of looking at the same landscapes or the same types of landscape, but much is merely established through the everyday operation of language.
Presented by The Center for Collaboration and Ethics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Co-Chairs: Ian Werkheiser and Michael Butler
For links to sessions contact: digitalworldsworkshop@gmail.com
For more information, including full papers, visit: digitalworldsworkshop.wordpress.com
The ethical philosophy of Peter Kropotkin is uniquely suited to guide our communities through these trials, when we know that the capitalist class will not do so, and the state cannot do so. First, Kropotkin’s naturalistic approach to ethics differs from more mainstream approaches to ethics because (a) it emphasizes the evolutionary origin and advantageousness of human communities and human morality while simultaneously (b) situating this morality in a long linage of animal mutual aid in conditions of extreme environmental conditions. Second, Kropotkin differs from other moral sentiment theorists in his emphasis on the centrality of struggle – both communal and individual – to ethical behavior. As our environment changes to become increasingly hostile and disruptive of our current modes of procuring our basic needs, our lives will be full of struggle, and full of need to dramatically rethink our social organization. Because Kropotkin’s ethical theory arises from thinking on the long history of mutual aid in the face of a hostile environment, it can best serve as a guidestar in these times.
This paper looks at the rise and fall of Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes through a few philosophical lenses. First, I argue that what made the group work was a cohesive aesthetic sense – a set of aesthetic and, to a lesser extent, ethical values that were much more rooted in humanistic practices like taste and judgment than in the rule-based type of moderation that Facebook uses. To explicate this sense, I draw on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, both in his emphasis on practice, or phronesis, as central to human understanding, and on his work in Truth and Method on “the guiding concepts of humanism” -- taste, judgment, Bildung, and common sense. Next, I examine the way in which both the platform of Facebook generally, and the UUUM group particularly, are examples of what the Philosopher of Technology Albert Borgmann refers to as “devices” – they each have a “sharp internal division into a[n opaque] machinery and a commodity produced by that machinery.” While Facebook reaches for transparency with its loquacious – yet sporadically enforced – pages of written “community standards,” the UUUM administrators invented the deity Uuumos and a Council of Elders to interpret Uuumos’ will. This mythology, and its accompanying set of aesthetic guidelines and models, is perhaps not exactly what Borgmann meant by his term “focal thing.” But it is an example of a non-technological practice that, even on a highly technological platform, can create a sense of communal meaning and orientation.
From this account of Ricoeur’s, I move on to discuss the way that narratives about Appalachia form and inform a concept of identity. I then compare and contrast this account of Appalachian narrative identity with other accounts of identity formation. I argue that we can only understand Appalachian identity as a type of narrative identity; it is through the historical, fictional, sociological, and artistic stories we tell about Appalachia that we understand what it means to be an Appalachian person or institution. I then turn to the work of Edward Casey on place to sketch out the way in which the lived experience of place intertwines with and informs narratives. I conclude with an account of Appalachian identity that accounts both for the narrative formation of identity and the place-based nature both of these narratives and of the experiences which inform them.