June 22, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
A Guardian article making the rounds on social media argues that the mindfulness movement has become “the new capitalist spirituality” — “magical thinking on steroids,” which instead of overturning the “neoliberal order,” now “only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.”
This “McMindfulness,” as Ronald Purser calls it, has been “stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.” So instead of “discussing how attention is monetised and manipulated by corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple,” mindfulness advocates “locate the crisis in our minds.” As a result, any “potential for social or political transformation” is “neutered” with practitioners simply improving their ability to cope with “the toxic conditions that make them stressed in the first place,” while leaving those conditions intact and, in fact, strengthened.
None of this is a new argument — it’s been made repeatedly by scholars of religion, including Buddhists (Purser among them), as well as by social critics like Slavoj Zizek. But I want to consider it further, if only because I dedicate one third of Shadowing the Anthropocene to introducing a complete system of mindfulness practice. How does that form of mindfulness — or bodymindfulness, as Shadowing calls it — differ from the “McMindfulness” Purser and others criticize? I’ll try to explain that here.
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Posted in GeoPhilosophy, SpiritMatter | Tagged Buddhism, McMindfulness, mindfulness, Peirce, political ecology, practice, process-relational theory, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young | 2 Comments »
June 2, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I originally presented a “primer” to process-relational philosophy on this blog back in 2010. A substantially updated version of it is part of my book, Shadowing the Anthropocene. Here it is as a stand-alone, 10-page PDF file.
Posted in GeoPhilosophy | Tagged C. S. Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational theory, process-relational thought, Whitehead | Leave a Comment »
This announcement is long past due… It’s for the new, open access, peer-reviewed international journal that I am co-editing with Alenda Chang and Janet Walker, through the University of California Press. It includes a call for submissions for two special issue “streams”: “Disaster Media” and “Mediating Art & Science.”
Media+Environment is an open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research. The journal seeks to foster dialogue within a fast-growing global community of researchers and creators working to understand and address the myriad ways that media and environments affect, inhabit, and constitute one another. Founded on the premise that media and environment is a crucial conjunction for our time, the journal encourages both traditional and multimodal forms of scholarship. Read more here.
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Posted in MediaSpace | Tagged ecocinema studies, ecomedia, media ecology, Media+Environment | 1 Comment »
As agreed to with my publisher (Punctum), the e-book version of Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times is now available for free download (or pay what you can). To celebrate this, I’m sharing a couple of snippets from the book here.
As related in my Reader’s Guide, the book consists of three sections: first, an introduction to process-relational ontology (in general, and in the specific version I develop); second, an application of that ontology to understanding the possibilities for genuine action in the moment (any and every moment); and third, an application of it to the images and meanings that make up our increasingly post-secular, global, “iconoclashic,” and culturally and ecologically challenged world.
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Posted in GeoPhilosophy | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, eco-realism, Kairos, May Day, metaphysics, ontology, Peirce, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, speculative realism, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
April 22, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ve been posting about the Ukrainian presidential runoff elections over at UKR-TAZ, the blog I established in the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution. (See Four theses on Ukrainian politics and Politics as reality-FB.) The gist of my comments is relevant to the study of social media’s impacts on political and cultural change in general, so I’ll summarize them here.
My four theses were fairly straightforward: (1) that, in electing as its president Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and actor who plays the president on television, Ukraine would overtake all rivals in the race to equate politics with reality-TV, (2) that Ukrainians are more savvy than most about their politicians, (3) that for a political system dominated by oligarchic interests, Ukraine’s is surprisingly pluralistic, and (4) that as with all oligarchic or plutocratic “democracies,” this pluralism is restricted to issues that don’t threaten the overriding interests of the oligarchic class.
I added a concluding sentence about why I wasn’t fretting too much about the electoral decision, unlike some (but not all) of my Ukrainian friends and colleagues. My follow-up post goes into a little more detail about this. It reads, in part:
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Posted in MediaSpace, Politics | Tagged Amazon, Facebook, Google, oligarchy, social media, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
April 18, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Like many, I’ve been finding it difficult not to feel an upwelling of anxiety as the scope and scale of the climate emergency has become more and more obvious, as Trump-style political (non-)responses — precisely the kinds of responses that will only make things much worse — have scaled themselves up around the world, and as new forms of political manipulation have been enabled via social media and other technologies, all of which inscribe the most serious cause of the problems — wealth inequality and the interest vested in maintaining it — ever deeper into the matrix of human options. To the extent that there is so much to be gained from maintaining the status quo (or lost from challenging it), to that extent will things continue to get worse. And if keeping up with all these developments seems so difficult, responding to them adequately has seemed almost impossible.
Movements and initiatives like Extinction Rebellion provide glimmers of hope on the possibility of mobilization — the next week and a half (Earth Week) is a particularly active time for them (see here on how you can join a local initiative).
At the same time, the sense of imminent crisis and urgency in all such activism carries an affective thrust that doesn’t necessarily model a healthy and “sustainable” mode of activity. (Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland deal with this to some extent in their recent book, Urgency in the Anthropocene.) The sense that there is so much to do right now — that we should be out in the streets rioting, waving our flags, poking our cameras into politicians’ faces, and constantly delivering monologues (so as to break into the 24-hour news cycle, to keep our opponents on their toes, and to keep ourselves from losing momentum) — all of that can contribute to the sense of heightened anxiety.
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March 17, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams.
Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — which is what the “cenes” refer to (from the Paleocene and Eocene to the Pleistocene and Holocene) — typically takes millions of years to establish itself. By that standard, the “Anthropocene” can only be based on the fantasy “that what our civilization is doing just now is going to keep on long enough to fill a geological epoch.” (The Holocene is only about 12,000 years old, so it’s debatable whether it even qualifies as an epoch.)
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Posted in AnthropoScene | Tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Ecozoic, geology, Neocene, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck, Transition Culture | 2 Comments »
February 9, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
For someone who teaches media and environment, it’s heartening to see people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and one of her advisors, Cornell legal star Robert Hockett, break through the media din. Even Tucker Carlson had to admit that “it’s nice to have a smart person” on his show to explain things. (Students, take note.)
First, Ocasio-Cortez: Continue Reading »
Posted in MediaSpace, Politics | Tagged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, campaign finance reform, climate change communication, ecomedia, environmental communication, Fox Business News, Fox News, Green New Deal, Juan Williams, media, right-wing media, Robert Hockett, television, Tucker Carlson | 18 Comments »
January 28, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
And here is Animal Collective’s beautiful International Year of the Reef collaboration with marine biology art-science duo Coral Morphologic, entitled Tangerine Reef:
More on Coral Videography, “pioneers of avant-garde coral macro-videography,” on their web site.
Posted in EcoCulture, SoundScape | Tagged Animal Collective, coral reefs, Coral Videography, International Year of the Reef | 3 Comments »
January 28, 2019 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ve been trying to convince acclaimed northeast Vermont brewer Shaun Hill to add Whitehead’s Process and Reality to his Philosophical Series of ales, stouts, lambics, and porters, on the pretext that it was written down the road from the brewery. But also because Nietzsche, Foucault, Emerson, Thoreau, and Deleuze would appreciate his company. (Shaun says he first has to read the book.)
Meanwhile, here is French avant-garde guitar maestro Richard Pinhas’s take on the book, performed with Japanese noise master Tatsuya Yoshida (a.k.a. Merzbow) and drummer Masami Akita. Three of the album’s four tracks can be heard here.
AllMusic’s Thom Jurek writes about the music:
Posted in SoundScape | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, beer, Greensboro VT, Heldon, Hill Farmstead Brewery, Process and Reality, Richard Pinhas, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
December 19, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ve posted here before about the Kurdish experiment in social-ecological-feminist radical democracy that’s been unfolding in the unlikeliest circumstances in the northern Syrian region of Rojava. Donald Trump’s sudden announcement of a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Syria now leaves that experiment extremely vulnerable… which puts anti-war* activists into an uncomfortable position.
(I add that asterisk to “anti-war” because I see the anti-war goal as occasionally requiring civil and even military defense, for instance when a people and land are under attack by a foreign invader. There are shades of grey here, but the point is to work continuously toward creating the conditions for lasting peace even while protecting one’s citizens from annihilation.) Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged anti-war, Bookchin, foreign policy, Kurdistan, Kurds, Rojava, social ecology, Syria, war | 2 Comments »
November 30, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I was interviewed yesterday by the local CBS-affiliated WCAX news show on the topic of how to motivate Vermonters to take action on climate change (while Bernie Sanders and Cornel West were speaking just up the road). What was used of our interview was fairly minimal, so I thought I would share the notes I prepared in the moments between getting their questions and doing the interview.
The entire piece can be read or viewed here. Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged climate action, climate change, climate motivation, interview, news, small-c conservative values, Vermont, Vermonters, VPIRG, WCAX | 3 Comments »
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