March 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The story of the Wisconsin Republican Party vs. environmental historian Bill Cronon makes for a rare example of a single academic’s blogging activism (blogtivism, to use that ugly word) going viral.
You’ve probably heard the basic outline of what’s happened already: Cronon became interested in finding out who was behind the controversial legislation crafted by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, posting about it on his blog, Scholar as Citizen. The state GOP responded by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to have access to all his personal emails including any reference to a range of words (like “Republican”), names, and topics. Cronon responded publicly to the scare tactic, and the rest is becoming history.
According to Cronon, his blog has received more than TWO MILLION (!!) hits over a 24-hour period — unheard of for an academic blog post. The New York Times has crafted an editorial responding to the story, scheduled to appear in its paper tomorrow (but readable online today).
Did someone mention anything about the risks (and/or virtues) of blogging?
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Politics | 1 Comment »
March 24, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
To the extent that ontological questions drive my recent writing (which includes Ecologies of the Moving Image, Ecologies of Identity, and a metaphysical manifesto-thriller called Why Objects Fly Out the Window), they are predominantly the following two:
- How do things enter into relation with other things?
- What happens (in the world) when they do?
In other words, I’m grappling with the nature of events, which I would define as new relational processes arising unpredictably from the encounter of previously unconnected processes. Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged ecosophy, ecosophy-G, eventology, Guattari, Naess, Ontology, epistemology | Leave a Comment »
March 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ll be in New York City this weekend to participate in the iLAND Symposium at the New School, at the invitation of iLAND founder and Artistic Director Jennifer Monson. iLAND is the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, and this year’s symposium, which runs through Friday evening and all day Saturday, is entitled Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance And Ecology.
Among the projects highlighted this year will be:
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged dance, ecoart | 1 Comment »
March 22, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Ian Bogost throws out a challenge to us (bloggers) all: How should blogs evolve? What kinds of media do we want for our thinking, writing, debating, communicating?
In other words, rather than celebrating what blogs allow us to do, or lament the knee-jerk negativity they still elicit in some (notably, academic) circles, and rather than merely taking them for granted as we’ve received them, how can we make them do what we want them to do? And if we can’t, what can we (eventually) replace them with?
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | Tagged Academe, academic blogging, blogosphere, digital humanities | 3 Comments »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Some Landscapes has a great post about landscape artist/musician Richard Skelton. As evident in works like Landings, Skelton is an artmonk, an eco-process-relationalist extraordinaire, and very much the musical equivalent of the kinds of artists I wrote about here.
Threads Across the River (which follows Scar Tissue in the video below) is beautiful: Continue Reading »
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged acoustic ecology, landscape art, music, soundscape | 4 Comments »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Thoughts for a spring equinox…
Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come.
Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a quick synopsis of those explorations, and here for an entry point into a discussion on The Immanent Frame, one of the most intelligent blogs exploring these issues).
Continue Reading »
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis | 1 Comment »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
March 17, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The IAEP picks a nice image for this conference…
Spirit tracks on Mars
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged conferences, environmental philosophy | 3 Comments »
March 16, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities.
You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized so many viewers that the young videomaker has apparently gone into hiding. I won’t link to it, since it doesn’t really deserve all the hits, but it’s easy enough to find. The gist of it is that “God is soooo great — we prayed for him to smite his enemies and there he did, smashing those godless Japanese to smithereens.” A lot of viewers couldn’t seem to tell the difference between satire and the real thing, which apparently follows Poe’s Law: one can’t satirize fundamentalist religion without it being taken by some as the real thing, because there are enough instances in which the real thing is as bad as that (Glenn Beck being only the tip of the iceberg).
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter | Tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality | 7 Comments »
March 15, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
A few observations from the events of the last week or so:
(1) Tsunamis happen. When they do, in a globally media-connected world, they bring us all a little closer together. (Not all of us; those who don’t wish to be brought closer may drift further apart. But, to risk getting overly psychoanalytical, those who’ve had a reasonably loving upbringing, or those whose instincts and/or the influences they were exposed to helped them overcome a loveless upbringing, will drift closer together — because empathy works on, with, and through them, and the images and thoughts of tragedy resonate.) This is something new in human history, and it gives me cause for hope.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged eventology, Japan tsunami, media ecology, new media, political ecology, Politics | 1 Comment »
March 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Following up from the last post…
Part of Jodi Dean‘s response to her critics was this paragraph:
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of communism is its capacity to return, throughout history, as an aspiration, even in the face of counter revolution, active hostility, defeat, war, etc. Communism is irreducible to the conflicts of the 20th century. I think the reason is that “from each according to ability to each according to need” is an axiom of working and living together with undeniable power.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Politics | Leave a Comment »
March 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It riles me up when intelligent people whose work I respect a lot say ill-considered, if not outright indefensible, things. Jodi Dean’s post arguing that communism “worked” strikes me as such a thing. I’ve provided a lengthy counter-argument on her blog, the gist of which is that the political projects that were actually carried out (rather than merely dreamed) under the flag of “communism” were colossal failures, for a whole host of reasons. This is thoroughly documented, and anyone who has spent much time in the former Soviet Union, or I imagine in China, has encountered the many levels of failure: social, economic, ecological, and, perhaps most disturbingly, a kind of deep spiritual failure.
Gilles Deleuze argues that what we need are artistic and philosophical experiments that would revive our belief in this world. (That’s what this blog has argued since its inception.) While the Soviet experiment did produce such a belief in its earliest stages — and these are worth learning from — it lost it rapidly and decisively. Whether we date that loss to the long slow decline after Khrushchev, or to Stalin’s ascent and totalitarian takeover in the 1920s (and the killing fields that followed), or to the suppression of leftist dissent (such as the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, or others even earlier), is all a matter for debate. Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Politics | Tagged capitalism, commons, Communism, Deleuze, Hardt & Negri | 12 Comments »
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