The nearly 400-page, richly illustrated anthology Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, which I conceived and edited as part of a Fulbright award held in Berlin (originally meant to be held in Ukraine, but displaced due to the war), is now available for pre-ordering. Please encourage your libraries and bookstores to order it.
The full-color book features the work of 30+ Ukrainian authors and artists that together articulate “what in the world is worth fighting for” — a world in which, in the face of history’s repetitions and the future’s uncertainties, we nevertheless persist, in Katya Buchatska’s words, in “plant[ing] a garden so that we have something to lose.”
Political philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes that “Terra Invicta does something urgently needed but nonetheless new: it makes it clear that there is no choice between ecological concerns and the struggle against military aggression. In Ukraine, they are two moments of the same struggle. Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.”
It’s what informs my analysis of images, imagination, and the digital in The New Lives of Images. Here is the three-minute version of it.
The universe is a living, dynamic, and responsive universe. It is made not of static objects, but of events — events which elicit other events. Its most basic unit is an event of “response” to “things given.”
Events elicit other events: they evoke or draw out responses. At its simplest, this elicitation is directly causal, as with a billiard ball in motion hitting another billiard ball and setting it into predictable motion. But as this relationality gets complex — and the universe we know is quite complex — the elicitation, and the responsiveness to it, take on higher-order forms. Things — which make up the events we perceive and experience — come to “stand for” other things, which they do in three basic ways: through their directly causal force (the billiard ball model), through their resemblance to the “other things” they come to stand for (the recognition model), and through their being interpretable within a system of meaning-making (the interpretation model).
I’ve just gotten my hands on an advance print copy of The New Lives of Images, and it looks and feels wonderful to hold and handle. I’m quite happy with what Stanford University Press has done with the book — the artwork, the typography, and the entire editorial and publication process was and is commendable. And being part of the Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media series is an honor.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a layered (two layers deep) table of contents — Stanford likes simplicity in that respect — so I thought I’d share that here. Note that the list of sub-headings does not exactly reflect the length of the respective chapters. The book’s first, theoretical “half” — a long essay on images and six “image regimes,” culminating in the digital — clocks in at a crisp 125 pages. The second, empirical half of the book, with its three lengthy and more-or-less-standalone investigations into the imaginal interface between contemporary humans and the earth (the Anthroposcene), humans and nonhuman animals (the Therioscene), and humans and our gods (the Theoscene), comes in at close to 200 pages. And there are nearly 60 pages of notes, and a 30-page index. Which makes it feel like a big book. I’m looking forward to the paperback, which should be out simultaneously with the cloth-bound and digital versions.
There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin.
The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after all, connect within the ranks of the uber-rich masculinist jet set, where sexist pedophilia seems readily appeasable).
The second is psychoanalytical: that Trump is a pathological narcissist with a fragile father-damaged ego, and that he only looks up to other, more “successfully” imperial father figures. Putin is one of the few who fit his criteria.
The third is “realist,” which acknowledges that there are benefits, from Trump’s perspective, to a cozier relationship with Russia. Allying with Russia could, for instance, steer the latter away from China. More importantly, and more specifically these days, is that Russia is a fossil fuel superpower — and Trump’s authority is also reliant on a perpetuation of the global power of fossil fuels. Rehabilitating Putin will enable Trump to “make deals” around Russia’s only assets, which are its oil and gas deposits. When other prices are rising all around Trump, he could at least keep gas prices down by dealing directly with Putin.
Should this blog move to Substack? Here are some reasons to do it:
Substack is where things are happening these days (see here, here, here, and here). Some of the most popular blogs and newsletters are increasingly found there, and traditional media increasingly focus and rely on them. Substack’s growth has been relatively unrelenting.
Substack provides multiple options for building one’s readership and support base that other venues (like the university-based WordPress one that this blog is built on) do not. Most of these include interlinking with other blogs, which creates a more coherent network of readership and conversation — exactly the kind of thing that attracted me to blogging in the first place (back in 2009), but which has faded everywhere except in Substack. It seems to be the only remaining place where the old, highly interactive “blogosphere” is not just surviving, but visibly thriving.
(A third reason might be that Substack is easily monetizable, but as long as I’m on a reasonable university salary, that’s not a consideration for me. My university keeps me busy enough. That said, if things were to go extremely well here, I could retire earlier and devote even more energy to writing. ;-))
I’m organizing a two-day academic retreat focusing on “Generative AI, Techno-authoritarianism, and the Future of the Critical Humanities.” It will take place in late September, partly under the auspices of Simon Fraser University’s Joanne Brown Symposium series on violence and its alternatives. We’re stretching the mandate of that series in that we aren’t focusing directly on violence either caused or prevented by AI. But insofar as AI poses a threat either to humanity itself or to the humanities, and insofar as the humanities have served as a bulwark against violence (and that’s worth debating), the connection is deeply relevant.
(The event will not be a public or online one, but we will share our insights in some form very soon after. I’ll share more about it in this space.)
But I’ve been engaging with AI, including in the writing of a monograph, which makes me a cautious (and critical) collaborator. Writing with AI has felt both exhilarating and deeply disconcerting. Practically at the beginning of my conversation about my book-in-progress with ChatGPT, it/they (I’ll use the agendered pronoun, which can take either a singular or plural form) were already giving me suggestions I might expect from an intelligent friend who’s very familiar with my work. As a tiny sample, for instance, they suggested:
Joanna Macy, who passed away at age 96 a couple of days ago, was a profound inspiration to many in the environmental activist world. Among other things, she taught us that “environmentalism” was about dedication to the world around us and the relations that constitute it, that it begins from the deep experience of concern and trouble that we have with it, and that it transforms our feelings for that world.
As she said in a 2017 interview with Dahr Jamail, “I’m doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other.” Since then, the “Great Unraveling,” as she called it, has only sped up, with pandemics, intensifying wars, and populist political movements demonstrating how humans have begun to “turn on each other” all the more. So the task to which she dedicated her life — the “Great Turning” from an earth-consuming, terminal-capitalist growth society to a life-sustaining civilization, and the “work that reconnects” and makes us capable of action toward it — continues. My longtime colleague and fellow eco-Buddhist Stephanie Kaza called Macy’s approach a “wild love for the world.” Naomi Klein, in an endorsement to the book of that title, described it as a lifelong answer to the question “How do we live in solidarity on this warming planet?”
Macy’s message was that the best way forward is by facing things in their nakedness. As she says in that same 2017 interview (which I strongly recommend), “When people find that they can, and want to, feel and know and tell what is happening to our world, that is so much sweeter and [more] liberating than the opposite. When people get integrated and find how good it feels, then they really want that more than the narcotic of ignorance and delusion, as painful as it is.”
Buddhist philosophy and practice helped her in this, as it has for many. This is because Buddhism encourages sitting with the emotions we feel in order to see how they connect us to everything else, not just in the vague generality of “all things being one” but in the specificity of this, that, you, me, and every situation and intentional action. If this, then that. If not this, then not that.
If there’s a joyful message that Buddhism conveys, at least in its life-affirming Mahayana forms, it is that this moment and every moment provides an opportunity to pierce through delusion and act in ways that bring forth beauty and a sense of solidarity with all sentient beings. Here we are (whoever and whatever “we” may be), in this together, with the capacity to act from this recognition of our togetherness.
An earlier post on this blog, entitled “Ontology 101,” proposed to clear the way for a general understanding of the different kinds of things an ontology (or general conception of reality) should be able to distinguish. My bookThe New Lives of Images, which will be out in September, examines in great detail the kinds of things called “images,” which I consider to be one of the main types of “things” we need to understand in order to improve our dealings with the world today. The bigger picture within which images function remains to be filled in.
“Ontology 101” elicited a private response from a friend, philosopher David Brahinsky, who reminded me that American philosopher Justus Buchler had a lot to offer with his ontological writings and that this blog has never adequately covered Buchler. This despite my years of writing about Whitehead, Peirce, and various more recent “speculative realists” such as Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and others. So I invited David to write a guest post introducing Buchler’s thought. I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but am now sharing it in the hope that it can contribute to my and others’ further thinking about things, relations between them, and reality. Specifically, how is Buchler’s language helpful for distinguishing between the kinds of things that exist and what they are capable of?
Some sixteen years ago, in the first of a series of pieces that tried to define what my work aimed toward (which at the time I called a “post-anthropocentric political ecology”; see here and here for a few others), I wrote that “what is essential is a collective struggle to wrest a realm of compassionate solidarity from a realm of suffering based in delusion.” Here’s a revisit of that idea.(Some of that series ultimately became Shadowing the Anthropocene, but here’s an example of a piece that did not.)
Among other analyses of the human condition, Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and a certain humanistic Marxism converge on the following understanding: that in an unstable and ultimately unreliable world, a world whose instability itself turns around an unstable and unreliable “us” at its center, we all do two things. We reify, and we fetishize.
That is, we “thingify,” treating unstable, dynamic, and elusive relations as well as conceptual abstractions as if they were stable, reliable, tangible objects. This gives us a sense of solidity by which we can comfortably move around amidst intangible processes. And, secondly, we invest some of those objects and abstractions with our desire — our productively libidinal, affective-emotional energy by which we connect ourselves to those things in a kind of emotional co-dependence.
Entire societies — cultures, religions, and so on — do this with specific objects, specific reifications, from which they select certain of them for deep libidinal investment. In early Christianity, “spirit” and “body” were reified, and the savior on the cross (and his saintly representatives) fetishized. Some early agricultural societies fetishized the maternal in the land, and later Christianity turned this into the Mother of God. In Nazism, the Nordic race and international Jewry were reified and fetishized, positively in the first case and negatively in the second, with Hitler becoming a stand-in for the former and the elimination of the latter being the first in a series of imagined purifications. With capitalism, the reification is on two levels — there is the fetishization of commodities, the objects of our desire, which becomes the engine for perpetual economic growth, and there is the fetishization of growth itself, the sine qua non of reality for the high priests who compel us to never abandon our faith. And so it goes down the line of every ideology ever to have seen the light of day.
Some ideologies began as critiques of these very processes. Buddhism aimed its critical insight onto the process of reification, encapsulating it within its teaching of Pratitya-Samutpada, or codependent arising. It developed meditative practices by which individuals could de-reify all things, including even themselves. In the process, it delivered fetishes of buddhas and bodhisattvas of many colors, forms, and sizes. Marxism became a fetishization of the proletariat, its spokespeople (the Party), and the future it claimed to build; in battling its arch-enemy, capitalism, it failed miserably. Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, despite its best efforts, fetishizes lack, the Real, or desire itself.
I created a (post-publication) “reader’s guide” for my last monograph, because it was really three (short) books in one and I didn’t think all readers would be equally interested in all three of them, so I figured a road-map would be helpful. My new book, The New Lives of Images, which Francesco Casetti rightly calls “two books in one,” doesn’t really need a reader’s guide because the Preface provides that. But for those who want an even quicker overview, here it is.
Book One (i.e., Part One) is theoretical and philosophical. It rethinks what “images” and “imagination” are through a process-semiotic lens (more on that in a moment). It provides a loosely historical typology of images and how humans have related to them — from the very beginning of imaging to the world of digital media. And it examines what’s at stake politically and ecologically with the latter.
Introducing the process-semiotic understanding of images and imagination takes some time, but here’s the nutshell version. “Imagination” is made of images by which we perceive and transform the world. And “images” are events of meaning-making mediated by things that bear some resemblance to — they look, sound, smell, taste, or feel like — other things that we have encountered before or elsewhere. Images, in other words, are not just those things that contain some depiction of something — photos, maps, sonic or musical gestures, and other kinds of objects. (And they also aren’t only visual.) They are the events in which those things connect us to other things and, in doing that, create meaning. By connecting the present to the past or the not-present, images weave the worlds in which we, meaning-dwelling beings, live. Images are supplemented by words and language, but in crucial respects images are more primary, and are therefore more important for us to understand.
Book Two is practical and empirical: it’s a critical-interpretive journey through a set of compelling imageries or “imaginaries” — artistic works (visual, audio-visual, musical, literary) that embody specific kinds of image-relations — which have to do, respectively, with the relationships between humans and the Earth (the “Anthroposcene”), humans and other animals (the “Therioscene”), and humans and our divinities (the “Theoscene”). The publisher’s description tells you some of the key artists I look at. They are chosen in order to highlight the creative edges of human thinking about these three “boundary zones.”
The upshot is that we live in the Mediocene, a time when images conveyed via digital media have become central to the ways we shape our world. The interpretive choices we make within that profusion of images will create the future that comes of it. If we don’t make appropriate choices — ones that recognize our embeddedness within an unstable and dynamic more-than-human world — our future prospects will be dim.
“Belief in this world” — which we might define as faith that this world and what we do in it is genuinely significant — was a paramount value for Gilles Deleuze, who thought that we are at risk of collectively losing such a belief.
Today, when the prospects for human flourishing are threatened from all sides (do I need to enumerate any examples?), and those for human existence itself appear to be diminishing rapidly, it seems difficult to either express or feel such a belief in this world. Beliefs in another world — one nourished either by religious imagination or by some science-fictional faith (in artificial intelligence, space travel, et al.) — beckon, as they have in the past.
On the understanding that action can be cheap, and that right action always starts from feeling, I sometimes ask myself a variation on the question “What would Jesus do?” I ask: what would Jesus feel? What would the Buddha feel? And the answer I give myself is: boundless love for this world. Love for every suffering, feeling being.
But then I wonder: was there not a certain nihilism in each of their responses to the world — in Jesus’s willingness to die for a cause, a cause known only to him at the time, and that in retrospect has led to a lot of confusion; and in Siddhartha Gautama’s desire to extinguish desire, to pierce its veil so as to escape it altogether? Whatever their motivations, a religion based on love of this world, and love of this universe, requires belief in this world, belief in the genuine sense of taking it to be real, the actual substance and (only) arena of our most deeply felt lives. And that’s, perhaps, where their followers have often failed.
I’m happy to share the news that both The New Lives of Images and Terra Invicta are now available for pre-order. The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worldsis a theoretically and empirically rich study of images, imagination, and the digital. It’s the fourth in a tetralogy of books on the ecology of imagination, and in many ways a direct follow-up to Ecologies of the Moving Image. Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth is an anthology that comes out of my Fulbright (Germany/Ukraine) work with 30+ Ukrainian scholars and artists. The book presents scholarly and creative writing (and visual art) embodying visions of what Ukrainians have been fighting for, within a global horizon of responses to the ecological crisis. More detailed descriptions are below.
