Should this blog move to Substack? Here are some reasons to do it:
Continue Reading »Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blogging, blogosphere, immanence, Substack | Leave a Comment »
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.
Chapter One can be read online. The book can be ordered here.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged imagination, Stanford University Press, The New Lives of Images | Leave a Comment »
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.
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged climate politics, Donald Trump, fossil fuel politics, petropolitics, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian war, Vladimir Putin | 1 Comment »
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.)
As its organizer, I’m trying not to commit to any position on AI just yet — of which there are several, including (from pro to anti) true believer, enthusiast (including cynical and self-serving pusher), cautious collaborator, skeptical critic, refusenik, and abolitionist. (For support for a few of these positions, see Wired‘s “The AI Backlash Keeps Growing Stronger,” The Boston Review‘s “The AI We Deserve” series, Freedom House’s report “The Repressive Power of Artificial Intelligence,” Kate Crawford’s Nature article “Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret,” and Laurent Dubreuil’s Humanities in the Time of AI.” We’ll be compiling a much longer list of recommended readings; suggestions welcome.)
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:
Continue Reading »Posted in Science & society | Tagged AI, artificial intelligencce, Frankenstein, Generative AI, humanities, J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, Joanne Brown Symposium | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Spirit matter, Uncategorized | Tagged Buddhism, deep ecology, eco-Buddhism, Joanna Macy, Mahayana Buddhism | Leave a Comment »
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.
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, capitalism, fetishization, Lacanianism, Marxism, process philosophy, process-relational philosophy, psychoanalysis, reification | Leave a Comment »
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.
Review copies, comp teaching copies, and pre-orders are available now. The book will be out in September.
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“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.
Continue Reading »Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged belief in this world, Buddha, Deleuze, emotional practices, love for this world | Leave a Comment »
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 Worlds is 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.
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged Andrey Kurkov, digital media, forthcoming books, image theory, imagination, Russo-Ukrainian war, Terra Invicta, The New Lives of Images, Ukraine, Ukrainian ecocriticism | 1 Comment »
The deadline is coming soon; please write to me if you need more time.
Call for Chapter Proposals: The Life-Cycle of Moving Images: Ecological Entanglements from Conception to Consumption and Beyond
We invite contributions for a forthcoming edited volume entitled The Life-Cycle of Moving Images: Ecological Entanglements from Conception to Consumption and Beyond, edited by Adrian Ivakhiv, Maria Boguszewicz, and Aitor Arruza Zuazo.
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The horror story unfolding around us continues.
A typical day (let’s say, yesterday) may include President Trump (1) again accusing Ukrainian president Zelensky of “starting” a war against Russia (after Trump’s attempted shakedown of that country for its resources, despite the fact that Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., U.K., and Russia that it ultimately never received, since Russia attacked it); (2) saying that CBS should be delicensed and heavily penalized for airing an interview with Zelensky and a segment on Greenland (because they appeared critical of his administration); (3) telling the president of El Salvador he’d like to send his “home-growns” (U.S. citizens he doesn’t like) to El Salvador’s growing Gulag-style prisons; and (4) announcing a cut of billions of dollars in funding from Harvard University because it did not submit to his administration’s demands that it immediately shut down all programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion, that it provide all its hiring and admissions data for audits by the Trumpists (sorted by race, national origin, performance on standardized tests, etc.) so that they can eliminate people who, e.g., aren’t conservative white men, and a list of several other demands that would amount to a federal takeover of the university. (All while using the “antisemitism” justification in the same way that Putin has been claiming that Ukraine under its Jewish-Ukrainian president must be “denazified.”)
Meanwhile, university libraries in some states are being ordered to delete research collections focused on “race relations” or “gender studies.” Federal funding for climate, weather, and ocean research is being eviscerated. The nonsensical tariff rollercoaster continues to jeopardize the livelihoods of farmers and business people who rely on predictable markets for their goods and their investments. And the list goes on.
I’ve been asked what I think we should do about all this. Here’s what I think.
Continue Reading »Posted in Politics | Tagged Astra Taylor, far right, movement building, Naomi Klein, Politics, Trumpism | Leave a Comment »
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