I’ll be the guest speaker at the Environmental Studies colloquium at the Antioch University New England Graduate School tomorrow.
Title of my talk: “Culturing Nature: Ecology, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things.”
Content: the Two Cultures, “science wars” and “nature wars,” Whitehead, Stengers, and Latour, imagery and the Anthropocene (from Bosch to Pollock to the undersea art of Jason deCaires Taylor), and a few thoughts on what a unified post-social constructionist, post-scientistic, post-humanist paradigm might look like.
A generalized mishmash, in other words. Suitable for a solsticial gathering. But not too much. The question is what to keep in, and what to leave on the cutting room floor.
“The dangers of didacticism, or the seemingly unbridgeable rift between cinematic drama and economic affectlessness, would seem to factor against attempting to film the crises of capitalism. Yet the works of past filmmakers and theorists struggling with the experience of economic collapse remain alive with lessons for the present, and the ongoing financial crisis has been the object of noteworthy, if rare, attempts to give narrative and visual form to its underlying causes and effects.”Jeff Kinkle & Alberto Toscano