immanence

My review of Graham Harman’s recent book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, has been published online in the journal Global Discourse. It’s part of a book review symposium, which will be accompanied (in the print issue) by the author’s reply to his interlocutors. The journal has been publishing a lot on Latour’s political theory (see here). I especially recommend Philip Conway’s recent piece “Back down to Earth: Reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics.” (Ask the author for a copy if you cannot access it online.) My piece, entitled “Will the real objects of politics please stand up?“, can be viewed here.

Another recent article of mine,”The Age of the World Motion Picture: Cosmic Visions in the Post-Earthrise Era,” appears in the mammoth compendium of reports on the state of the art in the religious studies field, The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices, and Politics. The 5-volume, nearly 4000-page and 200+ chapter anthology is a tribute to editor Stan Brunn’s heroic persistence in nagging so many of us to provide him with material; from what I’ve seen of it so far, it’s a momentous publication. My article is a remixed outtake from Ecologies of the Moving Image, with a focus on five visions “toward a new Earth and a people to come”: 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1973), Contact (1997), The Tree of Life (2011), and Melancholia (2011). It can be read here.

Two more (very sympathetic) reviews of Ecologies of the Moving Image can be read in the British ecocritical journal Green Letters (by David Ingram) and in the Canadian ecocritical journal The Goose (by Edie Steiner).

I’m looking forward to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference later this month in Montreal, where I’ll be participating in Shane Denson’s wonderful panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” featuring three of my film theory heroes, Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen (it comes from Denson’s and Julia Leyda’s Post-Cinema project); responding to a panel of papers on “Engaging Ecocinema: The Affects and Effects of Environmental Documentaries” (J12 in the conference program); and otherwise perambulating between the very active Media and Environment SIG (scholarly interest group) and several others, such as the Contemporary Theory and the nascent Film-Philosophy groups. I’ll do my best to report here on the SCMS ecomedia goings-on, though I expect that Ecomedia Studies may do that better than I will.

I’m also looking forward to participating in next month’s CENHS (Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences) Symposium at Rice University. The list of speakers is here.