I’m happy to share my talk from the recent Vermont Humanities conference. It captures the essence of things I’ve been writing and thinking about over the last while. And rather incredibly for a humanities conference, it was 100% glitch-free (despite the talk’s audio-visual intricacies; well, the image fades aren’t perfectly smooth, but those can be […]
Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category
Navigating climate trauma
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Solaristics, the Zone, This Mazéd World, Vermont Humanities on November 2, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Garden & Dump conference videos
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged climate trauma, eco-trauma, pre-traumatic stress syndrome, Stalker, Tarkovsky, the Zone on September 27, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Videos from the Aarhus (Denmark) conference “The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements” are available and free for the viewing, here on the conference YouTube channel. They include talks by philosophers Timothy Morton and Michael Marder and a wonderful conversation between Chen Quifan, Alice Bucknell, and Angela YT Chan. My own talk, “Event, Time, […]
Thoughts on an equinox
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged climate crisis, climate justice, equinox, future, Holocene, hope, inequality, seasons on September 22, 2021 | 1 Comment »
Marking the passage of the seasons from summer to winter and back again is something people have done for millennia. Seasons are reliable — anyone living outside the equatorial band will continue to have colder and warmer seasons, probably for the rest of our lives. But many of us are realizing that larger cycles may […]
Through an Anthropo(s)cenic Glass, Darkly
Posted in Anthropocene, Cinema, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, tagged 1 Corinthians 13, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Congress of Culture, deep time, Earth's deep past, eco-trauma, geology, geophilosophy, Holocene, IPCC, Late Holocene, Lviv, Peter Brannen, Solaris, Tarkovsky, Through a Glass Darkly, Ukraine, Vermont Humanities Conference, Zizek, Конгрес культури on August 11, 2021 | 1 Comment »
My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]
“Trust your (foamy) immune system”
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged actor-network theory, anti-vaccination movement, co-immunism, co-immunology, COVID-19, Foams, immunity, immunological theory, networks, Peter Sloterdijk, public health, Spheres on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »
“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]
The Garden and the Dump
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Aarhus, conferences, The Garden and the Dump on July 23, 2021 | 1 Comment »
I just sent in my abstract for the Aarhus University conference The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements. Other speakers include Tim Morton, Michael Marder, and Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan. The conference, which is open to all, will take place online on September 15 and 16. Further information here. (I like the […]
(M)anthropocene vs. the pluriverse
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Alfred Crosby, Anthropocene, calls for proposals, Columbian invasion, ecological imperialism, environmentalism of the poor, Foucault, Manthropocene, Martinez-Alier, multiple modernities, Orbis spike, Planthropocene, pluriverse, Radical History Review on May 18, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Those interested in the Anthropo(S)cene thread (technically, a “category”) of this blog may be interested in the call for proposals for a special issue of Radical History Review on Alternatives to the Anthropocene. (Hat tip to Jeremy Schmidt at The Anthropo.Scene.) The call reads, in part:
The [Real]: on Rothko, music, & the Global Trends 2040 report
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, Music & soundscape, tagged ambient music, Brian Eno, climate crisis, COVID-19, Global Trends 2040, hyper-events, hyperobjects, industrial ambient, Mark Rothko, Morton Feldman, National Intelligence Council, pandemic, Peter Gabriel, The Real, William Basinski on April 15, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply […]
Don’t travel the Anthropocene without this
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Shadowing the Anthropocene on September 29, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei’s superb cover design of my book. Cool. Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead! (Hipster alert!)
The world’s downtown
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged Coronavirus, David Remnick, E. O. Wilson, ecomodernism, half-earth, Maintenance Art Manifesto, Manhattan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York City, New Yorker, pandemic politics, sanitation workers, wildlife protection on April 13, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
With New Yorkers forced to stay home, and arts organizations getting creative in how they are making available their offerings, The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section has suddenly become more relevant to the rest of us, whose visits to the city were previously so infrequent as to make reading it a form of […]
The (un)binding & (re)bounding of worlds
Posted in Anthropocene, Spirit matter, tagged boundaries, environmental change, more-than-human world, other-than-human world, Peder Sather Workshop, Reassembling Democracy, religion and ecology, ritual, ritualizing on March 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
The following is a short essay I wrote for the Peder Sather/Reassembling Democracy workshop on “Environmental Change and Ritualized Relationships with the Other-than-Human World,” held at UC Berkeley this past December. There are physical boundaries between humans and specific nonhumans—fences, walls, windows (of homes, gardens, kennels, zoos, abbatoirs, safari vehicles, camera lenses, guns); and there […]
So, here we are…
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Spirit matter, tagged Christianity, ClimateJustice, globalization, hope, Jonathan Franzen, Matthew 25:40 on September 8, 2019 | Leave a Comment »
Wow, what a reaction the article described here has gotten… This version includes a follow-up comment below. Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending?” articulates an important point about hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change. Franzen suggests that an “all-out war on climate change” no longer makes sense because the scenario for […]