or, Carl Sagan rides again, and again… Prometheus Unbound raises questions about the atheist spirituality of Symphony of Science‘s star-scientist-studded videos (pun only slightly intended — they are mostly men, yes, but drumming on djembes (!), and it’s well worth waiting to see Jane Goodall tell us about the “wuzzy” line between humans and the […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
spiritualizing science
Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged pantheism, Sagan, spirituality on March 4, 2010 | 1 Comment »
weird life, shadow biospheres, dark signs… & quakes
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged cosmos, nature, Peirce, semiosis, theology on February 27, 2010 | 23 Comments »
The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we […]
visualizing immanence
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged biosemiotics, complexity, documentaries, immanence on January 30, 2010 | 6 Comments »
This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward Lorenz, […]
Hell, nature, & justice in Haiti
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged disasters, paganism, political ecology on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »
What do we do in the aftermath of such a disaster, except to express profound sadness, shock, and sympathy, and to send donations to aid and relief organizations working in the affected areas? How do we even portray it in a way that respects the victims? Citizen media, according to Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy, […]
after-thought: living immanently
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Deleuze, immanence on December 26, 2009 | 5 Comments »
After posting about “a year of immanence” a few days ago, it occurred to me that I could have called it “A year of living immanently.” And then I thought, What would that mean? Would it be living with one’s face to the wind, always in motion, responding to the flow of life, one’s heart […]
Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecopolitics, film, Hollywood, ideology, paganism, pantheism on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »
New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.
But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]
subjectivity, impermanence, & dark flow
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, flow, Lacan, meditation, mindfulness, Ontology, epistemology, Shinzen Young, Vipassana, Whitehead on December 7, 2009 | 19 Comments »
I think the idea and image of dark flow streaming out of our universe has also been resonating with me because of the work I’ve been doing using Vipassana teacher Shinzen Young’s system of mindfulness training. [. . .] Dark Flow is the (cosmic) Real, the shimmering atomic structure of things behind the structured object-world we (think we) see, the wave-like spirit-energy that Buddhists calls “emptiness” only because giving it a more substantialist term would already be a way of trying to contain it. Call it emptiness, or dark flow. If astrophysicists hadn’t “seen” it, we would have had to invent it. (I mean we, invent, it.)
‘dark flow’ & the vitality of emptiness
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged Buddhism, dark vitalism, emptiness, Lacan, Zizek on December 1, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The image of dark flow, described as 1400 galaxy clusters streaming toward the edge of the universe at blistering speed in the ongoing “afterglow” of the big bang (or something like that), has haunted me ever since I read about it several days ago. Caused “shortly after the big bang by something no longer in […]
Žižek and his Others
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, ecology, environmentalism, Lacan, paganism, Zizek on November 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus […]
‘2012’ and all that
Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged 2012, doom, ecoapocalypse, sacred place, sacred time on November 17, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Back in the mid-1990s when I was researching my book Claiming Sacred Ground — on the ‘sacralization’ of space, place, and landscape, with a focus on two places where it’s been happening at a rapid clip over the last three or four decades (Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona, which has been in the news recently […]
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