March 31, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” which has just come out in a special issue devoted to posthumanism of the Shanghai Academy-based, bilingual Chinese journal Critical Theory. (The issue, which is focused on posthumanism, features a significant new piece by N. Katherine Hayles, alongside work by several Chinese scholars.)
A more helpful metaphor for theoretical novelty is Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” which can also be applied to the literature on the “post-human” and on posthumanism. By the “distribution of the sensible,” or portage du sensible, Rancière means
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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged alternative humanisms, Chinese humanities journals, critical theory, distribution of the sensible, extinction, humanism, humanities, Jacques Rancière, post-human, posthumanism, posthumanities, theory | 3 Comments »
March 25, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Here are a few thoughts coming out of the five weeks of readings in decolonial theory that I’m doing with my Advanced Environmental Humanities class (which has been online and open to the interested public). The course is centrally concerned with the present “global moment,” and the following can be considered a short take on how this moment might best be theorized.
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Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged A/Cene, Anthropocene, Anthropocene theory, becoming-traumatic, capitalocene, climate trauma, collective trauma, colonialism, decolonial turn, decoloniality, Decolonization, Decolonization is not a metaphor, eco-trauma, indigenization, post-traumatic, pre-traumatic, the Storm, trauma | Leave a Comment »
March 24, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Equinoxes and solstices are geometrical phenomena. They mark the passage of time in ways that are easy to understand and more or less universal. I understand people’s desire to watch for them, to mark them out, and to even reclaim them as somehow more primordial than other kinds of temporal passage points.
But changing seasons involve much more of a multi-layered confluence and conflagration of elements. And they are specific. This place has its seasons. They vary in their timings and specificities, and their variations provide for talking points because of the background of consistency those variations revolve around. When the consistency reasserts itself, we are satisfied.
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Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Bill McKibben, bioregionalism, equinox, seasons, Vermont, weather | Leave a Comment »
March 15, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Reading Nigel Clark and Bron Szerszynski’s just published Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences is helping me think through what I see as perhaps the key philosophical debate of the current time. That debate is over the “ontological politics” of the difference between science in its theory and practice — including the sciences of climate change, of ecological systems, of viruses, evolution, geology, and more — and colonial/capitalist modernity’s most direct victims: the knowledges and lifeways of indigenous and place-based cultures.
This debate has a more general antecedent, which is the debate over the proper relationship between science and religion. Science tells us certain things, religion(s) tell(s) us very different kinds of things, so how do we make sense of those differences?
The debate I have in mind is more specific than that, for several reasons: because indigenous religion is not just any kind of religion; because it isn’t just about “religion,” but about reality (though in some sense the science-religion debate has always been about reality); because the science we’re concerned with is more specific (and more specifically institutionalized) today; and because this debate comes with an understanding of the political economy/ecology of the last five centuries that the broader debate has generally lacked.
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Posted in Philosophy, Science & society | Tagged Bron Szerszynski, cosmopolitics, critical realism, Decolonization, Elizabeth Povinelli, enactive cognition, geontologies, geontology, indigenous cosmovisions, metaphysics, Nigel Clark, ontological politics, Ontology, epistemology, ontopolitics, phenomenology, Planetary Social Thought, pragmatism, science and religion, social constructionism | 2 Comments »
March 12, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I had been avoiding the Whitehead Research Project‘s monthly reading groups because of conflicts with other scheduled activities, but today I joined. The reading was a short, unpublished manuscript somewhat misleadingly titled “Freedom and Order,” as it’s mostly about humor, wit, and imagination.
Now I understand why I’ve always been put off by, and a little suspicious of, people who are too witty. Whitehead counterposes wit against humor:
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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged A. N. Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Bakhtin, C. S. Peirce, democracy, eco-egalitarianism, eco-justice, humor, religion, revolution, Whitehead, Whitehead reading group, Whitehead Research Project, wit | Leave a Comment »
March 8, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Manifestos are back in style (if this one, this one, and this one are any indication). Here’s my latest crack at a fairly simple statement of principle.
The lesson of the field of environmental studies, to which I’ve dedicated more than three decades of my life, is that there’s a civilizational task ahead of us.
(When I say “us,” I mean to invoke humanity, fully aware that it’s a category that’s far from unified and settled. What “humanity” might be remains an open question. And when I say “civilizational,” I mean to indicate the immense complexity of ideas and practices that hold together much of the human side of the world as we know it.)
The task is that of instituting two radical and simultaneous shifts, one “external” and one “internal.”
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Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged ClimateJustice, environmental justice, manifesto, manifestos, principles, statements | 2 Comments »
February 26, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I don’t usually write about local politics on this blog. But why not? Here’s my prediction for next Tuesday’s Burlington,* Vermont, mayoral election. Let this be a test of how good, or bad, I’ve gotten at observing my city’s politics.
(For outsiders: this is the city where Bernie Sanders cut his political chops as mayor for most of the 1980s. Since then, it’s been largely contested between two parties—Democrats and the further-left Progressives, with a diminishing group of Republicans and occasional independents to spice things up. At this point, it’s become something of a two-party system, just not the usual two. The city has little opinion polling to speak of, which is part of why I’ve pushed myself to write this. And while I’ve lived here almost 18 years, I’ve only been a citizen and voter for the last two. I’m also no expert at this, so take what follows with a grain of salt.)
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Posted in Politics | Tagged Ali Dieng, Burlington, local politics, Max Tracy, Miro Weinberger, Vermont | 3 Comments »
February 19, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally (for instance, here). In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘News Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claimed that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”
I want to respond to that argument here.
The argument is not a new one; some version of it has plagued the field of “media ecology” for as long as that field has existed (which it has, as a kind of interdisciplinary interloper into media studies scholarship since the early 1970s). Debates over the aptness of the metaphor have only intensified as an ecologically oriented media scholarship has grown.
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Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Science & society | Tagged ecology, ecosystem metaphor, ecosystem science, ecosystemics, media ecology, media ecosystems, philosophy of ecology, science and technology studies, systems theory, theory of ecology | Leave a Comment »
February 13, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at best, anything can happen.
The journey into the Zone produces a world whose resonances work on multiple levels including the human or “anthropomorphic” (recreating an understanding of what it means to be human), the animate and biological (which I call the “biomorphic”), and the geographic and terrestrial (“geomorphic”). While most films aren’t particularly creative on any of these levels, the best films, especially those that have reshaped audiences’ understandings of the socio-ecological make-up of the world, do this on all three. They are cinema at its “morphogenetically” most creative.
Readers of my later writing, including Shadowing the Anthropocene, will understanding that this creative, “world-building” conception of art is of a piece with the broader process-relational philosophy I espouse, which resonates with the relationalism of a series of contemporary philosophical trends but more carefully delineates exactly what that means. The world, in a process-relational perspective, is a continual forward movement into “the Zone.” Its significance and value are found in this movement to the extent that the openness of the movement becomes greater and more generative of aesthetic, ethical, and (eco-)logical value and significance.
The Zone, then, is a good metaphor for thinking about life, meaning, and value, especially at times when we feel we may be collectively stepping into a place whose coordinates are difficult to map out and potentially treacherous to navigate. Here I want to argue that the reverse is true as well: that metaphor itself is among the best metaphors for thinking about the Zone.
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Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture | Tagged adequate image, adequate metaphor, Alex Ross, Ecologies of the Moving Image, metaphor, Peirce, process-relational thought, semiosis, semiotics, Stalker, Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Zone | Leave a Comment »
January 31, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of “The Coup We Are Not Talking About,” published in today’s Sunday New York Times, is an essential follow-up to her book Surveillance Capitalism, applying that book’s analysis to the situation we are living through.
This other coup is the “epistemic coup” which, she writes, “proceeds in four stages”:
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Posted in Media ecology | Tagged Anomalies, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, digital media, epistemic crisis, Facebook, Google, Googlization, infodemic, information civilization, information war, media ecology, media politics, mediasphere, New York Times, Shoshana Zuboff, social media, surveillance capitalism | 1 Comment »
January 29, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I will be making parts of my “Advanced Environmental Humanities” course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. Technical details remain to be worked out, but I’d like to make our readings and discussions open, so as to include interested participants from outside the university community.
The course is a graduate and upper level undergraduate seminar premised on the understanding that the current “global moment” is deeply challenging, confusing, and dispiriting, but at the same time potentially “pregnant with possibility,” and that the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities has much to offer it. The class will be meeting online using MS Teams software on Thursdays, beginning February 4 and running until May 6, 1:15-4:15 pm Eastern (New York City) time.
Here is a brief description. Anyone interested in joining the class for some of the readings and discussions can write me about it. If we’re lucky, we may occasionally get an author or two to join us.
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Posted in Academe, Eco-theory | Tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Advanced Environmental Humanities, courses, EcoCultureLab, environmental humanities, readings, University of Vermont | Leave a Comment »
January 21, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
What better way to understand ecological perception than by applying it to a study of the music of Radiohead, right?
Okay, I’ll explain. “Ecological perception” is not what you might think. (And it isn’t what I, in my writing, call “perceptual ecology.“) It is a psychological theory that studies the perception of an organism (such as a human) in terms of how it responds to the perceived “affordances” presented by that organism’s environment. Perception takes place not in the head or the brain, but in the (nervous system mediated) correspondence between organism and environment. Based in James J. Gibson’s studies of visual perception and applied to music by Eric Clarke, Alan Moore, and others, ecological perception in music looks for commonalities and differences in people’s interpretation of music and traces these to cross-cultural invariants and cultural variations and “specifications” in how listeners respond to musical affordances.
What does all of this have to do with ecology? And with Radiohead? For the most part, it doesn’t have much to do with the first, at least as ecology is commonly conceived, but I want to point out how it does or how it can. As for Radiohead, they are as good an example of “process-relationally interesting” music as any. (One of their albums made my “top 10 albums” list a few years ago, though really it’s their later work that cashes out on the promise of that album.)
The main reason to connect the two, however, is because that’s what Brad Osborn does in his book Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead (Oxford University Press, 2017). What I want to do here is to extend his argument to the sort of thing I mean when I talk about perceptual ecology.
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Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Music & soundscape | Tagged Brad Osborn, Britney Spears, Daydreaming, ecological psychology, ecology of perception, ecomusicology, J. J. Gibson, James J. Gibson, music psychology, music theory, musicology, perceptual ecology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, Stockhausen, The Pyramid Song, Thom Yorke | 2 Comments »
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