Tonight’s event will feature the journal’s three co-editors (Janet Walker, Alenda Chang, and myself) plus contributor Christina Vagt and coordinating editor Stephen Borunda speaking on the role of open-access journals like M+E in mediating and expanding the intersections between media production and environmental action. The 90 minute panel discussion and conversation will be moderated by FLEFF’s co-director Patricia Zimmermann.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
