Here’s a preview in section headings of the book I’m currently writing. It presents a way of thinking about images, what they’ve done for people, and how all of that figures into the contemporary world of digital media. It then applies that way of thinking to three sets of images: about humans as the stars of the “AnthropoScene,” about animals at its edges, and about gods and other mysteries at another set of edges. Or something like that.
Continue Reading »Posted in Visual culture | Tagged Anthropocene, books, image ecologies, image regimes, image-world, media ecologies, media studies, The New Lives of Images, visual culture, visual studies | 2 Comments »
A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about — what it means to be “posthuman” (and why I find that term inadequate).
The question is “who are we?” The answers that have been provided over the centuries fall into three general categories:
- “We are X” (name your ethnic/national/cultural identity),
- “We are human” (the modern/modernist answer), or
- “We are something else (but not X and not exactly just human)” (e.g., animals, Devo, spirits in a material world, cyborgs, posthuman, becoming this or that, blah blah blah).
Here’s my contribution to answering that question.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged alternative humanism, bioregionalism, border identities, borderlands, Bruno Latour, cultural identity, earthbound, ethnicity, Gaia, Galician, global cultural studies, humanism, identity, mestizo, nationality, Origins of the Slavic Nations, place, placelessness, posthuman, posthumanism, posthumanities, postmodern, premodern, Russian, Rusyn, Serhii Plokhy, Slavic, tuteishi, tuteishyi, Ukrainian, Zomia | Leave a Comment »
A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.)
The comment, on an article about the George Floyd demonstrations, reads in part (in my translation):
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged colonialism, coloniality, Decolonization, genocide, George Floyd protests, Mignolo, modernity, racism, slavery, Ukraine, United States, US history, white privilege, whiteness, xenophilia, xenophobia | Leave a Comment »
In a week of startling developments, some things still sound like they’re from The Onion. Or at least Harper’s Findings. They aren’t.
In a week of police riots capping decades of ethnic violence in a country torn asunder by authoritarianism, a dismal economy, and plague, police responding to a bee sting were attacked by a swarm of nearly 40,000 Africanized bees. Elsewhere, police “kettled” demonstrators and repeatedly charged at them, shoving them onto sidewalks, and striking them with batons.
Continue Reading »Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged America, events, findings, George Floyd, gleanings, news, police brutality, U.S. politics | 3 Comments »
As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third.
This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response to the firstness of things, their immediate, uninterpreted presence to us; ethics — in the response to a concrete, empirically encountered other; and logic — in the response to the patterns those encounters and appearances take. Each of them is a “normative science,” a way of cultivating one’s character in the world, so each takes repetition, and the difference found between repetitions, as its way of being, of becoming, and of inhabiting the world.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought | Tagged A. N. Whitehead, aesthetics, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, ecology, ethics, firstness, George Floyd, George Floyd protests, logic, object-oriented ontology, revolutionary moments, secondness, Shadowing the Anthropocene, systemic racism, U.S. cultural politics, Whitehead | Leave a Comment »
I’ve posted before about the coronavirus “silver lining” of the (partial) opening of access to peer-reviewed literature that some academic presses have been offering through the Covid-19 pandemic. Peer-reviewed literature is the bread and butter of scholarship, and access to it is not just a perk of being in academia, but one of the only ways it’s possible to stay on top of the thinking within any field of scholarship. The fact that only those who are in universities can regularly access these journals (and the fact that so much ill-digested information is much more readily available online) is one of the great barriers to a “knowledge society.”
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe | Tagged academic publishing, journals, JSTOR, knowledge society, open access, peer-reviewed literature, Process Studies, public scholarship, university presses | Leave a Comment »
People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, and an industrial-capitalist economic system. As it has struggled to keep up with a changing and increasingly globalized world (e.g., Abbas and Erni 2004, Bachman-Medick 2014, Connery and Wilson 2007, Freeman and Proctor 2018, Szeman 2011), cultural studies has become necessarily more informed by the sociology of globalization and by the anthropology of “multiple globalizations,” with their late colonial, postcolonial, and decolonizing contexts and their various relationships with the transnational capitalist economy.
Developing theoretical frameworks that cover the entirety of global culture has been challenging, and there seems to be a shared sentiment among scholars that no single such framework can ever adequately encompass the study of cultural identities writ large across the world. The following is a framework that I have been finding useful in thinking about the cognitive (or worldview) dimensions of “global culture,” including emerging manifestations of “ecoculture” or “ecocultural identity.” It is intended to help us think about how people, as individuals and as communities, make sense of their place (and time) in the world in relation to others.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged anthropology of globalization, capitalism, cognitive capitalism, colonialism, cosmopolitics, critical realism, cultural identity, cultural studies, cultural theory, decoloniality, ecocultural identity, etic, global cultural studies, globalization, identity politics, modernism, modernity, modernization, multiple modernities, postmodernization, reflexive modernization, reflexivity, sociology of globalization, tradition, traditionalism, traditionalization | Leave a Comment »
Some people believe you’re born from nothing; you live, which is something; and then you’re gone again, back to nothing. (Here’s a poignantly compressed version of that, a life in under 6 minutes.)
Others believe you’re part of a much larger thing, which keeps recycling itself (including you). Maybe there’s progress or development over the long arc of it, from something primordial and undifferentiated to something perhaps unimaginable.
Still others believe you came here from somewhere else, and that this place is a kind of trial, a testing or proving ground, which you’ll eventually leave to go back to that someplace else. (There’s some debate over whether you get to bring anything back with you.)
Finally, there are those who believe you’re not ever alone. There are always others with you: those who came before, those who will follow, and those alongside you over the course of it. And all that you do, you do with and for them.
There. Did I miss anyone?
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged beliefs, Buddhism, Christianity, cosmology, humanism, immanence, indigenous philosophy, mortality, perspectives on life, reincarnation, religion, transcendence, world philosophy | Leave a Comment »
The “reopening” of the world’s economies, locally and nationally, piece by piece, after the sudden and massive stoppage of the entire economic system, is raising important questions about whether the system can be put back into motion selectively and into a more viable direction than it had been moving beforehand.
Some observers have suggested, optimistically, that this pandemic has already heralded the end of the neoliberal era, or that at the very least it has provided death blows to a few of its key industries (such as oil and gas). Others disagree, and fear that the only reopening on the table is to an even more vicious “business as usual.”
Arundhati Roy’s call to arms, “Our Task is to Disable the Engine,” published last week on the web page of the Progressive International (an important new space for the growing movement of left-of-center eco-justice thinking), presents one of the more provocative and poignant volleys into this debate.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged Arundhati Roy, Coronavirus, crisis, crisis capitalism, Dean Baker, disaster capitalism, disaster environmentalism, disaster socialism, economics, global economy, global political change, New Republic, pandemic politics, Progressive International, rebuilding the economy, reopening the economy | 5 Comments »
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it more rather than less difficult to make sense of things. The infodemic has included a rapid spread of (what are being called) conspiracy theories.
In what follows, I outline an intentionally simplified theory about the Covid-19 “infodemic,” which I call a “media reliability theory,” and I provide an example to support it. I then discuss a few of its limitations and suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of the infodemic and of information in general. I call the latter an “infovirology” model, that is, one that focuses on how information spreads and the forms it takes as it does that. Like viruses, information spreads within ecosystems (information or media ecologies) and it is those ecosystems that need better understanding today. I end with some recommendations for a media regimen around the pandemic.
This is all work in progress, connected to a course I’ll be teaching this fall and to longer-standing work on media and cultural politics. Comments are welcome.
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology, Science & society | Tagged Anomalies, Bruno Latour, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, Coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, epidemiology of media trust, epistemology, fake news, information regimes, infovirology, media, media ecology, media politics, media theory, media trust, mediasphere, post-truth, Q, QAnon, Steve Fuller | 4 Comments »
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