An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media studies, philosophy and sociology of religion, and process-relational ontology. As such it packs a lot in, and I would welcome any feedback on it (by email or comments below). As the book won’t be finished for a while, this piece is a good reflection of one of my current research directions.
Continue Reading »I’ve been posting short pieces all this week in connection with EcoCultureLab‘s EarthDay+50 events, which include talks and a student arts exhibition. You can read the posts here:
- Monday: Frozen Moment
- Tuesday: Art and Sustainability in a Pandemic
- Wednesday (Earth Day): The Day Itself
- Thursday: Creativity is Not Optional
- Friday: What We Did, What Will We Do?
Recorded events will be viewable at the EcoCultureLab web site.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged Earth Week, Earth Week 2020, EarthDay+50, EcoCultureLab | Leave a Comment »
I dreamt that Leonard Cohen appeared by my bedside. He smiled and reassured me that things will be alright: “They will all have been beautiful in the end.” I wanted to ask him something, but wasn’t sure what. Then he was gone.
The radio (it was Radio Moskva, from back when I spent a fall in Kyïv in late Soviet days, with the radio wired directly into the communal apartments so that all you could do was turn it down or let it play) announced that the Catholic Church had recognized him as a saint, and I imagined him and Pope Francis talking in a bar together, or strolling across a golf course in heaven. Saint Leonard of Westmount, the headlines said.
They were building a temple for him outside Kyïv and pilgrims were starting to filter into the city. There was a rumor that Irving Layton was arriving by train. I tried to get to the station, but the (super-long) metro escalators were all tangled and people were reporting flooding on the tracks below. We all had to walk. The botanical gardens were in full bloom and I thought I heard the Vydubychi monastery bells ringing.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged communal apartments, Earth Day, Irving Layton, Kiev, Kyiv, Leonard Cohen, Pope Francis, Radio Moscow, Radio Moskva, St. Leonard of Westmount, Ukraine, Vydubychi monastery | 1 Comment »
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as pre-G practice, short for “process-relational ecosophy-G” practice. (Note: This is my post for Orthodox/Byzantine Good Friday… Now I will go listen to my favorite Vespers, Michael Fortounatto’s on Ikon Records (IKO 9), which I am still awaiting the digital release of. Someone please convince Musica Russica to do that.)
On sitting
Sitting practice is generally thought to be something like the baseline, the exemplar, and perhaps the “gold standard” of meditation practice. Pre-G practice resists that notion.
Continue Reading »Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice | 4 Comments »
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 masochistic eavesdropping.
But with NYC now the epicenter of coronavirus, it’s the “Talk of the Town” section that’s become the pulse of life for the rest of us too, especially David Remnick’s reports from whatever-story apartment he lives in. (I used to think New Yorkers lived “out of” their apartments, but now that’s not exactly the case.)
(Update: The magazine’s “Dispatches from a Pandemic” tag collects the many wonderful, heartfelt, depressing, insightful, and entertaining-despite-it-all musings from their city-dwelling writers.)
To those environmentalists among us (who include both ecomodernists and ecocentrists) who look favorably upon the way New Yorkers (and Hong Kongers and others) have devised eco-efficient ways to live on top of each other so as to unintentionally free up chunks of the rest of the world for wildlife to recover, NYC has become all the more the world’s downtown.
And so we wonder what will happen to downtowns in a pandemic-laden world. If we are to give wildlife the space that it needs — and that will protect us from its viruses and other risks — by moving into higher-density living arrangements, won’t that also put us at risk of becoming tinderboxes for the viruses that do get released from the grips of any such socio-natural “contract“?
Continue Reading »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 | Leave a Comment »
I have many friends who are despairing that, with Bernie Sanders’s exit from the presidential race, the United States has lost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect a leader who is honest, reliable, and completely untethered to the vested interests that keep our whole system careening towards catastrophe (climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction, out-of-control AI, an authoritarian global security state, and the inequities that breed the conflicts and terrorisms that engender wars both conventional and nuclear, chemical, biological, and cybernetic — we haven’t seen anything yet, folks). Bernie’s style was not for everyone, granted, but Joe Biden seems like yet another DNC loser to these people (I share their skepticism), promoting a “back to normal” that is neither realistic nor convincing in the face of these challenges.
The illiberal right knows all these things and knows how to win elections in their midst: by stoking the fears of disasters to come (real or unreal), they know their followers will see no way out except through building border walls and shutting the floodgates. In the short term they will likely continue winning.
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged authoritarianism, Bernie Sanders, cascading global crises, degrowth, fear, global change, global environmental catastrophe, hope, illiberalism, Noam Chomsky, pandemic politics, pandemics, Raul Ruiz, sustainability, The State of Things, Wim Wenders | Leave a Comment »
Please share the following call for presenters:
“When Corona Met Climate Change… What Changed?”
A series of live, short (under 3 minutes), and creative responses to the intersection of coronavirus and climate change, 50 years after Earth Day and 50 years before Ecotopia Day (EarthDay+100).
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe, Climate change, Media ecology | Tagged calls, Coronavirus, Earth Day, Earth Day 2020, events, hyper-events, lockdown, pandemic politics, virtual gatherings | 1 Comment »
There’s a lot of interesting thinking going on in response to the coronavirus pandemic and how it will “change everything.” Here’s the beginning of a curated sampling. It takes for granted that there will be suffering, a lot of it, unequally distributed and with a preponderance of it coming down on first responders and low-wage, precarious laborers. But the pandemic may also be, as Arundhati Roy calls it, “a portal,” a “historic trigger event,” or as Eric Holthaus puts it, “a moment of triage for the entire planet,” in which our task is twofold: “we have to urgently prevent social and economic collapse and build a new world at the same time.”
The question is: a portal to what (what kind of new world?), and how can we work the odds to favor the possibility of a more desirable “new world”?
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, disaster, disaster capitalism, disaster environmentalism, future scenarios, futures studies, pandemic politics | Leave a Comment »
A very helpful analytical review of the “relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education” has just been published online by Ambio. While it’s limited to a certain selection of key publications, the article, by European sustainabililty researchers Zack Walsh, Jessica Bohme, and Christine Wamsler, covers the terrain of “relational approaches” to ontology, epistemology, and ethics in a fair and evenhanded way.
Here’s their “tanglegram of key relational discourses” (click for larger version):
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged new materialism, Ontology, epistemology, organization studies, process research, process-relational thought, relational theories, relationalism, speculative realism, sustainability science, sustainability studies, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
The outbreak of Coronavirus is a good opportunity to think about how we treat guests whose novel appearance amidst us may pose hardship, but whose continuing presence is undeniable.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, Coronavirus, COVID-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Edward Gorey, global ecology, hyper-events, hyperobjects, One Health Initiative, pandemics, Timothy Morton, virology, viruses | Leave a Comment »
Categories
- Academe (108)
- Anthropocene (74)
- Blog stuff (51)
- Cinema (88)
- Climate change (74)
- Cultural politics (44)
- Eco-culture (174)
- Eco-theory (54)
- Manifestos & auguries (41)
- Media ecology (120)
- Music & soundscape (39)
- Philosophy (261)
- Politics (165)
- Process-relational thought (101)
- Science & society (36)
- Spirit matter (128)
- Uncategorized (57)
- Visual culture (88)
Translate
Archives
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Subscribe2
Top Posts & Pages
Popular resources
Books & articles
Interviews & music
Associated sites
Immanence on Facebook
-
