July 10, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
So, 150 or so fairly prominent individuals write/sign an open letter defending “justice and open debate.” (We can call them intellectuals, or literati, or academics, or even celebrities of a sort — maybe “intellectual celebrities” — but see point #1 below on generalizations.)
In the letter, they single out Donald Trump and the “forces of illiberalism” for criticism, but aim their guns at something more general and vague — “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty” — with allusions to (citation-free) examples that only hint at specifics. Media responses have provided the missing object here, calling it “cancel culture” – a term that emerged in social media, but that has been vigorously taken up by the right as a problem of the left.
Some people are pleased by the letter, even delighted, especially on the right (note WSJ’s headline “Bonfire of the Liberals“), others are not happy at all. At least one community feels threatened and sees it as promoting an erasure of their very existence (“containing as many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions as it does”), I’m guessing especially because of one of the signatories (the one who is the most commonly cited in headlines; see point #1 below).
Here are a few observations on the letter and the responses it has elicited, accompanied by questions that are only partly rhetorical and a hypothesis that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere yet.
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Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged cancel culture, culture wars, free speech, intellectual class, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, media ecology, media platforms, media politics, media regimes, Noam Chomsky, print literati | Leave a Comment »
July 1, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The Covid-19 situation in the United States, which has become the epicenter of new infections because of its flawed and chaotic response to the pandemic, is seen by some around the world as an emergency case of its own, requiring some sort of defensive response by countries that could become similarly infected. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper notes that “The world is putting America in quarantine.” (The piece was written before the new case rates began hitting over 40,000 on a daily basis, as they have this past week.)
Cooper largely credits Donald Trump for that. He writes:
A nation that could elect Donald Trump is deeply, deeply sick. […] When a country is as gangrenous as the United States, the rot tends to spread through its entire system sooner or later.
But the disease that, for Cooper, is represented by Trump is not so easy to quarantine or excise. It is not just that of poor leadership coupled with an underfunded public health care system that has become deeply mismatched with state and local needs and capacities. It is a disease with multiple layers that can be found in variations all around the world, from Brazil to Russia to Turkey to the Philippines.
To successfully diagnose and treat a disease, one must understand its symptomatology and its etiology (causes). With that goal in mind, I want to consider some of the factors involved in what we might tentatively call “Trump-like derangement syndrome,” or “TLDS” (which bears no necessary relation to “Trump derangement syndrome,” though a few of its causes might). I use this term as a placeholder to indicate that the problems of the United States appear (for many) to be linked to its president, but that there may be other conditions similar to it in other countries around the world, and that its causes are still to be worked out.
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Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged authoritarianism, Coronavirus, COVID-19, digital capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, illiberalism, information warfare, political technology, populism, Putinism, Russia, strongman politics, surveillance capitalism, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, United States | Leave a Comment »
June 29, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff’s widely lauded The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which some have placed alongside Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as essential reading for understanding today’s global economy.
The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst of a “fourth great transformation” (to use Karl Polanyi’s terminology), with “resources” — specifically, land, labor, money, and behavior — being extracted from the social relations and moral obligations within which they had previously been embedded, to become something new.
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Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged behavioral surplus, books, cognitive capitalism, communicative capitalism, digital media, disembedding, information civilization, information economy, instrumentarian power, Karl Polanyi, knowledge economy, media ecology, Polanyi, Shoshana Zuboff, stages of capitalism, surveillance capitalism, The Great Transformation | Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Yesterday was a perfect illustration of how exciting (and bewildering) it can be to read the U.S. national news. Here’s a multiple-choice quiz about it.
Which
of the following occurred yesterday?
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Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged news, Trumpland | 1 Comment »
June 26, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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.
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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 »
June 25, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Social media debates over the J. K. Rowling “transphobia” flare-up have encouraged me to formulate my own position on all of this. I’m still in the midst of that and would be happy for feedback (respectful, please).
In general, I see this as an example of what happens when two social movements move forward in partial tension with each other, and when the points of tension appear more visible than the points of connection. The movements in this case may be 1970s style feminism and transgender rights, but similar dynamics can be found in other situations. Social movements aren’t all equal and they call upon varying forms of engagement and evaluation, but social media, especially of the rapid-fire kind (like Twitter), tend to bring out the tensions rather than the potentials for synthesis. That’s where there might be a lesson in all of this.
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Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought | Tagged conservatism, essentialism, feminism, gender theory, identity, J. K. Rowling, liberalism, sex, social theory, transgender, transphobia | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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.
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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 »
June 11, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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):
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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 »
June 7, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged America, events, findings, George Floyd, gleanings, news, police brutality, U.S. politics | 3 Comments »
June 4, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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.
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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 »
June 2, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This post continues my thinking about the cultural fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic (see here for previous posts) and about conspiracy theories and new media (see here) — all very relevant as the George Floyd protests and Trump’s response to them reveal this country’s open wounds.
As a longtime observer of global-subcultural epistemic cultures (ways of collectively making sense of a rapidly changing world), I’ve been fascinated, and occasionally disconcerted, to observe some unusual forms of interplay — what I will call “network realignment” — between media-based subcultures.
There are two forms of this that I want to comment on in this post. The first is a “strange bedfellows” variety that has been evident in the response to Covid-19 — specifically to do with the increasing overlaps and sometimes convergences between what used to be called New Age culture and what is now called alt-right culture. The second, which has to do with the “alt-right” and the “alt-left,” is more difficult to put one’s finger on, but may ultimately be the more interesting one. I’m going to suggest a possible link between the two, a link that is in the very nature of social media, and which is evident in the way the George Floyd murder is playing itself out across the United States.
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Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter | Tagged affect, affective contagion, alt-left, alt-right, alternative health, Anomalies, anti-vaccination movement, anti-vaxx, complementary health, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, conspirology, digital media, disinformation, emotional contagion, emotional surge protection, George Floyd, George Floyd protests, illiberalism, infowar, media ecology, media politics, mediasphere, monochord, New Age culture, New Age movement, populism, post-truth, QAnon, Robert Fludd, social media, Trump, Wu Ming Foundation | 5 Comments »
May 30, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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.”
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Posted in Academe | Tagged academic publishing, journals, JSTOR, knowledge society, open access, peer-reviewed literature, Process Studies, public scholarship, university presses | Leave a Comment »
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