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Search Results for 'climate change'

Egypt & everywhere

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, tagged , , , on February 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Uprisings, revolutions, and sudden political realignments are perfect subjects for process-relational philosophical reflection. Their causes are always somewhat mysterious; historians may reconstruct the events that led up to them, and may come up with theories to account for them, but these almost always remain highly contestable. They are moments when suddenly much more is at stake than is normally the case.
[. . .]
But the effort will have been worth it because, as Antonio says, “To behold such a space is a beautiful thing” and “to unlearn it is impossible.” The role of the theory of self-determination and civil disobedience (alongside the practice of social networking) in these uprisings cannot be underestimated. And every time those streams get watered, they deepen.

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gleanings

Posted in Climate change, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Scientists found that Asian and American brains respond completely differently when faced with images of dominance and submission, and when evaluating character traits of themselves as opposed to other people. Asians and Americans gathered with other world leaders to fiddle at a Mexican resort while buildings burned. [. . .] Graham Harman and Steven Shaviro got ready to slug it out in the middleweight neo-realist philosopher category of the international thought-wrestling society. [. . .]

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slouching toward the Cancun bar

Posted in Eco-culture on November 15, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Peaksurfer‘s Albert Bates has a very good article up called The Great Change: Slouching towards Cancun. A few tidbits: Because of the huge outpouring of non-profit energy, money and effort at Copenhagen last year, and the subsequent meltdown of the Copenhagen round, the approach to this year’s COP (Conference of Parties to the Framework Climate […]

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Invictus & the politics of affect

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 2, 2010 | 14 Comments »

There are many things one can say about Invictus: about Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela, Eastwood’s directorial prowess and editorial conceits (e.g., masculinity and its transformation through individual experience), the film’s characterization of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its portrayal of the actual story of the South African national rugby team’s, the Springboks’, stunning rise to victory in the 1995 World Cup. What interests me most, though, is its depiction of mass affect and collective emotion, which are portrayed in two of the main variants these take in today’s world: sports and politics. [. . .]

The film’s crystal moments, those affect-carrying plateaus or peak moments embodying its main tensions, are those surrounding the combat on the field and its emanation into the crowd: slowed down crunches of bodies against bodies (unprotected, unlike in American football), sweat leaping between them out of their crushing impact, rapid cuts between on-field plays that occur too quickly to be followed and can only be enjoyed as sheer spectacle, and crowds leaping for joy, singing, applauding, and dancing, their emotions spreading like waves across the stadium, the streets, and the nation. [. . .]

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two democracies… (& planet compost)

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »

The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. My last post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.

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Brulle’s response to Lakoff

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , on May 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Robert Brulle has kindly shared his reply to George Lakoff’s article “Why Environmental Understanding, or ‘Framing,’ Matters.” See below for further discussion of the article. I found Dr. Lakoff’s comments quite interesting and revealing of the limitations of cognitive science in the analysis of social change processes. From a sociological perspective, attitudes and beliefs are […]

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