August 11, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The following six books all have the same title. Without looking them up, match each book’s subtitle with the author and publication details listed below.
- Coming to Our Senses: Affect and An Order of Things for Global Culture
- Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West
- Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
- Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism
- Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophe
- Coming to Our Senses: Significance of the Arts for American Education
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Posted in Academe | Tagged books, Foucault, genealogy, Morris Berman, quizzes | 7 Comments »
July 31, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Last updated on November 11, 2018
Immanence sometimes dips into areas of controversial or “boundary” science, which means areas of science whose interpretation is both publicly and scientifically contentious. While I don’t consider climate science to be all that scientifically controversial (though it is certainly politically controversial), and the general topics of “fake news,” “information war,” and the alternative media ecosystem (which are sometimes covered here) are not particularly scientifically contentious, topics such as “the Hum,” to take one example, fall into the area of anomalous phenomena — phenomena whose ontological status is considered unknown, mysterious, or problematic from a scientific perspective. (See note 1 below on the Hum.)
Public health has seen a number of such contentious issues arise, and in recent years the growth in cases of Lyme disease, and more so of “chronic Lyme,” has joined the ranks of other syndromes and conditions — from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or specific variants of it, such as Gulf War Syndrome), Recovered Memory Syndrome, Multiple Personality Disorder, and others — which have at various times teetered precipitously at, or over, the edges of what the scientific community considers “real.” There are connections between many of these phenomena and environmental change (on that, see Mary Beth Pfeiffer’s book), but those won’t be the primary focus of this post. Continue Reading »
Posted in Science & society | Tagged alternative health, Anomalies, anomalistics, Anthropocene, bugs, chronic Lyme disease, complementary health, conspiracies, ecological syndrome, fear of nature, global hum, health scares, hysteria, infectious diseases, institutional trust, Lyme disease, Lyme wars, medical establishment, medicine, modern syndromes, public health wars, scientific controversies, uncertainty | 7 Comments »
July 13, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage.
It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting in and accommodating oneself to a larger civic body, a larger civitas.
The problem today is Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged body politic, civics, civillity, communicative discourse, illiberalism, incivility, left politics, Politics, post-truth, Trump | 3 Comments »
June 20, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
(Or twice the video below.)
Immanence passed its tenth anniversary last month and somehow failed to celebrate it. (The actual anniversary, May 11, marks the posting of this two-line fragment. Regular posts took another seven months to appear, or at least to take on a permanent form.)
To celebrate, I recently re-did the Primer page, which collects some of the more interesting theoretical/analytical posts across several themes — “Eco-theory and climate politics,” “Post-constructivism and Speculative Realism,” “Process-relational theory,” “Cinema and media theory,” “The body politic (politics, affect, culture),” “Interdisciplinarity, scholarly publishing, and academic life,” “the ‘Anthropocene’ naming debate,” and “Readings” (i.e., book discussions). I also added to the “Faves” page. Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Blog stuff | Tagged anniversaries, Anthropocene, blog, Critical Holocene, David Bowie, immanence, Late Holocene | 4 Comments »
June 15, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”):
rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes shape systematically and repeatedly with each ‘Earthbeat’ taking 12 months. During the course of a single ‘beat,’ the northern hemisphere contracts, reaching a peak in February and March, at the same time as the southern hemisphere expands. This is followed by Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society | Tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes | 4 Comments »
May 25, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Please circulate widely…
FEVERISH WORLD 2018-2068: ARTS & SCIENCES OF COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL
A Symposium and Convergence in Burlington, Vermont, October 20-22, 2018
Fifty years after the widespread international protests of 1968 challenged institutional norms, and some sixty years after C. P. Snow lamented the gap between academia’s “two cultures,” those of the arts and the sciences, it is time to ask whether educational institutions have changed in ways that help us address the world’s intensifying crises. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Anthropocene | Tagged 1968, artscience, Bruno Latour, C. P. Snow, eco-arts, EcoCulture Lab, ecopoetics, ecopolitics, Feverish World, two cultures, University of Vermont | 6 Comments »
May 23, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen)
It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems.
The implications of that are pretty simple, but also profound.
For instance, that transition will require phasing out all of the millions of jobs — predatory jobs, bullshit jobs — that are premised on squeezing a profit at the expense of people, communities, and living systems. And it will require a simultaneous phasing in of all the work that it takes to make our communities socially and ecologically sustainable — healthy, happy, just, flourishing, eudaimonic, and ecologically diverse and resilient. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics | Tagged bullshit jobs, capitalism, David Graeber, ecology, environmental studies, eudaimonia, higher education, Movement for a regenerative university, regenerative economics, resilience, socialism, sustainability, sustainability transition, transition, Transition Culture, universities | 14 Comments »
May 22, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Okay, so I watched Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding (not so much intentionally as to enjoy the loving company of my co-habitants) and was impressed by the tension between Bishop Michael Curry’s sermonizing on love and the dour and perplexed faces of many of the royal-loving Brits in the audience. Diana Evans’ Guardian piece gets at that tension very nicely.
I also caught the references in Curry’s speech to Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, whose work has been creeping into mainstream Catholic views about humanity and ecology, and whose views undergird — with significant critical rethinking — the views of ecotheologian Thomas Berry. (Berry should be familiar to most readers of Immanence: see, e.g., here, here, and here. In fact, his term “Ecozoic” figures in the tag line to my EcoCulture Lab — oh, and by the way, welcome, readers, to the EcoCulture Lab.)
Now, in a stunning article on Religion Dispatches, Notre Dame theology and history of science graduate John Slattery claims that Teilhard was not only forward-thinking in his embrace of evolutionary theory, but was also disappointingly retrograde in his embrace of eugenics and blatant racism. Continue Reading »
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged anti-racism, Christianity, cosmology, Eucocentrism, eugenics, evolution, evolutionary theory, Peirce, racism, spiritual evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, theology, Thomas Berry, Whitehead | 3 Comments »
Coming soon…
“volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz”
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Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, Punctum Books, Shadowing the | 9 Comments »
April 15, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
My Gund Institute research talk from a few months ago, on “Navigating Earth’s ‘Zone of Alienation’: Chernobyl and the Search for Adequate Images of the Anthropocene,” can now be viewed online (see link below). It consists mostly of out-takes from my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, forthcoming later this year from Punctum Books.
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Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy | Tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, Chornobyl, Four Noble Truths, Gund Institute, Herzog, images, nuclear accidents, nuclear power, sacrifice zones, Shadowing the Anthropocene, slow violence, socio-ecological suffering, Ukraine, University of Kansas | 6 Comments »
April 11, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
… that might get humans to pull through the next few centuries relatively intact as a species (if not undiminished or unscathed): Decarbonization, Deplasticization, Demilitarization, Decolonization, and Demographic Transition.
The first, Decarbonization, entails a dramatic reduction in industrial production of atmospheric carbon (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. It will keep conditions for the flourishing of human life from getting too unstable and unreliable. As it’s mainly a technical task, it should be pretty doable, as long as the interests vested in maintaining current carbon-heavy systems can be overcome.
The second, Deplasticization, entails the dramatic reduction in industrial production of (relatively) nonbiodegradable polymers (including microplastics). It will keep us from choking on our own industrial puke. Like the first, it’s also a technical task, so in principle it’s pretty doable.
Those two are the easy ones. Continue Reading »
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged Alan Weisman, capitalism, Countdown, decapitalization, decarbonization, Decolonization, demilitarization, demographic transition, deplasticization, human population growth, overpopulation, plastic planet | 3 Comments »
March 22, 2018 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Or, Things I love, like, dislike, and hate about it…
I love that I can research, write, talk, think, and teach about things that I’m passionate about, or at least care very much about. And because that passion derives from a sense that the world needs certain kinds of engagement and that my activity can contribute to them, that is immensely satisfying. Curiosity and the desire to engage with the world is what drove me to academe, and, happily, it’s kept me there. This part of my work has been making up about 25-60% of my workload, depending on the year, which makes me one of the blessed ones. (It’s far from the norm in academe, a norm that’s been generally receding, and it usually takes some time to get there, but it’s possible.)
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Posted in Academe | 21 Comments »
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