I originally presented a “primer” to process-relational philosophy on this blog back in 2010. A substantially updated version of it is part of my book, Shadowing the Anthropocene. Here it is as a stand-alone, 10-page PDF file.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged C. S. Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational thought, Whitehead | Leave a Comment »
This announcement is long past due… It’s for the new, open access, peer-reviewed international journal that I am co-editing with Alenda Chang and Janet Walker, through the University of California Press. It includes a call for submissions for two special issue “streams”: “Disaster Media” and “Mediating Art & Science.”
Media+Environment is an open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research. The journal seeks to foster dialogue within a fast-growing global community of researchers and creators working to understand and address the myriad ways that media and environments affect, inhabit, and constitute one another. Founded on the premise that media and environment is a crucial conjunction for our time, the journal encourages both traditional and multimodal forms of scholarship. Read more here.
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged ecocinema studies, ecomedia, media ecology, Media+Environment | 1 Comment »
Like many, I’ve been finding it difficult not to feel an upwelling of anxiety as the scope and scale of the climate emergency has become more and more obvious, as Trump-style political (non-)responses — precisely the kinds of responses that will only make things much worse — have scaled themselves up around the world, and as new forms of political manipulation have been enabled via social media and other technologies, all of which inscribe the most serious cause of the problems — wealth inequality and the interest vested in maintaining it — ever deeper into the matrix of human options. To the extent that there is so much to be gained from maintaining the status quo (or lost from challenging it), to that extent will things continue to get worse. And if keeping up with all these developments seems so difficult, responding to them adequately has seemed almost impossible.
Movements and initiatives like Extinction Rebellion provide glimmers of hope on the possibility of mobilization — the next week and a half (Earth Week) is a particularly active time for them (see here on how you can join a local initiative).
At the same time, the sense of imminent crisis and urgency in all such activism carries an affective thrust that doesn’t necessarily model a healthy and “sustainable” mode of activity. (Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland deal with this to some extent in their recent book, Urgency in the Anthropocene.) The sense that there is so much to do right now — that we should be out in the streets rioting, waving our flags, poking our cameras into politicians’ faces, and constantly delivering monologues (so as to break into the 24-hour news cycle, to keep our opponents on their toes, and to keep ourselves from losing momentum) — all of that can contribute to the sense of heightened anxiety.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | 4 Comments »
It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams.
Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — which is what the “cenes” refer to (from the Paleocene and Eocene to the Pleistocene and Holocene) — typically takes millions of years to establish itself. By that standard, the “Anthropocene” can only be based on the fantasy “that what our civilization is doing just now is going to keep on long enough to fill a geological epoch.” (The Holocene is only about 12,000 years old, so it’s debatable whether it even qualifies as an epoch.)
Continue Reading »Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Ecozoic, geology, Neocene, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck, Transition Culture | 2 Comments »
For someone who teaches media and environment, it’s heartening to see people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and one of her advisors, Cornell legal star Robert Hockett, break through the media din. Even Tucker Carlson had to admit that “it’s nice to have a smart person” on his show to explain things. (Students, take note.)
First, Ocasio-Cortez: Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, campaign finance reform, climate change communication, ecomedia, environmental communication, Fox Business News, Fox News, Green New Deal, Juan Williams, media, right-wing media, Robert Hockett, television, Tucker Carlson | 21 Comments »
And here is Animal Collective’s beautiful International Year of the Reef collaboration with marine biology art-science duo Coral Morphologic, entitled Tangerine Reef:
More on Coral Videography, “pioneers of avant-garde coral macro-videography,” on their web site.
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape | Tagged Animal Collective, coral reefs, Coral Videography, International Year of the Reef | 3 Comments »
I’ve been trying to convince acclaimed northeast Vermont brewer Shaun Hill to add Whitehead’s Process and Reality to his Philosophical Series of ales, stouts, lambics, and porters, on the pretext that it was written down the road from the brewery. But also because Nietzsche, Foucault, Emerson, Thoreau, and Deleuze would appreciate his company. (Shaun says he first has to read the book.)
Meanwhile, here is French avant-garde guitar maestro Richard Pinhas’s take on the book, performed with Japanese noise master Tatsuya Yoshida (a.k.a. Merzbow) and drummer Masami Akita. Three of the album’s four tracks can be heard here.
AllMusic’s Thom Jurek writes about the music:
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, beer, Greensboro VT, Heldon, Hill Farmstead Brewery, Process and Reality, Richard Pinhas, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
As more people attach pronouns to their names (“she/her,” “they, their,” et al.), both in print and when speaking — intended as a way of respecting and “normalizing” pronoun preferences beyond the simple binary of “he” and “she” — I’ve come to recognize a certain awkwardness in one of the common variations: the use of the plural “they, them, their.” In my mother tongue, Ukrainian (and in a few other languages I know), the plural “they” (“ви, вам, вас, вони, їх, їм”) is reserved for respectful speech toward and in deference to elders, rather like the old-fashioned word “thou” in English. Asking to be referred to as an elder feels inappropriate, especially when the request comes from someone far from being an elder.
At the same time, I recognize that I (and I think I’m not alone here) do not necessarily want to have to announce my sexual identity whenever I speak. It’s my business, something to protect perhaps and to reveal selectively, but not to flaunt. My solution to this double dilemma, however, is not to do away with a respectful practice — respectful both to those who prefer neutral terminology and to elders and others deserving of respect. Instead, I would like to propose that we normalize the plural by making it available to everyone. We are all “they,” and we are all “we.” (After all, we also don’t want to reaffirm the dichotomy between “us” and “them,” do we?)
Coincidentally, this would allow us to respect the plurality of each of us — something a growing group of philosophers and psychologists have argued is naturally the case. Human individuality is singular in principle — a principle our highly individualistic society prizes — but in practice this individuality, and especially modern, neoliberal hyperindividuality, is both an achievement and, in a cross-cultural sense, something of an aberration. Most societies have traditionally valued harmony, belonging, togetherness, and solidarity at least as much as they have valued individuality.
Continue Reading »Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I was interviewed yesterday by the local CBS-affiliated WCAX news show on the topic of how to motivate Vermonters to take action on climate change (while Bernie Sanders and Cornel West were speaking just up the road). What was used of our interview was fairly minimal, so I thought I would share the notes I prepared in the moments between getting their questions and doing the interview.
The entire piece can be read or viewed here. Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Politics | Tagged climate action, climate motivation, interview, news, small-c conservative values, Vermont, Vermonters, VPIRG, WCAX | 3 Comments »
Categories
- Academe (108)
- Anthropocene (77)
- Blog stuff (53)
- Cinema (88)
- Climate change (76)
- Cultural politics (47)
- Eco-culture (178)
- Eco-theory (57)
- Manifestos & auguries (46)
- Media ecology (128)
- Music & soundscape (39)
- Philosophy (264)
- Politics (177)
- Process-relational thought (102)
- Science & society (39)
- Spirit matter (133)
- Uncategorized (62)
- Visual culture (90)
Archives
Subscribe2
Popular resources
Publications
Selected talks & interviews
Music
Associated sites
-
-