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Musical process and reality

March 19, 2024 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

A lot has been written about music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: for instance, on Deleuze and music theory, on music after Deleuze, and on Deleuze’s “Thought-Music,” and there’ve been some valiant efforts to put Deleuze to music, like this one, this one, and this one, and several related to Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, including an entire record label.

Not nearly as much has been done with the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. If we take his three key late-period books of metaphysics — Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought — we find, to my knowledge, only a handful of albums named after them: free saxophonist Evan Parker’s Process and Reality, the collaboration of the same title by Richard Pinhas, Tatsuya Yoshida, and Merzbow/Masami Akita (which I wrote about here), Steve Bicknell’s EP Modes of Thought, and an album by Anu BlonDee that may or may not be titled after the latter book as well (with track titles like “Mahjong Tea” and “It Ain’t Ova,” I’m not convinced). There’s nothing named after Adventures of Ideas, which could be because it, like most of Whitehead’s books, wasn’t particularly adventurously named. Process and Reality remains his most compelling title (and still awaits a beer named after it, which Difference and Repetition has long had).

If there’s any generalization we can make about music inspired by either Deleuze or Whitehead, it’s that their work appeals especially to electronic musicians (all the Mille Plateaux folks, Bicknell, maybe BlonDee), free jazzers (Evan Parker), and those populating the experimental terrain between the two genres (Pinhas and his collaborators). (My own efforts — tracks like this one and a few others, rather than full albums — are in a more minimalist vein, but the inspiration has generally been free-jazzy.)

It’s a bit surprising to me that no well-known 20th century composer shows any clear and documented influence from Whitehead’s philosophy. You’d think, for instance, that Schoenbergian twelve-tonalism would have been influenced by Whitehead’s earlier or middle period writings on science and relativity.

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Posted in Music & soundscape, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

White smoke

March 5, 2024 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Everyone sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for geologists to finally decide whether or not we have entered the Anthropocene epoch can now breath a sigh of relief. They’ve sent up their white smoke signal to indicate that yes, they’ve decided. (Oh, maybe I’m mixing it up with the Vatican.)

They’ve decided no. But it doesn’t mean what you think it does.

If it sounds like they’re passing the buck, well, they are geologists, the turtles of the scientific world. They shouldn’t be making radical, epoch-ending pronouncements.

Actually, it may mean what I and others have been saying it ought to mean: that the Anthropocene is an event, not an epoch. It’s the kind of thing that, in the geological record, happens pretty suddenly, shockingly — “a complex, transformative, and ongoing event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event” — and everything afterward is different.

How different? We won’t know until we’re an epoch or two removed from it. Let’s enjoy the ride.

(But in the meantime, you can read Erle Ellis‘s account of the decision. Ellis resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group last year, partly because he disagreed with the narrowing of criteria the group was using to define the Anthropocene.)

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Why religion isn’t (coherent)

February 29, 2024 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Language is an instrument for dealing with the details of reality. All of our words, along with the ways we string them together, contain or reflect concepts — signs or semiotic constructs – by which we refer to elements of a dynamic world. Because they are essentially pragmatic and context-specific, if we scrutinize any of them too closely or probe them too deeply, they become incoherent. (That’s what Jacques Derrida’s voluminous writings on deconstruction were intended to demonstrate.)

“Religion” is one of those words, and I’m going to argue here that its value has diminished significantly since it emerged into wide usage. (This isn’t my original argument; see, e.g., Benson, McCutcheon, or my earlier articles on this.) It came into broad usage for comparative reasons — to describe discrete things called “religions” — at a time when Europeans were colonizing and encountering other places and cultures around the world. But that world was changing rapidly, and in the intervening time the things called “religions” have also changed due to various processes (which we can loosely, but also problematically, label “modernization”). As a result, “religions” aren’t what they used to be, and a lot of other things have emerged which don’t fit the category of “religion.” These things all fit on a spectrum, but the concept of “religion” keeps us from being able to describe that spectrum appropriately.

It’s not that the elements of “religion” have gone away. They are all still with us.

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Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Ontology 101

February 9, 2024 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The word ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies.

Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being” or “of the nature of being,” or the study of “what is and of how it is.” I prefer to call it “the study and understanding of reality in its differing contours, dimensions, and modes.” So what does that mean?

Let’s take a random list of items: the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain falling outside my window as I write, the number six, a copy of The Book of Mormon found in a drawer in room 613 of the New York Downtown Marriott, gravity, Jesus’s resurrection on the third day, Spiderman, an earworm of Pere Ubu’s “Chinese Radiation,” and the Red King.

Each of these is real in some sense or other: for instance, as a tangible object, as a concept (a type or category, a theory, et al.), as an event that either occurred or was imagined to occur, as a possibility, etc. Some of their realities may overlap.

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Indigenous identity & Vermont: an update, updated

December 22, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This is a follow-up to a series of posts shared here on the topic of Indigenous identity, allyship, and the situation in my local state of Vermont. The first three can be found here: titled “Reindigenization and allyship: starting points,” “Reindigenization & allyship, part 2,” and “Reindigenization & allyship, part 3: on getting it right.” I’ve been a co-organizer of several key events related to this issue at the University of Vermont, and I plan to share further thoughts on it in the future. Here I am just providing links to recent scholarship and reportage that could help bring readers up to date.

The conversation continues to evolve, and this page may be updated as it does. The list of links is not comprehensive. If you have other material you think should be here, please send it to me. This page was originally published on December 22, 2023, revised on May 7, 2024, and most recently updated on October 30, 2024.

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Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

For a 21st century Logos

December 20, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Teaching my course in comparative spiritual practices, I find there is a rationality underpinning each, but that some require lesser leaps of faith (for us twenty-first-century humans) than others.

Stoicism is one of the lesser-leap philosophies: it has a pretty systematic account of the nature of things, which resonates with modern science reasonably well, and it shows you how to confirm that nature empirically. Of its Greco-Roman-Hellenistic kin, Epicureanism has a lower confirmation bar, and Skepticism still lower; so for those who like some bar, Stoicism is a good bet.

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Angel of Apocalyptic History

December 9, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

My talk at the recent “Apocalyptic Anxieties” conference, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is available for viewing at the SFU Institute for the Humanities YouTube page, or below. Here is an abstract of the talk:

From the Angel of Apocalyptic History to the Optimism of the Will: Climate Hope within States of Urgency

Apocalyptic scenarios have accompanied environmental politics for decades; today they are globalized in a profusion of political and ecological anxieties (representing a “pessimism of the intellect”) and a welter of conspiracy theories. Apocalyptic trauma has also been the shadow side of the centuries-long “slow violence” of extractive colonialism, and of the fascisms of the twentieth, and arguably twenty-first, centuries. This talk will seek insight into apocalypse in the historical meditations of Walter Benjamin — specifically, in his “angel of history” who “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” in front of his feet — and in the writings of Gramsci, Stengers, Mbembe, and others. It will propose an “optimism of the will” rooted in a willingness to face Benjamin’s “angel,” who challenges us to acknowledge commonality with humans and nonhumans facing the uncertainties of a world unmoored from any guarantees — of “nature,” of “truth,” of “progress,” of scientific knowledge, or even of human survival itself. 

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Woodsworth Chair: Three challenges

November 22, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m delighted to formally announce that I have accepted an offer to take up the position of J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, beginning next year. (Simon Fraser recently, once again, took the top spot among comprehensive universities in Macleans’ Canadian university rankings.)

The chair is named after J. S. Woodsworth (1874-1942), a prominent Canadian activist-intellectual, pacifist and labor campaigner, co-founder and first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, predecessor of today’s New Democratic Party), co-architect of Canada’s social-welfare system, and minister (the robed type) who was part of the Social Gospel movement. It will be a great honor to represent these aspects of his legacy and to follow in the footsteps of previous chair holders Eleanor Stebner, Ed Broadbent, and Alan Whitehorn.

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Posted in Academe, Manifestos & auguries | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

The population bli(m)p

October 14, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

When I was younger, I would occasionally hear from fellow environmentalists that the “real problem” was human overpopulation. (The standard answer, from the well informed, was: nope, it’s inequality, extractive capitalism, institutional inertia, patriarchal values, colonialism, et al. “Overpopulation” was a symptom, not the disease.)

The population-mongers have mostly faded since then, as the “demographic transition” argument has proven itself pretty convincing (people with greater opportunities for a real life end up having fewer children, and more and more countries have taken that path). And as most environmentalists have come to see the role of culture, politics, and economics in shaping our problems.

But I still find it stunning to see a diagram like this one, in a NY Times article from a few weeks ago.

It shows a range of projections of global human population growth, with almost all of them peaking in the coming decades — at 10 billion around 2085 — and then falling way, way down, in fact to below 110 million within a matter of centuries.

According to the author, Dean Spears, who is an economist at University of Texas Austin’s Population Research Center but who is working from data produced by leading demographic studies, “per year births” may have already peaked, as early as 2014, and “peak human population” is expected to be achieved between 2060 and 2090. (I find it hard to believe that we won’t hit 10 billion by 2050. I hope to be around to see.)

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Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Conversations with chatbots

September 4, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Like a lot of university faculty these days, I’ve been thinking about, and testing out, chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. In fact, I’ve been quizzing them on various things.

They have answered some of my questions with general-consensus knowledge. For instance, on whether or not it’s too late for humanity to successfully respond to the climate crisis so as to “preserve a civilizationally-conducive climate,” both gave reasonable, concise, “first shot” answers at the question, in the manner of “on the one hand” this, “on the other hand” that. ChatGPT-3.5 assessed the “too late” probability at 20-30% and “not too late” at 70-80%. Bard assessed the first at 40% and the second at 60%. (Bard is a little more up-to-date in its database.) Both provided the kinds of responses you’d expect from students who’ve read IPCC report summaries and a smattering of other popular writings.

But on some issues they plainly make stuff up. Asked who are the most important authors and writings that have comparatively analyzed the philosophies of A. N. Whitehead and C. S. Peirce, Bard provided a few surprisingly reasonable answers, in no logical order (Corrington, Griffin, Hartshorne, Cobb), but threw in a made-up name, “Donna Orange,” a “professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont” and author of the book “Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Logic of Chance.” No such person is or has been at the University of Vermont (my university for the last twenty years). An actual Donna Orange, who works for NYU, wrote her doctorate (and later a small book) on Peirce’s theism, but not with that title.

Other responses get more wildly fictional. Asked about Ukrainian ecofeminist philosophers, Bard invented two out of four people from scratch, along with books they have supposedly written. Asked to create a course syllabus on “environment in world cinema,” Bard either made up or seriously mangled every single book (or author) it listed. (For the record, ChatGPT didn’t list books, just films, and otherwise tended to do better.)

The normal explanation for this chatbot creativity seems to be that their creators have programmed them to give seemingly reasonable answers even when they aren’t sure of those answers (as if AIs could be “sure” of anything). In their haste to respond quickly, they blend facts together into “believable” responses. Clearly, the imperative to satisfy its querents comes before the imperative to be accurate.

But the U. of Vermont reference made me wonder: did Bard throw that in as a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, an empty plot-forwarding device meant to deflect from the fact (while still suggesting it) that Bard is actually playing with me?

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Posted in Media ecology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ecomedia Studies handbook

August 8, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m happy to share the news that the Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies is out — and is entirely open-access, which is especially thrilling, as Routledge handbooks can otherwise get pretty expensive. It’s a 36-chapter mega-volume that tries to define the field and lay out some of its most exciting international contours. The volume is the culmination of three years of work between co-editors Antonio López (whose initiative powered the process), Miriam Tola, Stephen Rust, Kiu-wai Chu, Alenda Chang, and myself, working with about 46 other authors from around the world.

It includes my co-written (with António Lopez) chapter defining “ecomedia” (“When Do Media Become Ecomedia?”) and theoretical chapter on the “three ecologies” (“Three Ecologies: Ecomediality as Ontology“), as well as 34 other chapters (plus an Afterword by Sean Cubitt) grouped into five sections: “Ecomedia Theory,” “Ecomateriality,” “Political Ecology,” “Ecocultures,” and “Eco-Affects.” The authors are arguably a who’s who of the burgeoning field, covering a range of topics, which the back cover lists as including “infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies.”

You can read or download the entire roughly 400-page volume, or individual chapters, from the Routledge Open Access web site, by clicking here.

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Media ecology | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Symbiocene@Ruigoord.NL

July 27, 2023 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Two things to consider before your morning coffee.

1) We are living through a Holocene collapse event,* when the nearly 12,000 year old regime of relative climate stability, the “comfort zone” for most of what we know as human civilization, is beginning to tear to shreds. (Here’s just one of the shreds from yesterday’s news.) It’s likely that climate havoc will grow, its extreme weather events and destabilizations creating the conditions for increased hunger, drought, heat waves, mass migration, disease, and warfare on a global scale. Those species that survive will eventually see a stabilization into a new “normal,” but any predictions about what that will look and feel like, or what role humans might have in it, if any, are premature.

2) Once you accept that, it should become clear that certain ways of living, and certain pursuits in life, are more worthy, more honorable, and more satisfying than others. The worthy ones will likely be focused on sharing (rather than hoarding) the joys of the world, fleeting as they are, and on devoting oneself to smoothening the ride for others. Ask yourself what capacities you can bring to easing the burden of what’s to come, then apply them as beautifully as you can. 

Now, enjoy your coffee.

The background to these promptings is that for the last three days I have been visiting, speaking at, and communing with a large group of thoughtful and creative people at a symposium hosted by the Ruigoord “free cultural space” outside Amsterdam, called Towards the Symbiocene?

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Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, Eco-culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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