My recent E-Flux article, “Russia, Decolonization, and the Capitalism-Democracy Muddle,” raised the question of Russia’s potential “decolonization” — what it means (and doesn’t), and how the debate over it, and over decolonization in general, needs some political updating. The article seems no less relevant after the abortive mutiny led last week by the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin (which I wrote a little about here).
That Russia, like all colonial empires, will need to “decompose” itself, is something I take for granted. (My other blog has plenty of resources for you if you’re not convinced that Russia is an “unreconstructed” Euro-colonial empire.) The only question is how: whether by some kind of “guided transition” (which has been tried before, in the 1990s, but on a misguided basis), a replacement or even collapse at the top accompanied by a strengthening at the parliamentary level (leading perhaps to actual, rather than fake, federalism), or through some sort of implosion or fission, accompanied by civil war(s), as seemed quite possible last weekend.
What that article didn’t address is the eco-political and “ecocidal” dimensions of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Those were a subject broached at a conference I spoke at a couple of days ago, held in Tutzing, Germany, and organized by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. The following is a brief summary of the comments I made there, followed by a few afterthoughts on ecocide in light of the Russian detonation of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine.
As the world breathes a sigh of relief that this meeting happened at all, ecocritics can wonder about the semiotics of the image framing Chairman Xi Jinping’s meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Relief :
1. a feeling of reassurance and relaxation following release from anxiety or distress.
2. financial or practical assistance given to those in special need or difficulty.
3. a person or group of people replacing others who have been on duty.
4. the state of being clearly visible or obvious due to being accentuated; a method of moulding, carving, or stamping in which the design stands out from the surface, to a greater (high relief) or lesser (low relief) extent; a piece of sculpture in relief; a representation of relief given by an arrangement of line or colour or shading;
GEOGRAPHY: difference in height from the surrounding terrain. (Oxford English Dictionary)
Is this: China as a force of nature? Xi backed by the power of the Earth itself? Blinken representing the upstart (phallic) power (on the left) arriving at the (immovable) granddaddy of all things under heaven?
There are at least 33 other halls in the Great Hall of the People that they could have met in (and many more images that they could have met in front of).
These thoughts, written in the aftermath of a half-day conference on race-shifting (first part viewable here) and influenced by Kim TallBear’s critique of identity, have me going out on a limb, for reasons that are likely pretty obvious. But I will persevere with them, and ask that you read them through to the end before reacting to isolated parts of the argument. Thoughts welcome.
1. Gender transitioning and race-shifting are parallel processes insofar as they involve a move (shift or transition) from one pole of a dyad to another: either from male to female or vice versa, or, in the case of race shifting, from one racial category (e.g., white, black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, et al.) to another.
2. Gender transitioning and race-shifting concern identity, which in late capitalism has become both deeply personalized (“this is about who I am”) and deeply politicized (“I have the right to be myself” = “we have the right to be ourselves”). Talking about them, in North America today (and to varying degrees elsewhere), has for this reason become something of a minefield. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Since they are important issues for many people, we need to talk about them coherently.
Sharing info on tomorrow’s University of Vermont event on “Indigenous Sovereignty, Race-Shifting, and University Responsibility,” which I am honored to facilitate. The speakers include Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Dakota/University of Alberta), Chris Anderson (Métis/University of Alberta), and Brenda Macdougall (Métis/University of Ottawa), with a response from Darren Ranco (Penobscot/University of Maine Orono). The event is free and open to the public, and registration for remote attendance is still open. Click on the image below for details.
The event is related to the three posts I have written on the topic, which you can read here: 1, 2, 3. It is part of a learning process I and others have been undergoing in our Vermont/New England/Great Lakes-St. Lawrence context.
What if the ways you take up this space—the pauses, transitions, and gaps between doings—shapes the world as much as the doings?* Do we fill the space with restless preoccupation? Death drive compulsions? Nervous uncertainty? Or curious delight at the poignancy of each thing?**
What if the redemption of the world depended on how we fill it, or allow it to be its own?
*the shared implication of affect theory, Buddhism, apophatic theology, Deleuzian cinepoetics, among others
One of the benefits of being a Cinepoetics fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin this year is that I was able to see a lot of films at last month’s Berlin International Film Festival, thanks to my Cinepoetics accreditation. (Another benefit is simply to be in Berlin, which is such a rich place for film, music, art, and theatre festivals, exhibitions of various kinds, and so much more. I’ll post something eventually about some of that.)
The Berlinale screens a tremendous diversity of films, from the popular to the experimental, with multiple themes every year. Of my favorites, these were three that stuck with me, for different reasons:
My reflections on a year of full-scale war in Ukraine can be read here.
Among them:
Like Ukrainians in general, whose resistance to the Russian onslaught has been remarkable, President Volodymyr Zelensky has done wonders in so many ways. But one thing neither he nor his western supporters have succeeded at — as this New York Times analysis shows — is convincing the global South to support Ukraine in its struggle. Wartime emergencies call for military support, but diplomatic pressure on Russia also needs to increase, which means that Ukraine’s foreign policy must broaden.
There are no good reasons for postcolonial democracies like Lula’s Brazil and the ANC’s South Africa to remain “neutral” in an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle. […] Zelensky and western supporters need to make clear that that’s what this is, and that no “tradition” of cold war “nonalignment” makes sense any more. We’re in a new world with new allies and new enemies, whose contours will increasingly be shaped by new conflicts. One of these — and one whose “war ecology” (to use Pierre Charbonnier’s astute phrase) shapes the nature of this conflict already — is that between fossil-fuel authoritarians (the likes of Putin and Trump) and climate-transitioning democracies (of whom the EU, Biden’s US, and Lula’s Brazil can be leaders).
It’s high time to shed the old lenses and shape a new global reality. In that, Ukraine can stand at the forefront.
Thinking further about the global climate precariat (and the ontology of climate trauma, etc.), I’ve been reading a set of books that try to articulate a “class politics” for the present eco-political conjuncture. In particular, Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022) and Bruno Latour’s and Nikolaj Schultz’s On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (Polity, 2023, Eng.) deserve to be read alongside each other as, at first blush, they seem to be about the same thing — the “class antagonism” of a world divided between climate “winners” and “losers.” On closer inspection, however, I think the two books are about different things occurring at different temporal scales, which makes them somewhat complementary. This post explains the difference and the complementarity.
Television guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine has passed away. In his honor, I’m reposting something I wrote back in 2010, a version of which made it into Shadowing the Anthropocene. Much of it deals with the objects-versus-relations debate that was occupying the then very active “speculative realist” (“new materialist”) blogosphere.The first video captures Verlaine and band playing the classic “Marquee Moon” at a concert (long past their heyday) in 2005. Note that all these old posts are still available and searchable; see “Explore” and “Primer.”
Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter.
In his reply, he later mistakes another author — of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different — for me, confusingly implicating me in a defense of D. T. Suzuki (among other things) where I had never attempted that.
For those interested in following up on this debate over Buddhism and its possible relations to Lacanian psychology, I would suggest the more complete version of my critique, which was published in my 2018 book Shadowing the Anthropocene (and which Žižek doesn’t seem to have read, so even though it’s open access, I will try to send him a copy of it). The critiques of Žižek feature in the sections “The Subject and the Subjectless” (pp. 185-193) and “Totality, or original hybridity?” (pp. 193-197), but there is plenty more reference both to Žižek and to Lacan in the second part of the book, which develops a Buddhist-inspired (and at times Lacanian-inspired) practice of process-relational “bodymindfulness.”
Regarding Žižek’s latest response, I don’t have much to add to what I’ve already written. I still think Žižek’s use of Buddhism as a foil for Lacanianism ends up reducing each to the other’s opposite in ways that miss the multiplicity of each, and especially of the two and a half thousand year tradition of Buddhist thinking and practice, with its many distinctive streams and sub-traditions.
The article features some good implicit sociology-of-science:
Like the zoologists who regulate the names of animal species or the astronomers who decide what counts as a planet, geology’s timekeepers work conservatively, by design. They set classifications that will be reflected in academic studies, museums and textbooks for generations to come.
And a few pieces of everyday wisdom a scientifically literate public should be able to recite, but most likely wouldn’t make it half-way through:
The global climate precariat — all of those whose lives and communities are endangered by the storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and wars produced or intensified by a destabilizing global climate system — are a vast segment of humanity. It is growing daily.
Together, the global precariat and its allies — activists motivated by compassion, fear, solidarity, or clearheaded reason, and everyday people working for social-ecological change — constitute what is potentially the largest political force on Earth. Together we could build a better, more just, and more sustainable world.
The only thing that is stopping us is the belief that walls, borders, weapons, armies, politicians, and/or gods will protect us at the expense of others. Those who spread the latter beliefs — politicians, media networks, think tanks, and the fossil capital that fuels them — are the enemies of reason, love, and humanity. They need to be fought with reason, love, and humanity.
It’s coming to the point where that fight needs to be made visible and unmistakable in everything we do.
