Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Search Results for 'anthropocene'

White smoke

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , on March 5, 2024 | Leave a Comment »

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. […]

Read Full Post »

Ontology 101

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2024 | 5 Comments »

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 […]

Read Full Post »

Symbiocene@Ruigoord.NL

Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2023 | 1 Comment »

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.) […]

Read Full Post »

Russia, the climate crisis, & ecocide

Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2023 | Leave a Comment »

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 […]

Read Full Post »

Space

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged , , on March 25, 2023 | Leave a Comment »

Like atoms and galaxies, days are full of space. 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 […]

Read Full Post »

Climate change as class war?

Posted in Climate change, Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 31, 2023 | 5 Comments »

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 […]

Read Full Post »

R.i.p. Tom Verlaine (relationalism & earth jazz redux)

Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2023 | Leave a Comment »

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 […]

Read Full Post »

Žižek’s belated reply

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , on January 6, 2023 | 3 Comments »

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 […]

Read Full Post »

The event that might be big

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , on December 19, 2022 | 1 Comment »

The New York Times’ Raymond Zhong summarizes the latest deliberations on the Anthropocene in an article called “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.” 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, […]

Read Full Post »

More-or-less-(than)-human

Posted in Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , on October 19, 2022 | 1 Comment »

The term “more-than-human” has become a popular way of designating the “nonhuman” within the environmental humanities. Other terms used include “other-than-human,” and much less frequently “unhuman” and “inhuman,” with the latter’s negative connotations upended (successfully or not) to read positively. “More-than-human” was, to my knowledge, first used by David Abram in his 1996 ecophilosophical bestseller […]

Read Full Post »

Sharpening our moral clarity

Posted in Anthropocene, Cultural politics, tagged , , , , , , on October 12, 2022 | Leave a Comment »

Indigenous intellectuals like Kim Tallbear see the current Anthropocene crisis (climate change, etc.) as a continuation and intensification of the kind of thing Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans (among others) have experienced for centuries. Her thoughts for Indigenous People’s Day, shared on Tallbear’s Substack account, are well worth reading. Describing a “radical hope” that might […]

Read Full Post »

Toward a non-fascist ecocultural activism

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 16, 2022 | 3 Comments »

This post continues the ethical and political thinking I have shared in some of my eco-theoretical manifestos and asketological writings (including parts of Shadowing the Anthropocene). Its interest in ‘non-fascist life’ takes its lead from critical analysts of fascism including Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and more recent writers […]

Read Full Post »

« Prev - Next »

Skip to toolbar