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Search Results for 'conspiracy'

Primer

Posted in on June 10, 2014 | 3 Comments »

Here is a thematic primer to this blog, running from the more theoretical to the more down-to-earth topics it covers. Click on the links to go to the articles. (And another way to find things is by following the categories.) Post-constructivism & ‘Speculative Realism’ Between Continental & environmental philosophy Imagination & contemporary theory Integralism & […]

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The groundlessness of revolution

Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2013 | 3 Comments »

Every violent suppression of dissent is violence against the humanity that is being born. The world to come is at stake in these encounters. That’s what I tweeted last night while watching what looked like the squashing of a revolution, when riot police appeared by the thousands and began moving in on the territory held […]

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the attractions of process (metaphysics)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , on December 9, 2010 | 26 Comments »

With Whiteheadian process philosophers and object-oriented ontologists meeting minds in Claremont, Chris Vitale softening up to OOO, Levi Bryant declaring himself a process philosopher — more precisely, that he’s “always been, [is], and will always be a process philosopher” — and Ian Bogost sharing a very sympathetic attempt to develop commonalities between the two schools […]

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Inception: the anti-Matrix?

Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought, Visual culture, tagged , on August 6, 2010 | 8 Comments »

I’ve been studiously avoiding reviews of Inception, Christopher Nolan’s new metaphysical heist thriller, wanting to see it for myself (intrigued by its premise) before I start to see it through other people’s eyes. Today I saw it, and I’ve now scanned some of the reviews and a bit of blog commentary (see links at bottom). […]

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surfacing

Posted in Blog stuff on July 25, 2010 | 3 Comments »

… but only momentarily, from my writing (mainly Ecologies of the Moving Image, which continues to proceed apace, but also the Praxis Forum I’m editing on the Ken Burns National Parks series for Environmental Communication, the paper I’ve been invited to give on green pilgrimage at the Fourth Compostela Colloquium, and the piece I’m writing […]

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climate denialism as hysteria?

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Science & society, tagged , on February 15, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science — today it’s in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel’s op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of sentences — I’m realizing that it’s not enough to refer to a “climate denial machine” (as I’ve done here before). There is certainly an organized, machinic quality to denialism, with well-funded nodes of misinformation generating the talking points disseminated across the internet/mediasphere by climate denialists. But the intensity of many of the comments has made me think about the virtues and pitfalls of another frame, that of “hysteria,” since it really seems akin to the kinds of hysterias chronicled by historians like Norman Cohn and the more familiar territory of conspiratorial claims and counter-claims around such issues as alien abductions, satanic ritual abuse, or JFK and 9-11 conspiracy theories.

At the same time, there’s a risky irony in suggesting that climate change denial is a hysteria, since to deniers it’s precisely the claim of anthropogenic global warming that appears hysterical and millennialist. Hysteria, both the diagnosis of it and the thing itself, relies on a reading of “signs” or “symptoms” as indicative of a cause much larger than what one can easily deal with. There’s a monster lurking behind those markings on one’s skin, or in the body politic. And just as conspiracy theories aren’t wrong by definition (and my listing of those in the previous paragraph wasn’t intended to suggest that those ones were), so hysterical reactions aren’t necessarily unproductive — they are a response to something that one cannot respond to in a more direct and appropriate way. The politics of climate change, in any case, carries something of the “paranoid style” that Richard Hofstader identified in American politics back in the 1960s. But since then, we’ve moved more deeply into a kind epistemologically unmoored world, a world in which we rely on experts to inform us about basic risks that are not directly perceivable by us (such as those from nuclear radiation, environmental contaminants, and the like) but in a context where the structures of epistemic authority are no longer holding up well at all, in which common sense is undecideable and skepticism extends “all the way down”, as Jodi Dean has put it. This is especially the case in societies characterized by wide cultural divides, such as that of post-Bush II America. [. . .]

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still process-relations all the way down

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , on September 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Keeping up with Graham Harman means continually being tempted to respond to him, and since he doesn’t allow comments on his blog, for reasons I completely understand, I can only hold my tongue or flap it here. (Or I can do the respectful thing and write up a lengthier and more in-depth argument, but that […]

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when bad things happen (karma running over dogma)

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on June 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »

We live in a universe of hazard, a place where asteroids strike, where car smash-ups pluck out a life like a boot squashing a centipede, where planes fall out of the sky, a heart attack takes a brother from behind in the middle of a night, a train runs over a friend’s passed out daughter, […]

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filmmakers & the Iranian opposition

Posted in Cinema, Politics, tagged , , , on June 20, 2009 | 7 Comments »

Two of the world’s best known Iranian artists, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis and director of the Oscar-winning animated feature based on it, and leading filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, have been presenting apparent “proof” at the European Parliament that Mousavi actually won the elections. This comes in the form of an internal memo […]

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a pretty complex history of sustainability…

Posted in Eco-culture, tagged , on February 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Every grad student in environmental studies (and related areas) should be quizzed on this map: The Complex History of Sustainability. Departments could be evaluated based on how well they cover the spectrum portrayed in it… Within reason, of course — we don’t really need an eco-Nazi, a global warming conspiracy theorist, or even a libertarian […]

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