August 5, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Kieran Suckling’s post Against the Anthropocene, originally posted here on July 7 and subsequently shared with the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Anthropocene Working Group by Andy Revkin, has elicited a round of emailed back-and-forths from some noteworthy individuals, including paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz and paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky.
As this debate would be of interest to readers of this blog (and because it hasn’t been shared elsewhere), I’ve decided to share some of that conversation by permission of the individuals involved.
Tony Barnosky first sent around his article Palaeontological evidence for defining the Anthropocene, referring to it in a response to Suckling as follows:
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Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy | Tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, environmental humanities, geology | 10 Comments »
June 23, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ll be the guest speaker at the Environmental Studies colloquium at the Antioch University New England Graduate School tomorrow.
Title of my talk: “Culturing Nature: Ecology, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
June 21, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The new issue of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy includes work by Quentin Meillassoux, Tristan Garcia, a review panel discussing Katrin Pahl’s Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion, and a piece by me on the objects-processes debate in speculative realist philosophy.
The latter, entitled “Beatnik Brothers? Between Graham Harman and the Deleuzo-Whiteheadian Axis,” is an updated version of the talk I gave at the 2012 Nonhuman Turn conference at the University of Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
The complete issue can be downloaded here.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Deleuze, Graham Harman, Nonhuman Turn, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 4 Comments »
June 13, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Two quick observations about art and ecology at Welcome to the Anthropocene:
1) I’m impressed with how well art has been integrated into the program, thanks in part to Jennifer Joy‘s work in weaving her own performances with a troupe of local artists and dancers throughout the events. (And how none of it is the cloying kind of art one sometimes finds when environmentalism and art meet.) This should be the goal of any interdisciplinary environmental conference or gathering; this conference, in many ways, raises the bar.
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Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged AESS, eco-art, two cultures | Leave a Comment »
June 12, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The following are the comments I prepared for the roundtable “The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.” They follow in the line of critical thinking on the Anthropocene initiated by gatherings like the Anthropocene Project (see here, here, and here, and some of the posts at A(S)CENE) and journals like Environmental Humanities.
As a cultural theorist, I come to the topic naturally asking what the different theoretical paradigms in cultural and environmental theory can say about this term “Anthropocene.” These paradigms stretch across a spectrum that can be very loosely grouped into “realist” approaches and “constructivist” approaches.
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Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy | Tagged Andy Revkin, Anthropocene, capitalism, ecopolitics, environmental humanities, two cultures | 14 Comments »
June 10, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Immanence has taken on a new look. It’s crisper, cleaner, and easier to read. Most of what was in the old version is in the new one, though it might take a moment of poking around to find it. If you are reading this on a blog reader, please visit the blog on its home page. And please feel free to let me know what you think.
Posted in Blog stuff | 4 Comments »
June 10, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This week’s AESS conference “Welcome to the Anthropocene” features a breakfast roundtable called “The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.” See the session description below.
Unfortunately the panelists have been dropping like flies: it looks like neither dancer and performance artist Jennifer Monson, eco-artist Jackie Brookner, nor performer and comedian Jennifer Joy can make it. That leaves eco-journalist (and musician!) Andy Revkin (who’ll be giving a keynote address the previous evening), author and biologist Amy Seidl, and myself.
So this is a general call to all artists and eco-humanities folks in the New York City area: come to the breakfast roundtable if you can and if you dare. It’ll take place this Thursday morning, 7:30-9:00 a.m. at Pace University, 1 Pace Plaza in Lower Manhattan.
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Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture | Tagged AESS, Anthropocene, eco-arts, environmental humanities | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Since most of us love lists — or at least love and hate them simultaneously — here is the updated version of the “Top humanities theorists of the last century” list.
See the previous version for the full criteria and the caveats. Briefly: it’s a list of the most cited humanities theorists of the last 100 years (roughly) according to their Google Scholar citation numbers.
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Posted in Academe | Tagged citations, Foucault, humanists, humanities | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Brian Leiter’s blog recently hosted some interesting conversations on the ethics of live-blogging academic talks.
I’ve done that a few times, but always tried to get the live-blogged speaker’s permission, if not in advance then immediately afterward, and always offering to take the notes down if the speaker preferred that. (No one has requested that from me yet.)
Some of the comments on Leiter’s blog also discuss the ethics of academic institutions making papers available publicly or semi-publicly without permission — which has bearings on the publishability of the papers.
Posted in Academe | Tagged blogging ethics, live-blogging, online publishing | Leave a Comment »
May 19, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Announcing a competition:
Which scholars should be on the list of “Top humanists of the last century” but are not?
The person who names the greatest number of such names by the end of the day (12 midnight) EST next Sunday — using the methodology specified there (a simple Google Scholar search) — will win a copy of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image.
The rule is that the names must be listed first in the comments section of that post.
With one exception: James Stanescu, who blogs at Critical Animal, has already named Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, and Antonio Gramcsi, so they are out of the running — and he is in the lead at 3, since the prize was first announced on Facebook. It’s now gone public.
Beat 3!
Posted in Academe | Tagged humanities | 1 Comment »
May 18, 2014 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
A theme that’s been coming up in my conversations recently (including when visiting UC Davis) is the question of the “humanities canon”: i.e., who are the theorists whose views have been most influential in shaping the humanities disciplines, especially over the last century or so? And more specifically, is there anything approximating an “environmental humanities canon,” and who are its key theorists?
I’ll leave the second question for later. As for the first, an easy place to start is with a simple Google Scholar search for some of the most commonly cited humanists of the last century.
Is there any question about who will top that list? For me there wasn’t. (Drumroll coming.) But after first place, there were some surprises.
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Posted in Academe | Tagged canon, humanities | 18 Comments »
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