I’m at the Vollmar Akademie by Lake Kochel in the Bavarian Alps, just a short train ride beyond the last S-Bahn station south of Munich, for “Studying the Environment – Working Across Disciplines.” The Rachel Carson Center has got a bunch of us together here to hammer out some ideas for inter/trans/disciplinarity in environmental research.
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The above is
(a) beautiful,
(b) ugly,
(c) neither beautiful nor ugly in itself (nor anything else in particular), or
(d) _________ (fill in the blank)?
It’s a view (on a particularly hazy day) of the Sheffield wind power project in northeast Vermont, as seen from Crystal Lake State Park beach outside the town of Barton.
The view itself Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged Vermont, visuality, wind power | 4 Comments »
I’ve always been more of an improviser than a long-range planner, but my job requires that I occasionally dabble in long-range projections of my work. Here’s one.
While a number of concerns have framed my scholarship over the years — ethical, political, cultural, ecological, and theoretical concerns — the philosophical core of it has been solidifying around a certain conceptual machine, which I am setting to work in different contexts.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged categories, Deleuze, ecosophy-G, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
For anyone who thought “socially engaged Buddhism” (a.k.a. liberation Buddhism, Buddhist socialism, et al.) was a marginal movement within the Buddhist world, Bruce Smithers’s Tricycle article “Occupy Buddhism” shows it reaches high up the (sort of) hierarchy of publicly known Buddhists… to the Dalai Lama.
It’s a selective analysis (the DL is much more pragmatic than this suggests). But worth reading, as are the comments.
Hat tip to Brian McKenna of the E-ANTH listserv.
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Marxism | Leave a Comment »
It will be quite an event for Peirce scholars.
My proposed paper will be on applications of Peirce to film theory, and in particular the two neo- (quasi-?) Peircian approaches that I present in Ecologies of the Moving Image. The first of these builds on Sean Cubitt’s three-part typology of the image (pixel–cut–vector, which I rework as spectacle–sequentiality–semiosis); I’ve written about it before on this blog and elsewhere. The second develops Peirce’s three normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, logic) into a logo-ethico-aesthetics of viewership.
Here’s a quick encapsulation of the latter:
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged aesthetics, ethics, logic, Peirce, Peirce Centennial Congress | Leave a Comment »
Ecologies of the Moving Image will be out next month. (Some seven years after I started working on it.) Here is a poster for it.
Many thanks to Steven Shaviro and Sean Cubitt for their generous endorsements, which I reproduce here:
“Ecologies of the Moving Image is an ambitious book, and a capacious and satisfying one. Continue Reading »
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged ecocinema studies, Ecologies of the Moving Image | Leave a Comment »
The AAR panel responding to 2013 Holberg Prize winner Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures has now been scheduled. Information is as follows.
QUERYING NATURAL RELIGION: IMMANENCE, GAIA, & THE PARLIAMENT OF LIVELY THINGS
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged Gaia, Gifford Lectures, immanence, Latour, natural religion | 2 Comments »
A key question for a process-relational account of a film is the question of how that film shows objects and subjects in the process of being made — how it shows subjectivation and objectivation arising together. Much of Ecologies of the Moving Image is about this, but what remains more implicit throughout the book is the way in which film itself expresses subjectivation.
I thought of this while re-watching Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang’s documentary about a “farewell cruise” on the Yangtze River before the completion of the final phase of the Three Gorges Dam.
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Process-relational thought | Tagged Up the Yangtze | 1 Comment »
Teaching my film course (especially in its current rendition as “Ecology Film Philosophy”) and the book that goes with it (Ecologies of the Moving Image, which will be publicly available in July) — and especially teaching the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which serves as a sort of template for the book — makes me feel like the Stalker in the film.
“Stalkers” are guides to the Zone Continue Reading »
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged Chernobyl, Stalker, Tarkovsky, Zone | 1 Comment »
We haven’t been there in
Can someone please turn down the thermostat?
*The exclamation mark that was originally in this title bothered me; seemed too celebratory (hardly the intent). So I’ve trashed it.
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Composing a worthwhile Earth Day post takes more energy than I have today, so instead I’ll link to Jeremy’s Earth post at Struggle Forever! It articulates a thought I often feel on this day (surrounded as I get by students eager to maternalize the planet) but in a way that resonates with the weirdness of the last week, with its bombs, explosions, and highly mediated manhunts.
A few snippets:
The Earth is not your mother . . . S/h/it is a monstrous assemblage . . . Earth Day is a dark holiday. It is a reminder, not of the beauty of nature or the miracle of life, but of the horrors that we have wrought upon the rocky surface of this planet . . .
And the picture says a great deal:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Earth Day, end times | Leave a Comment »
Here’s what I’m slated to teach this summer, for 3 weeks beginning May 20.
Ecology – Film – Philosophy
Posted in Media ecology | Leave a Comment »
