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Post-Soviet riot grrls

August 20, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

While this doesn’t have much to do with the usual themes of this blog, it is an interesting case study of media culture and political protest (and one that my Ukrainian studies background qualifies me to comment on).

It’s the case of Pussy Riot supporter Inna Shevchenko, an activist with the Ukrainian feminist protest group Femen. Let’s figure it out:

A (western-style) feminist activist-performance group best known for (literally) exposing themselves to gain media exposure (with the help of happily obliging male photographers) chainsaws down a cross commemorating Stalin’s Ukrainian victims as an act of solidarity with anti-authoritarian punk-feminists Pussy Riot. (Those are the three musicians recently sentenced to two years in jail for their “sacrilegious” anti-government performance in a Russian church. More on them later.)

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Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Earthset?

August 7, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

It’s high time for an update here… I’m in Malibu for Nature and the Popular Imagination (conference program here), where I’ll be giving a keynote on “The Age of the World Motion Picture.”

I blogged about this part of the California coast the last time I was out here, and my thoughts there have worked their way into my talk here. The talk lays out a Peircian-inspired approach to thinking about moving images, and specifically images of the earth and its cosmic environment (black void, or otherwise) as found in movies like 2001, Solaris, Contact, Melancholia, and others.

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Posted in Academe | 4 Comments »

Birthday thoughts

July 15, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Birthdays, and other such markers (I realized while meditating by the Lamoille river this morning), are an opportunity for pooling together thoughts, those facing back across the memoried past and those facing forward to an open future, and gathering them into a spool of desiring-productive-energy to be set spinning outward. Not only one’s own thoughts, but those of others (such as those I felt* spilling over into my own at a certain moment at that riverside juncture).

Thoughts are the openings from which the future is crafted. Thoughts are not only mind-thoughts; they are body-thoughts, and the more of our bodies (those affective landscapes of motion, emotion, capacity, and orientation) we pack into those thoughts, the stronger they are. Our body has its thoughts, many of which we are not aware of; we are its thoughts as much as they are ours, perhaps more so.

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Posted in Spirit matter | 2 Comments »

Deacon’s Incomplete Nature

June 14, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Jason (Immanent Transcendence), Matthew (Footnotes to Plato), Adam, Michael, and Leon have begun their cross-blog reading of Terrence Deacon’s mammoth and ambitious Incomplete Nature. (See also Asher Kay’s post from February and Matt’s post on his conversation with Deacon about Whitehead.)

Deacon’s book has been getting unwelcome attention for his seeming unwillingness to appropriately credit his predecessors (and also for his writing style); see Matt’s summary and this page here for the details.

But process-relational bloggers are quite correct that there’s more to Deacon than the arguments of others, be they emergentists and dynamic systems theorists, autopoieticists like Varela and Evan Thompson, et al. Deacon’s Peircian pedigree is significant, and my own reading of his argument will include careful attention to the degree to which the Peircian underpinnings, which were quite evident in his 1998 tome The Symbolic Species and in work since then, remain in this latest volume.

See here for more on the Deacon-Peirce connection.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

“Craziness” & habit

June 14, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

In a process-relational view, there are no crazies. There are those who subjectivate with the aid of habits developed in response to conditions that have changed sufficiently that those habits are no longer very effective, or are not considered appropriate by others.

Calling someone — and treating someone as — “crazy” is a way of reifying a particular relationship between one’s own subjectivity and that other’s objectivity. In a process-relational understanding, their objectivity is an artifact of our subjectivation. In reality, they subjectivate as much as we do. Within their own history of subjectivation the habits they have developed make perfect sense. They indicate options selected from an array of possibilities to shape a certain array of subjective propensities.

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Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Nature & the Popular Imagination keynote

June 7, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Here’s the abstract for the keynote I will be giving at Nature and the Popular Imagination in Malibu this August. It builds on my recent talk at Bucks College, but without the nod to pop-cultural interest in Avatar.

THE AGE OF THE WORLD MOTION PICTURE

starring the Cinematic Earth, with cameo appearances by Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, Martin Heidegger, C. S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, Lynn Margulis, James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick, Donna Haraway, and Koko the Gorilla

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Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture | Leave a Comment »

Cruising

May 24, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

When your long-retired parents invite you (and family and sibs) on a Mediterranean cruise, do you

(a) jump at the opportunity,

(b) graciously accept (realizing, for instance, that this may be one of the last opportunities for us to reconnect with the full nuclear-plus family, or what’s left of it),

(c) bite your tongue (knowing, for instance, what a jet-lagged toddler will be like on one of those mega-crowd eating-and-gawking extravaganzas), then graciously accept, or

(d) politely decline?

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Panpsychism in the news?

May 24, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

No, not really… But the Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interesting piece on leading panpsychist philosopher David Skrbina called The Unabomber’s Pen Pal. It turns out that Skrbina has been corresponding with Ted Kaczynski as part of his study of the philosophy of technology.

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SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out

May 20, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.”

It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker did a fabulous job editing it.

She and I co-wrote the introductory chapter, which can be read here.

I don’t yet have an electronic version of my closing chapter, “Religious (Re)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature,” but I’d be happy to share a pre-publication version of it upon request. An excerpt of it can be found here.

Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

For the moment

May 14, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Now that a very busy semester has ended, I can return to the constructive speculative-metaphysical strand of this blog, in which I work out the process-relational philosophy I’ve tentatively labelled Ecosophy-G. A suitable acronym for this project might be “pre-G” (process-relational ecosophy-G), pronounced “pree-jee,” with the “pre” also indicating that the philosophy is a form of pre-articulation, a work in progress, and the “ge” referring, among other things, to the “Ge-” of geography, geophilosophy, and geode.

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments »

NT11: Post-Non-Human Turn(over)

May 6, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

With just enough distance to sense that I miss it already (in a brain-body hangover kind of way), but not enough for this to be taken too seriously, I offer some morning-after thoughts on the Nonhuman Turn conference.

1. It was a tremendous gathering of forces, of people doing valuable work with ideas, with knowledge-building practices and critical interpretive and reframing strategies (some of them novel and experimental, some of them simply variations on what academics do). For all that was said (at the end) about how washed-out the academic conference format is, this one was actually a very well-scaled meeting, making possible the kinds of conversations and connections that a larger conference would preclude. It was well run, technically savvy, and enjoyable. Remarkable in many ways.

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Posted in Academe, Philosophy | Tagged | 14 Comments »

NT10: Ian Bogost (& Grusin closing)

May 5, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Bogost’s talk not being streamed (by his request).

Ian Bogost, “The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry”

A talk about philosophy and the objects of which it’s made, in 12 parts (first 11 are pretend)

I. Enjoying This Presentation

II. The Things We Do: Airport tarmac. Philosophers in a lecture hall not unlike an aircraft approaching the runway. Multiple dancer airport performances. Air traffic controllers and graduate students. We do the things we do. Questions, comments. Thank you for flying.

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Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Philosophy | Tagged | 3 Comments »

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