I’m on my way to Milwaukee for the Nonhuman Turn conference. I will do my best to live-blog from it, though that will depend on the technology the U of Wisconsin Milwaukee offers conference participants. Stay tuned.
“Ultimately, the thinking of speculative pragmatism that is activist philosophy belongs to nature. Its aesthetico-politics compose a nature philosophy. The occurrent arts in which it exhibits itself are politics of nature.
“The one-word summary of its relational-qualitative goings on: ecology. Activist philosophy concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becomings in the midst. Creative change taking place, self-enjoying, humanly or no, humanly and more.”
These two short paragraphs close the Introduction to Brian Massumi’s recent, and thoroughly Whiteheadian, book Semblance and Event. They serve as a good epigraph to what I’d like to discuss here, which is the “neo-Whiteheadian wave” I see arising in cultural theory and its connections to ecology and to “speculative realism” (which, in Massumi’s hands, becomes speculative pragmatism; the differences are worth exploring).
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged environmental philosophy, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 12 Comments »
CALL FOR PAPERS
Meeting of The International Association for Environmental Philosophy
at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association—Eastern Division
December 27-30, 2012, Marriott Atlanta Marquis, Atlanta, GA
Posted in Academe | Tagged environmental philosophy | Leave a Comment »
An interesting call for papers from Ecozon@…
Call for Papers: Ecozon@ Issue 4.1 (Spring 2013)
Green Countercultures
Guest Editor: Peter Mortensen, Aarhus University
From the late 1950s to the early 1970s an extraordinary counterculture emerged among young people in various western countries, opposing the values of mainstream society. The counterculture originated in a protest again Cold War moralism, conservatism and consumerism, and it was later galvanized by opposition to ethnic discrimination and the US war in Vietnam.
Posted in Eco-culture | 3 Comments »
We’re getting some good submissions, but there’s room for more. The deadline for proposals has been extended to May 1. I’m sharing the call for papers again here…
The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (ISSRNC) is pleased to announce its next conference in Malibu, California at Pepperdine University in August 2012. The conference theme will be “Nature and the Popular Imagination.”
Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | Leave a Comment »
The level of stupidity on display in David Levy’s Washington Post article Do college professors work hard enough? is astounding.
While Levy portrays himself as a life-long educator and academic and a “former chancellor of the New School University,” his article only reflects the growing disconnect between those who educate and those who administer and sit on boards of educational institutions.
Posted in Academe | 8 Comments »
In a comment to my last post on triads and divinities, my frequent commenter/interlocutor “dmf” points out a nice essay by Robert Gall called “From Daimonion to the ‘Last’ God: Socrates, Heidegger, and the God of the Thinker,” which Mark Fullmer has made available beyond the restricted-access community.
Gall distinguishes between the god of the religious believer, the god of the philosopher (“all those abstract ‘ultimate realities’ that have accumulated throughout the history of Western philosophy that complete some comprehensive, intellectual view of all that is”), and the “god of the theologian,” including those theological “knockoffs,” as Rorty calls them — like Tillich’s of Heidegger, Mark Taylor’s of Derrida, Richard Kearney’s of both (among others), process theologians’ of Whitehead, and, earlier, Aquinas’s of Aristotle — that appropriate philosophy for theology.
To these three Gall adds a fourth: the “god of the thinker.”
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged art, daimon, Heidegger, ontotheology, paganism, polytheism, theology | 9 Comments »
One of the things that Ecologies of the Moving Image has left unresolved, and left me needing to think more about, is the extent to which my Peircian “triadism” holds up.
Philosophically, the case for some sort of triadism as a way of getting around dualisms is, at first blush, appealing. But there are triads, and there are triads.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged deity, dialectics, Peirce, polytheism, theism | 14 Comments »
The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies.
The list of speakers reads like a “who’s who” of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the keynotes, while lesser mortals like myself, Mackenzie Wark (not so lesser last time I checked), and others known to the philoso-blogosphere (Woodard, Stanescu, Denson, et al.) are also scheduled to present.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Nonhuman Turn, object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism | 10 Comments »
For those in New York City today, David Rothenberg has assembled quite the cast of characters…
Posted in Eco-culture | Leave a Comment »
We’ve hardly had any snowstorms this winter in Vermont, and I’d almost started believing we’d have springlike weather right through to, well, spring.
So somehow it’s comforting to sit at an airport waiting for a delayed flight in the midst of a New England snowstorm. A two-hour drive across Vermont today took me through rain, snow, sleet, slush, and an infinity of variations in between.
I’m off to NYC for the AAG (do-re-mi, ABC, 1-2-3 baby you & me, to quote the Jackson Five). I’ll be giving a version of my work on green/eco pilgrimage (through the lens of affect theory, or something like it), and hanging out. If I ever get there.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
My paper for this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, coming up next month in Boston, will focus on the two films that got a lot of side-by-side attention at last year’s Cannes festival, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Since a few of my favorite bloggers have also discussed them side by side, I thought I’d share my preliminary thoughts about them here.
The two films play a key role in the final chapter of my (forthcoming) Ecologies of the Moving Image, but as I’m still thinking these themes through, I will be interested in responses I get at the SCMS (or here).
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Visual culture | Tagged film, Malick, Peirce, von Trier | 13 Comments »
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