Bruno Latour’s upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable. See ANTHEM for the details.
There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.
[. . .]
A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world.
Perhaps the promise of Latour’s work — aside from its sociological and science-studies import — is reaching a new culmination as the religious and ecological threads he’s been toying with for so long come to their mutual fruition.
Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that.
What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today’s ecological crisis.
… from Bill McKibben and 350.org’s new roadshow, “Do The Math,” previewed tonight here at the University of Vermont:
If climate scientists (and climate change modelers) are correct that the burning of more than a small fraction of the world’s available fossil fuel reserves will trigger changes that will induce paroxysms of preventable suffering, then prudence, honor, and justice dictate that we should act to prevent that from happening.
When applying for a promotion — which generally means applying for Associate Professor status “with tenure,” or applying for Full Professor (the top of the heap) — an academic must use any tactics available to make a case for the value of his or her scholarly work.
In the good old days, at most institutions, this might not have taken much. In the humanities, a fairly common bar for getting tenure was having published a scholarly book; for full professor, a second one. But academic book publication is in transition and no longer as simple as it used to be. And peer-reviewed journal articles, still the standard in the “hard” sciences, are not going away; publish-or-perish remains the rule. Continue Reading »
The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) presents the Tenth Annual Meeting on Environmental Philosophy, to be held 12-14th of June 2013 at The University of East Anglia, UK.
“Thinking and Acting Ecologically”
The ISEE invites submissions on any topic in environmental philosophy / ecophilosophy broadly conceived. The focus of the tenth annual meeting will be on developing ideas and concepts that are not only thematically concerned with the environment but are themselves contributions to ecological action.
The editors illustrated it with photos from David Cronenberg’s Crash, which I found funny. The online version doesn’t quite capture the effect. The English version is now available open access here and here.
The article is a remixed outtake from the final chapter of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image, which is scheduled to come out in Spring 2013 in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s Environmenal Humanities Series.
The following is an article I originally wrote in 1989, or maybe 1988, after seeing three films by Ukrainian poetic cinema master Yuri Illienko (a.k.a. Iurii/Yurij/Jurij Ilyenko/Ilienko/Illyenko/Il’yenko). Two of the films — A Well for the Thirsty and Eve of Kupalo Night, or St. John’s Eve — had languished unseen under Soviet censorship for some twenty years. They are screening this coming week at New York’s Lincoln Center.
These are some of my favorite films of all time. “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” was groundbreaking and the 3 Illienko films rarely get shown anywhere. (“Eve of Ivan Kupalo” is one of the wildest rides on celluloid.)
See them on the big screen — at the Lincoln Center this coming week — if you’re in the New York City area.
James Steffen has a useful write-up on the series. And see my obit for Illienko here, with a couple of clips. I promised there that I would try to make available an old article in which I analyze three of Illienko’s films — all of which are showing at the Lincoln Center. I will do that shortly.
Little time this week, unfortunately, for me to keep up with the Pussy Riot conviction (as promised here) or anything else. But I recommend Charles Cameron’s series of posts (six so far, and counting) over at Zenpundit, including his annotated summary of their closing statements. The statements themselves are very lucid and articulate, as one should expect from women who can quote Rosi Braidotti *AND* Nicolai Berdyaev.
To get a sense of what the PR girls are up against, have a listen to radical traditionalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin on the “holy war” Pussy Riot have started. “Geopolitician” Dugin’s political advice gets into Putin’s inner circles, even if Dugin’s attitudes toward Putin himself have sometimes been ambivalent.
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.)
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.
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.
