While I’ve been too busy to follow the Wall Street occupation very closely, let alone participate in any but the most vicarious ways, I’m encouraged by the persistence of its participants. Isn’t it time Americans started saying basta! to government of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations?
Here’s a collection of links I’ve found useful:
Posted in Politics | Tagged anarchism, direct action, Politics, Wall Street occupation | 4 Comments »
Tim Morton writes beautifully. His “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones,” published in the most recent issue of Continent, is a beautiful illustration of this. I could say he writes poetically, but that would be suggesting that his writing is not itself poetry, but only looks and feels like poetry — which would mean succumbing to a distinction between the essence of Morton’s writing and its appearance, and to a rift between the two, that I’m not prepared to commit to (though I think that Morton is).
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged aesthetics, object-oriented philosophy, process-, Tim Morton | 19 Comments »
Why are the Wall Street protests not getting the media coverage similar events in other countries, or in Tea Party country, get? (Keith Olbermann asks this, below.) Discuss.
Posted in Media ecology | Tagged media, Politics, protest | 6 Comments »
I love gex‘s simple, elegant, and beautiful graphic depictions of philosophical ideas.
Posted in Visual culture | 2 Comments »
Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects is finally available and readable on-line, courtesy of a wonderfully innovative relationship between Open Humanities Press and the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The book is part of OHP’s New Metaphysics Series, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour.
As regular readers know, Levi has been a longtime philosophical companion and frequent sparring partner to this blog. On occasion that sparring has gotten enflamed, but the heat has always, in the end, generated much light — which is what philosophical sparring is all about. I’ve read parts of the book in an earlier version and strongly recommend it; it’s an important contribution to contemporary efforts to carve out a post-anthropocentric metaphysics.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Bryant, object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism | 2 Comments »
We’re been given the green light to announce the following tenure-track position in Environmental Studies and Geography. I’m chairing the Search Committee. Please pass it on to anyone you think will be interested. Review of applications will begin November 15.
The Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Vermont invite applications for a tenure-track assistant professor in Political Ecology to begin August 2012. Possible areas of expertise for this position include: critical engagements with conservation and development, ecological displacements and migration, regional and inter-regional adaptations to climate change, environmental governance/governmentality, risks and conflicts of resource extraction, impacts of ecological change on livelihoods, and contested rights to resources. We seek an individual whose primary regional specialty is Latin America/Caribbean or Africa.
Posted in Academe | Tagged environmental studies, geography, political ecology | Leave a Comment »
As I think about our Environmental Studies curriculum (I’m Acting Director this semester) and start to think about my Nature and Culture course (which I’ll be teaching in January), I come around to the question of how to conceptualize the fraught relationship between humans and everything else.
The Nature and Culture course offers tools for thinking about this relationship, and challenges students to interrogate those tools, developing them in their own ways and to various ends (ethical, practical, political, etc.). One conceptual tool, among many, is the “good news—bad news” frame. Here’s a quick attempt to present things in this frame.
First, of course . . .
Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | Tagged ecopolitics, environmental education, environmentalism, framing | 5 Comments »
Steven Shaviro has posted his response to my and three other “curators’ notes” on his Post-Cinematic Affect.
The twists and turns of the discussions that have followed each of the daily commentaries have been fascinating. Somehow we’ve gone from a discussion of recent cinema to theorizing about affect and the limitations of recent affect theory (under the sign of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Silvan Tomkins), metabolism and panpsychism, magic (homeopathic and other kinds), fashion, “cinesensuality” and allure, Lady Gaga, YouTube and its “free labor,” and back again to capital and the possibilities for resistance, liberation, and alternative logics.
Posted in Cinema, Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture | Tagged affect, Shaviro | 2 Comments »
I’ve been waiting for this particular call for papers… I hope to see some of you there in Tenerife!
“NATURA LOQUENS:” ERUPTIVE DIALOGUES, DISRUPTIVE DISCOURSES
Contributions are invited for the 5th EASLCE International Conference on “Natura Loquens: Eruptive Dialogues, Disruptive Discourses,” to be held in Tenerife, Canaries, SPAIN, 27-30 June 2012. The event is organised on behalf of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) by the University of La Laguna, Faculty of Philology, and the Department of English and German Studies, in the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
There is an ongoing debate nowadays over the agency of Nature and the necessity of reopening the definition of what counts as speech. One would need to differentiate between new insights about animal communication and the idea that nonanimal and inanimate nature “signify,” or the suggestion of biosemiotics that life itself is a process of signification. Thus, Nature often presents articulated reactions which can be both eruptive and disruptive.
Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | 7 Comments »
Another remixed outtake/spinoff from my Ecologies of the Moving Image book project has come out, this time in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, in a special theme issue on “Imagining Ecotopia.”
My piece is called “Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia.” Here’s the abstract:
Posted in Cinema | Tagged film, heterotopia, utopia | Leave a Comment »
Elena del Rio and Paul Bowman have gotten the Post-Cinematic Affect series off to a wonderful start, over at In Media Res.
I’m up next tomorrow.
Posted in Media ecology | Leave a Comment »
At bottom I am speaking of nothing other than a cinema capable of inventing a new grammar each time it goes from one world to the next, capable of producing a unique emotion before every thing, every animal, every plant, simply by modifying the parameters of space and time. But this implies a constant practice of both attention and detachment, an ability to enter into the act of filming and return an instant afterward to passive contemplation. In short, a cinema capable of accounting, above all, for the varieties of experience in the sensible world. Easily said….
— Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Éditions Dis Voir, 2005), pp. 89-90
I just caught up with the news that Raúl Ruiz died this past week.
Posted in Cinema | Tagged exile, film | 5 Comments »
