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Toward an ecophilosophical cinema

February 17, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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).

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Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Visual culture | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments »

On not blogging, and its results

February 12, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Bloggers like to talk about why they blog. I will talk here about why I have not been doing that (blogging, or talking about it) and what that’s meant for me.

The main reason is the obvious: having a kid takes away all your free time. And blogging, unless it’s done as part of your professional workload (or as an attempt to kickstart one of those into existence, like some spiritual entity one forms in effigy and then enchants into life through the appropriate charms, chants, invocations, and ritual gestures), is done during one’s free time.

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Posted in Blog stuff | 3 Comments »

Last man

February 3, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m catching up on the news that Theo Angelopoulos died last week. Hit by a motorcycle. Now that the “last of the European modernists” (as he’s often called) is dead, where does that leave us?

Like kids searching for a father we never knew?

http://youtu.be/EC-AhAYLnOc

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Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

In a nutshell

January 26, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Shinzen Young lays it all out:

He has also started blogging (to add to his other  online  presences).

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Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | 3 Comments »

Work resuming on the tower

January 23, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Blogging will resume here next week.

Meanwhile…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Shadow Blog in the shadows…

December 15, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Readers may have noticed that in addition to a general hiatus on this blog, the Immanence Shadow Blog (scroll down on the right) also stopped updating several weeks ago. This is because Google Reader, in its recent redesign, eliminated its Shared Items feeds, which means that I can no longer click “Share” on items in my feed reader and have these automatically show up in the Shadow Blog.

Responses to the elimination of this social networking feature on Google Reader seem to have been overwhelmingly negative (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). But Google doesn’t seem to have shown any interest in re-establishing any of it. Instead, they have put their energy into developing and refining Google+, hoping that users will follow them into that uncharted domain. I haven’t done that, and am looking for alternatives. Ideas welcome.

 

Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »

The joy (& loneliness) of being interdisciplinarian

December 13, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

What makes an -ologist, -osopher, -ographer?

What, for instance, makes one an anthropologist? A geographer? A philosopher? A scientist?

Scene 1:

As chair of a search committee looking to hire a political ecologist, a tenure-track position to be shared between a Geography department and an Environmental Studies program, I’ve been involved in intensive discussion of what would make one enough of a geographer for the job. We are open to interdisciplinarians, and a lot of environmental anthropologists and other social scientists have applied — understandably, given how the field of political ecology has been evolving — but the person will be required to teach some geography courses and to successfully navigate their review/promotion/tenure career in the Geography Department.

What we seem to be settling on is something like “experience or a very clear capacity to teach introductory geography courses, and clear indication of experience and participation in the development of geographic concepts, theoretical approaches, associations, etc.” So if you’re not a geographer but have gone to an AAG and had a publication in Society and Space, you just might be alright by us. (But not necessarily by others.)

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

Lynn Margulis, r.i.p.

November 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Heard about this last night. She died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts yesterday evening, surrounded by family.

(We had just seen her son Dorion Sagan, son of Carl, give a great talk at the anthropology conference last Friday, after which he and his partner had to speed back to Toronto to get their passports to fly to Boston.)

She was one of most important biologists of the past century, and the female face of the Gaia hypothesis, the radical implications of which have yet to be recognized. (They go beyond the popular interpretations and involve the importance of understanding symbiosis and the role of bacteria in life on Earth.)

May she rest in peace.

Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Not drowning, just coming up for air & waving

November 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I owe regular readers an explanation for the lengthy hiatus on this blog.

As I had predicted would happen back in the summer, this semester turned into an extremely busy one for me.

Directing the Environmental Studies program at the University of Vermont is a large part of that busyness: it’s a large, interdisciplinary and cross-college program of nearly 500 undergraduate majors, which has seen its student numbers climb consistently over several years while faculty and staff numbers have actually declined. This has led to a barely sustainable staffing situation, though we are far from unique in that respect. Directing it involves a lot of advising (those 500 students) and overseeing of a somewhat complicated and highly individualized curriculum, reading and signing off on paperwork, organizing, leading and/or attending various kinds of meetings (in three different Schools and Colleges), overseeing the teaching of courses including our Students-Teaching-Students courses, putting out little fires as these arise on a somewhat regular basis, and so on.

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Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments »

The 1% correlation

October 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

No comments necessary.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

For the Separation of Capital & State: 5 Demands

October 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This list of demands is simple, yet demanding, as it should be. See below for explanatory notes. Please share these demands widely.

In recognition of the primary role played by oversized and deregulated financial institutions in causing the current economic crisis, WE DEMAND:

1) That all persons who have served as directors or chief executives of large financial institutions in the previous 10 years, and all persons who have accepted over $500,000 in campaign donations from employees of such institutions in the same period, be disqualified from running for office in Congress, Senate, and the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the United States of America.

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Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

The Occupation

October 19, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The metaphor of “occupation” strikes me as a provocative one not only for what the activists in Manhattan and elsewhere are doing, but for what they are struggling against.

Some, and perhaps many, of these are people without traditional “occupations,” so they are occupying themselves by re-occupying the public spaces that have been occupied for too long by the values, habits, and appeals of the Occupation Force — the whole industry of slogans, gestures, come-hither looks, sales pitches, jingles, hooks, nods and winks (backed up by policies, and ultimately by laws and policing) that keep us steered into the spectacle of Politics-as-Usual-and-Consumption-Above-All.

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Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

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