What follows are notes from the first day of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema.
These are, needless to say, my own hastily drawn up notes (and I’m still a little jet-lagged from my arrival yesterday). Forgive the point form and abbreviation inconsistencies. Any errors are my own; any wonderful ideas are other people’s, unless specifically attributed to “ai.” Other initials refer to other speakers/participants. My tiredness toward the end of the day shows…
Posted in Cinema | Tagged affect, documentaries, ecocinema, ecocriticism, film | 3 Comments »
I’m in Munich at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), where I’m participating in a workshop called Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema. The workshop has been convened by Center associates Alexa Weik von Mossner and Arielle Helmick, and features some leading figures in the fields of ecocinema studies (a.k.a. cine-ecocriticism) and the study of affect and emotion in film and visual culture. Since I’ve been asked by a few people to blog about it, I thought I might try my hand at live-blogging. Unfortunately a computer mishap yesterday and some online issues this morning have set me back with those goals, but I’ll share what I can, when I can.
Posted in Media ecology | 4 Comments »
The Integral Ecology reading group seems to have lost some of its momentum over the last 3-4 weeks (as witness the minimal responses to the last two posts), but Nick, the “staunch Wilberian” of the group ;-), has now picked things up with his overview of Chapter 8 at the Integral Ecology Center blog.
(Hmm… With our arrival at IE’s home turf, might E and/or Z show up to comment on our comments?)
Posted in Philosophy | 1 Comment »
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has recently been alight with debates over the role of religion, God, theism versus nihilism, the secular and the “post-secular,” and other such things. Since these are topics I’m naturally interested, and somewhat invested, in, I ought to participate, but time constraints have made that all but impossible for me recently.
(One of those constraints is a trip this week to the Rachel Carson Center in Munich for “Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema,” about which I intend to blog, and perhaps live-blog, while there. I leave tomorrow, so stay tuned for more on that.)
Adam’s post Knowledge Ecology provides a useful way into these discussions, but see also these posts at Footnotes to Plato (and this one), Plastic Bodies, Immanent Transcendence, Larval Subjects, and After Nature.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged cosmology, nihilism, panentheism, pantheism, speculative realism, theism, Whitehead | 2 Comments »
The latest issue of Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination — which looks like an excellent issue — includes a review of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” that reminds me how important it is to pay attention to the dialogical and heteroglossic texture of Malick’s films, and how easy it is to lose the path when one puts too much weight on a single line of text.
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy | Tagged Bakhtin, film, life, Malick, nature, Peirce | 2 Comments »
In response to my Dharma of file sharing post, visual artist Tom Gokey, whose work readers may know from Speculations journal, shared a link to his video on “Public Libraries, 3D Printing, FabLabs, and Hackerspaces.” It is… stunning in its implications. Just watch.
The democratization of production? The total plasticization of the world?
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Ontology, epistemology, plasticity, reality, technoculture, virtual reality, virtuality | 6 Comments »
After a brief hiatus, the Integral Ecology reading group is back in action here. (Antonio at Mediacology combined two chapters – 5 and 6 – in his post of two weeks ago, and I’m running a little late with this one.)
What follows is my summary and response to Chapter 7, “Ecological Selves: The Who That Is Examining.” Since the research literature pertaining to psychological development and ecology is not my particular field of expertise, I’ve asked my friend Andy Fisher to comment on that section of the chapter and am including his comments below. Andy is the author of Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (SUNY Press, 2002) and a practicing clinical therapist who lives in Perth, Ontario.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Esbjorn-Hargens, flat ontology, Integral Ecology, Ontology, epistemology, Wilber, Zimmerman | 9 Comments »
The same issues I have blogged about in relation to academic file sharing site aaaaarg.org have been (predictably) arising elsewhere, including most recently — and a little less predictably — in the world of online Buddhism.
This particular discussion got started by an announcement at Buddha Torrents that they have been asked (rather politely) to stop sharing files of books online. In reply, Justin Whitaker at American Buddhist Perspective posted a thoughtful rumination on the ethics of downloading dharma books, with a call for a new business model and a nod to the experience of the music industry. A further post goes into more depth.
Posted in Academe | Tagged AAAAARG, Buddhism, dharma, file sharing, open access, Thich Nhat Hanh | 5 Comments »
Among the books coming out in this fall’s Duke University Press catalog (pdf) is one I’m particularly looking forward to: Elizabeth Grosz’s Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art.
Grosz is among the most exciting thinkers in the post-Deleuzian landscape — a tremendous synthesist of the biological (especially Darwinian), philosophical (especially “vital materialist”), and feminist (notably drawing on Luce Irigaray here), whose work offers rich insights for bridging the sciences and humanities.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Darwin, Deleuze, feminism, Grosz | 5 Comments »
Time magazine’s Healthland supplement summarizes a recent clinical study of 18 healthy, spiritually inclined adults who were administered a certain drug over 5 eight-hour sessions. Among the results:
Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.
Critically, however, the participants themselves were not the only ones who saw the benefit from the insights they gained: their friends, family member and colleagues also reported that [X] had made the participants calmer, happier and kinder.
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged findings, mysticism, spirituality | 2 Comments »
It will take some time before I can say anything very intelligible about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
But here are some initial thoughts, for what they’re worth.
(1) This is the film in which Malick just lets it go, and lets it flow…
Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought | Tagged film, flow, life, Malick, nature | 3 Comments »
So what’s all this anti-vitalism wafting on the (post-) Continental wind? What’s it working from? (Thacker? Others?) Is it anything more than another round of vanguardism (“not enough to revitalize matter, let’s devitalize life while we’re at it” — another version of the old Stalinist jingle about not being able to make an omelet without breaking some eggs)?
Anyone who was at the conference, or with the time (and a strong enough internet connection, which I don’t seem to have at the moment) to listen to the audio recordings from it, care to summarize?
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged anti-vitalism, Continental philosophy, life, vitalism | 3 Comments »
