immanence

Green Countercultures

April 3, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Nature & the Popular Imagination (redux)

March 30, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Just slackin’

March 27, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

“Only a god can save us…”

March 16, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Thinking through threes (& deities)

March 14, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn

February 28, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Survival of the beautiful wondercabinet

February 25, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

For those in New York City today, David Rothenberg has assembled quite the cast of characters…

It’s a beautiful poster, and a good event.

Posted in Eco-culture | Leave a Comment »

Airport delay bliss

February 24, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

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).

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Visual culture | Tagged film, Malick, Peirce, von Trier | 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.

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?