Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Good news, bad news…

September 8, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 . . .

Continue Reading »

Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments »

Shaviro responds

September 2, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Cinema, Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Natura Loquens (CFP)

August 31, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | 7 Comments »

Cinemas of the Not-Yet

August 30, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 , , | Leave a Comment »

Post-Shaviro readings

August 30, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Ruiz goes home…

August 24, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

 

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.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Cinema | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

Coming up: Post-Cinematic Affect theme week

August 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Next week, the Media Commons project In Media Res will be hosting a theme week on Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (which I wrote about here).

I’ll be guest curating the discussion on Wednesday, and Steven will be responding on Friday.

Here’s the full line up:

  • Monday August 29: Elena Del Rio (University of Alberta, Canada)
  • Tuesday August 30: Paul Bowman (Cardiff University, UK)
  • Wednesday August 31: Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont, USA)
  • Thursday September 1: Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
  • Friday September 2: Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University, USA)

To participate you will need to take a moment to register here.

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

Life outside the lava lamp

August 17, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Over at Naught Thought, Ben Woodard (sorry, Ben, for the earlier misspell) wants “to know what the Process/Relational folks think” of his thoughts about philosophies of process versus philosophies of objects or substances (or something like that). What follows is one quick and dirty way of thinking of a certain key difference between these two approaches.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , | 17 Comments »

New growth…

August 10, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

And while we’re on a grassy, shooty, growthy theme (and in the midst of a rare spurt of blog activity)… I’ve been wanting for years to write a book about “Laughing Stock,” the stunningly beautiful final album from Talk Talk, so many worlds beyond where they started, and the epitome of a process-relational musical ethic. Perhaps for the 33-1/3 series. (I’ve suggested as much to a couple of collaborators, including a Ukrainian friend who’s written a long piece on the album already. Now it’s just a matter of finding the time to do it.)

Since my take on the album is all about thirdness — the generative emergence of beauty from beauty, insight from insight, meaning from the shimmering percolation of lively interactivity — feel free to email me your own experiences of the album. Some of the comments here are a nice window onto this flowering world: for instance, the guy who “cr[ies] like a baby everytime i hear this song.” Or the one who finds it “very hard to keep myself together when new grass comes on.” Superlatives upon superlatives, and yet no 33-1/3 book on the album yet. Must rectify.

Posted in Music & soundscape | 6 Comments »

Growth in the underbrush…

August 10, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Leon takes me to task for slowing down here, but finds much life in the ecophilosophical immanent-ontological underbrush — among fellow travelers Knowledge Ecology (who’s been on a roll lately), Immanent Transcendence, and Ecology without Nature. (And we should add Leon’s own After Nature.)

(Note: It’s all underbrush; no towering redwoods among us.)

He is, of course, right on all these counts. I’ve been a little nomadic over the summer (including spending beach time on Martha’s Vineyard this week with little rinpoche) and unable to spend much time online. I haven’t even managed to stay up to date with the Integral Ecology reading group (which hyper-prolific Tim has thrown several smoke-bombs into, and Michael will be wrapping up). And being program director in the fall will not make things much easier. But I am wrapping up my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript, which has been priority #1.

Posted in Blog stuff | Leave a Comment »

What’s behind the U.K. riots?

August 10, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Okay, it’s just an ad… and for a book that focuses on a single node within a complex, multi-scaled set of relations. But that node ought to be obvious, and the fact that it isn’t tells us as much about the last 40 years as we need to know to start fixing things.

More here, and here.

H/t to Nina Power.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Nature & the Popular Imagination

August 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m helping to organize this conference. Nature, Hollywood, eco-apocalypse, and the Malibu coast (the one that Mike Davis says we should let burn)… Can you resist?

NATURE & THE POPULAR IMAGINATION

The Fifth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

8-11 August 2010, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California (USA)

INFORMATION & CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Posted in Academe, Eco-culture | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Skip to toolbar