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?
The news that self-help guru James Arthur Ray has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide brings to an end (of sorts) a saga that began with three deaths and numerous injuries at an October, 2009, sweat lodge ceremony outside Sedona, Arizona. Since I’ve written a handful of articles and half a book about Sedona, and some of the people I wrote about have been indirectly affected by the event, I thought it fitting to comment on it here.
The first issue includes an article on the “Professional development of interdisciplinary environmental scholars,” which includes some excellent advice for aspiring environmental interdisciplinarians, including on graduate study options, job prospects, strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinary work as opposed to more traditional disciplinarity, and much else.
After Nature, the new blog hosted by process-relational ecophilosophical fellow traveler Leon Niemoczynski, now has an RSS feed. That means that I can enthusiastically recommend that philosophically inclined readers of this blog subscribe to it.
Leon is author of Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature. The five most popular tags on his blog give you a good idea of what to expect there: they are “Whitehead,” “Deleuze,” “Peirce,” “process-relational philosophy,” and “speculative realism.” And Leon has already begun posting some excellent field-guide style tutorials: one on Ecstatic Naturalism, another on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, and a third is being promised for “Speculative Naturalism,” subtitled “The God of Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Meillassoux.”
In its “Best places to celebrate the solstice,” Salon.com urges us to “embrace your inner pagan” — at places like Glastonbury Festival (natch), the Hill of Tara in Ireland, Cusco in Peru, and the desert site of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah (pictured above).
It seems that my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which came out ten years ago, is circulating for free online as a PDF. (I just downloaded it myself to see if it’s the real thing; it is. Do a PDF search for it if you want it.)
I don’t mind people downloading it — it’s a good way to look at it before deciding if you want to spend money for a hard copy. The hardcover is pricy — or was when it came out. But it’s also attractive and nice to hold in one’s hands, and you can now find it cheap. (Ask me if you want one for under ten bucks.)
Tim Morton makes the useful point that E/Z’s notion of the “noosphere”
can only be functional if it discriminates between some kinds of thing such as cognizing with neurons versus other kinds of thing such as cognizing with plant hormones, or resting on a table, or spanning a river.
Differences are starting to emerge in our group reading of Integral Ecology, with Tim Morton taking a grumpy stance from the back of the car while others are measured but generally more positive in their assessments. Tim’s main criticism seems to be the Object-Oriented Ontological one that E/Z’s categories “map perfectly onto normal everyday human prejudices,” and specifically prejudices against non-sentient beings. Tim writes:
This continues from the previous post, where I discussed chapter 3 of Integral Ecology. Together these posts make up my summary overviews for Week 3 of the reading group. What follows is less a summary than a response to chapter 4, but I think it covers most of the key concepts in the chapter.
The Integral Ecology reading group moves here this week, picking up the baton from Adam and Sam at Knowledge Ecology. (And see Michael’s summary at Archive Fire.)
This week we’re focusing on chapters 3 (“A Developing Kosmos”) and 4 (“Developing Interiors”). Following a short summative preamble, this post examines Chapter 3. Its follow-up will examine Chapter 4.
A new book by Tim Ingold is always good news, especially one that — like his 2000 collection Perception of the Environment — brings together several years’ worth of work into one volume. Ingold describes Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description as “in many ways” a “sequel” to that earlier book, and it’s interesting to examine the territory he’s traversed since then.
Graham Haynes’s band touring under the name Bitches Brew Revisited, after the famous album by Miles Davis that turned 40 last year, opened the Burlington jazz festival last week.
