April 8, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
This is the second post in a series on the intersections between ecology, ontology, and politics. (The first reviewed Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain.) Here I focus on integral ecologist Sean Esbjörn–Hargens‘s article An Ontology of Climate Change: Integral Pluralism and the Enactment of Multiple Objects. This post can also serve as a prelude to the cross-blog reading group on Esbjörn–Hargens‘s and Michael Zimmerman’s Integral Ecology, to begin in May of this year. The next entry in this series will look more directly at Integral Theory founder Ken Wilber’s relationship with the ideas of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged environmental sociology, Esbjorn-Hargens, integral theory, integralism, Ontology, epistemology, post-constructivism, Whitehead, Wilber | 7 Comments »
April 4, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Ecology, ontology, politics: These three terms are among the most common themes of this blog, but their intersections deserve a more sustained exploration. This is the first of a series of posts that will do that through critical discussion of various readings and concepts.
This first post reviews and reflects on some of the questions raised by Andrew Pickering’s latest book The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010). The next two posts will examine the integral theory of Sean Esbjörn–Hargens as applied to climate change, and integral theory pioneer Ken Wilber’s critique of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Science & society | Tagged Bateson, cybernetics, ecology, Ontology, epistemology, Pickering, Politics, science studies | 9 Comments »
April 2, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
UW Madison has done an exemplary job responding to the Wisconsin Republican Party’s efforts to intimidate eminent environmental historian William Cronon. The two documents, by the university’s legal counsel and by chancellor Biddy Martin, are well worth reading and are available on Cronon’s blog. While many of the legalities are specific to Wisconsin, the principles aren’t. They deserve a congratulatory shout-out for upholding the best academic and legal traditions.
Posted in Academe, Politics | Leave a Comment »
March 30, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Some of today’s most important eco-artists — people like Patricia Johanson, Betsy Damon, and others — work on a landscape scale with interdisciplinary groups of participants to render socio-ecological change into aesthetically tangible and artistically significant forms. Experimental dancer and choreographer Jennifer Monson’s work falls into this category as well, though, as dance, it tends to be more ephemeral and less product-oriented than even the most process-based of eco-art.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter | Tagged dance, eco-art, iLAND, Monson, New York City, performance | 3 Comments »
March 29, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The Bill Cronon-Wisconsin Republican party tangle is making me — and many others, judging by the responses I’ve seen on academic listservs — think a little more deeply about how we use our e-mail addresses. Like many, I’m troubled by the possibility that someone could ask to see my e-mail correspondence on any old topic. But I also recognize that they have that right, or something like it, and that the same Freedom of Information laws allow me to ask for others’ e-mails — not everyone’s, but anyone’s who works for a publicly funded institution, like a university. That’s part of the price we pay for a public culture, which keeps us from the Hobbesian state of everyone’s liberty (with guns) against everyone else’s. It’s also what makes that culture vulnerable, but that makes it all the more important to use our public profiles in ways that enhance that culture’s viability.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Media ecology, Process-relational thought | Tagged aesthetics, Chomsky, Cronon, Foucault, Politics, Wisconsin | 2 Comments »
March 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The story of the Wisconsin Republican Party vs. environmental historian Bill Cronon makes for a rare example of a single academic’s blogging activism (blogtivism, to use that ugly word) going viral.
You’ve probably heard the basic outline of what’s happened already: Cronon became interested in finding out who was behind the controversial legislation crafted by Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker, posting about it on his blog, Scholar as Citizen. The state GOP responded by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to have access to all his personal emails including any reference to a range of words (like “Republican”), names, and topics. Cronon responded publicly to the scare tactic, and the rest is becoming history.
According to Cronon, his blog has received more than TWO MILLION (!!) hits over a 24-hour period — unheard of for an academic blog post. The New York Times has crafted an editorial responding to the story, scheduled to appear in its paper tomorrow (but readable online today).
Did someone mention anything about the risks (and/or virtues) of blogging?
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Politics | 1 Comment »
March 24, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
To the extent that ontological questions drive my recent writing (which includes Ecologies of the Moving Image, Ecologies of Identity, and a metaphysical manifesto-thriller called Why Objects Fly Out the Window), they are predominantly the following two:
- How do things enter into relation with other things?
- What happens (in the world) when they do?
In other words, I’m grappling with the nature of events, which I would define as new relational processes arising unpredictably from the encounter of previously unconnected processes. Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged ecosophy, ecosophy-G, eventology, Guattari, Naess, Ontology, epistemology | Leave a Comment »
March 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I’ll be in New York City this weekend to participate in the iLAND Symposium at the New School, at the invitation of iLAND founder and Artistic Director Jennifer Monson. iLAND is the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, and this year’s symposium, which runs through Friday evening and all day Saturday, is entitled Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance And Ecology.
Among the projects highlighted this year will be:
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged dance, ecoart | 1 Comment »
March 22, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Ian Bogost throws out a challenge to us (bloggers) all: How should blogs evolve? What kinds of media do we want for our thinking, writing, debating, communicating?
In other words, rather than celebrating what blogs allow us to do, or lament the knee-jerk negativity they still elicit in some (notably, academic) circles, and rather than merely taking them for granted as we’ve received them, how can we make them do what we want them to do? And if we can’t, what can we (eventually) replace them with?
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | Tagged Academe, academic blogging, blogosphere, digital humanities | 3 Comments »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Some Landscapes has a great post about landscape artist/musician Richard Skelton. As evident in works like Landings, Skelton is an artmonk, an eco-process-relationalist extraordinaire, and very much the musical equivalent of the kinds of artists I wrote about here.
Threads Across the River (which follows Scar Tissue in the video below) is beautiful: Continue Reading »
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged acoustic ecology, landscape art, music, soundscape | 4 Comments »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Thoughts for a spring equinox…
Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come.
Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a quick synopsis of those explorations, and here for an entry point into a discussion on The Immanent Frame, one of the most intelligent blogs exploring these issues).
Continue Reading »
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis | 1 Comment »
March 21, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
« Newer Posts - Older Posts »
