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.
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Media ecology, Process-relational thought | Tagged aesthetics, Chomsky, Cronon, Foucault, Politics, Wisconsin | 2 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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:
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged dance, ecoart | 1 Comment »
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?
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | Tagged Academe, academic blogging, blogosphere, digital humanities | 3 Comments »
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 »
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).
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis | 1 Comment »
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.
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
Posted in Academe, Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged conferences, environmental philosophy | 3 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities.
You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized so many viewers that the young videomaker has apparently gone into hiding. I won’t link to it, since it doesn’t really deserve all the hits, but it’s easy enough to find. The gist of it is that “God is soooo great — we prayed for him to smite his enemies and there he did, smashing those godless Japanese to smithereens.” A lot of viewers couldn’t seem to tell the difference between satire and the real thing, which apparently follows Poe’s Law: one can’t satirize fundamentalist religion without it being taken by some as the real thing, because there are enough instances in which the real thing is as bad as that (Glenn Beck being only the tip of the iceberg).
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter | Tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality | 7 Comments »
A few observations from the events of the last week or so:
(1) Tsunamis happen. When they do, in a globally media-connected world, they bring us all a little closer together. (Not all of us; those who don’t wish to be brought closer may drift further apart. But, to risk getting overly psychoanalytical, those who’ve had a reasonably loving upbringing, or those whose instincts and/or the influences they were exposed to helped them overcome a loveless upbringing, will drift closer together — because empathy works on, with, and through them, and the images and thoughts of tragedy resonate.) This is something new in human history, and it gives me cause for hope.
Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged eventology, Japan tsunami, media ecology, new media, political ecology, Politics | 1 Comment »
Following up from the last post…
Part of Jodi Dean‘s response to her critics was this paragraph:
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of communism is its capacity to return, throughout history, as an aspiration, even in the face of counter revolution, active hostility, defeat, war, etc. Communism is irreducible to the conflicts of the 20th century. I think the reason is that “from each according to ability to each according to need” is an axiom of working and living together with undeniable power.
Posted in Academe, Politics | Leave a Comment »
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