When your life takes you places. Or, on localism and the ambivalence of the green mobile intellectual…
One of the paradoxes of environmental scholarship is that, for obvious reasons, many of us favor localism over globalism, community solutions over international policy crafting (though we obviously recognize the need for the latter), and living-in-place over a life spent on screens and in airports. Yet we work within an intellectual community that is effectively global — scholarly networks are that by their nature — and that beckons us to be that way in our daily lives, and not just in the background of our (never only) 9-to-5 professional interactions.
Living in northern Vermont (in Burlington over the long run, but partially and currently in the northeast Vermont town of Greensboro for personal/family reasons and because our permanent home is rented out), my family and I engage a lot with the lives around us, human and nonhuman. Most environmentalists would say that this is absolutely as it should be.
The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s forum on religion, secularism, and the public sphere, is in the midst of publishing a series of responses to David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. My contribution, entitled “The Dawn of Everything Good?“, appeared last week. The series can be read here. The following comments build on those I’ve written there, so it’s recommended (though not essential) that you read those first.
The dawn of what, precisely?
One of the things I find interesting about The Dawn of Everything is that it’s never exactly clear what Graeber and Wengrow (henceforth, “G & W”) mean by their title. Do they intend their book to be the ultimate tell-all about the origins of everything? They claim that this isn’t what they’re doing, but those claims don’t always ring true. Or is it a reference to theories of “the dawn of everything,” including some of the very theories (or paradigms, really) that they critique? In that case the title should be accompanied by a question mark (“The Dawn of Everything?“). Or could it be a reference to their own hopes for the present moment — or for any moment (processual thinkers that they are) — that we have options we can choose from today that would make tomorrow a better day, less encumbered by trajectories inherited from the past?
I would throw a big party when I turn sixty, the kind of party I used to throw in my twenties, when there was plenty to celebrate and plenty of people to celebrate with. (One of those was the ‘End of the World party’, which tells you the kinds of things we celebrated back in the 1980s.)
I’ve been quarantining, more or less, since I brought Covid back with me from Switzerland. (Conferences in Europe these days seem to be very efficient super-spreaders). It’s Day 17 now, with symptoms and positivity having returned last week after a few days of feeling fine and testing negative. Like Edward Gorey’s doubtful guest, this one seems reluctant to pack up its bags and leave.
But thanks to a wonderful uncle-and-aunt-in-law’s cabin, I am currently enjoying the festival around me, which that great anti-capitalist monk Thomas Merton described this way in “Rain and the Rhinoceros“:
I’ve just posted a piece called “Understanding Russia” over at UKR-TAZ, in which I look at some proximate and deeper causes of continued Russian support for the invasion of Ukraine. It’s mainly a review of some recent literature.
The part that may be of greatest interest to readers of Immanence is the concluding section, in which I discuss Sophie Pinkham’s review of Thane Gustafson’s recent book Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change. Gustafson discusses Russia’s economic over-reliance on oil and gas, and its dismal economic prospects in the long term. As Pinkham puts it,
Russia is warming 2.5 times as fast as the world on average, and the Arctic is warming even faster. The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that the country will be a relative winner in climate change, benefiting from a melting and accessible Arctic shipping route, longer growing seasons, and the expansion of farmland into newly thawed areas. Gustafson counters, with a dry but persuasive marshaling of facts, that in the redistribution of wealth and power that will result from climate change, Russia is doomed. After reading Klimat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine begins to look like the convulsion of a dying state.
In my analysis, Russia is not an isolated case of a country that has deviated from some international norm. Rather, it is a variant of something we find reflected in many places — in illiberal, authoritarian responses to looming economic insecurity, such as those undergirding Trumpism in the U.S., Orbanism in Hungary, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and shades of Modiism (India), Xiism (China), Brexitism, and many others. And in an increasingly climate-traumatized world, we can not only expect those to continue, but to also seek common cause with each other.
Big data + authoritarian governance = techno-totalitarianism.
At least that’s the equation we’re most familiar with, and the route that appears to be being laid out in Xi’s China, according to this lengthily researched New York Times piece. (To be fair, the authors only use “techno-authoritarianism,” and the titular and subtitular “-totalitarianism” gloss appears to be the editors’ — which makes me wonder what the authors think of that terminological shift.) The video is worth viewing.
If I was currently teaching a course in media and/or science fiction, the question I would want to raise is whether and how big-data surveillance and analysis technologies might be used for more libertarian and decentralist ends. (We know they are useful for monitoring the state of the Earth, since without them we would hardly know the details of climate change.)
The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah Crockford for providing the occasion for these comments. Since this particular line of thinking was resonant among conference participants, I’m sharing it here in an extended form.
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up at multiple venues across the city of Toronto under the theme “What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.” I recommend reading some of the documents from the Biennale to get a sense of how they do this.
Visiting the biennale has inspired me to continue formulating my “manifesto in progress” (see here, here, here, and here for a few earlier glimpses). Manifestos aren’t the place to be comprehensive or to explore internal contradictions, of which there are many, so this one is obviously formulaic. It is presented on the hypothesis that formulas can sometimes be helpful for orienting ourselves.
Two images came into my in-box this morning from wildly different directions, which in their combination set up a fizzy train of thought in their wake. (No doubt because of my current thinking on images in the Anthropocene, including images of that weird space where we find the religious, spiritual, and divine. And maybe because of a recent brief revisit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s final, unfinished text The Visible and the Invisible, with its chiasmic interpretation of the phenomenology that intertwines us all with and against each other.)
The first of these was a Ukraine war “icon” from a series shared on NPR reporter Julian Hayda’s “Unorthodox Icons” Facebook page. This particular image shows Mary, the Mother of God, seemingly crushing, or perhaps gently enclosing and redirecting, with her soft, sheltering hands, the firing main gun assemblies of several “Z”-marked Russian tanks.
I was interviewed last week by UC Santa Barbara music professor and KCSB DJ David Novak on his show Selectric Davyland. The hour-long interview offers a highly personal take on Ukrainian music since the 1980s; David called it a “Personal and Political History (and a Playlist) of Ukrainian Experimental Music.” It features an adventurous mix of work by contemporary Ukrainian composers and bands from Kharkiv (The Moglass), Odesa (Kadaitcha), and Berlin (Zavoloka), as well as a piece of Polissian (Chernobyl area) traditional singing by the authentic folk ensemble Drevo, and a few bits from my own late 1980s-1990s Ukrainian-Canadian band Vapniaky, a.k.a. Stalagmites Under a Naked Sky.
One of the points I make in the interview is that a common theme in Ukrainian music is the relationship to land. One finds this in all Ukrainian music, from contemporary classical to black metal, industrial, rave, ambient, and experimental. It’s of course evident in the avant-folk forms that have become popular in recent years (as in Dakha Brakha, Go_A, Folknery, et al.), and is a theme that’s become all the more explicit in the statements of musicians, and some of the music being made right now, in the context of the current war and attempted Russian invasion.
