March 5, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
One of my favorite object-oriented bloggers (who we’ll call A) writes that “It’s not surprising that there’s a wave of attacks on scholarly blogging” (emphasis added), pointing to another’s (B’s) post about “blowback from academics regarding blogging.” B’s post cites only two examples, “here on (A’s) blog (circularity #1) and here on (C’s).” The one on A’s blog mentions only C’s, and the one on C’s refers to a certain D’s and… back to A, where the only mention of blogging comes on an mp3 link. D’s, meanwhile, as I explained here, referred to a single “question raised” about blogging — one critical comment amidst dozens — in a discussion on a particular listserv.
So we have one attack that’s really just a curmudgeonly whine (the one from the listserv that, in its context, turned out to be the exception that proved the rule, which is that everyone loves blogging). And we have a second (on A’s mp3, which I haven’t listened to, so I can’t say much more about).
Friends, what say we wave off the attacks, relax, exhale?
Posted in Blog stuff | 9 Comments »
March 5, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
By Jon Cloke
Loughborough University geographer Jon Cloke shared this piece with the Crit-Geog-Forum in response to the recent discussion about blogs and social media (see here for more on that). Jon’s been kind enough to allow me to share it on Immanence. I think it provocatively gets at the larger picture in which blogs (and related media forms) are both filling in the communicative gaps for social movements that have not been well served by traditional media or academic circuits, and are helping create new circuits for informational exchange. – ai
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Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, Politics | Tagged blogging, debt crisis, economics, new media, Politics, social networking | Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Stu Elden has been posting about a debate debate on the Critical Geography listserv over the virtues and pitfalls of blogging, and of using blogs, Twitter, and other social media as research tools and data.
I’ve been trying to follow that debate, at least to the extent that I’ve been able to follow anything on the listservs I subscribe to (which hasn’t been much recently). The ease of following blogs as opposed to listservs is one of the points I made in a comment to the list. I find that listservs can be more difficult to keep up with than blogs, since blogs just roll into one’s blog reader, which make their posts more easily organizable, taggable, shareable, searchable, and so on. When one follows one or two listservs, as many disciplinary scholars are likely to do, it’s not a real bother to keep up with them. But when one follows several, as interdisiciplinarians tend to do, it can become overwhelming. I’ve unsubscribed from some recently, but still stay on a handful (for the record, E-ANTH, Critical Geography, the Environmental Communication Network, ASLE, the Peirce List, and two or three others I can’t remember right now).
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Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | 10 Comments »
February 28, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Marina Zurkow’s Elixir videos are wonderful, as is her Renatured blog. (Thanks to Tim for posting about her work.)
There is something sad and elemental about them, in their depiction of the self-containedness of our worlds and their ultimate vulnerability in the face of the chaos beyond. At the same time, the title suggests an alchemical remedy of sorts. Is this the elixir (of self-awareness) that will heal the rift between us and the cosmos, the child-like Aeon about to be born into the storm, or is it just another placebo, the child’s toy of Heidegger’s account of the Heraclitean Aion (which, after all, is as good as things get in this part of the universe)?
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Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged Aleister Crowley, art, Heidegger, Heraclitus, ParkeHarrison, visuality, von Uexkull | 7 Comments »
February 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Here are a few thoughts after watching Frontline’s Revolution in Cairo, which is a very good 24-minute summary of how this particular democratic moment occurred, and after reading Badiou‘s, Hardt & Negri’s, Hallward‘s, Amit Rai‘s, and some other takes on the events.
(1) The recipe:
Tools + Techniques + Events + Vision = The revolution(s) we’ve been witnessing
The first three, in the Egyptian instance, are pretty easy to identify (click on the links). To oversimplify just a little, they are Continue Reading »
Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged Badiou, Egypt, media, nonviolence, Obama, Politics, revolution | 2 Comments »
February 27, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
It’s nice to see Speculative Realism capturing the attention of SF writer and all-round idea impresario Bruce Sterling – see his Speculative Realism as “philosophy fiction.” As a long-time SF lover, the idea of “philosophy fiction” has always appealed to me. Some of the best writing in the genre has been profoundly metaphysical, which is to say speculatively realist.
One little point: Process-relational philosophies have long been speculative and realist. And many of these (along with a lot of ecophilosophy of the last 25 years) reject the centrality of the human-world “correlation,” just as Quentin Meillassoux did in his 2006 book that has been so influential for the Speculative Realists (caps intended).* Whitehead’s Process and Reality is perhaps the most obvious modern example of a speculative metaphysic that is realist through and through, but there have been plenty of others. Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged correlationism, ethics, Meillassoux, philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 7 Comments »
February 26, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Quick, name five genius scientists and inventors…
Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison.
All vegetarians? Of course. Elephant journal includes five others on its list.
How about philosophers and cultural innovators? Pythagoras, Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha, Leo Tolstoy, Marsilio Ficino, Plato by some accounts… See here for a longer list.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
February 25, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
To the USA, perhaps… But mostly neither here nor there…
- There’s an interesting flare-up occurring over Moammar Gaddafi’s son Saif’s Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, involving respected political theorists David Held and Benjamin Barber, among others. (See Eric Schliesser for more.) The issues it raises are as old as the oldest profession: universities’ acceptance of money from dubious sources and whether it’s possible for that money not to have “strings attached,” the role of advisers and examiners in checking out every potential instance of plagiarism, the glamor of well-dressed and politically well-placed youth (why wouldn’t you want to teach Gaddafi’s son if he seems smart and interested in what you have to say?), etc. I once taught a niece of Robert Mugabe’s; nothing interesting to report about it, though — she didn’t talk much, and seemed to do her own work.
Posted in Academe, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics, Visual culture | Leave a Comment »
February 19, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Johann Hari’s article in The Nation on How to Build a Progressive Tea Party is one of the more exciting and inspiring pieces of news I’ve read recently. Hari recounts how a group of Twitter-linked citizens outraged by David Cameron’s £7 billion cuts to social programs when a single company, cellphone giant Vodafone, was allowed to get away without paying £6 billion in British taxes, organized to shut down Vodafone stores across the country.
All the cuts in housing subsidies, driving all those people out of their homes [200,000 in London alone, apparently], are part of a package of cuts to the poor, adding up to £7 billion. Yet the magazine Private Eye reported that one company alone—Vodafone, one of Britain’s leading cellphone firms—owed an outstanding bill of £6 billion to the British taxpayers. According to Private Eye, Vodaphone had been refusing to pay for years, claiming that a crucial part of its business ran through a post office box in ultra-low-tax Luxembourg. The last Labour government, for all its many flaws, had insisted it pay up. But when the Conservatives came to power, David Hartnett, head of the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, apologized to rich people for being “too black and white about the law.” Soon after, Vodafone’s bill was reported to be largely canceled, with just over £1 billion paid in the end.
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Posted in Politics | Tagged activism, Politics, social movements, Tea Party, twitter | 8 Comments »
February 15, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
The New York Times has a couple of nice pieces on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions: an interactive account of the key events and a more detailed piece outlining the role of the different protest groups, bloggers and Facebook-ites, nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Obama administration.
A few quick thoughts:
1) Max Forte is right about the U.S.’s equivocation, its policy of “hedging its bets” in a mix of realism and opportunism.
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Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged Egypt, multitude, posthegemony, revolutions | 3 Comments »
February 11, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Max Forte at Zero Anthropology* has a perceptive assessment of what he takes to be a (Hillary) “Clinton doctrine,” which he describes as the U.S.
hedging [its] bets by keeping a foot in almost all camps, by maintaining contact with diverse sectors in a society critical to U.S. national security interests, emphasizing “stability” when regime survival seems possible, and then emphasizing “orderly transition” when change seems probable. It is a mixture of realism and opportunism and a desire to intervene without being seen to intervene, a low cost foreign policy that builds on established bases of military aid and support for civil society groups. By maintaining open and positive channels of communication (with Mubarak, the military, the April 6 Movement, El Baradei, and even the Muslim Brotherhood [long a working ally of the U.S.]) the U.S. made sure that no matter what resulted, it would remain in the picture as a continued player of importance. Viewed in this light, there is nothing contradictory about U.S. statements on Egypt.
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Posted in Politics | Tagged Egypt, eventology, revolutions, social change | 6 Comments »
February 11, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU
I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing.
As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a London trash heap (above) is the most brilliantly conceived segment, and one gets to hear the full (and in its own way brilliant) incoherence of his position on the topic. “The true ecological attitude is to hate the world: less love, more hatred,” as he puts it in the full interview (available in the book-of-the-film, p. 180).
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Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture | Tagged ecology, film, Morton, nature, philosophy, Zizek | 6 Comments »
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