April 12, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
(This is a slightly revised version of the piece I posted a few hours ago…)
I haven’t posted about the debate between object-oriented and process-relational ontologies for a while here, in part because I said I’d had enough of that debate.
But the more I read of Levi Bryant’s work — both in Democracy of Objects (which he’s kindly sent me a pre-publication version of) and on his blog — the more convinced I am that there isn’t much of a debate, at least not over fundamental and incommensurable differences, between his version of OOO and my understanding of PR ontology.
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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Bryant, correlationism, Meillassoux, object-oriented philosophy, Peirce | 3 Comments »
April 10, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Chris Vitale has a nice post up on Deleuze’s Bergsonian notion of the image as a “slice of time,” or a “slice of the world” — which for Deleuze amounts to more or less the same thing. In a similar spirit, I thought I’d post briefly about a Whiteheadian notion of time.
Normally when we think of slicing into time to depict a moment of it, we tend to think of it as a linear flow. Slicing into time is like slicing into bread: what’s on the left of the slice is the past (for westerners and others who read from left to right), what’s on the right is the future, and the slice itself is where we’re at right now. The world as it appears to us is a cross-section of the loaf.
Or a better metaphor, since we’re in motion, might be a train moving forward on the track of time: the tracks ahead of us are the future, those behind are the past, and the train is us.
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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged Bateson, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, rigpa, time, Whitehead | 5 Comments »
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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?
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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 »
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