Graham is “puzzled that Ivakhiv thinks OOO can be refuted by the fact that objects have histories.” I’m puzzled why Graham would think that I think that. I’m also puzzled why my brief comment (on Tim’s blog) about stability and instability, and about stability as an achievement rather than a default mode, should have set off such a volley of responses (e.g. here and here). Continue Reading »
Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position.
The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t fall from the sky; they are made into objects that withstand a fairly high degree of turbulence in their environments. Humans have become great producers of such things — of things that can be shipped all the way from China (as Leonard Cohen used to sing) and that work for a little while according to their instructions, before we tire of them and order next year’s model.
But even in a world without humans, there are achievements aplenty: planets and galaxies (amazing achievements, they); oceans teeming with life, some of it organized into social groups; and ecosystems, geological formations, bacterial networks, individual organisms, and all the rest. Even the things that do fall from the sky — asteroids and meteorites, for instance — are achievements, though the more impressive achievement is the atmosphere that protects those other things from the onslaught of the meteorites. They all take a fair bit of work being made and maintained — not necessarily work by “themselves” (though that, too), but work on a multitude of levels and scales. And they are all in process (or, to be more precisely, in various kinds of process), always modulating between stability and instability but, fortunately (for us) crafting enough stabilities to make a pretty richly diverse world possible. Continue Reading »
Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy | Tagged lava lamps, minimalism, music, Ontology, epistemology | 6 Comments »
Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic case studies from around the world, but these will be informed by the theoretical conversations of the week we spent at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
Following this excerpt I have added some comments relating the ideas (discussed here) of Descola, Latour, and Stengers to some of the concepts I’ve been working with from Whitehead, Peirce, and the fields/discourses of biosemiotics and panpsychism. I haven’t seen these connections made (in this way, at least) in any of the literature by or on these authors, and I’m still working out these ideas myself, so that part is work-in-progress.
From animism to cosmopolitics
Animism, like the “primitive,” “pagan,” and “savage,” but also like “religion” itself, is a term has been used to classify cultural difference into a hierarchically valenced series: animists, for Edward Tylor and other evolutionists, were thought to have maintained a “lower” and more “primitive” conception of the universe, one peopled by spirits and with objects being ascribed human characteristics. In Tylor’s view, the animist “stage” of belief was followed by a polytheistic one, and in turn by a monotheistic one. This evolutionism has since been largely rejected, and more recently, a loose coterie of anthropologists and scholars of religion have reappropriated the term “animism” to mean something rather more interesting (Bird-David 1999; Descola 2005, 2006, 2009; Harvey 2006; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2004). Continue Reading »
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged animism, anthropomorphism, biosemiotics, cosmopolitics, Descola, Latour, panpsychism, Peirce, Stengers, Whitehead | 15 Comments »
I’m reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I’m co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make up the book’s concluding chapter. The original piece had a coherence to it that will be lost somewhat, so I thought I would share the first couple of sections of it here.
(Graham Harman’s recent comments about the slowness of traditional scholarly publishing versus the rapidity and accessibility of open-access publishing, which reiterate the argument that got me to set up this blog in the first place, has encouraged me to want to share at least something of this SAR event that happened a year and a half ago, and that won’t culminate with a publication for several months still.)
The remainder of this piece, including the “cosmopolitical” argument I alluded to in this post at the time, will remain in the book’s conclusion. You’ll have to wait for the book to read the finished version of that. It will be a very good collection, and I hope SAR Press doesn’t make it too inaccessible for the general public.
Here are a couple of excerpts… Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Spirit matter | Tagged cosmopolitics, cultural ecology, ecology, environmental philosophy, religion, religion and ecology | 4 Comments »
For some inexplicable reason, my post on Spike Jonze’s movie Where the Wild Things Are keeps getting an inordinate number of hits, seemingly from casual passersby. These are people from all over the world, coming (sometimes) in droves to that one blog post, generally dropping into this blog directly from Google, and I can’t find any connecting link to an outside source that would account for all that traffic.
It’s old, and it wasn’t a particularly substantive post, even compared to some of the other film reviews I’ve posted here. So why all the interest?
Posted in Blog stuff | 6 Comments »
Tim Morton has kindly posted about the cover art Indiana University Press gave my nearly decade-old (but none the worse for wear) book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which he likes for its “polyvalent symbolism” incorporated into a Mondrianesque design. The photo in the midst of that design is one I took looking up to the top of Glastonbury Tor. Glastonbury is one of the two sites I focus on in the book’s analysis of landscape, nature, “practices of place,” and the politics of imagination.
I have some copies to spare, which I’d be happy to share at cost ($10 inclusive of shipping, or really whatever you’re willing to reasonably pay). First come, first served. Send me an email with your address; and bear with me, since I’m terrible with sending things through the mail. (In this day of clicking on keys and tapping on screens, it seems like an impossible task to pack something and carry it to the post office during business hours. But I would do it, for the cause.)
Added later:
It seems I jumped the gun in offering to send the book internationally at that price. The U.S. has eliminated its surface mail rate (sometime in the last few years), thanks apparently to paranoia around ‘homeland security,’ and the cost of shipping the book by air mail works out to $15 U.S., which doesn’t include the cost of the book. So it’s best to get it through your local Amazon or some other venue. I believe that parts of it can be found at aaaaarg, but if your local library doesn’t have it, you can always ask them to order it. Sorry for any confusion about that.
Posted in Spirit matter | Leave a Comment »
The Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations conference in Tartu (the leading center for biosemiotics research) promises to be a good one. Plenary speakers include Jesper Hoffmeyer (one of the leaders of the field), ecophilosopher and musician David Rothenberg, postcolonial ecocritic Graham Huggan, and philosopher of science Colin Allen.
The deadline for abstracts has passed. Two publications are planned. For more information, see the conference home page.
Posted in Academe | 1 Comment »
Consider the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series for your next manuscript… The new series poster is here.
The Environmental Humanities Series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad. Film, literature, television, Web-based media, visual art, and physical landscape—all are crucial sites for exploring how ecological relationships and identities are lived and imagined. The Environmental Humanities Series publishes scholarly monographs and essay collections in environmental cultural studies, including popular culture, film, media, and visual cultures; environmental literary criticism; cultural geography; environmental philosophy, ethics, and religious studies; and other cross-disciplinary research that probes what it means to be human, animal, and technological in an ecological world.
New or forthcoming titles include:
- Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, Nancy Holmes, editor
- Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, Jodey Castricano, editor
- Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century, Damian F. White and Chris Wilbert, editors
- Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally, Jenny Kerber, author
- Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope, Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields, editors
Posted in Academe | 1 Comment »
I really should be promoting this more than I have, since my colleagues are working hard at organizing it. The theme lends itself well to the kinds of topics discussed on this blog, and the association is very interdisciplinary, spanning across the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. It would be great to see some of you here this summer.
Let me know if anyone is interested in co-organizing a session on film/media, complexity and the ontology of socio-ecological relations, or something related. Unfortunately the conference conflicts with both the ASLE (Association for Literature and Environment) and ECN (Conference on Communication and Environment) conferences (in Bloomington, Indiana, and El Paso, Texas, respectively), but if you aren’t going to either, Burlington (and Vermont) are great places to visit in late June.
Info:
Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences 2011 Conference “Confronting Complexity”
June 23-26, 2011, Burlington, Vermont. Hosted by the University of Vermont.
Plenary speakers will include climatologist Heidi Cullen and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (invited).
For more information on the conference or to submit a proposal, visit www.aess.info/2011
Note that the session proposal deadline has been extended to January 23.
Posted in Academe | 1 Comment »
“Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. … Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts.”
“it is a [the?] plane of immanence that constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth or deterritorialization, the foundation on which it creates its concepts. … The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges.”
Thanks to Karla Stingerstein (see her series of Deleuzian artworks here), Rob Shields/Space and Culture (and Fiona Banner), and Melissa Wong. Quotes from D & G, What is Philosophy?
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture | 1 Comment »
A process-relational buddhontology sees every moment as a moment of grasping, or prehension, that begins with an open, spacious cognizance, gathers/feels/responds to what has arisen before it, and ends in the satisfaction of its own concrescence. When the object of that satisfaction is unrecognized as what it is — as the immanent flow of desiring-production, a flow that cannot be frozen or held in place because there is nothing tangible there to hold and no one tangible to hold it — it conditions the next moment with its own sense of incomplete satisfaction.
Liberation from delusion comes with recognizing things in their true nature as the open flow of immanence shared. The full recognition of that leads spontaneously to the realization of the compassionate solidarity of all things (i.e. that we, all minded, empsyched things, all subjectivating entities, are in this together). Living in light of that recognition is wisdom.
(Meditation, at least of the zen and dzogchen varieties, is the practice of learning the microphysics of how to do that: of allowing what arises to arise, of dwelling in the open, spacious, non-grasping cognizance of the moment, of letting things be in their fullness. As for the macrophysics, that requires collective work, guided by an understanding of social and institutional dynamics, of capitalism, and other things.)
What this means is that this moment is all that there is (for any subjectivating entity). But moments like this — the ending of a year and beginning of another (for entities like us who dwell also amid the shared abstractions of concepts like ‘years’ and ‘then’ and ‘hope’ and ‘time’ and ‘us’) — provide an opportunity for setting our goals, arranging our motivations, projecting our desires forward on trajectories that may take on a life of their own beneath our conscious graspings, running alongside us in the machinery of our body-mental-matter.
With that in mind, here’s a toast to this year-inaugurating moment:
May this be the year that all sentient beings are liberated from delusion. (If only for a moment; moments are, after all, what the world is made of.)
May we all experience the liberating insight into the true nature of things: as feelingful expressions of becoming, openings onto the beauty that ever arises, steps toward the elusive mystery that draws us onward.
May we turn all desires into desire itself. The only wheel to escape is the wheel of delusion which, when seen clearly, is nothing but the open embrace of all things. (The trick is in the seeing, which is the doing.)
Peace be to all.
Top image courtesy of Alvin Lau.
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | 5 Comments »
Here’s a handful of best-of-the-year stories collected from around the blogosphere (and beyond:
Zero Anthropology (includes a top 10 of Wikileaks posts)
Andy Revkin’s list of planet-sized events (and click on the BBC, Wired, NPR and Scientific American science stories of the year links for more in this vein)
Grist’s top 10 green stories of the year,* and their A-to-Z of the 2010 urban landscape
Skeptic’s Top 10 science books of the year
Tativille‘s year in cinema (and here are Sight and Sound’s and Film Comment’s critics lists)
MUBI’s best movie posters of the year
The year in socially engaged Buddhism at The Jizo Chronicles
The year in ecomedia studies
*(Note: I forgot to include this here originally, so I’ve added it.)
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
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