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More on communism (vision & history)

March 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

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Posted in Academe, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Belief in expired wor(l)ds, & in wor(l)ds to come…

March 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

It riles me up when intelligent people whose work I respect a lot say ill-considered, if not outright indefensible, things. Jodi Dean’s post arguing that communism “worked” strikes me as such a thing. I’ve provided a lengthy counter-argument on her blog, the gist of which is that the political projects that were actually carried out (rather than merely dreamed) under the flag of “communism” were colossal failures, for a whole host of reasons. This is thoroughly documented, and anyone who has spent much time in the former Soviet Union, or I imagine in China, has encountered the many levels of failure: social, economic, ecological, and, perhaps most disturbingly, a kind of deep spiritual failure.

Gilles Deleuze argues that what we need are artistic and philosophical experiments that would revive our belief in this world. (That’s what this blog has argued since its inception.) While the Soviet experiment did produce such a belief in its earliest stages — and these are worth learning from — it lost it rapidly and decisively. Whether we date that loss to the long slow decline after Khrushchev, or to Stalin’s ascent and totalitarian takeover in the 1920s (and the killing fields that followed), or to the suppression of leftist dissent (such as the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, or others even earlier), is all a matter for debate. Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments »

cfp: Rethinking Time & Ecology

March 8, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue of Environmental Philosophy

THEME: Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and Ecology

Details: Continue Reading »

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | 4 Comments »

Open movie culture

March 7, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Among the freely watchable films Open Culture includes in their 340 Free Movies Online list are films by Tarkovsky (all of them!), Godard (Breathless, King Lear), Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove), Jarman (Caravaggio), Hawks (His Girl Friday), Bunuel (L’Age d’Or), Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog), Kurosawa (Rashomon, Throne of Blood), Dreyer (Vampyr), Greenaway (Rembrandt’s J’accuse), Linklater (Slacker), Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi), Errol Morris (Fog of War), Hitchcock (lots of them!), Eisenstein, Truffaut, Lynch, Scorcese, Lang, Leone, Ford; docs on Philip K. Dick, Warhol, Tarkovsky, and James Dean (by Robert Altman); Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (which I referred to in my post on Steven Shaviro), and much more.

The post also includes a pretty complete list of free movie sites.


Posted in Media ecology | 2 Comments »

The anthro(polo)(blogo)sphere

March 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Having looked at the debate among critical geographers over blogging and social media (here, here, and here), let’s look at another, adjacent discipline: anthropology.

No work necessary: Ryan Anderson’s latest post at Ethnographix does it for us. Anthropologists,  Anderson writes, have been “slow to find their way into the vastness that is the internet.” Fortunately, there are some excellent exceptions. His overview of them covers almost all of the anthro blogs in my own blog reader: Savage Minds, Neuroanthropology, Zero Anthropology, Middle Savagery, Archaeological Haecceities, media/anthropology, Michael Shanks’s excellent personal blog, and a few others. (I would add Anthropology.net and Material World to the list.)

Anderson has cross-posted the piece, plus a readers’ poll, at Daily Kos.

(This could become a little like my Environmental Thought and Culture graduate seminar, where we do a survey of how different social science and humanities disciplines are meeting the eco-critical challenges of the twenty-first century. Next stop: philosophy? sociology? English lit? communication studies? I’ll leave those to others, for now.)

(Note: (polo)(blogo) bears no relationship to bolo’bolo. But maybe it should.)

Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Drip-drip or occasional release?

March 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The last few posts raise the question of whether it’s better for me to post newsy snippets like these as separate blog posts, or if I should keep them in the Immanence Shadow Blog (Google shared items feed). I’ve generally confined them to the latter, except when there’s something particularly important or worthy of comment. It’s a question of whether readers prefer the constant drip-drip of blogginess — like Leiter’s or Harman’s philosophy blogs, Grist’s environmental feed, et al. — or an occasional but substantial release of the blog-gates.

Comments welcome.

Posted in Blog stuff | 1 Comment »

Revolution as clash of velocities

March 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

At Space and Politics, Gaston Gordillo continues his Spinozan-Deleuzian account of the “revolutionary resonance” of the tumult spreading across the Arab world.

“The longer a resonance lasts and the farther it expands the stronger it becomes. During most of human history, the maximum speed at which a revolutionary resonance traveled was the speed of the bodies carrying it within them. […]

“In the Egyptian Revolution, the synergy between the velocities generated on these networks of instant communication and in the urban terrain was decisive in allowing the multitude outmaneuver state violence and state propaganda. The revolution was fought at different yet inseparable velocities: the speed of swarms of bodies clashing with the police on the streets and the much-faster speed of the affective resonances generated by those clashes and amplified over the internet and TV networks not controlled by the Egyptian state like Al Jazeera. Disembodied and projected instantly as images, sounds, and text onto countless computers and TV screens, these resonances became embodied again by affecting the millions of bodies watching, listening, and reading. Not all bodies were affected the same way. Yet millions resonated positively, and not just in Egypt.”

Read the entire article here.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Metaphorics of “revolution” & “rebellion”

March 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

When we hear about a Twitter and Facebook “revolution” in “X Square” or in a city in Libya, do we get keyed up? When we later hear about “rebels” and “civil war” somewhere in Africa (in that same Libya), do we tune out?

This week’s On the Media — one of the best hours of every week on National Public Radio — includes a segment on the effects of media metaphors like these, and other good material on online protestors “anonymous,” media coverage of recent labor protests, and distinguishing between journalism and “churnalism” (the regurgitated publicity that fills airwaves).

Posted in Media ecology | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Plastic planet

March 6, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Discard Studies shares Max Liboiron’s engrossing, and depressing, account of the ocean’s toxic soup of plastics.

A few quotes:

“The best conservative estimate we have is that there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the ocean. For comparison, The Gulf Spill spewed roughly 2.5 million pounds of oil per day at its peak.  That makes it would take 345 years of oil leaking to reach the same amount of plastic that is already in the ocean.” […]

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Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Hold your fire…

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 »

The flight of the bumbleblog

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 , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Why blog (reprise)

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 »

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