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AESS Confronting Complexity conference

January 5, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Planes of immanence

January 3, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

“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 »

…& beginnings (a toast to this moment)

December 31, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

Year ends

December 31, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

On anthropomorphism: making humans, pencils, & souls

December 29, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Tim Morton has recently been suggesting that just as humans anthropomorph (that’s a verb), so pencils pencilmorph. I love this idea, though I’m not sure about its implications, which I want to think through here.

Anthropomorphism #1 (traditional, & its extensions)

The traditional definition of anthropomorphism is something like “the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things.” It’s treating, or perceiving, a nonhuman thing as if it were a human. And it’s a good thing, if you’re Walt Disney; or a bad thing, if you’re doing science and your peer reviewers don’t want to acknowledge that the animals you’re studying also think, communicate linguistically, pass things on culturally, and so on.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments »

2nd annual report

December 26, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Compared to last year’s report, this one will be brief.

The blog has been a little more active this past year than in its first year, featuring some 200 posts (compared to 140), many of them short but some quite substantial. Highlights included the cross-blog Vibrant Matter reading group (in May and June), the recurring process-object debates (see Geophilosophy), more writing on film, and more political commentary (including about oil and the Gulf spill and other environmental matters).

Continue Reading »

Posted in Blog stuff | 4 Comments »

The tree of life, in pieces

December 21, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

If you haven’t seen the trailer for Terence Malick’s forthcoming film The Tree of Life, you’re just not a real cineaste, are you?

What’s better than burrowing analytically into the Heideggerian ecophilosophical themes of Malick’s films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World — before making any of them he was a Heideggerian philosopher)? Analyzing the trailers, of course, which is what Eric Kohn does in a shot-by-shot breakdown of its full 96-cuts-in-two-minutes length. Water, fire, nature, innocence, grace (sounds like a Tarkovsky film so far, or something Lars von Trier is about to twist inside out), baseball, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn (so much for Tarkovsky)…

H/t to Drifting’s David Lowery.

Posted in Cinema | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

Happy solstice

December 21, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

What was the Earth protecting the moon from last night anyway?

Ah, the solstice sun… First time in 456 years, apparently.

Happy Solstice. More here.

Posted in Spirit matter | 3 Comments »

A book per visitor…

December 20, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Fifty visitors at once on this blog (according to Sitemeter). That may well be a record… If the pages load slowly, that’s probably the reason… Must be the books.

Posted in Blog stuff | 1 Comment »

The science gene

December 20, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Pretty funny, if you haven’t seen it yet…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M-vnmejwXo?fs=1&hl=en_US

H/t to Tom Cheetham.

Posted in Academe, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Books of the decade in ecocultural theory

December 19, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

What books, published over the last ten years, have contributed most cogently and profoundly to our thinking about the relationship between culture and nature, ecology and society? (That’s to name just two of the dualisms this blog regularly throws into question.) Who have been the most important ecocultural theorists so far this century? And which are the most important publishers in this area?

Below is a highly subjective “top 10” (sort of) of the books that have most influenced my own thinking on these issues. It aims for a certain representativeness, a balance between the rigorously theoretical and the  theorized-applied, the established names and the new, and between the many fields and styles of thinking I’m aiming to encompass on such a list.

This is followed by a longer list of some 50 additional nominees. These include books that almost made the top ten and others that I haven’t read yet, but that have gotten enough mention in one or another of the fields and subfields I try to monitor to warrant their inclusion. Those fields include philosophy, social/cultural theory, geography, science and technology studies, environmental history, environmental anthropology and sociology, cognitive science, and emerging or interdisciplinary fields like ecocriticism, environmental communication, political ecology, biosemiotics/ecosemiotics, critical animal studies, affect studies, religion and ecology, and ecopsychology.

All are monographs (or close to it) first published in the English language between 2000 and 2010. In including titles published this year, I’m keeping in mind that a book can be influential even before it comes out, since the author is likely to be preparing the way for it — in articles and public presentations — for some time in advance.

I’m interested in hearing your suggestions for other books not on this list, as well as comments and votes “yay” and “nay” on any of the following. If there are enough “seconds” on any of these 60 or so nominations, or on any others anyone would like to add to the list, I’ll run a Survey Monkey style vote (and share it on relevant listservs) to see which book wins.

Finally, with such a long list, I’m bound to offend everyone who’s been left off. My apologies in advance. Remind me of your book (or, better still, send me a copy! 😉 ).

Continue Reading »

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 24 Comments »

My smile is stuck… (moonlight in vermont)

December 18, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

From the very first moment of hearing Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica many years ago, I was hooked. The first crashing guitar chunks of “Frownland” followed by the Captain’s growling happy voice “My smile is stuck, I cannot go back to your Frownland”… When I read Lester Bangs’ lines, they rang true:

‘Trout Mask Replica shattered my skull, realigned my synapses, made me nervous, made me laugh, made me jump and jag with joy. It wasn’t just the fusion I’d been waiting for: it was a whole new universe, a completely realized and previously unimaginable landscape of guitars splintering and spronging and slanging and even actually swinging in every direction, as far as the mind could see…while this beast voice straight out of one of Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras growled out a catarrh spew of images at once careeningly abstract and as basic and bawdy as the last 200 years of American Folklore…I stayed under the headphones and played Trout Mask straight through five times in a row that night. The next step of course was to turn the rest of the world on to this amazing thing I’d found, which perhaps came closer to a living, pulsating, slithering organism than any other record I’d ever heard.’ – Lester Bangs, New Musical Express, 1 April 1978

He was inconsistent and probably more than a little crazy, but his blues-derived experimental rock-and-roll was one of the most original things to have appeared in its time or since. Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, died yesterday, at 69, from complications associated with multiple sclerosis. Rest in Peace.

My smile is stuck
I cannot go back t` yer Frownland
My spirit`s made up of the ocean
And the sky `n the sun `n the moon
`n all my eye can see
I cannot go back to yer land of gloom
Where black jagged shadows
Remind me of the comin` of yer doom
I want my own land
Take my hand `n come with me
It`s not too late for you
It`s not too late for me
To find my homeland
Where uh man can stand by another man
Without an ego flyin`
With no man lyin`
`n no one dyin` by an earthly hand
Let the devil burn `n the beggar learn
`n the little girls that live in those old worlds
Take my kind hand
My smile is stuck
I cannot go back t` yer Frownland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYdjQCrO_xM?fs=1&hl=en_US

More here (hat tips to all):

The Listening Ear

Some Came Running

A Music Long Before Meaning

Sub Specie Aeterni

www.beefheart.com

Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

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