immanence

Migration glitches, etc.

December 17, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Some of the videos on this blog seem to have not made it through the migration from MovableType to WordPress. That’s because this blog is on the University of Vermont server, which has fewer options for embedding videos than do stand-alone WordPress blogs. You can still find those videos from the Search bar of the old blog, but I will gradually work through them to make sure they’re here if they deserve to be.

The old blog will remain in place until it’s taken down (which I’m told will be sometime soon, but earlier predictions about such things have not been reliable). Until then it remains a useful record of this blog’s first two years. The category pages now give you a complete chronological file of all the posts in each category — which is a much quicker way of scanning through what’s been on immanence over that time than working your way through the posts here. The old blog also has a much more complete tag cloud.

The old blog is no longer accepting comments, nor will I be adding anything to it, except for the occasional reminder to the remaining subscribers (166 and dwindling) to come join us over here. It is at this point a sarcophagus, a dead record of the first two years of immanence. (A brief annual report will be coming soon. And expect a few changes in the new year.)

Posted in Blog stuff | 1 Comment »

Nature’s nation

December 17, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The new issue of Environmental Communication includes the special section I edited for them on the Ken Burns series The National Parks. It can be accessed here if you have an institutional subscription. If not, Routledge sometimes makes sample issues available.

My own piece, which kicks off the five-article set, has a few things to say about Burns’s nature as composition, and ecology (and politics and jazz) as improvisation. E-mail me if you’d like a copy of it.

Posted in Eco-culture | Leave a Comment »

Capitalism

December 15, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Quick thought after listening to Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” today about the estate tax:

Any system, as a coordinated set of actants and relations, will disproportionately favor those of its members who know how to work it for their own benefit. A pragmatic egalitarianism will attempt to minimize the opportunities for such disproportionate favoritism, without creating worse problems in the process.

As a system oriented toward the monetization (commodification) of things, i.e.,the conversion of things into capital, and the accumulation of such capital through the means made available for that, capitalism disproportionately favors those who know how to squeeze money out of things. Progressive taxation, estate taxes, and other such means of regulatory management work to reduce such systemic favoritism so as to better support socially valued goals (such as social cohesion, equal opportunity, fairness, etc.).

The question is whether we want to live in a capitalist society characterized by vast discrepancies in wealth and power, or a democracy in which capitalist and/or market relations have a place but do not dominate all relations. In 1900, 1% of Americans controlled 50% of the wealth in the country. By 1970, as a result of progressive social and economic policies brought in by the presidential administrations of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and others, that percentage had declined to 20% and a large middle-class had emerged. Today the percentage controlled by the wealthiest 1% is back up to 33%, and climbing.

Posted in Politics | Tagged capitalism | 2 Comments »

Cancun: what just happened?

December 14, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Making sense of what happened at the COP 16 global climate change summit in Cancun is not easy, especially when environmental and climate justice activists seem so intensely divided among themselves (and when the mass media has paid so little attention to it all). Democracy Now yesterday pitted Friends of the Earth’s policy analyst Kate Horner against Center for American Progress senior fellow (and fellow environmental philosopher) Andrew Light, and the two of them seemed to be speaking from different planets. Light’s extended take on the “Cancun compromise” is available here, while FOE International chair Nnimmo Bassey laments the “hijacking of Africa” at the summit here.

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged Cancun, ecopolitics | 3 Comments »

Agreements & productive differences

December 13, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Levi Bryant has proposed a ceasefire on the objects/relations debate, and followed that up with a nice post calling for self-moderation of our more confrontational urges and for a more affirmative writing (and blogging) style that would render the form of our writing more consonant with its content. I’m all for the latter; it’s something I try to practice when I’m not too overcome by impatience (which is easy to get in the heatedness of online exchanges like these). As for a ceasefire, we aren’t of course at war, but stepping back and holding our metaphorical fire makes sense, and could even be timely given the agreements that Levi and I, at least, seem to have reached (which I’ll spell out in a moment). It’s become clear to me over the last year and a half or so of discussions with Levi that while he responds to things heatedly, he always comes back in friendly and generous demeanor, and I value that quality in him.

As for those points of agreement — anyone wanting to trace how these arose can read backwards from his reply to my comment to his reply to my reply to his reply to Chris’s replies to our replies to each other, probably starting with my attractions of process post (!!) — they are these:

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Bryant, OOO | 10 Comments »

Being knowing, knowing being

December 12, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The debate between relational and objectological variants of speculative realism (for lack of a better characterization) has taken another of its more frenetic turns, which is both frustrating and promising — frustrating because it tends to descend into personally directed pejoratives when it does that, and because, as Steve Shaviro suggests, it seems to go around in circles, but promising because there are glimmers of helpful insight that arise in the process. At the risk of getting drawn in further, I will try to clarify one of those glimmers here.

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead | 3 Comments »

immanence seeks poetry editor

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

With its migration and re-emergence on a new (and improved) server, it’s a good time for this blog to diversify and transubstantiate, like water into a good Mediterranean wine.

To that end, Immanence seeks a poetry editor, someone to collect and/or produce textual and visual poetry as an accompaniment and countercurrent to what appears on the blog already. Contributors in general are also welcome: writers, textual poachers, and creative artists interested in the interfaces between ecology, culture, philosophy, and media. (See the Categories up above for a more complete list of the content areas. “Poetry” can and should be added to it. The blog’s mission statement is here, but it can evolve, as all good things do.)

I’ll be taking some release time from the blog in the near future, and I’d be thrilled to have guest contributors and/or co-editors. If you’ve liked what you’ve read here and would like to join the conversation, as a contributor and not just a commenter, please write me to let me know.

As for what’s in it for you… A new audience? Joy? The irrepressible lightness of being immanent?

Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »

mediation arrives…

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Michael at Archive Fire has been doing an excellent job summarizing and, at times, mediating between Levi, Bogost, and myself (and others). See, e.g., here, here, and here. He’s genuinely trying to see the best of both perspectives and to weave them into some concordance. Paragraphs like the following, which reframes the discussion over life and the mouse in space, are particularly useful:

In this case, ‘life’ is not just a “quality”, or “singularity”, it is an emergent property embodied in the mouse’s extensive and intensive constitution – a constitution, or composition, or assemblage that is intrinsically processual, temporal and always existing in relation. Whatever ‘withdrawness’ an entity has it has by virtue of its structural depth – its embodied ‘local’ (which is actually co-local) complexity.

Very well put.

Posted in Philosophy | Leave a Comment »

repetition with (slight) difference

December 10, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Just a few quick responses to Levi Bryant. Levi writes:

1) entities are nonetheless patterned or structured despite their becoming, 2) they are unities, and 3) they cannot be submerged in or exhausted by their relations. Relations can always be detached. Objects can always enter into new relations. [. . .] if you hold that entities are constituted by their relations then you lose that excess by which it is possible to account for how anything new can enter the world.

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Bryant, object-oriented philosophy | 4 Comments »

and anyway…

December 9, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Process-relational and object-oriented philosophers, as far as I can tell, share the idea that things have an interiority, a “one’s own-ness,” that is not accessible to others in the way that it is to oneself. We can argue about where that interiority is located — whether in one’s experience (which is where we access it, for PRists) or somewhere more withdrawn than that, and maybe even inaccessible to one’s own experience; and whether it’s what withdraws from relations (as it seems to be for OOOists), or what enacts relations (as it is for PRists). And we can argue about what possesses it — whether only active unities (Whiteheadian “actual occasions” and “societies”) or aggregates of all kinds (rocks, discarded snakeskins, toothpicks and shopping carts, etc.). But that’s a significant agreement.

Posted in Philosophy | 4 Comments »