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.
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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:
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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.
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“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?
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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.)
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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.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged animism, anthropomorphism, Jung, Latour, object-oriented philosophy, Whitehead | 8 Comments »
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).
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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 film, Malick | 3 Comments »
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.
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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.
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