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As another political season (leading to the midterm elections) winds down here in the US, people get wound up. Here’s part of something I wrote to a friend who happens to be a Tea Party sympathizer – which surprised me when I found this out, but life is full of surprises, and meeting them mindfully keeps things interesting.

 

[. . .]

“I completely agree with you about special interest groups being too powerful in the U.S. It’s one of the reasons why I originally hesitated to move here when I was offered a job at the University of Wisconsin ten years ago. (The U.S. has ten times as many people, and ten times as many universities, than Canada, so it was likelier that I’d find a job – which I was looking for at the time – in the U.S. than at home.)

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That’s what one of our extremely gracious hosts at the Instituto de Estudios Gallegos, kept repeating during the wining and dining that made up an important part of the IV International Colloquium Compostela. I can now attest that it’s absolutely true. The meals were extended food fests where serving after delicious serving, dish after delectable dish — of locally caught seafood and fish, locally grown meats (which I had trouble abstaining from, 18 years of meatlessness notwithstanding), fresh breads, local wines, and tasty desserts — kept arriving for hours on end, keeping us at the table well into the night from our late starting dinners (10 pm being typical).

Aside from the food and the setting — the gorgeous medieval city and World Heritage Site of Santiago de Compostela — the colloquium itself was very good, with an interdisciplinary mix of researchers including anthropologists, historians, scholars of religion, a few geographers, a sociologist, and a handful of others (including two archbishops presenting on Christian pilgrimage in north Africa and the Middle East) discussing pilgrimage and its relation to conflict and peace in the world’s religions (and, in my case, outside the world’s religions). The plan is to publish the results in book form.

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Amazing that after 7000 years this 100+ megalith cromlech is standing (once again), and that it was only “discovered” in 1964. (Discovered presumably by those who had a reasonably good idea of what they were discovering…) It is the Almendres Cromlech outside Evora, Portugal.

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I’m getting ready to head to Spain, where I’ve been invited to give a talk on “green pilgrimage” at the Fourth Colloquium Compostela. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ll be speaking about.

 

Green Pilgrimage: Prospects for Ecology and Peace-Building

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Fabio Gironi has a very perceptive response to the recent posts at Larval Subjects, Ecology Without Nature, and here, over Buddhism, objects, and relations.

I like his admission that “I have never been – nor [do] I plan to be—a practicing Buddhist or a ‘believer’ of any sort, but the encounter with Nāgārjuna’s philosophy was probably the most exciting intellectual encounter of my career.”

There is something wildly exciting about reading Nagarjuna, even if it may be confusing if not accompanied by a reliable guide (and even if accompanied). My own understanding of Nagarjuna comes largely filtered through his more recent anglophone translators and interpreters: Garfield, Westerhoff, and others, and I’m sure Fabio knows his Nagarjuna better than I do. But I wonder if he sells himself short by shying away from being a “‘believer’ of any sort.” I know what he means here, but I would want to raise Deleuze’s “belief in this world” as an option into an otherwise too staid picture of ‘belief.’

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Paul Ennis’s book of interviews with seven “post-Continental” philosophical “voices” is out now and orderable on Amazon. (The hard copy will be available in late October.) The seven are Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, and (gasp) myself.

As (U of San Diego’s) Peter Gratton’s blurb says, “Pick up this book and grab a front seat to those whose work will be in short order the landmarks of our post-Continental futures.”

(Note to the philosophically uninitiated: “Continental” refers to one of the two main traditions within academic philosophy, the other being “analytical.” The continent is Europe, since this tradition finds its main sources among French, German, Italian, and other continental European, as opposed to Anglo-American, philosophers. Wafting on the air of cappuccino, perfume, and the sound of accordions in the street, “Continental” is, simply put, more fun.)

And from Paul’s too-kind introduction:

“With Ivakhiv we get a clear indication that the division between philosophy and other disciplines will eventually give way and will do so because the academics of the future are no longer satisfied with the boundaries they have been bequeathed.”

Congrats, Paul, on getting it out, and thanks to Zero Books for making it happen, and for delivering on their promise that “another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.”

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece on the just-released National Research Council report ranking doctoral programs across the U.S. Among other things, the report is criticized for the 4-5 year time lag in producing it, its confusing methodologies, inaccuracies in data, and its disciplinary approach (which is ill-suited for evaluating interdisciplinary programs like the one I teach in).

Among the report’s more interesting general findings are the following. (Remember that the data covers doctoral research programs over the period from the early 1990s to 2005-6.)

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Does object-oriented ontology = Buddhism? Tim Morton has been making intriguing sounds to that effect, and Levi Bryant has begun to ask him the hard questions about how and whether that might be possible — of how to “square the circle” of independent substances (OOO) with Buddhism’s conditioned genesis (a.k.a. dependent arising, codependent origination).

Tim’s task strikes me as quite challenging, especially because Buddhism is conventionally thought to be as relational as philosophical traditions can get. Levi has a clear exposition of conditioned genesis, which he rightfully depicts as the cornerstone metaphysical principle on which Buddhist practice, psychology, and soteriology are all built.

It’s necessary, however, to think carefully about Buddhism’s relationality. One of the popular metaphors for thinking about conditioned origination is the idea of Indra’s jeweled net. Levi uses the image of a spider web, but the idea is the same. He writes:

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setting

David Byrne has a great, observation- and photo-rich post from Detroit (Don’t Forget the Motor City) that relates back to some of the themes I touched on when I posted about that city’s decline and potential reinvention as an near science-fictional green city. Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (as David points out) provides some context for that.

I’ve been a little too busy to post here recently, but I have been adding to the Shadow Blog, and most recently I seem to be getting captivated by visually arresting posts like David’s, Transversalinflections’ Thoughts and a song (and this piece on artist Monika Cichoń), some wonderful posts from Matthew Flanagan’s Landscape suicide, Next Nature (like this compilation of bizarre oil-death-glam fashion photos), Ron Burnett’s blog, and other things in that vein.

Meanwhile, tonight’s sunset from here looked momentarily like this:

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Add to that the last slow chirps of early autumn’s few remaining crickets (their chirping slows down, at a predictable rate, as it cools), and a bat still flittering between the trees (a good sign, since their populations have dropped considerably in the last few years), and there you have it.

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Since I write about film from an ecocritical perspective, I feel obliged to share information about the greening of filmmaking practice. Transforming Cultures has a post about that.

Here’s the trailer for Lauren Selman’s/Real Green Media‘s Greenlit, a film that, like No Impact Man, appears to fall into the “it’s the right thing to do, but aw, shucks, isn’t it hard?” genre of eco-documentary. It won’t get everyone running to the theaters, but it’s good that someone’s doing it. (There should be an abbreviation for that: “igsdi,” meaning “not my thing, but I’m glad someone’s doing it.”)

Now someone tell me what the dominant color is in this trailer… (Giordano Bruno would say it’s under the spell of Venus, which he thought a good thing.)

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“immanence is itself real, or reality itself. It is nothing other than reality in the making. But this reality is not reducible to actuality: what is actual may be rational, as Hegel claimed, but reality is also virtual, and it is with virtual singularities that philosophy is concerned. As a result, to think immanently is to render thought immanent to reality, to its chaotic becoming, its variations, and its vibrations. It amounts to constructing an image of thought that is not posited in advance, independently of the real itself, and orienting it from the start, but that grows from within the real, or Being.”

– Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy, p. 192

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