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just sitting there

September 16, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

My favorite line in Patrick Groneman’s account of a group of Buddhist meditators’ attempt to bear witness, by just sitting, amidst the rival armies of 9-11 protestors in downtown New York City (anti-mosque, pro-mosque, et al) is the passer-by yelling

“This is New York, don’t just sit there…stand up and say what you believe in.”

Which made me think: Isn’t that what blogging is — everyone standing up and waving their beliefs for everyone else to see?

Ideally, of course, it isn’t that. Saying something is only one part of communicating; listening is the second, and attending to the ecology of speaking and thinking — the links made up of one’s interlocutors, the things spoken of and those left unsaid, the feeling and impulse giving rise to the speaking, and so on — is the third.

Nathan at Dangerous Harvests has a good wrap-up of the debates over Socially Engaged Buddhism that have followed this summer’s symposium on that topic. (See also Fly Like a Crow.)

Meanwhile, this video, shared by Santi Tafarella, stages the encounter between the “two Americas” in a way that leaves me a little uncomfortable (because of the ethical issues the experiment raises) but that at least gives us some figures: 6 for (racism), 13 against (and willing to act in defense of a Muslim American’s rights), and 22 not willing to stand up and say what they believe, or much of anything. That’s a majority. Definitely not New York.

Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

claim your own ground (Indiana 60% off sale)

September 15, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The entire regular-price catalog of Indiana University Press is on sale today for 60% off. (Don’t worry — they’ not going under, as far as I know. They do it every once in a while.) That includes my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which should be going for $10 today. Grab it while it lasts. Details here.

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field of dreams

September 13, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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I just watched Amy Hardie’s recent film The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a year in her life during which this science documentarian and self-proclaimed skeptic becomes haunted by a series of dreams that appear to foretell her own death before the year is over. The film becomes an exploration of neuroscience, the meaning and function of dreams and of death (she interviews neurologists and dream researchers Irving Weissman, Adam Zeman, Mark Solms, and others), and the relations that connect and give our lives meaning.

The film treads carefully over the question of what dreams are, leaving open various interpretations: that they are the mind’s meaningless narrative elaborations of random electrochemical brain activity, the efforts of the mind to consolidate new experiences with memories, the uncensored emotional and intuitive currents of our lives turned into neural/narrative pathways, etc.

I watched it knowing almost nothing about where it will go, or even if the filmmaker survives, and I think the film is best seen that way. But it’s worth mentioning that it takes an unexpected, though (thankfully) understated, ecopsychological twist toward the end: it suggests connections between Hardie’s awareness of the damage done by coal mining to the otherwise beautiful Scottish borderlands where she lives, and the extended field of uncensored intuitive currents that dreams allow access to. The latter is a variation of interpretation #3 above, which the film ultimately favors (structurally), and which echoes ecopsychology’s central thesis — that we intuitively/unconsciously sense what’s wrong with the ecological relations making up the world around us.

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psychogeographic landscape cinema

September 11, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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Andrew Ray over at Some Landscapes has been posting about experimental landscape films, including Chris Welsby‘s Wind Vane, Tree, and other “landscape-generated landscape films”; Sarah Turner’s Perestroika; the “Land Art for the landless” films/performances of Francis Alÿs; and others.

Catherine Grant writes about Turner’s hypnotic and haunting Perestroika at filmanalytical. “Films think,” Turner says, “they embody theory affectually” (in which she is echoing Film-Philosophy founding editor Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy).

From Ray:

“the film’s ‘extreme psychogeography’ culminates in the narrator’s vision of Baikal, the deepest lake in the world ‘and the zero-point of Siberia’s status as a weathervane of global warning, landscape and mind’, as ‘a lake of fire awaiting the final sunset’.”

For Turner, as Sophie Mayer recounts, “the IPCC report before Copenhagen stated that the Amazon rainforest will burn when the temperature rises two degrees. ‘It’s a cultural real that is outside a Western imaginary because we don’t live in the extremes of climate change.'”

Here’s a piece of it:

Excerpt from Perestroika (©2009 Sarah Turner) from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

assemblages, species, genres, & cinema

September 11, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

(Warning: This is a long and involved post.)

In reposting Steven Shaviro’s critique of DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society, Levi Bryant has reminded me of one of the impetuses (impeti?) that moved me to a Whiteheadian perspective. Steven’s review is excellent, and it prefigured what eventually became his book Without Criteria, which I think of as one of the landmark texts in the post-Deleuzian return of Whitehead.

While I like DeLanda very much, I agree that there’s a schematicism in his writing that detracts from what I like most about Deleuze (his “poeticism,” as Shaviro calls it, though it’s more than just stylistics). But thinking through the scientific concepts underlying/informing Deleuze is important work, and DeLanda at least makes it manageable in a way that Deleuze’s own texts rarely do. Whatever losses in fidelity may arise in the transfer, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is one of the clearest elaborations of a Deleuzian ontology I have seen. A New Philosophy of Society follows up on it by taking on social-science theory, but I think it suffers a little (as Shaviro and Chris Vitale both argue) from a creeping shift away from thinking of assemblages as events and processes to thinking of them as substances. As Shaviro puts it, “For Whitehead’s actual entities are themselves events; whereas, for DeLanda, as much as he wants to proclaim the importance of (contingent) event over (fixed and closed) structure, events are still things that ‘happen to’ entities, rather than entities themselves.”

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Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

fomenting “rebellion”

September 9, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’ve just read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on “The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama”, which I’m happy to see is publicly available online. It’s a good summary of what corporate watchers have been saying for years (see, e.g., here and here), but with a lot of interview material updating what the libertarian duo have been up to more recently, including their connections with the Tea Party movement. (I really should be putting “libertarian” in scare quotes, since good people like Noam Chomsky use the term to refer to a love of liberty, though their definition of liberty is much more substantial than the kind of free-for-all-for-the-wealthy that the Kochs stand for.)

Charles and David Koch (pronounced “Coke”) are on Forbes’ list of 20 wealthiest people in the world, and they, along with Scaife, Olin, Searle, Bradley, Coors, and other millionaire family foundations, have provided the funding that’s built up the network of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing organizations, think-tanks, pseudo-populist front groups, and spin machines that has kept this country in a right-wing holding pattern for the last three decades.

It’s true that their “more than a hundred million dollars” spent on these causes is a drop in the bucket compared to their multibillion dollar fortune, but the money gets amplified as it works its way through the system — which is why Americans for Prosperity, which has fought health-care reform and cap-and-trade climate legislation, among other things, can plan to spend another $45 million dollars between now and November on electoral races around the country.

On the Kochs’ climate and environment connections, see Joe Romm’s piece from last April, this update, and David Levy’s piece here.

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eco-Marxism & the “4 laws of ecology”

September 6, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Marx’s insights for ecology are many. The four “informal laws of ecology,” as Levi Bryant points out in his post on John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, are not one of them (let alone four). These “laws” have been making their rounds ever since biologist and eco-socialist (and one-time Citizens Party candidate for the U.S. presidency) Barry Commoner proposed them around 1970. Numerous iterations afterward have suggested three, four, or five such laws, with Greenpeace’s Declaration of Interdependence being particularly influential. I’m not aware of any scientific ecologists today who think of them as actual scientific laws, though others have been proposed for the science of ecology (see, e.g., here or Pierre Dansereau’s 27 laws of ecology). Foster’s point is that they are “informal,” and therefore intended to provoke thought, not to serve as a foundation for a science.

But let’s look at them, and then at Marx. The first of Foster’s (Commoner’s) “laws,” that “everything is connected to everything else”, is (as Levi points out) a platitude. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t take us very far. (Except in the mystical experience, which has its place, and an inspirationally important one for many environmentalists; but let’s leave that aside.) The point it makes is intended as a corrective to the common-sense notion that things are simply what they are (people, animals, possessions, units of one thing or another, etc.) and that’s all. The law says that they aren’t just that: everything arises out of its own set of originating conditions, and passes away into other conditions, affecting other things in the process. Not everything directly affects everything else — that would be impossible, since two things that arise simultaneously but in different places don’t normally affect each other (unless by way of some “holographic universe” or superstring-like mechanism that scientists haven’t figured out yet). But if you traced the lines of causal connection from any thing in the universe, you could, in principle, trace it back/forward/across to anything else. That’s what the theory of evolution and the Big Bang both propose, and the science of ecology shares the supposition (though theoretical physicists may not): there is a single universe that has unfolded along a single (branching/diversifying/multiplying/expanding) trajectory, and everything in it is connected through this shared ancestry/descent/line of development. That’s all. The more pragmatic point (which was Commoner’s point) is that our actions have effects and that we normally don’t give them enough thought.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments »

low impact movie?

September 5, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

<a href="Level Ground has an excellent review by Another Green World‘s Derek Wall of the eco-doc No Impact Man (you can click the title to watch the whole thing, apparently).

We can’t collect bottles and line them up until we get to a sustainable world. Structural change rather than individual action is essential. Take transport, I think the first battle is to get people out of their cars and into the subway. However without real investment in public transport this isn’t going to work. […]

The film is a slow burn joy; the most important points come out of the cracks and between the lines. […] Colin, by subverting the reality genre, provides environmental education in spades.

[…] the real No Impact Man (and women and children) lives in Colombia, Latin America and is absent from Beavan’s film. In Colombia, Afro-Colombian communities live green lives, growing their food organically and gently prospering on very little. Ironically they are under attack from the paramilitary death squads, as powerful figures make a grab for their land, so that palm oil plantations can be used to make quick profits for bio-fuels to run cars in the USA driven by greens.

Read the whole thing here. (I haven’t seen the film yet, so can’t comment on it.)

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stray shopping carts

September 3, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Cart Project ought to please both objectophiles and processophiles (for different reasons–which suggests a pragmatic solution to that debate):

“Until now, the major obstacle that has prevented people from thinking critically about stray shopping carts has been that we have not had any formalized language to differentiate one shopping cart from another.

“In order to encourage a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, I have worked for the past six years to develop a system of identification for stray shopping carts. Unlike a Linaean taxonomy, which is based on the shared physical characteristics of living things, this system works by defining the various states and situations in which stray shopping carts can be found. The categories of classification were arrived at by observing shopping carts in different situations and considering the conditions and human motives that have placed carts in specific situations and the potential for a cart to transition from one situation to another.”

Montague is developing a full taxonomy of false and true strays, from the train damaged to the (semi-)naturalized, in different locations around the world (but especially Buffalo, Cleveland, and environs).

One of the first things I try to get my intro Nature & Culture students to think about is where things come from and where they go… That’s process (a.k.a. life-cycle analysis). On the other hand, there’s the vibrant materiality of each specific shopping cart, and of the whole population of them as they scatter into the bloodstream of non-shopping-cart-world.

There’s something very Mark Dion-ish about this kind of performative eco-art that mixes obsessive classification and documentation with archaeology and garbology for insights into the industrial ecology of our world.

Now if only we can get these into our Amazon shopping carts (har-har)…

H/t to Next Nature.

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realism, or bust

September 2, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Michael at Archive Fire just shared a good quote from Latour on Whitehead, “king of the realists.” Funny thing — I just finished up some comments introducing Whitehead to my ecocinema students… The upshot of those comments is that, according to Whitehead’s attempt to rewire the metaphysics of the western world, there are no things, just events, happenings; and in order to understand events, you have to understand processes; and to do that, you have to learn to think in threes instead of twos — oops, that’s Peirce (the next piece of the philosophical puzzle that’s accompanying the course). Getting ahead of myself there… But, then, that’s the nature of process, always moving forward (while looking back)…

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big ideas

September 1, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I haven’t read any of these yet, but the Chronicle Review’s tenth-anniversary What’s the Big Idea? forum features a good cast of characters, including Peter Singer, Parker Palmer, James Elkins, and others (including Jaron Lanier, of all people, writing about “The End of Human Specialness”). Nice to see my colleague Saleem Ali up there, too. (That, I think, is called a “shout out” nowadays. Hey, I was a DJ too, many moons ago.)

The other thing worth shouting out about is the upcoming National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, being organized by the AAUP for October 7. (You might get more of those kinds of announcements here as I get deeper into my new role as secretary of the faculty union.)

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DeLanda, Peirce, etc.

September 1, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Larval Subjects and several other blogs have begun their reading group of Manuel Delanda’s small but ambitious book A New Philosophy of Society. It’s not my favorite of his books — that remains the brilliant A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, followed by the drier, but useful, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. But I think New Philosophy is worth a re-read. (I had offered to participate in the group-think-thing but somehow my comment didn’t make it up on Levi’s blog, which is all to the good, as this week and next are hellishly busy for me. Levi is right, though, in suggesting that I’m developing an assemblage theory of my own. As are a lot of the post-ANT Deleuzians like Protevi, Berressem, et al. With the emphasis on the verb, as in the French “a-ssa(m)-blazh.”)

I also enjoyed the (rather inconclusive) recent discussions of Peirce on Larval Subjects. My hunch, as I suggested there, is that Peirce’s “firstness” has some commonality with OOO’s “withdrawing objects”: firsts withdraw from relation (so to speak), seconds are relations, and thirds are the destiny of relations (again, so to speak). But ultimately I think Peirce is far too processual-relational thinker to be incorporated into OOO without a serious struggle. I admire Levi’s attempt to grapple with him, in any case. The Peirce wave is only beginning, as more of his stuff gets published and worked over. We haven’t seen nothing yet. (OK, anything. Anything yet.)

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