I’ll be giving an online public talk called “The Invasion of Ukraine as a Turning Point?” for the University of California Santa Barbara this Tuesday at 4 pm Pacific Standard Time (7 pm Eastern US/Canada time, 11 pm GMT). It hinges on the idea that the Russian invasion, like other unexpected “hyper-events” (such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster), may provide a historical “inflection point” at which rearrangements of agency — that is, rearrangement of the structural forces and capacities by which human potentials are shaped and constrained — could occur. There’s of course no guarantee that they will occur, or that the rearrangements will be for the better and not for the worse. But it’s good to know what kinds of rearrangements might be possible, so that we could better act on them.
Continue Reading »The invasion of Ukraine has shifted media attention away from many other things, Covid and climate among them. But the climate implications of the war have not gone unnoticed.
To start with the obvious: Russia is a petrostate. As Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta writes,
More than a third of the Russian federal budget is funded from oil and gas revenues, half of which come from Europe. The dependence gives Putin not only a steady flow of cash but also leverage. […]
Putin deliberately prepared to exploit this reliance in the runup to the attack, with Russian energy giant Gazprom holding back gas deliveries to Europe and emptying the gas storage it operates in Germany at the start of this winter.
With Russian gas, oil, and coal sales fueling its military, there is good reason to consider this a “fossil fuel war,” as Ukrainian climate scientist and IPCC member Svitlana Krakovska has called it, that, if it continues, “will destroy our civilization.” It is, at the very least, a war that’s “fueled by the world’s addiction to oil,” as Nicole Goodkind puts it.
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change | Tagged climate politics, energy transition, fossil fuel dependency, Russia, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine | 1 Comment »
A piece of mine on “Decolonialism and the Invasion of Ukraine” has appeared on E-Flux, the Sternberg and U. of Minnesota Press critical arts journal. It’s associated with a series on the topic including Oleksiy Radynski’s “The Case Against the Russian Federation” (to which it is a response), an anonymous “Appeal to Decolonize the Russian Federation,” and Nastia Teor’s “Attention! Air Raid Sirens in Kyiv.” It’s reprinted from UKR-TAZ.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Here are some thoughts on the humanitarian, historical, moral, and environmental implications of the crisis of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were prompted by questions asked of me by a public radio interviewer. I’m still working on the answers (and the interview has not aired, as far as I can tell). Comments welcome.
1. Migration has always been with us. It is what makes humans human. It’s the flip side of settlement, or co-settlement (since there are always others to live and settle with), which is what we still need to get better at.
2. The crisis is not one, but many. What we call a “migrant crisis” could, if reframed, be called a political crisis; a crisis of the nation state, of borders, and of territorial sovereignty; an economic crisis, where there aren’t enough resources to go around, or where their distribution is unfair; or a moral crisis. Each of these reframes can offer suggestions for action: if it’s economic, some form of (entrepreneurially “friendly”) wealth redistribution; if political and national, a “rescaling” of decision-making away from the national to regional and transnational levels; and if moral, an emphasis on moral and inspirational leadership that cross-cuts the inequities at play in a bordered world (such as the basic class difference between those who travel freely and fluidly and those for whom borders are impassable).
In a more ultimate sense, it is an environmental crisis, where what’s at stake is people’s relationship to specific places — places we call nations, countries, territories, homelands — and where those relationships get uprooted by events.
3. Migration crises will only get worse; we need to get better at dealing with them. Refugee/migration crises arise where there are wars or other disasters, with their usual combination of human and “natural” causes. These events displace people internally and externally. Ukraine’s displaced, for instance, are in the millions internally and now nearing three million externally. Such disasters can be expected not only to continue but to increase, as climate change and associated global risks deepen and multiply, which we know they will. Moreover, territorial borders are hardly eternal; they, like nation-states, need maintaining and are ultimately fragile. Dealing with migrations will therefore be an issue for all of us.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged borders, critical zones, cultural politics, ecotopia, futurism, green politics, liberalism, migrant crisis, migration, Putinism, refugee crisis, refugees, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, xenophobia | Leave a Comment »
This is being cross-posted (in modified form) from UKR-TAZ, where it is part of a series examining the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The invasion of Ukraine continues to horrify, with casualties mounting and humanitarian corridors failing to materialize. But one of its more interesting dimensions, from the perspective of media and cultural theory, is the role of information and cyber warfare. The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel provides a good synopsis of the ways in which Ukraine has so far been “winning” the information war, but argues that it’s far from over. Others are less circumspect, and some, like Meduza’s Maxim Trudolyubov, argue that Russia lost it at the very outset, just by starting the war. The depravity of Russian disinformation, as Joanna Szostek argues, seems to know no bounds.
Peter Pomerantsev has cautioned, however, that we need to be careful with our terms here. The very notion of “information war,” he argues, may serve disinformational goals, in that it “reinforc[es] a world view the Kremlin wants—that all information is just manipulation.” To put this into a broader scholarly context, all reality may be “socially constructed,” all efforts to shape and know it simply forms of a Nietzschean “will to power,” but not all are equally durable, desirable, or ethically and morally satisfying. Some constructs are more worth pursuing than others.
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology, Politics | Tagged Bellingcat, cyber warfare, cyberwar, disinformation, information warfare, infowar, media warfare, Putin, Russia, Svitlana Matviyenko, Ukraine, Zelenskiy, Zelensky, Zelenskyy | Leave a Comment »
Readers of this blog may know that I have longstanding research as well as personal/family connections in Ukraine and that I have sometimes run a parallel blog on issues related to that country. (Called “UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone,” the blog is found here.) I recently began posting to that blog more regularly with observations and analytical considerations on the impending, and now the fully actual, broad-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Since war has a way of obviating any concern for other, less immediate things — from the Covid pandemic (how many of the faces sheltering in Kyïv’s or Kharkiv’s underground are wearing masks?) to climate change (has it even been mentioned in the news in the last few weeks?) — the question of the cultural and political implications of this war and its after-effects is an important one for all of us to think about.
One of the arguments I’ve made on UKR-TAZ is that the invasion of Ukraine marks the appearance of a new form of 21st century fascism, where “fascism” consists of a sense of deep historical grievance, a desire for “palingenetic” rebirth (in this case, of Great Russia), a leadership cult, and an “industrial strength” application of military technology. My goal in part was to revive the question of what fascism is and how it is to be approached, as I see global as well as environmental implications to that question (about which I plan to write more). Jason Stanley has just published a piece in The Guardian making the case for Putin’s fascism and even antisemitism more clearly than I could; it’s recommended reading.
My concern has been, all along, that a precipitous event, a “hyper-event” like the current invasion of Ukraine, could set into motion a global political realignment creating both a new cold war and potential hot wars, which would completely incapacitate our collective will and ability to deal with climate change and the other major challenges facing the world. It doesn’t take much for a war like this to spiral out of control (cyberattacks, for instance, aren’t geographically restricted in their scope, and it would be easy for a set of them to turn into accusations and counterattacks involving Russia, the US, and other NATO countries).
Continue Reading »Posted in Politics | Tagged fascism, global politics, hyper-events, peace, Putin, Putinism, Russia, Ukraine, war | Leave a Comment »
My recent 2022 Mohyla Lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, “The Chɵrnobyl Event: Ecology, Media, and the Anthropocene,” is now available to be watched online. (That “ɵ” in “Chɵrnobyl” is intentional; I discuss it in the talk.) In addition to updating some of my work on the Chɵrnobyl “hyper-event” and its multiple impacts, the talk touches on some background relevant to the current situation in Ukraine. Several layers of the seven-layered story I tell in the talk — including the Soviet, the Ukrainian, the Cold War/media war, the nuclear, and now the Zone (which Russian armies have reportedly taken control of) — have suddenly taken on renewed resonance in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The talk starts about 7 and a half minutes in, here:
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged 1986 Chernobyl accident, Chernobyl, Chornobyl, Chɵrnobyl, Cold War, nuclear power, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, USSR | Leave a Comment »
As part of my Visiting Scholar gig at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center, where I am for the next few months, I gave a talk last week called “The Image of Disaster: Image Events, Spaces of Suffering, and the Anthropo(S)cene.” It’s a remix of things I’ve said and done before, with moderate updating and some interesting discussion in the Q and A.
The talk is now available for viewing on the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies web site.
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Keeping up with the scholarly literature on the Anthropocene, or even on the humanities-relevant Anthropocene, has become a full-time job, and no one I know is paid to do that full-time. (All of the Anthropocene literature is arguably humanities-relevant, but not to the same degree.)
To give a sense of the numbers: I counted a total of 102 different books published in the last three years alone (2019 through 2021) that were available for downloading on a popular file-sharing (a.k.a. book pirating) site. Again, that’s publicly available copies of books being shared for free. That is a fraction of all the published books on the topic, and an even tinier fraction of all the publications, which include journal articles, reports, theses/dissertations, and materials in the popular press. (Google Scholar returns 44,800 publications, mostly scholarly journal articles, with the word “Anthropocene” since 2018.) Just reading those 102 recent books alone — books that most people around the world with an internet connection can get copies of with a few clicks — would take some time.
Here are a few thoughts on what this might mean.
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe, Anthropocene | Tagged academic meat grinder, academic publishing, Anthropocene, Anthroposcene, discourse, episteme, fast scholarship, Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge, singularity, slow scholarship, tenure | Leave a Comment »
Readers of Shadowing the Anthropocene will know that Buddhist thought has influenced my own thinking in profound ways. To be more precise, Buddhist thought, feeling, and practice has influenced my own thought, feeling, and practice. But there are many forms of Buddhism; like all philosophical and religious systems, it is a long and complex historical tradition, whose “essence” is debated among its representatives, and some of whose forms may be less adequate for contemporary needs. The form I have found most fruitful is connected to the more life-affirming variations of Mahayana (including Varjayana) Buddhism, particularly in their East Asian (Chinese and Sino-derived) forms such as Chan and Zen. (I should add that the duality “life-affirming” and its opposite, “life-denying”, like any conceptual duality, is ultimately meant to be overcome through the liberating insight of Prajnaparamita.)
Of latter-day representatives of this tradition, Thich Nhat Hanh, known to his followers as Thay, was perhaps the best known and most celebrated and beloved. He passed away this week at the age of 95.
Continue Reading »Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, death, Heart Sutra, Mahayana Buddhism, Prajnaparamita, process-relational theory, Thich Nhat Hanh | 1 Comment »
Here’s a working thesis on the present global moment:
1. For many people around the world, life has always been precarious. But for a certain class — the global middle class (and up) — the world had felt more or less secure and comfortable, as long as one knew how to navigate it: play by the rules, stick to a job, don’t get involved in violent crime or too addicted to illicit substances, etc. Environmentalists, religious millenarians, and others may have known or suspected all along that this world of comfort and security was a facade or a temporary and ultimately unsustainable foothold in a more precarious universe, but for the most part those doubts could be ignored, with the secure and comfortable world lying within reach. All of that has now changed: the world of “business as usual” may remain an option, an available leap of faith, but it is clearly not the only one, and it requires effort to sustain. The world of “not going back to business as usual” is now also a very viable option. The future, for many who had previously felt themselves immune to such a prospect, has become uncertain. In this sense, the “feeling of the world” has changed.
2. The Covid pandemic is the most obvious global correlate for this change in affective circumstances. But there are others: for some Americans there is the George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter, and the racial reckoning that has followed, and of course there was the election of Donald Trump, with its continuous drip of unbelievability; for Britons, there was Brexit; and for others there are various populist ground quakes, conspiratorial emergences, and the like. And in the background, there is the looming prospect of climate change, which has become incontrovertible for a great many people. All of these things contribute to the sense of a sea-change in the feeling of the world, and that there may be no going back. Underlying this sense is the premonition of trauma: the sense that the ground beneath our feet has shaken, shifted, or become radically unstable.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics | Tagged affective politics, Anthropocene, conspiracy culture, COVID-19, global cultural studies, global middle class, illiberalism | Leave a Comment »
Mark Bould’s new book The Anthropocene Unconscious makes more or less the same argument as I made in my 2008 New Formations article “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Toward a Jamesonian Ecocriticism,” later expanded in the “Terra and Trauma” chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image, but he applies it to literature rather than film. The level of critical acclaim Bould is getting indicates either that he is a much better writer than I am, that he has access to PR machinery I didn’t have (and/or the tenacity to promote his work better), that the timing is right for the argument to resonate, or, quite possibly, a mix of all of the above.
Bould’s overarching question — “What if all the stories we tell today are fundamentally about climate change,” or at least about the constellation of forces now known as “the Anthropocene”? — was my question except that back in 2008 there wasn’t an obvious and well-known author to use as one’s foil (for Bould, it’s Amitav Ghosh). And Bould is drawing out his argument over a much broader canvas. I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not sure how directly he gets at the geopolitical and psychoanalytical dimensions that I tried to get at. At any rate, it’s great to see the argument getting a broad hearing.
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Eco-culture, Eco-theory | Tagged Anthropocene Unconscious, Fredric Jameson, geopolitical unconscious, Jameson, Jamesonian ecocriticism, Mark Bould | Leave a Comment »
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