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 »
Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of “imaginative formations.” Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world, and contest it among each other.
My recent review essay on the “religious imagination” covers several books that help us think through the relationships between religious creativity, imagination, and what Jacques Ranciere has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The books include T. M. Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others; Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge and Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion; Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei’s The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; David Morgan’s Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment; Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; and Jack Miles’s Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story.
You can read a pre-publication version of my paper here, or find the whole issue of this journal — a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on the “‘spiritualization’ of ecology” — at the journal’s web site. (The journal is paywalled by its publisher, so if you’re at an academic institution that doesn’t subscribe to it, you can urge your library to do that. Full disclosure: I’m an associate editor of the journal.)
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged cognitive theory, image, imaginal, imagination, Jeffrey Kripal, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of religion, religion, religious imagination, T. M. Luhrmann, visual culture, visual theory, Wouter Hanegraaff | 5 Comments »
(Warning: This post goes into ontological questions of interest only to philosophers.🙂 I leave aside their potential ecological implications for another time. But see Arne Vetlesen’s Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism for one take on those. I hope to discuss that book in a future post.)
One of the most rigorous philosophical proponents of panpsychism, or panexperientialism — the idea that everything that exists experiences, or that all that is is best thought of as a form of experience — is philosopher Galen Strawson. In publications like this one (from which all quotes I cite below are taken), Strawson makes the case that experience is the one thing we can be sure of, precisely because we experience.
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Buddhism, Galen Strawson, Ontology, panexperientialism, panpsychism, process-relational thought, sleep, speculative realism | 3 Comments »
The work of environmental/climate humanists is premised on the assumption that the way we make sense of the world matters. This means that the dreams we have — Covid pandemic dreams, climate change dreams — also matter. The best artists, in turn, help shape our collective dreaming. The environmental arts and humanities aim to help dream a new world into existence.
Brooke Jarvis’s “The Global Dream Lab” (“Did the Pandemic Change How We Dream?“), which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, captures a bit of the reason why I do what I do, and why I often find the wilder, more speculative variations of ecocinema (like the films I focus on in Ecologies of the Moving Image) more promising than empirical, fact-based eco-documentaries.
Jarvis’s key interlocutor, psychologist and dream researcher Dierdre Barrett, is cited as describing dreams as “another way of thinking,” when “the unheard parts of ourselves are allowed to speak.” The dreaming brain, Jarvis writes, is “tuned differently” than the waking brain; its “most bizarre and nonsensical elements” keep dreams from being “‘overfitted,’ or unable to make sense of new information.” Dreamlife, in this sense, represents the opening up our creative capacities for integrating the challenges of an unmoored world. (That in turn connects with my interest in A. N. Whitehead, the metaphysician of creativity.)
For making sense of the new world represented by Anthropocenic climate change, we may need to “seed” our dreams with new imaginative possibilities, like the ones I refer to in my recent talk on navigating climate trauma.
Continue Reading »Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged brain, COVID-19, dream research, dreaming, dreamlife, emotional practices, mind, pandemic, psychology | 4 Comments »
I’m happy to share my talk from the recent Vermont Humanities conference. It captures the essence of things I’ve been writing and thinking about over the last while. And rather incredibly for a humanities conference, it was 100% glitch-free (despite the talk’s audio-visual intricacies; well, the image fades aren’t perfectly smooth, but those can be difficult for videoconferencing software to deal with).
The talk is 40 minutes long; the remainder is Q&A. Thanks to Vermont Humanities and its director, Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, and programs and communications director Ryan Newswanger, for the invitation to speak and for the smooth delivery of the event. And thanks to Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Yeampierre, and the others who made This Mazéd World a provocative and rewarding week of climate-focused presentations, and to the UVM Center for Community Engagement for supporting it.
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change | Tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, Anthropocene, climate trauma, Solaristics, the Zone, This Mazéd World, Vermont Humanities | Leave a Comment »
As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective.
I have given a few talks recently in which I propose that climate change, along with its “traumatic core,” is analogous to the phenomena encountered by the fictional scientist-visitors to the planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem’s 1962 novel of that name and its cinematic adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. As Lem put it,
The peculiarity of those phenomena [witnessed on Solaris] seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.
Attempting to make sense of that “seemingly rational activity” comes to be called “Solaristics.” But alongside that activity, the Solarian ocean triggers psychological and metaphysical traumas for the humans who visit it. Solaristics, or the effort to learn about this ontologically indeterminate alien Other, becomes a profoundly unsettling activity: it is, Slavoj Zizek describes it, an encounter with one’s own “traumas, dreams, fears, desires… the innermost of your inner space.”
Here I want to compare that argument with a different kind of “encounter phenomenon,” that of reported sightings and encounters with scientifically anomalous non-human intelligences, or SANHI. I take that term from the literature on UFOs and ETs, but modify it to make clear that it doesn’t include scientifically accepted or explainable non-human intelligence, such as that found in other mammals, cetaceans, cephalopods, and the like.
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change, Science & society | Tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, anomalistics, boundary work, climate trauma, COP26, ETs, Exo Studies, extradimensional, extraterrestrial intelligence, integral theory, Jonny Greenwood, Lars von Trier, Melancholia, NHI, nonhuman intelligence, SANHI, science studies, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Solaris, Solaristics, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, UFOs | Leave a Comment »
