How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.
Search Results for 'anthropocene'
Books of the decade in ecocultural theory
Posted in Eco-theory, tagged Anna Tsing, Anthropocene, books, books of the decade, cosmopolitics, decolonial turn, decoloniality, Donna Haraway, ecocultural theory, Eduardo Kohn, extinction crisis, Marison de la Cadena, multispecies studies, ontological turn on December 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
“I am become Death…”
Posted in Politics, tagged Bhagavad Gita, democracy, Donald Trump, media, public education, public media, public sphere, Trumpism on November 12, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary). Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning […]
America is waiting: Meme magic & the spiritual practices of the Interregnum
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged alt-right, America is Waiting, Byrne and Eno, election interregnum, election magic, Interregnum, Interregnum before the Interregnum, meme magic, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Paula White, power of prayer, prayer, remix culture, spiritual practices, Trumpism on November 6, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the things I study is spiritual practices – which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as the things people do to enhance their capacity to live in accordance with chosen ideals. Those ideals can be defined in religious terms (for instance, as salvation, enlightenment, or unity with God) or in more secular and philosophical […]
Generalized Floating Dread Event (GFDE)
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, affective contagion, affective politics, dark flow, dark matter, emptiness, political affect, revolutions, Zizek on October 30, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose […]
Emotional practices, part 2: Affective construction, the triune self, & the art of joyful deliberation
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged A. H. Almaas, affect theory, affective neuroscience, affective practice, askesis, C. S. Peirce, constructivism, emotional practice, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Hadot, inquiry, Jacques Lacan, neo-Spinozism, Paul Maclean, philosophy as way of life, philosophy of the moment, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, Spinoza, spiritual practice, three-body practice, triune brain, triune self on August 25, 2020 | 1 Comment »
In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In […]
Deep Adaptation & its critics: a question of reality
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged Deep Adaptation, ecospirituality, environmentalism, Jem Bendell, Open Democracy, radical environmentalism, religion and ecology, societal collapse, spiritual environmentalism, spiritual movements on July 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more […]
Scenes in the image-world
Posted in Visual culture, tagged Anthropocene, books, image ecologies, image regimes, image-world, media ecologies, media studies, The New Lives of Images, visual culture, visual studies on June 26, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a preview in section headings of the book I’m currently writing. It presents a way of thinking about images, what they’ve done for people, and how all of that figures into the contemporary world of digital media. It then applies that way of thinking to three sets of images: about humans as the stars […]
Eco-ethico-aesthetics and George Floyd
Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought, tagged A. N. Whitehead, aesthetics, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, ecology, ethics, firstness, George Floyd, George Floyd protests, logic, object-oriented ontology, revolutionary moments, secondness, Shadowing the Anthropocene, systemic racism, U.S. cultural politics, Whitehead on June 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]
Pandemic epistemology
Posted in Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, Atlantic Monthly, conspiracies, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, media, mediasphere, pandemic politics, pandemics, public communication of science, public trust, science communication on April 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, […]
Comments on process-relational meditation
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice on April 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as […]