There are some beautiful photographs of Eyjafjallajokull accompanied by the Northern Lights here. (Thanks to Politics Theory Photography for posting on it.)
They remind me of one of my favorite films about nature, seeing, and light, Peter Mettler’s Picture of Light (with music by Jim O’Rourke).
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged Iceland, nature, visuality | 2 Comments »
Pierre Hadot died yesterday. An important influence on the later Foucault, a classicist whose readings of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers made them seem relevant once again, and an astute defender of the Orphic (as opposed to the Promethean) approach to Nature, Hadot’s influence was felt by many for whom philosophy is more than just a conceptual exercise. Fabio at hyper tiling has written a nice eulogy. I don’t see any obits yet in the Anglophone Google News, but this New York Times review of Philosophy as a Way of Life and this review of The Veil of Isis provide reasonable entry points to his thinking.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Hadot, paganism, philosophy | 1 Comment »
I’ll be laying a little low as I travel over the next few weeks. Expect intermittent blogging over the summer as well, though it will undoubtedly get more active during the proposed Vibrant Matter reading group, assuming that happens (it’s elicited interest so far from Peter Gratton at Philosophy in a Time of Error and Scu at Critical Animal). Antonio Lopez (Mediacology) and I have also talked about an inter-blog reading group/discussion of Integral Ecology, the massive tome by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman.
Other things on my reading list in the coming months include a lot of Peircian, Whiteheadian, and Deleuzian material, Tim Ingold’s Being Alive once that comes out (which someone at Routledge suggested may be sooner than the listed publication date), and a fair bit of cinema/media theory (such as Casetti’s Eye of the Century, Rodowick’s Virtual Life of Film, Ehrat’s Peircian Cinema and Semiotic, and others), partly in preparation for my fall film course and partly related to the project we won’t mention. Add to that the Ranciere (Dissensus) reading group that’s starting up here at UVM, and there’ll barely be any time left over for writing, or for enjoying the summer — neither of which should be even negotiable. That said, I would welcome discussions about anything along the above lines…
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Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it.
“At what temperature do words burst into flame?
Is language itself what remains of a burning?
Are cinders all that’s left from the ringing at the origin of words?”
Derrida’s reference point is the Holocaust, but it’s also the entry into language, which resonates with Lacan’s notion of a gap between the Real and the Symbolic. Following up on Meg’s suggestion of petrification and Pompeii as western civilization’s perhaps archetypal reference point for volcanic/traumatic cataclysmic events, what’s left behind, and what Herzog dwells on in the films I mentioned, is the signature of the Event (though, in the case of La Soufriere, it’s a non-Event). Rather like a nuclear explosion that leaves its radioactive shadow splayed across everything, the traumatic event leaves everything askew, haunted by a spectre, or ringing with an inaudible sound, the meaning of which we can’t make out. The vacated city, the empty landscape, the city frozen in time, with its illegible ciphers, the Event we can never come back to, yet which we perpetually circle around. If the human disappearance from this planet is genuinely thinkable, Herzog is one of its most evocative thinkers.
But sometimes reading these fragments can only be done in still shots, not in movement images. Unlike Deleuze’s time-image, which is always an image of movement, these might be something more like a geological frozen-time-image, which is always an image of movement stilled, of time passed, and, as Barthes put it in Camera Lucida, ultimately an image of (one’s own) death.
La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1962)
For all that I value the vibrant materiality of process-relational and vibrant-materialist ontologies, I still turn to Derrida (and Buddhism) to remind us of the resonant emptiness at the heart of things. Derrida and his followers (Caputo, Mark Taylor) groped toward an ethic, a call, a claim on us from within that emptiness; but for a pretty reliable method for hearing that call, we could do worse than to turn to Nagarjuna and the Buddhists.
Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter | Tagged Buddhism, Derrida, ecoapocalypse, eventology, Nagarjuna, Resnais, trauma | 6 Comments »
I’ve been posting links to Earth Day news in the shadow blog (which you can follow in the column to your right on the Immanence main page). The most interesting news, to my mind, was the initiative for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and the calls to establish an international climate court, both coming out of the People’s World Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Hosted by Bolivian president Evo Morales, whose proposal last year that April 22 be formally adopted as International Mother Earth Day was unanimously accepted by the UN General Assembly, the conference seems to be where a lot of the energy from the global climate justice movement has gone since the Copenhagen debacle.
News about the conference is being widely covered in the left-green and indigenist mediaspheres, including at Democracy Now!, Climate Justice Now!, Climate and Capitalism, Another Green World, Grist, It’s Getting Hot In Here, Indian Country Today, and the World War Four report, and with Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and others chiming in on it. Even at this people’s summit, and within Bolivian indigenous communities themselves, however, one finds rifts, such as this one over mining in Bolivia. And while all the “Mother Earth” language, pervasive at the conference, might raise questions in other contexts (for instance among feminists, for whom it perpetuates a dichotomy that equates femininity with passivity), in this context it seems a way of acknowledging the centrality of indigenous discourses, which I think is important both to climate change and to land rights activism. Meanwhile, however, Big Coal continues to boom.
The big controversy around here was Derrick Jensen’s invited keynote address on Wednesday night, which elicited at least a few calls for retroactive renunciation of his views. Jensen didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before, and at times his talk seemed to descend into a kind of anti-civilizationist stand-up comedy, but many of our students loved it.
On the philosophical front, my favorite Earth Day blog post (probably not intended as an Earth Day post, but certainly suitable to be one) was Peter Gratton’s interview with Jane Bennett, posted yesterday as part of a series of interviews with “speculative realist” philosophers (and, in this case, “vibrant materialists”). Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things is becoming a welcome theoretical interlocutor between the speculative realists and all the other theorists I regularly post about here, so it’s great to see it being read. Reviews are reportedly forthcoming (including, eventually, my own), but the book would be a good one for an inter-blog reading group.
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged ClimateJustice, Earth Day, ecopolitics, environmentalism | 4 Comments »
Volcanic eruption films aren’t plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog’s 1977 film La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional films — Fata Morgana, Lessons of Darkness, Wild Blue Yonder — the film has a tone of tender and lyrical, apocalyptic beauty, a resignation in the face of what appears to be humanity’s passing. Like Aguirre, Heart of Glass, Grizzly Man, and several of his other films, it is also about the human encounter with an indifferent but powerful (capital-n) Nature.
The same elements that later appear in Lessons of Darkness (about the burning oil fields of Iraq), and in different permutations in several of his other films — moving vehicle and helicopter shots of a landscape emptied of humans, classical music including the Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s Parsifal, and the feeling of a waiting, as if something momentous is about to occur, or has already occurred, or both — is already present here, though without the cinematographic intensity of Lessons of Darkness. At times the film is like an archaeological dig through an abandoned city, or a devastated one (the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique). At others it is about sheer contact — between the camera and the world — and about its embarrassed failure, the “inevitable catastrophe that did not take place.” This is the failure that, Herzog seems to be suggesting, haunts the cinema verité desire to be there when It, whatever It may be, happens.
Like most of Herzog’s films, La Soufrière blurs several sets of lines: between documentary and fiction (a line that Herzog prides himself on dissolving, though here he hews closer to the first pole than he usually does), between observation and performative enactment (meaning that his own persona is ever-present, which in this case includes taking his crew up to the caldera to poke their camera inside the steaming volcano, as if to dare nature to scald them with some smoke and ash), and between the hilarious and the deadly serious. The film highlights the barbed existential irony that when, in 1902, the inhabitants of neighboring Martinique were preparing to leave before an anticipated volcanic eruption, their governor persuaded them to stay; 30,000 died. Now, seventy-five years later, the inhabitants left (except for the few that Herzog’s crew finds and interviews, and of course, Herzog himself, attracted to the volcano like a moth to the flame). And the volcano… balked.
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged dark vitalism, event, eventology, Herzog, Iceland, landscape, nature, volcanoes | 5 Comments »
One can find an increasing number of videotaped lectures online by today’s better known cultural theorists. But lectures are lectures, and the best audio-visual teaching tools remain full-fledged documentaries like Manufacturing Consent, An Examined Life, or Slavoj Zizek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, and these remain all too rare. Somewhere in between the two are small-budget, self-produced videos like Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographies of Primates, which I still find to be one of the best introductions to Haraway’s thinking.
But there’s a growing assortment of video mashups — mixtures of lectures or clips with excerpts from relevant found materials — uploaded to the internet by enthusiastic theoryheads, and some of these can be surprisingly useful. I learned about the mysterious Bruno Latour piece, A Film About Modernity, from Himanshu Damle (it’s mysterious to me, since I can’t find any more information about its production). Its use of video clips is pretty effective.
Others, like Andy Robinson’s short video lecture on Lacan, Deleuze, and Reich and Liquid Theory TV’s video illustrating, contextualizing, and debating GIlles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, are a bit more professionally produced, but still only partially successful. The narration in both is a bit too incessant and monotonous (essentially a single voice reading an essay), but each of them covers a lot of material.
It would be useful for someone to catalogue and review these kinds of videos and clips. Is anyone doing that already?
Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged Latour | 2 Comments »
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Updated April 15, 2010
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
A friend of mine inadvertently reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Mikhail Bakhtin, written, apparently, in his last notebook entry before his death (and published subsequently in Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences):
“There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of the past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)–they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a next context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time.” [non-italicized emphasis in original; bold added]
The context of our conversation was an attempt to remember the name of the pub where we shared drinks and lively conversation several years ago. I suspect that Bakhtin would agree that every drink and every worthy conversation will have its homecoming festival.
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I’ve had more than my share of occasions to write and speak about faith, but it’s generally been about others’ faiths, not my own. Summarizing one’s own can be tricky, at least if one prefers to deal with substance and not with labels. The term itself is slippery: is it intended to cover beliefs about the universe (metaphysics, cosmology), principles and guidelines for action (ethics), or the practices by which those beliefs and principles are inculcated into daily life, either collectively (religion) or individually (spirituality)? Is it some combination of all of these?
Some years ago, inspired by the This I Believe public radio series, I decided to sit down and write up a creed I could sign my name to. Having come across it again recently, I’m happy to see that it still seems sensible to me, so I thought I would share it here. The analyst in me feels like treating it as a found object, unpacking it for the ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’ it covers, even speculating about the person who wrote it. But the point of the exercise is really quite different: it’s to express in everyday terms, pithily and pointedly, the orienting concepts that guide you, without reference to schools of thought or faith traditions or other kinds of things that divide us and pose barriers to dialogue.
Here they are, a few years old but more or less congruent with what I still believe.
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged faith, religion, spirituality | 1 Comment »
Michael at the wonderfully named Archive Fire blog has been posting about a lot of the same topics that I try to cover here. (The top five categories in his tag cloud are Ecology, Power, Praxis, Sentience, and Theory.) In his words, Archive Fire explores issues “from critical theory, fringe politics and ecological science to popular culture, world history, social justice and human evolution,” and its discourse and tactics “emerge out of a hybrid matrix of anthropology, critical theory, philosophy and activist strategies” and “a manifest commitment to creative praxis.” The blog regularly links to the work of some of the same names that come up there, from Latour and DeLanda to Zizek, Jeremy Rifkin, Antonio Damasio, and others. (And he’s been all too kind in his recent post about me.)
Posted in Blog stuff | 2 Comments »
For an indication of why I’m interested in the “more” that object-oriented philosophers grapple with, the “remainder” beyond what can be accounted for of an object or phenomenon through relational accounts, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few paragraphs from my 2001 book Claiming Sacred Ground.
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged landscape, object-oriented philosophy, pilgrimage, relationalism, religion | Leave a Comment »
