I should probably resist from critiquing blog posts, since these rarely capture one’s considered thoughts the way print articles and books do. So rather than replying in detail to Graham’s rejoinder to my previous post, I’ll agree to the cease-fire he proposes (though I hope we weren’t really sniping at each other!). At least after making one last point, which I’ll do by creatively misquoting his penultimate paragraph, specifically by inverting the object-relation duality:
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged object-oriented philosophy, relationalism, speculative realism | 5 Comments »
I’m looking forward to Graham Harman’s forthcoming review of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and I’m glad to see that this discussion between object-oriented philosophy and Bennett’s vibrant materialism (and, by extension, the other theoretical impulses she draws on, which this blog, for the most part, enthusiastically shares) is getting underway. That discussion will no doubt continue over the summer as this blog, Critical Animal, Philosophy in a Time of Error, and maybe a few others engage in a collective reading of Bennett’s book. (Perhaps that should be followed by a group reading of Tim Morton’s new book, The Ecological Thought.)
While Graham’s argument that relationism is “a spent force” is obviously not one that will convince the growing number of scholars drawing in productive ways on relational theories (Whitehead’s, Deleuze’s, Bergson’s, Simondon’s, Latour’s, Serres’s, Stengers’s, et al), he’s entitled to make that case. He summarizes his objection here in this way:
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Harman, object-oriented philosophy, Peirce, relationalism, Whitehead | 7 Comments »
Happy May Day and merry Beltane, to those in a mood to celebrate this weekend. I’m traveling and unable to blog much, but the past week’s events warrant at least a quick update on why such a mood might be difficult to sustain with any steadiness.
The biggest environmental bad news story was, of course, the Gulf oil spill, which threatens to turn Louisiana’s wetlands and much of the Gulf of Mexico into an industrial sacrifice zone and, according to some voices, to become one of the worst ecological disasters in history. (More pictures, as well as maps, here.) Jonathan Hiskes at Grist, which, as always, is doing an admirable job keeping up with events, calls this the The worst week ever, brought to you by the fossil-fuel industry. Hiskes notes the deaths of two coal miners in Kentucky, the talk of sinking the Chinese coal freighter that crashed recently into the Great Barrier Reef, and the approval of the Cape Wind energy project off Martha’s Vineyard — which, as the week’s leading good news story still “feels pretty bad” for all the sparring that went on around it. All the while, the fossil fuel industry continues to make huge profits.
The best news might have been the dissemination of the final conclusions from the Cochabamba conference’s working groups. Despite their marginality in the echelons of global power, these conclusions are at least making a clear case for a global eco-socialist alternative, a case that will be heard by some thanks to the Bolivian government’s pursuit of them in the United Nations. President Morales submitted the conference’s Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth for consideration to the UN this week.
Elsewhere: PBS’s two best programs, Bill Moyers’ Journal and Now (which Moyers started) signed off for the last time yesterday. Pierre Hadot signed off as well, for good. And Middlesex University announced it will close its top-rated Philosophy program (reports of this and of philosophers protesting the economically driven decision are all over the philosoblogosphere, but Infinite Thought is as good a place to catch up on it as any).
In somewhat less sobering news, Dot Earth alerts us to the Lens‘s Moment in Time project, a global moment for catching a collective glimpse of humanity in action, to take place at 11 am New york time tomorrow (Sunday). E. O. Wilson has been doing what he does best, which is writing about ants — which Larval Subjects’ recent note on made me think of how an ant megalopolis is a perfect example of how difficult to isolate “objects” from the relational world. (What’s an object here? A single ant? Nope. The entire city? Yes, but it’s co-evolved with its surroundings to such a degree one could hardly place boundaries around it…) Stuart Elden, meanwhile, joined the blogosphere. Welcome, Stu.
And extraterrestrials circling around Alpha Centauri finally got to watch the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl event. Many debates followed.
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology | 1 Comment »
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…
Posted in Blog stuff | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
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