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films (& best-of lists)

February 22, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The decade isn’t really over yet: there was no “year zero,” which means that the year 2000 was the two-thousandth year of its calendar, and that this year is the 2010th, the last of the third millennium’s first decade, not the first of its second. But I’ve seen so many “ten best films of the decade” lists already (thanks partly to the last issue of Film Comment, which has over a hundred of them), that I feel helplessly encouraged to throw together my own.

But first, as we wind our way to the Oscars, for what it’s worth, here are my five favorite films of 2009. (There are only so many great movies made in a year, o Academy Award givers.)

1. The White Ribbon (dir. by Michael Haneke, Germany/Austria)

2. A Single Man (Tom Ford, USA)

3. A Serious Man (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA)

4. Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, USA)

5. Coraline (Henry Selick, USA)

The White Ribbon is a brilliantly cast, acted, photographed, and paced dissection of the social fabric of a pre-WW1 Protestant German village. But it’s also about the ecology of authority and social control that, in different permutations, underlies any social order — and about the impossibility of coming to know that ecology without a gap or question mark at the heart of the inquiry, that gap here represented by the teacher who is the not-fully-reliable narrator recounting the events years later. And while it largely conforms to Haneke’s grim, cerebral and joylessly clinical vision of humanity, there are moments of compassion and tenderness that transcend that – which is something I don’t remember from his previous films, though it’s possible I’ll forget what they were here as well. (As an antidote to that vision, I recommend seeing The Last Station, if only because that film’s Slavic anarchist earthiness does provide a feel for a possible alternative to repressed, authoritarian pre-war Germany.)

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Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

the decay of images (& of bodies)

February 19, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNCI4bFoqOg&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Catherine Grant’s wonderful Film Studies for Free has posted a great set of resources on film preservation as part of the Film Preservation Blogathon, which features blog posts, articles, images, videos, tweets, and rallying calls from distinguished cinephiles including Roger Ebert, David Bordwell, and others.

The video above (included there) is a Studio 360 piece on Bill Morrison’s found footage collage film Decasia, which is one of the best examples of film, or art, that comments on its own materiality, including its origins and, in this case, its inevitable demise. I’ve blogged about the ecologies and temporalities of images a few times here (with more to come), but thinking about Decasia makes me realize that my recent post on Bergson neglected to mention this materiality of the image.

It may be true, as I wrote there, that “the past is divisible into the era of reproducible images and the era that preceded it: BP (before photography) and AP (after),” or more generally, Before Recording and After Recording, with different extension and limit points for different types of recording — oral, literate, electromagnetic, et al. It may also be true that our technologies of archaeological retrieval, interpretation, and restoration are digging ever deeper into the materiality of the world, making more of it available virtually for new actualizations in the present and future. But it is also true that those materialities all have their half-lives, their temporalities of decay and disintegration, and that there won’t ever come a time when the past is rendered fully open, a pure and transparent archive in which nothing has been lost, nothing has slipped away or disappeared in an invisible stream off the edge of the universe. Things do slip away.

I’ve been thinking about this slippage of things since Graham Harman posted a note in reply to Steven Shaviro arguing that Bergson’s intuition about time “isn’t really grounded in reality”. The point of difference between relational and object-centered accounts, according to Harman, “is whether a thing’s process of genesis is inscribed in its current reality” or not, to which he says “no”: “Much of its genetic history does leave traces, but a great deal of history is forgotten by reality in every moment.” I had begun to respond to him, thinking to myself that this Bergsonian intuition is very much a matter of debate, and that it isn’t just relational and processual philosophers like Bergson and Whitehead who believe that everything at one moment of reality gets incorporated, in some form, into the next moment; that reality, in other words, moves forward — developing, evolving, changing, or enduring, as the case may be, rather than dropping off into an abyss. Where, after all, would it go?

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Posted in Cinema, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

readings

February 18, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied/embedded/distributive/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant to Deleuze and Guattari. Protevi’s main source of strength is Deleuzian theory, and here he draws very much on Manuel Delanda’s efforts to synthesize Deleuze with complexity theory (as did his very good co-authored book on Deleuze and Geophilosophy). But he also perceptively accounts for the strengths and weaknesses of these very differently rooted research/theoretical programs as he tries to build a synthesis out of them — one that would account for affect (and affective cognition) at multiple levels of the “body politic,” from the neurophysiological to the subjective/intersubjective and “up” to the civic, cultural, “populational” and societal. Chapter One is a gem of summative concision. I haven’t gotten yet to the case studies — Terry Schiavo, the Columbine high school massacre, and Hurricane Katrina — but having read his earlier writing on Katrina, I expect these will be good.

It’s the kind of book I would recommend for a reading group (graduate class or online cross-blog sort of thing). Others in that category might include Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (which I’ve so far only read bits and pieces of that have appeared elsewhere); John Mullarkey’s excellent, perhaps even field-defining Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, which I recommend to anyone interested in film, the image, and philosophy; and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ and Michael E. Zimmerman’s Integral Ecology if only to see where they succeed and where they fail in synthesizing the various extant forms of ecophilosophy. I’ve yet to get to the latter book, and reviews I’ve seen have been mixed, which isn’t surprising given the authors’ almost devotional indebtedness to integral philosopher Ken Wilber (quite a shift from Zimmerman’s earlier Heideggerian/Continentalist work). But we need syntheses like it, so I expect the effort, even if flawed, to be valuable.

Posted in Academe, Philosophy | Tagged , , | 5 Comments »

Avatar’s global affects

February 15, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Protesters-dressed-as-cha-002.jpg

Palestinian activists go Na’vi

(Note: After a query from an editor friend, who is unfamiliar with recent research on affect, I’ve decided I should preface this post by saying that no, I don’t mean “effects” with an “e,” but “affects,” accent on the “a.”)

It’s been fascinating to watch the unfolding public conversation about Avatar (much of which, come to think of it, my early review had anticipated): environmentalist celebrations of how it portrays the Earth rising up against the megamachine of capitalism and patriarchy; critiques of how the film perpetuates the stereotyping of indigenous people and reiterates tropes of their salvation by white male messiah figures; the Vatican’s and religious right’s denunciations of its pantheism; the film’s advance of technological wizardry into the domain of a virtual hyperreality, like The Matrix but replacing that film’s gnosticism with a pantheistic new age science of networks and neural systems; and debates over the balance struck in the film between good spectacle (the high-tech stuff) and bad narrative (poor writing, flat characterization, stereotypes all over), or between bad spectacle (Spielbergian gee-whiz stuff) and good narrative (such as the film’s allegorization of global capitalism’s destruction of indigenous communities). Film Studies for Free has usefully summarized the various allegorical readings of the film proposed so far, many of which get articulated in conversations and comments by viewers in various blogs, op-ed commentaries, and social networking sites.

The religious debate has been interesting in part because of the negative reactions that have greeted some of the conservative commentators like Ross Douthat and others who lament the film’s pantheistic nature spirituality and its associated “anti-Americansim” and “anti-humanism”. In his New York Times op-ed, Douthat wrote that “the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.” About 90% of his 146 commenters disagree, sometimes vehemently, with his assessment, generally by sympathizing with the film’s pantheism and seeing in it either something deeply American (in Transcendentalism’s line of descent), much more broadly religious (such as “panentheism” or some mixture of animism and stewardship), or just eco-pragmatically commen-sensical. And while some of the Christian movie sites that typically like to bash Hollywood liberalism do trash Avatar, others (reviewers and commenters alike) are surprisingly positive about the film. Defenders can also be found among more sophisticated conservatives, like the localist Front Porch Republic, and even the libertarian Cato Institute has defended it as an argument on behalf of property rights, the very foundation of capitalism.

What’s more surprising and interesting about the film, however, is how it’s not only breaking box office records around the world, but also may be setting off waves of emotional contagion in its wake — from spurring the launch of numerous fan groups and blogs to providing encouragement and fuel for environmental and indigenous activists as widely dispersed as South America, South and East Asia, and Palestine (portrayed above), to creating something that’s been called “post-Avatar depression.” But let’s start with the politics.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 51 Comments »

climate denialism as hysteria?

February 15, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science — today it’s in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel’s op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of sentences — I’m realizing that it’s not enough to refer to a “climate denial machine” (as I’ve done here before). There is certainly an organized, machinic quality to denialism, with well-funded nodes of misinformation generating the talking points disseminated across the internet/mediasphere by climate denialists. But the intensity of many of the comments has made me think about the virtues and pitfalls of another frame, that of “hysteria,” since it really seems akin to the kinds of hysterias chronicled by historians like Norman Cohn and the more familiar territory of conspiratorial claims and counter-claims around such issues as alien abductions, satanic ritual abuse, or JFK and 9-11 conspiracy theories.

At the same time, there’s a risky irony in suggesting that climate change denial is a hysteria, since to deniers it’s precisely the claim of anthropogenic global warming that appears hysterical and millennialist. Hysteria, both the diagnosis of it and the thing itself, relies on a reading of “signs” or “symptoms” as indicative of a cause much larger than what one can easily deal with. There’s a monster lurking behind those markings on one’s skin, or in the body politic. And just as conspiracy theories aren’t wrong by definition (and my listing of those in the previous paragraph wasn’t intended to suggest that those ones were), so hysterical reactions aren’t necessarily unproductive — they are a response to something that one cannot respond to in a more direct and appropriate way. The politics of climate change, in any case, carries something of the “paranoid style” that Richard Hofstader identified in American politics back in the 1960s. But since then, we’ve moved more deeply into a kind epistemologically unmoored world, a world in which we rely on experts to inform us about basic risks that are not directly perceivable by us (such as those from nuclear radiation, environmental contaminants, and the like) but in a context where the structures of epistemic authority are no longer holding up well at all, in which common sense is undecideable and skepticism extends “all the way down”, as Jodi Dean has put it. This is especially the case in societies characterized by wide cultural divides, such as that of post-Bush II America.

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Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Science & society | Tagged , | 6 Comments »

Swift/climate/boating the media

February 11, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Having published the results of its 12-part investigation into the leaked/hacked climate scientist e-mails at the University of East Anglia, the Guardian is now inviting “web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.” It’s a kind of public version of peer review for something that has been so public already that the issues at stake have gotten lost in the din.

I haven’t read the full report, which concludes (not surprisingly) that the whole fracas was a PR disaster for climate science, but that it has not at all damaged the solidity of the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change. (Yet the silliness continues even in Fox News et al’s weather reports.) But The Wonk Room’s assessment of it as A Case Of Classic SwiftBoating (How The Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’) captures at least part of it. If you recall, the attack campaign by “Swift Boat Veterans Against John Kerry,” much of it based on unproven allegations and unsupported smears, helped sink the 2004 Kerry presidential campaign, leaving his campaign team with too little time to turn popular response around. The mass media reaction, then as now, involved too little critical analysis of claims and too much “following the leader.” This only tells us what we already knew about the American media, though it strengthens the case for a stronger left and progressive presence in the media landscape.

U.S. television’s few spaces for progressive-leaning critical analysis are already dwindling, with Bill Moyers and David Brancaccio both scheduled to end their shows on PBS. The significant exception is MSNBC, whose conversion to the liberal left still surprises me, given the network’s ownership by armsmaker General Electric (with a minority share held by Microsoft), and I keep wondering how long that will last. As Robert Parry has put it, “There is, after all, a big difference between Murdoch’s News Corporation’s longstanding commitment to a right-wing perspective on Fox News and General Electric experimenting with a lineup of a few liberals after other ratings strategies had failed.” Part of the problem is that Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews, et al. too often come off as predictable and repetitive — the left version of Fox News — which though I enjoy watching it, is not necessarily going to convince the unconvinced.

But Maddow can be brilliant, and it’s great to have a bit of European-style political diversity in the mass media landscape. Now if there was more of a unified infrastructure — not marching in lockstep, but at least in communication with each other — of progressive think-tanks and political pressure groups of the kind that the Right has built up over the last 40 years (thanks to billions from the Scaifes, Olins, Koches, Bradleys, et al), maybe that media diversity can hold out for a while, and even expand. Relying on philanthropy is ultimately not a very good answer to a desperate need for more democracy. But surely the George Soroses of the world could be convinced that science, environment/health, justice/fairness, and good governance — the cornerstones of today’s progressive left — are all principles worth supporting. (I know that “progressive left” hasn’t always meant all those things, but it’s a good time to come to an agreement that it does, or should, today.)

Published simultaneously at Indications. Hat tip to John Quiggin at Crooked Timber for news on the Guardian investigation.

Posted in Climate change, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

knowledge wants to be free (doesn’t it?)

February 8, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Publishers are starting to catch up to AAAARG.org, the rapidly growing file-sharing megalibrary for cultural theory and philosophy books, which currently makes available PDF files of hundreds of books that I would love to have but couldn’t realistically afford to buy. (See Columbia University Press’s cease and desist letter here.) At least I couldn’t afford all of them. On my professor’s salary I could certainly buy the ones I want most — after looking up some reviews, viewing the pages that Google Books (and/or the publishers) make available online, or actually walking to the campus library to sign them out just so I can see how much I really need to have my own copies. (Which means that at any given time I might have over two hundred books out on indefinite loan from the library, and that my most common excuse to visit the library is to return something in response to another borrower’s request for it.) But the library option often means special-requesting a book first and waiting weeks for it to arrive (if that happens at all), or recalling it from another borrower — which leaves me feeling rotten enough for taking it away from someone else that I rarely end up resorting to that. (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.) And when I buy, there’s usually still that grad-studenty, budget-conscious voice in the back of my head asking if I really need this book, or will it just sit on a shelf and gather dust?

I imagine, though, that for the actual grad students and untenured academics who probably make up the bulk of AAAARG’s membership (along with some voracious intellectuals outside academe who have no access to a university library, and librarians or publishers’ employees subverting the system from within), most of these aren’t very realistic options. (For one thing, the book is probably out of the library in some professor’s office when you need it most.) And part of the value of a site like AAAARG is that it brings all these materials together in one place and — although the site doesn’t exploit this nearly as much as it could — that it can generate conversations about and around them in the process of making them available. So in addition to being a kind of dream library — because of the selection, but also because the books are always there on the shelf, to be read (or downloaded) whenever you need it — a site like this could also be a reading room and a virtual cafe with speakers, conversations, performative denunciations and adulations and rousing manifestos, and whatever else might happen when a bunch of intellectuals gather together around their favorite authors.

That little bit of (not so) utopian fantasizing aside, there’s something about wandering the aisles of this library that feels less like sitting in the comfortable couch of a Barnes and Noble or, better yet, one’s favorite local bookstore that’s somehow survived the onslaught of the chain stores — or for that matter even the pages of Amazon, with all its reviews and commentary — and that feels more like sneaking through the porn section of a video rental joint. The titles are written in black ink on white covers, with little or no information about them until you load them in your VCR. Some of them are misfiled or mistitled. Many have fingerprints all over (notes in the margins, black bands running down the sides of a bad photocopy job). There’s no colorful display of the current hot sellers, the store manager’s and employees’ selection of current favorites, or discounted copies of publisher’s deleted titles. And certainly no coffee.

So what do we make of this new tug-of-war, which echoes the skirmishes between record companies and Napster-inspired mp3 file-sharers, and all the many variations of the intellectual property rights game to be played out on similar battlefields in years to come? I know that information “wants to be free,” and that the same should go for knowledge and ideas. But I also know that there’s a price to be paid for their production: even if most scholarly books generate little if any profit, if the publishers didn’t make their money back — at least some of it (where they’re supplemented by institutional subsidies, private endowments, government grants, and the like) — then it wouldn’t be possible to produce those hand-held, flippable paper-and-ink bundles the world has come to know and love.

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Posted in Academe | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments »

Bergson & the universal image machine

February 5, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

There’s something about our time that is very Bergsonian, in the sense that there’s a kind of simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, the former feeding the possibilities of the latter. At the same time as new technological tools propel us ever forward on trajectories of embodied interactivity (the internet, iPod-iPhone-iPad, YouTube, Facebook-Twitter, etc.), recording technologies (those that preserve something of the present for the future) combine with technologies of retrieval (those that unlock the past, from historical and archaeological tools to sampling technologies, about which see Copyright Criminals) to enable an ever deeper digging into and opening up of the past. In the process, the past becomes fuel for the reinvention of ourselves toward the future, this reinvention always taking the form of images — which, for Bergson, are central, the shimmering half-way point between mind and matter.

Let me explain. I get that feeling of simultaneously backward and forward glancing, pastwardness and futurity, when, browsing around on YouTube, I find things I never would have thought I’d be coming back to. It’s as if the past were an image archive that is being gradually dredged up, and its fossilized pieces are being liquefied and turned into blood flows that will revive and strengthen certain affective molecular currents, currents still in circulation in the collective social body of the present.

Here, for instance, is Magma, whose potent mix of late John Coltrane-style free-jazz intensity, Steve Reichian symphonic minimalism, Carl Orffian operaticism, and hard, driving rock, sent (mostly French) audiences into spells of ecstasy in the early 1970s. While that performance is from 2006 (old guys getting it together again), it would hardly have happened were it not for the redistribution of their records, archival recordings, and films as DVDs, MP3s, YouTube videos, and the like. Here’s the guitar solo from Kohntarkosz. And then there’s this bizarre film outtake from 1972, with Catholic priests grooving to the Kobaian rhythms. (Kobaia is the planet Magma presumably ‘channeled’ in a series of albums in the 1970s.)

Meanwhile, new films are made from the images of the past. This documentary on “Krautrock,” the German progressive, avant and space rock movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, is quite good:

The music had its fans at the time (more in the UK than in North America), but the documentary does a great job putting it into the much broader context of post-war Germany, the 1960s, the psychedelic revolution, and all that. And yet somehow it doesn’t feel dated to me; on the contrary, it feels as fresh as tomorrow’s news, because I know there are fans out there, Radiohead generation kids and remixers and whoever else listening to these things and reviving them in ways I wouldn’t have imagined possible back in the days when the music industry seemed like one stifling oligopoly. (You can watch all of it on Coilhouse. Thanks to Mutate for the tip.)

None of these are standard History Channel fare. All are products of the internet and MP3-era explosion of musical tastes, one of the cultural victories of our day — the losers being the big music corporations, or at least what they stood for. The corporations themselves are still around, of course, doing the same thing corporations do, and even if they weren’t, they would simply have been replaced by others, made from the same movable parts of the corporate machine. But technology moves forward despite them.

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Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

Bryant’s objects & a possible object/subjectology

January 31, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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Reading Levi Bryant’s blog sometimes feels like having a brilliant storm of white-hot thought rain down upon one’s backyard garden, the shoots struggling to stay vertical, but rendered that much stronger after the rain. There are wonderful passages in his recent musings on ethics, relations, objects, and ontology. From Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always Dangerous), for instance:

“Where today we tend to think of character almost exclusively as a moral or ethical property, character should probably be thought as “power” (in the sense of “capacity” or “ability”, or what a thing can do), or “nature” (in the sense of the “nature of a thing”, not in the sense of φύσις). In this respect, ἦθος is closely bound up with the Greek concept of arete or “excellence” (ἀρετή), which would later become the Latin virtus, which, importantly, has connotations of power (in the sense of capacity or ability) and strength. Again, it is sad how degraded the concept of virtue has become worn or degraded. The key point not to be missed with respect to the Greek concept of ἀρετή is that ἀρετή is not an exclusively human property. All entities, for the Greeks, have their “ἀρετή“, and in many respects this ἀρετή constitutes the proper being of an entity. Thus, for example, the ἀρετή of a hawk is its keen eyesight, its sharp talons, its ability to fly swiftly, and so on. The ἀρετή of a tree might be its sturdiness, the manner in which it reaches to the heavens, its ability to resist heavy winds, and so on. The Greeks, it would seem, were Deleuzian ethologists well before Deleuze, defining entities in terms of their powers, capacities, or excellencies, rather than qualities.”

What follows are some comments on Levi’s response to my concerns (which he identifies correctly) about object-oriented ontology’s premise of the absolute independence of objects from each other.

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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments »

visualizing immanence

January 30, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTH4VSIQZw?fs=1&hl=en_US

This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, and others — it’s all there. Iraqi-born physicist-host Jim Al-Khalili gives us the enthusiasm and hipness of a newfangled (and perhaps more respectable) James Burke, and the music, from Arvo Part’s opening strains (“Spiegel im Spiegel”) to Satie, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, et al, adds a great deal to the pleasure of watching it. Nice work on BBC’s part.

The doc provides helpful tools for visualizing dynamic systems, which are part of what’s making it possible for science and culture, Latour’s two poles of the “modern constitution,” to work their way toward a rapprochement. What’s still missing is the integration of first-person subjectivity — mind as opposed to body — which biosemiotics (drawing on Peirce, von Uexkull, Bateson, Sebeok, et al), Whiteheadian process metaphysics, enactive cognitivism, and related schools of thought, help to get at. To actually bring these together into a successful and convincing synthesis — one that would put Newton, Descartes, and the rest fully into the past and put cognitive science on a much stronger footing (in my opinion) — will require a lot more work, of course. Philosophers in particular have their work cut out for them (as my recent exchange with Levi Bryant might suggest).

The Secret Life of Chaos is in six 10-minutes segments, but if you only have a few minutes to sample it now, watch the bit on feedback loops and the butterfly effect that begins this segement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxAltBlGZAo?fs=1&hl=en_US

Incidentally, John Law’s post-Actor-Network-Theory After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, which I’ve mentioned positively a few times here recently, has now been made available at the fabulous ever expanding scholar-hipster’s online library aaaarg.org. A few of the missing social-science pieces I mentioned work their way into Law’s book…

Thanks to Integral Options Cafe for blogging about the BBC doc, which just premiered in the UK this past week.

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments »

the politics of objects & relations

January 29, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The objects versus relations debate has revved up again over at Larval Subjects, in the commentary responding to Levi Bryant’s Questions about the possibility of non-correlationist ethics.

The debate, as I would describe it, circles around the following question: If we agree that traditional philosophy has been too centrally premised on the relationship between humans and the world at the expense of the world itself (with all its other things, beings, entities, relations, and whatnot), then is it better to promote a philosophy that focuses on objects, that is, not just on human subjects/objects but all objects, or one that focuses on relations between things (subjects, objects, networks, processes, whatever)? The first approach is taken by object-oriented philosophers like Bryant, Graham Harman, and others; the second by relationists, such as those influenced by Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and Spinoza, among others (though the exact list depends on whom you ask; a few recent and recommendable books in this latter tradition are Steven Shaviro’s Without Criteria, John Protevi’s Political Affect, and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter).

Since I’ve responded to Levi’s points on his blog, I’ll restrict myself here to addressing in greater depth the question raised by Levi, Scu, and anxiousmodernman (in their comments) about the politics of relationalism.

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Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

“clean” coal

January 28, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Today is National Coal Ash Action Day, as MountainJustice.org reminds us — see the information there on what you can do about it. Meanwhile, Climate Ground Zero reports on a fascinating case unfolding in West Virginia’s coal country, where tree sitters have halted blasting of a mountaintop by Massey Coal company.

Climate justice folks have taken the old growth forest protection movement’s most direct form of direct action to a place where it’s clearly about justice, not just trees (as so many have documented, and as Google Earth provides plenty of photographic evidence of). A petition to halt the blasting can be found here. (And reading the comments can be a blast as well.)

One of the things I like about that video, incidentally (and ironically), is that it sounds like a piece of ambient drone music by someone like Nurse With Wound or Zoviet France being performed as if it were one of R. Murray Schafer’s outdoor concerts, on location where it counts. Except that here the horns are being played by real live mining company truckers. And what becomes clear here is that music can be dangerous — a force of violence, not merely to oneself (when subjecting one’s eardrums willingly) but to others. Like a lot of art that comments on atrocity, however, the sonic blasting is only a prelude to the physical blasting that awaits the landscape, or a kind of homeopathic substitute for it if the tree sitters succeed in stopping it from getting to the more destructively physical stage.

Meanwhile, President Obama, despite all the good things in his speech last night (which I generally liked a lot, and which helped renew the feelings of admiration I’ve had for him all along), worryingly continues to dither on the energy issue, speaking not only of “clean coal” as if it actually existed but of off-shore drilling and a whole “new generation” of nuclear plants, and not even mentioning sustainable energy once in a speech that should have been a programmatic reframing of reality. I understand (as I think one of the MSNBC commentators mentioned last night) that he was aiming, in part, to take the wind out of any possible response by Virginia’s governor, who gave the Republication response afterward. But please, we need more pressure on the folks in Washington…

Here’s an interesting piece on the use of GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps to disclose the reality of the 450+ mountaintops removed to access coal deposits in the United States:

Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

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