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Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology (review)

April 2, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Seems someone else beat me to reviewing Bernd Herzogenrath’s anthology Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology for Deleuze Studies, and the reviews editor failed to tell me that (which he must have known for a few months now; I hope that’s not common practice for them). In any case, things like that happen, especially with academic journals that operate with little or no administrative support, as is the case with DS. I could send it to another journal, but DS is the leading venue for anglophone Deleuze scholarship and the book’s been out since late 2008, so I’ll just share it here, in its extended-length and hyperlinked (and thus ‘value-added’) version.

Incidentally, if anyone else would like a venue for online publishing of reviews related to Deleuze, eco/geophilosophy, and the like, I’m quite happy to make space available here for that. The print publication process, after all, takes time (and costs money), and journals are better used as venues for peer-reviewed scholarship, which also takes time, than for reviews, which are useful as soon as they’re written.

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Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

meteorologists on the moon

March 31, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Trusting a weather forecaster to tell you about climate change is like trusting the view from your bedroom window to inform you about what’s happening in China. (Unless, of course, you live in China.) Why is this so hard to understand?

These pieces at the New York Times, Dot Earth, and Grist help us get at this issue: it’s because TV (and radio) meteorologists are people’s most obvious connection with the weather — they are the mediators of most weather news/events — and, for the lay person living their (relatively) ahistorical one day to the next, weather and climate have always been practically synonymous. This highlights the role of the media in the public understanding of science, and pinpoints the challenge for educators: how to separate weather from climate, and how to mediate climate, which is something that most people rarely have to deal with except in occasional conversations with their elders (“I remember the winters we used to have!”).

And while I’ve generally been suspicious of most forms of geo-engineering, in part because they deflect attention from the need to transition away from fossil fuels, Living on Earth’s interview with Jeff Goodell pointed out that one of the good things about it is that the very idea of geo-engineering underlines the fact that humans are, in fact, in a position to change the Earth’s climate, consciously or otherwise, and for better or for worse. So even if most geo-engineering proposals sound pretty wild, it could be useful to give them an airing. In the end, are wild ideas about renewable energy and green cities really wilder than continually injecting millions of reflective particles into the stratosphere, or setting off nuclear bombs on the moon?

(Hey, maybe we could send a few of those climate-skeptic meteorologists to the moon to forecast what effect that will have. Joe Bastardi in space…)

earth276.jpg

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like a ufo…

March 29, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

And while we’re on a Christian thematic… here are a few beautiful videos set to songs by Sufjan Stevens.

Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland:

And two more…

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Posted in Music & soundscape, Spirit matter | Tagged | 2 Comments »

when in Rome…

March 29, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I try not to comment on things I have little expertise in, but my year spent at a Catholic seminary school in Rome (with at least one resident pedophile among the clergy) gives me a bit of experiential basis for commenting on the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Here’s my rhetorical question:

If the society you grew up in denied and suppressed the expression of your sexual urges, but at the same time offered you ONE institution in which you could not only spend a lot of time in the exclusive company of other members of the sex/gender whose contact you craved, but ALSO gave you power over them in large numbers, mentoring them as they were groomed to gain entry into the class and position of authority that you were allowed to have, why would you NOT become a priest?

There are, to my mind, three things the Vatican ought to do at this point:

(1) Institute a policy of no tolerance for the sexual abuse of minors by priests, and apologize unambiguously and make amends for what’s gone on up to now.

(2) Advocate greater tolerance for minority sexual persuasions in society at large (of the homosexual kind, not of the pedophilic kind that resulted from the Church’s public suppression and private enabling of the former). Or at least stop advocating against such tolerance and acceptance.

(3) Allow priests to marry, just as the Eastern Rite Catholic churches have done for centuries, with little apparent harm.

(A fourth step, only a little less directly related, would be to open positions of religious authority up to women as well.)

That way, wouldn’t Catholicism be able to get back to modeling the right ways to practice Christian (brotherly, and sisterly) love?

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in praise of unfaithful thinking

March 28, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&hl=en_US&fs=1&

There are two ways of being an academic. One is to burrow ever deeper into the little field one cultivates, to become a master of it, all the while propping up the fenceposts around that field to ensure that one’s terrain is left undisturbed by poachers, wild boars or raccoons, dissonant ideas, and so on. The other is to keep moving, following nomadic lines of connection from one thing to another, roping them in from time to time, but always getting diverted by the next thing that appears on the horizon. That may be the Next Big Thing (poststructuralism, postcolonialism, complexity theory, cognitive neuroscience, ecocriticism, or what have you), but it could also be a responsiveness to the world, which is always throwing up next (little) things if we pay attention to it rather than getting caught in our models of it.

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Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

food & desert mansions

March 26, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

(great scenes, part 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxpfO90mg8&hl=en_US&fs=1&

A propos the previous post…

This may be one of Antonioni’s worst, or at least most dated, films, but the climactic scene is certainly memorable, especially if you know Pink Floyd’s “Careful with that axe, Eugene” (though, honestly, once the screaming starts, the music feels pretty dated too). It’s a Deleuzian time-image if I’ve ever seen one. (Non-vegetarians might wish to fast-forward to about 3’20” to get to the meat of it.)

Visiting the point itself in Death Valley several years ago — during one of those springs when it was blooming like it very rarely does — made me realize that both the mansion and the movie are a little out of place at the real Zabriskie Point.

But the slowly exploding food does resonate with latter-day food politics, doesn’t it?

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

aesthetics & Peirce in the Santa Monica Mountains

March 26, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

santa-monica-mountains-m.jpg

I like to follow extended think-fests (such as conferences) with brief flights away from cerebrality, at least for a couple of days where possible. So following the SCMS, I visited the Santa Monica Mountains, which included a hike up La Jolla Canyon and Mugu Peak at the northern end of the range, and another up Solstice Canyon and the Sostomo Trail/Deer Valley Loop. Both were beautiful, as it was a great time to be there — warm, sunny, breezy, their chaparral and riparian vegetation in full bloom this time of year. Then I drove up from Malibu via Mulholland Highway to Hollywood — having recently re-read Mike Davis’s case for letting Malibu burn (in The Ecology of Fear) in preparation for it — and then walked from Griffith Observatory to the top of Mount Hollywood to get a great view of the whole LA area, somewhat muted by smog but not nearly as much as it would have been several years ago.

(As for letting Malibu burn, well, some of the monster homes did remind me a little of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, although (a) burning and exploding are not the same thing, (b) there’s still a fair bit of land set aside in the public/private patchwork of the area to keep environmentalists at least somewhat happy, and (c) I might even consider living there myself if I could afford it ;-).)

The irony, and this is part of the point, is that getting away from thinking tends to trigger new synaptic connections for thinking. This time the connections revolved mainly around two sets of foci, one having to do with the raison d’etre of my teaching, research, and writing (which I’ll leave aside for a future post), and the second having to do with aesthetics and Peircian phenomenology. I’ve been thinking a lot about the latter recently — especially Peirce’s classification of experience into firstness, secondness, and thirdness — and wondering why it was that, for all the thousands of pages he wrote during his prolifically unpublished life, he had very little to say about aesthetics and ethics. In fact, he often admitted his ignorance of both of them, even as they fit into important places within his philosophical system. (He took aesthetics and ethics to be two of the three divisions of “normative science,” the third being logic, and the three corresponding, respectively, to the beautiful, the good, and the true.)

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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

more great scenes

March 22, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

From Bande a Part. (Thanks to Annette for suggesting it.)

Or these two from Blow Up:

But I distinctly remember someone else coming along and kicking what was left of Jeff Beck’s guitar neck right after this. Am I misremembering? Did I see something that was never there in the first place, like the David Hemmings character hearing the tennis ball hit the rackets in the final scene of the film (below)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o11LTgXPtM&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

spring

March 20, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

While it may be the first day of spring, traveling to warm places makes it easy to forget what that means. I’ve been enjoying LA and the SCMS all this week. Besides the three sessions devoted explicitly to ecology and cinema (or ecocriticism and cinema), there have been papers and sessions on animals, water, ecocide and the postmetropolis, and related topics — all of which indicates a growing presence of ecocinecriticism within the cinema/media studies world.

If anyone is interested in a PDF of the paper I’m giving today (partly summarized here), you can e-mail me privately about that.

Posted in Media ecology | Leave a Comment »

two or three scenes…

March 14, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

How à propos: Today’s Guardian’s piece on The Greatest Film Scenes Ever Shot.

What are your favorite scenes, your most indelibly etched screen memories, those “tiny pieces of time” as the article quotes James Stewart saying, that have remained with you ever since seeing them? (The comments open things up to a wider range than the actual article.)

How about the coffee cup scene from Two or Three Things I Know About Her?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4LWwhFJoUw&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Forty-four years haven’t dated it as much as I thought it would have.

Or the library, subway (below), and Nick Cave concert scenes in Wings of Desire?

Posted in Cinema | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

cinema, ontology, ecology

March 14, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed.

Here’s one articulation of that model.

The starting point: Films, or moving images, move us. They take us on journeys (metaphorical or real) into film-worlds. In this sense, films, like all art forms, produce or “disclose” worlds. These worlds are different (according to medium-specific regularities) from the profilmic or extra-filmic world. They are, for one thing, more dynamic (visually-audially) and more synthetic, insofar as they enable a complex array of fragmentations, juxtapositions, and recombinations of elements, and thus for a condensation and multiplication of meanings.

One part of my analysis is of those film-worlds themselves; a second is of our experience of being drawn into those film-worlds; and a third is of the relationship between the film-worlds (as we experience them) and the extra-filmic world.

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Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments »

toward a post-constructivist synthesis

March 12, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I recently mentioned my belief, or hope, that the humanities and sciences are working their ways toward a post-constructivist synthesis, a paradigm in the making with the potential to become a powerful player in twenty-first century public discourse. “Post-constructivism” says little, and “post-representationalism”, “post-anthropocentric humanism,” and “post-Kantianism” — the other terms I used there — don’t help much. So I feel obliged to articulate in more detail what I mean by this assertion. If it is a trend, it is not one that can be demonstrated with quantitative evidence: no matter how many names or schools of thought one can list, there will have been no exhaustive survey done of how these names and schools stack up against all the others that continue to generate knowledge in our academies and in the other intellectual spaces of the world (including emergent ones like those found on-line).

This claim, or belief of mine, is just a reading — and not a disinterested one — of those fields that I cover in my own everyday reading, browsing, research and teaching practice. Its components include the following:

1) There has been a clear shift away from a strict “social constructionism,” or “constructivism,” in the humanities and social sciences to something more cognizant of the complex relations between the social and the non-social, a category that includes the material, the bodily, the affective and emotional, and the biological.

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Posted in Philosophy, Science & society | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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