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visualizing immanence

January 30, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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:

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 »

one of these (ambiguous & contradictory) mornings

January 24, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Valery Lyman’s 16-minute film, One of These Mornings, captures the pain, the joy, the happiness, and the excitement embodied in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.

Now, a year and a couple of months after that election, Ben Ehrenreich’s Slate piece on the dramatic failures (already!) of the international, but especially US, response to the Haiti earthquake disaster, Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?, forces us to confront the fact that changing the world is not brought about by an election. If Ehrenreich and others are right, it appears that through a combination of knee-jerk militarism, systemic racism, and the pursuit of economic interest even in the midst of tragedy, Haiti’s most needy have not been getting much of the relief that the global community has generously sent out through personal donations via social networking media alongside traditional aid channels. That’s a scandal in itself, and it calls for serious reflection on why so little has changed in this country.

The other big moment of contradiction this past week was the U.S. Supreme Court decision about corporate “personhood” and unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns — which is the biggest single setback to democracy this country has seen in a long time. But, there being a silver lining to every dark cloud, this may also be the moment for Obama to step in and take the reins of his multiple-majority power lock and do something with them. (Why is it when Bush had to work with a Democratic majority in Congress he still managed to do so much damage, and when Obama has clear majorities in both houses, his hands are tied? We know, of course, that it’s largely because of the beholdenness of all American politicians, wimpy “moderate” Democrats no less than others, to the special interests who fund them — which the Supreme Court decision has just made that much worse.)

The decision is an easy target for Obama, and at least some of the more moderate Republicans (such as McCain, who’s initiated campaign finance reform in the past) as well as Democrats would be hard-pressed to support the decision. As he prepares for his State of the Union address this Wednesday, any American who supports him should take some time in the next couple of days to send a message to the the White House and to, at the very least, sign the MoveOn.org petition against the Supreme Court decision. For this “progressive” president to act on his promises, he needs to feel the country behind him. One step can lead to another, generating momentum for at least some of the change he had promised; but that first step has to be taken.

Real change is not brought about by a single election, nor by the expression (audacious or otherwise) of hope. It’s brought about by the hard work of enacting that hope into practice. Once the conditions are set for a moment of good feeling like that embodied in Valery Lyman’s film, we need to ensure these remain not just moments but movements, the moments of jubilation being the froth spraying off the tops of the waves, whose repeated breaking on the shores of our consciousness changes that collective consciousness. Hope needs to be set into motion along multiple vectors — cultural and institutional — and at multiple scales. But it requires political leadership, and leadership, in a system of politics as financially corrupted as this one, only comes with repeated kicks from behind. Friendly, soft, but persistent kicks.

Thanks to Ron Burnett for sharing the Vimeo link. Of the bloggers I’ve read commenting on the Supreme Court decision, Sara Robinson’s at Campaign for America’s Future, Chris Vitale’s at Orbis Mediologicus, and Brendan Demelle’s at Ecological Buddhism provide inspiring and interesting perspectives. And see Rebecca Solnit’s piece on the disaster of media coverage of Haiti.

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

exquisite corpse

January 22, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Michael Bérubé’s In praise of humility is so good I can’t resist posting a link to it. Why, indeed, has the Obama revolution lost its steam? I think Bérubé must be aiming for Andrei Codrescu‘s job as NPR’s occasional commentator extraordinaire. Read it and weep (at least until you realize what’s going on).

Incidentally, Bérubé’s latest book The Left at War is well worth reading and discussing, even if one doesn’t agree with all of it. And, incidentally, the title of this post, which refers to a Surrealist method of collective anti-authorship, isn’t intended as a comment on Bérubé’s piece but rather about what he is describing. Politics as a stumbling around in the dark, a piecing-together from the bits left by the last guy, with no idea what will come of it. At least Codrescu has the good sense to smell it and marvel at its texture.

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ways to shoot starlings

January 18, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

“Shoot” as in film, photograph, capture and display, but also fly with them, shoot the rapids of their movement, accompany them, become starling. These mesmerizing videos of moving masses of starlings, “murmurations” as they’re called, like other YouTube animal videos, tell us as much about the phenomenon being watched as about those watching it.

It all gets going here at around the 3’20” mark. But it would be nice if we were given some alternative soundtrack options. Like this one, with no commentary, just a few intertitles, set to the music of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble:

I like the interplay between still shots and motion sequences, and even the traffic moving beneath them, and the sound of the traffic, adds a nice touch.

Bill Oddie’s video is as much about the starlings as about its quietly awestruck observer, with his whispered play-by-play, Qigong-like imitative acrobatics, and the way he holds his hands up for warming to the blue TV-screen light of the starling-filled sky:

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Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

ecology, Deleuze/Tarkovsky, & the time-image

January 16, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books make for difficult reading, and if one is to make headway into them, it helps not only to know something about Bergsonian philosophy, Piercian semiotics, and (a lot about) the history of film, but also to have clips at hand of the films Deleuze discusses. Fortunately, Corry Shores has been very helpfully compiling such clips, accompanied by excerpts from the books, at his Deleuze Cinema Project 1 blog site.

The two books are books of philosophy centered on the moving image — a term that is somewhat redundant in a Deleuzian/Bergsonian framework, for which everything is (in) movement and becoming, and in which the image, which is both visual and auditory, is part of the very texture, or nature, of things. Deleuze, in other words, does not distinguish between a thing and its representation; rather, there are things, which are always in motion, in process, in becoming, and these things appear as “images,” which can be visual, auditory, etc., depending on the sensory equipment that is brought to them. Since the images are always in motion, it is cinema, the art of the moving image, that has best come to capture this quality of world-in-motion. The books are primarily dedicated to articulating Deleuze’s Bergsonian (and Piercian) schema and to setting out a fairly detailed typology of images. Its historical argument — that a shift after World War II allowed for the emergence of the “time-image”, which comes to supplement and ultimately supplant the “movement-image” — can be taken, albeit loosely, or left, but its ontological underpinnings are original, powerful, and I believe very useful for an emergent eco/geophilosophy.

Marcy Saude’s 5 or 6 minutes on cinematic time is a nice short video discussing Deleuze’s “time-image” concept over clips from Rosselini’s Umberto D, Bela Tarr’s Satantango and Gus van Sant’s Gerry:

As I see it, there are at least three reasons why Deleuzian film theory should be of interest to ecophilosophy. The first is the same reason why Deleuze is of interest more generally: because in providing one of the most coherent and self-consistent accounts of the world as process and change, his philosophy helps us understand the ways that things — i.e. relational systems from the molecular to the social to the ecological — come together and drift apart, territorialize and detteritorialize, with us, psycho-biological processes that we are, caught amidst them and acting from within them upon them (and upon ourselves).

The second reason is Deleuze’s Bergsonian and Piercian (and somewhat biosemiotic) focus on the image and its nature as carrier of affect. This brings imagination — the perception of things as not only a passive “reception” of what is “out there” but also an active reconception and engagement with the images and image-affects — to the center of cultural and environmental theory. Environmentalism needs a better understanding of how images do their work in the world; Deleuze can help with that.

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Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Hell, nature, & justice in Haiti

January 14, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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What do we do in the aftermath of such a disaster, except to express profound sadness, shock, and sympathy, and to send donations to aid and relief organizations working in the affected areas? How do we even portray it in a way that respects the victims?

Citizen media, according to Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy, have gotten ever better at providing a sense of the real-time reality unfolding on the ground in situations like this, but they still have limitations. The best of the established media seem to be rounding up bloggers and tweets and connecting the diaspora community with their loved ones, in their general effort to cover what is happening. As Global Voices’ excellent Haiti earthquake page shows, reports are being compiled in numerous places, such as here, and even Wikipedia is doing a reasonable job staying on top of it.

Academics who know the area are responding by spinning some context around it, to help the rest of us understand the history that has made Haiti the poorest country in the hemisphere, least able to withstand a shock like this. In his piece in yesterday’s Guardian, philosopher Peter Hallward blames a long history of US and colonial intervention, neoliberal economic policies, and the vacillations of the international community for the extent of the tragedy. Despite its being a couple of decades old, I know of no better account of that history than Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and his later Memory of Fire trilogy.

But then there’s nature, in her guise as unpredictable Mother, angry Papa Legba, vengeful Jehovah. The most egregious of religious interpretations is evangelical pastor Pat Robertson’s despicable comment blaming Haitians for their own disaster, claiming they had made a “pact with the devil” in overthrowing the French and have since been reaping its fruits. Voilà: rising up against unjust rule is bad when non-Christians do it, but good when it’s Robertson’s own Americans in their revolution. But reacting to such ignorance is too easy and does little (immediately) for the victims of the tragedy.

And there’s nature in the dark purity of the (f)act itself: nature acts, for no “reason,” wiping tens or hundreds of thousands in the simple scratch of an itch. Nature is not just.

That said, nature is also never merely nature either. We are part of the nature that acts, part of the system of relations by which the earth twists and moans and writhes in its sleep. There’s little point in looking for a global warming “signature” here. Rather, it’s about vulnerability — and its just (or unjust) distribution among us. As the world globalizes, as we come to see and feel the pain on our screens, we come to build the body of humanity. But the building of it is highly, deeply, radically uneven. An anthropologist working in Haiti, whose e-mail was forwarded to me by a friend, laments the news coverage, “which depicts this as a natural catastrophe, when the real problem is substandard housing and lack of infrastructure.”

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Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Spirit matter | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

climate rage

January 12, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

climategate.jpg

Just a quick follow-up to the previous post…

After the East Anglia flare-up, Paul Krugman was right to ask what fuels the rage behind climate denialism. Anyone who has perused any popular web site on environmental and climate issues will be struck both by the numbers and the utter vehemence of the denialist community. Looking at their own web sites is even more disconcerting (I won’t draw your attention to them; they’re easy enough to find).

One of the things that fuels this is, of course, that it’s well funded by the fossil fuel lobby (we’ve known that for years). Another is simply the organic totality of the American right, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, for whom climate change has become a hinge issue, just as abortion and gay marriage have been for some years now. Krugman puts it down to anti-intellectualism and “mommy party” politics — “Real men punish evildoers; they don’t adjust their lifestyles to protect the planet” — which sounds a little like George Lakoff’s argument about red staters’ “strict father” politics versus blue staters’ “nurturant mother” (which he later changed to “nurturant parent”) politics, an oversimplification that captures something, but misses more.

Identity, however, is clearly an important piece of it (as the Identity Campaigning blog knows), which is why global ecopolitics is now at least as much a matter of communication, image production, and cultural activism as it is of science or policy formulation.

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

“Climategate” follow-up

January 12, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent “Climategate scandal,” I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science.

To my surprise, the Wikipedia article on the topic is probably as good a place to start as any (as Wikipedia often is, despite its known flaws and potential unreliabilities; the fact that it’s both up-to-date and reasonably thorough on this topic allays my fears about Wikipedia’s slow decline, as reported in the digital media a little while back).

This article, published early last year in EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, summarizes the results of an extensive survey of climate scientists, which shows that while just over half of Americans believe there is a scientific consensus about human-caused global warming, 97.4% of actively publishing climatologists agree that human activities are bringing about a warming of the global climate. The study was carried out before the East Anglia e-mail flare-up, but the main thing that the latter would have done to this data is to bring down the level of trust in climate science among the public, especially the American public, not to change the scientific consensus. This editorial in Nature, one of the two most respected scientific journals on the planet, presents a fair assessment of what the hacked e-mails mean for the scientific community. (The other of the two, Science, has not editorialized about it, but here’s the news piece they published soon after the e-mail issue broke.)

This piece by Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters usefully summarizes an earlier study by Brown, Pielke, and Annan that shows more or less the same result, and mentions a few of the reasons for the mass media’s overemphasis on climate skepticism. Links to other studies of the scientific “consensus” and to statements by leading scientific organizations can be found at the Wikipedia page on scientific opinion on climate change and on the climate change consensus.

While there’s little scientific value in these, I find David McCandless’s visualizations at Information is Beautiful to be a neat summation of the main arguments pro and con and of the scale of consensus (though some of the commenters make a valid point about his approach, which is not very statistically rigorous). The first of these, however, follows the popular media frame of believers-versus-skeptics (“is climate change real or not?”), which is part of the problem of why so many in the public remain underinformed and unconvinced. Coby Beck’s How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, at Grist.org, delves into the various arguments put forward by the (fossil fuel industry-fueled) denialist machine and by the (reasonably) befuddled public.

That ought to do for a start…

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

neuropolitics & environmental communication

January 11, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

My article “From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication” is coming out in the next issue of Environmental Communication. Here’s the abstract:

George Lakoff’s work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of social movements and of environmental communication, however, is not as straightforward as Lakoff’s followers suggest. Examining and comparing Lakoff’s “neuropolitics” with those of political theorist William E. Connolly, this article argues that Connolly’s writings on evangelical-capitalist and eco-egalitarian “resonance machines” provide a broader model for thinking about the relations between body, brain, and culture. Environmentalists, it concludes, should pluralize their “frames” and pay greater attention to the micropolitical and affective effects of their language and practices on the communities within which they act, communicate, and dwell.

And a couple of excerpts from the article:

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Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

secret language (of scientists) going public

January 3, 2010 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

At a time when so many social mammal species are in crisis, it’s at least heartening to see news like tonight’s 60 Minutes segment on “The Secret Language of Elephants” or today’s Times Online article “Scientists say dolphins should be treated as ‘non-human persons’.” The scientific taboo on anthropomorphism is finally lifting, and animal behavior studies are becoming more like anthropology — something that only lone rogue anthros like John Lilly or Barbara Noske would have dared call for not too long ago…

Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged | 8 Comments »

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