Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus an overflow audience composed primarily of undergrads providing pretty good evidence of this — and then by characterizing the world of Lacanian theory as a kind of widely but thinly spread diaspora, in which the Lacanian had to craftily pretend to go along with the powers-that-be until they got into a secure position at which point they could turn around and “shoot,” i.e. do the real (Lacanian) stuff.
It’s nice to have one’s university marked out as a unique place in this way, not necessarily because of the Lacanianism (though some would say for that, too) as because having Žižek’s imprimatur adds some always-welcome cachet to it. Compared to the talk Žižek gave in Montreal recently, where his topic had been theology and the death of God, he was more on home turf here, both in terms of having the sympathetic packed-hall audience and because his topic was the more familiar one (for his fans) of ideology, film, and Jacques Lacan.
As I’ve related here before (to some extent), I admire Žižek’s passion, am awed by his energy and prolificacy, and strongly sympathize with his overall project, which he has loosely characterized as waking people up from their ideologically induced slumber, where the ‘waking’ is part of a Lacanian unmasking of psychologically driven illusions, and the ‘ideology’ is the one propping up capitalist injustice. But when it comes to the details of his arguments, I don’t always find them as convincing as I would like.
Back in the mid-1990s when I was researching my book Claiming Sacred Ground — on the ‘sacralization’ of space, place, and landscape, with a focus on two places where it’s been happening at a rapid clip over the last three or four decades (Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona, which has been in the news recently for the multiple sweat-lodge deaths associated with prosperity self-help guru James Arthur Ray) — I heard a lot about “prophecies” leading up to major earth-changing events in 2012. For believers, the Harmonic Convergence of August, 1987, heralded the beginning of the final quarter-century of the current era, affording us twenty-five years to get our acts (ax?) together, collectively and individually, before being ground up for cosmic compost.
There’s a lot of research on belief and the tremendous resilience of the human mind’s capacity to bounce back with creative reinterpretations when alleged prophecies fail to occur. I actually believe that “creative (re-)religioning” is one of the things that will help us get through the “earth changes” coming up in the near future, so it’s something we need to think about and get better at. But December 21, 2012, is not the date we need to fear (or hope for, if you’re apocalyptically inclined), as the changes facing us will more likely be a matter of creeping climate system effects, ecological breakdowns (probably starting with our oceans), the steady decline of cheap energy sources, and growing economic dislocation for millions, than any sudden cosmically induced calamity. Blogging Mayanist Johan Normark’s 2012 postings are an excellent place to start for more informed readings of the whole 2012 phenomenon. (And see also what Mayan elders say about the whole thing, and Gary Lachman’s piece on the groovy Reality Sandwich.) What we need is not a rapid spike in fear and fearmongering, but the cultivation of our collective capacities for adaptive resilience, creativity, and empathy — plus pressure on political actors for quick and radical policy measures when possible.
It’s understandable, though, that Hollywood and the pop-culture industry would shift into high gear over this opportunity to sell movie tickets ($225 million worldwide in its first weekend!), books (what an incredible list), survival gear, spiritual solace, and tickets on the next spaceship out of here, and that, in reply, even NASA would issue statements (see here and here) to calm the ill-informed and worried.
Just as we like, even need, to mark out particular spaces and places as sacred — they become emblems for more genuine “reality,” utopian kernels to which we can actually travel, in our hearts or in our bodies (a hermeneutically flat topography just doesn’t compare, and probably makes us sick) — we also like to do that with time. It allows us to plan and organize our lives, look forward to things, and give our present bearings the weightiness of meaning. By saying this, I don’t mean to suggest that our lives are meaningless to start with and that we do these things to give ourselves the illusion that they are not. Meaning is woven into our activities; it oozes out of everything we do, and what we do is oriented, from day one, at allowing its ooze to flow. The same goes for any living thing, though obviously we humans are a lot more obsessed with it, for various reasons (to do with our neotenous nature, our complex and highly neuroplastic brains, our utter dependence on language and narrative, and much else).
Cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel writes of the “sociomental topographies” that mark our understandings of space and of time, and the forms of “mnemonic socialization” by which we learn what the important dates, events, check-points, and cycles are in our collective identity worlds. We live, however, in a world transitioning to the global scale, one in which national memories and identities are weakening and in which ethnic and civilizational ones are filling in the void, but where, for many of us, the latter don’t do the trick very well any more. Many people look to the global scale for their collective identity bearings, but that scale remains a work in progress, a contested arena without clear and effective markers in place, with science being one (or more) of the contestants, but others readily spilling into the vacuum. The appeal of 2012 doomsters is therefore understandable.
There were things I liked about Emmerich’s previous mega-doom-pic The Day After Tomorrow (like the scenes of an ice-age Manhattan), and some research has shown that it played a role in catalyzing discussion about climate change (see Leiserowitz and Lowe et al). What the effects of the 2012 asteroid will be is anyone’s guess. But I’m willing to wager an awful lot of money that life will go on…
A beautiful piece by improvisational guitarist and deep-sea diver Henry Kaiser, shot somewhere off the coast of Antarctica. (He’s done similar scenes in a couple of Werner Herzog films, Encounters at the End of the World and the sci-fi docu-fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder.)
Somewhere around the 7-8 minute mark, I was so overcome with emotion I almost spilled out of my body, messing up the keyboard of my laptop and covering it with an organless goo as it tried to squeeze its way through the monitor to swim along with him. On a rainy day, I can imagine myself setting this on infinite-loop and bathing myself in it. The final violin lines glide into the skin of my brain like blades of gold. Where would we be without the Henry Kaisers of this world?
His Antarctica journals can be found here, and more underwater video clips here.
“For Buddhism,” Clark writes, “the negative path of the destruction of illusion is inseparably linked to the positive path of an open, awakened, and compassionate response to a living, non-objectifiable reality, the ‘nature that is no nature.’’’
John Clark’s recent article in Capitalism Nature Socialism, “On being none with nature: Nagarjuna and the ecology of emptiness,” has gotten my neurons firing in a productive way. Clark is a political philosopher whose book The Anarchist Moment had long ago excited me about the prospect of melding together a Daoist-flavored, but Murray Bookchin-inspired eco-anarchism with a Foucauldian critique of power. Clark abandoned his Bookchinian social ecology years ago, finding Bookchin’s project too limiting (though he still sees the need to periodically inveigh against it). But it’s good to see that he is still working on a socio-ecological project that continues to synthesize, deeply and thoroughly, from eastern as well as western traditions.
This particular piece is among the best attempts I’ve seen to apply Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka (Madhyamika) philosophy to environmental ethics, and it raises issues of relevance to ecophilosophy, the relational/objectological debate that featured here a little while ago, and eco-social liberatory practice. Since the article is only available through a personal or institutional subscription to the journal, I’m cutting and pasting some favorite passages into this post, interspersed with comments recontextualizing Clark’s argument within the philosophical currents I’ve been exploring here — specifically, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan/Zizek, and others. What follows isn’t an in-depth philosophical analysis, and there remain many issues one could try to work out in the relationship between these different thinkers and traditions. I just wish to point out some of the resonances here. (And, sympathizing with Tim Morton’s — that Deleuzian anti-Deleuzian’s 😉 — recent lament about Derrida’s burial beneath mountains of Deleuze, I’ll briefly touch on their compatibility here, at least in a cursory way. They are both, after all, “philosophers of difference” — as one might argue Nagarjuna is, too — but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that there remain large differences, no pun intended, between their philosophical projects.)
I’m happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean Dom Grasso, aims to become “the Santa Fe Institute of the East.” What form that may take is currently a little up for grabs, as UVM reconfigures its graduate offerings through a series of transdisciplinary research initiatives. But it’s a very safe bet that both environmental (including socio-environmental) research and complex systems research will continue to grow, and my hope is that Kauffman’s arrival may herald greater collaboration not only between those two broad fields but with humanists, philosophers, and cultural studies folks as well.
Kauffman’s books Reinventing the Sacred — see this video to get an idea of it — and At Home in the Universe both resonate well with the ideas explored on this blog (from Connolly’s immanent naturalism and Whitehead’s process thought to Deleuzian and Spinozan thought on nature and society), as I’ve posted about previously. I look forward to having him as a colleague.
Slavoj Zizek’s engagement with theologians like radical orthodoxist John Milbank continues to perplex me a little bit, but having heard him speak a few days ago with death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal left me reassured me that Zizek is far from the wildest (and zaniest) mind out there. Altizer’s voice thundered through the Palais des Congres conference room as he corralled Hegel and William Blake into a kind of ecstatic rave-up on Satan and the self-annihilation of God. I’m not familiar enough with Altizer’s thinking to judge it, but it sounded a little to me like taking two parts X (in this case, Hegel), one part Y (Blake), and sprinkling in some N and M (Nietzsche and Jung?) just to see what will come of it (something, I think, about spirit’s immanence in the world through the self-annihilation of God via Christ). [sentence deleted out of respect]*
But Zizek’s big argument was the same as ever: that the relativists, postmodernists, multiculturalists, holists, pagans, buddhists, relationalists, Deleuzians, and even deconstructive theologians like John Caputo (addressed directly) are all wrong, and are really just propping up the illusory Big Other instead of releasing us into the revolutionary moment, and that what we need instead is a Leninist revolutionary force to bring about, I guess, an egalitarian utopia on Earth.
I like watching Zizek perform and enjoy his post-Yugoslav sense of humor, and I think his big Lacanian thought is a very good one to have around — on ecological matters no less than on others (though there’s an incoherent desperation in his writing on ecology that makes me glad Tim Morton is around to tell us more clearly what Zizek would like to say). But I can’t help wondering if there’s a kind of continuity — not of ideas, but of sensibility — developing between his (and Alain Badiou’s) ultra-Left neo-Orthodoxy and other orthodoxies, like the Radical Orthodoxy of Milbank and of Philip Blond, spiritual gurus for some of the “red Tories” among David Cameron’s soon-to-be-ruling Conservatives in the UK, and maybe even the Radical Traditionalists that have influenced the European New Right (including the neo-‘Pagans’ among them such as Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin and France’s Alain de Benoist). I haven’t read Zizek’s/Milbank’s Monstrosity of Christ (being, quite honestly, a little afraid of it), only reviews of it; but it does seem to me that all of these neo-orthodoxies are fervently anti-liberal, both in liberalism’s economic (neoliberal) and its cultural variants, and are either sour on democracy, or at least merely utilitarian in their approach to it.
This blog was added to the Directory of Best Green Blogs earlier today. To honor that I thought I would re-post a link to one of my favorite climate change related videos: the plastic bag polar bears emerging from the subway vent and melting back into them (i.e., the Environmental Defense Fund NYC subway ad campaign video, with music by Stars of the Lid).
(But do we still say “Save the Planet” these days? Can someone come up with a better three-word slogan?)
And then there’s GP2 (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a.k.a. the Pacific Trash Vortex), and the artists who are out there now. This from Midway Atoll, near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre:
Folks, do something. First about greenhouse gases, then about the impending ocean aquacalypse, and global poverty, and everything else. Enjoying every minute of it while you’re doing it.
(For some reason, this didn’t go out over Google Reader, so I’m re-posting it…)
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek’s post at Speculative Heresy – and the many comments on it – provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his initial arguments in ways that represent the counter-arguments quite well, so that both (or all) sides seem smarter and more clear-headed coming out of the process than going into it — which is what good philosophizing should be about.
The key, as he presents it, is to define politics in a viable and useful way: is it just about relations between humans and other humans (as he first assumed), or is it about ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ ‘the space of the im/possible’ (a Derridean formulation that needs more clarification, so see Nick’s elaboration on it), or something else. Nick argues that “if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political.”
I agree with Nick that the definition of ‘politics’ should not be fully subsumed within the definition of ‘art’ (or ‘philosophy’ or religion’ or ‘science’ or ‘nature’ or anything else) — losing the distinctiveness of each of these terms renders the world less distinct and gives us a weaker grasp on things. But art, philosophy, etc. can still be political, and identifying overlaps between these categories can do important work for us.
Politics, to my mind, is about relationality — ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ etc. — but it doesn’t just describe that relationality; it affects it. Something becomes political to the extent that it effects change in relations, and specifically in power relations — that is, to the extent that it opens up, closes down, or somehow reorients or reconfigures capacities (one’s own and/or others’) for acting and for effecting change in the world.
This seems circular, but I’m trying to be consistent here with a process-relational ontology. To say that ‘politics’ is about ‘effecting change in the ways change can be effected’ is to render politics open in a world that is itself open. If voting cannot effect change, then it is not (any longer) political; or rather it is negatively political to the extent that it closes down the possibility for change, for instance, by creating the illusion that one is making change when one isn’t. Politics, by this definition, consists of those adjustments, negotiations, and struggles by which we reconfigure power in the world (where power is not just ‘power over’ but power-to, power-with, etc.). This can be done through art or philosophy, i.e. through the expression or conceptual formulation of new or different ways of relating, to the extent that these then affect actual relations in the world. But it is not identical with them.
And it can be not only between humans, since humans aren’t the only entities acting within a shared world. But humans have been pretty effective at changing others’ capacities for acting on their worlds, so politics – cosmopolitics, in Stengers’ terms – should today be about the nonhuman as well as the human .
Derek Wall at the eco-lefty Another Green World has just alerted us to an excellent piece new Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom has written on the climate change debate. Please read it, ye Copenhagen-bound.
Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can’t help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The piece both captures and fails to capture salient issues in this debate…
The author, Joe Brewer, gets it right in arguing that the video successfully applies the following “lessons” from cognitive science:
1) That our thinking works in visual and embodiment-based metaphors: Yes, the video employs the graphic physical embodiment of such metaphors portrayed through movement, gesture, dress, etc.
2) That it “makes climate change sexy”: Yes, it does this through the way it elicits, solicits, and interpellates the viewer in a process of desire, a directional build-up whereby we want to “finish the job” of stripping the supermodel. It’s left up to us to do that in our imagination. It’s now in our hands, like a video-game joystick. (Take that where you will…) This point is made by Brewer’s second (“sexy”) and fourth (image schemas) arguments. (The latter, his “balance” and “source-path-goal” schemas, are a fancy way of saying that the metaphors are based in the capacities of the body — for movement toward a goal, for balance, etc.)
3) That it’s effective marketing. Indeed. At 160,000 views as I write, it’s now had 50,000 more views since he wrote his piece.
But his point that it “deconstructs the fashion industry” is wishful thinking on Joe’s part. It plays along with that industry, adding fuel to its workings. (Underwear ads are just as much a part of the industry as are ads for jeans and fur coats, and provoking viewers’ desires to see naked bodies doesn’t take anything away from clothing manufacturers’ ability to sell those bodies clothes.) It adds to the normalization of a certain body image for women: all the models are unhealthily tooth-pick thin women, and all follow the script of how sexy women are supposed to look at their audience of unseen voyeurs. (And did anyone else notice that the more they strip, the more they look 15 years old?) Of course, there’s nothing to stop others from doing alternative versions of this featuring non-white models, male strippers, transvestites, or anything else — which is the argument of the pro-porn feminists, the green fashionistas, et al.
But another thing that strikes me is that the final take-home verbal message — “If you want to see 350, our natural state, you have to get your politicians to act now” (emphasis added) — is not conveyed in a visually or metaphorically effective way. When it comes to graphically embodying any kind of action (other than stripping, or being stripped), our cognitive (embodied, visual, metaphorical) mind is left at the door.
The first text comment below the video when I watched it was dagrimreefah’s “This media cartel sure is doing a great job on all of you livestock” — which is probably intended as a witty interjection of climate denialism, but there’s a more general point that could be made with that. A quick glance at the rest of the comments tells us a few interesting things:
(1) Most of them refer to the physiques of the models (some of them, wisely, asking to see more — not less clothing, mind you, but just more healthy flesh covering their bones);
(2) Of those that refer to the science of climate change, a large number deny it and/or politicize it with anti-Obama rhetoric (or with critiques of his compromises); and
(3) Not a single one seems to get the metaphor of “supermodels” being both the women displayed and the ways — the only ways — in which we actually know about climate change itself and the role “350 parts per million” plays in it.
Climate change models are highly sophisticated, complex pieces of science that deserve a bit more discussion. Riffing on that, however, would take away from the project of making hegemonic (“common-sensifying”) the message about climate change. But I would argue that part of making that message broader is playing up its science (just to raise awareness of how we know about climate change) and, secondly, playing up its ethics and politics: its potential (and already claimed) victims, its costs, and the vested interests on both sides (“old energy” on one, new entrepreneurialism on the other).
Okay, I’m asking too much of a simple 90-second ad. But discussing the ad seems useful, even if it contributes to the viral spread of something I’m ambivalent about…
Just a quick note to let readers know about a new blog that looks in many ways to be a kindred spirit to this one: Violent Signs, subtitled “Immanence, Art, and Ecology,” is maintained and moderated by Tim Matts, a Ph.D. candidate at Cardiff, who intends the blog to serve as a forum “for those working with or curious about materialist philosophies of immanence” and to “focus on contemporary strands of poststructuralist thought with an emphasis on the dynamic ‘encounters’ or ‘interface territories’ that subtend and insist between literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, cinema, ecology and technology.” In its range of themes, depth of thought, and attractive and evocative visual aesthetic, it’s a welcome addition to the eco/geo/philosophical blogosphere.
