In response to a few people’s queries about how I find the time to blog…
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff | 7 Comments »
The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: “like scenes from Mad Max,” “like waking up on Mars,” “like a nuclear winter morning”. . . White urban Australia’s dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback, the uncanny aboriginal sacred that still haunts the landscape, as cinematized in Peter Weir’s Last Wave and countless other Australian films. Somewhere in there one can find a climate change signature, or at least an El Nino initial. Jon Snow writes:
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged ecoapocalypse, ecocinema, film | 7 Comments »
I agree with Mediacology‘s critique of Derrick Jensen’s ‘dark side’ — or at least of a certain linearity in his political vision — but I still find his Star Wars spoof pretty funny. And I think it’s good to have someone saying the things he says (like these). And his column does add some fire to Orion magazine, which as the reigning most beautiful environmental mag, has always been better with the other three elements (air, water, earth) than with the fire.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged Derrick Jensen, ecopolitics, media | 4 Comments »
One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by individuals, designed or improvised with materials at hand, working with others less by design than by happenstance. They can be found in outdoor public spaces, wooded ravines and forests, wild patches of cities and countryside, abandoned industrial sites. Remaining little documented, they appear not to exist at all except when directly encountered, which is something that usually happens by chance.
Even calling them ‘artworks’ can be problematic, since they may not be created with the intent of being recognized as art, or made by ‘artists’, and certainly not as part of the ‘art system’ (as Bourdieu, Luhmann, or Stallabrass would define it). Insofar as they assert the (past) presence of those who have crafted them, they can be read as forms of graffiti, or a kind of resistant creativity akin to the guerrilla gardening movement of urban space activists. Marking out a space as different and significant, but leaving behind little direct evidence of the intent underlying them, they may convey an aura of mystery, playfulness, childlike wonder, or the more serious character of a sacred space or shrine, but until they are turned into a public topic (as has occurred with the fairy houses on Monhegan Island, where I just spent a few days, and about which more in a moment), they remain ambiguous and a little unplaceable within the systems of things that make up the recognized world. They are anomalous or ambiguous objects, which makes them relevant to the recent discussion here of objects versus relations.
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture | Tagged ambiguous objects, animacy, animism, art, eco-art, entropy, paganism, relationalism | 56 Comments »
Incidentally I may have to shut down the automatic commenting capability on this blog for a little while to ward off the spamming machines that seem to have recently been attacking it.
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I’m glad to see that Steven Shaviro and Levi Bryant have stepped into the fray of the debate over the relative virtues of object-centered versus relation-centered ontologies. (Among others, e.g. kvond, Peter Gratton, Graham Harman of course, and see the commenters to Levi’s posts on Harman and Whitehead). With some of the best blogging philosophers going at it, I’m content to sit on the sidelines and watch things unfold. To be fair, Shaviro and Harman, as well as Bryant, have been going at this kind of thing for a while now, but it’s nice to think that my review of Harman’s book helped to catalyze a little bit of the current flare-up. It’s fine to wait around for the print publication of Shaviro’s and Harman’s critiques of and responses to each other, but blogs are so much quicker at quenching one’s philosophic thirst. (And it’s nice to see Whitehead taking a more central place in this discussion.)
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Bryant, Harman, Ontology, epistemology, relationalism, Shaviro, speculative realism, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
The level of discussion following my review/critique of Harman’s Prince of Networks, along with Harman’s brief but welcome response, has encouraged me to post a few more thoughts about this difference between “relationalism” and “objectology” (my term for a central part of his object-oriented philosophy or ontology), that is, between a view that holds that the world is constituted by “relations all the way down”, and a view that admits the world is characterized by relations (of all sorts) but asserts that each entity has an essential non-relational essence. (Thanks to Mark Crosby for his eloquent summary of the dispute in the comments to the last post.) Harman’s reply raises a couple of issues I’d like to address at a little more length.
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged Deleuze, Harman, relationalism, speculative realism, Whitehead | 1 Comment »
Continuing from yesterday’s post on Graham Harman… (Warning: This post is long.)
Where Tool-Being presented a Heidegger flushed clean of his anthropocentrism, Prince of Networks takes Bruno Latour for a ride on a philosophical adventure toward a world not of actors and networks but of objects, pure if not so simple. The book’s first half provides a detailed, clear, entertaining, and precise exegesis of Latour’s metaphysics through an examination of his claims in four books: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. The second, slightly longer half investigates some philosophical problems his actor-network theory opens up; explores lengthy detours through Meillassoux (on relationism and correlationism), Whitehead, Husserl (immanent objectivity), speculative realism, and other by-ways; and ends with a detailed explication of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, which, the argument goes, is made possible by Latour’s ‘flat ontology’ and deepened through Heidegger’s tool-being (with the aid of Zubiri and others), but which is ultimately Harman’s own. In effect, this is Harman building an all-star collective, enrolling Latour (who participates vicariously) and Heidegger (who’s too dead to tell us whether he’d go along with the project or not), with assistance from others, against the revolution by which Immanuel Kant installed humans at the philosophical center of everything.
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged Deleuze, Harman, Latour, mortality, object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism, Whitehead | 33 Comments »
A propos yesterday’s post on transition culture and the Bataillian (versus Malthusian) thermodynamics of ecopolitics, the new issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, on “(Sustainability) + Pleasure,” turns out to be all over this topic.
Wendy Steiner’s “The Joy of Less” introduces it well, positing a sensualism that’s quite happy with the “pleasure economy” of an “age of surplus” and that locates its heroes and prophets among such figures as Walt Whitman, William James (with his redefinition of meaning as “feelings of excited significance”), and the sensibility of European modernists (Baudelaire’s flaneur, Breton’s surrealist vagrant, and Nabokov’s Lolita-loving Humbert Humbert) — as opposed to the rhetoric of sustainability, which “is all about limits on freedom and the thwarting of desire.” “The disconnect between sustainability and pleasure is profound,” she writes, but then goes on to point out the blurrings and conciliations of the two both in children’s culture (school ecology programs, Wall-E) and in the postmodernist arts of Pynchon, Delillo, Chadwick and Spector, and others.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged Bataille, ecopolitics, hedonism, sustainability | 3 Comments »
Reading about the growing “transition towns” movement back to back with a read-through of Design Philosophy Papers’ latest issue on Bataille and “Inefficient Sustainability” has gotten me thinking about some of the unspoken premises that make their way into environmentalists’ prognostications of the future.
The transition towns movement began in Totnes, England, home of the Schumacher Society, and was spurred into motion in part from permaculturist Rob Hopkins’ work on transitioning to a sustainable economy, but it has now spread to hundreds of towns, villages, cities, and regions in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere. Drawing from permaculture founder David Holmgren’s modeling of energy transitions and associated crises, Eco-Mag’s Future Scenarios issue offers a particularly useful and concise synopsis of four possible futures, intended to be taken up in transition town salons and community forums and to help guide in the development of local transition plans and sustainability policies. The four scenarios are distinguished by differential rates of fossil-fuel energy decline (slow or fast) and of climate change symptoms (mild or severe) and by people’s responses to these changes. The general idea is that human use of oil and other fossil fuels is “peaking” and we need to transition toward more sustainable power sources, but that these aren’t readily available; they require more systematic social, political, technological, and economic changes than most are prepared to work toward; and any transition will be marked by the effects of climate changes already, to some extent, set in motion.
The four scenarios are “Brown Tech: Top Down Constriction”, where slow energy decline rates accompanied by severe climate change symptoms allow for aggressive “resource nationalism” and centralized government and corporate investment to prevail, but with wars and chaos looming in the background; “Green Tech: Distributed Powerdown,” where slow energy decline rates and mild climate change symptoms allow for greater diversity of responses at multiple scales, including strengthened “cultures of place”, distributed energy economies, and the like (this is perhaps a best-case scenario); “Earth Steward: Bottom Up Rebuild,” in which rapid energy declines but mild climate change symptoms bring about financial and economic shock, reduction of mobility, increases in crime, malnutrition, and disease, and a hollowing out of cities, but also the rise of a kind of quasi-feudal, neo-monastic ecodecentralism rising up in the ruins (akin to what Theodore Roszak described back in his 1970s Person/Planet); and “Lifeboats: Civilization Triage,” a kind of worst-case scenario where rapid energy decline accompanied by severe climate change leads to global breakdown, significant population decline, and the abandonment of cities, but with “oasis agriculture” and regional survivalism helped out by new opportunities — such as by the creation of “highly productive shallow waters and estuaries” in and around the “complex reef structures” made possible by urban architectures newly flooded in coastal lowlands around the world. (I love it.)
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy | Tagged Bataille, ecotheory, McDonough, Ontology, epistemology, recycling, Stoekl, transition towns | 3 Comments »
The obits have been coming in, albeit a little slowly, for Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith, founder of the fearless and influential British journal The Ecologist, co-founding member of Britain’s Green and Ecology parties, and publisher of the instrumental 1972 manifesto A Blueprint for Survival. Goldsmith, who died in his sleep on August 21, was a controversial figure, as well known in some circles for his conservative, some might say paleo-conservative, social views as for his ecological activism. Despite its faults and cringe moments, his 1992 book The Way: An Ecological Worldview synthesized a certain subset of environmental theories — ecological holism (Gaia, systems theory, etc.), anti-modernism, pro-indigenous and “vernacular culture” traditionalism (premised on a somewhat timeworn cultural ecology and an incipient ecopsychology), and anarcho-decentralism — as lucidly and ambitiously as anyone had done at the time (save perhaps Murray Bookchin). The fiery dust-up at The Ecologist over Goldsmith’s cavorting with figures in the European New Right in the mid-1990s left that magazine a little tattered (and a few editors short), though it’s recovered well since then. As a side effect of the split, former co-editors Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann, and others founded Corner House, which has been producing some of the most incisive left-green assessments of the state of the world since then. Hildyard et al’s earlier document Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons remains a socio-ecological classic.
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics | Tagged ecopolitics | Leave a Comment »
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