Ambient electroacoustic artists Stars of the Lid do a beautiful job with thisEnvironmental Defense Fund NYC subway ad campaign video.
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture | Tagged animals, animism, eco-art, ecomedia, mortality | Leave a Comment »
I woke up this morning from a dream in which I had gotten lost in a part of the house (where I live) that had gotten disconnected from the rest of the building. I was wandering somewhere in what seemed like a large hotel or apartment complex looking for the rest of my home. When I woke up, I was happy to have found my way back, here to the real world. But it made me wonder what would happen if I hadn’t – if I had gotten lost in a dream world.
Earlier I had dreamed of Sino-Russian cyber-virus agents taking over the internet and forcing the rest of us to live without it all again — a meme that CBS’s Katie Couric and other media outlets had placed in my head with coverage yesterday of the Conficker worm, which supposedly hijacks computers in an attempt to create a global botnet. Couric had talked about right-wing Russian youth behind it (or that’s what I remember); I probably added the Sino- part myself — a kind of unconscious remnant Orientalism, I guess.
Realizing it was April Fool’s Day today only made both of these weird dreams seem a bit more realistic and consensus reality seem more dreamlike. We live in/on April Fool’s Day. Earth Day, Earth Hour (the “first globalized ritual,” as Stephen Bede Scharper called it yesterday), April Fool’s Day, Earth Fools’ Hour — every hour, as the economy goes down and alternative dreams (the right-wing lunatic dreams of Glenn Beck et al, the utopian Communist dreams of Zizek, Badiou, Ranciere, et al, the green dreams of worldchangers, sustainability transitionists, and green Obamists) float up like balls on a stormy sea… After the storm we will sift through them, relish what we’ve collected, and be glad to have found our way back here, back to shore, after a long weird dream.
Posted in Eco-culture | Leave a Comment »
There are some great pictures to be found here, at The Big Picture: abandoned subdivisions and building sites, landscapes of unused freight containers (#34) and disused newspaper racks (#30), and “Free Weekly Tours of Quality Foreclosed Homes, Prices Won’t Last!!!” (#9, from Las Vegas). There’s something Ed Burtynskyesque about them…
On the topic of Ed Burtynsky: While the image quality is fairly poor when you blow it up to full-screen, Burtynsky’s TED Prize talk has him bearing his environmentalist heart on his sleeve (including his connection to the enviro-optimists at Worldchanging.com). Expect more on his photography and the work of other recent landscape-themed artists coming soon here…
Posted in Politics, Visual culture | Tagged eco-art, economy | 2 Comments »
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which has been the leading forum for what’s come to be known as “ecocriticism” over the past 15 years or so, has finally caught up with the times and gone digital, thanks to the deal it arranged with its new publisher, Oxford. To celebrate the transition, all issues dating back to volume 1 (1993) have been made available for free online until 15th May 2009. You can browse and download articles here. More information about the journal can be found at the journal’s homepage .
Incidentally, my article on “Green Film Criticism and Its Futures” appeared in volume 15 no. 2 last year.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ecocriticism | Leave a Comment »
Warwick philosophy journal Pli has made some back issues available on-line, including issues on Romanticism, Science, Nature, and Nietzsche. A few particularly recommended articles:
Isabelle Stengers, “God’s Heart and the Stuff of Life“,
John Sellars, “The point of view of the cosmos: Deleuze, Romanticism, Stoicism,”
Alain Badiou, “Who is Nietzsche?,”
and the Nomadic Trajectories issue, which features Deleuze, DeLanda, Stivale, Debord, and others (and which has to be downloaded as a single file).
On a different (but in some ways perhaps converging) trajectory: Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s (Geoffrey DeGraff’s) The Shape of Suffering: A Study of Dependent Co-Arising brings nonlinear dynamic systems theory to an exploration of the Buddhist doctrine of ‘dependent origination’ or ‘conditioned arising’ (pratītya-samutpāda in Sanskrit, paticca samuppāda in Pali), which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s one of the many books and documents available at the on-line Theravada Buddhist library Access to Insight.
And finally, writer and art curator Joel Weishaus, who previously authored the year-long “digital literary art” blog Reality Too, has been uploading sections of his new project, a work-in-progress called The Gateless Gate. It starts here, though it seems one could start reading at any point.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Buddhism | 1 Comment »
Here’s an effective little media piece:
Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
Full screen is particularly nice, and the well referenced script gives it substance.
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged ecomedia, environment | Leave a Comment »
Following from the last entry: I should have mentioned the other kind of biocultural studies that’s been getting more & more attention recently: see here, here, and here.
The “Biocultures Manifesto,” which appeared in New Literary History back in 2007, seemed to suggest that it was time for all the work on embodiment, biopolitics (Foucauldian, Agambenian, etc.), and various efforts in science studies and cross-over areas of cognitive science to lead to something fairly radical, and ended with this series of bullet-point “provocative assaults” on received wisdom:
* Science and humanities are incomplete without each other.
* It is untrue that the humanities are the realm of values and the sciences the realm of facts.
* Science isn’t hard and the humanities aren’t soft.
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged bioculturalism | 2 Comments »
I really think that philosophy’s production site is shifting more and more from the library/study and cafe and scholarly journal to the web and blogosphere. Kvond over at Frames /sing has been putting out some very interesting and detailed blogs about Bruno Latour. Larvalsubjects (philosopher and ex-Lacanian analyst Levi Bryant) is blogging about ontology, assemblages, speculative realism, Whitehead, Deleuze, and trees. Heideggerian-Latourian Graham Harman churns his stuff out at Object-Oriented Philosophy. Political theorist Jodi Dean blogs at i cite. Discussions weave themselves together between these and other blogs like The Accursed Share, Fractal Ontology, Planomenology, and some of the others you can find linked on my “Rhizosphere” (blogroll). Some of these bloggers (like Harman and Dean) are well-published academics, others appear to be grad students or just independent intellectuals, but the difference is not necessarily obvious — the mutual iterability and recursivity between them contributes to a deepening of the collective philosophizing that’s occurring, which makes for a different version of the “peer review” that academe prides itself on. (For a recent critical study of peer review processes, see Inside Higher Ed.)
And the format is affecting the philosophy. Graham Harman’s forthcoming “Orpheus: Principles of an Object-Oriented Philosophy” is “being written with an experimental structure designed for electronic reading rather than paper books, which are clearly doomed as the primary medium of our profession.” Books like Steven Shaviro‘s Connected had been trying to do that some time ago.
I’m sharing some of the more relevant (to this blog) posts on my Google blog reader – click on “Immanence Shadow Blog (Posts From Other Blogs)” in the sidebar below. I’m also trying to follow discussions in the environmental media/cultural blogosphere there, so it should make for an interesting mix. To go directly to the shadow blog, click here.
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy | 2 Comments »
I’ve added some Google Reader “shared items” links to this page (scroll down to the “From Other Blogs” heading near the bottom of the sidebar), where you can click for links of interest from my blog reader. These will be updated automatically as I come across things that are relevant to this blog. They will mostly be recent, but may occasionally feature “classic” pieces, such as, for instance, Bill Connolly’s response to Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, which includes some of his clearest writing on immanent naturalism, or Slavoj Zizek’s “Ecology – A New Opium for the Masses.”
Posted in Blog stuff | Leave a Comment »
“Cultural studies” refers to the study of cultural objects, meanings, and processes, and their production and use in contemporary society. It is an interdisciplinary field with a twin commitment to intellectual rigor and social relevance. While the “rigor” piece sometimes means “objectivity,” often it involves a questioning of the assumption that objectivity and subjectivity can be easily distinguished and kept separate; studying culture, in other words, is hardly possible without some level of engagement in culture, which raises ethical issues for those doing the studying. The “relevance” piece means an applicability to real-world situations – an applicability that often means critique but that also intends to promise action towards change for the better (which generally means toward the more democratic and socially just).
So what about green cultural studies? Even though not all “natural” environments are green (in arid countries their predominant color is arguably brown; in marine environments, blue; in arctic environments, white), “green” has generally come to signify a commitment to environmental/ecological politics. Its application to the study of culture is intended in this vein. “Green cultural studies” describes the study of cultural objects, meanings, and actions with an eye and ear for their implications for environmental politics, that is, for understanding and improving the relations between people and the places, landscapes, and multi-species ecological relations they find themselves enmeshed within.
The green political spectrum is a big tent. It includes biocentric or ecocentric deep ecologists, ecofeminists, social ecologists and bioregionalists, eco-socialists and eco-anarchists, environmental justice activists, anthropocentric pragmatists, and liberal and even conservative environmentalists (including those who favor market over state mechanisms, or who favor conservation of “traditional” cultural values and institutions alongside the conservation of ecological relations). Green politics overlaps with and engages in dialogue with numerous other political perspectives; likewise, green cultural studies has developed close, though frequently contested and contentious, links with feminism(s), socialism(s), postcolonialism(s), poststructuralism(s), critical race theory, queer and sexuality studies, and other perspectives within cultural theory and politics.
The emerging field of green cultural studies has poked its head in many places, including at conferences (such as Cultures and Environments, Nature Matters, the biennial ASLE conferences, and the Environment and Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association) and in journals of environmental studies (such as Ethics Place and Environment, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Organization and Environment, The Trumpeter, Cultural Geographies, and Capitalism Nature Socialism) and of cultural studies (such as Cultural Studies, New Formations, and Topia). As a relatively new and poorly defined field, green cultural studies also overlaps significantly with ecocriticism and environmental communication.
Some representative texts in the field include:
- Laurence Coupe’s The Green Studies Reader
- William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground
- Andrew Ross’s Strange Weather
- Jhan Hochman’s Green Cultural Studies
- Sean Cubitt’s Ecomedia
- Tom Jagtenburg and David McKie’s Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity
- Julia Corbett’s Communicating Nature
- and Robert Cox’s Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere.
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Eco-theory | Tagged cultural studies, ecology, ecomedia | 2 Comments »
“Immanent naturalism” is political theorist William E. Connolly’s term for a tradition of thought that doesn’t seek ultimate explanations, ahistorical forces, or transcendental frameworks to give meaning to the world; rather, it finds meaning enough in the world as it is experienced by mortals like us.
The general idea is that the world itself is richer, more mysterious, and more radically open — to change, emergent complexity, and innovation — than we tend to think, and that by opening ourselves to that richness and mystery, we extend our capacities for deepening the experience of life for ourselves and those we interact with. In a sense, immanent naturalism is another term for an earth- and life-embracing ethic that conceives of the universe as fundamentally open and pluralistic, and that refrains from any form of closure including the closure that thinks it’s figured it all out.
Connolly’s writings on immanent naturalism include sections of Neuropolitics and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style; follow the highlights in the linked book excerpts. See also his reply to Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age at the Immanent Frame blog.
“Immanent naturalists,” Connolly writes, “such as, variously, Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze ground ethics in the first instance in an attachment to the world or a gratitude for being that includes and exceeds the identities infused into them. We do not ask, in the first instance, why we should be moral. We ask, in the first instance, how to enliven and cultivate care for an abundance of life over identity that already infuses us to some degree.” Connolly writes of being guided by a “visceral gratitude” and “care for a protean diversity of being,” and his various writings work out the implications of what that might mean for politics and culture, and by what methods and techniques we might be able to get better at it.
On this blog, I use the term “immanent naturalism” a little hesitantly and experimentally, thinking it through as I speak/write, to see if it makes sense and if it might catch on (with me, with others) or not. Part of my hesitation comes from the dualistic implications of naturalism (natural versus supernatural or unnatural, naturalist versus idealist). Connolly’s point, like the Spinozist and Deleuzian traditions he draws from, is that nature includes everything that is. For Deleuze, it’s not just everything that is, but everything that has the potential to be, that is virtually there in the structure of the universe, i.e., the structure of becoming (whether it ends up becoming actual or not). Naturalism, therefore, doesn’t have to only deal with empirically knowable existing things; it can be a matter of recognizing that the world is process, and that the invisible and unknowable, for partial and situated observer-participants like ourselves, is also part of that world.
Conceivably, this “immanent naturalist” rubric might fade into others over time here – which makes sense, because I intend it to cover such a broad range of thinking (process philosophy, “social nature,” actor-network theory, autopoietic systems theory, ecosemiotics, embodied cognition, etc.).
See also On immanence.
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy | Tagged Connolly, immanent naturalism | 7 Comments »
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