In the interests of improving the archivability, searchability, and general user-friendliness of this blog, I’ve changed some of the “Categories” and added several more to the list. (If you’ve been a subscriber to any of them, you may need to resubscribe under the changed label.)
Quick explanation: “Categories,” which are listed at the top of the sidebar on your right, classify blog posts into topics. These can be read in isolation from others, more easily searched, and subscribed to individually. So, for instance, if you are most interested in reading what’s been published here on the topics of climate change, media, and debates over the Anthropocene, but couldn’t care less about philosophy, politics, music, or film and cinema, you could subscribe to the “Anthropocene,” “Climate politics,” and “Media ecology” categories. To subscribe to individual categories, go to “Subscribe2” in the right-hand sidebar. Or you could of course just visit periodically, click on the categories you’re interested in, and scroll through what you’ve been missing.
Anyone following the news on UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — news that may be hard to miss, since the New York Times, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, CNN, and most other major media have covered it in recent months — knows that an important government report is about to be released. (What’s more interesting is that science media are reporting on it, too.) Here are a few thoughts in anticipation of that report.
Many things are reported and believed to exist, which remain scientifically unsupported: ghosts, poltergeists, encounters with spiritual beings, experiences that appear to cross or at least blur the boundaries between life and death, sightings of creatures unknown to science (Nessies and sasquatches and the like), and so on. Reports of UFOs, or as they’re now sometimes called, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), tend to fall into this same grab-bag. A social scientist might consider them to be part of the unformatted “plasma” of reality that may be “out there,” but remains scientifically unmapped, unclaimed, and “untamed”; which means that we’re not sure which reality bin to slot them into — material, fantastical, fictional, folkloric, or some other kind. Evidence of personal and collective human encounters with all of those things is plentiful; there just isn’t a coherent and credible scientific theory to account for them.
Buddhism has its “Two Truths” and its “Three Truths“: the “Two” were made famous by Indian philosopher Nagarjuna; the “Three” a little less famous by Chinese philosopher Zhiyi. About a year ago, I offered up four perspectives on mortality, and here I want to make the case that they could be seen as a kind of “Four Truths” formula — in effect, the four suits in the card deck of reality (a card deck that remains, however, triadic). Let me explain.
On one level, an individual life is a precious and
remarkable thing, especially if you’re fortunate enough to live a full one. How
you live it matters.
On another, we are of the same substance as all things in the universe, continuous with everything. We just happen to find ourselves at a particular fold in the fabric, but that fabric unfolds on its own and there won’t be much of us around when (and where) most of that unfolding happens.
When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world might have begun changing.
Despite the expectation of an impending return to normalcy, many observers are recognizing that the post-Covid world will be in some ways very different from what came before. Judging by the spate of recent prognostications (for instance, here, here, here, and here), it will be less open and global, more multipolar, and probably more unstable; less growth obsessed, and more cautious and conservative in its expectations; less individualist and more collectivist, more concerned with security and with local resourcefulness; but also more virtual.
To say that Billie Eilish’s “Your Power” video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things.
First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won’t comment on). Then there’s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won’t comment on, except to say, I can’t imagine doing this myself).
Then there’s the video itself, but here I’ll issue a spoiler alert and just say: watch the video, from start to finish. Watch it full-screen. Pretend you are the camera. What are you feeling? What are you doing?
Two new publications — one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the other in The Atlantic — help make a point that critics of the “Anthropocene” (the name, not the geological designation) have been making for years: that it’s nothumanity that is somehow at fault for the ecological crisis, since many human societies over millennia have learned how to live more or less sustainably within their environments, and that those who have deserve more recognition for it, recognition that could and probably should include some measure of land repatriation. I’m referring, of course, to indigenous societies.
The PNAS article, co-authored by Erle Ellis and 17 other environmental and Earth systems scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, demonstrates, as its title puts it, that “People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.” This long history of “shaping” “nature” suggests a much more blurred continuum between “nature” and “culture” than was taken for granted until recently. The authors speak freely of “cultural natures,” the “global history of anthropogenic nature,” and of “anthromes” (or anthropogenic biomes) in a way that recalls the “nature wars” of the 1990s, when environmental humanists like Bill Cronon were chided by ecologists for disrespecting the boundary between culture and wilderness — except that now it’s scientists in PNAS who are doing that with hard scientific facts (rather than deconstructionist arguments) at their disposal.
On the fifty-first Earth Day (this past Thursday), two of my classes premiered a virtual exhibition of environmentally themed art. Called “Intimations: Eco-Artistic Glimpses Through the Fog of an Unwinding Pandemic,” the exhibition features several dozen works in a multitude of media including paintings and drawings, digital images, collages, narrative poetry and haiku, 3-D works (displayed in 2-D, but sometimes creatively), and audio and video pieces. (I recommend giving the videos their full viewing time, with the sound turned up.)
The exhibition is co-hosted by the undergraduate “Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media” class, the undergraduate/graduate “Advanced Environmental Humanities” class, and EcoCultureLab. (Note that with one or two exceptions, the students are not studio art students; almost all are Environmental Studies majors. Some are being challenged to “make art” for the first time in their university career.)
You can view the walk-through exhibition here or start from the launch page, then return to it after viewing the exhibition so that you can vote for your favorite artworks and provide any other comments you may have. The exhibition will be up for at least a few weeks. We plan to announce the “People’s Choice” awards on May 1, so vote before then.
Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply is what it is, and it takes you somewhere else, different from where you start.
This is what I meant by the Zone in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image, except that with Rothko and his kin (Hilma af Klint comes to mind), the Zone itself is stable — it is simply there in its presence and its vibrant materiality — even while its effect is destabilizing. In the open alterity of its static image, a Rothko painting (or one of the more geometically pure af Klint works) beckons the viewer into itself, where it stands without deviation. Any motion in the image is something that happens in the relation between image and viewer; it occurs at the level of vibration, not of narration. You stand there, and you begin to vibrate with it. It opens you.
In perilous times — times, for instance, of a destabilizing pandemic (with intimations of worse things to come; more on those things below) — artistic works and/or spaces that provide that kind of “transcendent stability” can be reassuring and comforting. The best such works do not simply reassure us in the status quo; they take us out to a place different, from which we can get a different glimpse at the present. The pandemic is like that: if we think we will simply go back to “normal,” we’ve missed what it brought us.
The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of an informed lay person. The comments on media, politics, and the culture of science are more directly connected to my research areas.
Why such a draconian response to this virus? Aren’t mortality rates from Covid-19 much lower (less than 3%) than for so many other infectious diseases?
It’s true that Covid-19 mortality rates are much lower than some epidemics have had, but there are many factors that play into mortality rates, including treatment, societal responses, general hygiene and immunity levels, and the like. There have been many viral pandemics in the past, some of them killing millions of people. Covid is out of the ordinary mostly in its rapid spread and highly contagious nature, and in the lack of a vaccine against it. Given the conditions for the emergence of zoonotic viruses — the last pockets of wild animal refuges being decimated around the world, climate change setting off more movements of refugee human and animal populations — we can expect more viruses like it to emerge, so whatever we learn from this encounter will be valuable moving forward. The only large-scale protections we have against the worst of these virueses are (1) living healthy, immuno-protective lives (which we should all be trying to do) and (2) developing vaccines (which modern science does better than any traditional medicine did).
Tonight’s event will feature the journal’s three co-editors (Janet Walker, Alenda Chang, and myself) plus contributor Christina Vagt and coordinating editor Stephen Borunda speaking on the role of open-access journals like M+E in mediating and expanding the intersections between media production and environmental action. The 90 minute panel discussion and conversation will be moderated by FLEFF’s co-director Patricia Zimmermann.
Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” which has just come out in a special issue devoted to posthumanism of the Shanghai Academy-based, bilingual Chinese journal Critical Theory. (The issue, which is focused on posthumanism, features a significant new piece by N. Katherine Hayles, alongside work by several Chinese scholars.)
A more helpful metaphor for theoretical novelty is Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” which can also be applied to the literature on the “post-human” and on posthumanism. By the “distribution of the sensible,” or portage du sensible, Rancière means
