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philosophical sitings

March 9, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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 »

shared item links

March 1, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.”

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Green cultural studies

February 26, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

“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:

Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Eco-theory | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Immanent naturalism

February 26, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

“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 , | 7 Comments »

About this blog

February 26, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

An online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives:

(1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice, especially at the interdisciplinary junctures forming in and around the fields of ecocriticism , green cultural studies, political ecology, environmental communication, ecophilosophy, and related areas (biosemiotics, geophilosophy, social nature, poststructuralist and liberation ecologies, zoontologies, urbanatures, animist liberation theologies — invent your own neologisms); and

(2) To contribute to the development of a non-dualist understanding of nature/culture, mind/body, spirit/matter, structure/agency, and worldly relations in general. Dualisms aren’t inherently bad, but these ones have become stultifying; they contribute to the log-jam in which environmental thinking has been caught for too long. To this end, the blog is interested in philosophies of process, ontologies of immanence and becoming, and epistemologies of participation, relation, and dialogue – that is, ways of understanding and acting that take ideas and practices, bodies and minds, subjects and objects, perceptions and representations, agency and structure, to be fundamentally inseparable, creative, and always in motion. The blog will be a place where non-dual mind (/body, subject/object) meets non-dual world (nature/culture), or where rigpa meets anima.

(For more on these topics, see the posts on immanence, immanent naturalism, rigpa and anima, geophilosophy, green cultural studies, between Continental and environmental philosophy, and the “P-R Theory 101” links in the right-hand column.)

The blog aims to be a useful resource for scholars, graduate students, and the interested public. As the boundary between scholarship and the wider world of public thinking gets ever more more blurred thanks to digital technology, the distinction between lay and scholarly loses its cogency. The original idea was for the blog to serve as a forum for thinking in and around the Environmental Thought and Culture Graduate Concentration at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont. The broadening described here is an outgrowth of that.

A blog, like an idea, is only successful to the extent that it germinates, grows, connects, and takes on a life of its own. This one began as one person’s (self-) prod to think out loud and to forge connections in thought, word, and image. To what extent it grows beyond that will become evident over time.

For a summary of the blog’s first year, see here; and of the second year, here.

This version updated (slightly) on December 9, 2010 (after the migration of the blog to WordPress).

click tracking

Posted in Blog stuff, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , , , , , | 36 Comments »

Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.

February 23, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to him afterwards, I was a bit disappointed to find out that he had never heard of Deleuze, had only just heard of Whitehead as someone he should look into, and knew probably a modicum about Spinoza (he cites him a few times in the book). Not that I should expect that kind of intellectual cross-fertilization to be the norm — it’s not, especially across the Continental-analytical divide (though Kauffman does have a background in philosophy; and it’s also possible that he was being humble). But there’s an obvious resonance and potential alliance to be built here. I’m starting to read Kauffman’s book to confirm or disconfirm Steven Shaviro’s critiques of it. Shaviro is a Deleuzian-Whiteheadian (post)poststructuralist whose excellent forthcoming book on Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze can be previewed in snippets on his web site.

More “out there” among leading biologists who lean this way (toward emergence, immanence, self-organization, mind-body non-dualism, etc.) is Brian Goodwin, whose book Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture, is being touted as his “biological testament.” It seems unfortunate that he chose such a relatively unknown, or at least non-academic, press to publish it with (Floris Books in England; it’s distributed here by the Rudolf Steiner folks). I haven’t seen it yet, but Arturo Escobar’s review is enough to make me order and eagerly await its arrival. Escobar’s own Territories of Difference is, incidentally, one of those landmark books (a long time in the making) that I expect will redefine environmental scholarship in important ways. I’ll post more about it at some point.

Both Kauffman and Goodwin are profiled in John Brockman’s 1994 book The Third Culture, which can be read on-line. The book also includes chapters on Francesco Varela and Lynn Margulis, alongside the usual Darwinist and computationalist-cognitivist heavies like Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett, Minsky, et al., and the more likeable Gould and Eldridge types — the whole left, right, and center, if you will, of the then-current (circa early-1990s) scientific star circuit. Brockman’s profiles/interviews are a great way of getting some familiarity with these folks; they include them commenting on each other’s work and ideas, so you get a kind of three-dimensional mapping of who’s who in relation to who else. It could use some updating, though, which Brockman’s Edge.org does, in a dizzy, all-over-the-place kind of way…

Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

more on complex sustainabilities

February 23, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The “Complex History” mentioned below was published on Archis.org, which also features an interesting essay on architecture’s “Counter-Histories of Sustainability”.

Meanwhile, on the eve of the Oscars it’s interesting to note that globe-trotting green architect Bill McDonough has been making inroads with the Hollywood eco-set, all the while losing some of his sheen as a world-saving superstar. Danielle Sacks wrote a long and very interesting, if not very complimentary, article for Fast Company recently on McDonough as the “Green Guru Gone Wrong.” I recommend reading the whole piece, along with the growing archive of reader comments. Sacks argues that McDonough’s flawed character has left behind a string of disappointments – disappointed clients, acolytes, Chinese villagers, et al. – even while his great ideas continue to thread their way around to some of the right places. For an antidote to Sacks’ iconoclasm, and to be reminded of how effectively he presents those ideas, see one of Bill’s videotaped talks on “cradle to cradle,” such as this one. (Thanks to Toby Miller’s Green Citizen blog for the Sacks/McDonough tip.)

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a pretty complex history of sustainability…

February 22, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Every grad student in environmental studies (and related areas) should be quizzed on this map: The Complex History of Sustainability. Departments could be evaluated based on how well they cover the spectrum portrayed in it… Within reason, of course — we don’t really need an eco-Nazi, a global warming conspiracy theorist, or even a libertarian transhumanist onboard. My question is: can this be made into a wiki-style collaborative, multi-dimensional, open-source work-in-progress?

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immanence & codependent origination

February 14, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I took a break from reading John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline – in which Mullarkey develops a philosophy of immanence drawing on, and critiquing, the respective efforts of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle – to have some lunch and browse the latest issue of Tricycle. One of the articles, a personal-confessional story of the kind that’s typical for this popular Buddhist magazine, includes a nice, pithy summary of the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination:

“It’s teeter-totter metaphysics–I arise, you arise; you arise, I arise. […] You are because you are not something else; therefore, what you are not–the chair beneath you, the air in your lungs, these words–births you through an infinity of opposites. It’s like the ultimate Dr. Seuss riddle: Without all the things that are not you, who would you be you to? There’s no Higher Power in this system to grab onto for support; we are all already supporting each other. Pull a person or people the wrong way, and you immediately redefine yourself in light of what you’ve done to your neighbor.”

Isn’t this the metaphysics of immanence in a nutshell? A two-and-a-half-thousand year tradition of philosophy and practical psychology studies it intimately, while contemporary philosophers grope painstakingly towards it. A handful of philosophers work to bridge the two traditions (David Loy, Robert Magliola, Carl Olson, Youxuan Wang, Jin Park, et al.), but they are pioneers in a largely undiscovered corner of the forest (or wing of the insane asylum). Loy’s most recent books, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution and The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory are particularly good at communicating, in a popular vein, the more theoretical/philosophical work he had done in earlier works such as Nonduality and A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. But it’s a little frustrating that this dialogue has not gotten further. (For instance, the parallels between Loy’s Buddhism and Zizek’s Lacanianism cry out for analysis. Only a handful of people seem to be working on a rapprochement between Buddhism and psychoanalysis, e.g., Raul Moncayo, Anthony Molino, Gay Watson, Mark Unno. Zizek’s own writing on Buddhism seems restricted to a superficial, pop-cultural analysis. The blog Something Completely Different has had a bit of discussion about this.)

Incidentally, Mullarkey’s book seems very good at first glance; he’s a clear thinker and writer. And his new book on film and philosophy, Refractions of Reality, looks even better. Its first chapter can be read here.

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

imagination & contemporary theory

February 11, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This is a summary I provided to a grad student who was starting to get into this area. It’s very introductory and far from complete in its coverage, but since there’s so little out there on this topic, I thought it would be useful to post it. It’s also a bit biased towards literature that’s relevant to religion and religious experience (since this is what the student was working on). Comments are welcome.

The topic of the imagination had been out of fashion for a while in the humanities, especially as textual and semiotic approaches (structuralism, poststructuralism et al) came to dominate cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Gradually it’s been coming back, but without any consensus on what it means or how it should be dealt with. The following are some of the threads of thinking that, to my mind, need to be drawn together in a coherent way in order to make contemporary sense of ‘the imagination’ or, as I prefer to call it, the imaginal. They are pieces of a much larger puzzle that is far from being solved.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Pandora’s Last box of musical delights

February 6, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’ve been getting into music networking/streaming radio sites Last.fm and Pandora.com and thinking about how they and related forms of social and artistic networking relate to the ideas this blog is exploring. Google can search for words, but not (yet) for snippets of musical melody, harmonic progressions, jazz solos, visual images. But once these are digitized, uploaded, and interpreted, they can be tagged and connected to others in ever-multiplying connections. These sites allow for the utmost in niche marketing – type in your favourite artist and listen to all the other artists who sound that way – but also for an infinite pluralization of the niches your musical identity can occupy.

Blogger Steve Krause compares Pandora and Last.fm to ‘nature’ and ‘nurture,’ in that Pandora.com actually analyzes individual pieces of music according to a set of parameters they developed – they refer to this process as the Musical Genome Project – while Last.fm relies on its users, i.e. on the interpretive creativity of the social community, to tag and analyze music so as to create as complete a many-layered map of the musical universe as possible.

Continue Reading »

Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

On ground and groundlessness: Jamesonian Marxism v. Derridean deconstruction v. Buddhist onto-phenomenalism (w/ guest appearances by Lacan and Freud, spiked all the way through with ecology)

February 6, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Or, Toward an eco-Buddhist-processualist cultural criticism

Note: This is work in progress and probably won’t be published for a while, and not in this form in any case. It comes from an attempt to theorize an ‘ecocritical’ understanding of culture that is in dialogue with the Marxist tradition of social and political analysis, Derridean poststructural philosophy, Buddhist psychology, and the psychoanalysis of Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, among others. I welcome comments.

For Fredric Jameson, it is history, understood in Marxian terms as a series of changing relationships among and between social groups and their systems of material production, that serves as a relatively stable ground or horizon against which the vicissitudes of human culture play their figure. For Derridean deconstruction (and other brands of poststructuralism), there is no ultimate ground, and textuality in its groundless infinite play is what shows us this most clearly. For the approach I’m working on, rooted in a more naturalistic understanding of the world than Derrida’s and a more ecological one than Jameson’s, there is similarly no ultimate ground, but there are relative grounds that can be found in the unfoldment of social and ecological relations. The hermeneutic I’m proposing doesn’t leave us errantly wandering among texts and discourses (as does deconstruction), but leaves us ethically responding to others (as many deconstructionists themselves do) among relations that are simultaneously material and biological (a la Marx and Darwin), discursive (a la culturalism), and imaginal-phantasmic (a la psychoanalysis).

Continue Reading »

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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