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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).

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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.

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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 »

to come on this blog…

January 26, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Over time, I’ll be posting snippets of work-in-progress here that arise from the two manuscripts I’m currently working on. The first of these manuscripts pulls together cultural case studies I’ve done over the years into a conceptually unified argument for an immanent-naturalist “multicultural political ecology,” while the second examines cinema from this perspective. The first is really more empirical than it sounds, examining a range of developments in the arts and media and specific struggles over “nature” as it’s perceived, defined, imagined, and lived. Some of this is a development from my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground, which examined struggles over nature and landscape at two sites of ecospiritual pilgrimage (Glastonbury and Sedona), but the current book applies this approach to a much broader range of cultural phenomena. A third volume, still on the more distant horizon, will flesh out the implications of “immanentism” for ecological, political, and religious philosophy.

As I’ve stated before on this blog, the term “immanent naturalism” is political theorist William Connolly’s term, and I’m using it 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, etc.). 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. But conceivably, this “immanent naturalist” rubric might fade into others over time – which makes sense, because it’s intended to cover such a broad range of thinking (“social nature,” actor-network theory, autopoietic systems theory, ecosemiotics, embodied cognition, process philosophy, etc.).

Some of these posts will deal with how these different strands of what I’m calling “immanent naturalism” deal with the dualisms of nature/culture, spirit/matter, body/mind, and real/imagined. These aren’t the only dualisms that have bogged down our imagination – think male/female, black/white, East/West, etc. – but they are the ones that keep in place the sticky log-jam of thinking between the sciences and the humanities that will have to be unstuck and unjammed if humans are to deal effectively with the social and environmental challenges that face us. (Now there’s a big claim! But it’s one that underlies everything on this blog, so if you’re not convinced, well, then, so be it…)

As you can guess, the blog, then, is also a way to keep myself working, to keep myself honest, and, perhaps over time, generate some discussion with like-minded (or other-minded) theorists and researchers.

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atheism and immanence

January 24, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Here’s an interesting conversation developing on nature and immanence on an atheist blog.

Incidentally, I liked Obama’s nod to non-Christians and “non-believers” in his inauguration speech. It felt like a refreshing breath of fresh air in the constricted atmosphere of American public religious discourse. With the recent growth of religious/spiritual discourse on the left – in part propelled by the Obama campaign – we might be turning a corner…

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geophilosophy

January 23, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The term “geophilosophy” is intended here in a nod both to Aldo Leopold’s idea of “Thinking like a mountain,” which I take as a provocation (what, or how, does a mountain think?) rather than a declaration of identity (“I’m the one who speaks for the mountain”) and, secondly, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ecophilosophizing. The latter can be found especially in A Thousand Plateaus and in the “Geophilosophy” chapter of their final work, What is Philosophy?. Mark Bonta and John Protevi provide a useful elaboration of Deleuze/Guattari’s views, while a growing number of other theorists draw from it in thinking about politics, society, and the human-nonhuman nexus.

More generally, geophilosophy is philosophy in and of the earth. To the extent that all our philosophizing, and all our culturing and politicking and religioning and art-making and languaging, emerges out of the effort to live with others in and on and with the earth, geophilosophy is everything, or at least the reflective and communicative part of everything. While much of that everything has heretofore (at least in recent times) been unconsciously geophilosophical, some of it is attempting to be conscious and reflective about it, and to get better at it.

The intent of this blog is to keep a finger on the pulse of at least some of the currents flowing in the direction of a better geophilosophy of living.

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immanence and field-being

January 23, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

An excellent source of current philosophical thinking on issues related to this blog from an Asian perspective (primarily Buddhist and Daoist) is the International Journal for Field-Being, which is published by the International Institute for Field-Being. “Field-being” is one of the terms Asian thinkers (and translators) have used to encompass a kind of non-essentialist ontology of process, flow, and becoming. Among other thinkers broached in the journal, Western philosophers including Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Dewey have figured prominently.

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