Several prominent Deleuzians are collected in Bernd Herzogenrath’s “Deleuze/Guattari and ecology.” The opening chapter is on the publisher’s web site.
Patrick Lee Miller’s recent posts on Heraclitean spirituality, published on the Immanent Frame blog, make a valuable contribution to theorizing the ethics and spirituality of immanence. He notes that Heraclitus’ famous quote that’s sunk into popular culture as “You don’t step into the same river twice” actually means something more like “Neither you nor the river you step into are ever the same twice.” Miller’s translation is worth reproducing:
No
twice
stepping into
the same river,
this specious now, this
very one, now gone, alas,
not even once, if truth be told,
nor can it be, truly, for knowing grasps
a thing, no thing, each thing is nothing in itself but
a waxing palimpsest, this selfsame text, myself no less,
waning at best before your very eyes, each blink
effacing, the drying ink tracing these echoes,
these dying refrains of infant palindromes,
returning again imperfectly somewhere
new, some time over or under,
wherever yields never the
same word twice, unless,
maybe, now, this
once,
Yes.
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | 2 Comments »
I moved to the States from Canada in December of 2000, as the Bush-Gore election was being decided. (Almost turned back at the border, thinking, what am I doing?) Now, eight years later, the bad dream is over. Forty years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, that bad dream seems over, too. We can only hope that a 500-year bad dream (slavery and all that) might be ending too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Humanity with all its warts, its hopes, dreams, and nightmares, plods on.
Now that the people of the US have done their thing, things seem in better hands, and the onslaught on Gaza has subsided, if only temporarily, it’s important to look around and see what’s happening elsewhere. While, in the retrospect of the 18 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s a lot to be said for Gorbachevan moderation, there’s also a need to support widespread public initiatives for democracy, human rights, environmental protection, and anti-authoritarianism wherever they arise. One of those is Charter 08 in China. Its signatories deserve recognition for their courage, not jail, silence, and forgetting. It’s potentially a very important moment in the history of that country. There’s a lot of blogging about it: for instance, here and here and here.
Related to it, though indirectly, I highly recommend seeing Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang’s haunting film about change in and around one of the largest environmental (and human) modification projects in history. It’s one of the best docs of the last year.
Posted in Politics | Leave a Comment »
After writing about Jon Hassell’s “coffee coloured” global music of the future, I was intrigued to find out that Timothy Morton, author of “Ecology Without Nature,” has been writing about the ecological implications (or something like it) of Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament.
For those unaware of the fine details of musical tuning, Just Intonation is what’s considered to be a more “natural” tuning system (based on natural harmonics) than the one we’ve gotten used to after a few hundred years of piano-dominated equal temperament. The latter mathematically divides the scale into twelve equal parts (semi-tones) and then strings them into melodies and weaves them into harmonies. But those notes are found nowhere in nature; in fact, JI aficionados argue, it takes seriously detuned ears (like ours) to hear equal-tempered music – which describes most of what passes for music on radios and iPods today – as if it were normal.
In “Ecru and beige versus magenta and blue sound”, Morton argues that Equal Temperament, typified by the piano, “hard-wires” a certain way of listening which itself “reifies inner space” into a kind of permanent “brown” – the “metastasized cancer of the bourgeois ego.” When minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley started messing with this tuning in the early 1960s, they literally “opened up the non-reified spaces within.”
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged music | 1 Comment »
I just came across this interesting tribute Brian Eno had written to trumpeter and experimental composer Jon Hassell, which gets at a few very deleuzian and immanentist notions: about music as “embodied philosophy”, and Hassell’s idea of a “coffee coloured music of the future” that reflects “a globalised world constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences [are] celebrated and dignified.” Hassell came up with the coffee/music metaphor well before the era of world music, Starbucks, and Putumayo, before Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” (which arguably launched the era of world music, if not Starbucks), and it certainly doesn’t work as well today as it might have then. If anything, coffee represents the homogenization of differences into a universal currency of caffeine-fueled global service-industrialism. (See Anahid Kassabian’s “Would you like some world music with your latte? Starbucks, Putumayo, and distributed tourism” for an interesting take on this.) But Hassell‘s music, to my mind, succeeded in integrating its source influences at a level that few hybrid musical forms had before then. “Earthquake Island,” “Aka-Darbari-Java,” and his two “Fourth World” collaborations with Eno were particularly good. At least on the level of content, Hassell’s musical caffeine might be considered “fair trade.” On the level of production, on the other hand, they still constitute something along the lines of cultural appropriation.
But, then, we live in an era of cultural appropriation run wild (or gone tame and mainstream)… Timothy Taylor’s “Global Pop,” “Strange Sounds,” and “Beyond Exoticism” do a good job chronicling some of this current within western musical culture.
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged music | 1 Comment »
Not because of his convoluted language, which entices and charms the converted but puts off others (though linguistic innovation is a way to provoke new thinking), nor the ways some of his (and Guattari’s) concepts get taken by their followers into a celebratory Mad Max style of desert anarchism (though desert anarchism sounds okay to me, at times & for a while, just not as a model for social and political life).
But because of his willingness to think, to forge new, usable concepts in a space that’s free of presuppositions about what’s natural and what’s cultural, what can and what can’t be done, and in a way that makes the natural and the cultural, the political and the psychic/spiritual, open, maximally porous, and non-predetermined. Deleuzian thinking urges a fluidity with concepts, with structures and systems, as it creates productive textural mash-ups of the political, the psychic, the spatial, and the bodily and biological.
So while his books with Guattari are the best known, I would start with his work on images, cinema, thought, Bergson, Spinoza. In A Thousand Plateaus, I would start with the ethology and geology, the refrain, the smooth and the striated. I would also dig into his sources (from Spinoza to Pierce and Bergson to complexity theory) and work from them. Of his interpreters, I would recommend Manuel DeLanda (especially A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History), Bonta & Protevi, Clare Colebrook, Brain Massumi, and the applications to film, music, and the arts (Bogue, Buchanan, Grosz, et al).
But I also like the way his thinking has rippled in so many directions, reviving Spinoza (among others) in productive ways, setting off eddies and flows around the notions of affect (which brings together feeling, thinking, embodiment, subjectivity, and the presocial), ethology (which brings together humans, animals, and environments), ontology, territoriality/territorialization, production, etc. — into political theory (via William Connolly and Hardt/Negri), cultural theory and art & film & music practice, science studies (via actor-network/assemblage theory) and belatedly into environmental theory (via Jane Bennett, Stephen Muecke, Bonta/Protevi, Connolly, Guattari’s ecological activism, and see rhizomes 15 for some other starting points).
Posted in Philosophy | Tagged Deleuze | Leave a Comment »
Rigpa is the state of compassionate awareness that, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is the innermost nature of the mind. It is the primordial, nondual mind that shines through when unobscured; intelligent, cognizant, awake. “Empty in essence, cognizant in nature, unconfined in capacity.” Recognizing and dwelling within rigpa is the goal of Dzogchen practice (a kind of South/Central Asian relative or analogue of Zen meditation practice).
Anima suggests the state of animacy, animateness, animality, shared by all sentient beings. “Anima mundi” is the World-Soul that permeates and animates all things. “Animism,” both in its classical definition and in its revived and revalorized form (as used by anthropologists such as Nurit Bird-David and Tim Ingold and scholar of religion Graham Harvey), is belief and practice which recognizes the aliveness and “ensouledness” of all things. “Anima” is also Carl Jung’s term for the inner soul, the feminine part of the male self, though, by extension, I take this to mean the multifaceted diamond of animate soul within all things.
Where Rigpa meets Anima is where the empty, cognizant, unconfined essence of reflection meets the embodied, relational phenomenality of the world in its ceaseless becoming.
Posted in Eco-theory, Uncategorized | Tagged animism, Buddhism, Dzogchen | 2 Comments »
…the moment Wall Street crashed into the woods, its train having pushed as far as it could go off the rails it thought it had built. The photo is from my series of Haida Gwaii nature-culture collaborations, where the detritus of industrial civilization, having reached as far as it could — in this case, the Queen Charlotte Islands off the northern coast of British Columbia and a little south of the Alaska Panhandle — is taken over by the processes that take over such things. The (human) ends being swallowed by the (ceaselessly churning and swallowing) means. What civilization was this?, Werner Herzog (or Robert Smithson) will one day wonder…
These decomposing wrecks are all over the woods of Graham Island.
Posted in Politics, Visual culture | 1 Comment »
On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as well as of social relations after the long hard winter, where Mary is the cosmos; or toward a boddhisattvic liberationist Buddhism that cherishes life rather than seeking to flee from it.
Immanentism redirects our attention to what is going on in the moment-to-moment shaping of the world, to our experience and ability to shift things in one direction or another, to karmic conditions as open-ended rather than fixed. When we grasp something (the self, political power, the object of our desire), we lose it. Immanentism redirects us to the between: the grasping, the finding and losing, the power-to and power-with, the swelling current that pushes for change (e.g., in the build-up to the last US election) rather than the icon of change it gives rise to (Obama) though that icon be instrumental to the change.
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged animism, deconstruction, Deleuze, Derrida, immanence, immanent naturalism, Lacan, paganism, pantheism, religion, Zizek | 2 Comments »
On a visit to Ohio this week, I caught about ten minutes of an interview on a network TV station with a representative from the Maldives, talking about the plight they face with rising sea levels and the urgency of doing something about climate change at the Poznan, Poland, meeting. (See more.) It got me thinking: what does it take to get the Maldives on American news? What sort of media work would get climate change victims (small island nations, Arctic peoples, et al) a space in the imagination of the developed world that would help build the social-justice side of the climate action case? Is anyone (a Green Media Center of some kind) working on this?
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged ecomedia, environment | 2 Comments »
The Immanent Frame, a blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere, has been having some great discussions about the role of religion, Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, and related matters.
Posted in Philosophy | Leave a Comment »
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