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why deleuze?

January 13, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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).

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book list

January 5, 2009 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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rigpa meets anima…

December 14, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

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this moment

December 14, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

QCI%20060.jpg

…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.

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immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics

December 14, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

Continue Reading »

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climate change victims

December 14, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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?

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The Immanent Frame

December 8, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

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.

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nice piece on Huxley

December 8, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Jeffrey Kripal’s piece on Aldous Huxley in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education captures a piece of the tug of war (cultural war?) over spirituality since the 1960s.

It’s interesting that East Europeans are rediscovering Huxley, now that Orwell would seem less relevant. Perhaps there’s a correlation between authoritarianism (as embodied by Soviet-style socialism and portrayed in Orwell’s 1984) and dualist-transcendentalist religion (the only way one can avoid the system is by transcending it, working outside the system, liberating oneself from it altogether), versus liberal commodity capitalism (Brave New World, today’s Eastern Europe) and immanentism (Huxley, psychedelic spirituality, etc)? I’ll have to think about that… It’ll be interesting to see what Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) and Leonardo DiCaprio do with Brave New World.

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Immanence

December 1, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Immanence suggests co-implication, the implication of one thing in another (spirit in matter, mind in body, movement in repose, humans in nature), nonduality, the vitality of becoming rather than the stasis of being, the sufficiency of life in its generative relational flux, its vessels of light scattered for our gathering in each moment of darkness.

Philosophers of immanence, from Heraclitus and Nagarjuna to Spinoza, Whitehead, and Deleuze, find inspiration in the middle of things, the moment-to-moment movement of thought, awareness, connection, action, rather than in large, transcendent, ventriloquistic forces (such as ideologies, ultimate causes, or apocalyptic narratives).

Immanence suggests a continuity and empathic resonance rippling between things. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” This could have well been written by Nagarjuna or by Jacques Derrida in an errant wander outside the text (as his later writings often did). Derrida may be popularly known for saying that “il n-y a pas d’hors-text,” or “there is no outside-the-text,” but his writings on ethics, religion, politics, and animality make clear that this “no outside” is more akin to a Zen koan or Nagarjuna’s “emptiness” than to a denial of bodies, spirits, and whatever else. Like Muir, both Derrida and Nagarjuna posit a world of what Buddhists call “codependent arising” (and see here), where things, ideas, and selves arise and make sense only in relation to others in a process of ceaseless becoming, the rhizomic connectivity of “and… and,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, rather than the binarism of “either/or.”

This blog, like that process, will seek connections between environmental philosophy, cultural theory (especially in its poststructuralist and postconstructivist variants), and sciences and philosophies of the east, the west, and the ne(i)ther (the postcolonial, the fourth world, et al) — connections to help make sense of the world in its current states of unrest, swerve, systemic shift, transition, and (r)evolution.

(“Really, (r)evolution toward what?” you ask. How about to a socially and ecologically sustainable, post-carbon, self-renewing, radically democratic, globally just, and bioregionally diverse society. Murray Bookchin, I think, had spoken about utopianism being a necessity in our time. That would be effective, informing, inspiring, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky dreamy utopianism.)

An ethic of immanence is one of responsiveness shimmering across animate bodies to feel the collective breathing, the communion of subjectivity.

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the idea behind this blog (original version)

December 1, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Every blog has its reason for being. The idea behind this one was originally to serve as a forum for thinking in and around the Environmental Thought and Culture Graduate Concentration, which I coordinate at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont.

But that idea mutated as I realized that there isn’t yet a place that acts as a forum for a kind of alternative tradition of thinking about nature, culture, process, politics, and the spiritual (in the broadest sense of the word) that William Connolly calls “immanent naturalism” and that he, among others, associates with innovative activity in environmental and political theory and activism today. That’s part of the inspiration for this blog, so some of the thinkers and ideas that make up that loose “tradition” may be popping up a lot, if not in person at least in reference.

(For definitions of terms used here, see “Immanence” and the other links under “About” at the top of the right column on the Main page of this blog. Connolly’s own writings on immanent naturalism include sections of Neuropolitics and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style; follow the highlights in the linked book excerpts. 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 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.)

But the more practical goal of this blog is to be a means of communication about issues at the intersection of environmental, political, and cultural theory, especially in the disciplinary interstices inhabited by such fungal intellectual growths as ecocriticism , political ecology, green cultural studies, eco-poststructuralism, environmental communication, and so on (biosemiotics, geophilosophy, animist liberation theology — invent your own neologisms). Where culture meets nature meets consciousness…

So I think of it as a resource: for grad students, for fellow scholars working in these areas, for lay folks interested in these ideas (the boundary between scholarship and the wider world of public thinking gets ever more more blurred thanks to the internet), and for myself – to keep working and communicating outside of the usual framework of publishing, research, etc. A blog is, understandably, more laid-back, unrefereed, and stream-of-consciousness than other forms of intellectual work, so this one may get bulletin-boardy and diaryish, or just inactive, at times.

A blog also, like an idea, is only successful to the extent that it grows, connects, germinates, and takes on a life of its own. This one will start out as just me posting, and we’ll see what happens next. The internet is littered with the detritus of dead blogs and broken links, and if this one goes that route, so be it. But hopefully it won’t.

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so i walked in here one day…

May 11, 2008 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

and decided to paint the walls, put up a few pictures, throw a rug down onto the floor, plug in a tea kettle. But it’s taking longer than I thought it would.

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