http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU I enjoyed Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life when I first saw it a couple of years ago, and, having just watched it again, I’m glad to see that it bears re-viewing. As one might expect, some segments are more lasting than others. Slavoj Zizek wearing an orange safety vest talking about ecology at a […]
Posts Tagged ‘ecology’
Examining life, trash, & radical nature
Posted in Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged ecology, film, Morton, nature, philosophy, Zizek on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »
Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature
Posted in Cultural politics, Spirit matter, tagged cosmopolitics, cultural ecology, ecology, environmental philosophy, religion, religion and ecology on January 8, 2011 | 4 Comments »
I’m reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I’m co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make up the book’s concluding chapter. […]
Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology (review)
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, tagged Deleuze, ecology, ecosophy, geophilosophy, Guattari, philosophy of ecology, theory of ecology on April 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Seems someone else beat me to reviewing Bernd Herzogenrath’s anthology Deleuze/Guattari and Ecology for Deleuze Studies, and the reviews editor failed to tell me that (which he must have known for a few months now; I hope that’s not common practice for them). In any case, things like that happen, especially with academic journals that […]
cinema, ontology, ecology
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecology, film, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »
I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]
the decay of images (& of bodies)
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Bergson, ecology, film, gothic, Harman, image, impermanence, mortality, photography, time on February 19, 2010 | 10 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNCI4bFoqOg&hl=en_US&fs=1& Catherine Grant’s wonderful Film Studies for Free has posted a great set of resources on film preservation as part of the Film Preservation Blogathon, which features blog posts, articles, images, videos, tweets, and rallying calls from distinguished cinephiles including Roger Ebert, David Bordwell, and others. The video above (included there) is a Studio 360 […]
ecology, Deleuze/Tarkovsky, & the time-image
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged Deleuze, ecocinema, ecology, great scenes, pantheism, Tarkovsky, time on January 16, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books make for difficult reading, and if one is to make headway into them, it helps not only to know something about Bergsonian philosophy, Piercian semiotics, and the history of film, but also to have clips at hand of the films Deleuze discusses. Fortunately, Corry Shores has been very helpfully compiling such clips, with excerpts from the books, at his Deleuze Cinema Project 1 blog site. [. . .]
As an art form of time, cinema can help us arrive at a more adequate understanding of the nature of time. If Deleuze is correct and the production and dissemination of a “direct” image of time within cinema expands our capacity to conceive of our own and the world’s temporality — or, rather, expands our capacities for ethically inhabiting time, for thinking, feeling, and affectively being with others, for generating productive syntheses in the differential fabric of the world, for becoming — then moving-image media hold great potential for our ability to understand and visualize the relationship between the world and ourselves in our common nature as time, duration, becoming, and change. [. . .]
Žižek and his Others
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, ecology, environmentalism, Lacan, paganism, Zizek on November 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Speaking here at the University of Vermont last Friday, Slavoj Žižek responded to a student query about where to study Lacanianism by lauding our Film and Television Studies Program as the only one anywhere at which Lacanians are actually “in power” — the current chair, former chair, and at least one other faculty member, plus […]
open-source socialism & the politics of self-organizing systems
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Politics, Process-relational thought, tagged autopoiesis, biology, ecology, ecotheory, enactive cognition, political ecology, self-organization, Whitehead on May 27, 2009 | 4 Comments »
(On Kevin Kelly’s “The New Socialism,” Paul Ward’s Medea Hypothesis, Steven Shaviro’s “Against Self-Organization,” and more.) Self-organizing adaptive systems and other networks are more than just the flavor of the philosophical month; they are a model increasingly used to make sense of the natural and cultural worlds. Generally it’s assumed that such distributed self-organization is […]
Green cultural studies
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged cultural studies, ecology, ecomedia on February 26, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“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 […]
more on complex sustainabilities
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecology, sustainability on February 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
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 […]
a pretty complex history of sustainability…
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecology, sustainability on February 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
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 […]