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Posts Tagged ‘eventology’

Ecosophy-G

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , on March 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

To the extent that ontological questions drive my recent writing (which includes Ecologies of the Moving Image, Ecologies of Identity, and a metaphysical manifesto-thriller called Why Objects Fly Out the Window), they are predominantly the following two: How do things enter into relation with other things? What happens (in the world) when they do? In […]

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Religion & the Japanese tragedy

Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »

Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]

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Observations: politics – media – empathy

Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , , on March 15, 2011 | 1 Comment »

A few observations from the events of the last week or so: (1) Tsunamis happen. When they do, in a globally media-connected world, they bring us all a little closer together. (Not all of us; those who don’t wish to be brought closer may drift further apart. But, to risk getting overly psychoanalytical, those who’ve […]

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More thoughts on Egypt

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »

Max Forte at Zero Anthropology* has a perceptive assessment of what he takes to be a (Hillary) “Clinton doctrine,” which he describes as the U.S. hedging [its] bets by keeping a foot in almost all camps, by maintaining contact with diverse sectors in a society critical to U.S. national security interests, emphasizing “stability” when regime […]

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The affective resonance of Tahrir Square

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on February 7, 2011 | 1 Comment »

My thoughts on the “affective contagion” of revolutionary events such as those in Tehran a year and a half ago, or those currently happening in Cairo, have always been somewhat undertheorized. Posthegemony‘s Jon Beasley-Murray points to an exhilarating piece written by his UBC colleague Gastón Gordillo on Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution that is helpful […]

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Egypt & everywhere

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, tagged , , , on February 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Uprisings, revolutions, and sudden political realignments are perfect subjects for process-relational philosophical reflection. Their causes are always somewhat mysterious; historians may reconstruct the events that led up to them, and may come up with theories to account for them, but these almost always remain highly contestable. They are moments when suddenly much more is at stake than is normally the case.
[. . .]
But the effort will have been worth it because, as Antonio says, “To behold such a space is a beautiful thing” and “to unlearn it is impossible.” The role of the theory of self-determination and civil disobedience (alongside the practice of social networking) in these uprisings cannot be underestimated. And every time those streams get watered, they deepen.

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conversions

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , on August 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »

What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether […]

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offshore toxic event

Posted in Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , on May 28, 2010 | 2 Comments »

The OTE keeps unfolding… Does that thing (between 0:11 and 0:27) know what it is swimming through?? Here’s a good collection of some of the most memorable images (but what’s that awful music?): Does Sarah McLaughlin improve things a little?

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cataclysmic eventology

Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on April 23, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959) In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it. “At what […]

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the Event (or, ‘nature at its finest’)

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , on April 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Volcanic eruption films aren’t plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog’s 1977 film La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional films — Fata Morgana, Lessons […]

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happy solstice

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on June 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Two revolutions are being marked this weekend. One of them is natural, cyclical, the revolution of the earth around the sun with the sun reaching its most northerly point (in closeness to the surface of the tilted planet we live on), standing still for a brief moment, and turning back to the south. The second […]

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more on Tehran

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on June 18, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Planomenology‘s Reid Kane has posted an extensive analysis of the Iranian events from a perspective informed by Zizek and Agamben, among others — the first I’ve seen in this vein, though I’m anticipating others like it in the left-philosophical blogosphere. The piece draws too much, for my taste, on a monolithic (Marxist) understanding of capital […]

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