{"id":1025,"date":"2009-01-26T10:01:13","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T15:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/26\/to-come-on-this-blog\/"},"modified":"2009-01-26T10:01:13","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T15:01:13","slug":"to-come-on-this-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/26\/to-come-on-this-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"to come on this blog…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over time, I\u2019ll be posting snippets of work-in-progress here that arise from the two manuscripts I\u2019m currently working on. The first of these manuscripts pulls together cultural case studies I\u2019ve done over the years into a conceptually unified argument for an immanent-naturalist \u201cmulticultural political ecology,\u201d 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 \u201cnature\u201d as it\u2019s perceived, defined, imagined, and lived. Some of this is a development from my first book, Claiming Sacred Ground<\/a>, 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 \u201cimmanentism\u201d for ecological, political, and religious philosophy.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve stated before on this blog<\/a>, the term \u201cimmanent naturalism\u201d is political theorist William Connolly\u2019s term, and I\u2019m 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 \u201cnaturalism\u201d (natural versus supernatural or unnatural, naturalist versus idealist, etc.). Connolly\u2019s point, like the Spinozist and Deleuzian traditions he draws from, is that nature includes everything that is. For Deleuze, it\u2019s not just everything that is<\/em>, 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\u2019t have to only deal with empirically knowable existing things; it can be a matter of recognizing that the world is process<\/em>, and that the invisible and unknowable (for partial and situated observer-participants like ourselves) is also part of that world. But conceivably, this \u201cimmanent naturalist\u201d rubric might fade into others over time \u2013 which makes sense, because it\u2019s intended to cover such a broad range of thinking (\u201csocial nature,\u201d actor-network theory, autopoietic systems theory, ecosemiotics, embodied cognition, process philosophy, etc.).<\/p>\n

Some of these posts will deal with how these different strands of what I\u2019m calling \u201cimmanent naturalism\u201d deal with the dualisms of nature\/culture, spirit\/matter, body\/mind, and real\/imagined. These aren\u2019t the only dualisms that have bogged down our imagination \u2013 think male\/female, black\/white, East\/West, etc. \u2013 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\u2019s a big claim! But it\u2019s one that underlies everything on this blog, so if you\u2019re not convinced, well, then, so be it…)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over time, I\u2019ll be posting snippets of work-in-progress here that arise from the two manuscripts I\u2019m currently working on. The first of these manuscripts pulls together cultural case studies I\u2019ve done over the years into a conceptually unified argument for an immanent-naturalist \u201cmulticultural political ecology,\u201d while the second examines cinema from this perspective. The first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688385],"tags":[201,4410],"class_list":["post-1025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog_stuff","tag-immanence","tag-immanent-naturalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gx","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1034,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/immanent-naturalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":0},"title":"Immanent naturalism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Immanent naturalism\" is political theorist William E. Connolly's term for a tradition of thought that doesn't seek ultimate explanations, ahistorical forces, or transcendental frameworks to give meaning to the world; rather, it finds meaning enough in the world as it is experienced by mortals like us. The general idea is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1107,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/08\/07\/cracks-in-charles-taylors-immanent-frame\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":1},"title":"Cracks in Charles Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently worked my way through Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which, since its publication in 2007, has become one of the most widely reviewed and critically lauded books on religion and secularism -- and which, in a tangential way, was one of the provocations that led me to start\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1007,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/01\/the-idea-behind-this-blog-original-version\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":2},"title":"the idea behind this blog (original version)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1010,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2008\/12\/08\/the-immanent-frame\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":3},"title":"The Immanent Frame","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"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.","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1033,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/about-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":4},"title":"About this blog","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"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,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5164,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/10\/growth-in-the-underbrush\/","url_meta":{"origin":1025,"position":5},"title":"Growth in the underbrush…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Leon takes me to task for slowing down here, but finds much life in the ecophilosophical immanent-ontological underbrush -- among fellow travelers Knowledge Ecology (who's been on a roll lately), Immanent Transcendence, and Ecology without Nature. (And we should add Leon's own After Nature.) (Note: It's all underbrush; no towering\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}