Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

Susan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse video of weather patterns captured by web cam over the course of an entire year, atmospheric effects assume the quality of translucent washes that blur distinctions between opacity and transparency, painting and technology. Aerial views of built environments set against expansive cityscapes present essential imagery for large-format digital woodblock prints realized in monochromatic tonals and saturated grids of yellow and blazing orange. Some combine undulating wood grain patterns with pinhole perforations to admit light; others consist of diaphanous walnut stains applied to hand-crafted paper, a self-referential allusion to art’s planarity and permeable membrane. The evanescence of these views is echoed in pristine impressions of filtered dust and shimmering milkweed assemblages contained in Plexiglas light boxes. Known as Asclepias, milkweed is an herbaceous flower named by Carl Linnaeus after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, due to its efficacious medicinal powers. Like the weather, the milkweed’s reflective silver filaments respond to shifting currents of air paired with gently wafted treetops projected in the viewing room. Here pearls of light corresponding to the spheres and pinpricks of the prints on the walls float randomly over the fictitious frame of a cubical vitrine. Orbs appear and disappear amid nocturnal shadows as figments of the imagination, their languid dispersion eliciting not-ofthis-world sensations of suspension, ascent and transcendence. This joined to the mesmerizing stillness of a gallery pierced occasionally by the sound of supersonic aircraft, a reminder of the machine in the garden. Beyond, the history of landscape photography and the Romantic sublime are encoded in works titled “Old Stand” that render minuscule figures of stationary box photographers against the grandeur of ice-capped Rockies. In some of the works the human figure is effaced as a historical memory through exquisitely modulated rubbings whose unbounded spatiality contrasts with the reflexive interiority of the viewing room. Campbell’s incandescent vision of nature asserts the phenomenal power of art to elevate the human spirit in the presence of heart-stirring beauty. It dares to reaffirm the timeless union between the material and immaterial substance of the universe, between human life and the ephemera of the natural world. f i l m

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

/pdf/red-skin-white-masks-rejecting-the-colonial-politics-of-2cjykv975i.pdf

Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States Audra Simpson, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.Audra Simpson's book, Mohawk Interruptus, is an achievement of scholarship. It delivers what it promises, has a strong authorial voice that is both in keeping with rigorous academic prose and that is easily understandable by a wide readership. Her examples are rich, engaging, and accessible. She combines sophisticated theoretical analysis with rich ethnographic detail, making for a challenging but enjoyable read. Her stories, I imagine, would resonate with individuals inside and outside the communities she renders visible, quite deliberately foregrounding her ethical relation to the Mohawks of Kahnawa:ke. The stories she shares are clear, poignant, respectful, and at times simultaneously humorous and horrifying. Simpson seemingly effortlessly weaves her own embodied subjectivity, with rich ethnography, political theory, and compelling narrative in this excellent, robust, and nuanced study.Simpson makes three claims in this book: (1) "sovereignty may exist within sovereignty," and that such nested sovereignty has implications for the seemingly settled conditions of settler colonialism (p. 10-11); (2) there exists an alternative to "recognition" which is "refusal"; (3) hitherto this point, and as a result of their Western, institutional, and statist forms of analysis (p. 11), neither political theory nor anthropology have offered the conceptual tools required to make sense of Indigenous politics and their challenge to settler colonialism (p. 177). Simpson makes Mstrong arguments to support these claims throughout the book, presenting interruption and refusal as political forms and strategies, ultimately achieving what she sets out to do. Throughout her work, Simpson offers some compelling conceptual tools that launch a rigorous challenge to historical and contemporary forms of anthropology.Using the three signposts of "membership" (p. 13), "detention and recognition" (p. 18), and "refusing to play the game" (p. 25), Simpson deftly navigates the reader through her argument. Her argument builds methodically, and for this reason I structure my review in a way that mirrors the arc of her argumentation. She first maps a genealogy of history and context to orient the reader, she admits in a partial and event-driven way, to Kahnawa:ke (Chapter 2). She does this particularly to signal that the territorial history shapes the complex questions of membership that she later tracks throughout the monograph. This context is essential to her third claim: to make sense of the complexities of membership in Indigenous communities, conceptual tools that account for histories of colonialism and the ongoing dispossession upon which settler states are premised and maintained are required.Simpson moves to construct her ethnography of refusal (Chapter 4), arguing that if "we take this historical form of ethnological representation into account, we might then be able to come up with techniques of representation that move away from 'difference' and its containment, from the ethnological formalism and fetishism" (p. 97) that she describes in Chapter 3. In her articulation of ethnographic refusal, Simpson offers both a theoretical and experiential ethics of refusal in her writing, indicating her purposeful inclusion and refusal in the context of ongoing dispossession and colonialism. This is a deeply political and ethical move, in keeping with the refusals and interruptions that she documents throughout the monograph. This refusal is buttressed by her exploration of the "ethnographic limit" of her research and writing, punctuated by her questions to herself that guide the arrival at enough: "Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? …

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States

In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright address the political implications of climate change by theorizing four possible planetary futures: Climate Leviathan as capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Mao as non-capitalist planetary sovereignty, Climate Behemoth as capitalist non-planetary sovereignty, and Climate X as non-capitalist non-planetary sovereignty. The authors of the present article agree that the depth and scale of destabilizations induced by climate change cannot be navigated justly from within the present social-political-economic system. We disagree, however, on which of the non-capitalist orientations is better suited for generating viable alternatives to the worst dystopian futures. The article thus stages a debate to elucidate the theoretical and political divergence between Climate X and Climate Mao (renamed Climate Jacobin).

Climate X or Climate Jacobin?: A Critical Exchange on Our Planetary Future

Radical Democracy with what Demos?: Mouffe and Laclau after the Rise of the Right

Abstract:This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a "rational society." The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conception of critical theory more in line with the first disposition, and that the relevance of the skeptical disposition is likewise seriously undermined if climate change is taken into account.

Larry Alan Busk

Papers

Climate X or Climate Jacobin?: A Critical Exchange on Our Planetary Future

Radical Democracy with what Demos?: Mouffe and Laclau after the Rise of the Right

Climate Change and the Irrational Society

What Is “Totalitarian” Today? in advance