Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Critical environments names several senses. If the (Greek) krinein is to sift and kritikos is the ability to discern, then we are faced with the work of interpretation. Yet if we turn to the Latin criticare, then those environments are diagnosed as gravely ill. We know that what we call the ‘environment’ is indeed in a state of crisis – acidification renders the oceans increasingly inhospitable to life; deforestation threatens both local ecologies and global climate maintenance; the appetite for meat eats up land as well as nonhuman life. Many of us choose not to know this, or perhaps maintain the fetishistic logic of knowing that comes with simultaneous disavowal. Corporate interests ranging across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the super-saturation of all forms of media hamper the work of interpretation and the possibility of agency and intervention. Series chairs: Lynn Turner & Wood Roberdeau Goldsmiths, University of London Thursdays, Spring Term 5.00-7.00pm Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02 The events are free -- no booking is required and all are welcome.
While ecocriticism has become a respected field in literary theory and in the broader landscape of aesthetic philosophy, it could benefit from an enhanced ethical-political framework which social ecology – an underrated critical theory developed by Murray Bookchin – could provide. This essay attempts to tease out the potentials for such a framework, integrating the insights of social ecology, ecocriticism, Critical Realism, and John Dewey's aesthetic concepts into a layered idea-set used for the study of all kinds of aesthetic objects, from popular art to the gallery arts. Its key principles are the emergence of aesthetic objects (including formal artworks) out of congealed human experience, the relation between organism and environment in assessing meaning, the breakdown of implicit or overt hierarchies within a work, and the idea of the artist and art-critic as a "gardener". We live in an era of crisis and catastrophe. While nuclear war occupied the minds of the general populace and the artists alike throughout the second half of the 20th century, the subsequent neoliberal era has given way to a more fragmented set of species-destroying prospects. Everything from killer-robots, to viral epidemics, to totalitarian statism, to mass surveillance, to bio-genetic mutations appear in popular fiction as new threats to human survival. The social imaginary of a large part of our culture has responded to neoliberalism, with its rhetoric of triumph and the optimistic " end of history " , by taking a turn for the apocalyptic. 1 However, an apocalypse need not be an altogether gloomy affair. The English word comes from a Greek word, which, translated, means " lifting the veil " , uncovering what was hidden, revelation. Moments of downturn may show us everything that could go wrong, but, if examined the right way, can also provide insights for how to transform things for the better. That, in brief, could be framed as the central problem of the arts today, including the world of criticism which attempts to make sense of it: how to " lift the veil " in such a way as to reveal not only potentials for doom and dystopia, but potentials for hope and utopia – or rather eutopia (good place) as distinct from an impossible outopia (no place). 2 Whether a contemporary person's mind is fixed on dystopian pessimism or eutopian hope, one topic of our cultural apocalypse is becoming more and more salient as a whole:
The Edge of the Earth. Climate Change in Photography and Video
Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today2016 •
T.J. Demos' contribution to "The Edge of the Earth" 's catalogue
More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing beyond the Bifurcation of Nature
Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: Tracing More-Than-Human Aesthetics in Times of Socio-Ecological Crisis2024 •
This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at play in more-than-human processes of becoming. In a world out of joint, the conceptual apparatus inherited from western modernity no longer holds as a way to grasp our current socio-ecological predicaments. This warrants a complete overhaul of ‘modern’ aesthetics. Rather than a supplementary dimension of human values, the beautiful or the sublime, the aesthetic now manifests as a paramount dimension in fashioning, cultivating and sustaining more-than-human worlds. Hence, the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead is introduced as it transcends the modes of valorisation that define our present, providing a reading of our own present and the habits of thought that structure it. More importantly, Whitehead provides a functional more-than-human metaphysics with conceptual tools to reconceptualise the contours of aesthetics beyond the frameworks of modernity. In this ‘generalised aesthetics’, feeling and experience are centre-staged as fundamental to all modes of becoming. This approach is situated in relation to emerging perspectives in sociocultural research, notably STS and feminist technoscience, which eschew social and human-centered aesthetics, to wager that new modes of more-than-human sensitisations are required to exceed western abstractions and attune knowledge practices to experimental possibilities in worlding.
Perspectives from this special issue on Greece are folded into a discussion of the current post-Foucauldian and " neo-Benjaminian " moment of contemporary photographic theory and visual culture. Bourdieu's ethnography of photography is contrasted with his own photographic practice and considered in light of Azoulay's Civil Contract of Photography. The return to the " event " of photography and an understanding of its contingency reawakens its revolutionary potential. [visual culture, crisis, Pierre Bourdieu, Ariella Azoulay] Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. (Benjamin 2008a:37)
Alluvium 3.1 (2014)
Editor's Introduction: Critical Environments2014 •
In this paper I introduce contemporary issues in ecocriticism that are explored in my guest-edited issue of Alluvium on 'Critical Environments'. This paper examines the ways in which questions of sight and receptivity are used to address the issues of perspective that are opened up by the recognition of the likely causes and possible effects of environmental crisis and are under scrutiny in contemporary ecocriticism. Using Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, among other recent climate fiction, alongside theoretical insights from Ursula Heise, Timothy Clark, Timothy Morton, Claire Colebrook and Mike Hulme, I examine creative and critical innovations that are emerging in response to these issues.
Philosophy of Photography
Review of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, by T. J. Demos (2018)2018 •
NeON: Re@ct! Social Change Art Technology Symposium, Dundee, November
Ecocritical Media Arts and the War on Terra2019 •
Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically and aesthetically. But it also recognises that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endless opportunities for misunderstanding when we capture, store and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concerns the construction of a "we" that embraces the human and non-human victims of ecocide. The master's tools might dismantle the master's house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than-human social change?
Brad Haylock and Megan Patty, eds, Art Writing in Crisis, Sternberg Press, London, 2021
Art in the Anthropocene: Apprehending abstracted crises, thickly (2021)The planet is facing manifold crises that are fundamental, comprehensive, and abstracted from the senses. This sensory abstraction, compounded by the non-palpable accumulation of risks, complicates any artistic practice that would seek to apprehend these crises. How, for example, is an artist to represent climate change adequately in relation to its consequences when our knowledge of the process is mediated by statistics, indicators, and monitoring technologies? What images can be used to condense the meaning of the Sixth Extinction when it is a process of moving toward the end, for all time, of multiple categories of being? This chapter develops an understanding of how artists can adequately represent the crises that we face.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Academia Letters
-AMINO(IMINO)PHOSPHONATES VIA AN NUCLEOPHILIC ADDITION REACTIONS TO 1,2-ALKADIENEPHOSPHONATES2021 •
Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift
Antonio Montefusco and Giuliano Milani (eds.), "Le Lettere di Dante: ambienti culturali, contesti storici e circolazione dei saperi" (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020)2023 •
In Christian O. Christiansen (ed.) Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 59-81.
The Demise of the Radical Critique of Economic Inequality in Western Political ThoughtJournal of Belgian History
Branding (a slice of) Belgium. Nationalism and tourism promotion in politics and the press (ca. 1935-1985)2024 •
Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra
Graded extensions of categories2000 •
2020 •
2006 •
2006 •
Clinical Infectious Diseases
Increased Risk of Serious Bacterial Infections Due to Maternal Immunosuppression in HIV-Exposed Uninfected Infants in a European Country2014 •
International Journal of Food Microbiology
Detection of Bacillus cereus in foods by colony hybridization using PCR-generated probe and characterization of isolates for toxins by PCR2002 •
2006 •