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by Christine M. Skolnik | January 7, 2014 · 23:59

Ecological Imaginings

Ecological Imaginings: Aztec Human Sacrifice, Photographic Objects, and Future Simulations

Tuesday, February 11, 6:00-8:00 PM

DePaul University Art Museum

935 W. Fullerton Ave.

The DePaul Institute for Nature & Culture presents a visually rich, interdisciplinary panel featuring three unique perspectives on relationships among images, ecologies, and various types of networks. The panel themes range from Aztec sacrifice, through contemporary photography and philosophy, to neuroscience and future landscape simulations.

Why did the Aztec earth need to eat human blood and excrement to survive? How do photographs work to both reveal and hide things; can we say photos themselves have their own, distinctive creative agency? How do images help change people’s minds about the environment, convincing them of the importance of green spaces? Come and find out.

The evening will also include plenty of time for discussion to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue and student engagement. The Public, Faculty and Students from all disciplines and interests are invited and encouraged to attend this perspective-broadening evening.

Three presentations will be followed by discussion:

1. Kay Read, Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, Ecologically Picturing Human Sacrifice: The first presentation relates human sacrifice in pre-Hispanic, Nahua (Aztec) culture to the concept of “trophic webs” (ecological webs of sustenance). By briefly examining pictographic manuscripts and selected Mesoamerican agricultural practices, the presenter explores how an approach centered in materiality helps us understand why human sacrifice provided “food” in light of those trophic webs, and asks how these explorations might help us think through our own troubled relationships with the natural world.

2. Randy Honold, Assistant Dean of LAS and Instructor, Department of Philosophy, Photographing Objects: The second talk reflects on photography within the context of speculative realism and the intrigue of the photograph as object, focusing on the presenter’s own photographs. Among the philosophical/aesthetic topics of the presentation are 1) the relationship of “the photograph” to the history of photography; 2) a consideration of the hybrid “nature” of photography; and 3) the mysterious manner in which photographs both reveal and conceal their objects. The images in this talk make visible the complexity of ever unfolding ecosystems of objects.

3. Christine Skolnik, Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse, Imagined Ecofutures: Employing a critical approach rooted in “realist magic,” the third paper reviews recent findings in the neuroscience of imagining the future within the context of landscape simulation. The presenter argues for acknowledging the importance of the self in the process of imagining the future, and discusses images from the successful Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan (LARRMP) as a case study.

Presenter Information:

Kay Almere Read, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies (DePaul University), holds degrees in Art (University of Illinois, 1969), Religious Studies (University of Colorado, 1982); and History of Religions (University of Chicago, 1983, 1991). She researches Mesoamerican cosmology, mythology, imagery, time, sacrifice, ethics and the interface of religion, nature and culture. She has authored numerous articles and books, including Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos (1998), and periodically posts drawings on the Institute for Nature and Culture’s blog at EnvironmentalCritique.wordpress.com.

Christine Skolnik is an adjunct professor in DePaul’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric & Discourse and a faculty advisor to the Institute for Nature & Culture. She holds a PhD in English (Rhetoric) from Penn State and a recent MA in Urban Sustainability. She teaches courses in environmental writing and rhetoric as well as technical/professional writing. Her research interests include sustainability, rhetorical theory, psychology, and neuroscience. She is currently a contributing co-editor of the popular DePaul Institute for Nature and Culture blog, Environmental Critique.

Randy Honold is currently compiling a set of photographs that translate ideas of ecology and object-oriented ontology, teaching environmental philosophy, and blogging at DylarAddict.wordpress.com and EnvironmentalCritique.wordpress.com.

This event is open to the public. Parking is available at the Sheffield Parking Facility located at 2335 N. Sheffield Ave. and the Clifton Parking Deck at 2330 N. Clifton Ave. For more information, contact Randy Honold at rhonold@depaul.edu, (773) 325-4928

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Filed under Art, Humanities and Ecology, Nature, Objects, OOO, Uncategorized, Urban Ecology

Tagged as culture, DePaul’s Institute for Nature and Culture, Ecology, nature, object-oriented, OOO, religion, Rhetoric, Tim Morton

by Christine M. Skolnik | September 30, 2013 · 20:58

Rhetoric and Magic in the Anthropocene: A Variation

Below is a comment on Tim Morton’s Realist Magic available on Open Humanities Press, and recently published in paperback. For a review see a previous Environmental Critique post by Rick Elmore, “Adventures in Realist Magic” (6.20.13). (WordPress link functions not cooperating in this endeavor.) I highly recommend the paperback to scholars who want to grasp the material more firmly and really work with it.

Timothy Morton’s critique of modern causality in Realist Magic is in some sense a fulfillment of an unspoken promise in the earlier works. It reveals the fragile “man” behind the curtain of the normal science that underwrites consumer capitalism, and it synthesizes Morton’s aesthetic and ecological investments in a manner that avid readers will find particularly satisfying. While it is commonplace to critique the scientific establishment in the name of ecology, much current criticism fails to grasp the elusiveness of the empirical method as a hyperobject that confounds conventional analyses. Morton’s thesis that causality is aesthetic braves the complexities. It also comes to the rescue of sleeping Beauty and the dwarfed Humanities (to confound and confuse narratives even further).

In this comment I focus on Morton’s stunningly simple inversion of the rhetorical canons. The five canons, often used to describe the writing process, are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. In Realist Magic Morton privileges delivery, arguing that the other canons, as aesthetic moments, follow (in reverse order) from delivery. Indeed, the work performs this thesis, beginning with the opening of Realist Magic and Morton’s sound track of PM Dawn’s Set Adrift on Memory Bliss. The melancholy 90’s mix sets the tone for the work at hand, attunes us to Morton’s melancholy, and foregrounds relationships between affect and cognition within the context of causality.

Linking the rhetorical canons and causality is not so radical given the dominance of the canons as tools of thought in the pre-modern era, and the likelihood that the empirical method was derived from these rhetorical habits. However the reversal of order and focus on delivery, as opposed to invention, are very—Morton. As I suggest above, the inversion also dovetails with affect theory, if delivery follows sense of audience and sense of audience follows affect (attachment), as outlined, for example, in Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. I particularly appreciate Morton’s references to sound throughout the text. Sound is an important element of rhetoric (which I think is categorically affective), not only because tone is always constructive of meaning, self, and relationships, but because internalized qualities of rhythm and harmony pervade all rhetorical performances including Morton’s text. This emphasis on sound is performed by the cadences of Morton’s well-known authorial voices, articulated through his prose, and in the echoes of his public and new-media selves. Morton’s recursive style is also punctuated by sharp images, including (my favorite) clown faces crowding the picture frame.

Circling inelegantly back to rhetoric, aesthetic and affective qualities of causality are evident not only in the rhetorical canons, but also in the Classical Stases, which are the stages of an argument or deliberation. The conventional order (stages) of Stases arguments (“stasis” is the singular) are fact, definition, cause and effect, evaluation, and policy/procedure, or what I might here modulate into “practice.” (This is one of many versions of the Stases, btw.) Arguments about causality are crucial to conventional processes of deliberation because they are the presumed basis of value judgments and practical procedures, but they are relevant to the discussion at hand because, as arguments, they have an affective quality. A good deal of contemporary critical and rhetorical theory (not to mention neuroscience) has proposed that cause and effect follow value judgments, which follow practice as habit. To the extent that all of these arguments are aesthetic/affective, not only sound and sight, but various other senses (external and internalized), determine our perceptions of causality. Following Morton, rhetoricians might further explore an inversion of the Stases. We might ask what aesthetically and affectively warrants practice and work back through value, cause and effect (or effect and cause), and definition, to fact.

Such a reverse practice, a rhetrico-hermeneutic moonwalk if you will, could be applied to virtually any socio-cultural situation or text. Ecological restoration, for example, a major concern of the Institute for Nature & Culture which sponsors Environmental Critique, could be encountered as an aesthetic problem, which derives its ethical means and meanings from beauty, writ large.

On the simplest level Realist Magic reminds us that causes are infinitely complex and our instrumental understanding of them is always an interpretation. The book is full of rhetorical magic performed, as Morton advises, right before our eyes. While the old alchemists strived to turn dross into gold, Morton merely vanishes matter, and thus the usual “substance” of both capital and science. He does not dissolve the real into the ideal however. Rather he separates the real from the material, redirecting our attention to affect, the limitations that science places on our affective experience, and the capacity of art to reveal and realign our priorities.