Papers by Daniel Gustav Anderson
Mindfulness is a meditation technique that involves attending to the present moment, without refe... more Mindfulness is a meditation technique that involves attending to the present moment, without reference to past or future, and without judgment. In the "radical acceptance" of the present it prescribes, mindfulness is a practice concerning one's relation to time that is promoted as a health boon in times of turmoil and tension appropriate for those short on time. A self-help practice legitimized by appeal to Buddhist cultural references and public figures, mindfulness promises do-it-yourself stress relief, performance enhancement, and happiness to the belabored North American petit bourgeois enduring increasingly stressful and diminished working and living arrangements. While scholars have investigated mindfulness as a religious phenomenon, few studies have considered its generalization and use in everyday life as a cultural formation in the context of its historical milieu. The generalization of mindfulness coincides with that of stress as a pathology, and the production of a pressured, volatile, and competitive social environment by the economic liberalizations of the 1980s to the present. This dissertation
For the 2016 Cultural Studies Association conference (June 2-5 2016, Villanova University, Philad... more For the 2016 Cultural Studies Association conference (June 2-5 2016, Villanova University, Philadelphia, PA), the ESP Working Group is proposing six clusters of presentations on topics at the intersection of critical theory, cultural inquiry, and environmental concern.
The Working Group on Environment, Space, and Place of the Cultural Studies Association would like... more The Working Group on Environment, Space, and Place of the Cultural Studies Association would like to invite submissions for the 13th Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), to be held at the Riverside Convention Center, Riverside, Greater Los Angeles Area, California, 21-24 May 2015. We welcome a wide range of papers addressing environment, space, and place. This year we will be constituting two panels on the topic of "Possible Worlds."
This presentation emerges from a portion of my dissertation, which is a critical history of a med... more This presentation emerges from a portion of my dissertation, which is a critical history of a meditation practice called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a contradictory formation in its increasingly ubiquitous prescription for use in addressing the problems of neoliberal everyday life: on one side, it is overwhelmingly instrumentalized, and functions as a kind of compensatory tactic to make the present, the given, tolerable enough to reproduce it for another day. On the other side, however, it presents or at least promises an emancipatory valence against many of the premisses and experiences of neoliberalism-a utopian content tied to anticapitalist, anti-war politics. Here, I will describe how mindfulness has emerged to meet the needs of teaching faculty increasingly stressed and burnt-out (and worse) by the neoliberalization of the university: diminished pay and working conditions, increased exposure to risk in the form of job insecurity and artificial crises, and diminished power to address any of these needs within the institution or in public life-in a word proletarianization, a condition where university-level teaching becomes another low-paying service job, but one requiring many years of preparation and, often, accumulated debt to prepare for. Under these conditions, well known to those present here at CSA, how could persons committed to the public-good mission of the university, the life of the mind, not get stressed out and burnt out, at a minimum? Mindfulness' penetration of the university classroom coincides with its emergence as a generalized mode of self-care for stress
This paper explores the logic behind the ways in which culture is put to use in everyday life as ... more This paper explores the logic behind the ways in which culture is put to use in everyday life as means of either getting ahead of the pack in a competitive social field vying for limited resources-the environment neoliberalism has constructed for us in North America-or managing, containing, or resisting the consequences of that social environment. I start from the premise that culture makes available to use certain repertoires of practice that may be emancipatory from or compensatory to capitalist social relations. But how to specify that distinction with regard to the neoliberal moment? The explicitly environmental aspects of neoliberalism are most relevant to this question: first, the violence of the intentionally diminished public resources in the everyday lives and horizons of expectation of working people and increased resources and insecurity as means to the end of retrenched class lines (Harvey, 2005), which, as scholars such as Wendy Brown argue, is articulated extensively and intensively into the limitations and disciplines of everyday life as governmentality; and second, the exhaustion of natural resources such as air, soil, and water on which life and hence labor and hence the accumulation of capital depend-as a consequence of the accumulation of capital. I argue that Michel Foucault was right to turn to our foremost theorist of the ends-driven deployment of violence, Carl von Clausewitz, in describing how neoliberalism is posited and imagining its consequences in the lectures published as The Birth of Biopolitics. Further, On Anderson 2
What follows is one of those winding, exploratory sorts of essays that takes a while to get to a ... more What follows is one of those winding, exploratory sorts of essays that takes a while to get to a claim, but builds momentum along the way. It is intended as a provocation to thought and not as a work of formal scholarship.
In a recent article in ISLE (Autumn 2013), Louisa MacKenzie and Stephanie Postumus try to come to... more In a recent article in ISLE (Autumn 2013), Louisa MacKenzie and Stephanie Postumus try to come to grips with a recent debate over the role of critical theory in ecocriticism in the pages of ISLE and other publications that had roped in such scholars as Serpil Oppermann, Simon Estok, and Greg Garrard. MacKenzie and Posthumus offer ways to read two of the central articles in this exchange, with the intention of drawing out means to move forward meaningfully with the ecocritical project. While I appreciate these authors' attempts to push back against the reactionary elements this debate and in one article most especially (one by S.K. Robisch), I think this is a well-meaning engagement, but very limited in scope. There are ways
After Emerson and Muir, an inevitable point of contact emerges between environmentalism and conte... more After Emerson and Muir, an inevitable point of contact emerges between environmentalism and contemplation in the humanities: the objective world is a refuge of the spirit, a site appropriate to personal renewal, an authentic home. This contemplative repertoire can be politically significant and utopian in content, because it gives a rationale for protecting wild places and for opposing those forces that quantify and destroy them. This paper will consider some of the ways in which the contemplative mode as it is articulated around the site of the environmental politics carries a kind of utopian aspiration that is accessible through Marxian political economy. For instance, I see appeals to "deep meaning" in this context as an attempt to recuperate qualitative valuation, valuing moments of life and community for their distinct qualities, from the regime of exchange value that prevails under capital, and an aspiration for a social order adequate to the appropriate protection and valuation of the natural world understood qualitatively as sacred. This is not without complication or contradiction, of course, particularly as it abuts an equally strong tendency to personal subjectivism and a correlative impulse to retreat from the social and the political. In describing the contemplative mode (qualitatively), this paper will drawn on the talks given and the file of readings recommended for the Contemplative Environmental Pedagogy retreat led by Paul Wapner in July 2013, which I attended, emphasizing Douglas Christie’s recent proposal for an explicitly environmental form of contemplation, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (forthcoming), 2014
This brief article is intended to reorient the basic terms of discussion around the position of c... more This brief article is intended to reorient the basic terms of discussion around the position of critical theory within ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and related discourses.
History is what hurts" -F. Jamison, The Political Unconscious (102).
First, a disclosure. My discipline is Cultural Studies. This means that I value a consistent and ... more First, a disclosure. My discipline is Cultural Studies. This means that I value a consistent and coherent methodology, but I am not very picky about my archive or the objects I take up for analysis-that is, I cast a very wide net. This contrasts against the usual approach in ecocriticism, which has a very stable archive-writings concerned with nature, the natural world, place, and related themes-but for which methodology remains an open question, as Simon Estok among others have frequently observed. There are many ways in which the analogies I explore here among experimental jazz and film, dialectical reasoning, Romantic poetry, meditative practice, and ecocriticism (an eclectic archive, to be sure) are imperfect. My claim is not that these are perfect equivalents, but that the lessons of one may be instructive for the others in some respects. This essay is held together critically and methodologically, not topically or thematically. So: On with
The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, 2012
If ecocriticism has been a form of scholarship that is integrated with an activist practice, that... more If ecocriticism has been a form of scholarship that is integrated with an activist practice, that activism has most often taken the form of rhetorical appeals to conservation and to valuation of a specific place (or “place” as such), a species, or even a privileged mode of representation such as the pastoral, the work of the bioregionally-grounded poet, or green themes in middlebrow novels (Garrard, 2005). Ecocriticism-as-advocacy assumes a particular view of time. An active present is taken as a means of forestalling an undesirable future, with little account for the past; the critic is in a race against time to explicate the water images in this or that poem, and heated debate concerns the limits of an appropriate canon for such an enterprise . Meanwhile, historically-informed and materialist approaches to ecocriticism, have been proposed, which look to the past as a field of determinations and limits on the present: the present as the given product, finished or not, of past causes . Both these approaches, and the Utopian mode—so promising in its ability to imagine a positive political program in addition to the earnest advocacy we already have of the conserve this and care for that type—are all predicated on two unspoken and contradictory a priori: time as a matrix of causality, and hence the objects of time as legible in space in the present, on one side; time as a transhistorical and transcendent Now of reflection and contemplation or another. The former, in that it supports a view of nature as a time-produced and time-bound formation vulnerable and impermanent in its complexity, is appropriate to an activist stance as something to defend; the latter predicates a certain kind of criticism, specifically a detached and aesthetically-oriented gaze. Both positions have merit. However, neither is wholly or solely adequate, and there remains between them a conceptual tension if not contradiction between the political and critical engagements characteristic of ecocriticism since the 1980s.
This paper concerns neoliberalism, summarized by John as "the nexus of a libertarian economics, a... more This paper concerns neoliberalism, summarized by John as "the nexus of a libertarian economics, an anti-statist politics, and a psychology of interestgoverned behavior, which together provide […] a 'unified framework for understanding all human behavior'" (425). All possible cultural, cognitive, or political choices are expressible through commodity choices, and therefore, any of many alternatives can be considered as equally plausible to the next in the delirium of the marketplace: evolution or creationism, critical history or reactionary propaganda passing as knowledge, as "real" history. I take this question of plausibility to be a matter of public concern, and a suitable object for critique in the context of rhetoric: How can one achieve a public good in convincing others that something is so or not so by means of reason and evidence in good faith, given that plausibility and desirability have become conflated under neoliberalism?
Thesis Chapters by Daniel Gustav Anderson
Mindfulness is a meditation technique that involves attending to the present moment, without refe... more Mindfulness is a meditation technique that involves attending to the present moment, without reference to past or future, and without judgment. In the “radical acceptance” of the present it prescribes, mindfulness is a practice concerning one’s relation to time that is promoted as a health boon in times of turmoil and tension appropriate for those short on time. A self-help practice legitimized by appeal to Buddhist cultural references and public figures, mindfulness promises do-it-yourself stress relief, performance enhancement, and happiness to the belabored North American petit bourgeois enduring increasingly stressful and diminished working and living arrangements. While scholars have investigated mindfulness as a religious phenomenon, few studies have considered its generalization and use in everyday life as a cultural formation in the context of its historical milieu. The generalization of mindfulness coincides with that of stress as a pathology, and the production of a pressured, volatile, and competitive social environment by the economic liberalizations of the 1980s to the present. This dissertation offers a discursive history of mindfulness as an artifact of this historical juncture, and probes the social problems and possibilities that are encoded in its applications for spiritual growth and professional development. Here, mindfulness comes into focus as a paradoxical formation: As stress management and as a disciplined elision of history in the present, mindfulness reproduces and retrenches the class relations that generate the stress of this juncture, even as the appeal of mindfulness is grounded in an Enlightenment ethos of freedom by practiced self-knowledge and the explicit anti-capitalist sentiment and desirable social alternatives to the present figured in the Buddhist sources it appropriates, frustrating its realization by generalizing its own opposite.
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Papers by Daniel Gustav Anderson
Thesis Chapters by Daniel Gustav Anderson