Image events amidst eco-ruins: social media and the mediated earth

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Notes

1 These statistics are both inexact and rapidly changing, but numerous sources roughly agree. For examples, see: “Internet Growth Statistics,” Internet World Stats, https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm; Simon Kemp, “Digital in 2018: World’s Internet Users Pass 4 Billion Mark,” We Are Social, January 2018, https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018.

2 Jon Russell, “China Reaches 800 Million Internet Users,” techcrunch, August 21, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/china-reaches-800-million-internet-users/.

3 Elizabeth Brunner and Kevin M. DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace’s Panmediated Global Detox Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 52, no. 4 (2016): 281–99.

4 For some detail of these changes, see Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), among others.

5 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 100.

6 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), xiii.

7 Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).

8 See James Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

9 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 61.

10 Brunner and DeLuca, “The Argumentative Force,” 281–99.

11 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2005).

12 “U.S. Study Shows Widening Disconnect with Nature, and Potential Solutions,” Yale Environment 360, April 27, 2017, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-study-shows-widening-disconnect-with-nature-and-potential-solutions.

13 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More than Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 267.

14 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, ix.

15 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2010), 263.

16 David Abram, Becoming Animal, 128–29.

17 Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2017).

18 See https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018/.

19 There are numerous sources that largely agree of these numbers, which can never be precise. For examples, see: Matthew Scully, “Inside the Global Industry That’s Slaughtering Africa’s Elephants,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/inside-the-global-industry-thats-slaughtering-africas-elephants/276582/; WWF, “The Status of African Elephants,” Winter 2018, https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/winter-2018/articles/the-status-of-african-elephants; WWF, “Wild Pandas Increase by 268,” http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/giant_panda/panda/panda_survey/; Michael Graham Richard, “Wild Tiger Population Dropped by 96.8% in 20 Years,” treehugger, July 12, 2010, https://www.treehugger.com/endangered-species/wild-tiger-population-dropped-by-968-in-20-years.html.

20 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 14–5.

21 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278.

22 Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 136.

23 Ibid., xv.

24 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 178–9.

25 Ibid., 181.

26 Derrida, Without Alibi, 72.

27 Ibid.

28 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles J. Stivale (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 52.

29 Ibid., 149–50.

30 Ibid., 151.

31 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 54, 85.

32 Ibid., 21, 34.

33 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 77–8.

34 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 234.

35 Ibid., 355.

36 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 1993), 67–8.

37 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007), xii. Out of necessity, this essay will not have anything resembling a comprehensive account of Badiou’s philosophy.

38 Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 109–37.

39 Badiou, Ethics, 41–2.

40 For rhetorical scholars, Biesecker via Lacan and Ballif via Derrida make important and exacting contributions to thinking the event. Barbara Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan,” in Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric, ed. Mark J. Porrovecchio (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16–36; Michelle Ballif, “Writing the Event: The Impossible Possibility for Historiography,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2014): 243–55.

41 For a more in-depth analysis of Badiou’s concept of the event in the context of environmental communication, see Kevin DeLuca, “Truths, Evils, Justice, and the Event of Wild(er)ness: Using Badiou to Think the Ethics of Environmentalism,” in The Handbook of Communication Ethics, eds. George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi (New York: Routledge, 2011).

42 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1968/1949), 110.

43 Ibid., 109.

44 Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” trans. Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007): 460.

45 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1929/1978), 222.

46 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 111.

47 Ibid., 108.

48 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books), 23.

49 McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), 33, 71.

50 Ibid., 23.

51 Derrida, “A Certain Impossible,” 450–1.

52 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 133.

53 Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Creative Cultural Studies: Encountering African Elephants in China,” Culture, Theory and Critique 60, no. 2 (2019): 176.

54 Ibid., 198.