Plant Media

Environmental/Phytomental/Ecomental Media Reading List

Frames and Keywords

• Scale
• Joshua DiCaglio, Scale Theory: A Non-Disciplinary Inquiry, (2021: UMinnesota Press)
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "On nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales," Common Knowledge 18:3 (2012), 502-523.
• Zachary Horton, "Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene," in Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, (2017: Palgrave Macmillan).
• Field 
• Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed" in The Field of Cultural Production, (1994: Columbia UP)
• Rodney Benson, "Field theory in comparative context: A new paradigm for media studies," Theory and Society 28:3 (1999), 463-498. 
• David Couzens Hoy, “Power, Repression, Progress,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Basil Blackwell, 1986).
• Milieu 
• Selections from Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (2020: UMinnesota Press)
• Georges Canguilhem "The Living and Its Milieu," trans. John Savage, Grey Room 3 (2001), 7-31.
• Infrastructure 
• Nicole Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure,” in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
• Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343
• Ashley Carse, “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal
  Watershed,” Social Studies of Science 42 no. 4 (2012): 539–563.
• Stephanie Wakefield, "Making nature into infrastructure: The construction of oysters as a risk management solution in New York City," Nature and Space 3:3 (2020), 761-785.
• Gabriele Schabacher, “Abandoned Infrastructures. Technical Networks beyond Nature and Culture,” ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung. Mediocene, 9:1 (2018), 127–145, https://mediarep.org/handle/doc/19833.
• Assemblage
• Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, (Edinburgh UP: 2016)
• Jane Bennett, "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout," Public Culture 17:3 (2005), 445-465.
• Spirituality/Comparative Metaphysics
• Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, "Metaphysics as Mythophysics. Or, Why I Have Always Been An Anthropologist," in Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish
• Wilfried van der Will, "The functions of 'Volkskultur', mass culture and alternative culture," in Modern German Culture, ed. Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will, (2006: Cambridge UP)
• Involution 
• Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia, (1969: UC Press)
• Chin-Chaun Lee, "Involution and vacuum: Comments on mainstream U.S. media studies," The International Communication Gazette 0:0 (2016), 1-6.
• Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers "Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters," differences 23:3 (2012), 74-118.
• Entanglement
• Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, (2019: Duke UP)
• Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (2007: Duke UP)
• Indigeneity
• Roopika Risam, "Indigenizing Decolonial Media Theory: The Extractive and Redistributive Currencies of Media Activism," Feminist Media Histories 8:1 (2022), 134-164.
• Francesca Merlan, "Indigeneity: Global and Local," Current Anthropology 50:3 (2009), 303-333.
• Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai, “Plants” in Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South, (2021, UChicago Press)
• Element
• John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, (2015: UChicago Press)
• Eva Horn, "Air as Medium," Grey Room 73 (2018), 6-25.
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (2015: UMinnesota Press)
• Yuriko Furuhata, “Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media.” Media+Environment 1:1 (2019), https://mediaenviron.org/article/10797-of-dragons-and-geoengineering-rethinking-elemental-media
• World/Umwelt
• Jonas Andersson Schwarz, "Umwelt and individuation: Digital signals and technical being," in Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, (2018: Routledge)
• Gottfried Schnödl and Florian Sprenger, Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right-Wing Thought, (2022: Meson)
• Ecology
• Erich Hörl and James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, (2017: Bloomsbury)
• Intelligence
• Luciana Parisi, "The alien subject of AI," Subjectivity 12 (2019), 27-48.
• (Built) Environment
• Yuriko Furuhata, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control, (2022: Duke UP)
• Erich Hörl, "Critique of Environmentality: On the World-Wide Axiomatics of Environmentalitarian Time," in Critique and the Digital, ed. Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt, (2020: Diaphanes)
• Evolution
• Kinji Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, trans. Pamela J. Asquith, (2013: Taylor and Francis)
• Code
• Bernard Dionysius Geohegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023: Duke UP)
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "On 'Sourcery,' or Code as Fetish," Configurations 16 (2008), 299-324.
• Mark C. Marino, "Intro" and "Kittler's Code" in Critical Code Studies (2020: MIT Press)
• Consciousness
• Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, (2007: Basic Books)
• Something by Raymond Ruyer?
• The Genesis of Living Forms
• Neofinalism
• Untranslated options: 
• Embryogenesis of the World and the Silent God
• La conscience et le corps
• Translation
• Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity
• Sakai, Naoki. "Translation." Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006): 71-78.
• Liu, Lydia He. Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity--China, 1900-1937. Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Chow, Rey. "Translator, traitor; translator, mourner (or, dreaming of intercultural equivalence)." New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 565-580.
• Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1913-1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253-263
• Jussi Parikka, “Politics of Swarms: Translations between Entomology and Biopolitics,” Parallax 14, no. 3 (2008): 112–24. 
• Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 
• This is a collection of essays. If we are to read this, we probably should pick and choose, but it might be an interesting way to think about the question of translation through a register that engages a different kind of encoding.
• Douglas Hofstadter, “Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.”