A beautiful piece by improvisational guitarist and deep-sea diver Henry Kaiser, shot somewhere off the coast of Antarctica. (He's done similar scenes in a couple of Werner Herzog films, Encounters at the End of the World and the sci-fi docu-fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder.)

Somewhere around the 7-8 minute mark, I was so overcome with emotion I almost spilled out of my body, messing up the keyboard of my laptop and covering it with an organless goo as it tried to squeeze its way through the monitor to swim along with him. On a rainy day, I can imagine myself setting this on infinite-loop and bathing myself in it. The final violin lines glide into the skin of my brain like blades of gold. Where would we be without the Henry Kaisers of this world?

His Antarctica journals can be found here, and more underwater video clips here.

Thanks to Andrew Osborne at Total Assault on Culture for sharing this.

"For Buddhism," Clark writes, "the negative path of the destruction of illusion is inseparably linked to the positive path of an open, awakened, and compassionate response to a living, non-objectifiable reality, the 'nature that is no nature.'’’

This, to my mind, is Buddhism's central leap of faith. Clark's answer to this question -- he points to work in evolutionary biology that demonstrates the biological underpinnings for altruism -- is, unfortunately, unsatisfactory. None of that work says anything about the kind of altruism that Buddhism is asserting, an altruism, or feelings of kinship, solidarity, empathy and care, extended to all sentient beings. Instead, it generally limits itself to kin- and social-group related altruism. (Wilson and Kellert's "biophilia hypothesis" could come closer to the Buddhist claim, but the versions I've read of it don't do that; they merely smuggle in certain assumptions about "nature" and then try to prove them with empirical data showing that we, or some of us, like certain kinds of "natural" environments, etc.)

In Buddhism, the claim is more radical and profound: it is that a fundamental compassion for all dependently-arising entities like us will emerge as a direct consequence of experiencing the "groundlessness" of our own being. What's generally meant is the kind of graduated experience of that groundlessness that comes out of the diligent practice of the eight-fold path. Simply pulling the rug out from one's own self-construct, as can happen in psychedelic experience for instance, will not necessarily do it (though it might). The claim, then, is experiential, processual, and relational, and can only be tested empirically. The Buddhist sangha (community) provides a "safe" vehicle for its testing and its fruition. But in a pluralistic world such as ours, will the experience of groundlessness, achieved in isolation from other parts of the eight-fold path, necessarily lead to compassionate empathy with other sentient, existent entities like us? It's not clear. Clark suggests as much when he writes:

"The reason why many forms of skeptical critique lead to cynicism, egoism, or social conformism is that the critique remains on the intellectual level, while the socially and historically constructed self, which consists not only of a collection of abstract ideas, but also, quite notably, of mental and behavioral dispositions, is not subjected to the ultimate critique through the transformative power of fully engaged practice." (p. 27)

Deleuze & Guattari's exhortations to pursue "lines of flight" and "deterritorialize" can be seen in this light. Not all self-deconstruction is ego-deconstruction, and not all ego-deconstruction is guaranteed to be empathogenic. It helps to have the guidance of a dharmic community, a sangha, within which to perform it. The leap of faith of a neo-Buddhist globalism, perhaps, is that humanity (or maybe humanity plus nature) can be that sangha -- which is why both communication/dialogue and social justice are called for, because we're all in it together, or we aren't in it at all.

In the end, Clark makes a case (or a plea) for Madhyamika philosophy's relevance to the larger political and historical project of social liberation:

"Nagarjuna helps us understand the fundamental human predicament: that we are faced with a dream world of illusory, deceptively permanent objects and egos, and a futile quest to defend the ego and dominate reality. Where most analyses (including most Buddhist analyses) of egocentric consciousness and the egoic flight from the trauma of lack stop short is in failing to investigate the social and historical roots of these phenomena. We must understand that the ego is not only a psychological and epistemological construct, but also a historical one. Its roots are to be found in the development of large-scale agrarian society and regimented labor, the rise of the state and ancient despotism, the emergence of economic class and acquisitive values, the triumph of patriarchy and warrior mentality - in short, in the evolution of the ancient system of social domination and the domination of nature. To put it in Buddhist terms, our true karmic burden, both personally and collectively, is our profound historicity and our deep materiality." (p. 28, emphasis added)

He calls for a "history of the ego," with

"its long evolution [...] in dialectical relationship with such institutions as patriarchy, the state, and the system of economic exploitation of humanity and nature, culminating in the present globalized society of transnational corporate capital, the nation-state system, the technological megamachine, and the mass-consumer culture. [. . .] Undoing the ego means undoing not only the psychical legacy but also the social legacy of that history of domination."

I would applaud this project, while recognizing that it's not an easy one and that this way of phrasing it sounds too singular, monolithic, and teleological -- too much, in fact, like Bookchin's. (I suspect that Clark may be aware of this problem, but that he had to wrap the article up somehow, making it relevant to the readership of Capitalism Nature Socialism). More accurately, I would say we need a "history of egoic conditioning," or something like Foucault's history, or genealogy, of the subject, but with a focus on the "lack" and the "other" to that subject -- which emerges differently under different historical circumstances. Writing that history/genealogy isn't easy because we can hardly get a god's-eye view unaffected by our own historical moment (as Heidegger and Foucault both recognized). Pieces of it can be found in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with their attempt to historicize the body, the psyche, and the polity all at once; in David Loy's Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack; in some of Teresa Brennan's work; and in Morris Berman's overambitious and prematurely abandoned (what happened to him?) project that peaked with Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West; and scattered in other places. (I haven't figured out yet how much of it can be found in Ken Wilber's integralist project; see Michael Zimmerman's and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens' Integral Ecology for a relevant offshoot.)

I want to end by coming back to my point about the complementarity of Deleuze and Derrida, or of what I would call the Deleuzian Buddha and the Derridean Buddha. It's often been noted, including by Derrida himself, that Derridean deconstruction shares much with the negative-theological traditions of Asian thought. As I've argued before, Derrida's focus on language limits his project. Nagarjuna does essentially the same thing, but his approach is more radical in that it calls for the deconstruction not only of the concepts that structure our experience, but of the experience itself. That's where philosophy becomes psychology (and, ultimately, what goes by the term "mysticism"). Varela, Thompson, and Rosch made much the same argument in The Embodied Mind, and the Varela-founded Mind and Life Institute provides a space for developing both the science and the psychology of this line of work.

Where a Derridean/Nagarjunian deconstructive project helps us see through the constructs we believe to make up the world (of individual ego and of collective/social ego -- the nation, the empire, the state, the body politic), an affirmative project such as Deleuze's -- and the life-affirming thread within Mahayana Buddhism, as Clark argues -- provides a necessary complement. I resist the idea that these make up two fundamentally opposed approaches, an "ontology of lack" versus an "ontology of abundance," as Tonder and Thomasson's Radical Democracy puts it. They are complementary, with the deconstructive and psychoanalytical (and here we need a lengthy excursus on Lacan, object-relations theory, and much else) taking away from the self/ego structure (social and personal) whilst the affirmationists (Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, Connolly, et al) provide means to orient ourselves within the space that has been vacated in its wake. Connolly's idea of "relational arts of the self" -- all those ways (ritualistic, psychophysical, et al) in and through which we can wean ourselves away from resentment so as to more fully embrace the earthy reality of the relations in which we find ourselves -- points to the work we can do individually toward this end. As inheritors of the spiritual traditions of millennia, with a growing knowledge of how the bits and pieces of those traditions affect us physiologically, psychologically, socially, etc., we have a lot to draw from (though, of course, I wouldn't suggest that traditions are there to be poached indiscriminately, without sensitivity to the political relations circumscribing them).

Enough, for now.

The photo above is of a decomposing whale carcass I came across on a beach near Tlell, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands), several years ago.

This particular piece is among the best attempts I’ve seen to apply Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka (Madhyamika) philosophy to environmental ethics, and it raises issues of relevance to ecophilosophy, the relational/objectological debate that featured here a little while ago, and eco-social liberatory practice. Since the article is only available through a personal or institutional subscription to the journal, I’m cutting and pasting some favorite passages into this post, interspersed with comments recontextualizing Clark's argument within the philosophical currents I've been exploring here -- specifically, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan/Zizek, and others. What follows isn't an in-depth philosophical analysis, and there remain many issues one could try to work out in the relationship between these different thinkers and traditions. I just wish to point out some of the resonances here. (And, sympathizing with Tim Morton's -- that Deleuzian anti-Deleuzian's ;-) -- recent lament about Derrida's burial beneath mountains of Deleuze, I'll briefly touch on their compatibility here, at least in a cursory way. They are both, after all, "philosophers of difference" -- as one might argue Nagarjuna is, too -- but I'll be the first to acknowledge that there remain large differences, no pun intended, between their philosophical projects.)

This goes against Graham Harman's (and others') argument that there is something more to any object than its properties, relations, and conditions. For Buddhism, there is nothing (no-thing) left over. But that is not to say that there is, in fact, nothing... There is the process-relational flux of what Clark calls "nature naturing," the continual coming into existence and passing away of the experiential bits of the world, all of which is quite real. The point is not that these things don't exist; it's that they can't be pinned down. They aren't things -- they are processes, and when we try to fix them in our minds using the tools we have for that (words and mental constructs), we fail. We can only follow them and respond, react, go along with, resist, interact.

Madhyamaka philosophy does not deny the reality of the world; to the contrary, it affirms it. I'll have more to say on that shortly, but the basic point I want to underline is that the "negative" and "deconstructive" project that Nagarjuna is best known for -- and I use the Derridean term here to indicate a strong resonance with Derrida's philosophical project -- goes hand in hand with an affirmative, "reality-based" project of the sort that, in current Continental philosophy, is best represented by Deleuze. I'll return to this point below.

In his introductory paragraphs, Clark quotes eco-Buddhist poet Gary Snyder saying that ‘‘the greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.’’ This becomes a running theme for the piece, and is why he turns the commonplace expression "becoming one with nature" into "becoming none with nature." It is becoming, but not becoming "one" "thing."

"According to the Buddhist analysis, we defend the ego through a futile quest to dominate a fugitive, ungraspable reality. Faced with the constant failure of this project, we experience both ourselves and the world around us as unsatisfactory and frustrating. Our own suffering leads us to inflict suffering on other human beings and other beings in nature, and to attempt to dominate and control them in pursuit of our impossible egocentric goals. Egocentrism takes on a multitude of forms, ranging from egoistic self-hatred and self-destruction to egoistic delusions of an expanded, universalized or eternalized selfhood." (p. 9)

This depiction of the human psyche as perpetually frustrated by the failure of its project to "dominate a fugitive, ungraspable reality" is very similar to the psychoanalytic analysis, including, and perhaps especially, a Lacanian one such as Zizek's (this despite Zizek's ill-informed comments on Buddhism). I love the term "fugitive reality"; if I didn't have a decent name for this blog already, I might be tempted to change it to something like that. Unlike psychoanalysis with its "talking cure," however, Buddhism has traditionally taken a multi-pronged approach known as the "noble eightfold path," with an important component (particularly for those delving further than the average person might) being meditation. On meditation and "nature", Clark writes:

"It may not be self-evident that meditation is the most immediate practice of the non-domination of nature. However, once one has given up the dualistic view of nature being something ‘‘out there,’’ it is apparent that all that appears to consciousness, that is, within the space of appearing, is nothing more or less than ‘‘nature naturing.’’ Thus, the meditative practice of refraining from clinging to the objects of consciousness means allowing this ‘‘naturing’’ to manifest itself without control or obstruction. This practice as the asymptotic approach to consciousness degree zero is the most immediate (that is, the least mediated) practice of the nondomination of nature." (p. 9, note 9)

Clark then develops the notion of an "ecology of emptiness", with its negative and affirmative poles:

"Thus, it is true that Nagarjuna’s dialectic is perhaps the most radically negative one in the history of world philosophy, but, as Thich Nhat Hanh points out, it has a positive function in relation to our experience and relationship to reality. Negation ‘‘has the role of breaking down concepts to the point where the practitioner comes to rid himself of all discrimination and penetrates undiscriminated reality. [...] Nagarjuna’s goal, like that of all Buddhist philosophers, is to save all human beings, and indeed, all sentient beings, from suffering. His negative dialectic is an attack on the confusion, ignorance and illusion that leads to suffering. It is also an attack on the destructive attachments that accompany this confused thinking and lead to grasping, violence, and domination. Nagarjuna dialectically destroys various forms of knowledge as objectification, reification, domination, and appropriation, so that in the absence of such forms, experience can open itself more fully to that which is experienced. [...]

"What is experienced in this process includes all that we conventionally call ‘‘nature.’’ This nature is seen as the realm of samsara, the endless cycle of change, while nirvana is seen as the awakened and liberated state. But awakening is awareness of precisely such unending change. It is awakening to the true nature, or non-nature, of nature." (pp. 13-4)

"Nagarjuna’s negative dialectic has the positive function of helping one experience nature as directly and openly as possible, free from conceptual distortions." (p. 15)

"It is ironic that Nagarjuna’s critique of the substantiality of things has sometimes been labeled ‘‘nihilistic,’’ for his central practical and theoretical project entails an explicit attack on nihilism. Nihilism for Nagarjuna means a negation of and loss of faith in reality and in nature. It is an attempt to escape from the real world, that is, the world of the phenomena in all their ‘‘suchness’’ or ‘‘thusness.’’ He attacks ruthlessly (that is, with ruthless compassion) all conceptual escapes from reality, all substitutions of illusions for the realities of experience. Indeed, such nihilism is identified as one of the two extremes that are forsaken by those who travel the ‘‘Middle Way’’ of the Madhyamaka." (p. 16)

Nagarjuna's critique of nihilism, that is, of the escape from reality, mirrors Gilles Deleuze's project of "restoring the belief in this world" (spoken of in Cinema 2).

"To say that all things are empty is merely another way of saying that they are dependently arising; that is, that they have no ultimate existence separate from the web of conditions of which they are a part. They exist only as conventional abstractions resulting from our processes of conceptualization. There are thus two levels of truth: the conventional (or relative) and the ultimate. Conventional truths are conceptual and verbal but play a quite real ontogenetic and phylogenetic role in view of their pragmatic value in both individual and species development. Our concepts are of instrumental value for a vast spectrum of purposes ranging from personal and collective survival and wellbeing to the control and domination of other beings. Identity and substantiality are therefore at best eminently useful fictions. Unfortunately, at worst they can be personally, socially, and ecologically destructive delusions." (pp. 16-7)

"Attachment to the illusion of a separate ego creates deep insecurity, because it leads one to be always haunted by the nothingness, or lack, that one can never banish from this constructed selfhood as it is actually experienced. Through attachment to the ego, we fall into a kind of bad faith in which these intimations of emptiness are repressed, projected, and denied." (p. 18)

This, again, is the point where Buddhism meets psychoanalysis. The key difference between Freud/Lacan/Zizek/et al. and Nagarjuna is that the former presuppose that this is all unavoidable -- the best we can do is to come to terms with the ego (etc.) process and try not to get too caught up in the delusional tricks it plays on us. This is effectively a kind of "middle way" position that squares rather well with Buddhism's "middle way" -- except that Buddhism provides what are arguably more effective tools (refined and developed into quite a diversity over many centuries) for deconstructing ego-attachment. There is a risk, of course, in any such efforts, and Buddhism as itself a historical phenomenon is hardly immune to that risk. The Buddhist tenet that ego-attachment is avoidable, expressed in the historical and institutional circumstances within which Buddhism has evolved, has often tended to develop into a "life-denialism," a kind of escape from reality rather than the affirmation of reality that Mahayana Buddhism (in particular) speaks so strongly of.

More to come . . .

(But do we still say "Save the Planet" these days? Can someone come up with a better three-word slogan?)

And then there's GP2 (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a.k.a. the Pacific Trash Vortex), and the artists who are out there now. This from Midway Atoll, near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre:

Folks, do something. First about greenhouse gases, then about the impending ocean aquacalypse, and global poverty, and everything else. Enjoying every minute of it while you're doing it.

The Speculative Realist blogosphere has been abuzz over the relationship between ontology and politics. Nick Srnicek's post at Speculative Heresy - and the many comments on it - provide a good entry point to this discussion. Nick has wisely redrawn his initial arguments in ways that represent the counter-arguments quite well, so that both (or all) sides seem smarter and more clear-headed coming out of the process than going into it -- which is what good philosophizing should be about.

The key, as he presents it, is to define politics in a viable and useful way: is it just about relations between humans and other humans (as he first assumed), or is it about ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ ‘the space of the im/possible’ (a Derridean formulation that needs more clarification, so see Nick's elaboration on it), or something else. Nick argues that "if we’re not careful, everything becomes politics, and nothing gets changed. Art becomes intrinsically political. Ineffective protests become political (rather than spectacle). Writing blog posts becomes political! Politics – if it is to mean anything, and if it is to escape the nihilism and apoliticism that Nina rightly criticizes – must have a narrower definition than these neutered conceptions of the political."

I agree with Nick that the definition of 'politics' should not be fully subsumed within the definition of 'art' (or 'philosophy' or religion' or 'science' or 'nature' or anything else) -- losing the distinctiveness of each of these terms renders the world less distinct and gives us a weaker grasp on things. But art, philosophy, etc. can still be political, and identifying overlaps between these categories can do important work for us.

Politics, to my mind, is about relationality -- ‘the way of being-with amongst entities’, ‘the act of deciding exclusion and inclusion,’ etc. -- but it doesn't just describe that relationality; it affects it. Something becomes political to the extent that it effects change in relations, and specifically in power relations -- that is, to the extent that it opens up, closes down, or somehow reorients or reconfigures capacities (one's own and/or others') for acting and for effecting change in the world.

This seems circular, but I'm trying to be consistent here with a process-relational ontology. To say that 'politics' is about 'effecting change in the ways change can be effected' is to render politics open in a world that is itself open. If voting cannot effect change, then it is not (any longer) political; or rather it is negatively political to the extent that it closes down the possibility for change, for instance, by creating the illusion that one is making change when one isn't. Politics, by this definition, consists of those adjustments, negotiations, and struggles by which we reconfigure power in the world (where power is not just 'power over' but power-to, power-with, etc.). This can be done through art or philosophy, i.e. through the expression or conceptual formulation of new or different ways of relating, to the extent that these then affect actual relations in the world. But it is not identical with them.

And it can be not only between humans, since humans aren't the only entities acting within a shared world. But humans have been pretty effective at changing others' capacities for acting on their worlds, so politics - cosmopolitics, in Stengers' terms - should today be about the nonhuman as well as the human .

Also published at Indications.

Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can't help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The piece both captures and fails to capture salient issues in this debate...

The author, Joe Brewer, gets it right in arguing that the video successfully applies the following "lessons" from cognitive science:

1) That our thinking works in visual and embodiment-based metaphors: Yes, the video employs the graphic physical embodiment of such metaphors portrayed through movement, gesture, dress, etc.

2) That it "makes climate change sexy": Yes, it does this through the way it elicits, solicits, and interpellates the viewer in a process of desire, a directional build-up whereby we want to "finish the job" of stripping the supermodel. It's left up to us to do that in our imagination. It's now in our hands, like a video-game joystick. (Take that where you will...) This point is made by Brewer's second ("sexy") and fourth (image schemas) arguments. (The latter, his "balance" and "source-path-goal" schemas, are a fancy way of saying that the metaphors are based in the capacities of the body -- for movement toward a goal, for balance, etc.)

3) That it's effective marketing. Indeed. At 160,000 views as I write, it's now had 50,000 more views since he wrote his piece.

But his point that it "deconstructs the fashion industry" is wishful thinking on Joe's part. It plays along with that industry, adding fuel to its workings. (Underwear ads are just as much a part of the industry as are ads for jeans and fur coats, and provoking viewers' desires to see naked bodies doesn't take anything away from clothing manufacturers' ability to sell those bodies clothes.) It adds to the normalization of a certain body image for women: all the models are unhealthily tooth-pick thin women, and all follow the script of how sexy women are supposed to look at their audience of unseen voyeurs. (And did anyone else notice that the more they strip, the more they look 15 years old?) Of course, there's nothing to stop others from doing alternative versions of this featuring non-white models, male strippers, transvestites, or anything else -- which is the argument of the pro-porn feminists, the green fashionistas, et al.

But another thing that strikes me is that the final take-home verbal message -- "If you want to see 350, our natural state, you have to get your politicians to act now" (emphasis added) -- is not conveyed in a visually or metaphorically effective way. When it comes to graphically embodying any kind of action (other than stripping, or being stripped), our cognitive (embodied, visual, metaphorical) mind is left at the door.

The first text comment below the video when I watched it was dagrimreefah's "This media cartel sure is doing a great job on all of you livestock" -- which is probably intended as a witty interjection of climate denialism, but there's a more general point that could be made with that. A quick glance at the rest of the comments tells us a few interesting things:

(1) Most of them refer to the physiques of the models (some of them, wisely, asking to see more -- not less clothing, mind you, but just more healthy flesh covering their bones);

(2) Of those that refer to the science of climate change, a large number deny it and/or politicize it with anti-Obama rhetoric (or with critiques of his compromises); and

(3) Not a single one seems to get the metaphor of "supermodels" being both the women displayed and the ways -- the only ways -- in which we actually know about climate change itself and the role "350 parts per million" plays in it.

Climate change models are highly sophisticated, complex pieces of science that deserve a bit more discussion. Riffing on that, however, would take away from the project of making hegemonic ("common-sensifying") the message about climate change. But I would argue that part of making that message broader is playing up its science (just to raise awareness of how we know about climate change) and, secondly, playing up its ethics and politics: its potential (and already claimed) victims, its costs, and the vested interests on both sides ("old energy" on one, new entrepreneurialism on the other).

Okay, I'm asking too much of a simple 90-second ad. But discussing the ad seems useful, even if it contributes to the viral spread of something I'm ambivalent about...

I loved Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, so I've compiled a list of some useful online resources about the film, book, and author (mostly for my own sake, so I can easily access them if and when I might get around to writing more about it). Just to summarize what I like most about the book and the film:

- Its existential realism: play, fun, mischief, friendship, love, loss, fear, loneliness, change, beginnings and endings... all there, in a kind of holistic mix that brings them all into reflective perspective.

- Its extended-family cameraderie/communalism: Max's "wild things" are a social network of flawed but hearty characters, kinda like reality. And they like to pile on top of each other.

- Its valorizing of the imagination as a place to play (and work) things out, to figure out one's emotions & responses to things, a place for practice (in the sense of preparing for reality, but also in the Buddhist sense of practice being everything).

- That they eat their kings (at least up until Max comes along). Kings need to know their place!

- Max's performance is great.

- Finally, there's the East European Jewishness of the characters (or call it their Italianness, their Slavicity, whatever) -- I mean that quality of being emotionally and bodily there, present, expressive, close to the surface but resonant in the depths, which can be a troubling thing for those not used to it, but which can be lovely. In the film, this is in the the facial, bodily, and emotional expressivity of the acting (if animatronically enhanced puppet/costume/creatures can be said to act). There's a soulfulness to these characters that stays with you long after Max leaves the island.

"The creatures spend their days and nights ambling, flopping in and around the forest and seaside (and into each other), averting direct confrontation with dropped sidelong glances and turnings away, shyly or defensively signaling affection or hurt in breathy, nasal, barely enunciated speech. [...] Jonze seems to have spent the same obsessive energy on getting James Gandolfini to give him the right quietly nasal delivery of lines like "Oh, hi" or "What?" as D. W. Griffith and his team of artisans expended on the reconstruction of Babylon for Intolerance."

I realize there are at least two critiques of the story worth considering. The first is the narrative/psycho-political critique that sees it as reintegrating the child's rebelliousness into a new compliance with the adult order (he does come home, after all, with a seeming willingness to conform). As Kenneth Kidd puts it in Making American Boys, the story makes wildness utterly safe; it's a story of "managed wildness." But my hunch is that this reading overplays this "safeness," since kids do have to grow up (i.e. integrate into the adult world) and both the book and the film, in their effects, valorize the wild things in a way that renders them available for the child as a resource to be drawn on as he or she grows up. (Or am I too much a product of my ego-psychology-as-taken-for-granted time? What would Deleuze & Guattari say? Work with the wild things, become-wild, but not as a prelapsarian reversion back to childhood; rather as a synthesis and integration.)

The second is the post-colonial critique that claims the story reiterates the colonialist trope of the white boy-man adventurer journeying out to tame the wild and (racially) colored jungle primitives and all that. Pushing this interpretation too far, though, would probably sound silly even to the least Euro-American of audiences -- but see Shaddock below for a good case of this argument.

Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak

Richard Gottlieb on WTWTA

Fitzsimmons et al visual literacy analysis
(I think that analyzing Jonze's film using their methodology would show some interesting differences between the book and the film; e.g., in the film Max is treated less like a "king" and more as an equal, a "buddy" or interesting newcomer related to playfully and with interest, but not with too much deference)

Shaddock article (postcolonial critique of the story)

Sendak interview with Bill Moyers

Newsweek interviews

Maria Lassen-Seger's thesis on metamorphs in childrens literature