Prompt possibility one: In the readings for this week, how do unspoken ideas about race, class, gender, or some other some other social structure (nation? geographic location? language?) undergird our conceptions of nature and the environment? What was the most surprising way this week’s readings prompted you to rethink nature?
More open-ended blog prompt: Respond to an interesting passage in one of the readings that you would like to discuss in class.
In “Queer Ecology,” Timothy Morton argues that environmentalism should not aim to elevate nature but situate the human in the field of the nonhuman. In fact, he reinterprets ecology, so that it possesses decentering powers:
Ecology is the latest in a series of humiliations of the human. From Copernicus through Marx, Darwin, and Freud, we learn that we are decentered beings (Derrida, Animal 136), inhabiting a universe of autonomous processes. Ecological humiliation spawns a politicized intimacy with other beings. This intimacy is a polymorphously perverse belonging (and longing) that doesn’t fit in a straight box—an intimacy well described by queer theory when it argues that sexuality is never a case of a norm versus its pathological variants. Such intimacy necessitates thinking and practicing weakness rather than mastery, fragmentariness rather than holism, and deconstructive tentativeness rather than aggressive assertion, multiplying differences, growing up through the concrete of reification. (277–278)
The intellectual reference points here might seem exaggerated but they serve a point. For Morton, ecology demonstrates that 1) the cosmos does not revolve around us (Copernicus), 2) material circumstances determine our worldviews (Marx), 3) biological evolution explains our current state (Darwin), and 4) our personalities are not singular, stable entities (Freud). In other words, we inhabit “a universe of autonomous processes” outside our control. This “humiliation,” in turn, has political implications that should push us in nonesssentialist directions. “Weakness,” “fragmentariness,” and “tentativeness” become values. Yet, it’s queer theory that allows Morton to move ecology away from “masculine Nature” (as he writes elsewhere in the essay) to this position. As this passage argues, queer theory reveals the ways in which binaries are never just binaries. Ecology, environmentalism, and nature, therefore, are not opposed to civilization. Instead, they can open up new avenues to practice intimacy with the nonhuman subjects and objects that we’re closer to than we realize.
Prompt #1
The nations of Africa, Central and Latin America and most of Asia are known as the Global South,
These nations face poverty, human rights violations, and environmental abasements. (p4) Intro -Nixon refers to the people who live in these places as disposable people. People in these areas are subjected to environmental discourse and slow violence.
Slow violence in the Global South have made me aware to what is going outside of the U.S. From the wild life preserves, sanctuaries and white flight in South Africa being nostalgia for a way of life that no longer exists. The game wardens at the preserves not seeing Ndebele for went to the lodge as a customer and equal he was to them a disposable person. The world’s rich wanting to dump its detritus in Africa not caring that it will cause disease and sickness. Knowing that Africa can use clean water, sanitation and medicine, (p48) The Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster the Gov’t could have given its people the non-radioactive iodine pills preventing disease and death but withheld it for a number of days.
Slow violence is it racism or just abjection to the poor. (p6) Kristeva” such lives are based on exclusion”.
Currently Brazil is building and preparing its country for the 2016 Olympic by spraying for the Zika virus, building an Olympic village housing, while it’s live in squalor and (CNN Health 2/12/16) “nothing being done about the City’s bay and lagoon are still contaminated with dangerous bacteria due to unprocessed sewage.
Powers of Horror essay on Abjection by Kristeva (p4) Abjection, on the other hand is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady; a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you”. Everything has a plan the rich are planning the future of the world by dividing it up and deciding who and what is viable, what stays and what goes. I referred back to Kristeva while reading these passages and have a better understanding of abjection.
Open Ended Prompt
William Cronin’s statements in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” feel bold, but surprisingly he does seem to back them up convincingly. The idea that he’s talking about rethinking nature while opening with the reminder that people find it to be the “best antidote to our human selves” (1) is perplexing at first. Especially given that he recognizes what would be the criticism of making that statement. Although he further goes on to say that his “criticism is in this essay is not directed at wild nature per se … but rather the specific habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness … what we ourselves mean when we use this label” (5). What I appreciate in a lot of readings is when a historical aspect is brought in to compliment the theoretical. Other readings have made it clear that waste is a broad term in different contexts. That wilderness was once considered waste (synonymous with barren or desolate) is an interesting thought to wrap one’s head around even now that I know how waste doesn’t need to necessarily always carry a positive or negative connotation. Aside from the history of the word, Cronin mentions a topic that I find very interesting which is the frontier. In storytelling, the American frontier in the Old West has long been associated with nostalgia or an idealized life and as is bound to happen with many genres, there is eventually a revisionist move towards deglamorizing and often focusing on truths about the genre’s origins that were initially ignored (the same could be said of science-fiction where space and technology are depicted as wondrous, dangerous or both). Historically, I know of the frontier as a place where society was being established or re-established. Law and behavior were seen as different and “racial energies” (as Cronin puts it) were not a transparent issue both with say how the immigrant workers that built railroads were treated or the treatment and discussion around Native American ownership of the land. “Among the core elements of the frontier myth was the powerful sense among certain groups of Americans that wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism” (4). That the word and idea of “frontier” could also carry just as much along with the word “waste” is an interesting discovery. I think of how hikers who walk the Appalachian trail think about what they do as both sport and also as having a spirituality. That cities or “city-living” was seen as artificial and effeminate or modern and safe. That race and gender also have their own association with frontier. Like with waste, Cronin uses frontier to show how loaded of a word it can be.
Prompt 1: In “Queer Ecology,” Timothy Morton argues that Butler’s call for multivocal gender performativity already exists in nature; that across species, heteronormativity is neither inherently “natural” nor even the norm. I was surprised and fascinated to see Butler’s Foucauldian approach laid out alongside ecology and Darwinism, and to see their easy affinity and possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue. Many such calls for a conversation between the humanities and the sciences seek to legitimate the former by grounding it in the latter (with the implicit assumption that the humanities approach lacks such grounding on its own). But Morton has a different take. He writes “It’s not that ecological thinking would benefit from an injection of queer theory from the outside. It’s that, fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology: queer ecology” (281). Rather than staking one approach as the foundation for the other, he calls for a true dialogue between ecology and queer theory, one that takes into account their shared interest in “intimacy with other beings…in a different key” (273).
Open-ended blog prompt:
In the readings for this week, I found William Cronon’s discussion in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” very interesting and thought-provoking. In his writing, he tries to explain the relationship between civilization and wilderness, stating that there is not much difference as the society imagines it. He emphasizes how people separate themselves from nature by idealizing it and thinking of it as something distant and remote, not considering themselves as members of the natural world. Therefore, he claims that wilderness is a product of civilization and human creation, “and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made” (Cronon 1).
Although many years ago in the English language wilderness was categorized as “waste”, today it is considered a sacred place that is often fought to be preserved by environmental activists. However, what was once thought to be dangerous and savage is nowadays almost beyond price. Cronon extends his analysis of wilderness to biblical references, and argues that wilderness was always a place of sacredness and “where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God” (Cronon 2). With the rise of civilization, the wastelands have been converted to human use, making them desacred and linked to Satan.
Nevertheless, humans are not that far away from wilderness. Even though civilized society seems to neglect a trace of wildness, at the same time it longs for desolation and savage. If we are so satisfied with our current civilized environment, why do we long so much to preserve even a little bit of wildness?
In Homo Sacer, Agamben states that, “[t]here is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (8). And so, for Agamben, politics is a process or state that requires a sustained play between what the individual is and what he or she is not (i.e. “bare life”). That is, politics is where the hybridity of identity is recognized and negotiated.
In “Queer Ecology,” Timothy Morton argues that “[a]ll life-forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and outside at every level” and that “the boundary between life and nonlife is thick and full of paradoxical entities” (274 & 276, respectively). And so, I wonder if, by bringing Morton into conversation with Agamben, we can forge a theoretical framework that takes life and politics to be foundationally linked. Rather than thinking of politics as something that is superimposed onto life, we might begin to think of politics as being ingrained into the basic foundations of life.
One possible advantage of adopting such a view is that it might help discourage persistent naturalization of life and life-processes that we often see in public discourse. Discourses, such as social Darwinism (and its present reincarnations), often assert that politics and social life are determined by supposedly “natural” processes of biological development. By playing with the order and suspending the idea that life is antecedent to politics, we might be able to more firmly contest these types of claims. This could potentially open new spaces for thinking of and enacting alternative forms of politics – forms of politics designed specifically for the cultivation of more equitable forms of life and community.