Ecological Antagonisms

A talk by Rupert Read I recently intended at UEA proved very much “something interesting to think about” in the words of Twin Peaks’ Gordon Cole, largely in the sense that it illustrated some of the antagonisms within ecological discourse. It also, need it be said, made some very important points regarding the reality of the catastrophe we find ourselves within and the value of ecological thought, and I want to make it clear that I saw much value there, even if what I say here is largely points of disagreement that it raised with me.

Something that became apparent to me during the lecture was the absence of a specific term. For whatever reason, despite openly talking about it at various points, referring to a “system”, and even towards the end mentioning the “means of production” the word Capitalism failed to appear. Despite everything being talked about within the lecture being some facet of the complex system of effects we may designate as the capitalist order, it was never directly references, becoming something of an elephant in the room even as Read referred to the scale of necessary change necessary to fight ecological collapse.

On key points I agree absolutely, the sheer scale of climate catastrophe, the need for large scale change, but in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but constantly question the notion of an environmentalism removed from anti-capitalism as something that is as deeply flawed as anti-capitalism devoid of environmentalism. Read made some interesting observations on how we may or may not be governed by nature in the sense that nature is or isn’t something we are part of, trying to negotiate a position between those two points and arriving at a point where nature both is something that opposes us and that includes us. For me this lined up with my inclination towards the fundamentally incomplete and ruptured order of reality, and gave me some extra impetus on route towards an idea of re-weirding the structures of reality that inform us.

Re-weirding in this context sounds very much like a slight diversion from the term re-wilding which was discussed much here, the idea of returning the land back to a percieved natural state, and something that actually I find quite interesting and promising as a practice, having grown up within the countryside myself and witnessed the sheer ravaging of the land that is wrought by industrial agriculture and other practices. As I see it, Re-weirding the landscape is a natural bedfellow to this, something the aim of which is to excavate the antagonisms within nature, hint at the underlying and terrifyingly alien forms lying beneath the idyllic surface of a country meadow. During the Q&As Read endorsed a kind of romanticism, hinting at ideas of the sublime, of a kind of spiritual veneration of nature found in some indigenous cultures. This struck me as something that could quite easily be extrapolated into a process of re-weirding, but actually strangely at odds with the statement heard elsewhere in the talk about de-alienating ourselves and, as it were, getting back in touch with nature. In truth what this process seems to suggest is a different state of alienation, or a re-alignment of perception, rather than a simple re-assertion of affinity.

Highly interesting to me was mention of James Cameron’s Avatar, mentioned with regard to it being one of the highest grossing films of all time and containing a clear ecological message. My immediate thought was back to Mark Fisher’s Terminator vs Avataran essay in which Fisher presents Avatar as a wholly more contradictory film, one that is far from presenting a simple ecological program, or even an effective critique of techno-capital. From the piece;

“James Cameron’s Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut. We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of the very cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.

And if there is no desire to go back except as a cheap Hollywood holiday in other People’s misery – if, as Lyotard argues, there are no primitive societies, (yes, the Terminator was there from the start, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent); isn’t, then, the only direction forward? Through the shit of capital, metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, its cyberspace matrix?”

This highlights my main criticism of the talk, something I might call “eco-primitivism”, the desire to return back to a state close to nature, live in communion with it, something that contains within it some deep contradictions I think Fisher effectively excavates. If we are to return to this state of nature, to re-wild ourselves so to speak, the only way we seem to be able to do so is via the very tools which are currently facilitating ecological disaster, the technologies of late capitalist subjectivity, the libidinal drives of advertising, the digital spaces of the internet, the “shit of capital”. This is an issue that I think is going to come more and more into focus as we proceed into collapse, that we are already past the event horizon as it were of capitalism, and that the only way to truly overcome the hugely damaging modes of production, the systems of ecological destruction, is via the very means in which we are already engaged. This is not to say that we cannot to some extent pay more heed to the world around us, but it does suggest a deep contradiction that we must work past rather than against.

“Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families and villages. Hands up, furthermore, those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture, rather than in fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure.”

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