Slavoj Žižek writes an article riffing on the book by Kohei Saito, (Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, 2017) to make a point about biological-robotics as ecosystem tools, but also makes some points useful for discussing environmentalism. (Note that this doesn’t endorse his comments identifying Trump as a “centrist liberal”, best left for a different diary.)
For Slavoj Žižek “What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.”
What is the meaning of radical denaturalization of nature. It doesn’t mean that we don’t value our relationship to nature or our position as its ecological stewards. We instead should take more seriously the need for direct activism in making revolutionary and global structural change to end the climate crisis. Decentering scientific culture is conjoined with the critique of its political economy.
The formation of new land creates new political problems unlike the remarcation of existing land, it’s no different than adding gold to the monetary system now that fiat money rules. So many want to re-naturalize a financial system that has long been denaturalized, by lobbying for a return to the gold standard. That “naturalization” is only a tactical profit motive, however nostalgic for certain “Gold Bug” capitalists, but popular depending on how much of your less diversified wealth is held in metals. New capital instruments (bitcoin) and methodologies (MMT) have emerged much like the human-hybridizing of nature itself.
Yet the “preservation” aspect of conservation ideology, often reified in aspects of deep ecology serves reactionary purposes as the need increases to reverse the current climate crisis. Preservation that would impede remediating the crisis must be balanced against the need for scientific solutions that serve specific radical political—economic objectives. Neither eco-fascist whining nor neoliberal commodity markets will help us consume our way out of the crisis. Micro-robot labor still is about extraction of value.
New concepts of the Anthropocene have framed the climate crisis since it is about “whether the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.[19] because of the influence of human behavior on Earth's ecology.
A democratic Anthropocene is under attack by a variety of political movements, largely traditionalist, others cynically psychotic in its sadopopulism.
There are rifts and riffs as a “unconscious socialist tendency” because Marx allowed that he might be a hippie, however like a 19th Century utopian socialist, the material realities obviated such dreamlands. The metabolic rift, that "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism", that “rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist production and the growing division between town and country” is obvious. No amount of gentrification, suburban sprawl, or exurban growth will ameliorate it.
Jedediah Purdy’s sense of the Anthropocene makes the difference between the neoliberal and the democratic structures necessary.
The Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural. Ultimately, as I shall argue, it makes nature a political question. In this respect, the Anthropocene marks the last of three great revolutions of denaturalization: the denaturalization of politics, of economics, and now of nature itself. First came the insight that politics was not an outgrowth of organic hierarchy or divine ordination but instead an artifice—an architecture of power planned only by human beings. Second was the recognition that economic order does not arise from providential design, natural rights to property and contract, or a grammar of cooperation inherent, like language, in the human mind. Instead it, too, is formed by artificial assignments of claims on good and useful things and by artificial means of cooperation—from contracts to credit to corporations. Both politics and the economy remain subject to persistent re-naturalization campaigns, whether from religious fundamentalists in politics or from market fundamentalists in economics. But in both politics and economics, the balance of intellectual forces has shifted to artificiality.
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Even wilderness, once the very definition of naturalness, is now a statutory category in U.S. public-lands law. Designated lands are managed intensively to preserve their “wilderness characteristics,” which is not to say they look anything like what might have been in 1491, let alone before human contact. Climate change is the emblematic crisis of the Anthropocene condition, turning the world’s weather into a joint human-natural creation: there is no returning to an undisrupted pattern of weather and climate.
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In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a global market launders inequality through voluntariness. It conflates the hard questions of how to use the world’s resources with the general economic questions of how to allocate scarce and valued resources, and it offers answers through the dispersed choices of the market. In its “progressive” form, it incorporates “prices” for “ecological goods and services” and therefore ensures, for instance, that carbon emissions have an economic cost to the emitter and wetlands a value to the owner who preserves them.
But even the progressive managerial model maintains two powerful constraints. First, it accepts vast inequality as its starting point, which it mainly does not question. Second, because its key mechanism is individual choice within the economic frame, it elides the political choice among possible economic architectures. Because each economic order is, in turn, a blueprint for a world that human activity will help to create, this elision of political choice means that the neoliberal Anthropocene is the death of possible worlds.
Tomorrow’s Democratic Anthropocene
The alternative, a democratic Anthropocene, can be forecast only in fragments. To reflect on it is, in part, to reflect on its nonexistence. Indeed, though the need for a democratic Anthropocene is increasingly urgent, it may be impossible to achieve because there is no political agent, community, or even movement on the scale of humanity’s world-making decisions.
bostonreview.net/...
There are some fanciful notions, even if the Capitalocene (sic) serves to make a point for science as having a relative autonomy not so different than T.S. Kuhn’s community of knowledge. We may have issues with an assertion that science might be memory-free in its hegemony — it’s still about structures.
DEBATES
WHERE IS THE RIFT? MARX, LACAN, CAPITALISM, AND ECOLOGY
Slavoj Žižek
This apparently abstract point has crucial consequences for how we deal with our ecological predicament. Kohei Saito sees the root of the ecological crisis in the rift between the material metabolism of our lifeprocess and the autonomous logic of the reproduction of capital, which poses a threat to this metabolism. In the course of the book, Saito admits there are previous rifts:
“despite the appearance of long-term sustainable production in precapitalist societies there was always a certain tension between nature and humans. Capitalism alone does not create the problem of desertification ex nihilo, /…/ it transforms and deepens the transhistorical contradiction by radically reorganizing the universal metabolism of nature from the perspective of capital’s valorization.”(250)[ii]
But the overall scheme remains one of linear progress in alienation. That’s why Marx was also in his late years more and more interested in an “unconscious socialist tendency” in the persisting remainders of pre-capitalist forms of communal life and speculated that these remainders could directly pass into a post-capitalist society. (For example, in his famous letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx plays with the idea that, maybe, Russian village communes could function as places of resistance against capital and establish socialism without going through capitalism.) Pre-capitalist forms maintain the more of intimate ties of the human with the earth. Along these lines, the title of the first chapter of Saito’s book – “Alienation of Nature as the Emergence of the Modern”(25) – clearly locates the “rift” in capitalist modernity: “After the historical dissolution of the original unity between humans and the earth, the production can only relate to the conditions of production as an alien property.”(26)
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The ultimate ground of this rift is that, in capitalism, the labor process does not serve our needs; its goal is to expand the reproduction of capital itself, irrespective of the damage it does to our environment. Products count only insofar as they are valorized, and consequences for the environment literally do not count. The actual metabolism of our life process is thus subordinated to the artificial “life” of the reproduction of capital.
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In capitalism, the rift under discussion here gets more radical not just in the sense that the metabolic process between humans and nature is subordinated to the valorization of capital itself. What made the rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism and modern science: capitalist technology, which triggered radical changes in rational environs, cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists have already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from Anthropocene to Capitalocene. Apparatuses based on science enable humans not only to get to know the real, which is outside the scope of their experiential reality (like quantum waves); they also enable us to construct new “unnatural (inhuman) objects which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature (gadgets, genetically modified organisms, cyborgs, etc.). The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only “symbolize nature”; we, as it were, denaturalize it from within.
It is this dimension of truth that eludes science: in the same way that my jealousy is “untrue even if its suspicions are conformed by objective knowledge, in the same way that our fear of refugees is false with regard to the subjective position of enunciation it implies even if some facts can conform it, modern science is “untrue” insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity. It is important to bear in mind that this “social mediation” is not an empirical fact external to the scientific procedure; it is, rather, a kind of transcendental a priori which structures the scientific procedure from within. So, it is not only that scientists “don’t care” about the eventual misuse of their work (if this were the case, more “socially conscious” scientists would be enough). Instead, this “not-caring” is inscribed into its structure, coloring the very “desire” that motivates scientific activity which is what Lacan aims at with his claim that science doesn’t have memory. How so?
In the conditions of developed capitalism, a strict division prevails between those who do the labor (the workers) and those who plan and coordinate it. The latter are on the side of capital: their job is to maximize capital’s valorization, and when science is used to enhance productivity, it is also constrained to the task of facilitating the process of capital’s valorization. Science is, thus, firmly entrenched on the side of the capital: it is the ultimate figure of knowledge, which is taken away from laborers and appropriated by capital and its executors. Scientists who work are also paid, but their work is not at the same level as laborers’ work: they, as it were, work for the other (opposite) side and are, in some sense, the strike-breakers of the production process… This, of course, doesn’t mean that modern natural science is inexorably on the side of the capital: today, science is needed more than ever in any resistance against capitalism. The point is just that science itself is not enough to do this job, since it “has no memory,” since it ignores the dimension of truth.
So, we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
Kohei Saito, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press 2017.
[ii] An exemplary case of a rift in premodern societies is provided by Island: it was fully forested when Norwegians arrived there in 8 century, and soon afterwards it was totally deforested.
thephilosophicalsalon.com/...
A small example of the border-boundary problem as denaturalizing by using a maritime territory dispute:
Aside from the origins of Gojira’s (1954) comment on the active nature of the tectonics, a specific example of the issue of borders and boundaries is at work in the maritime political economies that are often punctuated by military action in the East Asia seas.
Undersea troughs are both boundaries and new land, altering political and social boundaries in disputes over islands.
Is the trough a boundary or it is (also) an incidental depression, which still doesn’t address that a “margin” is also a boundary, indeed two boundaries or edges. This is a useful if problematic trope.
Boundaries and borders are at work with the Senkaku islands between Okinawa and Taiwan. The histories of exploration and appropriation define the dispute, often relying on the inaccuracies of centuries-old illustrated maps.
The existence of the back-arc basin complicates descriptive issues. According to Professor Ji Guoxing of the Asia-Pacific Department at Shanghai Institute for International Studies, The Okinawa trough in context of back-arc basins of the world.
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China's interpretation of the geography is that
...the Okinawa Trough proves that the continental shelves of China and Japan are not connected, that the Trough serves as the boundary between them, and that the Trough should not be ignored ....[67]
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Japan's interpretation of the geography is that
...the trough is just an incidental depression in a continuous continental margin between the two countries ... [and] the trough should be ignored ....[67]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Ji, Guoxing. (1995). "Maritime Jurisdiction in the Three China Seas," p. 11 ; Sibuet, Jean-Claude et al. "Back arc extension in the Okinawa Trough," Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 92, Issue B13, p. 14041-14063.
Borders are denaturalizing, much like the appropriation of Crimea by Russia.
Most prominent is the understanding of borders as a process; that is, borders result from processes of bordering that differentiate among places, peoples, and jurisdictions. This emphasis on process highlights borders as active forces and resources in international and domestic political, social, and economic relations. It also highlights the contingency and variability in bordering practices both across space and time. Moving forward, this makes plain that borders and bordering practices are undergoing substantive changes, both symbolically and materially, amid globalization. But it is equally important to emphasize that the changing nature of borders does not suggest that they are evolving in a uniform direction, much less simply vanishing. Instead, borders are likely to exhibit greater variability and contingency in the future, making their study even more important for understanding an expanding range of issues.
www.oxfordbibliographies.com/...
On the “denaturalization of economics”
reviewing Margaret Schabas . The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2005). ISBN 0-226-73569-9
In the early 1990s, a number of scholars made strong claims about connections between economic discourse and natural science. Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor (1990), Philip Mirowski's More Heat than Light (1990), and Charles Clark's Economic Theory and Natural Philosophy (1992) all presented histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic thought that stressed its indebtedness to models of the physical world. Margaret Schabas revives that conversation, but also revises its fundamental premise. She agrees that political economy began, in the eighteenth century, with analogies to nature. Wealth was studied as a physical phenomenon; the laws that governed it were both analogous to, and continuous with, the laws that governed physical nature. But Schabas argues that a "denaturalization of the economic order" set in toward the middle of the nineteenth century, in the work of neoclassical economists, and a few late classical ones, notably J. S. Mill (16). In fully developed neoclassical theory, prices are no longer imagined to measure quantities of labor, or any other physical quantity. They are instead psychological effects: they reflect "the distinct calculations of different minds" (15). Only when economic life has been thus psychologized and separated from the physical world, Schabas argues, does "the economy" become visible as the distinct entity we now imagine.
Interpreted narrowly as an observation about theories of value, this argument would not be altogether surprising. It has long been recognized that classical economists (Adam Smith, J.-B. Say, David Ricardo, Karl Marx) sought to explain wealth by tracing value back to the physical agencies that produced it. Neoclassical economists dispensed with that realist theory of value, interpreting price more simply as a point where the supply and demand curves intersect. It is not controversial to say that economic theory was "denaturalized" in this sense. The denaturalization thesis becomes surprising largely because Schabas generalizes it, so that it applies not simply to theories of value, but also to styles of reasoning and conceptual models that pervade economic discourse as a whole.
The first half of the book shows how heavily eighteenth-century thought about wealth depended on analogies to the physical world. The book begins by surveying eighteenth-century science broadly, but with a particular emphasis on analogies between human commerce and the "oeconomy of nature," for instance, in the works of Carl Linnaeus. The second chapter discusses François Quesnay and other French economists. Quesnay is best known as the founder of a "physiocratic" school of economics, which held that all wealth was produced by nature. Pushing beyond this theory of value, Schabas cites Vernard Foley, Loïc Charles, and Paul Christensen to show that Quesnay was also strongly interested in physiology and in theories of subtle fluids. Physiocracy thus not only appealed to nature as a source of value, but modeled its account of human behavior on the agencies of physical nature. Schabas advances a similar argument about The Wealth of Nations. Though Adam Smith moved toward a labor theory of value, Schabas persuasively demonstrates that he imagined labor itself as a natural agency. For instance, Smith's notion that labor "fixes and realizes itself in some vendible commodity" depends not just on Locke but on an analogy to the "fixed" agencies of eighteenth-century chemistry (90). Smith also imagined nature as a laborer, holding that agriculture was more productive than other employments, because "in agriculture, . . . nature labours along with man." David Hume presents a slightly more complex case for the book's thesis, since his economic thought is less systematic than Smith's, and since he explicitly criticized universal explanations founded on natural philosophy. But Schabas is able to find many instances where Hume's acquaintance with natural science may have helped to shape his thinking about money.
muse.jhu.edu/…
The Denaturalization of Economic Thought
Ted Underwood, Eighteenth-Century Life, Duke University Press,Volume 33, Number 1, Winter 2009. pp. 71-73
Modern economics is all about human agency and nature and its search for genuine laws is gone completely. Schabas’s central thesis and the main theme repeated throughout the book is that the history of economic thought is a history of how a body of thinking about “wealth” became both secularized and denaturalized. More important and perhaps more sensationally, Schabas regrets at least one part of this development. Where certain neoclassical economists see “progress” in the elevation and appreciation of human agency, Schabas sees only nonsense and pretentiousness.
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...By the time of Marshall’s Principles (1890), economics had morphed into a study of economic phenomena that were entirely the result of human agency and institutions, and nature and natural processes no longer played much of a role. Detached from nature and natural processes, the economy is capable of producing mountains of “utilities” — the sky is the limit.
As a result, professional economists are mostly engineers out to “control” the economy with clever mathematical models. With the denaturalization of economics completed, there is a sharp loss of interest in “economic laws.” Models are not used to determine what the fundamental underlying laws of economic development are and how they operate. On the contrary, models help rationalize economic data and subsequently control those processes natural or otherwise that have given rise to the data themselves. Economists have become the social engineers of the modern world (p. 157; cf. Hayek 1955).
It wasn’t always this way of course. There once was time when “the economy” that emerged in scientific discussion was tightly linked to natural processes.
eh.net/...
(all bolding is mine)