Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)

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Deep Ecology and Postmodernity: Making space for conversation / Chris Drinkwater

 

The problem and its significance

 

Remove the world around the struggles, keep only conflict and debates, dense with men, purified of things, you will have the theatrical stage, most narratives and philosophies, all of the social sciences: the interesting spectacle we refer to as "cultural". Whoever says where the master and the slave are struggling?

Our culture cannot stand the world.

Michel Serres [1]

 

<1> Let me state as bluntly as I can the oppositions with which I shall be working. The following are some deep ecological assumptions [2]:

1. That things, somehow, have meaning in themselves (i.e., intrinsic meaning).

2. That things matter in and for themselves (i.e., intrinsic value).

3. That things are connected, in a whole, of which 'we' are inextricably a part.

4. That others (human and non-human, organic and inorganic) are absolutely Other from the apprehending human subject, in a way that resists any explanation, measurement or commentary.

5. That our knowledge of the above brings us face to face with our absolute ignorance and our mortality. Through such encounters with limits, human beings can begin to acknowledge the non-human in ways that resist the latter's reduction to the status of resource.

<2> Some countervailing assumptions of postmodern cultural analysis would be:

1. That nothing, neither word not thing, has meaning in itself. Meaning arises out of the play of difference between inherently unstable signs. Meaning is shot through with ambiguity .

2. That what matters and what doesn't matter is (over)determined within the field of power-discourse-knowledge.

3. That everything is connected and falls apart in the same moment. Postmodern cultural analysis as a critical practice uses the imbrication of things in order to lend itself to their falling apart (that is, to the deconstruction of universal constructs, fixities of meaning, reifications).

4. That alterity is a mark of discourse, an excess, that arises out of the necessary limits of language.

5. That knowledge claims are always situated and provisional, marks of social construction, rather than of representation, with no central agency. We would do well to admit this state of contingency, as a great deal of human injustice, as well as misplaced hopes, have arisen out of beliefs in, and claims to, Truth that may be accessed by language, but is independent of language. There is nothing mysterious about this impossibility of an original ground of truth. It is simply a corollary of our involvement in the field of discourse. From this point of view, claims such as the one above, about confrontation with absolute ignorance and mortality, are liable to sound rather grandiose. They may threaten a repetition of religious expectations, of salvation even in finitude. They sustain the belief that there is something we are ignorant of. The whole sense of postmodernity is that there is no such 'thing'.

<3> I hope that by the end of this paper to any reader, these antinomies will appear less vicious and uncompromising in relation to one another. It is not that I want to modify either perspective, in concession to the other. I do not seek a common ground, in this respect. To the contrary, I seek to keep the oppositions alive, implacably opposed to one another, yet in a way that sustains not hostility, but a tensional space.

<4> I begin with the fact of ecology's virtual exclusion from cultural studies. Cultural studies are centrally concerned with issues of meaning, subjectivity, objectivity and knowledge. They attempt to describe their production, conditions and complex structural effects. They are particularly interested in effects of inclusion and exclusion: for instance, "What is a legitimate object of attention within a particular discourse?" Why do cultural studies not attend to ecology? Why is negligible attention paid to a discourse and cultural movement, which are so challenging to dominant values and ways of life? I suggest that the omission is not accidental. Cultural studies find it difficult to think ecological discourse, because the latter implicitly questions cultural studies' own limits. It is a questioning which will be felt throughout this article. At this point I shall suggest only that these limits have to do with an institutionally conditioned resistance to engaging with the natural sciences, and more deeply still, suspicion of 'nature', as such. Intent upon resisting any naturalistic reduction - every performance as performance is context-specific, culture-specific - cultural studies is impelled to construct and continually reconstruct boundaries between the cultural and the non-cultural, or to absorb non-culture into culture. Nature becomes the lowest common denominator - a sort of cultural entropy. The disappearance of nature is achieved.

<5> With regard to postmodern cultural analysis, the ethical and political perspectives of localization contrast starkly with ecology's presentiment of global catastrophe. These differences of focus are perhaps reflected in the wide divergences, real or apparent, between the discourses of ecology and postmodern cultural analysis. For instance: one promotes the need for 'world view', the other considers that the only role of a philosopher, in the words of Richard Rorty, is to 'decry the notion of having a view while avoiding having a view about having views' (quoted in Harvey 56); one longs for healing, the other practices 'necrophilic decadence'(Hebdige); one seeks 'foundations' and contains an important sub-discourse called 'deep ecology', the other practices 'contrived depthlessness' (Jameson); one seeks re-enchantment, a rediscovery of meaning in nature, the other insists that meaning is only ever discursive and human; one is integrative, the other is disintegrative; one tells a story of human beings in and of nature, the other urges us to embrace human realities and to acknowledge that we cannot step outside our culture, language and particular human perspectives, needs and feelings [3].

<6> What can such opposing perspectives possibly have in common? How do I imagine that they might have anything to say to one another? Do they cohere in the same world? I suggest that they do, and the fact that they do signifies something about the social, political, cultural world we are living in. Let me name some of the intriguing cross patterns: each places a very high value upon difference, a profound acknowledgement of Otherness; each tends toward a radical political pluralism; each values complexity and resists reductionism; each is pursuing ways of dissolving the hierarchical dualisms associated with Enlightenment rationalities; each questions the core modern value of progress through and towards Reason, Truth and ultimate Freedom; each focuses attention upon the limits of any possible knowledge, the necessity of uncertainty; each is reforming the category of subjectivity and carrying out historically informed criticism of constituted subjectivities; each is projected toward the dissolution of 'Man'; each has a great deal more to do with whole structures of thinking and feeling, than with expert arguments, conjectures and refutations.

<7> The term, "structure of feeling" is Raymond Williams' (Long Revolution 64). Williams may be found particularly helpful in thinking about what it is that is the object of cultural analysis. He relates "structure of feeling" to a notion of social group or "collective subject" which unites individuals and social forms, in a way that reduces neither to the terms of the other. What Naess ("Shallow and Deep") calls "the deep, long range ecology movement," which would include much of ecofeminism and all those who experience non-human beings as valuable in themselves, and not only for humans, might in Williams' terms be called a "significant community, a way of seeing and being and acting in the world" (Problems 30):

And then to be able to give an account of this precise community, a community of form which is also a specific general way of seeing other people and nature, is to approach the problem of social groups in a quite new way [4]. For it is no longer the reduction of individuals to a group, by some process of averaging; it is a way of seeing a group in and through individual differences: that specificity of individuals, and of their individual creations, which does not deny but is the necessary way of affirming their real social identities, in language, in certain characteristic situations, experiences, interpretations, ideas (29-30).

A cultural studies interpretation of ecological consciousness, understood in these terms, will describe this "group," this "significant community," in such a way that the collective is taken to include "in a fundamental way, those personal realities which will otherwise be relegated to a quite separate area" (29). There is "in a final sense," a "unity, of the most individual and the most social forms of actual life," which the separation into disciplines is unable to encounter. The individual and the social are implicated in one another.

<8> Resistance to the reduction of "personal realities" characterizes Williams' style of cultural analysis. Equally, the significant community which includes Earth First! activists and some ecofeminists, but isn't restricted to these groups - the community of which these groups are maybe exemplary, is definitively characterized by attention to personal realities of embodiment, connectedness with organic and non-organic being, a sense of belonging to a community which is wider than a human community. There are other important elements to the structure of feeling, but for now, the essential point is that it is a deeply affective personal reality. This is not to be reduced to "subjectivism," but the very real personal constitution of a world. That is why phenomenology appeals to many ecological writers [5]. Tensions then develop, the pulling away in suspicion by ecological writers who are intent upon positioning the person. But while such critics may question the status of an affirmed personal reality, they too acknowledge that person and reality are intricately related, so that to question a certain metaphysical construction of reality involves construing the person differently. It is not, that is to say, that personal realities do not count for such critics, but that they question the privileged status accorded to some realities over others.

<9> Williams analyses structures of feeling primarily through literary texts. "Great" texts are those which dramatize

a process, the making of a fiction, in which the constituting elements, of real social life and beliefs, were simultaneously actualized and in an important way differently experienced, the difference residing in the imaginative act, the imaginative method, the specific and genuinely unprecedented imaginative organization (Problems 25).

He calls this process "possible consciousness" (Problems 23) which, in another place, he relates to "emergent" cultural forms (Writing 150-165). What emerges is a "significant response," a "particular view of the world: an organizing view" (Problems 23). What I want to do is to describe emergences of such experiences as they appear, not only in great literature but in mundane eco-philosophy and in everyday lives. This might be imagined as a democratization of the limit situation, or of limit consciousness. Ecological consciousness opens onto different possible worlds.

<10> The question remains: Which forms of knowledge (structures of thinking and feeling) are likely to contribute to the world's transformation in ways that I, and some of those with whom I stand, desire? (The question leaves behind for the present where our desires come from). The question is not about the causal effects of discourse. The contingencies and overdeterminations are too many and too complex for these to be addressed. It relates, rather, to discursive (complex structural) effects. Postmodern cultural analysis offers tools for, at least, considering these: To describe, for instance, the constitutions of certain subjectivities, certain objectivities, and their potential deconstruction, succeeded, perhaps, by the liberation of unspecifiable power effects. Think of "power of nature" in this way - not as something external, either magical or explicable by modern science, but as what constitutes and emerges from relationships, including relationships between human and non-human beings [6]. The discourse that emerges from relationships of "withness" (nearness, proximity, solidarity, affinity) is a discourse of power with, power among and power to. This is a kind of power that Foucault neglects. It is a power of participation in place of domination.

<11> Is it feasible to elaborate a sense of ecological connectedness in terms that can be understood and embraced by postmodern cultural analysis? Most people who are applying discourse analysis and other tools of postmodern cultural analysis in the area of "natural" environment appear to be doing what Barry Smart in Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies claims critical sociology should do: "The aim of a critical-interpretive sociology is to challenge prevailing regimes of truth and associated relations of power," recognizing "the implications of the unavoidably reflexive relationships between social analysis and social life" (80, 81). But my immediate interest concerns "prevailing regimes of truth" insofar as they may appear to impregnate postmodern cultural analysis itself. In particular, I resist a habit of excluding from consideration even the possibility of relationship between the human and the non-human not wholly written/determined by cultural forms. I resist the infinitising of culture. And this is very difficult for me, because I am trying to think outside of one prevailing paradigm (culturalism) whilst avoiding a leap into its traditional Other ("naturalism," "essentialism").

<12> I assume that , in some way, the discourses both of postmodernity and of ecology are articulated in response to the failure, or the limits of Enlightenment. One must not ignore the very material signs of those limits; resources depletion, species annihilation, global warming and all the publicly available indications of danger to and from 'the environment'; the demise of communism; the evident failures of modern medicine, schooling, city planning, centralized economic planning, policing; most of all, perhaps, the failures of Empire, the revolt of the colonized, the threat of the 'Third World', international terrorism and the new fundamentalisms, barely acknowledged demographic fears, which are forcefully expressed in the repression of refugees and migrants.

<13> Both ecological and postmodern discourses are sometimes said to retreat from "reality," from history, towards idealism and utopianism on the one side, and on the other, towards nihilism and cynicism. These criticisms need to be considered in their specificity. But generally, it can be said, each of these discourses is fictioning new truths [7], stretching or transgressing some limits, affirming others, questioning common sense and moving toward an openness which is neither upward nor downward, but a different space.

 

Definition of terms

Ecology

 

A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and for affection to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole Nature in its beauty.

Einstein [8].

 

<14> Provisionally, I use the sign "ecology" to mean:

(a) Ecological consciousness and unconsciousness; a culturally mediated experience, problematic or paradigm; a disparate production of discourses, unified by attention to whole, complex systems of relationships, the questioning of center and command-obedience structure (Ogilvy 283-5), mutual dependency and interconnectedness, conditions of equilibrium and disequilibrium in all systems, including persons, forests and the planetary biosphere.

(b) Ecological ethics, aesthetics and politics. These value complexity, diversity and sustainability. They value non-human beings for themselves, as ends, not as means.

"Environmental ethics" is an important sub-discourse of ecology. Its key problematic of non-anthropocentrism (sometimes called "biocentrism" or "ecocentrism") involves arguments for or against intrinsic value in nature and the criticism of utilitarian ethics.

(c) Ecological sensibility. Ecological ethics, caring about nature, depends upon a felt relationship with other, non-human beings, such as to evoke concern and the desire to protect. This felt relationship may take many forms, e.g.:

• a sense of living in nature
• identification with living processes, such that the ego-self experiences them as a whole, of which it is a part
• identification with humanity as universal steward and protector

(d) Ecological ontology is articulated to all the above senses of ecology, insofar as they involve an understanding or assumption of what a human being is.

<15> All the above relate to non-human natural systems as ethical ends. "Ecological sensibility," and "ecology" in general, may be distinguished from instrumental environmentalism, which focuses upon managing natural resources for human ends. However intertwined environmentalism and ecology may be in the practice of environmental activists, the distinction is an important one in several respects. First, the field of ecology as a structure of feeling and thinking is much wider than that of environmental organizations or activism. Public manifestations are in any case only the occasional and visible signs of social movements that, for the most part, operate in diffuse and "invisible" ways (Melucci 70-73). Secondly, ecology as I am using the term is much wider than any set of activities that could be understood as "environmental action" or "environmental politics." It is not only that Green politics has a broader scope than environmentalism - which it does (Dobson 205-13). Ecology as the cultural phenomenon that I take it to be includes a proliferation of networks and practices that have very little to do with environmentalism as it is conventionally conceived. Thirdly, ecology typically defines itself in opposition to environmentalism. The latter is associated with a human centered, instrumental, managerial, problem-solving consciousness of a very modern kind. Thus Neil Evernden considers that "by basing all arguments on enlightened self-interest the environmentalists have ensured their own failure whenever self-interest can be perceived as lying elsewhere" (10). Evernden concludes that "environmentalism, in the deepest sense, is not about environment. It is not about things but relationships, not about beings but Being, not about world but the inseparability of self and circumstance" (142). This is closer to our sense of "ecology" than it is to anything that is normally understood as "environmentalism" [9]. Elsewhere, Evernden contributes a statement of ecological "insight," to which the editors of the influential Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Devall and Sessions), "return again and again":

The really subversive element in Ecology rests not on any of its more sophisticated concepts, but upon its basic premise: interrelatedness. But the genuinely radical nature of that proposition is not generally perceived, even, I think, by ecologists. To the western mind, interrelatedness implies a causal connectedness. Things are interrelated if a change in one affects the other. So to say that all things are interrelated simply implies that if we wish to develop our "resources," we must find some technological means to defuse the interaction. The solution to pollution is dilution. But what is actually involved is a genuine intermingling of parts of the ecosystem. There are no discrete entities. . . . Ecology undermines not only the growth addict and the chronic developer, but science itself (Evernden, cited in Devall and Sessions 48).

More politically specific, Dobson describes what he calls "ecologism," in distinction from "environmentalism." Ecologism is characterized chiefly by opposition to values and lifestyles associated with affluent industrialism / post-industrialism. Especially, it opposes Enlightenment values, assumptions and myths, such as human centeredness and belief in progress through science and reason - in short, a Promethean world view. Ecologism attempts to shift the burden of persuasion onto those who would defend the dominant post-industrial consensus (Dobson 10). But the very popularity and co-option of environmentalism by the main political parties serves to keep ecologism off the agenda.

<16> There is an aspect of Dobson's characterization of "ecologism" or of "Green political thought" that I should like to focus on, as it marks a theme that recurs in this paper. Dobson refers to Goldsmith's distinction between the "real world" and "the surrogate world" - the first comprising such things as trees and topsoil, the second, things that we make or fashion (98, citing Goldsmith 185ff.). Ecology is conservative. Greens require, Dobson suggests, that the onus of justification should be upon those who want to change the natural world. The "privileging of the real world over the surrogate one" amounts to "one of the most profound aspects of green motivation" (99). Dobson's perception hits the mark, with which any significant conversation with postmodernity must engage. For postmodern cultural analysis, in its militations against mystifying naturalisations, tends toward suspicion of the natural. In so doing, it risks culturalistic reduction. It is unable to contemplate an Other of culture as such. Against the grain of postmodern cultural analysis, the kind of ecology to which I aspire seeks to preserve such an Other. and the space through which it can become not an excluded, alien and reified 'Real', but an ever present, ever absent source of being, a sign, not of fracture, but of connectedness and belonging. The sense of fundamental relatedness emerges out of actual, concrete relationships, that are not wholly determined by cultural forms, with both human and non-human beings. Ecology is not a set of beliefs, but a structure of thinking and feeling for which relationships with nature and non-human beings are a primary experience. Such relationship, I suggest, is both socially constructed and, in a sense, "given." It is recognized. It is a response to something actual.

<17> Many contemporary social theorists refer to "the end of nature." Ulrich Beck, for instance, writes of "the end of the antithesis between nature and society. ... Nature can no longer be understood outside of society, or society outside of nature" (80). Nature is "neither given nor ascribed". It has become "a historical product, the interior furnishings of the civilizational world" (80).

The central consequence is that in advanced modernity, society with all its subsystems of the economy, politics, culture and the family can no longer be understood as autonomous of nature. Environmental problems are not problems of our surroundings, but - in their origins and through their consequences - are thoroughly social problems, problems of people, their history, their living conditions, their relation to the world and reality, their social, cultural and political situations. The industrially transformed 'domestic nature' of the cultural world must frankly be understood as an exemplary non-environment, as an inner environment, in the face of which all of our highly bred possibilities of distancing and excluding ourselves fail. At the end of the twentieth century nature is society and society is also "nature"' Anyone who continues to speak of nature as non-society is speaking in terms from a different century, which no longer capture our reality (81).

Here is no troubling sense of "return," no indication that the internalization of nature may be incomplete. Nature as an arena beyond the grasp of the social is truly ended. That is not to say that "society" has control over nature. It has precisely as much control over nature as it has over itself, no more, no less. What remains is politics. Beyond the political, there is nothing. The political has become the new foundation, the only "given." Notwithstanding the respects in which the details of Beck's argument may be challenged by other social theorists, in this he represents the common sense of cultural and social theory. How is one to begin to think outside of this space without appearing regressive? The problem is not internal to theory. It is the problem of postmodernity, of living in a world without depth or distance, the cultural world of late-capitalism, "a completely interdependent World system in which nothing or nobody is external to its boundaries" (Melucci 185). How does one challenge this self-consciousness of the World system? In fact, this is the task which postmodern critical theory sets itself, without imagining that it has any other resource than to think that world from "inside." In this sense, it continues the movement that modernity began. Nothing is sacred. The whole world is "standing reserve" (Heidegger, Question 24). "Non-externality" is also the condition in which "man encounters only himself" (27). It signifies the hyper-inflation of culture, which Jameson envisages as an "explosion":

a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself - can be said to have become "cultural" in some original and as yet untheorized sense (Jameson, Cultural Logic 87).

<18> It is "the real" to which ecology responds. How can postmodern cultural analysis countenance such a claim? It is not just that ecology "believes" in "the referent." The "authenticity of the ‘real world'" (Dobson 98) has all kinds of connotations: of innocence, "origin," "natural state." Yet, from a less suspicious perspective, these may appear as recognition, respect, relationship, regard for Otherness. Rippling through the discursive spaces of ecology is an ambiguity between gravitation toward original innocence and a sensibility that is both more simple and more complex than nostalgia. It is simple in its response to an other, but its strategies of preserving spaces for that other are complex and overdetermined. Nostalgia is an easy target for a hermeneutics of suspicion. In my effort to "justify" ecology, I shall tend to neglect these more regressive manifestations; but let me admit here that at times they have driven me to near despair. Yet in equal measure I am wearied by a cultural analysis that cannot see beyond the signifier. But these are only temptations, not definitive boundaries. Astonishingly, the worlds of ecology and postmodernity open upon one another.

 

Postmodern cultural analysis

 

Postmodernity is . . . no more (but no less either) than the modern mind taking a long, attentive and sober look at itself, at its condition and its past works, not fully liking what it sees, and sensing the urge to change. Postmodernity is modernity coming of age . . . looking at itself at a distance rather than from inside, making a full inventory of its gains and losses. . . . Postmodernity is modernity coming to terms with its own impossibility; a self-monitoring modernity, one that consciously discards what it was once unconsciously doing.

Zygmunt Bauman (272)

 

<19> "Postmodernity" or "postmodernism"? I am wary of the term "postmodernism" because of its associations with aesthetics and popular culture, when I am primarily interested in postmodern philosophy and socio-cultural theory. But I do not intend to debate whether "modernity" has ended and "postmodernity" begun. Some writers employ the terms "postmodernity" or "postmodernism" to describe a phase of historical development. Thus Jameson uses "postmodernism" in an attempt to understand the logic of cultural production associated with capitalism's "third stage" - late capitalism. But when I use the term "postmodernity," I am not attempting to theorise a totality. I "bracket" the question of whether it is useful to think of such a totality. "Postmodernity / postmodernism" may describe the cultural logic of late capitalism, but "postmodernity" as I use it is:

• a structure of feeling about whose generality I wish to make no estimation

• a loosely definable critical attitude, not discontinuous with "modern" suspicion

• an attitude, ethos, or cultural mood that finds expression in various cultural and political forms, including the politico-cultural practices of social movements.

<20> Lyotard describes postmodernity as "a mood, or better a state of mind" (cited in White 5). It is a widespread mood, not confined to cultural critics. It often offers itself as an "impertinence" (a term that White borrows from Michael Shapiro). "The rationale for this tone is to shock or jolt the addressee into seeing the contestable quality of what he takes as a certainty." White suggests that "impertinent" strategies have a "cost." They sometimes neglect attending to the more diffuse "mood" or "state of mind" of "postmodern modernity":

It is the mood and the attempts to turn it in an affirmative direction that constitute the most subtle challenge to modern ethical - political reflection. The mood is partially anxious and melancholic: postmodern reflection knows we really are "homeless." But such reflection also often manifests the feeling that somehow there is something affirmative emerging, something to be celebrated. (6)

<21> White's characterization of postmodernity, and especially his turning to Heidegger for the nearest expression of that mood, is germane to my purpose. However I would question how far Heidegger, in the later writings, understands "homelessness" as a permanent state - as an ontological condition. Just possibly, White's reading of Heidegger marks a difference between a postmodern mood that "knows we really are homeless" and an ecological mood that knows we really are (always already) at "home" - and is able to offer its own readings of Heidegger to suit [10]. Another way of phrasing our problem emerges. How can ecology begin to convince postmodern cultural analysis that it is authentic, not merely nostalgic? And how can postmodern cultural analysis begin to persuade ecology that it can be responsible to the earth and its inhabitants?

 

Paths to articulation

 

I think what we can best offer at such times is to facilitate conversations between different ways of thinking, being especially careful to search for and include those voices that sound foreign to or critical of our "native ones."

Jane Flax [11]

 

<22> Postmodernity and ecology may be characterized according to their respective reflections upon modernity. Modernity is Janus faced. It is a "conjoining of the ephemeral and fleeting with the eternal and the immutable" (Harvey 10). It signifies, on the one side, fragmentation, individualism, division of labor, expertise, bureaucratic rationality, alienation from the social product, atomism; and on the other, "totalizing metanarratives," technological effectivity, reification of the Subject, hubris, utopian imagination, universal Reason, exportable abstraction, Progress.

<23> Postmodern questioning of modernity focuses upon the latter group of significations, to the neglect of the former. Can postmodern pluralism, uncertainty, anti-foundationalism, the valorizing of difference, constitute anything other than a continuation of modernity? How is fragmentation to be resisted, diversity supported? This question seems to call for something like a postmodern project of renewal. Critical analysis may be necessary, but not sufficient for such a becoming. And perhaps, just as modernity may be conceived as two-faced, postmodernity must similarly construct itself. Neither side is more "privileged" than the other. We do not have to choose between them. Perhaps ways may be sought, and found, in which they may support and complement one another. Such a strategy might constitute a response to the usual kinds of criticism of postmodernism, for its complicity with late capitalist heterogeneity and its inability to provide a normative basis. It may also serve to hone ecology, balancing its universalism with skepticism.

<24> The motif of the Same and the Other will recur in the conversation between ecology and postmodernity. In some sense, ecology yearns toward the Same. We are immersed in the world, participant, one-with, implicated in a whole that we can never describe as a whole. To do so would be to take a point of view from outside of it - the God's eye view of modern science - or a certain modernist ideology of science [12] - the "spaceship earth" view, that is not so much the astronaut's gaze as a figure in which the astronaut figures [13]. It is as Wittgenstein stated the paradox of theories of language, that led to his late eschewing of theory: we are in language. Postmodern cultural analysis and ecology find themselves on the same ground at this point. Where they tend to differ, perhaps, is in their respective responses to immanence. Ecology feels at home on earth - feels earth to be our natural home.

<25> Thus my primary concern is with ways of thinking and feeling ecos - home - and their relation with contingency, uncertainty and finitude. Associated terms include, in addition to the above, enfoldment, belonging, being-in-the-world, connection, love, identification (mimesis), Self-realization, conatus (Spinoza), wholeness, holism, Gestalt, reciprocity, synergy, participation, enactment, appropriation, place, dwelling, dialogue, solidarity, affinity, power with, situatedness, organicism, responsibility, community, tradition, complexity, fluidity, liminality. Antonyms include distancing, representation, objectivity, universality, abstraction, "World as picture" (Heidegger "Age" passim.), domination, dissociation, atomism, fragmentation, separation, resource, instrumentality, impersonality - all of which terms may be said to characterize modernity.

<26> It is my intention to "save" ecology's intuition of homely connectedness: not to oppose it to postmodern regard for the other, but to hold on (always hanging on) to a sameness that is at the same time an otherness. Nature is Other and we are of nature - "nature looking into nature" (Thoreau, cited in Worster 78). We are not outside. The relation between signifier and signified is conventional, arbitrary, wholly "inside" culture, as it were. But there is nothing conventional, arbitrary, invented, about the human immersion in nature. The purest proof of this is at the same time a condition of our historicity: this is, our essential temporality and our mortality. How we are born, how we die, these are matters of culture. Birth and death are events that do not occur independently of their cultural constitution. However they exceed their culturally constituted character. Words cannot grasp them. That is what makes these events awful, and occasions of massive signification and cultural performance.

<27> In the birth-life-death cycle we share our temporality with the whole being and becoming universe, or what is sometimes called "the creation." I would like to think that this word might be recuperated, with all its connotations of wonder and the sacred, but without the mythical entity of the creator. It seems to me that "ecological spirituality" is striving towards a sense of wonderful and sacred creation without center, will or subject [14]. Ecology disseminates God, whilst transcending the notion of God as Subject. Implicit in such a view is this: Human history is not the whole. It is but a skin on the surface. That, perhaps, is the holistic heresy. Yet postmodern cultural analysis itself remains locked into a holism that is a holism ofthe social, spatialized as that whole may be.

<28> The problematic of the One and the Many re-emerges in cultural analysis as a problem of the recovery of history. Thus Chantal Mouffe declares that "what is needed is a new kind of articulation between the universal and the particular" (36). Ernesto Laclau hints at a "totalizing practice of a liberatory kind . . . that is unified or totalized in relation to a horizon" (81) - that is, not to a foundation. And what Jameson calls "cognitive mapping" is a kind of "totalizing" activity which attempts (although it never completes the task) to understand postmodernism as the historically formed totality that it really is.

<29> This subsection heading is "Paths to articulation," and so far I seem to have considered only obstacles on these paths. Yet if we can stay with the idea of impossible articulation between the one and the many, the same and the other, it will lead us to an articulation - always tense, always ambiguous, never resolved into a simple unity - between what I have called the two "faces" of postmodernity. What may assist us in the enterprise is an approach to postmodernity and to ecology that regards them as practices, specifically, practices of distancing and identification. Attempted conversations often founder on disagreements over conflicting representations. Postmodern cultural analysis in its many forms attends to what language does , for instance, to subjectifying and objectifying effects. In other words, postmodern cultural analysis has a performative inclination. The performativity of representations is a feature remarked upon by many postmodern cultural analysts. [15] The performative "enacts or produces that which it names" (Butler 23). Performativity connects, crucially, with the impossibility of distance - of the subject from the object, of culture from nature, of fact from value, and the temporal distancing of theory from practice. Performativity connotes that each term is implicated in the other.

<30> "Impossibility of distance," "implicatedness" - are these not signs for holism, and for ecology? Ecology, according to this understanding, implies precisely that one cannot "see" the whole, for one is part of it, and no static part, but active within it - implicated. The main focus that I seek to clarify is the meaning of this complexity for postmodern cultural analysis, and for ecology. Perhaps even to suggest that postmodern cultural analysis and ecology, despite appearances, may not be distant from one another. Ecology, perhaps, is an aspect of what Eyerman and Jamison (45-65, 66-93 and passim.) call the "cognitive praxis" of postmodernity, a strand which, more than any other, draws out unresolved tensions and ambiguities within postmodernity. Our conversation is not between distinct discourses. Rather, it is my intention to break down their apparent externality to one another. For undoubtedly, each tends to deny the other in itself, even "Others" the other, for example, as "essentialist," or as "relativist."

<31> If distance is impossible, it is nevertheless necessary. That is the human predicament. Language is founded upon operations of spatial and temporal distancing - what Derrida calls "différance" or "arche-writing"(62, 128 and passim.). Self-consciousness is already consciousness of self in separation from the Other. It chases but never finds original unity. To be human is to live in language is to be separate. But these terms, "separate," "distant," "other," "the same," are blunt tools. Sharper implements are required, with which to differentiate these distances, these samenesses. One such tool may be suggested by the term "implicated."

<32> Pragmatically, which forms of distancing shall I endorse, practice myself, and which shall I eschew? Perhaps this is a way of asking which practices of reason, reflection and criticism are most probably conducive to "a better world." Barry Smart maintains that

Contrary to Marx's thesis on Feuerbach it is not a question of interpreting the world or changing it, but rather of recognising that the forms of knowledge we produce, the interpretations we generate, necessarily contribute to the social world's transformation (Postmodernity 78).

Smart's assertion corresponds to my thesis concerning distance and its lack. Ecological consciousness is not just a set of theories about the world, and is not reducible to a set of pronouncements or "perspectives." It is, rather, a "structure of thinking and feeling." As such, it is a cultural pattern, not a set of psychological states [16].

<33> How is ecology as a structure of thinking and feeling to be approached, and how permitted into dynamic, tensionful dialogical relation with postmodernity? A clue to our task may be found in Weber's suspicion of Western rationality, to which Smart refers:

Specifically we might note the recurring difficulty which rational and methodical forms of life have had in satisfactorily answering questions about "ultimate presuppositions," foundations, or grounds; the continuing problem of meaning in a "disenchanted" modern world; and the accumulation of signs that the modern pursuit of mastery over all things through the continual refinement of calculating and purposive forms of rationality seems destined to remain unfinished, incomplete and frustrated. (Smart, Postmodernity 87)

Smart observes that the latter factor - rationality's evident impossibility of completion, suggests a limit also to its "disenchantment" potential. Postmodern cultural analysis, as I understand it, is very much about exploring and enhancing this limit, these fracturings, interstices, spaces of freedom. It strategically suspects modernity's claims about itself. Postmodern cultural analysis does not interest itself in the first two factors of disenchantment in the above quotation - the suppression of questions about ultimate presuppositions, and about "meaning." Ecology, on the other hand, constitutes a direct response to these aspects of modernity; an insistent attention to grounds, "deeper questions," values, meaning. A direct interrogation of instrumental rationality, compared with postmodern cultural analysis's indirect guerilla tactics. If scientific rationality "has simply offered 'artificial abstractions' which are unable to 'teach us anything about the meaning of the world'" (Postmodernity 88, quoting Weber), ecology aims to rectify this lack, partly by way of the production of "a new metaphor." [17]

<34> Thus postmodern cultural analysis and ecology may be conceived as addressing different aspects of modern rationality, and so, of complementing one another. If that is too neat, the schematization may at least prove helpful (and corresponds to my schematization of the "two faces" of modernity and postmodernity). Ecology can appear, and often is, simple and direct in its response to modernity, in comparison with postmodern cultural analysis (and postmodern fictions) which, rather, enhance the vulnerability of modernity by multiplying its own inherent tendencies to self-reflexivity [18]. Where postmodern cultural analysis works on the "internal contradictions" of rationality, ecological philosophy is more directly confrontative, less ambiguous, in its interrogation. For these reasons it can appear, and sometimes is, rather pious, insufficiently ironic, perhaps rather too sure of its own ground.

<35> Postmodern cultural analysis typically interrogates the assumption that beneath surface appearances may be found a real essence, a "latent," "hidden" or "deep" structure or meaning, awaiting recovery. It is perhaps an understandable suspicion that deep ecology assumes such an essence, but does it? It undoubtedly seeks the truth of the latent, by which I mean not structures of reality - which, Naess (Ecology 57, 60, 67) says, are in any case of the world, not in the world - but assumptions, norms, values. It does not accept the mechanistic or functional model of the human. It declares the possibility of personal knowledge, which is, I suppose, a "tacit knowledge" [19]. This implies no unmediated access to "the real," conceived as object (external, silent, outside language). It assumes the possibility of philosophical reflection. It assumes that values (norms) are real and have real effects - but are not for that reason objective. Neither are they subjective. They are not discovered, in the way that facts may be discovered. They are, in some sense, realized. "Intuited" is a term much used by deep ecologists, and much suspected by deep ecology's opponents. A parallel may be drawn with Heidegger's notion of truth as "disclosedness," "disclosure" or "bringing to truth" (Being 256-273; Basic Writings 113-141). Such realization is powerful enough to inform behavior. Indeed, realization of fundamental values is already an activity of the body, a movement towards, a visceral response. It is immediate in the way that hunger is immediate.

<36> What is realized in this way is not a belief. What occurs, perhaps, is the emergence of a different temporality, a living from moment to moment, the acceptance of flux, and the rejection of driven goal orientation. Such a way of being does not entail an absence of goals, but a more skeptical, questioning attitude to them, and a refusal to allow projected futures to subsume presents. This is not to turn "given" experience into a "foundation," for no structure is erected upon its rocky solidity. Quite the reverse, experience, being mutable, fluid, ungraspable, may be said to be structured like a language, in différance. That is to say that in the process of realization of fundamental values, "ultimate norms" (Naess Ecology 42-44), the subject is not discovered, but dispersed. Deep ecology is sometimes accused of individualism because of its accent upon "intuition" and personal meaning. I consider such a criticism to be fundamentally misplaced. Deep ecology shares with postmodernity a critical attitude towards an individualistic value orientation, specifically the pursuit of utilitarianism, dominated by instrumental-technical reason in the service of personal goals. Deep ecology is mostly about promoting certain shared ends and values, always acknowledging that living, lived meanings are rooted in the person. It distrusts the category of experience (Naess "World"), insofar as "experience" sets up an opposition between subject and object of experience, reifying the Subject and distancing the Object. Depending upon experience for its self-definition, the Subject permits experience to congeal, so that the sum of past experiences is taken to define the self, which then selects and interprets every new experience according to its self-understanding. This is the very egoistic pattern of relating that deep ecology offers to subvert.

<37> Considering its commitment to fundamental norms and meanings, it seems that deep ecology would find it hard to accept the postmodern claim that all norms and meanings are contingent. Consider, however, what the claim amounts to. "Contingency" is in binary opposition to "necessity." It connotes finitude, accident, chance - and meaninglessness, insofar as meaning is associated by tradition with permanence, the Platonic forms, unchangeability, transcendence, Spirit. Thus impermanence, appearances, mutability, immanence, body, all occupy subordinate places in the oppositional series of which contingency operates as a marker. To recuperate meaning and contingency, the inevitability of these oppositions must be questioned. Ecological philosophy is implicitly, sometimes explicitly, committed to ambivalence, uncertainty, and contingency: a sense of unfathomable complexity, the impossibility of technocratic management, the unpredictability of consequences, the ubiquity of relations, the figure of wilderness. Animate "nature" is not docile. It does not conform to human systems of power/knowledge.

<38> Without aiming at an exhaustive analysis of these signs, their genealogies and ambiguities, we do need to be aware of some of the different assumptions and investments surrounding them. Let us consider, finally, "whole" and "sense of whole." The ecological Self, one articulation of a sense of whole, assumes first of all the possibility and desirability of identification [20]. Beyond that, the form of the whole is barely specified in the discourse of deep ecology, although Naess attempts several elaborations. In so doing, he links the ecological Self to traditions, but he doesn't prescribe any of these traditions. He does strongly suggest that a choice must be made between inhabiting a philosophy and being a functionary, acting without responsibility and according to rules of which I am ignorant and which are not of my making. Or rather, he makes the (Socratic) claim that we cannot avoid living a philosophy. The choice is between doing so consciously and skeptically, or behaving to order. A philosophy we live by, in the deep ecological case, an "ecosophy," is a whole together with its implications and correlative assumptions and hypotheses. It is a whole in several respects: (1) It is systemic. Each part is internally related to every other part; (2) It is not separate from its proponents' thoughts, feelings and actions, that is; (3) It is founded upon "ultimate premises" that are always normative in character and the specification of which can only ever be more or less precise. Naess gives the name "precisation" to the dialogical process of specifying norms (Ecology 42-43).

<39> In The Pluralist and Possibilist Aspect of the Scientific Enterprise, Naess suggests strategies against a "unity of outlook, a 'scientifically' sanctioned conformism," which develops not out of intrinsic qualities of science as such but out of "pressures upon the scientific enterprise as a whole" (129). At any rate, freedom of choice, he argues, must be based in radical pluralism of research programmes. Some research programmes are of a philosophical nature, and seek to identify fundamental metaphysics. Naess favors rich diversity of personal and cultural philosophical frameworks or "total views." Plurality of research programmes also relates to the multiple and irreducible ways in which science can be practiced; the languages of the field ecologist and the particle physicist are not necessarily inter-translatable. How freedom of choice increases, he explains by the concept of "precisation" [21]. Precisation of a term (such as "energy," "mass," "matter") eventually leads to the articulation of a system, which always presupposes a philosophical system (explicitly or implicitly). "Reasons" are only effective within the terms of a system. There is no point of adjudication outside of a system. Between sufficiently different philosophical systems, there is incomparability. "If one starts making an exposition of a theory more and more precise in a definite philosophical direction, what is gained in preciseness is lost in philosophical neutrality and comparability, and vice versa" (Aspect 130).

<40> So we need to continuously switch between levels of precisation:

When I recommend that norms be made more precise, nothing more is meant than a point - form, fragmentary or theme-restricted formulation: we erect a fragile lattice of norm and hypothesis relations which at every turn merges with the hazy sea of implicitness. The fragmentary nature of statements must be shamelessly and unreservedly admitted or we sink into the quagmire of sloganeering political thought, and veil inadequacies through the agency of words like 'democracy' and 'freedom'." (Ecology 43).

Any attempt to locate a universal point of reference for comparing frameworks is thus like "blowing up a balloon from the inside" (Naess, "Reflections" 22).

<41> Naess's elaboration of his own ecosophy, which he calls "Ecosophy T"[22], is, precisely, a precisation of the implicit norms and factual beliefs upon which he acts. But he is intent upon not imposing a system. Agreement (and solidarity) may occur around a necessarily imprecise "common platform." An example of a common platform statement is this:

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes [23].

Platform statements are more precise than ultimate norms, but they are still imprecise. The point about low level precisation of common platform statements is that we can talk about them and make sense of them in our own ways. Naess is conscious of a delicate balance between agreement and freedom. With a view to fostering reflection and debate upon "deep," "long-range" ends, Naess invites us to explicate our framework, spell out our fundamental norms. At the same time he insists always upon the provisional and multiple status of precisations, as well as their incommensurability. He resists the universalizing claims of science, wherever moral and political issues are concerned.

<42> An ecosophy is a structure of thinking and feeling. It arises out of a culture. But in modern Europe and America and for many people in ‘Third World' countries, the philosophy we inherit is more likely to be technological, dominating, progressive. So that there is resistance value in a kind of individualism - "personalism" may be better (Roszack) - which questions the dominant culture, and which thinks and feels its way to personal value assumptions. Such practices of value clarification are social, even if they are performed in solitude. Naess's mountain retreat is a social fact. It would seem to be important both to be aware of this (social constitution of subjectivity) and to make our own value commitments, in the full knowledge that we do nothing as isolated individuals. On this, at least, postmodern cultural analysis and ecological philosophy can readily cohere.

<43> I have been arguing that deep ecology is able to acknowledge contingency and ambivalence. Can it be said in corollary that postmodern cultural analysis acknowledges a certain presence of meaning? This does seem to go against the grain. From "aura" to the "transcendental signified," those philosophers / cultural analysts who have been "claimed" by postmodernity refuse presence. This is not to deny meaning, but transcendental meaning: a-historical, supra-human, permanent, given meaning. It affirms the cultural and temporal constitution of all significations. Nevertheless, in calling attention to the indeterminacies (and overdeterminations) and fluidity of meanings, postmodernity suggests the ubiquity of meaning, such that no separation can be enforced between language - culture, as the supposed realm of meaning, and nature, the field of the known or knowable. If deconstruction offers itself in this way to ecological philosophy, how much more evidently do those other voices of the postmodern, which attend to the demands of Earth (Heidegger "Essence"), to aletheia as a revealing, or to the symbol that gives (Ricoeur 288, 299)?

 

"Conversation": on "method"

<44> How are we to bring postmodern cultural analysis and ecology into conversation with one another? How are they to engage? And how are "we," the reader-authors, to conduct conversation? The root word of "conversation" is the Latin, conversari, "converse, v. ...to turn oneself about, to move to and fro, pass one's life, dwell, abide, live somewhere, keep company with" (Oxford). These images nicely suggest an openness, and a continuous re-viewing, a regarding from many angles, many positions. But they perhaps too readily evoke the scene of inspection of a still object, one that can be turned in the hand or walked around. I prefer to think of the "objects" of conversation as participants, fully engaging, turning about, going about, and in between, and in and out of, one another, in and out of us.

<45> How then admit the Other? How can we change (save) ourselves? One line of approach is suggested by post-Heideggerian hermeneutics. Hans Georg Gadamer, for instance, in an essay entitled "The Problem of Historical Consciousness," attempts to delineate the possibility of hermeneutic understanding, that is, of any "authentic" understanding of historically constituted objects, including, crucially, ourselves. The hermeneutic circle is not a problem to be overcome but a fundamental condition of historical understanding. That is, it is positive and productive. It works out as a dialectic between prejudices (unconscious presuppositions, opinions, etc.) and the "new." Authentic reading of a text is a process between subject and text which allows the Otherness of the text to engage with the reader's necessary, culturally conditioned "anticipations." The Truth is always Other, and is the object for both reader and text. Crucial to Gadamer's hermeneutics is that I can only understand that with which I have an affinity. Affinity is our common historical determinedness. Understanding is a process of dialogue, with person or text (or with any culturally constituted object?). Dialogue assumes openness to the Otherness of the text (or person) - an I - Thou encounter, one might say, following Buber.

<46> Gadamer describes a process of interpretation which takes account of the relative Otherness and the relative Sameness of reader and text (or, say, of one culture and another culture, one sensibility and another - say postmodern cultural analysis and ecological philosophy). Interpretation is a mode of dialogue, an authentic practice of seeking truth, an encounter and an engagement. It doesn't pretend detachment and transcendence, yet it allows a certain transcendence to the "thing itself," the common object of intention of both reader and text . Such a process of knowledge, according to Gadamer, is fundamental to what it is to be human. It is human self-understanding, reflexivity. It is not limited to the relation between reader and text, although this was Gadamer's primary concern. Understanding (Verstehen) is Dasein's mode of being (129). It is the "very movement of transcendence" (130). As "self-understanding in relation to something else" (130), it offers a way into thinking human relationships with non-human beings. For finally, all understanding and all relationship is a process ("processual whole," 108) of self understanding, that transcends the limited unity of the ego. It is openness to the Otherness of our own potentiality, a possibility of becoming something other than I am. Understanding, for Gadamer, includes an embracing of the existential given described by Heidegger - simultaneous thrownness and pro-jection, facticity, temporality, finitude, and ethical knowledge, phronesis, as described by Aristotle - a knowing how which is distinguished from techné, or knowledge of how to attain certain ends. For the ends themselves are always at stake (Gadamer 143). Instrumental relationships with "nature," "the environment," according to such an understanding, must always be open to question. And the questioning of the other is in the same movement a questioning of ourselves.

<47> How might the hermeneutical / ecological / phenomenological questioning of self and Other relate to a more general conversation between postmodern cultural analysis and ecology? The answer may lie in the model of rationality suggested by hermeneutical inquiry. The political ecologist Mark Sagoff cites Richard Rorty, on two senses of "rational":

[T]he word means something like "sane" or "reasonable" rather than "methodical." It names a set of moral virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of others, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force. ... In this sense of "rational," the word means something more like "civilized" than "methodical." (Sagoff 12, quoting Rorty).

Science and every form of human inquiry, Rorty argues, has an ethical basis; no metaphysical or ontological basis, no foundational method, can be found. Rortyan "conversation" appears to be a counter method, insofar as it resists the imposition of method or the promise of solutions to problems through the correct application of a method. It implicitly resists the expert - or rather, inflated claims concerning expertise. It puts the expert in place as a "local intellectual" [24].

Thus a 'rational' approach to social policymaking:...need not depend on methods, theoretical underpinnings, or criteria laid down in advance. Rather, a rational approach emphasizes the virtues of clarity and open-mindedness in describing problems and finding ways to solve them. (Sagoff 12-13)

Such an approach will develop the values of inquiry and deliberation in public policymaking, not reliance on a "stronger" conception of scientific inquiry "associated with objective truth, correspondence to reality, method and criteria" (Sagoff 13, quoting Rorty).

[W]e have to get along without certainty: we have to solve practical, not theoretical problems; and we must adjust the ends we pursue to the means available to accomplish them. Otherwise, method becomes an obstacle to morality, dogma the foe of deliberation, and the ideal society we aspire to in theory will become a formidable enemy of the good society we can achieve in fact. (Sagoff 14)

<48> This distinction between two conceptions of "rational" offers a way out of the dilemma of either believing in reason or being an "irrationalist." Nevertheless, Rorty's and Sagoff's "civilized virtues" have their limits [25]. These are important for my purposes, for they have to do directly with what Rorty means by "conversation," and hence with the kind of conversation between postmodern cultural analysis and ecology, for which I am trying to open a way. I feel unwillingly constrained by Rortyan "reasonableness." I have to be careful here, for the "civilized," "sane" values that Rorty and Sagoff name are ones that I subscribe to, and they are important defenses against aggression, bullying disdain and disregard. And what can conceivably be excluded by Rortyan reason, according to which: "to be rational is simply to discuss any topic - religious, literary or scientific - in a way that eschews dogmatism, defensiveness and righteous indignation" (Sagoff, 12, quoting Rorty)? What do I wish to include, that might be discounted by such an account? Consider these: prophecy, trance, magic ritual (symbolic performance), art, intuition, rhetoric, sharing experience, transformation, revelation, song, dance, inconsistency, incoherence, fantasy, play, laughter, transgression, amazement, "spiritual experience," at-oneness, love. Well, of course, I'm wanting too much! But, I want to say, These virtues and practices are no more "subjective" or "private" than the virtues associated with civilized conversation. They are certainly culturally formed, and in several instances are necessarily shared rather than individually realized. (They are a mixed and incoherent baggage and might be multiplied many times over). Some of them are markedly absent from our public life, or hidden. Magic ritual, symbolic performance, for example, is no doubt prevalent, but not overtly so. What is the public inquiry, but such a practice? no doubt fantasies are indulged in policy debate, but not explicitly. Fantasy is not a publicly recognized value (or, rather, it is not recognized as a positive value. It is a term of denigration in political/public life. It must be segregated, made safe within the boundaries of fiction, film and television. It must be privatized.

<49> How does all this relate to the way "conversation" might proceed between postmodern cultural analysis and ecology? One might imagine a conversation that values deep listening, a listening that stills egoistic desire, a being-with-the-Other. One might imagine cultural studies listening to the voices of ecology, and, more importantly, to the "voices of nature."Postmodern cultural analysis might acknowledge both the immediacy and the Otherness of what is called the "Real" or "nature," or, perhaps, "Being."

<50> Ecological philosophy, for its part, might be less inclined to freeze into repetition of convictions. It might avoid tendencies to crude synthetisation and the delivery of homilies. It might pay regard to its contingency, its conditional formation. It might be more self-reflexive and ironical. It might acknowledge that its own experience of nature is overdetermined within a tradition (or traditions) - an admission that by no means negates its insights. It might pay more witness to despair, helplessness and rage, and to its own fragmentations and dispersals. It might acknowledge the Other within the Same - radical alterity that traverses any self, even the ecological Self.

<51> Radical alterity is the submerged Other of modernity. Modernity assimilates otherness. By, typically, process of abstraction, it familiarizes the strange and incorporates difference in order to impose the rational will. Thus, qua Weber, processes of bureaucratic rationalization are part of the same project that problematizes the world through science and technology. Incorporation is the master strategy.

<52> Postmodern cultural analysis, in resisting modern homogeneity, exhorts to the celebration of difference. Then it derides any sense of belonging to a whole. Especially, it suspects "experience" and "feelings," insofar as these are appealed to in order to justify claims concerning how things "naturally" are. It ruthlessly eschews any appeal to "nature" or the "real" as a ground of knowledge. it constructs useful tools for the unsettling and dispersal of unities. All unities.

<53> I think I want to say that in its enthusiasm for dispersal, postmodern cultural analysis threatens to close off the psychic and cultural spaces within which relationships are formed. I use "formed" for its organic resonance, in preference to the mechanistically tainted "constituted" - or worse, "constructed." But it is worth noting the prevalence of the latter terms within postmodern cultural analysis. The relationships in which we are immersed do not lend themselves to full analysis.

 

Concluding remarks

<54> Deep ecology addresses problems of meaning in a disenchanted world. It declares ultimate presuppositions, values, grounds. This paper has made the case that these strivings are not foundational in a modernistic sense. They articulate a different kind of grounding. Postmodern cultural analysis already feels this lack of grounding, value and political commitment. Questions about these aspects surround the discourse. Cultural studies critics of postmodern cultural analysis tend towards a Marxist historicism. Though not hostile to Marxism, I come from another direction. I address these endemic and widely recognized lacunae of postmodern cultural analysis through ecology - to consider what ecology may have to offer to postmodern cultural analysis. I respect postmodern cultural analysis' suspicion of "grounds" - hence its quickness to suspect ecology - but I seek to disallow that suspicion from becoming debilitating.

<55> To fully acknowledge and accept the tensions between ecology and postmodernity, I have argued, is part of what it means to embrace the predicament associated with such terms as "contingency," "ambivalence" and "uncertainty." That is, postmodern cultural analysis would be following its own logic, were it to admit a space of undecideability between, on the one hand, a spirit of suspicious contestation, and on the other hand, a spirit of preservation, of letting beings be [26]. Such an avowal promises to recuperate contingency and meaning (in the sense of grounds and norms), by challenging the association of meaning with permanence and transcendence. At the same time, I have tried to show that ecology is implicitly committed to postmodern uncertainty, and loses nothing of its normative force by embracing the tensions that I have been describing.

<56> In spite of these potentials for sympathy, there exist significant constraints preventing dialogue between postmodern cultural analysis and ecology. Chief of these, perhaps, is a resistance on both sides to acknowledging the Other in the Self, the Self in the Other. Dialogue, as I have attempted to exemplify it, presupposes such an acknowledgement. Relationships are formed in the recognition of Sameness traversing the Other, Otherness traversing the Same. They grow neither out of critical rigor alone, nor complacency, but from a quality of attention, and out of a space-holding tension that disallows the collapse of Same into Other, or of Other into Same. Dialogue in this sense answers a summons. It responds to the irreducible Other that is, in some inconceivable way, not separate from ourselves and our potentialities. In the midst of radical uncertainty, it responds. Insofar as cultural analysis neglects an ecological dimension, it reduces the absolute alterity of the Other. It substitutes, for the Other, desire of the other. All that remains is desire, typically nostalgic, inherently questionable, "suspect." There can be no response when there is nothing to respond to. I have argued the imperative of admitting response, which is, in some sense, to encounter the immediacy or "nearness" of the Other that is neither signifier nor signified nor referent, but resists all categorization.

 

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Notes

[1] From Serres' Le Contrat Naturel, cited in Conley (77) (trans. Macarthur and Paulson). [^]

[2] Arne Naess coined the term "deep ecology," to characterize an emerging social movement that questions the normative and descriptive premises that underlie and constitute individuals and societies, and that seeks to give expression to modes of thinking, feeling and living that have regard for all living beings and natural ecosystems. Not everyone who considers themselves sympathetic to deep ecology would share all of the assumptions with which I open this essay. Assumption [4], in particular, is not usually associated with deep ecology. I take "deep ecology" to refer to a "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein 32) and an open-ended direction, not to a definitive set of beliefs or attitudes. Deep ecology's insusceptibility to definition is a characteristic that it shares with postmodernity. [^]

[3] The Rorty and Jameson references are in Harvey (56, 58). [^]

[4] A way that, in spite of the formation of Cultural Studies, is perhaps no easier today than it was in 1970, the year of the essay's first publication. [^]

[5] For example, Abram. [^]

[6] Gilligan gives an account of ethical commitments emerging out of relationships, rather than following from moral principles. [^]

[7] "I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist, that is, 'fictions' it. One 'fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one 'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth." (Foucault 193). [^]

[8] Quoted by David Midgley, in a review of Badiner ed., Dharma Gaia, Environmental Values 2/2 (1993): 185. [^]

[9] There is a considerable literature of ecological resistance to managerial environmentalism, much of it growing out of movements in the South. Braidotti et al. contains a useful summary. The journal Alternatives is an invaluable source. [^]

[10] Bate provides one of the more recent, in a long line of ecological readings of Heidegger. See also Taylor. [^]

[11] Flax 12. [^]

[12] Evelyn Fox Keller distinguishes well between multiple complex scientific practices, and masculinist ruling ideologies of science. [^]

[13] Garb and Sachs treat earth imagery. [^]

[14] The literature on ecological spirituality is copious. Spretnak is probably a good place to start. [^]

[15] For an example of performance theory applied to thinking about culture and the environment, see Szerszynski, et al. [^]

[16] It seems to me that Fox, in a very useful overview of deep ecology, commits a psychologistic fallacy. Cultural studies' more complex thinking of the overdetermination of individual thought and feeling structures suggests one respect in which ecology might benefit from dialogue with cultural studies. [^]

[17] "The metaphysics of mechanism can be dispensed with. The best way to do this is to show that it is only a metaphor; and the best way to show this is to invent a new metaphor" (Colin Turbayne, cited in Porush 1. [^]

[18] See, e.g., Foucault (Reader 32-50). [^]

[19] Perhaps Polanyi's notion of the "tacit component" in knowledge will aid an elaboration of "deep." [^]

[20] See, for example, Mathews. [^]

[21] Def.: "A sentence T(1) is more precise than a sentence T(0), if there is at least one interpretation which T(0) admits, but T(1) does not, and if there is no interpretation admitted by T(1) which is not also admitted by T(0)" (Naess, Pluralist 129). [^]

[22] Naess names "Ecosophy T" after his Norwegian mountain retreat. The point of the naming is to underline the personal character of any fundamental philosophical system. [^]

[23] This is the first of eight "basic principles" formulated by Naess and Sessions, published in Devall and Sessions. The deep ecology "common platform" has gone through numerous permutations. In accordance with Naess's outlook, it is only ever provisional. [^]

[24] On "local intellectuals," see Foucault 78-108. [^]

[25] For a more "situated" reclaiming of "rationality," see Haraway. [^]

[26] To "Let beings be", in a Heideggerian sense, is to allow the Being of beings to disclose itself. It by no means implies passivity. It is associated by Heidegger with the creative activity of poiesis. [^]

 

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