[lbo-talk] How many earths

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu May 7 18:42:51 PDT 2009


On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:


>
> On May 7, 2009, at 2:42 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
>> Zizek says...the premise, the
>> first axiom even, of every radical ecology is “there is no Nature.”
>>
>
>
> The premise of the scientific naturalist (sometimes called "materialist")
> world view is that "there is *only* Nature."
>
>
> Shane Mage
>

Yeah, sure, but something particular that is everything is nothing in particular. The first premise of materialists as I see it is that the material world, the "natural" world if you must, precedes the social world though the other first premise is that nothing can be known about that natural world that isn't a thoroughgoing product of social action in relation to materiality. This destroys Nature, with the capital N, and makes possibly the historical/metabolic production of natures. The idea is that, as Haraway quoting Spivak(?) noted, is that nature is what we cannot not want but as Elizabeth Bird argued - channeling Neil Smith through Haraway - the better question is what natures do we want to produce, to what extent can we do so, and what socionatural relations woulds we have to change/renegotiate in order to consciously produce our own natures - rather than continue to have them made for us, seemingly by "social" actors or "natural" processes, behind our backs or as a result of unintended consequences of conventional actions.



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