"Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetuses gestating in the amniotic efffluvia of terminal industrialism,4 one of those impossible things characterized by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature’s discursive constitution as “other” in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never “have.” We must find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession. Perhaps to give confidence in its essential reality, immense resources have been expended to stabilize and materialize nature, to police its/her boundaries. Such expenditures have had disappointing results.
Efforts to travel into “nature” become tourist excursions that remind the voyager of the price of such displacements-one pays to see fun-house reflections of oneself. Efforts to preserve “nature” in parks remain fatally troubled by the ineradicable mark of the founding explusion of those who used to live there, not as innocents in a garden, but as people for whom the categories of nature and culture were not the salient ones. Expensive projects to collect “nature’s” diversity and bank it seem to produce debased coin, impoverished seed, and dusty relics. As the banks hypertrophy, the nature that feeds the storehouses “disappears.” The World Bank’s record on environmental destruction is exemplary in this regard. Finally, the projects for representing and enforcing human “nature” are famous for their imperializing essences, most recently reincarnated in the Human Genome Project.
So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the “other” who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man.
********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Visiting Associate Professor Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:32 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
> Shane Mage 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
>
> note to Dwayne: we really ought to write an article developing these
> themse or something. :)
>
> reminds me of a conversation Dwayne and I have been having, mostly off
> list, about conceptions of nature.
>
> I have been telling him that it would be delicious to have him
> consider Zizek's explorations of woman-as-thing in the context of
> chivalrous love, where the obvious issue is about putting woman on a
> pedastal and, thereby, emptying her of content, subjectivity. But the
> less obvious thing about the chivalrous lover is that the chivalrous
> lover never actually wants to have sex with the Lady, though that
> would seem his most obvious desire.
>
> Rather, the chivalrous lover is terrified of such a prospect. Rather
> than sleep with the Lady, the chivalrous lover wants endless
> postponement by being subjected to the lady's arbitrary and punishing
> demands in order, ostensibly, to win her "love" and thus her
> enthusiastic desire to have sex with the chivalrous lover.
>
> i think this analysis of chivalry/romantic love/etc. would be
> marvelous applied to the way environmentalist often conceive of the
> nature they claim they are part of. but in this claiming, there is the
> endless postponement. it is never really so, because to claim,
> constantly, "we *are* nature" seems to belie everything such a
> statement is supposed to me.
>
> More frivolously, all I can fucking think of is a bugs bunny cartoon
> character, Yeti.
>
> Please cue the song, "Get Ready for This" (2 Unlimited -- dance track
> from 90s) except change the lyrics to, "Y'all Yeti for this?" That
> should get you in the right posit.... frame of mind.
>
> Yeti's this cute/ugly furry thing that gets carried away in his love
> for Bugs. He grabs him, too strongly, hugs him to his chest far too
> hard, and, crushing him, he says, "I'm going to love you and stroke
> you and squeeze you and call you george."
>
> and that is what I tend to think happens to the folks who don't
> realize that, in their attempt to constantly remind themselves that we
> are nature/ nature is us (and believe me, I'm obviously sympathetic to
> that view but wonder how it happens that you get to Michael Pollan's
> weridness in The Botany of Desire -- i've written about this in
> archives.)
>
> So, just remember this: "I'm gonna love you and squeeze you and stroke
> you and call you George." (nature)
>
> Interestingly enough, poking around, I learned that the Yeti
> character's destructive love for Bugs (nature) is based on John
> Steinbeck's character, Lennie, in _Of Mice and Men_.
>
> more here:
>
> http://www.etiquettehell.com/smf/index.php?PHPSESSID=45d91a1f42857dbbe88eff36f09741e3&topic=25063.msg559691#msg559691
>
> shag
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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