My apologies for being absent for far too long. I hope starting the blog up again can not only get me talking with several folks, but also help with several projects I have going. I need it and hope you will contribute!
I find it interesting that Byron Hawk's work A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity has not been taken up by more mainstream environmental thinkers in English and the humanities. As far as I can research, ISLE hasn't published a review and I am fairly certain a search of works cited in their pages since its publication will produce little to no results. The same could be said of Gregory Ulmer's work in chorography, one of Hawk's influences. Ulmer radically revises notions of place and environment as real forces of invention, a point Hawk takes up in his book on vitalism. Add to this, Thomas Rickert's essays on kairos ("Inventing in the Wild") and khora (in Philosophy and Rhetoric), and we have some well-argued and carefully thought out ways to rethink place, environment, and nature.
Before I detail this a bit more, I have to note that I have fallen prey to the same ideological blinders that may be hindering folks in ecocomposition, ecocriticism, and environmental communication (let's call these and their allies the "eco-humanities"). As Hawk notes, Dobrin and Weisser failed to push the concept of ecology to its limit, keeping to representational notions of discourse and thereby dividing the discursive from the environment, a point I came to in my own chapter in Goggin. But I had to talk with Hawk before getting to this understanding. There is still a premium in the eco-humanities on representation, cultural studies, etc. that serves to maintain the nature-culture binary. My contention is that this has limited scholarship in the eco-humanities because Ulmer, especially, but also Hawk and Rickert have been taken up so readily by folks dealing in technology, hypermedia, video games, and computer interfaces. In other words, many eco-humanities scholars see them as "technological culture" and, perhaps because of their ideological love of "nature" (read as "those things relatively untouched by human culture"), they skip over the important insights offered from their colleagues thinking about (and with) computer technologies.
I won't detail Hawk's vitalism here, having made notes on it in an earlier post, nor will I recount my argument in Goggin's book. Suffice to say that, as Raul Sanchez argues, we have a crisis of representation and one of the foremost areas this crisis affects is thinking about the environment. I think Zizek is right to point out that an environmental discourse founded on representation has all the makings of a new opiate of the masses. But what Ulmer, Hawk, and similar scholars point out is a fairly simple argument that if everything (including nature) is a text we read/ write in non-linear, non-book ways, and that the sum total of the read/ write situation - if what is written/ read is a product of an emplacement, a total environment, if you will, - then this is perfectly applicable to our own scholarly work in the eco-humanities. In short, the world around us, our total environment from cities to prairies, to corn fields, oceans, rivers, and highways are a hypertext with which we interface but must invent ways to navigate trough, following its connections, links, and databases.
I admit that this is awfully close to James Cameron's imaginary world of Pandora, a world that functions as a vast database for memory, culture, and information. But aren't these imagined worlds important because they reveal truths about our own? We certainly don't have the same species or biological morphology that allows us to download memories of our elders, transfer consciousness from one body to another, or meld our neurological pathways with that of companion species. But we can and do interface with our environments, be they technological or not. And the "non-technological" is as linked together, if not more linked together, than any network yet devised by humans. Isn't the astrology-astronomy continuum indicative of how we use the natural world as calculator and computational tool linked to interfaces with planting, hunting, and ceremonial activity? Don't we use landscape as repository for memory, as Simon Schama has argued at length? What, then, is the difference between digital and natural hypertext?
My question, then, is what happens when we view the environment through the lenses articulated by Ulmer, Hawk and others? If we see the environment - built as well as "natural" - don't we get around the questions of ideology posed by William Cronon, the problems of cultural politics pointed out by Bruce Braun, and the (im)possibility of sustainabile development posed by Timothy Luke? We certainly don't "solve" these problems or questions, but wouldn't we understand them in a new way? Wouldn't we be able to reconfigure our interfaces with nature?
To me, this sounds at least worth exploring. Plus, it resonates with the work of Latour, Haraway, Hayles, and some of our foremost thinkers of how we understand and move through our worlds.
Showing posts with label sustainbility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sustainbility. Show all posts
11.19.2008
Introduction (Draft)
I'm soliciting feedback on a draft for my intro. In footnotes, I mention that 1) all names of people are pseudonyms and 2) Goodman’s use of past tense here indicates how even a careful researcher and a document published by Sinte Gleska University can relegate native cultures to the past rather than admit their “survivance” in the present. For the sake of simplicity, I retain his past tense but work against it in my own characterizations of Lakota culture.
Let me know what you think!
epigraph:
“though the principles of symbolism are not reducible to sheerly physical terms… the meanings cannot be conceived by empirical organisms except by the aid of a sheerly physical dimension”
--- Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man”
We slept most of the day before Jim Jacobs came back to talk with us. The night before, we walked the trail up Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, an ancient, granite laccolith rising 1200 feet from the high plains like a lone advance scout of the Black Hills, some six miles distant. Rising as it does so distant from the other Black Hills, Mato Paha is extremely exposed, almost isolated from its sisters. It is truly a unique mountain and it serves as a spiritual site not only for Lakota, but also for many other plains cultures. We were at Mato Paha during June, one of the holiest months of the Lakota calendar. Jim was there as a member of the Lakota nation to participate in ceremonies marking the end of a three-month procession of spiritual renewal and rededication. According to Ronald Goodman (1992) “the Lakota lived between stories and symbols written in the sky and mirrored on the earth” (9) and traditional Lakota still gather at sites around in the Black Hills between the spring equinox and summer solstice, “synchronizing their movements to the motions of the sun along the elliptic” (2). In other words, traditional Lakota culture, like many other cultures around the globe, teaches that the heavens and the earth mirror one another. In this view, the Black Hills, as a geographic area, mirrors that part of the sky dominated by the sun during spring. Places such as Mato Paha have stellar analogues in Lakota constellations so that to map the heavens is to map a mirror image of the earth and vice versa. As a matter of religious practice, traditional Lakota may mirror the path of the sun as it journeys through these constellations by embarking on a ceremonial procession through the Black Hills. Mato Paha, according to both Goodman and Jim Jacobs, was usually the culmination of a three-month series of ceremonies designed to balance earthly and spiritual matters.
This practice bears a certain resonance with Burke’s quote that opens this introduction. The sheerly physical dimensions of land and sky, the physical correlation between geography and astronomy are necessary preconditions for the symbolic tapestry of traditional Lakota culture. Likewise, as a ceremony some may partake in for the benefit of the whole culture, the physical movements through these dimensions is necessary for the Lakota, as “empirical organisms,” to conceive meaning in areas of life beyond the ceremony itself. For traditional Lakota, as it is true for many peoples, the physical land is important not for what it represents and not because it stands as a symbol for something else. Rather, it is the opposite: the land is important because without it there can be no symbolic. Without the physical movement across the land concurrent with the movement of the sun across the sky, traditional Lakota would fail in the very real and important re-creation of a symbolic order. The journey across the Black Hills no more represents the sun’s journey as any reading of a text represents the process used to write it. Both movements are necessary and, to some degree, mirror one another, but they cannot be said to be representative in any true sense of the word. Rather, each depends upon the other: place and symbol, hills and stars, reading and writing, stitched together in time and space. This re-creation should not be understood as a return to an original or a static form of mimesis. Rather, because of the double movement involved, this is a dynamic re-creation that affirms change and remains at least partially open to what cannot be captured or contained within any iteration of the order itself.
This helps me understand some of why the Lakota have yet to accept any monetary settlement to the breaking of the Fort Laramie treaties by the United States, a settlement now worth over $570 million. Their denial of the money officially rests on their belief that one cannot sell sacred land and we should respect that position. But when viewed from the position that to accept that money would be to enter their land into the symbolic order of economics, thus eradicating the very foundation of their culture, we might better understand this decision despite the rampant poverty, violence, despair, unemployment, and other social problems, that the money might help alleviate on each of the Lakota reservations and in Lakota communities across the upper Midwest. Rather than the inverse double movements of land and sky, accepting a monetary representation of the land replaces the entire equation with a foreign order.
This raises a whole set of important questions for rhetoric and composition studies as well as other areas of inquiry that focus on the relationships between place and the symbolic – areas such as geography, environmental sociology, and ecocriticism. Much of this, I argue, has been distracted by an endless play of signifiers, focusing too much on language and symbols and not enough on the physical structures upon which those symbols depend. While I do not claim to have discovered a “ground” upon which we might rest our postmodern feet, I do claim to make some further progress in understanding how our discourses literally matter in the world. If we can only know the world through discourse and discourse is just an endless play of arbitrary signifiers, then we are fundamentally cut off from creation. But such an extreme version of postmodernism has come under scrutiny in the past decade and more and more scholarship is turning to the material world and the ways it is involved in making meaning every bit as much as social material. This leads me to inquire into material places: are they also involved in the production of meaning and, if so, how? And what might that mean for research into writing or for the teaching of writing?
Let me know what you think!
epigraph:
“though the principles of symbolism are not reducible to sheerly physical terms… the meanings cannot be conceived by empirical organisms except by the aid of a sheerly physical dimension”
--- Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man”
We slept most of the day before Jim Jacobs came back to talk with us. The night before, we walked the trail up Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, an ancient, granite laccolith rising 1200 feet from the high plains like a lone advance scout of the Black Hills, some six miles distant. Rising as it does so distant from the other Black Hills, Mato Paha is extremely exposed, almost isolated from its sisters. It is truly a unique mountain and it serves as a spiritual site not only for Lakota, but also for many other plains cultures. We were at Mato Paha during June, one of the holiest months of the Lakota calendar. Jim was there as a member of the Lakota nation to participate in ceremonies marking the end of a three-month procession of spiritual renewal and rededication. According to Ronald Goodman (1992) “the Lakota lived between stories and symbols written in the sky and mirrored on the earth” (9) and traditional Lakota still gather at sites around in the Black Hills between the spring equinox and summer solstice, “synchronizing their movements to the motions of the sun along the elliptic” (2). In other words, traditional Lakota culture, like many other cultures around the globe, teaches that the heavens and the earth mirror one another. In this view, the Black Hills, as a geographic area, mirrors that part of the sky dominated by the sun during spring. Places such as Mato Paha have stellar analogues in Lakota constellations so that to map the heavens is to map a mirror image of the earth and vice versa. As a matter of religious practice, traditional Lakota may mirror the path of the sun as it journeys through these constellations by embarking on a ceremonial procession through the Black Hills. Mato Paha, according to both Goodman and Jim Jacobs, was usually the culmination of a three-month series of ceremonies designed to balance earthly and spiritual matters.
This practice bears a certain resonance with Burke’s quote that opens this introduction. The sheerly physical dimensions of land and sky, the physical correlation between geography and astronomy are necessary preconditions for the symbolic tapestry of traditional Lakota culture. Likewise, as a ceremony some may partake in for the benefit of the whole culture, the physical movements through these dimensions is necessary for the Lakota, as “empirical organisms,” to conceive meaning in areas of life beyond the ceremony itself. For traditional Lakota, as it is true for many peoples, the physical land is important not for what it represents and not because it stands as a symbol for something else. Rather, it is the opposite: the land is important because without it there can be no symbolic. Without the physical movement across the land concurrent with the movement of the sun across the sky, traditional Lakota would fail in the very real and important re-creation of a symbolic order. The journey across the Black Hills no more represents the sun’s journey as any reading of a text represents the process used to write it. Both movements are necessary and, to some degree, mirror one another, but they cannot be said to be representative in any true sense of the word. Rather, each depends upon the other: place and symbol, hills and stars, reading and writing, stitched together in time and space. This re-creation should not be understood as a return to an original or a static form of mimesis. Rather, because of the double movement involved, this is a dynamic re-creation that affirms change and remains at least partially open to what cannot be captured or contained within any iteration of the order itself.
This helps me understand some of why the Lakota have yet to accept any monetary settlement to the breaking of the Fort Laramie treaties by the United States, a settlement now worth over $570 million. Their denial of the money officially rests on their belief that one cannot sell sacred land and we should respect that position. But when viewed from the position that to accept that money would be to enter their land into the symbolic order of economics, thus eradicating the very foundation of their culture, we might better understand this decision despite the rampant poverty, violence, despair, unemployment, and other social problems, that the money might help alleviate on each of the Lakota reservations and in Lakota communities across the upper Midwest. Rather than the inverse double movements of land and sky, accepting a monetary representation of the land replaces the entire equation with a foreign order.
This raises a whole set of important questions for rhetoric and composition studies as well as other areas of inquiry that focus on the relationships between place and the symbolic – areas such as geography, environmental sociology, and ecocriticism. Much of this, I argue, has been distracted by an endless play of signifiers, focusing too much on language and symbols and not enough on the physical structures upon which those symbols depend. While I do not claim to have discovered a “ground” upon which we might rest our postmodern feet, I do claim to make some further progress in understanding how our discourses literally matter in the world. If we can only know the world through discourse and discourse is just an endless play of arbitrary signifiers, then we are fundamentally cut off from creation. But such an extreme version of postmodernism has come under scrutiny in the past decade and more and more scholarship is turning to the material world and the ways it is involved in making meaning every bit as much as social material. This leads me to inquire into material places: are they also involved in the production of meaning and, if so, how? And what might that mean for research into writing or for the teaching of writing?
12.10.2007
Sustainable Post-Humanity
Has it really been almost a month since my last post!?? Yargh! Things have been hectic adjusting to a heavier teaching load, winterizing the house, celebrating Ruby's birthday, organizing UNI's Focus the Nation events, plus coordinating Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities! I've still got to write the test for Native American Rhetoric & Literature, but the papers for my writing courses are done and I am just waiting on portfolios.
In the meantime, I have been moving slowly on my sustinability article for Writing the Earth. While much of it is a trimmed-down chapter from my dissertation, I am contextualizing it in critical takes on sustainability like Luke's (2005) critique that "for ecological debates [sustianability] is now being used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions to refocus national economic prosperity as well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still unsustainable, consumption" (228). I just wish he wouldn't mince words...
Still, how might we reconcile this with being post-human or cyborg? If we are and have been contiguous or co-terminus with our technologies, can we keep those technologies and still remain sustainable? We can't simply glorify the web and computer technology without also recognizing the systems of briefly containing bio-hazards and dumping them on Third World and developing nations. While these technologies are affordances for first world capital, communication, and social organization that sometimes spills over to those privileged people in developing nations or that sometimes is harnessed by people living within what we would call less technological systems (remember Sting's posing with the Yanomami to save the rain forests?), it seems to me that it is more often an affordance for cancer, poverty, and ecological devastation among the least privileged of our species.
Ulrich Beck (1995) might argue that the market will work itself out here since I raise here a pretty classic example of distributing away the poisoned cake. But how many have died or been diseased since Beck argued this? How many more motherboards are destined to kill those who have little recourse other than to sift through a pile of toxins?
Of course, I write this at my Macintosh, knowing that Apple Computers has resisted market pressures to be more green. So, it's not an option to simply resist and say "Well, I'm going to make smarter purchases [or have my University make them for me] and therefore add my two cents to the marketplace in an effort to steer it in a way of my own choosing." I already do that by riding my bike to work, eating local and/or organic foods, conserving energy [passive solar, layering in winter, some wood heat, lower hot water temps, higher freezer temps, etc.], recycling, composting, and a fifteen year-old TV, not to mention other older electronics. Even with all that, I'm not perfect. But then, who is? It's not a matter of being "perfect" according to anyone's standards -- even your own. That's just an awful lot to live up to.
Still, we can do better and I'm trying to understand if there could be a sustainable post-humanity. It may even be the case that there can be no sustainability -- no concept of it at all -- without occupying a post-human position or consciousness. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, simulation is a binary to "nature" and cannot be divorced from it. However, if we follow her in locating the self "neither contracted inside the body nor unproblematically projected outside it, but at the cusp between the beholder and the world" (1995, p. 412), then these vast networks of technology are mere extensions of the body -- just prosthetics that we, in their novelty, use clumsily, just as my two-year-old daughter spills her cup of water on herself or on the table.
These prosthetics are not just cups of water, though. They are far more deadly -- even more deadly than cars and airplanes. Yet anyone can use these prosthetics. Of course anyone can have as many children as they want, too, which has its own impact on sustainability (sorry for the Malthusian interjection...). Like birthrates, though, we can affect them with out resorting to Malthus. We know there are economic and cultural influences on birth choices. Just as women and their partners learn to use their bodies to bear more children or not, what conditions might it take to affect the choices we make about technological prosthetics?
In the meantime, I have been moving slowly on my sustinability article for Writing the Earth. While much of it is a trimmed-down chapter from my dissertation, I am contextualizing it in critical takes on sustainability like Luke's (2005) critique that "for ecological debates [sustianability] is now being used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions to refocus national economic prosperity as well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still unsustainable, consumption" (228). I just wish he wouldn't mince words...
Still, how might we reconcile this with being post-human or cyborg? If we are and have been contiguous or co-terminus with our technologies, can we keep those technologies and still remain sustainable? We can't simply glorify the web and computer technology without also recognizing the systems of briefly containing bio-hazards and dumping them on Third World and developing nations. While these technologies are affordances for first world capital, communication, and social organization that sometimes spills over to those privileged people in developing nations or that sometimes is harnessed by people living within what we would call less technological systems (remember Sting's posing with the Yanomami to save the rain forests?), it seems to me that it is more often an affordance for cancer, poverty, and ecological devastation among the least privileged of our species.
Ulrich Beck (1995) might argue that the market will work itself out here since I raise here a pretty classic example of distributing away the poisoned cake. But how many have died or been diseased since Beck argued this? How many more motherboards are destined to kill those who have little recourse other than to sift through a pile of toxins?
Of course, I write this at my Macintosh, knowing that Apple Computers has resisted market pressures to be more green. So, it's not an option to simply resist and say "Well, I'm going to make smarter purchases [or have my University make them for me] and therefore add my two cents to the marketplace in an effort to steer it in a way of my own choosing." I already do that by riding my bike to work, eating local and/or organic foods, conserving energy [passive solar, layering in winter, some wood heat, lower hot water temps, higher freezer temps, etc.], recycling, composting, and a fifteen year-old TV, not to mention other older electronics. Even with all that, I'm not perfect. But then, who is? It's not a matter of being "perfect" according to anyone's standards -- even your own. That's just an awful lot to live up to.
Still, we can do better and I'm trying to understand if there could be a sustainable post-humanity. It may even be the case that there can be no sustainability -- no concept of it at all -- without occupying a post-human position or consciousness. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, simulation is a binary to "nature" and cannot be divorced from it. However, if we follow her in locating the self "neither contracted inside the body nor unproblematically projected outside it, but at the cusp between the beholder and the world" (1995, p. 412), then these vast networks of technology are mere extensions of the body -- just prosthetics that we, in their novelty, use clumsily, just as my two-year-old daughter spills her cup of water on herself or on the table.
These prosthetics are not just cups of water, though. They are far more deadly -- even more deadly than cars and airplanes. Yet anyone can use these prosthetics. Of course anyone can have as many children as they want, too, which has its own impact on sustainability (sorry for the Malthusian interjection...). Like birthrates, though, we can affect them with out resorting to Malthus. We know there are economic and cultural influences on birth choices. Just as women and their partners learn to use their bodies to bear more children or not, what conditions might it take to affect the choices we make about technological prosthetics?
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