Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0014
F. Neyrat, Drew S. Burk
In chapter 13 Neyrat summarizes a variety of conceptions of of the Earth conceived from various actors, from the early founding thinkers of the environmental and ecology movements in the United States such as Aldo Lepold and John Muir to more recent scientific conceptions of the Earth as a cybernetic living organism proposed by the celebrated scientist James Lovelock and his Gaia theory or Carolyn Merchant’s conception that each part of the ecosystem contributes to the health of the entire ecosystem as a whole. Neyrat goes on to show that what he terms minoritarian discourses refuse to consider the Earth as something that is mechanical in any way and that it is a living organism in its own right. These minoritarian discourses are in complete contrast to the variety of geo-constructivist discourses that today see the Earth as something technologically manageable.
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Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282586.003.0003
F. Neyrat
The second chapter delves deeper into the origins of what Neyrat describes as the “myth” of the Anthropocene, focusing on the work of one of the scientists who coined the term, Paul Crutzen, and how this so-called “new grand narrative” and unifying myth also has become, following the term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard, the meta-narrative of our times. If for Lyotard, grand narratives were constructed as unifying myths, narratives that legitimize institutions and social practices, then Neyrat will take up the task of analyzing this new grand narrative or master signifier of the “Anthropocene” by way of how this myth of the Anthropocene confronts two other entities considered as unifying narratives: humanity or humankind as the lone superpowerful subject and the object of the Earth. Neyrat will delve much deeper into this myth and the imaginaries that seem to help furnish some of the logic behind humankind’s awareness of climate change, its potential role in causing it, and how, by way of the imaginary and physical engagement of perceiving the Earth from outside the Earth by way of the Space Age, humans began to view the Earth as not simply something humans inhabit or are part of, but as an artefact.
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Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0005
F. Neyrat
Neyrat moves on to reflect on what the attempt at managing the climate, or the popular environmental term of Earth Stewardship, entails and how viewing the Anthropocene through the term of Earth Stewardship can help us to understand what exactly humankind’s position as a major geological force truly implies and how within this logic of geopower we can begin to uncover contradictions that leave us questioning any sort of concept of mankind as distinct from nature. Neyrat shows how seemingly positive connotations of managing or caring for the human within conceptions of Earth Stewardship can become mired within much larger conceptions of what nature is considered to be in distinction from humankind and that the history of the word steward denotes an agent with royal power—showing that within the complicated attempt at Earth Stewardship and climate management, there will no doubt be those who benefit and those who won’t.
{"title":"The Logic of Geopower","authors":"F. Neyrat","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Neyrat moves on to reflect on what the attempt at managing the climate, or the popular environmental term of Earth Stewardship, entails and how viewing the Anthropocene through the term of Earth Stewardship can help us to understand what exactly humankind’s position as a major geological force truly implies and how within this logic of geopower we can begin to uncover contradictions that leave us questioning any sort of concept of mankind as distinct from nature. Neyrat shows how seemingly positive connotations of managing or caring for the human within conceptions of Earth Stewardship can become mired within much larger conceptions of what nature is considered to be in distinction from humankind and that the history of the word steward denotes an agent with royal power—showing that within the complicated attempt at Earth Stewardship and climate management, there will no doubt be those who benefit and those who won’t.","PeriodicalId":440579,"journal":{"name":"The Unconstructable Earth","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122633585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282586.003.0600
F. Neyrat
On August 15, 1971, the gold standard, the conversion of the dollar into gold, was suspended. Two years later, the currency exchange became “floating,” which meant that from now on, the rate of exchange would be determined by the state of market fluctuations. And it was in this manner that the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had regulated the international financial system since 1944, came to an end. What happened at that time with regard to important economic data is something that obviously has an important bearing on how we largely structure our present—such a fluctuation of the exchange rate has largely favored speculation on currency and a disconnection of the speculative sphere, its autonomization from the so-called “real” economy. However, we shouldn’t convert this economic data too quickly into a hastily formed explanation for what should be more properly described as a major epistemic change, even a change in civilization, a major upheaval in the way we think about science, politics, the economy, as well as ecology and the environment....
{"title":"Turbulence, Resilience, Distance","authors":"F. Neyrat","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282586.003.0600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282586.003.0600","url":null,"abstract":"On August 15, 1971, the gold standard, the conversion of the dollar into gold, was suspended. Two years later, the currency exchange became “floating,” which meant that from now on, the rate of exchange would be determined by the state of market fluctuations. And it was in this manner that the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had regulated the international financial system since 1944, came to an end. What happened at that time with regard to important economic data is something that obviously has an important bearing on how we largely structure our present—such a fluctuation of the exchange rate has largely favored speculation on currency and a disconnection of the speculative sphere, its autonomization from the so-called “real” economy. However, we shouldn’t convert this economic data too quickly into a hastily formed explanation for what should be more properly described as a major epistemic change, even a change in civilization, a major upheaval in the way we think about science, politics, the economy, as well as ecology and the environment....","PeriodicalId":440579,"journal":{"name":"The Unconstructable Earth","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123023086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0007
F. Neyrat
In chapter 6, Neyrat moves to describing the new ecologists and environmentalists of the twenty-first century: the ecomodernists. Neyrat provides the origins of this new capitalist and industrialist friendly environmentalism that promised to take into account all environmental concerns within its mode of development and growth. In taking on a seemingly pragmatist position outside of ideological frameworks and offering a positive vision of our environmental future whereby technologies such as nuclear power, GMOs, and fracking, as well as rejecting the division between nature and technology, ecomodernists completely reject the environmentalism and ecology of their twentieth-century forebears. Neyrat provides an introduction to these ecomodernists who have a very different conception of the current era, where striving to comprehend some ideal or old environmental state of nature was always already impossible due to the inherent perpetual instability of the turbulence of ecosystems.
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Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0012
F. Neyrat
Neyrat begins to lay out his proposal for an ecology of separation that does not simply embrace the positions of deep ecology or of eco-constructivism whereby everything is interconnected. Neyrat proposes to provide an alternative ecology that would allow for the necessary distance within the interconnectedness of things so as to exit the failure of the “Spinozist cure” and also allow for humans to not forget or repress, but rather to recognize and provide a place for an ecology of separation that recognizes that nature does indeed exist. An ecology of separation thereby counters what he names this “transcendental narcissism”— the replacement of nature by humanity (Anthropocene), and humanity’s translation into an over-arching conception of technology.
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Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0100
F. Neyrat
“This evening, the city of Copenhagen is a crime scene, with those responsible fleeing for the airport.” It was in this manner that John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace for the United Kingdom, expressed himself following the Copenhagen summit on climate change.1 A crime? What sort of crime? What exactly happened during this summit? More than likely, no kind of event that would be capable of immediately changing the history of the world. But nevertheless, there was a noticeable turning point in relation to how societies were discussing the management of climate change; there was a revelatory moment in regard to what we have taken to calling the ...
{"title":"The Copenhagen Chiasm","authors":"F. Neyrat","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0100","url":null,"abstract":"“This evening, the city of Copenhagen is a crime scene, with those responsible fleeing for the airport.” It was in this manner that John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace for the United Kingdom, expressed himself following the Copenhagen summit on climate change.1 A crime? What sort of crime? What exactly happened during this summit? More than likely, no kind of event that would be capable of immediately changing the history of the world. But nevertheless, there was a noticeable turning point in relation to how societies were discussing the management of climate change; there was a revelatory moment in regard to what we have taken to calling the ...","PeriodicalId":440579,"journal":{"name":"The Unconstructable Earth","volume":"8 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132154531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0008
F. Neyrat
Chapter 7 is an overview of the work of the French thinker, Bruno Latour and how his recent thinking and writing seems to align well with those thinkers who place themselves in the camps of ecomodernism and postenvironmnetalism. While Neyrat begins by espousing the importance and scholarly merit of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, which allows a myriad of fields to further examine non-anthropocentric conceptions of how we represent human worlds aesthetically, politically, and socially. The rest of the chapter is a critique of Latour’s recent thinking in its promotion of technological development and what Neyrat describes as Latour’s “political ecology.” To do this, Neyrat performs a careful and critical reading of Latour’s essay, “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care For Our Technologies As We Do Our Children.” Using the story of Frankenstein as his vehicle, Latour explains our continual suspicion and distrust for technological advancements, that is, “our monsters,” with which we must come to terms with having to care for.
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Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0300
F. Neyrat
Throughout the first two parts of this book, we have examined the price to be paid for getting rid of any idea of something we call nature. This price is exorbitant, in the proper sense of the term: We have to get ourselves to exit any orbit, propelling ourselves into a stratosphere, one that is indeed much more imaginary than real, of an unbridled construction where humans are agents of mastery, into a stratosphere of limitless developments and technological monsters that should deserve our unconditional love. The absence of nature legitimizes the fantastic possibility of remaking the world in order to steer it, to be its pilot, to manage it; but the world, inevitably, withdraws from the human setting, leaving the latter alone—without nature and without a world....
{"title":"Object, Subject, Traject","authors":"F. Neyrat","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0300","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the first two parts of this book, we have examined the price to be paid for getting rid of any idea of something we call nature. This price is exorbitant, in the proper sense of the term: We have to get ourselves to exit any orbit, propelling ourselves into a stratosphere, one that is indeed much more imaginary than real, of an unbridled construction where humans are agents of mastery, into a stratosphere of limitless developments and technological monsters that should deserve our unconditional love. The absence of nature legitimizes the fantastic possibility of remaking the world in order to steer it, to be its pilot, to manage it; but the world, inevitably, withdraws from the human setting, leaving the latter alone—without nature and without a world....","PeriodicalId":440579,"journal":{"name":"The Unconstructable Earth","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129783090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-16DOI: 10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823282586.003.0010
F. Neyrat
After developing the conception of the anaturalist drive prominent behind a myriad of constructive, postenvironmental discourses in the West, Neyrat begins to provide a definition for the discourses and types of thought that would fall under this rubric of eco-constructivism. During the course of this chapter he outlines the similarities between eco-constructivism and geo-constructivism and highlights the important differences that distinguish them from each other. After providing a nice summary of the currents of the movement known as Accelerationism and the Accelerationist Manifesto as well as currents in transhumanism, the chapter ends by calling into question what all these various discourses falling into positions of ecomodernism or postenvironmentalism seem to blindly adhere to: an ecology that wholly embraces technological advancement and its fervor for continual construction.
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