Re: AUT: science, technology and ecology

[Ben Hoh <jebni@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harald,

Let's establish this from the beginning: I have a very low tolerance for all
that hippie tree-hugging shit.


> The appreciation of "wild" nature is in itself a very anthropocentric notion.

Sure, and the preconceptions contained therein (that wildlife is just
something for us to appreciate, that aspects of the planetary system can be
fetishised as "nature") are exactly what I think we need to challenge. By
"ethical relationship" I mean a non-fetishistic, non-dominative interaction
that challenges the presumed identities of both parties. Saying that we
shouldn't try to establish such relationships because anthropocentrism is
inevitable is like saying that because xenophobia is inevitable, racism is
somehow "natural".


> The declared anti-anthropocentric currents seem to me often to be
> the foremost expressions of a (capitalist) alienation from nature.

Yeah, I'd say that most "pro-nature" narratives are simply the idiotic
flipside of capitalist instrumentalism. But the problem I have with the
usual deployment of the concept of alienation is that it can inscribe an
origin that we somehow have to faithfully return to -- for me, the term
"species being" raises, among other things, the spectre of 19th Century
scientistic quackdom. But I think the concept describes something that
really happens, so I'd rather say that we're alienated from possibilites
rather than any kind of authenticity. And so rather than an alienation from
"nature", I'd say that "nature loving" crypto-anthropocentrism a product of
the lack of that ethical relationship. And no, I don't know what that would
be, exactly. That's what experimental political practice is all about.


Ben



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