Isabella Rosselini’s recent series of shorts on insect sex for the Sundance Film Festival may have been entitled ‘Green Porno’ (an interview with her can be seen over at Matthias Merkel Hess’ Eco Art Blog), but the films, all of which star Rosselini, prove little more than Tim Burton-esque fairytale and could not in any sense be considered as of a piece with the very literal variety of ‘Eco-porn’ emergent in the wake of Web 2.0.

The term had always seemed sportive to my mind, a sardonic and thus more or less healthy response to the contemporary ‘Green wash’ phenomenon. Evoking an overly benign and grossly over-determined ‘nature’ (or Nature as subject), ‘Eco-Pornography’ suggested that which had come to appear captured by delimiting centre-spreads in lavishly produced (and often Photoshopped) pages of expensive wildlife magazines, or served up as soft-focus, reified consumables in television documentaries for ‘eco’-hungry consumer markets.

As the extremely literal act of ‘fucking for the forest’, however, Eco-Porn emerges as an ostensibly ‘radical’ expression of Green ’sex activism’ (or ‘porn aid’). Taking its part in the necessary de-romanticisation of nature, the phenomenon might, then, be seen to summon forth the sort of ‘Dark Ecology’ prescribed by Morton and Žižek, albeit not unproblematically. Rather than supplying images or footage of their own production, however, the hosts of the Fuck For Forest website work to encourage active participation in their particularly ardent brand of eco-politics, intending FFF to facilitate as a non-profit node for those inspired by such activism, and who might wish to submit their own material in order to propagate further ‘environmental’ awareness. Holding submitted footage under consent, the website subsequently makes this available to subscribers who effectively donate towards sympathetic projects and actions.

“FFF is a non-profit erotic ecological project. FFF wishes to normalize sex and nudity to protect nature and liberate life. We collect money for ecology while exploring the power of sexuality.”

Despite how amusing initial contact with FFF might prove, the movement nevertheless poses broader challenges to what we take sexual politics to be; pornography, it seems, remains difficult to reclaim for social justice concerns, unless of course it is sufficiently de- and re-territorialised. Take the post-feminist ‘art sleaze’ of Suicide Girls for example, an enterprise that would seem owned and operated for the most part by women who would deploy the site towards a creative celebration of female sexuality over and against the androcentric passifications of such male-oriented publications as Playboy or Hustler.

If pornography remains corrupting today, then it would seem to remain not so much morally (in any caricatural sense) as pragmatically in terms of the impact its endorsement might have upon such inviolable late capitalist institutions as the paranoically-maintained ’self’, which is to say, upon the personal image (or ‘avatar’) so essential to the furtherance of career and the maintenance of appropriate social standing. Unless mediated in some fashion, the consumption of pornography would appear to run wholly counter to the sort of ‘bookish’ middle-class social values that have come to seem so desirable (particularly in Britain, it seems) as guarantor against the ‘unrefined’ thrill-seeking of the (‘uneducated’) working-classes. Succinctly formulated by Alain de Botton in terms of ’status anxiety’, this symptom calls for the phantasmatic support of ‘clean lines’ (the ethico-aesthetic of anodynised living) and, to my mind at least, is suggestive of a number of diagnostic or symptomnal readings of the ethics of pornography, particularly where ‘clean’ living is (and was always) the moral expression of insustainable living.

If the FFF phenomenon appears an inevitable symptom of web-based media centralisation, of the inevitable (perhaps inadvertent) cut-up of eco-political material, high capitalist film-making and unavoidable sex ‘hook up’ sites, does this not itself warrant further investigation in terms of ‘eco-justice’? Whilst close-quarter shots of day-glo, dread-locked poster hippies indulging in oral and anal sex acts might prove little more than ‘entertaining’, what of the millions of web users who regularly use internet pornography as a masturbatory aid and ostensibly as part of a ‘normal’ late capitalist lifestyle? Consider, if you will, the ignominious fate of a billion Kleenex tissues sourced from the unchecked clear-cutting of arboreal Canadian forests.

From a transcendental empiricist perspective, however, several things appear to be happening in the FFF phenomenon. In Logique du Sens, the sexual surfaces of the libido are restricted, blocked, and reduced; such flows are repressed “in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’”. In Proust, Deleuze discerns how “a molecular sexuality bubbles away beneath the surface of the integrated sexes”. The notion of sexuality, then, not so much as instinct but as creation, not so much as a transcendent mode of organization but as a revolutionary machine, becomes one that might be experimented with noologically; sexuality is linked closely to the possibility of immanence and thinking, to the all important event of thought, to the transformation of the dogmatic images that would constrain healthy experimentation. We might, then, consider how if true thought is possible only when liberated from the notion of castration as transcendent law, then castration needs to be thought of, instead, as a crack, a fracture that does not produce a lack but a surface of thought, “projecting the entire corporeal surface of sexuality over the metaphysical surface of thought.” If the transcendent law of castration results in a blockage of thought, it also results in the mastering and moulding of the sexual body into the molar notion of two sexes rather than the (pregenital) Harlequin’s cloak to which Deleuze compares it.

For ecological discussion, the sexual body might be seen to retain a revolutionary potential and sexuality a significant source of becoming; there is immense power in the ‘thousand tiny sexes’ of desiring-machines, in sexuality beyond the “all too human” idea of castration as absence, and in the multiplicity of surfaces that are opened up in its place. Striving to recognise the potential of sexuality when liberated from genitality as well as anthropomorphic presuppositions, recent Deleuzian scholarship has sought to explore sexuality and the machinic, sexuality and surfaces, and sexuality and animality (a forthcoming volume in the Edinburgh Deleuze Connections series promises useful material in this regard).

The FFF phenomenon might thus be conceived of after the ontology of sex and how we can begin to know of it when it is no longer captive to molar representations. Investigating the strengths and potentials but also the weaknesses and dangers that sexuality opens for thinking, bodies, and becomings, we open onto the ethico-aesthetic, the (eco)political, a noological force that enables change. Whilst the Fuck For Forest poster portrays heterosexual sex acts, the website itself contains images that run largely against hetero-normative practices, suggestive (albeit in something of a caricatural way) of activities that whilst crudely hitched to a ‘radical’ eco-politics, surely suggest ‘healthier’ alternatives to the sort of domesticated privations that remain enthralled to humdrum Oedipal coordinates.

After schizoanalysis, we might detect a purview that would usefully exceed not only the jejune institution of sex as a commodified aspect of ‘contemporary living’, but moreover, challenge new age Gaian-ism with its problematic Oedipalisation of indifferent, resolutely inhuman processes. Whilst the FFF website draws on a measure of ‘mother earth’ symbolism, surely the very concept of sex activism is one that suggests a wealth of post-Oedipal relations? The organisers of the FFF movement appear to uphold the orientation as a ‘healthy’ response (ostensibly for its ‘punk’ savvy) to the harrowing realities of internet pornography and the non-participatory ineffectualities of orthodox Green lobbying. By virtue of its unapologetically-explicit nature, or its de-romanticisations of both ‘loving’ sex and a neutered nature made safe for contemporary domestic needs, even the lingering ‘flower child’ sentiment appears displaced somewhat by the unsentimental emphasis on ‘fucking’, supplanting the image of the ‘tree-hugging’ flower-child with that of the ardent eco-nymph or satyr.

Of course, we remain entitled to think such sex activism ’silly’. But for those who (at the very least) have perhaps never had sex out of doors, or more significantly, have never considered their ‘private’ sexual practices as anything other than the carnal expression of ‘love’ for another human being, well, we might ask, is the home you love not also the extent of your desire?

Critique relates to values, not to objects. The objective world is given in phenomena, but what gives the given? This is the domain of values. Values condition the appearance of the objective world. It follows that the method of critique must be transcendental, since the transcendental is concerned not with the objects of experience but with the conditions which render these objects knowable.

In this sense, critique is anti-dogmatic. Dogmatism is the name Kant gives to the uncritical use of existing values, or what Nietzsche called the “higher values”, to make a philosophical claim. A dogmatic philosophy makes a claim about the world on the basis of concepts the principles informing which remain presupposed. Critique entails not simply an interrogation of these presuppositions but the genesis of a new object form distinct from both knowledge and experience.

Critique thus has two components: it functions to limit the claims of philosophical reason, interrogating the pre-existing values informing it, while also constructing a new field of investigation according to new values, a field in which the object is not “always already” conditioned by values. This is the theoretical “objectivity” which critique itself makes possible. Critique, then, is paradoxical by nature: it states that we can only create something genuinely new in terms of self-imposed constraint. An intellectual impulse, dependent on the values which condition the objects of consciousness, is constrained so that a new unconditioned form of objectivity is revealed.

Deleuze writes that the Husserlian “noematic content” relating to the objects of thought or perception “is not given in perception” but “involves an ideational objective unity as the intentional correlate of the act of perception”. This objective unity hovers over objects like an impassable cloud, allowing them to be thought or perceived, but unthinkable and imperceptible in itself.

Critical thinking does not begin freely, it is not a product of free will but of constraint. It follows that there thus must be something in thought which resists the will to think (which is the “free” will par excellence). This unthinking “thing” has a long cultural heritage. It has been identified with evil, the body, death, sin. Psychoanalysis understands it as the “object cause” of desire, as the horrific or terrifying longed for object of the unconscious drive. We will understand it, however, in purely formal, i.e. theoretical, terms as the constitution of critical objectivity.

Deleuze characterises the transcendental field as being composed of a “pure stream of a-subjective consciousness” prior to the world of experience, prior to the world of subjective selves and empirical objects. Following Bergson, he says the a-subjective stream can be thought of as a beam of light. Once the beam hits a surface, it is reflected back and becomes visible. The visible conditions the appearance of visual objects. But what constitutes the visible is the interruption of the beam, and is invisible, strictly speaking. “As long as consciousness traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, nothing is able to reveal it. It is expressed, in fact, only when it is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects.” Visibility and reflectivity are derived and secondary with respect to the obscurity which renders visible. This is why Deleuze was so concerned with cinema. Cinematic forms for Deleuze were critical objects.

In my last post I drew attention to the Collapse journal and its role in disseminating the so-called Speculative Realist ‘movement’. The proposed sixth issue promises much to those working on progressive ecocritical and ecophilosophical projects without necessarily cementing the journal’s relationship to Graham Harman et al. Having recently spoken with editor Robin Mackay about the new volume, I can confirm that it is still in preparation, but an announcement will be made soon and advance orders will be possible at that time. Arriving in December, “late contributors and general perfectionism have held up publication…” Perhaps more interestingly, Mackay expressed concern over the journal’s affiliation with the latest philosophical trend, stating that “it’s not really centred on ‘SR/OOO’, indeed I’d be happy to distance Collapse from this apparent new orthodoxy!”

Following Collapse V’s inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus’ deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will pose the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy’s task to escape the planetary horizon, to abjure ‘everything that makes us scurry about blindly on the desolate surface of the earth’ (Badiou)?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a direct line of correspondence between the spherical shape of the Earth as a planetary model for the horizon of thinking and the nature of transcendental idealism, so as to establish and determine the boundaries in which human thinking should and may occur – the spherical shape of the Earth as an unequivocal model for ‘the limits of all possible geography’. However, if Kant grants the Earth a direct determinative sovereignty in regard to thought, Nietzsche subverts the gravitational horizon of the Earth so as to bring about the possibility of the Great Politics and ‘Overman as the meaning of earth’. Thus Zarathustra begins his journey by exhorting to the people of the city, ‘Be faithful to the Earth’. Yet as his journey is prolonged, Zarathustra’s faith for the Earth turns into a longing for the ‘fresh air’, his will to remain faithful to the Earth is only nurtured by a ‘weightless affirmation’ of it. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks the earth as depth, inflecting Nietzsche’s weightless affirmation toward a profound, productive earth with a geological history: an earth turned inside-out, whose destiny is determined by its churning depths rather than by its surface inhabitants.

It is this enigmatic passage between the Earth as a geographical determination and the possibility of a weightless identification of the Earth that conditions Deleuze and Guattari’s discovery of a new ground for Geophilosophy – a philosophy that grasps thinking in relation to territory and earth.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as ‘an’ (or ‘the’) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract ‘world’ that is the condition for a ‘whole’ of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions present us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth – these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will bring together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of ‘planetary thought’.

Just a quick post to acknowledge an inspiring (if somewhat scandalous) comment on a thread over at Kvond’s always interesting Frames / Sing. The comment highlights Kvond’s criticisms of what he views as ‘Object Oriented’ philosopher Graham Harman’s tendency towards ‘orientalism’. Whilst I’d like very much to write a fully-fledged post on this fascinating observation, I am only just beginning to pick up on the threads of Object Oriented Philosophy/Ontology (OOP/O) and the Speculative Realism(s) (SR) of Harman, Brassier, Grant and Meillassoux et al, writers who have become principal to a philosophical quasi-’movement’ that can be traced and indulged in over at Speculative Heresy, Larval Subjects, Fractal Ontology and Steve Shaviro’s The Pinocchio Theory.

The influence of Deleuze upon the principal OOO and SR writers appears marked, and a fuller post in this connection will follow. But in the meantime I want to add a word on what might be going overlooked in the rush to celebrate a (‘novel’) post-Deleuzian philosophy. Largely a blogospheric phenomenon, to suggest that the SR ‘movement’ conceals a sort of problematic Orientalism, and moreover, might amount to an exotic re-packaging of other object-oriented philosophies (something that many would still accuse Deleuzism of) seems somewhat churlish, particularly given how exciting much of this thinking appears to be and how deeply amenable such materialisms are to ecocriticism, ecosophy or ecophilosophy. But these are thought-provoking and deeply ‘political’ criticisms nevertheless.

Whilst a fuller distinction between relational and object-oriented philosophies will have to remain forthcoming, I’d nevertheless agree wholeheartedly with Kvond that there’s a sort of “blogged responsibility” to comment on such insights/objections, “if only to triangulate and encourage more to post themselves”. Whilst the full post can be seen here, I reproduce Kvond’s comment below in the hope of drawing a little further comment to our particular region of the blogosphere. So please, don’t be shy.

On November 15, 2009 at 10:43 pm kvond Said:

I should add to your:

“Maybe—beyond this practical element—Harman himself envisions his depoliticized ontological universe of withdrawn objects as just another “pretty canvas.” ”

This resonates with his very odd response to my claim that his ontology Orientalizes the mediating other. His claim was of course I love orientializing, I love the exotic, there is nothing wrong with Orientalizing things, people, etc. (to sum the gist of it). I was a bit taken aback and had to try to point out that it is exactly through our exotic portrayal of others, or projections of erotic qualities, that a shadow follows along, and politically, a very destructive shadow.

At this point I believe he stopped responding, and I couldn’t tell if he was not aware of this rather obvious point (as an American in Egypt) or simply decided to ignore it. But the political consequences of his “ontology”, his painted picture of a Vicarious World really were of no interest to him. As far as he was concerned Orientalize away. It was then that I decided to make a general comparison between his writing about the Exotic, and Flaubert’s (a writer he considered the worst of the worst, from a socio-political standpoint). This was the end of all our communications.

Volume 2 of the Collapse journal is perhaps the single best introduction to OOP/O and Speculative Realism, but also such texts as Harman’s Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005) and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009). Also Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007) and Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008).

Despite broken links to Harman’s own blog and to those papers of his that were made available for a time at Speculative Heresy, a number of extremely useful PDFs can nevertheless be had here.

for Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

The problem facing any attempt to think structure is that the element which gives structuration is always missing from the field which receives it. How then do we recognise a structure when we see one? If our lives obeyed a secret pattern, if we were compelled by an invisible hand, or a machine which influenced our actions in some way, how could we possibly know? If our thoughts were not our own but another’s, would they not still be the same thoughts? Is not structuration itself imperceptible? The requirement is not to think the structure, exactly, but its structuration. We do not recognise structuration by seeing what is structured, but rather by seeing what is excluded from the structure. And there is always something necessarily excluded from it since it receives its structuration from another place.

Empiricism teaches that everything which is given to the observer is. Being is the totality of the evidence. But what if our observations were mistaken? This question of deception is crucial, but it cannot simply be maintained that truth is objective and distortion belongs to the subject. There is a deception on the side of the object, an objective distortion. Georges Bataille begins his great text The Solar Anus (1927) with the declaration that “the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form”. It is not simply that observation could be deceived, as if in a dream. This is a banality. The point is that a deception has no being. A dream, fantasy, or hallucination is not unreal, it is perfectly real in itself, but lacks being. Being, in other words, is not an attribute of reality, is not something about which we can be deceived, as if it were a quality like whiteness. One can only be deceived about attributes. Twentieth century European thought bases itself on this ontological insight: while we may be mistaken about what is, we are never mistaken about being, because we are. This overturns Aristotle’s refutation of Parmenides in book one of the Physics, and establishes, in one blow, a kinship between philosophy and madness. While our delusion may give us a false world, a world that is not, the reality of our delusion, that we live in it, is never in question. This one ontological fact is what makes madness an illness and philosophy a kind of madness.

A delusion is false not because it is a deception but because it has no being. This is what establishes delusion as a reality in itself, a private reality within the body of the psychotic, who is unable any longer to leave it. This is what grants the psychotic a place in the asylum, what justifies his incarceration there. Madness is the limit of the communicable world. But being is not secured by what is real. Delusion and psychosis are realities, but do not provide being. A fantasy, a dream are real, there is no being in them. What is real and what is are not the same. This means that being, fundamentally, is on the side of the subject, not the object. The subject gives to reality the being proper to it. The subject attributes being to reality. Being is not an attribute, to be sure, but it is attributed. Madness arises when one is held fully under the sway of the deceptions of objects, the objective distortion. The subjective attribution of being to reality is what structuralism sought. If it also sought to interrogate the theory of the subject established by the humanist and liberal discourse of the person, this is because the humanist subject retains the biases that place being on the side of the object and deception on the side of the subject. The world is, as such, and you or I perceive it or misperceive to varying degrees and according to the representations we form of it. The paradox of structure, on the other hand, demanded the contrary, that what we perceive is not the real but its signification. The structuration to which the signifier submits, and to which it makes us submit in turn, is being. Structuralism refuted atheistic empiricism and the humanist subject on which it is based in favour of a conception of the world as Logos, “in which we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

In his L’Abécédaire interview, Deleuze describes his perfect meal, which he says he might have on his birthday. Deleuze, an avowed fan of the rule of three, says the meal would consist of brain, marrow, and tongue, and gives a philosophical breakdown of the components: the brain is the concept or God the father, the marrow is the affect or the flesh of the Son, and the tongue is the percept or the holy spirit. This meal is a perfect example of Deleuzian philosophy. Let me explain.

First, there is thought: something thinks, produces concepts. But what is this thing? The brain, reason. But where is this brain, how are the concepts that it produces to be distinguished from what doesn’t think? This is the Cartesian quandary, since even though it might be simple to show that thought exists and therefore I exist, it is not at all clear that thought and I share the same being. Thought exists precisely because there is a thing which does not think, something which secures my being. The marrow: the flesh and the bones. So, it appears that it is only the difference between the two that allows perception, language, sexuality, art: the tongue or holy spirit.

This difference obsoletes the Cartesian dualism. The difference between thought and body can become an opposition only if one term remains constant and determining. Thus, Christianity asserts the opposition of thought and body on the ground that body is finite and mutable, and thus our being is only secured in opposition to something in us which is infinite and immutable: thought, reason, God. Kant and Hegel essentially atheise the Christian opposition of thought and body, and in place of God they put the teleological judgment that the ends of thought are good, reason will not lead us astray, thought is essentially good and will save us.

 

The opposition of thought and body persists even if we give priority to the body. Psychoanalysis is a perfect example. Lacan, at heart a Jesuit with a potty mouth, makes this explicit. Lacan’s slogan, “ne ce pas ceder sur son desir” (do not give in to your desire), means that the opposition of thought and body persists at the level of our cultural and sexual relationships and demands that we give in to them, demands that we let ourselves be signified, symbolised. Psychoanalysis teaches that we relinquish the drive (jouissance) in order to secure a place in the symbolic, in order to acquire a position in the family, then in society. This is what giving in to desire means. Giving in to desire means the same thing as giving up desire. This is what Freud saw as the ultimate perversity of civilisation.

Deleuze however can talk about thought and body as really distinct without in any way suggesting that they are opposed: the primary or determining instance is neither thought nor body, but the difference between the two. The opposition of thought and body is badly conceived because it needs to take into account two kinds of differences simultaneously: the extent to which thought differs from body, and the extent to which body differs from thought. The fact that the two cannot be reconciled leads to the kind of agonism Lacan preaches. But opposition is a very bad way of trying to account for this, since what is at stake is a difference between two differences, or a differential. What Deleuze proposes, then, is a new philosophy of language, perception, art and sexuality which takes the differential as primary and which does not presuppose that thought is good, that reason will save us, or, conversely, that embodiment is good, that sensuality will save us. Both are equally mistaken.

By Aidan Tynan, Cardiff University

It should be noted before too much virtual ink is spilled that in closing a recent post on Žižek and Eco-Critique I may have appeared to have given Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature (2007) short shrift, not least for seeming to include as an apparent after-thought one of his superb podcasts. Of course, Tim’s book was extremely influential upon Žižek’s more sensationalist formulations of an ecology ‘without’ nature, aiding and abetting the Marx-o-Lacanian in overturning naturalist ideologies that would keep us from engaging planetary life by way of inadequate conceptions of totality.

Only just now emerging in paperback, Ecology Without Nature remains essential stuff. With great dialectical facility, Morton supplies an indispensable thesis towards a ‘dark ecology’, or one sufficiently divested of what Hegel characterised as the schone seele or ‘beautiful soul’. Diagnosing the abject fetishisation of nature since the industrial era as a fully-fledged ’syndrome’, Morton’s might be conceived of as something like a symptomnal analysis, sitting well with my own research interests in post-Lacanian approaches to ecocriticism. Whilst Ecology Without Nature does not feature any sustained discussion of eco-psychology after explicitly post-Lacanian rubrics (although Julia Kristeva’s work can be seen to take its part in useful ways), Tim’s forthcoming The Ecological Thought (April/May 2010), promises greater development, if not a measure of refinement in this connection.

Since recently discovering Chris’ work, and since he was kind enough to allow me to use one of his images as the masthead for Violent Signs, I’ve wanted to feature a piece on his Hidden Landscapes, and if at all possible, to include some sort of discussion of their intense vitality where the representation of ‘natural’ environments might be concerned. Based in London, Chris is a freelance motion designer and illustrator and has produced video material for amongst other clients, The National Geographic. But his illustrative work seems most interesting here, not least by way of its apparent abstraction of alpine images. Undeniably affective, the scrubbed and opaque zones and fields without depth that comprise his Hidden Landscapes recall the “very special violence” of Deleuze’s masochistic sublime. In Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (1981), Deleuze considers at length the cascading movement of materials and forces that we witness on any one of Bacon’s spectacular canvases of ‘violence’, developing the semiology of forceful, material signs he had earlier set forth in Proust et Les Signes (1964) and Difference et Repetition (1968). To suggest that Thompson’s graphic images might be allied somehow with the paintings of a twentieth-century British figurist, is to acknowledge much less the “facile detours” suggested by the immediate horror of Bacon’s work, as “a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression”.

Bacon’s high modernism might thus be characterised as wholly corporeal, as geo-philosophical: “[w]hat fascinates [him] is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by the wind or deformed by an aspiration, but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make the spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus.” Thompson’s Hidden Landscapes appear to display an equal fascination with interior forces, with the clandestine affectivity of the geological interior, with the terrible spasms and whippings of the earth over time and with the dizzying effect such intensities have on those who would truly encounter them. In his compressed, intensified graphics, Thompson appears unconcerned with re-presenting static images of the world, but with capturing the pre-objective, pre-extended world of dynamic intensities, the virtual movements and spills that comprise ‘actual’ environments. Thompson’s work exceeds facile representations of ‘nature’, yet remains complexly pastoral; we sense and therefore feel the maddening torsions of vast biotic forces, the interminable coolings of immense geological flows, the slips and tumbles of alpine ice sheets, the geriatric twist of petrified woods, the perpetual buckling of the earthly crust itself.

Chris Thompson’s portfolio can be viewed @ http://www.juniortaxi.net/

Despite the location of its principal players within the North American political context, the following YouTube interview with Van Jones, former White House “Green Czar”, is more broadly suggestive of how global ecocritique might be increasingly implicated in wider socialist strategies. Jones explains that although the ‘Green Movement’ will start out relatively benign, it will eventually transform into an engine for massive societal change, flagging up not so much how socialist strategies are productively hijacking ‘environmental’ issues, as how the two antagonisms are in many ways commensurate.

Almost certainly, Van Jones’ discussion of political strategy should intrigue those who are looking not only to the putative ‘Greening of Marxism’ as a means of retaining socialist concerns under a Green ‘post-social’ moment, but to such neo- or post-Marxist theoretical criticisms as those supplied by Deleuzoguattarian and Žižekian models. Having become most widely accessible through Žižek’s increased visibility as public intellectual in recent years, the politicisation of the (late) Lacanian concepts of jouissance and the ‘Real’, or their relatively under-discussed status as (micro)political categories, seems to offer valuable conceptual means of articulating the complexities of such debates. Since Althusser, the relationship between the Real (as that which resists absolute symbolisation) and the much-maligned ‘Imaginary’, or that register to which fantasies, wish-fulfillments and perceptual falsehoods are attributable, has enabled us to conceptually schematise our relationships to ideology and thus totality, rendering Lacanian psychoanalysis an indispensable critical rubric homologous with even the most vulgar of Marxian ideology critiques. In Žižek, Lacan’s jouissance, the concept which enables him to think more than mere pleasure but the very structuration and limitation of desire, becomes a profoundly (micro)political concept in hitching the subject to the symbolic order (natural language, public conventions, ideological systems) by way of a necessary delimitation or ‘castration’, therefore supplying elegant ontological postulates pertaining to subjectivity, desire and public law. In being cut off (or castrated) from its primary object of desire (the mother) by entry into the Symbolic order (the paternal prohibition of incest) the subject is formed by a crucial repression of jouissance that enables us to think the subject’s relationship to collective representations, and thus, to the political, whether ‘Green’ or otherwise.

Therefore whether or not our interest lies with Marx-o-Lacanian theory in its own right, and with its serviceability in the face of current social justice concerns, Žižek’s forthcoming lectures on the ‘myth of natural balance’ at the London ICA and at Birkbeck College, University of London, promise equity in addressing what he sees as the eschatological tendency under late capitalism to imagine the end of the world more readily than a more modest change in the mode of production. Where our collective representations (of ‘nature’ or otherwise) depend so markedly upon the formation of Symbolic proficiency, Žižek’s Marx-o-Lacanianism certainly stimulates further questions concerning the potential of overlooked (or disavowed) Oedipal relations between subject, the mode of production and the biota, and moreover, why it is that we might be presently fixating on ecological disequilibrium and eschatology: the implicit question being, to what extent is ‘natural balance’ ideologically constructed? Yet despite their having both been billed as focused on ‘ecological’ themes, however, his lectures in New York (2007) and Athens (2008) were decidedly thin on analyses of environmental ideology, and it therefore remains to be seen whether or not both the London talks and the forthcoming Verso text (Spring 2009) will supply further insight into the problematic fulminations of ecopolitical desire by way of his unique synthesis of Marx, Schelling and Lacan. Whilst Žižek’s apparent ambivalence over such issues as sustainability and over-population continue to prove frustrating indeed to those ecocritics who sense something wholly amenable in his approach, we might at the very least, consider why it is that he maintains such ambivalence.

Žižek’s appearance in Astra Taylor’s recent documentary Examined Life (2008), proves far better introductory viewing where his positions on ecological ideology might be concerned than the recordings of the New York and Athens talks posted at YouTube.

Despite equivocation over specific environmentalist issues, then, Žižek is clearly most contentious where he calls for greater artificiality, greater separation from our biological lifeworld as a strategic means of finally accepting it. This would amount to a dialectical estrangement of our insufficient images of nature by way of the development of “a much more terrifying, new abstract materialism, a kind of mathematical universe where there is nothing, there are just formulas, technical forms and so on”, which is to say, Žižek’s recognition of the necessity of a profound de-romanticisation of nature, an embracing of the difficulties of finding poetry or beauty in what has long been perceived of as the worst of the world. In this brief clip from Examined Life, Žižek explains that this would better enable the emergence of a “true ecologist”, or one who loves the world completely and not by way of some sort of facile idealisation, an ecologism in acceptance of trash, of all the failures, stupidities, uglinesses and readily disavowed aspects that are omitted from our ideologically-conditioned images of the natural order. But again (and perhaps this is more on the part of Taylor’s direction than via any failing of Žižek’s to address it), we are left to infer what this must imply where our ‘eco-socialism’ may or may not be concerned. Despite the underdeveloped nature of much of the Athens lecture, Žižek nevertheless lists ecology/environmentalism (terms he conflates somewhat unhelpfully) as one of four principal antagonisms to the apparent triumph of post-Fukuyaman capitalism. Whilst he does not underscore the point in the Examined Life talk, Žižek’s thinking here is, of course, exceptionally clear and amenable to broad critiques of (bourgeois) Green morality. To paraphrase his words in Examined Life, to attribute meaning or judgement as punishment to ecological ‘imbalance’ would not only be to preclude a proper understanding of the disparate phenomena that make up the contemporary ecological situation, but to be distracted by an imaginary and ‘ideal’ unity where this remains difficult to substantiate.

But where, we might ask, is his fuller analysis of ecopolitical desire? It seems this is something we’ve had to wait for, for being much less interesting or urgent on his view than the broader business of reconceiving of Capital in terms of the Lacanian Real, or as the untranscendable horizon to which all other phenomena must be enthralled. In the wake of the recent, global financial implosion, Capital can no longer be denied as the Real of our lives. For Žižek it is the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing problems of our natural and social world. Which of course underscores that whilst ‘eco-capitalism’ might initially appear an extremely decadent or craven idea to hard-line socialist sensibilities, it appears more strategically desirable than ever before. Moreover, whilst Žižek’s ‘position’ would, then, appear superficially homologous with that of Van Jones, it seems more valuable still to consider the clear antipathies that might exist between these thinkers. Furthermore, the Lacanian concepts to which Žižek looks have of course become much transformed in the writings of other post-Althusserians such as Deleuze and Guattari, but also Fredric Jameson, and for anyone working on analyses of the formation of Green molar ‘interests’ from pre-political or molecular desire, the emphasis in the Van Jones interview on the relationship between ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ goals for progressive politics might then meet with useful extensions. Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary critiques in l’anti-Oedipe and Mille Plateaux also highlight the strategic imperatives of Marx-o-Lacanian ideas and concepts, whilst departing in significant ways from what we might identify as Žižek’s problematic Kantianism, not least over the epistemological status and interpretation of symptoms. Acknowledging how Deleuzoguattarian ’schizoanalysis’ might extend and break with the increasingly normative, Žižekian position on symptomatology supplies a formidably complex engagement with late capitalist subjectivity that Žižek’s critics suggest he has failed to properly understand.

But it seems fair to suggest that whilst such approaches have become increasingly commonplace for traditional forms of cultural criticism, they are emerging all too slowly for ecocultural research, and particularly in the North American institutional context. That we remain forced to make the distinction between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘ecocultural’ of course attests to the abject reification of the disciplines themselves under late capitalist market imperatives. Thus it is not only that cultural productions supply powerful symptoms for critical interpretation, but that the disciplines which would receive them have themselves come to prove equally symptomatic of the economic fabric under which they were borne and continue to operate. It therefore seems imperative that such symptomatological and schizoanalytic approaches be allowed to sufficiently contact the methodological bases of ecocritical practices; those ecocritics who would exercise a degree of ‘metacritical’ self-awareness, reckoning with the place of their fledgling discipline within a globally-hegemonic and inveterate free market economy, necessarily reckon with the complicities of their own reification, and therefore appear to be about much the same business as even the most radical of  ‘continental’ neo-Marxists.

A recent podcast by Professor Timothy Morton of The University of California at Davis, author of Ecology Without Nature (both the book and the blog), supplies an excellent and deeply sympathetic resource in closing this post insofar as he is working towards a ‘dark ecology’ by way of a cultural pre-history of environmentalism after Hegel’s schone seele or ‘beautiful soul’. Developing the Hegelian concept towards analysis of an ideological syndrome, Morton is somewhat Žižekian in tone, although his interests and emphases are far more literary than those we ordinarily encounter in Žižek’s studies.

Slavoj Žižek will be lecturing at the London ICA on the 24th of November at 6.45pm, tickets are £9-10 (£8 ICA members). He is also giving a free talk at Birkbeck College, University of London on the 25th of November at 2.30pm in Room B01 in the Core Management Centre, Torrington Place.

A recent interview with Žižek can be found on the The New Statesman website.

Spaniard Jose Luis Rodriguez’s ‘Wolf Attack’ recently won the 45th edition of the best nature and animal photography competition, under the auspices of the BBC Wildlife Magazine and London’s Natural History Museum. Studying for many years the habits and routes of a pack of Iberian wolves, Rodriguez took the shot by way of a hand built hatch operated by an infrared beam, which automatically activated the camera when the animal jumped over it. The image was taken with a medium-format Hasselblad 503CW film camera, with a fixed 80 mm canon.

Without labouring the point too greatly, or wishing to hitch Rodriguez’s work too clumsily to this blog’s prevailing philosophical bias, what this image conveys most powerfully is the ‘ecological’ relationship between animal, milieu (or ‘Umwelt‘), and affectivity or interior milieu (‘Inenwelt‘). Moreover, the device (or artifice) of the Hasselblad camera itself is, of course, the prior system of relations and relays productive of so intense and singular an image. Which is to say, it is this very moment of production in and of itself that we encounter as much as we encounter an inspiring image of a wolf. Rather than overlooking this relationship (something, it seems fair to suggest, that a great many consumers of wild life photography are want to do), it seems crucial that we foreground and acknowledge our desire for such images as images, and moreover, draw the ontic distinction between the image and the represented Real, in doing so according them both a proper measure of intrinsic or ’sovereign’ value.