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In the second instalment of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011), Adam Curtis appears somewhat dismissive of contemporary ecological thinking, taking a broad swipe, as he does, at the all-too-liberal basis of its concepts. On closer inspection, however, he supplies a call to think again, one that would encourage a less naive, less complacent approach to environmentalism; one welcome indeed for those working to re-assert the necessity of ideology critique for ecocriticism. If in his earlier series, The Century of the Self (2002), Curtis insisted that we historicise our notions of self-hood, tracking the ways in which twentieth-century consumerism and our culture of individuality grew apace, he here implies that our grasp of the nonhuman biome is no less constrained by a pernicious form of techno-narcissism. Threatening hazy notions of natural equilibrium or ‘steady state’ economics, Curtis suggests that our capitalist interpretation of the non- or pre-cultural world runs far deeper than might ordinarily be supposed, identifying and ousting the deeply ideological and totalising tendencies of much environmental ‘holism’.

Entitled ‘The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts’, the second episode of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace redresses a number of ecological ‘givens’, contesting and at times entirely overturning such seemingly wishful notions as autopoiesis (or the ‘self-organisation’ of natural systems) and the biosphere as a self-regulating and balanced ‘machine’ with which humanity merely needs to synchronise. The extent to which the Odum brothers, whose Fundamentals of Ecology (1953) was so key to the formation of ecology as a science in the mid-twentieth century, drew upon mechanical and electrical models in the development of their thesis, underwrites Curtis’ initial analyses of the basis of eco-systemic awareness under capitalist ideology. Coming to appear as little more than the reductive fantasies of nascent technophiles, Curtis seems to cast such hypotheses as largely disobliging, chiefly because they did not meet with thorough testing, which proves a salient point, given the extent to which they have come to permeate so indelibly the eco-cultural imaginary. Yet it is the degree to which they took their part in inspiring the very desire for the bureaucratic management of post-industrial society, for a conservative notion of ‘sustainability’, rather than for any revolutionary overturning of capitalist instrumentalism per se, that might concern us here.

Exploring the equally influential research of cybernetic theorist Jay Forrester, Curtis shows how he was employed by the techno-cratic think tank The Club of Rome during the 1960s-70s. Forrester’s research famously led him in The Limits to Growth (1972) to predict a total ecological collapse in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Curtis shows how whilst Forrester’s cybernetic systems analyses of the human relationship to the biome – its interconnected ‘feedback loops’ – supply a useful means of grasping the complexities of the eco-cultural dynamic, they nevertheless loan themselves all too readily to the scientific streamlining of capitalist productivity, to precisely the ‘sustainable’, eco-liberal ideology that the work of the Odum brothers proved so symptomatic of. We might then acknowledge the diversionary basis of much ecological debate away from any proper critique of capitalist ideology and its technological manifestations on the basis of a purportedly ‘a-political’, scientifically-’neutral’ imperative.

In short, Curtis bids us to think again about that which might appear ‘obvious’ about the difficulties of our environmentalist epoch. In line with this already provocative approach, we might invoke Heidegger directly rather than the cultural criticism of Adorno or Marcuse, or a philosopher whose relationship to ‘eco-critique’, to thinking about nature and desire under late capitalism, is not entirely unproblematic. In declaring that ‘we are not yet thinking’, however, Heidegger (and after him Deleuze) echoed Nietzsche’s call to affirm the power of thought as an event of pure difference. Beyond normative modes of ideology critique, therefore, we might instead strive to activate a very particular ‘culture of learning’, one honouring of an unflinching relationship to the unconscious of thought, to the violence and pathic ‘activity’ of the very ‘will to truth’ that conditions our attitudes and values, most particularly where the putative ‘neutrality’ of the sciences is concerned. To reproach ‘common sense’ in this way – and to which the sciences contribute substantially – is to enable a ‘noological’ consideration of the place of ecology as a science in ecocritical value-formation, demystifying our ultimately ‘reactive’ relationship to the more-than-human world, or that which has come to be figured as the ‘biome’, and in a manner that might exceed normative forms of ideology critique. We might then reconsider how the ecological sciences remain unacknowledged as symptoms of the very crisis they would seek to overcome.

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