Today my eyebrows rose to their maximum height when I ran into a Verso
blog post on Twitter. Titled “Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj
Žižek on Molecular Red”, I fully expected another helping of the
anti-Abbeyist ideology that permeated Christian Parenti’s Truthout
interview. Of course, there is an obvious provocation here. Since
ecology and “mother nature” are not terms normally thought of in
contradiction with each other, you have to ask what Žižek has in mind.
As a past master of the outrageous, you can expect him to fuck with your
mind—at least if you are the sort of person who takes the Elvis
Superstar of Marxism seriously.
Žižek’s commentary targets a new Verso book titled “Molecular Red:
Theory for the Anthropocene” by McKenzie Wark. The Verso blurb states
that it “creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new
planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that
the future of one determines that of the other.” Without knowing
anything about the book in advance, I was reminded of Parenti’s
dismissal of John Bellamy Foster’s “nature/society” dualism with the
reference to “human and natural forces” being entwined. Of course, if
you don’t go beyond the anti-Cartesian abstractions (that ultimately put
you in Leibniz’s camp, for what that’s worth), you don’t have a clue
about what the fuss is over.
It turns out that despite being represented as an anti-Cartesian, Wark
has much more in common with Foster than William Cronon. Žižek describes
him as concerned with the metabolic rift that Marx identified as the
root cause of a soil fertility crisis (ie., animal excrement flowed into
the Thames rather than fertilized the crops)—the very same point that
Foster has made in numerous articles. However, Žižek dismisses the
possibility of a rift but at the same time praises Wark for rejecting
the notion that nature was ever in balance:
Notions like “rift” and perturbed “cycle” seem to rely on their
opposite: on a vision of a “normal” state of things where the cycle is
closed and the balance reestablished, as if the Anthropocene should be
overcome by simply re-installing the human species into this balance.
Wark’s key achievement is to reject this path: there never was such a
balance, nature in itself is already unbalanced, the idea of Nature as a
big Mother is just another image of the divine big Other.
Of course, it is a bit difficult to figure out where Wark stands solely
on the basis of Žižek’s précis. Short of reading his book, the best
source would be a long article on E-Flux titled “Molecular Red: Theory
for the Anthropocene (On Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson)”
where he speaks in the name of the Carbon Liberation Front, a group with
just one member—McKenzie Wark.
The Carbon Liberation Front has a number of enemies with those
advocating markets as a solution" in first place. He also warns against
“a romantic turn away from the modern, from technology, as if the rift
is made whole when a privileged few shop at the farmer’s market for
artisanal cheese.” Uh-oh, I’d better fill the fridge with Kraft’s to
stay on Wark’s good side.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2015/05/26/mckenzie-wark-bogdanov-zizek-and-gold-plated-bullshit/
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