Deep Ecology & Postmodernity:

Making space for conversation / Chris Drinkwater

Remove the world around the struggles, keep only conflict and debates, dense with men, purified of things, you will have the theatrical stage, most narratives and philosophies, all of the social sciences: the interesting spectacle we refer to as "cultural". Whoever says where the master and the slave are struggling?

Our culture cannot stand the world. - Michel Serres

Let me state as bluntly as I can the oppositions with which I shall be working. The following are some deep ecological assumptions:

1. That things, somehow, have meaning in themselves (i.e., intrinsic meaning).

2. That things matter in and for themselves (i.e., intrinsic value).

3. That things are connected, in a whole, of which 'we' are inextricably a part.

4. That others (human and non-human, organic and inorganic) are absolutely Other from the apprehending human subject, in a way that resists any explanation, measurement or commentary.

5. That our knowledge of the above brings us face to face with our absolute ignorance and our mortality. Through such encounters with limits, human beings can begin to acknowledge the non-human in ways that resist the latter's reduction to the status of resource.Some countervailing assumptions of postmodern cultural analysis would be:
   

1. That nothing, neither word not thing, has meaning in itself. Meaning arises out of the play of difference between inherently unstable signs. Meaning is shot through with ambiguity .
2. That what matters and what doesn't matter is (over)determined within the field of power-discourse-knowledge.
3. That everything is connected and falls apart in the same moment. Postmodern cultural analysis as a critical practice uses the imbrication of things in order to lend itself to their falling apart (that is, to the deconstruction of universal constructs, fixities of meaning, reifications).
4. That alterity is a mark of discourse, an excess, that arises out of the necessary limits of language.
5. That knowledge claims are always situated and provisional, marks of social construction, rather than of representation, with no central agency. We would do well to admit this state of contingency, as a great deal of human injustice, as well as misplaced hopes, have arisen out of beliefs in, and claims to, Truth that may be accessed by language, but is independent of language. There is nothing mysterious about this impossibility of an original ground of truth. It is simply a corollary of our involvement in the field of discourse. From this point of view, claims such as the one above, about confrontation with absolute ignorance and mortality, are liable to sound rather grandiose. They may threaten a repetition of religious expectations, of salvation even in finitude. They sustain the belief that there is something we are ignorant of. The whole sense of postmodernity is that there is no such 'thing'.

Fish! They are so water-colored!

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight,

New earths and skies and seas around,

And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

A clear and ancient harmony

Pierces my soul through all its din,

As through its utmost melody--

Farther behind than they, farther within.

- Thoreau, Inspiration

A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and for affection to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole Nature in its beauty. - Einstein