Holy Crap!
This book is blowing my mind more than I'm even ready for. Object Oriented Horrific Speculative Fiction that's Actually True if You Look at It a Certain Way...
I am not able to read this book. All I can do is drown in it while blasphemous pipelines penetrate my lungs through the story's plot holes, keeping me artificially alive and unable to drown.
I can't even tell you what it's about. I'm more than halfway through and I don't know yet! You just have to read it...but you can't. You'll drown. Buy it anyway.
I don't know whether it's a revolution in literature, or the END of literature.
Welcome to pefkfl (pronounced PEF-ka-ful), Nick Guetti's blog. This is where I will post literature relating to various matters of interest to myself and perhaps others, including but not limited to Permaculture; fermentation (and other forms of "culturing"); ecology; fantasy and other forms of imaginative or speculative literature; and martial arts. Posts will be of a generally philosophical and often political nature.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Ecopsychology; the Myth of Natural Balance; "Dark Permaculture"
Ecopsychology is a
very interesting field with some very important things to say about ecological
and psychological trauma. Unfortunately, it's a pretty young field.
Fortunately, that means there's lots of room for it to grow. Unfortunately,
we've got a lot of growing to do. Fortunately, ain't nothing to it but to do
it.
This article was brought to my attention via Tim
Morton's blog. Like Tim, and lots of other people (actually, the entirety of
Western Civ, I suspect), I suffer from depression, much of it connected with
ecological trauma and the sociopolitical denial-blowback that resists
recognition of the trauma and muddies up the clarity of our decisions about how
to deal with it on a political level.
One of the most
depressing realities to face is that the agrilogistical methodology identified
by Tim as the source of most of our ecological problems is the very same
methodology resorted to by those who wish to counteract it. For more on this,
wait with bated breath for Tim's upcoming book, "Dark Ecology", and
in the meantime just visit his blog.
But the article
linked above is unfortunately rife with the very same mistakes we have been
repeating for the last twelve thousand years and change ("change" as
in dollars and cents, the only kind it's ever achieved so far). Being familiar
with established permaculture (I was very active in it for years until I saw it
was being realized as basically fetish capitalist fantasy-sale), I'm equipped
with the tools with which to criticize this; others--including people much
smarter than me, like Tim--are likely to continue to be lulled by it.
Even so, I'm really
surprised Tim liked the article, as full as it is of the kind of passive
apocalypticism I learned to expect of USA permaculture and peak oil ideologues,
something Tim incessantly criticizes. Not to mention the ontotheology of the
"Web of Life" that will magically repair itself when the
"low-energy future" forces us to leave it alone over there in the
exo-human "Zone 5" of untouched wilderness.
Sorry to be
ungentle. If my own failure to heal from trauma is any excuse, them I offer it
as such. But the above is an example of how established American permaculture
will have to be scrapped in favor of methodologies that are not quite so glibly
sure of their own goodness if caring people are ever to be equipped to face the
challenges that exist. Some offshoot of established permaculture might work,
but only if/when it deals with the following problems:
1. Lovelockian webs
of life in which everything happens by itself and for its own (good) reasons.
Smart theologians might take a leaf out of the Book of Job at this point (God
visits Job at the end and says, "You were right, I DON'T exist!").
I'm advocating the reverse of the sociobiologist perspective here: it's ALL
nurture, it's ALL culture, it's ALL artificial, and we are subject to responsibility
for ALL of it. Awful as it may seem, we have to learn to deal.
2. Myths of a happy
future prompted by resource scarcity. This is basically passive apocalypticism
and a kind of compensatory sadist fantasy reacting to the very same social
rejection that is cited in the therapy article. I know this assertion is likely
to generate horror and disgust among activists who cite all kinds of data from
all kinds of scientistic sources, but resource availability is best seen as an
economic issue, and I know enough about economics to be pretty convinced that
"peak oil" is essentially a meme-tool for the shaping of consumer
purchasing attitudes ("Hey, it's running out, you gotta be
careful...") so that prices will stay just high enough to be profitable.
Resources (as commodities) DON'T peak, they just get more expensive and then
governments have to subsidize production, as with agriculture for the last
century or so. Was anyone talking about tar-sands 15 years ago? No, because
mining them wasn't cost-effective. And oil is in everything: you could squeeze
it out of the keyboard I'm typing this on if you thought it was worth spending
the money to do it. "Peak oil" is meaningless. So is the
"low-energy future" (Is the present high in energy? No, the cost is
just subsidized, and it will continue to be, because of government-corporate
collusion, unless this is brought under control through adequate politics). In
general, the idea that we will adopt better ecological policies "when we
have to", is the sound of a scorched fiddle in the charred ruins of a dead
Rome. The article even briefly promotes the kind of disaster capitalism
("catastrophe as opportunity" or some such callous invocation) warned
of by Naomi Klein in her excellent book on the subject. ("The Shock Doctrine".)
3. Utilitarianism.
This is something permaculture has always been confused about. Though it adopts
some vestige of an object-oriented view, this view remains essentially
holistic-communal (chickens are "for" scratching, poplars are
"for" windbreaks, sheep are "for" eating grass, deer are
"for" herbivorous grazing, humans are "for" design and
management and eating sheep and deer, etc.). Though some concession is made to
the "intrinsic value" of objects in the basic principles, this is
almost totally forgotten in the design implementation modeling phase. Which
leads into:
4. Zoning. There is
nothing wrong with the permaculture zones at all, provided that we remember
that every object is the center of its own "Zone 0" (objects are not
fitted into human-conceived zones; they exude their own zones, and it is as
important that we "fit in" with their influence as the reverse, if
not more so), and also that even "Zone 5" (what we call
"unotouched" wilderness) is actually very touched and exists over
here, with us, on THIS side, within the sphere of human responsibility, as was
well understood by Native Americans and other indigenous folk.
Will this changed idea
of permaculture (we could call it "Dark Permaculture") ever be
realized? I find it unlikely, given my own very disappointing history with
American permaculture. The "movement" (as it calls itself
meaninglessly) appears to be far too socially homogeneous and class-centered.
But I don't believe it's impossible. Something like permaculture may have a
significant part to play in the creative acceptance of human ecological
responsibility. The answer is in our collective hands.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
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