NATURE INVISIBLE

On sociality in the      capitalist disorder 

A comparison study of 
Arran E.Gare and Raymond A.Rogers

by

RUSSELL PINK 

NOTE

I should state that this paper is at two removes from most source documents, being the product of my reading of published texts. I adumbrate and present essentials of the two main works; then cross-reference and link their content and propositions, where appropriate, in order to synthesise points made by the authors. The texts in question deal with topics of economic theory, historical social analysis, post-structural philosophy, environment and technology.  

INTRODUCTION

I place the sources in this essay on two levels. Primarily I make use of the following authors’ ideas and statements: Raymond Rogers in his 1994 text, Nature and the crisis of modernity; and Arran Gare in his Postmodernism and the environmental crisis (1995).  These are recent publications, but considered together the works provide a substantial library of earlier, more primary thinkers, forming a second tier of reference. Besides many to be introduced in passing, we have recourse to ideas from Karl Polanyi, Jean Baudrillard, Giambattista Vico and Fredric Jameson. 

Through such minds, I propose a summary of humanity and the Earth in their late modern predicament. This is reaching or, as some would have it, has reached a grave crisis point. Note that I use the third person ‘their’, not ‘our’. For this is not only a crisis of humanity. All through modernity, since at least 1750, anthropocentrism has been an insidious factor in the wrong-headedness of thought and action concerning the natural world; and the conceptual separation of humankind from itself “as nature”, is the worst aspect of the modern period. 

By the word ‘crisis’, I refer to a confluence of three trajectories that seem to bode ill for the future; these are:
 
1. The impact of hegemonic capital markets through global corporate activity and vast financial flows
2. The partial collapse or ongoing degradation of ecological balance/integrity in the natural environment and
3. The effect of applied (rather than theoretical or pure) scientific knowledge accumulating on behalf of the prevailing economic regime, at a rate far faster than historically embedded institutions, mores and decision-making processes are able to cope with. 

Knowing the background influences upon, and deeper currents of, today’s crises should help us to look at where an all-pervasive capitalist social organisation plus unfettered  technology, are taking nature. Always that direction includes us, the human species.

Lastly, 	I report on certain options raised in Gare and Rogers, to allay global ecological disaster through unbearable human economic and other pressures on the biosphere.  

COMMENTARY ON THE TEXTS

The Australian academic philosopher Arran Gare, in Postmodernism and the environ-mental crisis has a closely argued and very finely researched text. There are few that employ cultural analysis and environmental philosophy so adeptly, to discover how our present direction of philosophical thought and political economy are causing critical environmental problems - some already perceived decades ago. Gare is no stranger to principal figures and ideas in postmodern cultural theory, and his bib-liography alone evidences scholarly grasp of the field. His particular advantage is that he is able to cross-fertilise postmodern theories with the thought of outstanding environmental philosophers, historians of science and ecology experts. Thus he brings in and discusses the work of Warwick Fox, John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Alfred North Whitehead and others. Gare also makes an epistemological inquiry into the modern world’s foundations, via the work of major philosophers.  Among them are the Italian, Giambattista Vico, in the seventeenth century, Henri Bergson in the last, and of course, Martin Heidegger. Gare also introduces a remarkable Soviet environ-mentalist, and major precursor of the Frankfurt School of social theory. This figure, Alexei Bogdanov, has been recently resurrected by post-marxist  scholars, after being practically unknown to the West in his lifetime.

In tandem, I deal with Raymond Rogers, Canadian fisherman turned philosopher, who penned the book Nature and the crisis of modernity in 1994. It was published by Black Rose, an imprint well known to anarchists and for bringing out Murray Bookchin’s outspoken texts on social ecology and environment theory. Rogers examines successively the more radical treatises of capital and modes of production. Thus he expounds ideas from Marx, Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi. In another major aspect of the book, Jean-Joseph Goux and Jean Baudrillard are introduced and their ideas about communication connected to the work of the above thinkers.

Rogers’ exposition is forthright, logical, historically directed and diversely informed. His aim, as he says categorically, is not to be party to the current discussion on how to manage and utilise the natural world; rather,“This enquiry is about dysfunctionality and dislocation and loss. In broad terms then, this work is a record of animus leaving the world.” (Rogers p.12) It would be true to say that in much of Gare’s text, that description also applies.

Rogers sets out revised approaches to the Marxian description of the rise of abstract-value forms in social life and commodified relations under capitalism. It is a study of how money became the universal exchange value, and how that God-like pre-eminence of an objective standard for exchange has distorted how we view the natural world and our position in it. There has been, as Marx, Polanyi and Simmel reveal, a subsuming of the life-world within a human material production system, such that all relations, no matter what, become mediated by that system. The result in the twentieth century was that, wherever a set of social-economic relations existed which did not conform to the reign of quantity and the universalist value form, it was (or still is being) forced to do so. Thus are the last pre-capitalist modes of sociality in process of erasure, from Amazonia to Papua New Guinea. 

Interestingly, Rogers notes via Marx and Polanyi that the long development of a totally abstract exchange value parallels the rising commodification and alienation of labour. As money became the value and measure of all things, nature could not remain in living relationship to mankind, but had to be reduced to a cornucopia of exploitable resources. 

At the same time, humans were compelled to view themselves as impersonal units in a vast economic system coterminous with culture itself. The phrase “coterminous” (my own usage) can hardly be stressed enough for the present historical moment, if I read Gare and Rogers properly. 

To complete an accurate description of the postmodern condition, Rogers employs the arguments of the two French intellectuals, Goux and Baudrillard, concerning our prevailing ‘culture of substitution’. Baudrillard’s approach in his political economy of the sign is of special relevance to Rogers’ theme. 

In the last part of his investigation, Rogers treats the question of identity in the modern setting, referring to tensions between residual or embedded forms and emergent, disembedded forms of social relationships. These he demonstrates through an analysis of two key phenomena: Shakespearian tragedy during the late Tudor period  and  the Romantic movement  of  1780 to 1820.  Shakespeare and Keats are his specific examples. They both appeared at nodal points, or in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘moments of danger’, when residual loss was brought poignantly and sharply to attention by their works. The time of Shakespeare and the time of the Romantics had much social dislocation and fracturing. As in other such disturbed historical moments, a major step was being taken towards further disembedding of sociality from a natural habitus.

Referring to Fredric Jameson’s important early 1990’s essays on late capitalism and on consumerism, Rogers shows how a group of historical factors leads inexorably to the end of individuality, so crucial during the rise of the modern; and thus to the well-known postmodern situation, the “death of the subject”. Something akin to this is expressed by Heidegger, in his writing on technological society, as the loss of the ‘field path’, which metaphorically indicates the end of direct relations with nature. Under present cultural conditions, social relations are transformed yet more, by the reign of simulacra and by electronic mediation of information. The ‘hyperspace’ of TV and multi-media is quintessentially different in its effects on the way we think, to the linear printed text. (Arran Gare explores these major shifts with equal keenness.)

Rogers’ text ends in a discussion of the current environmental debate, for which  preceding analysis has prepared the way. Dominated by the money economy and caught in a media-saturated “consumer culture” of total abstraction, says Rogers, what possibility remains to us of treating nature with the form of archaic respect which was present most generally before the capitalist “takeover”? Humanity, while merely conqueror and user of nature, can never regain its former embedded relations, either with other humans or with nature. If the damaged psyche of the human knowledge system (under Western dominance) persists in its present course, we must be living on borrowed time. To make things worse, the crisis of nature and humanity is reinforced by an instrumental approach to environmental ecology. Such project seeks to preserve and manage (what is left of) the natural environment, but basically accepts the reigning market ethos. Rogers is clear that an alliance of environmentalism and economy is a doomed compromise. Trading pollution units and taxing effluent makers, will not finally reinstate a much-needed ontology; instead it virtually guarantees the concreting and enclosing forever of Heidegger’s field path; that is, the displacement of all values by money value.

COMPARING THE TEXTS

We return to Arran Gare. His tangent is different to Rogers’, but at many points they conclude similarly. Gare is concerned with the disjunction between two discourses: postmodernism and environmentalism. Rogers implies by his choice of references and sources that this is also his position, even if his excursion into post-structural thought is not as fine-tuned as Gare’s. Overall there is concord, in that both writers acknowledge human social-psychic structures and nature to be inextricably bound up in each other. So too are their future prospects.

Although an excellent scholar of poststructural and postmodern theories, Gare is most sceptical that from them can issue hope for remedying the environmental crisis. His  attitude is that Western culture suffers such fragmentation and loss of over-arching values that achieving a generally agreed environmental philosophy has been rendered extremely difficult. Yet he tries in his work to find where the two discourses might support and benefit each other. In contrast to Gare’s attempt at linking, so far the forty year long debate on the environment has been hostage largely to journals of science and scientistic ecology, whereas post-structural thought concerns itself with art, literature and the media. Crossing points have been rare, but they exist, as Gare elucidates.

Originating with a strain of early Greek philosophy which then gained renewed credence in the Enlightenment, our social structures are premised on the notion of a progressus in infinitum, or the eternal push for a more ‘perfect’ world. In much of the modern period this perfection, people hoped, might emerge from Science in the service of humanity. When the natural sciences were, under changing capitalist economy, yoked to Faustian technological developments, such negative results were often experienced that scientific idealism fell dramatically from grace. The most destructive came with World War One.  Simultaneously, and from at least 1870, a theory of progress founded in human and social sciences, had won much acclaim from intellectual elites. Among these, liberal economics purported to have both objectivity and a potential to make people “happy”. Modern industrial-consumer society was urged upon us by this belief, underpinned by an economic discourse which elaborated the ‘improvement’ mission of free-trade capitalism. Modern economic development took place within the identity of the nation-state, which was seen as in competition with other nations to raise GNP and living standards.

The present wave of globalising the traditional nation-state economy, says Gare, is yet another symbol of a core belief in unending Progress, which has guided modern thought. However, far from democratising wealth and making earthly Paradise, it is leading us to serious disasters. Anti-progressive thinkers cite all manner of destructive tendencies in globalised capitalism, which purveys no true progress, but a dangerous and even fatal illusion. To use the title of another book on globalisation, it presents a ‘false dawn’. Suffering most, but only so far, is the biosphere cradling human civili-sation. 

In a section about globalisation, Gare exposes its flaws and negative tendencies in  detail. It thrives today in a cultural atmosphere pervaded by popular media. “Postmodern” culture has become the norm – a disjointed, superficial “infotainment” and “newsak” culture as some wits call it. This is produced and consumed by two classes: a rootless international bourgeoisie which finances or runs corporations, and a sub-class of service providers who give the former technical backup and professional expertise. The classic industrial economies, as between 1870 and 1970, have been rapidly supplanted by the new, given a decline of the nationalistic bourgeoisie and the old-style proletariat. Demise of the modern class system - that which was analysed by Marxists- is in evidence everywhere, caused by change to notions of work, significant demographic shifts, realignments of identity and the surge into high technology around 1980.

In a stinging critique of Western intelligentsia’s role in recent times, Gare notes that it has helped little in the battle for Nature by opposing the neo-classical discourse of political economy. It has largely spent its time running about in circles, to put it crudely, picking apart and de-legitimising other Western institutions; religion, philosophy and literary culture. Although intellectually he concedes that post-structural and deconstruction theories give value on a purely philosophical level, it greatly worries Gare that their misapplication in the wider culture is harming potential for a much-needed anti-capitalist politics. Many key aspects of Enlightenment-based intellectual enterprise are being downgraded, or even de-graded, in humanities departments of universities. Part of the cause discerned by Gare is that too much emphasis is placed on our highly electronic and visual culture, resulting in the synchronic moving to replace the diachronic as the very base-line of human thinking. With little or no historical sense, both the pursuit of ideas and the formulation of a personal identity become very problematic for the well educated, let alone the public in general.  In Gare’s scenario, formal or ‘high culture’ with its vast repertoire that goes back to the eighteenth century (at least!) is now easily and modishly deprecated in favour of contemporary and instantaneous ‘pop’ culture. The fact that capitalism manufactures and manipulates most of that culture is hardly new.

The present crisis of mind and philosophy is partly due to the inordinate attraction that deconstruction has wielded over academia, and it has led, Gare suggests, to pseudo-radicalism and posturing among the intellectuals. Behind postmodernism, tacitly or openly supported by many universities, there is a zeitgeist that prides itself on being chic, on a multiplicity of (contesting) subcultures, and cool indifference to politics. In rejecting, for several reasons, old-style study of canons of literature, history and philosophy, today’s liberal arts curricula have created a cadre of petit-bourgeois “intellectuals” which believes, mistakenly, that it is truly educated. Its positions on human issues spring from glibly accepting post-structuralist interpretations of modern culture and human knowledge. Thinkers who take this line, are encumbered by a-historicity, and are not capable of transmitting the complex heritage to which their minds really owe; nor can they do useful work in the political arena. Clear evidence of such a development is that public intellectuals are a dying breed, replaced by “corporatised” academics (note the changed term!) who toe the line and teach  postmodern-influenced curricula. The latter are designed to retain students and attract fees much more than  to fully or deeply educate.

Science has fared little better than the Humanities. With a triumphal attitude it has watched the humanities, especially literary studies, lose ground and become a field of competing styles. Yet, scientific academia, once able to claim objectivity and rational investigation of the “real” as unassailable, is also in crisis. The continuing surrender of scientists to capital-driven technological research for dubious moral ends, has removed much of their former eminence as priests of higher knowledge.  And, given the revelations from both structuralism and its later relative, we recognise now that scientific knowledge is conditional, not final; and to some degree socially constructed in language as are all other forms of knowing.

Arran Gare intends an archaeology of the Western philosophical tradition in his quest to help us out of the above dead-end situation. He introduces the thinker Vico, because he believes Vico represents an anti-Cartesian strain in early modern philosophy that has remained a warning bell ever since. Vico’s so-called New Science, gave primacy to experience and language. It opposed the universalist, essentialist and abstracting tendency of Cartesian reason, in favour of the unique and the concrete. Vico was among the first to establish an historical theory of cultural development and decline. Pertinent to the situation we are now in, his last stage of culture is typified by many losses in social cohesion, linguistic clarity, the rule of law and plain decency between human beings.

Gare traces the heirs of Vico through to Nietszche and Heidegger, who shared his non-transcendentalism and his emphasis on becoming as opposed to being.  From a firm grasp of the Italian  humanist and the German demythologiser, Heidegger moves against perceived ‘onto-theology’ in the position espoused by Descartes. As part of that foray, in The question concerning technology, Heidegger says a Cartesian form has actually controlled the Western mind since the Romans. It was the Latin versions of key Greek terms that first disposed us to employ techne for dominating and manipulating the natural world. Whereas the Greeks concerned themselves with revelation and stewardship, the Latinised cultures became primarily concerned with challenge and control; and their challenge to nature, as seen in Descartes and again very clearly in Francis Bacon, was for it to yield its secrets up for our use. Bacon, indeed, urged the metaphorical ‘torturing’ of  Nature to serve human ends. At that very time, between 1600 and 1750, mercantilist capital was on the rise; a fateful concurrence, if ever there was one.

Gare then explores with minute argument, the post-structural conception of the modern predicament. He emphasises the contribution of human sciences proceeding from the linguistic turn, especially in Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault. In doing so, Gare shows that the honest scepticism he evinced early in his book against the undesirable effects of post-structuralism, does not obviate understanding that its exemplars have made an original contribution to knowledge. Where postmodern specialists go awry, he thinks, is that they abandon fully the ‘modernist’ method of refuting a certain body of knowledge, in favour of denying such body any validity at all. Popper’s defence of logical “conjectures and refutations” is rejected by the postmodernist, as the latter proposes there are only many texts (i.e. textual readings), and that no single text, however venerable, is able to be judged objectively against another. In their complexly argued view, there is no final referent against which to securely put an argument for superiority of one text or position in either literary criticism, history or philosophy. There is only unending “desire” and “difference” determining readability. To put it in shorthand, for the post-structural and deconstruction school , the historicity and evident persuasive power of the written word no longer help determine the value of a text, whereas they always did so in humanist enterprises of Western intellect during the era from 1700 onward.

Gare concludes with a chapter entitled ‘Towards a new world order’. There he offers his idea of a completely novel “grand narrative” to underpin a sustainable culture, over and against a domineering and ruinous one led by economics. Our hopes lie, he posits, in taking up a cosmology that can effectively challenge the hegemony of modern economic man; one which he finds in Alfred North Whitehead’s, and David Ray Griffin’s process philosophy. This he describes with much admiration, for it sits well with what the best in post-Heideggerian philosophy has to offer.

His rationale for a new narrative is this:
‘Environmental problems are global problems and their causes are global; it will be impossible for stories to effectively orient individuals for effective action to overcome these problems unless the stories pertaining to people’s individual lives and to local problems can be integrated into broader narratives, and ultimately with a grand narrative revealing the relationship between the lives of individuals and the dynamics of the global... order’. (Gare, p.140) 

I found this a hard option to accept, but was more persuaded when Gare emphasised that a future metanarrative must be reflexive and dialogic. It must be founded on a cosmology, and be very unlike the monological and monocultural narratives of Economy and Science that have led we moderns to impasse. The new narrative, he says, will incorporate the concept of becoming so strongly propounded by Heidegger, and will be inclusive of formerly invisible minorities in Western history. It will take into account diversity and plurality.  The result can be likened to a symphony of viewpoints and cultural perspectives. What will also help the environment, he believes, is a set of bio-regional narratives emerging from localised experience, the articulation of which could stimulate the necessary political will to really oppose the existing aggressive, reductionist global order. 

A second half of the solution Gare proposes, is that nations reassert their primacy over internationalism, because today’s internationalism is of a dominating, monolithic type. He encourages de-linking from the globalised economy, seeking ways to sustain the nation without it. In this way, the periphery of poorer countries will not go on being impoverished by exploitation from the core group of extremely wealthy, powerful nations, and the people of the core will not be played off for wages and living conditions against the periphery. 

Such a concept of national and cultural autonomy flies in the face of much conventional wisdom, but Gare thinks it is about the only viable basis for establishing a healthy human-nature coexistence, being grounded in ties to homeland and/or a unique culture which globalism would deny. This type of nationalism, he stresses, is not of the old European jingoistic or imperialist colour. It is peaceful and positive, rather than power-driven and selfish. It aims at coexistence among nations rather than conflict, which we have in abundance under present forces of globalisation. At all geopolitical levels of Gare’s proposed order, from continents to local villages, there should be a re-commitment to the highest values in education, justice, creativity and environmental care; otherwise society will merely revert to past modes of behaviour.

My opinion of Gare’s final two chapters is that he waxes too optimistic, even naïve, given the grip of globalising capitalism upon the world. It is laudable of him to suggest that humanity reinvent itself according to highest ethical principles, but those principles always differ in degree and kind across the planet, and conflict will arise as in the past. The kind of sane economic-ecological arrangements Gare wants to see implemented, may be almost impossible to arrive at from the vantage point of the year 2000.  Perhaps, with new willingness (as opposed to Nietzschean Will to Power) and reinstated belief in Nature as humanity’s home, they can be arrived at with the passage of much time. However, I fear such precious time is scarce to resolve the second issue; and as Gare admits, the present state of intellectual affairs does not help.

*         *        *

While Arran Gare ends on a ‘utopian’ note, anticipating reversal of fragmentation under a new metaphysics, Raymond Rogers maintains ardent scepticism about whether the system we exist in can be profoundly changed. While Gare hardly mentions the work of Jean Baudrillard, Rogers devotes many pages to his theory of the ‘culture of substitution’. Both believe that we are in a totalitarian regime under what the Frenchman calls ‘the hegemony of the code’. Rogers  ties  Baudrillard’s The mirror of production with another text by Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic economies. The two demonstrate how very far we have strayed from the material artefact. They hold that the empire of the sign prevails today, a development already prefigured in Marx’s work on commodity fetishism. The result of abstracting all forms of sociality, says Rogers, is that in industrial society, there is “an inability to recognize the presence of social relationships between human communities and natural communities outside modern categories of economics and abstract-value” (Rogers p.63)

To enlarge upon such “invisibility of nature”, Rogers employs the twin notions of the reproduction of money and reification. According to a line from Michael Taussig, in The devil and commodity fetishism, reification occurs when “profit no longer appears to be the result of a social relation but of a thing”. (in Rogers p.68)

Essentially Rogers describes a profound loss of meaning. Quoting again from Goux, he sees that:
“…meaning does not reside in a growing and dying natural community, but in an ever-expanding system of signs…which are a culmination of the process of [human cultural] disembeddedness.” (in Rogers, p74)
We have, thus, a world in which money and electronic media combine to render it impossible for a sign to be referenced to any natural signified.

Rogers, near the end of his essay, tries to find a means by which nature can be reintegrated into human epistemology and, moreso, ontology; and to free it from the harsh bonds of utility and labour. He sees part of the solution in Baudrillard’s challenge to our unwitting assumption about the logical inevitability of abstract value, and hence our acceptance of a culture of signs finally designating nothing at all. To severely precis Rogers’ conclusions, he supports the notion of looking at divergent ways to conceptualise sociality. If we do not search, the pervasive displacement of relations in modernity remain “at the heart of [its] inability to mount a viable argument for the conservation of nature.”(Rogers  p85).

Rogers is finally unable, regardless of powerful ideas out of Polanyi, Simmel, Baudrillard and Goux, to offer a ground for new praxis. But as he stresses to the reader, his primary aim was not to do that, so much as to show how dangerous the situation has become. Humans are in danger of letting the next generations lose altogether the age-old awareness that their culture is a superstructure, which depends intimately, finally, on its grounding in the natural universe. 

In concluding Rogers presents two polarised views in the debate on environment. One is the moderate “resourcist” view; the other, a radical activist oppositional view. Both have influenced political decision-making in recent decades, but the more palatable, by far, has been resource conservation policy.

Radical action is admitted by Rogers to be sometimes quite confrontational, for its agents believe that nature has the right to live “for its own sake”. They aim at preservation of essentially wild nature, nature free from the capitalist ethos. They are linked culturally and historically to the residual movements that Benjamin said appear at key “moments of danger” in modernity.

On the other side are conservationists or resourcists who, says Rogers with cynicism, advance an instrumental argument. This is compatible neither with human survival nor the health of nature. Humanity will never re-form its sociality inside nature because of the conundrum: 
‘What possible use is resource management if it preserves biological diversity while there is still no embedded relationship between beings?’ 
It can only prolong capitalist “business as usual” as the crisis intensifies. Rogers cannot accept that we get our cake and eat it too, because global economic development remains the supreme underlying motif of ecological “management”-it is a branch of capital theory.

In contrast, eco-radicals reject the moderate position, naming it a sell-out. They take up cudgels, real ones, to defend residual embeddedness. It is these (marginalised) fighters for the forests and marshlands, alone, who dare to problematise the discourse of capitalism at its very roots; no-one else now has the insight or the guts. Therefore their angry, insistent radicalism is more logical, responsible and reveals our true position. The conservationists might be well-meaning, but in accomodating capital, they taint their project.

Thus, whilst Gare posits that we need a cosmology to act as a reference point for all our knowledge, Rogers demands action to fight immediate danger. Gare’s analysis points strongly to the fact that the present crisis is not only about the discourse of capital replacing others by default, but of the loss of a common ethics founded upon stable metaphysical beliefs. On any and every issue of human concern, possible solutions have been waylaid by postmodern relativism issuing from elites in control of what people now experience via education and the media. A “happy” union of capital, digital technology and the nomadic postmodern cultural ambiance, lends itself to the marketing of brand names and life-style poses to suit (narcissistic) subcultures and malleable identities. These often insecure, short-lived identities are fostered by loss of historically-based social narratives that used to orient the mental and moral growth of the individual. Disorientation and the competition of signs without referents has proved extremely fertile soil for capital in its expansionary global phase. However, it is the real, organic soil of the planet, that which supports all biological life, being wasted and degraded by millions of tonnes per day under global capitalism’s reign.

To conclude, we return to Raymond Rogers. He is openly emotive about his own mission at the end of Nature and the crisis of modernity:
“I am not saying that all is lost, or that modernity is one single monolith with no divisions within it. What I am saying is that given the dominant perspective, which is now moving us toward globalisation of the world economy, I see no hope…..Where I do see some hope is in the resistance of groups….[which are]…recognising that capital is “only” a set of relations which have, after all, been created by humans….”.
(p 173)

Post-script

Rogers touchingly narrates his meeting of a very old fisherman in coastal Nova Scotia; a man who knows not just the monetary value of fish stocks and where they are found in the banks,  but  who can feel the sea in his blood, feel the Atlantic currents to his core, and relate somehow like the fish itself to the ebb and flow of tide and weather.  That sort of (pre-logocentric?) art of knowing oneself by feeling oneself as embedded inside and intimate with Nature, is what Rogers says shall pass into oblivion, unless we act now.  While the nagging, most discouraging question remains, “Is it of further use to act against ecocide in postmodern conditions?”  yet those who have the slightest hope for re-embedding humanity in Nature, must do so. If not, the likelihood of nature being made re-visible must evaporate in a painfully slow, sure destruction wrought under global capitalism.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arran Gare     Postmodernism and the environmental crisis   
Routledge  London  1995

Raymond Rogers     Nature and the crisis of modernity  
 	Black Rose  Montreal  1994

RELEVANT TEXTS

Jean Baudrillard    The mirror of production   St Louis  Telos Press  1975

Daniel Bell   The cultural contradictions of capitalism  NY  Basic Books  1976

David Ehrenfeld  The arrogance of humanism  NY  Oxford U P  1978

Neil Evernden   The social creation of nature  Baltimore  Johns Hopkins U P  1992

Arran Gare Nihilism incorporated: European civilisation and environmental destruction   Bungendore  Eco-logical Press  1993  

Anthony Giddens  The consequences of modernity   Cambridge   Polity Press

Jean-Joseph Goux   Symbolic economies   Ithaca  Cornell University Press   1990

David Harvey   The condition of  postmodernity    London  Blackwell  1989 

Fredric Jameson     Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism  
Durham   Duke University Press  1991

Scott Lash & John Urry   The end of organised capitalism   Cambridge   Polity  1987

John Livingston     Rogue primate: An exploration of human domestication  
Toronto  Key-Porter  1994

Niklas Luhmann   Ecological Communication   Cambridge  Polity  1989

Daniel Miller  Material culture and mass consumption  Cambridge  B.Blackwell  1987

Arne Naess   Ecology, community and lifestyle   
tr. David Rothenberg    Cambridge  CUP  1989

Roderick Nash   The rights of nature   Madison  University of Wisconsin Press  1989

Claus Offe    Disorganised capitalism  Cambridge  Polity   1985

Aihwa Ong   Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline  Albany  SUNY  1987

Karl Polanyi   The great transformation   Boston  Beacon Press  1957

Mark Poster   The mode of information   Cambridge  Polity  1990

Richard Rorty   Philosophy and the mirror of nature    Princeton  Princeton U P  1979

Paul Shepard    Nature and madness   San Francisco  Sierra Book Club  1982  

Georg Simmel  The philosophy of money   NY   Routledge   1990

Richard Taussig   The devil and commodity fetishism  
Chapel Hill  University of North Carolina Press  1980

Raymond Williams  Culture and society   London  Hogarth Press  1982

Michael Zimmerman   Heidegger’s confrontation with modernity