Reading group

Hi all! Still moved by your excellent work and reflections... Some of you have asked about the reading group. We are currently reading Nietzsche's Late Notebooks. The next reading group is May 13 at 5pm (they are every 3 weeks) and for the summer we will be meeting at Temps Libre (5605 de Gaspé, suite 106, behind Falco). Email me and I'll send you the reading if you'd like to come.

And please: can you make the spring come???? After all of this talk of global warming.... ;-)

Hi, bonjour !
Here is a very fresh action by the artist-activist groups Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) yesterday night at the Gugghenheim museum. 
Powerfull inspiration.
Wish you all a great journey through art labor.
josé



G.U.L.F. activism

...it took me a while to figure out a proper format... only in the end to upload it to Youtube...

...I enjoyed the class... there aren't many spaces like this to engage with philosophy and current world issues...
...regards...

Always a work in process

Do Not Feed The Buffalos

Thanks everybody, it was a pleasure learning with you all.

Nature Sounds

Hi everyone,

I am so moved and impressed by everyone's projects last night. It means a lot that so many of you shared them with us.

Here's the audio file that I didn't have the chance to share. While I originally intended it to be experienced in a enclosed space, it would be in interesting experiment to see how it's received in different places.

In process, I wanted to create an installation, a standing environment in which to enter and be enveloped. I’ve prepared what is like something of an in between for my installation, like an idea existing for how I would like to construct it and how I would imagine it being experienced. The structure itself would be free standing, where an adult could comfortably enter and sit, with little or no light. There is a specific need in this exercise in sound and perception for the body to enter a space and experience an affective difference in the process of entering; as opposed to putting a blindfold on and removing a physical sensor, it would be to enhance a sensory experience of listening and how it could thus be perceived.

I was trying to explore an installation that can explore concepts of environment and affect, outside of our typical understanding of nature, and instead imaging nature as other types of human environments. This piece was inspired by the idea of nature outside of nature, ecologies and environments that appear “natural” when we engage with and within them. So I’ve made a sound reel with tracks of places that thrive on human populations and traffic — the Jean Talon market, the metro, a bar. 

Made with colonial, western, and capitalist conditions in mind, I hope to capture how we experience sound outside of their natural environment and in an enclosed space as a alternative way to think through time, captured time, and the realities of time within separate spaces. 

You can listen or download it here:

https://soundcloud.com/andymarlo/nature-sounds

Bodies of Water (finally!)

Hi everyone,

First I just wanted to say how impressed I was last night by everyone's incredible final (even if they are as yet unrealized or in progress) works, and how lucky I feel to be surrounded by such brilliant and creative people. Thanks for sharing all of your hard efforts with us last night, and thanks to everyone who made the evening such a lovely time.

I have at long last managed to get my film uploaded on to Vimeo, sound included, and I would be  delighted if some of you wanted to take a look and give me your feedback.

Bodies of Water explores water as a common denominator connecting various bodies. Water is that which constitutes, surrounds, consumes and is consumed, transports, submerges, carves out and affects the bodies we see in the film, and thus as a common element, it helps to break down nature/human and self/other dichotomies that the concept of the Anthropocene traffics in.

I will provide some more  notes in a few days on the film, but for now just enjoy!




Here is the link to my film, Bodies of Water.
https://vimeo.com/164213166

Amazing evening, thank everyone of you!

Hi everyone,

Thank you for curating this amazing event.
It was amazing and wonderful evening! Each presentation was very interesting and affecting on me, thanks.

I take this opportunity to express my appreciation to Erin and all of you.
The concept of the 'anthropocene' and the affect theory conversing with films, the courage of taking on challenging readings, OKA's activity, food sharing, and talking with some of you, and tonight's special moments, the togetherness and much more, for all this I am grateful. Each Monday, I was thrilled and excited to participate and listen about new materials and diverse perspectives and thoughts. All of it has left a deep impression on me. I've felt and experienced this seminar which is designed thoroughly the multi-facets of crystal image in a topological and architectural mode. With this in mind, I have been able to write a conference paper engaging a few concepts, and have already incorporated them in my thesis work.

Thank so much you, Erin for your generous pedagogy and for letting me be in.

I hope all of us have had a fruitful semester one or way or another.
We will stay in touch and meet again, I hope so :-)

All the best,
mJ

Blogging about get-ting there

in process

I've been thinking about Lacan's cravat for four years

I feel as though I'm sneaking in an outlier, but I couldn't help it.

I'm in the process of doing a semi-creative/semi-academic piece for the final and I can't get this video out of my mind. I came upon it when I began studying psychoanalysis some years ago and it really stuck to me.

There's something about watching that long-haired student pour water all over Lacan's notes that really gets to me. Or rather, it's an interesting way to begin thinking about context.

Excerpt from Lacan Parle

Talking about sustaining life...

Jumping onto Mel's last post - I thought I'd put this video I came across about mushroom burial suits...


https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee?language=en

MONDAY!

Hey everyone,

We are so looking forward to Monday night's final class!

We will begin at The Topological Media Lab, EV 7.725, at 5:30 sharp.

For those of you that are presenting, we are asking you to please bring:

Laptop, USB or CD-ROM. Please don't put something on Google Drive, or send us a file. It would be easier on the day of presentations to have hard copies of everything. 

We are on a very tight time limit, and we have attached a schedule for those that have let us know about what they are doing. For those of you that are presenting in the first half of the class, we ask that you come to TML at 5pm in order to set up so to avoid too much time lost in between. 

Those people are:

Braden, Justin, Anthony, Jillian, Alyssa, Oslavi, Becky.

We'll have the pot luck in the SenseLab that we'll enjoy during and after the break. If a senselabber can confirm this, we'll ideally have the room open prior to presentations at 5:30pm to drop any food off. 

Here is the proposed schedule:

At 5:30 we will meet at The Topological Media Lab to begin our night of presentations. If you’re planning on bringing food we ask that you drop off your foodstuffs at the Sense Lab just prior to the beginning of class. 

5:00- The curatorial team will be available to set up your screenings or set up an art piece in the Sense Lab.

5:30- Braden 

5:45- Anthony 

6:00- Justin

6:15-Jillian 

6:30- Oslavi 

6:40- Becky

6:45- Alyssa
6:50- CriCri

7:00- Food time/looking at art stuff

For those that are presenting with visuals after the break, please load content before we start up again. 

7:20- Ellie 

7:35- Chelsea

7:50- Jennifer 

8:05- Melanie
8:20- Sima 

8:30- Conclude with José’s sounds piece on St. Catharine’s

We realize that the time frame will be in flux, hence the tentative 5:30-8:20 schedule. However, still plan to have a fifteen-minute presentation including questions in order to allow for the inevitable ‘flow.’ 

** Edit: If you are able, please bring a pair of headphones and some sort of portable device for José's presentation.

See you all Monday, and please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or concerns!

Have a great and sunny weekend,

Alyssa, Rebecca, and Braden. 

Earth Day

Just reflecting on Earth Day (apparently it's today, 22 April) having just received this email from Concordia's official channels (no doubt we all did).  The email briefly summarises some activities related to the 'anthropocene' and Concordia, and it has me thinking more broadly, on the role of educational institution in relation to these sorts of issues.

1. Conference at Concordia in May: 'Can We Avoid Anthropogenic Catastrophe?'
http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2016/04/20/can-we-avoid-anthropogenic-catastrophe-conference-environment-conflict-public-health.html

2. Countdown 2 Degrees - Multimedia Installation
The project counts down the exact amount of time before Earth's atmosphere reaches the apocalyptic '2 degrees' (more than what?) of which the planet can no longer easily sustain life on earth.  This project then, is technically acting like a countdown to the world's end.  The project will be projected onto a building at Concordia over the next few days, after sunset.

It's also calculating data in terms of carbon from the year 1750, which as we know Jason Moore would not agree with.  

I'd love to hear what you think about the kind of alarmist, exacting, calculation which the project makes(and note that it plans to recalculate every year with the aim of remaining exact

Check out the project here: http://www.concordia.ca/news/countdown2degrees.html

********

Interesting to see the varying kinds of discourse on environment and anthropocene; within concordia (projects like these ones in relation to projects such as those our class are involved in), within the email even (which mentioned projects on 'ethical consumption' coming out of the business school next to projects on activism).   Concordia as it stands, is a seething mass of potential discourses, a BwO of environmental projects, strategies and world views.  

Inuit Tactile Maps

Tactile Inuit maps! Compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.
 Tactile maps feel like a key to unlock the Earth's paths.
  Tactile maps registers in hand what the body will sense in a little while, crossing that path.
   Tactile maps are very sexy, that may just be my own fantasy...
    Tactile maps carry a sense of layers of history, passed from hands to hands,
     like old crumpled paper maps.
     
       When a path is used often, tactile maps loose their edges, polished by each passage.
So does the Earth, erodes and smooths its peaks, its cliffs.

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/…/…/inuit-cartography/

Vernissage, April 25th

Hello beautiful people, 

Only 5 days until our final class!

There are some of you that we haven't heard from, concerning your final projects. We will have a space or screening and presentations, as well as the Sense Lab and the rest of the EV building for any installation works. To help run this as smooth as possible, and to map out where all your projects will be, please send us the details before the weekend: if your project will be a presentation or an installation, what it will require and if you have any other notes for us. Remember that presentations shouldn't exceed 10-15 minutes!

Feel free to email all of us or reply in this post.

Alyssa: shore.alyssa@gmail.com

Rebecca: reba.s.holt@gmail.com

Braden: bradenscott3721@gmail.com 

xx

Miam Miam

Lovecraft, Cthulhu and The Ood

In this week's reading there are a great many references to H.P Lovecraft and Cthulhu and I thought it would be beneficial to post some artistic renditions of Lovecraft's mythos for those who are not familiar with the Old Ones.



These images are from a collection called The Art of Lovecraft: Artists Inspired by Lovecraft.

More on the collection can be found here:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5019979/tentacles-and-cosmic-sf-the-art-of-lovecraft

Also for a fantastic documentary on Lovecraft check out Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008). It's actually on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spoz_1KyZiA

Lastly, for those who are not Doctor Who nerds and have no idea who the Ood are this is what they look like.

The Ood are particularly good figures for the Anthropocene because of their biological vulnerability. They have these hind-brains that are outside of their bodies, attached by a kind of umbilical cord. In addition to the hind-brain, they are connected telepathically to a collective brain. This is what makes them vulnerable to colonization and enslavement by the hu- mans who lobotomize them; when they cut off their hind-brains, they cut them off psychologically from their collective consciousness. In fields like epigenetics and microbiome research, we are hearing new stories about the human body, not as a citadel, but as something porous and vulnerable to exposures. The world passes through us and we are not unchanged. I was wondering what the Ood, who are born with their brains in their hands, can teach us about these sorts of uneven landscapes of exposure that cut us off from what sustains us, and also what prac- tices of resilience...  (Haraway, 268)

Natural Capital

Nature provides countless services for free, such as water filtration and carbon storage. We call these services natural capital, or ecosystem services. We evaluate and describe these services, and calculate the economic cost if we had to provide them ourselves. When our leaders recognize the monetary and intrinsic value of natural capital, they will choose policies that protect and restore it.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/wildlife-habitat/projects/natural-capital/

David Suzuki's concept addresses nature's unpaid labor in a manner similar to Moore; albeit it differs  by presenting this unpaid labor in terms of economic value--capital; This is a strategic approach (and I argue a necessary one) that seeks public and economic leaders (but also the general public) to recognize the "monetary and intrinsic value" and choose to protect it.

I say this strategy is necessary because economic value is a form of convened valuation, one easier to agree with (and be tangibly affected by) than non-tangible ideological valuation or personal subjective appeals; however, it is also problematic in that it is limited to what is economically accountable and hence may fail to capture unknown or undervalued aspects. Furthermore, as Moore mentions (19, II) economic value is itself highly ideological; in this case the Suzuki Foundation offering a shift within the pragmatic ideologies of capital.

Moreover, such pragmatism and tangibility point that if Suzuki's approach works because it has the science and economic impact studies to back up the foundation's claims; in other words something unknown cannot be valued but also, science allows for this value to be known (it is a double-edge sword).

"How to think the anthropocene?" a conference hosted by Phillipe Descola Paris (5-6 Nov 2015), mostly in French

http://www.fondationecolo.org/l-anthropocene/video

a quick gush

I just arrived home and still am basking in the happy glow of this evening. While I'm still feeling gushy, I wanted to once more express my gratitude to everyone who made this excursion possible- I found it so energizing to discuss and think about the materials we've been reading and seeing in this course in a different ecology, one whose ongoing legacy ties together the disparate threads Moore draws out explicitly, and our other films and theorists, more implicitly, as related to the concept of the Anthropocene.


So, a BIG thanks to Matthew and Mark who were so generous to extend this invitation to such a large number of us to join them at the Town Hall and also to their oh so lovely and inviting living space, and who were so open to discussing the politics and Politics of the region. Thank you to Erin for being brave enough to orchestrate this adventure, providing us transport, and for encouraging us to experiment and explore. And thank you to all the drivers!

Here's a couple pictures from the evening:

Donna Harraway Talk

Here is a video which might be useful for context for next week's readings. Apologies if it has already been posted.

https://vimeo.com/97663518

OKA Church address?

Does anyone know which church in Oka the meeting is happening at?
Thanks!

The Capitalocene (part 1) interspersed with other readings and some comments

Here are some notes from Capitalocene. We will talk through it in more detail next week - but let's have it in mind tonight in case there are relevant ideas we might want to link to our experience at Oka. Everything from Capitalocene is in black. I've interspersed it with coloured quotes from other readings and a few of my own thoughts

2- Just what kind of argument is it? As with all fashionable concepts, the Anthropocene has been sub- ject to a wide spectrum of interpretations.2 But one is dominant. This one tells us that the origins of modern world are to be found in England, right around the dawn of the nineteenth century (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, 2007; Steffen, et al, 2011a, 2011b; Chakrabarty, 2009; The Economist, 2011a, 2011b). The motive force behind this epoch- al shift? In two words: coal and steam. The driving force behind coal and steam? Not class. Not capital. Not imperialism. Not even culture. But... you guessed it, the Anthropos: humanity as an undifferentiated whole.

 

The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized ine- qualities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and produc- tion. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.The mosaic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract humanity as homogenous acting unit.

At the same time, Anthropocene scholars cannot escape the conclusion that humans, too, are a “geophysical force” – the singular is important here – that operates within nature (Steffen, et al., 2011b, 741).


There are “human constructions” and “natural” constructions (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2011b: 837) – even as humans are recognized as a geophysical force.

Holism in philosophy, dualism in practice. This is the generalized condition of green thought today.

3-The two principal framing devices – consequences determine periodization, the Anthropos as the driver of these consequences – stem from a philosophical position that we may call Cartesian dualism

4- This dualism leads Anthropocene advocates to construct the historical period since 1800 on an arithmetic basis: “human activity plus significant biospheric change = the Anthro- pocene.” In this, too, the Anthropocene perspective incorporates the common sense of green arithmetic: “society plus nature equals environmental studies.”

Human activity not only produces biospheric change, but relations between humans are them- selves produced by nature.

The dominant Anthropocene argument obscures the actually existing relations through which women and men make history with the rest of nature: the relations of power, (re)production, and wealth in the web of life.

If we shift our historical method from one that unduly prioritizes environmental consequences to one that prioritizes the relational/consequential nexus – viewing differentiated and geographically-specific “modes of humanity” as products and producers in the web of life6 – a very different view of the Anthropocene problem comes into focus. 

5-To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization, is to prioritize the transcendence of the relations of power, knowledge, and capital that have made – and are now unmaking – the modern world as we have known it.

From DG on strata > emphasize on the complexity of relation

49 - To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial ele- ments, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials fur- nished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stra- tum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial ele- ments is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and com- pounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them. 

 
6-Are we really living in the Anthropocene, with its return to a curiously Eurocentric vista of humanity, and its reliance on well-worn notions of resource- and technological-determinism? Or are we living in the Capitalocene, the historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital?

From Guattari, 3 Ecologies > questioning the necessity of thinking in terms of the ethics-political and aesthetic

67-A new ecosophy, at once applied and theoretical, ethico- political and aesthetic, would have to move away from the old forms of political, religious and associative commitment . . . Rather than being a discipline of refolding on interiority, or a

68>simple renewal of earlier forms of 'militancy', it will be a multi- faceted movement, deployïng agencies [instances] and disposi- tives that will simultaneously analyse and produce subjectivity. A collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory dosure, and will instead open itself up on aIl sides to the socius, but also to the machinic Phylum, to techno-scientific Universes of reference, to aesthetic worlds, as weIl as to a new 'pre-personal' understanding of time, of the body, of sexuality.

 

6- What the more sophisticated versions of the “coal and capitalism” argument appreciate is that the long 19th century transition in the relations of power and production was one that went beyond relations be- tween humans; it also implied a transition in humanity’s relation with the rest of nature (e.g. Huber, 2008; Malm, 2013).

My position is that the critique of Nature/Society dualisms is not only relevant to historical analysis, but that the history of capitalism cannot be explained in terms of a ping-pong of nature-society interaction.

From Whitehead, Nature Alive > focusing on the necessity of getting beyond the idea of nature as "simple location"
205- The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.

207- It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.

6-This coherence is realized and reproduced through definite rules of reproduction – of power, of capital, of production. For capitalist civilization, these rules embody a value relation, quite literally determining what counts as valuable and what does not.7

 

I simply wish to highlight that capitalism’s “law of value” – understood more expansively than for Marx, but in the spirit of Marx’s method (Marx, 1973; Hopkins, 1982; Sayer, 1987) – produced an exceedingly peculiar form of wealth. This is of course capital as value-in-motion, whose substance is abstract social labor. Im- portantly, abstract social labor may be accumulated only through a far-flung repertoire of imperialist enclosure and appropriation of nature’s “free gifts” in service to commodity production (Burkett, 1999; Moore, 2011a). Capital is value-in-motion is value-in-nature. Value is a bundled relation of human and extra-human natures (e.g. Marx, 1977: 283; Burkett, 1999).

Value operates through a dialectic of exploitation and appropriation that illuminates capitalism’s peculiar relation with, and within, nature. 

>> this question of value and valuation is at the heart of each reading and of each film - what other forms of value can be activated, potentialized? The 3 Ecologies is an attempt to touch on this question of value, but it is also very much the force of the Whitehead. 

232 Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

7-  The mistake is to see capitalism as defined by wage-labor, any more than it defined by the world market. Rather the crucial question turns on the historical connections between wage-work and its necessary conditions of expanded reproduction. These conditions depend on massive contributions of unpaid work, out- side the commodity system but necessary to its generalization. Sometimes this is called the domain of social reproduction (e.g. Bakker and Gill, 2003), although it is here that the adjective “social” seems especially unsuitable – where does the “social” moment of raising children end, and the “biological” moment begin?

Work, in what follows, signifies the historically-grounded forms of geo- and bio-physical activity as they “bundle” with humanity’s distinctive forms of sociality and embodied thought (e.g. White, 1995).

Recall the importance of affect (re embodied thought). From Massumi's Power at the End of the Economy.

106-The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual: potential remaindered by the past, le in reserve for the future. Its autonomy is its openness. Its openness is to the escape hatch of its own futurity.

108-That a ective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, lls the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely a ective rebeginning of the world. Bare Activity. The world in which we live is literally made of these reinau- gural microperceptions, cutting in, cueing emergence, priming capaci- ties.

Politics, approached affectively, is an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune bodies while activat- ing their capacities di erentially. A ective politics is inductive. Bodies can be inducted into, or attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential.

109-The event can’t be fully predetermined. It will be as it happens. For there to be uniformity of response, other fac- tors must have been active to prechannel tendencies.

This means that there are potential alter-politics at the collectively in- braced heart of every situation, even the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement. You can return to that reservoir of real but un- expressed potential, and recue it. This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics.

7- These broadly-entropic transitions allow us to highlight the self- consuming character of the capital relation, which in any given historical configuration tends to burn through its necessary biophysical conditions (included workers) and in so doing jack up the organic composition of capital (Marx, 1977: 377-380; Luxemburg, 1913: 328-427).

8-Such post-Cartesian readings of capitalism’s “general laws” – or other propositions regarding the longue durée movements and moments of the capitalist world-ecology – opens up the possibility of moving from the “environmental” consequences of “social” processes to the socio-ecological con- stitution of Anthropogenic drivers themselves.

>> recall Lyell here on deep time.

8- Too often, the environment leads an unduly narrow existence, as a zone of consequences, impacts, and conditions.

Green scholars study the metabolism of globalization, industrialization, and agrarian change, rather than studying globalization, industrialization and agrarian change as metabolisms, as ways of organizing nature.

>> think of the subtle ways in which each of the films we watched challenges this "green" approach 

8- From this standpoint, the Anthropocene argument is not only philosophically and theoretically problematic – viewing humans as separate from nature and erasing capitalism from the equation – it also offers an unduly narrow conceptualization of historical time. This plays out at two levels. One is an awkward conflation of geological notions of time with the periodization of historical change. The other is the Anthropocene’s recuperation of an older historiographical vista which saw the “real” changes of “real” modernity beginning in the later 18th century.

11-This means that capital and power – and countless other strategic relations – do not act upon nature, but develop through the web of life. Crises are turning points of world-historical processes – accumulation, imperialism, industrialization, and so forth – that are neither social nor environmental in the usual sense, but rather bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled. In world-ecological perspective, nature stands as the relation of the whole. Humans live as one specifically-endowed (but not special) environment-making species within the web of life.

Consider the more-than human. Think through Whitehead again.

(207) But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of nature. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative

(208) potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. 'That way of enjoyment' is selected from the boundless wealth of alternatives. It has been aimed at for actualization in that process.

227- We are in the world and the world is in us. Our immediate occasion is in the society of occasions forming the soul, and our soul is in our present occasion. The body is ours, and we are an activity within our body. This fact of observation, vague but imperative, is the foundation of the connexity of the world, and of the transmission of its types of order.

228- I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity—which is Descartes' 'I am'—is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world. If we stress the role of the environment, this process is causation. If we stress the role of my immediate pattern of active enjoyment, this process is self-creation. If we stress the role of the conceptual anticipation of the future whose existence is a necessity in the nature of the present, this process is the teleological aim at some ideal in the future. This aim, however, is not really beyond the present process. For the aim at the future is an enjoyment in the present. It thus effectively conditions the immediate self-creation of the new creature.

11- The challenges involved in translating the philosophical premise of humanity-in-nature into historical methods and narrative strategies are considerable.Certainly, a core problem has been the difficulty in forging a conceptual vocabulary that grasps “society” and “nature” as a singular ontological domain, such that all human activity is simultaneously producer and product of the web of life.

Guattari's project as a counter to this statement.

49- It is to be hoped that the development of the three types of ecological praxis outlined here willlead to a reframing and a recomposition of the goals of the emancipatory struggles. And let us hope that, in the context of the new 'deal' of the relation between capital and human activity, ecologists, feminists, antiracists, etc., will make it an immediate major objective to target the modes of production of subjectivity, that is, of knowledge, culture, sensibility and sociability that come under an incorporeal value system at the root of the new productive assemblages.

Social ecology will have to work towards rebuilding human relations at every level of the socius. It should never lose sight of the fact that capitalist power has become delocalized and

50>deterritorilized, both in extension, by extending its influence over the whole social, economic and culturallife of the planet, and in 'intension', by infiltrating the most unconscious subjec- tive strata. In doing this it is no longer possible to daim to be opposed to capitalist power only from the outside, through trade unions and traditional politics. It is equally imperative to confront capitalism's effects in the domain of mental ecology in everyday life: individual, domestic, material, neighbourly, creative or one's personal ethics. Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantalizing consensus, it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus and the singular production of existence.

11- Elsewhere, I have tackled the problem with the concept of the oikeios, signifying the creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment (2011a). The oikeios provides a way to move beyond the narrative trope of “the” environment (as object) in favor of environment-making (as process), at all turns a co-production of specifically bundled human and extra-human natures (Moore, 2013a).  

12-Capitalism, as project, emerges through a world-praxis that creates external natures as objects to be mapped, quantified, and regulated so that they may service capital’s insatiable demands for cheap nature. At the same time, as process, capitalism emerges and develops through the web of life; nature is at once internal and external.

Of course it all began with coal, says the Anthropocene argument, because the consequences are measurable, and this is, after all, what counts. The consequences of this approach – green thought’s consequentialist bias – are more sig- nificant than commonly recognized. Kingsnorth puts this well:
My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge

13> must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science, has forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape. Most greens in the mainstream now spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nu- clear power to carbon sequestration. They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what will happen if we do or don’t do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers cherry- picked from this or that ‘study’ as if the world were a giant spreadsheet which only needs to be balanced correctly (2011).16 

13-“Capital,” in these accounts, forms inde- pendently of the web of life, and intervenes in “nature” as an exogenous force, variously intruding in, and interrupting, a pre-given “traditional balance between humanity and nature” (Foster, 1994: 40). This view of capitalism as an exogenous rather than endogenous actor in relation to the web of life has the paradoxical effect of reducing nature to a substance that can be variously protected or destroyed (e.g. Martinez-Alier, 2002).

 

When push comes to shove, the philosophy of humanity-in-nature gets pushed aside in favor of analytical practicality (compare Harvey, 1993 with Harvey, 2003, 2005).17

14-It turns out that, as with pregnancy, one cannot be a little bit Cartesian. For nature is either abstract and external or historical and immanent to everything that humans do, including those large-scale and long-run patterns of power and production that we call civilizations, world-systems, modes of production, and so forth.

Return to the necessity of thinking through the associated milieu in DG

50-It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary, central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring (different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are inter- mediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels.

14- Capitalism as a whole, I wish to emphasize does not have an ecological regime, but is in its most fundamental historical a sense a way of organizing nature. But this merely established a new set of questions around how these specific regimes mark specific crystallizations of nature and wealth, tools and power.

Let us be clear that the call for the relationality of humanity-in-nature does not deny the materiality of resources. (Moore, 2011a, 2011b). Far from it! The world-ecology alter- native argues that resources are relational and therefore historical.

14-Geology, in other words, co-produces power and production as it bundles with (equally co-producing) human patterns of power and production – hence the re-bundling of capitalist relations across the later 18th century North Atlantic as the energy regime shifted from charcoal and peat to coal. Specific geological formations, under definite historical circumstances, can become once object of human activity and subject of historical change. This allows us to see civiliza- tions moving through, not around, the rest of nature. 

From DG:

55-Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

14-Geology becomes geo-history through definite relations of power and production; these definite rela- tions are geographical, which is to say they are not relations between humans alone. (Any geograph- ical point of view unfolds from the premise that human activity is never ontologically prior to its geographical conditions and consequences.)

From DG

55-The strata are con- tinually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accel- erations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterrito- rialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.

15-Articulations of production and reproduction are mediated through the oikeios, especially its dialectic of organic life and inorganic environments (Birch and Cobb, 1981; Moore, 2013a).19


we can say that geology co-produces energy regimes as historically-specific bundles of relations; geology in this view, is at once subject and object.

But Nature plus Society does not add up. Perhaps most significantly, environmental determinisms, however partial or sophisticated they may be, leave intact the Cartesian order of things, in which society (humans without nature) and nature (environments without humans) interact rather than interpenetrate. The alternative, to see geology co-producing historical change through the oikeios, allows us to see energy regimes – even whole civilizations – moving through, not around, the rest of nature.

Material flows and their particularities do matter. But their historical significance is best understood through a relational rather than substantialist view of materiality, one in which the flows of resources, circuits of capital, and the struggles of classes and states form a dialectical whole.

DG on form:

54-As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro- cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter- ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.

21-In sum, because early capitalism’s technics – its crystalli- zation of tools and power, knowledge and production – were specifically organized to treat the appro- priation of global space as the basis for the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form: capital, the substance of which is abstract social labor.

The three revolutions we have identified – of landscape transformation, of labor productivity, of the technics of global ap- propriation – suggest a revision of thinking the law of value in ways both orthodox and revolution- ary. Crudely put, I think Marxists have understated the significance of value relations in the modern world-system.

From DG on machinic assemblages and relationally

68-In any case, content and expression are never reducible to signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a signifying system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting content, even if one endows it with a "certain" amount of independence and a certain potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic content already has a form and even forms of expression that are specific to it. Form of content and form of expression involve two parallel formalizations in presupposition: it is obvious that their segments constantly intertwine, embed themselves in one another; but this is accomplished by the abstract machine from which the two forms derive, and by machinic assemblages that regulate their relations.

21-In this, value-relations have been defined as a phenomenon reducible to the “economic” form of abstract social labor. But such an interpretation significantly understates the epoch-making influence of value relations. The law of value – under- stood as a gravitational field exerting durable influence over the long-run and large-scale patterns of the capitalist world-ecology – is not an economic phenomenon alone, but a systemic process with a piv- otal and decisive economic moment (abstract social labor). 

22-The decisive historical expression of Cheap Nature in the modern era is the Four Cheaps of labor- power, food, energy, and raw materials. These Four Cheaps are the major way that capital prevents the mass of capital from rising too fast in relation to the mass of appropriated cheap nature – when the delivery of such cheap natures approaches the average value composition of world commodity production, the world-ecological surplus falls and the pace of accumulation slackens.

 The present argument, then, is a brief for such a post-Cartesian – I would call it world-ecological – reading of value. The goal is to focus our attention on the relations of the oikeios that form and re-form capitalism’s successive contradictory unities of the exploitation of labor- power (paid work) and the appropriation of a global zone of reproduction (unpaid work) from the family to the biosphere.

This line of thinking and investigation led me to an unexpected argument. I cannot help but see a new law of value in formation in these centuries, expressed by two epoch-making movements.29 One was the proliferation of knowledges and symbolic regimes that constructed nature as external, space as flat and geometrical, and time as linear (the field of abstract social nature). The other was a new configuration of exploitation (within commodification) and appropriation (outside commodification but in servitude to it).

On the one hand, capitalism is a civilization that turns on the zone of commodification and the exploitation of labor-power within it. On the other hand, strategies of commodification and ex- ploitation can work only to the extent that uncommodified natures are somehow put to work, for free or very low cost. In sum, capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the “free ride” of uncommodified life/work to do so.