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Luigi Pellizzoni - Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature

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This book explores the intertwining of politics and ontology, shedding light on the ways in which, as our ability to investigate, regulate, appropriate, enhance and destroy material reality have developed, so new social scientific accounts of nature and our relationship with it have emerged, together with new forms of power. Engaging with cutting-edge social theory and elaborating on the thought of Foucault, Heidegger, Adorno and Agamben, the author demonstrates that the convergence of ontology with politics is not simply an intellectual endeavour of growing import, but also a governmental practice which builds upon neoliberal programmes, the renewed accumulation of capital and the development of technosciences in areas such as climate change, geoengineering and biotechnology. With shifts in our accounts of nature have come new means of mastering it, giving rise to unprecedented forms of exploitation and destruction - with related forms of social domination. In the light of growing social inequalities, environmental degradation and resource appropriation and commodification, Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature reveals the need for new critical frameworks and oppositional practices, to challenge the rationality of government that lies behind these developments: a rationality that thrives on indeterminacy and an account of materiality as comprised of fluid, ever-changing states, simultaneously agential and pliable, to which social theory increasingly subscribes without questioning enough its underpinnings and implications. A theoretically sophisticated reassessment of the relationship between ontology and politics, which draws the contours of a renewed humanism to allow for a more harmonious relationship with the world, this book will appeal to scholars in social and political theory, environmental sociology, geography, science and technology studies and contemporary European thought on the material world.

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ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS IN A DISPOSABLE WORLD

Ontological Politics in a Disposable World provides a rich and nuanced account of how society, scientific knowledge, and nature are being transformed in neoliberal times.

Charles Thorpe, University of California, San Diego, USA

Theory, Technology and Society

Series Editor: Ross Abbinnett, University of Birmingham, UK

Theory, Technology and Society presents the latest work in social, cultural and political theory, which considers the impact of new technologies on social, economic and political relationships. Central to the series are the elucidation of new theories of the humanity-technology relationship, the ethical implications of techno-scientific innovation, and the identification of unforeseen effects which are emerging from the techno-scientific organization of society.

With particular interest in questions of gender relations, the body, virtuality, penality, work, aesthetics, urban space, surveillance, governance and the environment, the series encourages work that seeks to determine the nature of the social consequences that have followed the deployment of new technologies, investigate the increasingly complex relationship between the human and the technological, or addresses the ethical and political questions arising from the constant transformation and manipulation of humanity.

Other titles in this series

Urban Constellations

Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain

Zo Thompson

ISBN 978 1 4724 2722 9

Eventful Bodies

The Cosmopolitics of Illness

Michael Schillmeier

ISBN 978 1 4094 4982 9

Genetics as Social Practice

Transdisciplinary Views on Science and Culture

Edited by Barbara Prainsack, Silke Schicktanz, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer

ISBN 978 1 4094 5548 6

The Visualised Foetus

A Cultural and Political Analysis of Ultrasound Imagery

Julie Roberts

ISBN 978 1 4094 2939 5

Ontological Politics in a Disposable World

The New Mastery of Nature

LUIGI PELLIZZONI
University of Trieste, Italy

ASHGATE

Luigi Pellizzoni 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Luigi Pellizzoni has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by

Ashgate Publishing Limited

Wey Court East

Union Road

Farnham

Surrey, GU9 7PT

England

Ashgate Publishing Company

110 Cherry Street

Suite 3-1

Burlington, VT 05401-3818

USA

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for

ISBN 9781472434944 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472434951 (ebk-PDF)

ISBN 9781472434968 (ebk-ePUB)

For my sons, Luca and Marco:
May they live in a reconciled world

Contents
Introduction

Human presence on the planet looks today more troublesome than ever. In spite of countless warnings and interventions, ecological issues show few signs of overall improvement. In many respects they rather seem to be worsening.

In 2000, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, with the objective of evaluating the impact of ecosystem change on human well-being, as well as of developing a scientific basis for action. The assessment began in 2001 and lasted four years, with the involvement of more than 1,300 experts from 95 countries. It established that anthropic pressures have changed ecosystems more extensively and rapidly in the previous 50 years than at any other time in human history. Population dynamics, contamination of ecosystems and extensive biodiversity loss (especially deforestation) can engender it was argued a host of unwelcome consequences, including less obvious ones, such as the diffusion of infectious diseases like yellow fever or dengue.

Years later the picture looks the same. Take climate change the most prominent issue both at public opinion and policy level. According to the UN Environment Programmes Emissions Gap Report 2012,

This approach is critical towards the carbon markets solutions promoted by the Kyoto Protocol (on which see points to conserving mangroves, seagrasses and salt marsh grasses, since this coastal vegetation (dubbed blue carbon) sequesters carbon up to 100 times faster and more permanently than terrestrial forests. Therefore carbon offsets based on the protection and restoration of coastal vegetation could be far more cost effective than current approaches focussed on trees. Additional benefits would be enjoyed by fisheries, tourism and reduced coastal erosion.

Other proposals for improving the effectiveness of climate policy include climate-smart agriculture. This concept, advanced by FAO in 2010, seeks to integrate the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental) by jointly addressing food security and climate challenges, according to three pillars: increasing agricultural productivity and incomes;

A major warning comes from the International Energy Agency (IEA).) is widely deployed. In other words, two-thirds of the worlds proven fossil fuel reserves should remain underground. A self-restraint that, looking at past and present trends, is hardly likely to come true.

In sum, there is evidence of growing intensity of exploitation of natural resources, increasing seriousness of ecological problems and failure or insufficiency of environmental policies. Confronted with this situation the social sciences have of course not remained silent. Their contribution to environmental science and policy-making, however, is notoriously weak. Human dimensions of environmental change are acknowledged and included in a number of programs, yet mostly under the assumption that people and the biophysical world can best be analysed and modified using similar concepts and protocols (for example, agent-based models). A single, seamless concept of integrated knowledge is thereby posited as both possible and desirable (Castree et al. 2014: 764). Scholarship in social sciences and humanities is either urged to adopt quantitative, behavioural approaches that fit the bill of a supposedly objective representation, at the price of missing a good deal of its capacity to account for the many ways humans relate with the biophysical world in terms of meanings, goals, means, power, violence and inequality; or, if other approaches are selected (qualitative, hermeneutic, critical), they are marginalized as irrelevant or as aiming at an unduly politicization of technical matters and factual research. The science wars against social science inquiry into scientific practices (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), are a good example in this sense (see ).

This problematic resonates in Michael Redclifts assessment of existing and potential contributions of sociology to the ecological issue, as traversed by two main lines of division. The first is between realism and constructionism. On one side we have those who take an approach grounded in the achievements of science, a broadly critical realist position, and [on the other] those who approach the environment from the perspective of social constructivism, who locate themselves within a more hermeneutic tradition. Their approach does not deny the materiality of non-human entities (nature) but argues that we cannot separate their material existence from our knowledge of them/it (Redclift 2009: 374). In short, while the first approach takes ecological issues as self-evident or scientifically-ascertained facts, the second focusses on the dynamics of problem-definition and solution-devising, asking whether and how humans relationship with nature changes accordingly.

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