“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, November 3, 2012

Sherryl Vint 2: The Mise-en-Scene of Things to Come (Underground Ecocriticism Keynote 2)

Colonialism and sci fi. Resource extraction celebrated in sci fi long after the extractive techs were developed. The disturbance of ethnocentrism. John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Could be positive.
Potential to imagine our species of only one of many.
Herzog, The Wild Blue Yonder. NASA footage and Antarctic footage plus Brad Dourif.
Alien landing << footage of Wright Bros. The title is from the air force's song. Critique of transcendence of nature and planet.
Agriculture: critiqued by Brad Dourif! (Thanks Sherryl.) "Pigs, that was a sin!"
Fantastic rant! It would take 500 human generations to go just 15% towards Alpha Centauri...
Proposal in the movie that the ideal space colony would be like a shopping mall...
Palimpsest of nature/culture binary. How might we imagine otherwise?

>> which brings us to the 18 movies in futurestates series.
Themes of: reproduction/genomics, corporations/ownership, climate/other change.
There are almost no animals in this series.
For Vint, the movies are very naive in many ways. They often involve personal not collective choices. Future associated with capitalism.
The idea of the future as expanding << capitalism (hence the Autonomous Marxists' non-futurist manifesto)

Biopower
Policing life/death boundary. Bioeconomics << 2006 report The Bioeconomy.
US Supreme court decisions: 1980 (Chakrabarty), 1990, established that forms of life can exist as property.
You can patent lifeforms.
University of Guelph's Enviropig.
Uncanny resonance of ecocriticism with Chakrabarty.
We need to reject the binary of sci and progress versus environment.

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