“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

Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 16

Catriona Sandilands, Pro/polis? Bees, Labour and Publicity in Bee Journal.”
Ranciere, Ten Theses on Politics. 
Politics not exercise of power, but fundamentally concerned with a subject of ruling. 
Disruption of preexisting understanding of who counts as political actor. 
Bennett: capacity to disrupt the world is not limited to human speakers
Other than human beings can also respond as well as adapt
Biopolitics already organizes the nonhuman capacity to respond
There is an implicit ontology in Ranciere
Equality is revealed in struggle not in experiment or enumeration
works of art can disrupt biopolitics in disrupting the sensible
Bee–human interchange. Bee politics are the foundation of the pollination and honey industries. 
Wealth of contemporary fiction and poetry about beekeeping. 
2400BC intro of bees into agriculture. How keeping bees ("keeping" nb) works. 
Bees are not quite domesticated; we don't consume their bodies so much as their labor. 
Bees versus Marx. 
Beekeeping involves long term and difficult engagement with the question of keeping. 
works that engage struggle of eruption of multispecies politics
Sean Borrodale, Bee Journal

No comments: