“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


Friday, November 2, 2012

Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 7

Joshua Schuster, "Regeneration through Pollution."
William Carlos Williams on world without us in Spring and All.
"Toxic refreshment": Futurist Manifesto, car covered in muck.
Urban grime is not debilitating but aesthetically promising.
Very hard to turn this into something ecological.
Praise of pollution. How do such works of art, dissonant with expectations, work now?

Williams: eugenic assumptions, fantasies of destruction. Hard to locate an ecologically sound schtick here.
Looking at different forms of remediation.
Bersani, the culture of redemption.

Watershed moment of Rachel Carson. Buell: standard all enviro justice movement have been following since.
"The pollution of the total environment of mankind."
To be modern is to be toxified.

Catriona Sandilands, "pollution hysteria."
Dead Kennedys, intentional toxification. "Kepone Factory."
[Me: to what extent isn't this a resistance to poison? I mean it's not saying "I love that I'm poisoned." And do environmentalists really shun even talking about poison? And is punk not Romanticism's quintessence?]

Environmentally aware and derelict at the same time.

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