The Polluted Subject: Capitalism, Identity, and Ecology

Subject-object dualism is not the essential root of our disrespect for non-human things; distance and difference are inherent to a collective ecology. This paper considers the origins of Nature’s transformation into the mythical sublime, the mirror for human experience, alongside capitalism’s enclosure of subjectivity into the space of identity: a container that creates both the illusion that we are separate from our environment and can make choices independent from it. Drawing out fragments of personal narrative, I incorporate the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Rem Koolhaas, Timothy Morton, and Silvia Federici to question the structure of “being in” as an ethical and sustainable environmental model. Instead of utopian monism as the panacea to environmental destruction, I posit polluted duality as a metaphor for how we are to ethically engage with an ailing world.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Ellena Basada

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 351-356

Affiliations

[0001]Oregon Institute for Creative Research

Berlin, Germany

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.47

SO-VID: f60a1450-b4ba-4722-a25e-38f6287fce4f

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.47

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

R Koolhaas (2002) Junkspace, Obsolescene, 100, 175–190.
A Badiou (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso, London.
J Baudrillard (1994) Simulacra and Simulations. The University of Michigan Press, Michigan.
S Frederici (2014) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, New York.
M Fisher (2016) Baroque Sunbursts. In Nav Haq (ed.) Rave: Rave and Its Influences on Art and Culture. Black Dog, London.
G.W.F Hegel (1977) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
L Marin (1984) Utopics: Spatial Play. Humanities Press, New Jersey.
S Gibbens (2019) You Eat Thousands of Bits of Plastic Every Year. National Geographic. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/you-eat-thousands-of-bits-of-plastic-every-year ( 1 July 2021 )
S Quirke (2016) A Sewer Runs Through It: The Willamette River in the 21st Century. Street Roots. http://www.streetroots.org/news/2016/06/09/sewer-runs-through-it-willamette-river-21st-century ( 1 July 2021 )

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Comment on this article

[1] R Koolhaas (2002) Junkspace, Obsolescene, 100, 175–190.

[2] A Badiou (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso, London.

[3] J Baudrillard (1994) Simulacra and Simulations. The University of Michigan Press, Michigan.

[4] S Frederici (2014) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, New York.

[5] M Fisher (2016) Baroque Sunbursts. In Nav Haq (ed.) Rave: Rave and Its Influences on Art and Culture. Black Dog, London.

[6] G.W.F Hegel (1977) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[7] L Marin (1984) Utopics: Spatial Play. Humanities Press, New Jersey.

[8] S Gibbens (2019) You Eat Thousands of Bits of Plastic Every Year. National Geographic. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/you-eat-thousands-of-bits-of-plastic-every-year ( 1 July 2021 )

[9] S Quirke (2016) A Sewer Runs Through It: The Willamette River in the 21st Century. Street Roots. http://www.streetroots.org/news/2016/06/09/sewer-runs-through-it-willamette-river-21st-century ( 1 July 2021 )

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