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Postenvironmentalism beyond Post-environmentalism

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Postenvironmentalism

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Abstract

This chapter starts with the consideration that different post-environmentalist theories seem to be unable to provide an inspiring message for people engagement in environmental issues and introduces an alternative perspective based on the post-modern material-semiotic theory. This emerged from the seminal contribute of science sociologists and critical geographers which explored the constitutively heterogeneous characters of socio-environmental agents as both natural and cultural at once. From such a perspective, the chapter investigates how material semiotics can contribute to overcome existing interpretations of post-environmentalism, by challenging common understanding of the world ontology as well as mainstream epistemological perspective. The result suggests the need for a new gaze on existing forms of environmental commitment, which is here named as postenvironmentalism (without hyphen) through which the whole, multilayered, complex process of making and unmaking the world performed by hybrid assemblages is regarded as a political activity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Remarkable literary transposition of the myth has been written by Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 1604) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust, 1808-1832).

  2. 2.

    In a later contribution, Latour explains ANT is not a theory, or a frozen structure instantaneously accessible without deformations, but rather a provisional proposal that is intended to designate a dynamic structure constantly regenerated by transformations and translations, summing up local and practical interactions. ANT in fact does not explain why something happens, rather how events are brought into existence by a number of assembling relations (Latour 1999).

  3. 3.

    The role of antagonism in politics has been explored by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s 1985 article on radical democracy. By building upon this assumption, radical democracy theory opposes the reflexive modernization (Mouffe 1998) in which democracy becomes dialogic in the attempt to overwhelm, at the same time, the opposition between progress and tradition, and the opposition between left and right without clashing.

  4. 4.

    Material-semiotic scholars derived the definition of actants from Algirdas Greimas’ (1986) definition of an integral structural element upon which the narrative of tales resolves. To Latour (2005), the term an “actant” is a source of action; both humans and nonhumans, that can do things, have sufficient coherence to produce effects, alter the course of events, and make a difference.

  5. 5.

    Bennet (2010) explains “Persons, worms, leaves, bacteria, metals, and hurricanes have different types and degrees of power, just as different persons have different types and degrees of power, different worms have different types and degrees of power, and so on, depending on the time, place, composition, and density of the formation. But surely the scope of democratization can be broadened to acknowledge more nonhumans in more ways” (109).

  6. 6.

    Notably, mediation tools such as voting machines, electoral procedures, parliamentary rooms, the media, and so forth are crucial also in conventional understanding of political organization.

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  1. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

    Chiara Certomà

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Certomà, C. (2016). Postenvironmentalism beyond Post-environmentalism. In: Postenvironmentalism. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50790-7_4

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