Ecology and the End of Postmodernism (Postmodern Encounters) - Softcover

Myerson, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840462795 ISBN 13: 9781840462791

Publisher: Icon Books, 2001

Synopsis

In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard claimed to have laid the 'grand narrative' to rest. Yet the ecological disasters of recent years Myerson argues, herald a return of the big story, and in a new way are a legitmation, after all, of science. Once again, the minutiae of the everyday are simultaneously part of the bigger picture...

About this title

About the Author

George Myerson writes on contemporary culture and environmental issues. His previous books include The Language of Environment, and Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Ecology is often assumed to announce the end of modernity – the final breakdown of modern confidence, the settling up of accounts between exploited nature and an exploitative society. Ecology discloses the disasters caused by the excesses and limitations of the modern: pollution by two centuries of industrialism; over-population supported by technological advances and driving them in turn further forward; viruses and bacteria renewed by the medical science that was meant to destroy them. Meanwhile, another ecological ‘lesson’ is that factory farming has finally warped our relationship to what remains of the countryside: with the spread of BSE, foot-and-mouth disease, a jugful of viruses.

This direful ecology appears to confirm the more abstract message of postmodern theory: the ‘end of modernity’, in the famous phrase of Gianni Vattimo. The rise of ecology seems to support the diagnosis of the postmodernists, notably Jean-François Lyotard, that modernity was a temporary phase of self-destructive over-confidence. There are many postmodern theories, but they share the view that modern culture was infected by a narrow rationalism, a naïve faith in progress and in Western techno-reason as the salvation of mankind. Ecology appears to be the news of its come-uppance.

This book stages an ‘Encounter’ between ecology and postmodern thought, an ‘Encounter’ which challenges the assumption that together they seal the fate of modernity. On the contrary, we shall see that ecology is not postmodern at all. The ecological vision, with all its disastrous news, belongs to a moment of ‘modernisation’, another modern leap towards the future. Ecology confounds many of the premises of postmodernism, and renews, in new ways, the grounds of modernity. In the year 2000, ecology announced not the death of modernity but the end of its shadow, postmodernity.

Ecology does tell a new story about the modern world; a story that alters our perception of science, technology and progress. But this new insight, this ‘ecological enlightenment’ in the phrase of Ulrich Beck, is thoroughly modern. To define ecology as postmodern is to skip over the difficult relationship between ecology and the modern outlook, a relationship that will increasingly shape our society’s future.

This ‘Encounter’ gives a glimpse of how ecology acts as a modernising influence, in two contrasting ways:

1. Legitimating the mainstream Ecology, the new understanding of man and nature, can become the newly legitimate face of mainstream modernity. With all its bad news, ecology can be used to declare a ‘great leap forward’ (to adapt Mao) of the modern order, which now claims to add a grasp of environmental consequences to the previous industrial system. This ecology is not post-industrial, but the herald of a new industrial future. For the mainstream authority of modern society, ecology can be a key resource. I shall call this role of ecology ‘Ecological Relegitimation’. In the year 2000, ecology provided plenty of new arguments for the legitimacy of modern order.

2. Radical ecology There is also a different potential to the new ecology. Modernity has always had within it a critical element, a dissident side. Although ecology can be adapted to support the mainstream, at the same time this ecology is the source of an alternative vision. This alternative is not postmodern. On the contrary, it is a new wave of modernism, a new radical modernism, the successor to the theories with which the twentieth century began. This new modernist critique expresses itself differently: it is diffused, has no central work or author, and speaks from many places. But this radical ecology is also present within the mainstream, and has the potential to reshape the development to come. In homage to earlier modernism, I shall refer to this radical ecology as ‘The Ecopathology of Everyday Life’.

My overall argument will converge with that of Ulrich Beck, when he insists that ecology belongs to ‘the waves of modernisation that face us’. For better and worse, the autumn of 2000 shows how ecology takes us deeper into modernity, and not beyond it. The year 2000 brought home the news of ecology, and at the turn of 2001, we stopped being postmoderns.

Edition details

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1840462795
• ISBN 13: 9781840462791
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 80