Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Introduction Whither Environmentalism? Phantom Limbs Methods Structure 1. The Move to the Outside Earth Day I: The View from Space is Better Reform and Radical The Social The Deep Theoretical Fog The Minority Tradition 2. Ecology/System/Totality Prosthetic Ecology State Ecology Ecology and System Translation Ecological Patois Modernity Enlightenment Modernity as Paradigm 3. Displacing the Humans Nature Knows Best The Anthropocentric Circle Wilderness and the Mirror of the Primitive Primitive Others Going over the Hill 4. Boundary Disputes Boundary Games The Cyborg Trope The Wager Objectivity and Others Critical Weakness: Toward a Weak Ecology Notes Bibliography Index
SynopsisBrings the radical environmentalism known as deep ecology into an encounter with contemporary social and cultural theory, showing that deep ecology still has much to learn from such theory. In Primitives in the Wilderness, Peter van Wyck brings the radical environmentalism known as deep ecology into an encounter with contemporary social and cultural theory. With an eye to critically exposing unexamined essentialist and foundational commitments, the author shows how deep ecology remains profoundly entangled with the very traditions of thought it has sought to overcome. The author critically assesses deep ecology's relations with the Enlightenment, modernity, systems theory, anthropocentrism, the figure of wilderness and the trope of the primitive, and the imagined promise of posthistoric primitivism. He demonstrates the manner in which deep ecology (and much of contemporary environmental thought) has remained blind to the lessons (and possibilities) of contemporary social and poststructural theory. Drawing from an array of contemporary theoretical works (including Haraway's figure of the cyborg and situated knowledges, Deleuze's conception of an image of thought, Foucault's panopticon, Trinh on ethnographic authority, Lingis on the "Other," Torgovnick and Clastres's work on the primitive and power, and Vattimo's "weak thought"), van Wyck opens a clearing within which the ecological problematic and the question of the human subject may be rethought., Brings the radical environmentalism known as deep ecology into an encounter with contemporary social and cultural theory, showing that deep ecology still has much to learn from such theory., In Primitives in the Wilderness, Peter van Wyck brings the radical environmentalism known as deep ecology into an encounter with contemporary social and cultural theory. With an eye to critically exposing unexamined essentialist and foundational commitments, the author shows how deep ecology remains profoundly entangled with the very traditions of thought it has sought to overcome. The author critically assesses deep ecology's relations with the Enlightenment, modernity, systems theory, anthropocentrism, the figure of wilderness and the trope of the primitive, and the imagined promise of posthistoric primitivism. He demonstrates the manner in which deep ecology (and much of contemporary environmental thought) has remained blind to the lessons (and possibilities) of contemporary social and poststructural theory. Drawing from an array of contemporary theoretical works (including Haraway's figure of the cyborg and situated knowledges, Deleuze's conception of an image of thought, Foucault's panopticon, Trinh on ethnographic authority, Lingis on the "Other," Torgovnick and Clastres's work on the primitive and power, and Vattimo's "weak thought"), van Wyck opens a clearing within which the ecological problematic and the question of the human subject may be rethought.