Ecological Politics Beyond Moralism?

The more I encounter Leftist political ecology the more I realize the ubiquity of cognitive biases prioritizing the human. So often such anthropocentrism operates via a deep conceptual and emotive coding for an anesthetizing moralistic frame.

If we genuinely seek to enact ecologies of sufficient practice for human and nonhuman nonzero flourishing it may be required to drastically reduce the intensity of certain cherished humanistic assumptions regarding design-as-politics. For example, hypersensitivity to self-ascribed cultural essentialism may de facto block required but admittedly radical public interventions into existing socio-economic habits and structural relations.

Yet, generating ecologically sufficient practice may mean making very hard choices that may not preserve locally desired or fetishized modes of living and generate much tension and conflict. Traditionally this clash between supposed necessity and self-conservation that seems inherent in complex animal social systems directed such tensions into the activity of war. But if we are going to develop radically divergent and ethical futures that are noncompliant with the thanatologics of capitalism and/or war we are going to need to reframe the context of our deliberative focus and pragmatic actions.

It seems more and more to be the case that we need to intelligently (re)design and (re)build processes of deliberation and negotiated prioritization within technical, expert and citizenry spheres (in everything from personal conversation to academics, media and official institutions) in order to diffuse conflicting tensions as they arise and channel them in ways that allow us to better utilize productive differences for enacting social innovation. Anthropocentric moralism – with all its documented anthropocenities – will never be a substitute for an ecologistics of sensitive negotiation between modes of existence indexed against different scales of complexity ranging from the subatomic to the existentially charged social experiential.

What I seek as an alternative to the self-justifying anthropocentric politics of the contemporary is a cosmopolitics of intelligent design that acknowledges and skillfully adapts to the functional imperatives of complex biosocial niches without over-prioritizing the ideologically coded and arranged/deranged desires of humans at the expense of entire ecosystems.

Nietzsche on 'the will to life'

Entangled materiality as potency - without the awkward vitalisms of previous discarded attempts at explanation. An inherent potency as relentless as it is undefinable..

  “Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian … Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Where does power come from? It congregates, co-habituates, coagulates, and reverberates via the expressive modes of existing assemblages as they express their structural relation. Affect writ large, and distributed according to whatever field of possibilities it negotiates in the making of bodies without limits other than those set out in the generative dynamics (historicity) involved in each and every specific ontic composition. To affirm the will to life is simply to acknowledge the facticity and potency of existence however ex nihilo it may seem from within.