CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Devastation
Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova
In this chapter we want to try to address the force, in the context of a general
ecology, of devastation. What we refer to as devastation is not solely a kind
of becoming of nothing in which the nothingness is produced by this or
that becoming of some thing, neither are devastations simply diminutions
of the stock of entities in the world or the finite number or range of things.
Some aspects of devastation are captured in describing it as attenuation or
diminution of the virtual, but such figurations are too extensive to address
the recalibration of the virtual that devastation presents, and what we
propose to do here is to map such shifts through general ecologies.
Devastation operates and couples with, protrudes from, and dissolves
certain other kinds of becomings that are biochemical, military and
economic, socio-political, technical and mediatic, among other things.
General ecology is inclusive of the three Guattarian ecologies of the mental,
social, environmental—ecologies beyond “nature”—but today it also takes
on the overtones of and relates itself to the debates around such events as
extinctions, their threatening immediacy and increasing intensity.1 General
ecology faces the need to recognize and explicate anxious humans, the strategies of modern warfare, calculations of probabilities, a rainbow of waste
molecules in water, carcinogens, plastic- or high fructose corn syrup-packed
bellies, oil spills, the proliferation of dross disguised as information, among
many other layers and registers. Devastations cut across these to produce
something that exceeds their categorical limits.
It seems that in the discussions of extinction, taking place for instance
in the accounts of deforestation or other examples of the destruction of
natural habitats, the Aristotelian model of genus and the forking paths of
classification (and with them, primary and secondary substances and lasting
identities) adhered to in the Linnean classification still have significant
traction on the public sense of the diminution of the variety of species,
in turn endangering the ecological and social horizons of possibility. But
something more is occurring. In conditions of devastation it is not a set of
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things becoming extinct under a category or idea that is thus itself transformed, affecting the others in a cascading logical fashion that uncannily
follows a tree-like formation, but it is the concept as an existing multiplicity,
a differential, that fails to actualize, a potentiality that is wounded in a way
that makes it implode, that makes it actualize a devastating becoming.
Deleuze draws upon the example of a lens in Bergson, where the virtuality of all colors in white light are actualized to offer a range of shades;
one could ask what happens to color if the blue of the sky is no longer
actualizable because the atmosphere has changed or disappeared.2 What
changes in the concrete universal of light that passes through the lens when
there is no blue of the sky?
Blueless
The philosophies of desire and of process wrote themselves out of the
condition of subordination reinforced by the Hegelian tradition in terms
of ideology, history, false consciousness and the like, by emphasizing
becoming and difference rather than being and identity. Rather than a
universe of “final perfection with static existence”3 as Whitehead abbreviates that of Descartes, one could say that they replaced the ontology of a
mechanical universe, in which the machine can fully come to a stop, with
that of an ecology—of non-linearity.
In the preface to Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze talks about the
problem of rendering the argument for affirmation in relation to discussions
of the negative, predicated upon more traditional philosophical tools such
as doubt, criticism, opposition and so on.4 The figure of the Beautiful Soul,
in this account, sees only the gorgeously ever-differentiating oneness of it
all, and is able to deduce neither a mode of living nor a reading of politics.
Drawing on this fissure, for the purposes of measuring philosophy on the
scales of a form of politics, this is a line of enquiry developed by Benjamin
Noys in The Persistence of the Negative.5 Our tack is different here, in that
we want to develop a discussion of how what is often seen as negative,
inimical, may operate by means of dynamics that are often rendered—when
it comes to the figurative capacities of text-based thought—as belonging
more properly to the anthropically beneficent fluctuations of nature in
vitalist thought. Thus we are faced with an oxymoron: a lively, devastating
vitalism, the becoming of obliteration, dark vitalism.
The conditions of the genesis of the actual are grounded in the virtual,
which is a differential infinitely saturated with change, infinitesimal or
infinitely large, multiple. The virtual is real but not yet actualized. The
virtual is also fully immanent6 and is affected by the actual, too; otherwise
the virtual would operate as an eternal transcendental idea, unattainable
and unthinkable. In what follows we seek to create an ethico-aesthetic
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vocabulary for devastation as performing the process of actualization, the
manifestations of the virtual–actual continuum which in turn involute the
virtual.
Devastation is a kind of ontological flexure on the process of actualization and change. Devastations may not necessarily diminish complexity,
and their effect is larger than the calculation of possibility, on the planetary
or cosmic scales. There is no point arguing whether devastation only affects
the domain of Eukarya or also Prokaryotic microorganisms; it does not
necessarily only affect cellular forms of life while leaving chemical and
physical structures intact. We also do not want to get stuck in the welltrodden paths of discussion centered on the reflexive subject, affective body,
trauma, or death.
A metaphysical devastation, a devastation of the virtual, arises from a
concatenation of shearings at multiple scales. Actual devastation doesn’t
create the virtual by way of resemblance, but necessarily feeds into it.
Devastation in general ecology does not imply that there is an end to
becoming or a negation of affirmation, but that there is a change to virtual
becoming. Devastation seizes, eliminates or radically changes the conditions of other becomings. The tendencies of devastation are not, however,
necessarily anti-organismic or entropic and as such faithful to the order
of thermodynamics. Devastation can generate novelty and complexity
outside diversity. Complex devastational forms include the dynamic
behaviors of new auto-immune diseases, harmful molecule compounds,
cancerous growths, radiation, accumulations of carbon dioxide, which do
not eliminate complexity and wholeness in favor of randomness or a flat
lack of differentiation, but radically redistribute the shares of potentiality,
shape planes of activity and tangle with, impersonate and swallow other
processes of change. The active growth of devastation is not the individually unthinkable scope of the death of the individual or the overwhelming
absences of pure nothingness, it is something to the side of such things,
being devastatingly vital, active, and productive.
The Chernobyl disaster thirty years on is a relevant example: the sociopolitical effects engendered by radiation seem to have ensured a lack
of anthropogenic factors within the exclusion zone, contributing to its
relatively higher biodiversity, with rare animals being spotted there. There
is a window of instability in such radioactively charged biodiversity that
allows certain elements to prosper for a while amid other unfoldings: the
biochemical effects of radiation interfere with the microbial and fungal
ability to process biological decay, thus leading to the conservation of the
dead.7 As a result, thousands of trees lie undecayed in the same spot where
they fell. This interference with the dead is of a different quality to that of
work attributed to the afterlife: it is an arrest of death.
Jean-Hugues Barthélémy has written on Simondon’s formulation of
“deadening,” which “is contemporaneous with each vital operation as
operation of individuation.”8 He suggests that the Simondonian view of
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death as a deposit can be altered to reflect an understanding of death as
“the very heart of life,” a position he finds confirmed by contemporary
biology, where “cellular suicide plays an essential role in our body in the
course of construction.” At the scale of cells, the death of certain of their
number in a developing embryo is a precondition for growth as a process
of the separation of bones, digits, orifices. In a related sense, Ray Brassier
notes the way in which cellular specialization occurs in evolution when
a primitive organism “sacrifices” a part of itself to protect the rest from
the external environment and to functionalize itself, thus making death
an origin of life, the death that can not be repeated in death itself.9 Such a
form of death, as part of an endosymbiotic becoming,10 a link in a chain
of becoming, or an excluded and unthinkable attraction at the core of
being, is radically altered in devastation. Devastationary death leads to
something other than further life and the recouping of material resources
into linked systems, the becoming of other states or the pull of originary
death. Devastationarily arrested deaths are multiplex, cutting across scales
of interpretive frameworks or capacities of knowing.
At another scale, devastation as ecological event can be characterized as
involving complex and manifold interactions across and within multiple
kinds of entities and systems. The earth’s history is marked by a number of
massive, planetary-scale events. We know that there are ages on the earth
when many things die, such as ice ages. The evolution of photosynthesis
created the atmosphere, whose interaction with the rays of the sun created
the ozone layer, and so life could evolve. Things (like free oxygen molecules)
have qualities that can be destructive for other entities, and electro
magnetic radiation is perfectly “natural” as part of matter. Devastation
does not simply amount to the existence of destructive qualities themselves
or destruction per se. Devastation relates to changes in the conditions of
becoming and can be of a form of very active production, reconfiguring
the relations between stability and change, expansion and contraction,
wreaking havoc in chains linking habitats to cosmologies, such as those that
move from the destruction of forests to the extinction of the languages of
those that live in them, resulting in a loss of ability to think in certain ways.
Above we differentiated devastation from a pair of other conditions.
Death in devastation is not the traditionally understood part of the cycle
of life and death, and patterns of growth and decay, nor is it the polar
attractor of the death drive. Certainly, both of these conditions may take
part in devastations. But devastations take things out of cyclical or determined states into proliferating conditions of involution. In the case of
Chernobyl, the afterlife and growth of radiation as the result of the disaster
drastically deplete fungal and bacterial operations, resulting in among
other things the non-return of nutrients to the soil. Such change delinks life
from its source in non-life or other forms of life and alters the processes of
becoming. This is not simply a deferral of the usual process, whereby trees
are “stored” for later decay, but an effect of radiation’s arrest of death in
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life that is itself a kind of growth, a propulsive unfolding of things, for
which we have no available ethico-aesthetic figures. One possibility for
these trees is that they maintain this dry, unrotted state, constituting an
expanse of excellent kindling, until the advent of a forest fire whose smoke
and ashes would spread the radioactive material they store far beyond the
current exclusion zone. This would be a growth, an affirmative becoming
for radiation as a kind of devastation.
Melancholia of obliteration
In the discourse of natural history TV extravaganzas, as Donna Haraway
puts it, “knowledge saves”11 via conservation, scientific understanding, and
popularization. Mediation of survival is one means of ameliorating conditions of devastation. In the case of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia however,
there is nothing to be done.12 A rogue planet is on a fatal and implacable
collision course with earth. One is obliterated, we are obliterated, they are
obliterated, everyone and everything is obliterated, along with the planet.
There is no possibility for reflection afterwards and no prospective capacity
to understand or sense obliteration. Perhaps the unknowable void, like air,
water and other things is also a precious commons?
Is Melancholia just a scary occurrence of the impossibility of thinking
the earth beyond human extinction or does it recount a differentiation
in and from devastation: the differentiated becoming of the perishing of
human species, animals, forests, flows, continents, the earth as a totality of
its destruction, or as a subset of those of planets as a whole? Melancholia
obliterates earth as a living planet, but it doesn’t cancel out its physical
matter, which is scattered in space and possibly left to drift as atomic
rubble. Are we tempted as humans to simply bemoan the obliteration of
the virtual that we equate with earthly human potentiality or is it indeed an
imaginary act of thinking the perishing of the virtual of all matter, echoing
in some way that of the ultimate fate of the universe and the ontology of
dark energy?
Obliteration thus sets out the other margin from that of natural cycles
within the bounds of which devastations become manifest. Obliteration
brings us to the question of the void, finitude, the vastness of nothingness,
and questions of cosmology, states and conditions that we do not pursue
here but use as a point of approximate measurement. Such conditions are,
as writers such as Schopenhauer and Thacker explicate, rather tricky to
make observations about.13 At the same time, and as such, they act as a
rather convincing limit to what we can describe as devastation.
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Spills
One of the most obvious and egregious of devastating abundances is that of
oil spills, from grounded and broken tankers, faulty and unguarded valves
on oil rigs, and the collateral damage inseparable from the development of
new techniques such as fracking. By such means, the earth, all surface, gets
in touch with its inner self. How is it possible to enter into knowledge of
such events?
The becoming of the Deepwater Horizon event, the momentous leak
from a BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, for instance, is interrogated by
a range of mechanisms, including risk discourse as epitomized in insurance
contracts and legal liability; the articulation of claims of environmental
stewardship, and the diminution of what the stakes of such might be; the
technical language of oil-spill management, and the attendant withering
of the terms of the precautionary principle; the media responses of the
various companies involved, distinguishable by the variety of their more or
less inept and mendacious quality. All of these produce their own kind of
grasp on and amplification of the event, even when they try to smother it.
Indeed, perhaps the urgency of a reckoning of devastation is partially driven
by how such conditions are supposedly resolved by such discourse, such a
resolution holding it at bay, boxing it off, rather than attempting any more
sustained understanding which might risk fundamental implications for oil
as a commodity.14
Oil is tragic because at the same time as providing enormous power it
poisons those associated with it, however remotely. Indeed, part of the
complexity of oil is its profound corruption of the discourses, persons,
and institutions around it as they work with the impact of this immense
energetic and toxic force. Such work includes the stabilization of certain
forces (capacity for getting energy) and the harnessing of others for certain
kinds of gain or utilization, and at the same time entails the marginalization
of the recognition of certain of its consequences (climate change).
The tragic nature of oil is apparent in the frequent reports of the
results of deliberate or accidental ruptures of oil pipelines in Nigeria and
elsewhere, this compounding the baleful consequences of large-scale gas
flaring and the generally haphazard and negligent treatment of its ecological
effects.15 Spills are regular, obliterating the use of land for farming and as
spaces of ecological succor. The abundance of such oil indulges a disregard
even for its wastage, not to mention the differential withering and bloating
effects on local life on the part of the colonial powers of the oil companies.
When spills occur in the slums and shantytowns, people collect some of
the oil in whatever containers are to hand. Frequently these spills result in
conflagrations, killing and burning all those that had gathered to collect the
oil in their meagre containers. Each such event is a catastrophe, but their
ongoing form, and the negligence with which they are handled renders their
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qualities those of devastation, in that their proliferation goes unchannelled.
As devastation, such spills populate entire ecospheres. They change the
capacity of parts of the surface of the earth to sustain life by smothering
it in a substance from beneath its surface, one composed, of course, by
decayed organisms.
One of the significant contingent factors about the way in which devastations mesh with human societies is that their unfolding is frequently
gamed, manipulated or gambled on for political advantage. Devastations
are political, and are drawn upon by meshings of rhetorical, calculative, juridical, economic, and socio-political forces and interests. This is
something readily observable in the brinksmanship passing for advanced
statecraft in the negotiations over climate change. Perhaps because obliteration is unimaginable, unrepresentable, that which edges towards it is
not yet it. Devastation becomes the negotiable continuum. The void is
unimaginable, therefore it acts as some solid, finite limit as a basis for
non-negotiation, as a state that we have not yet reached. Tap-dancing on
the rim of an abyss that cannot be seen looks all the more convincing if
the dancers themselves cannot see the edge. What should be a convincing
limit, is seen as a foundation upon which what is imagined to be political
and economic advantage can be made. A moral, if not conceptual or speculative limit, thus provides the basis for speculation on its transgression, on
the understanding that gambles will be made on the idea that it cannot be
transgressed.
Devastation as personification
Discussing brain injuries and drastic neurological conditions, Catherine
Malabou posits a “destructive plasticity” to describe physiological events
in the brain that fundamentally change a person, such as advanced
dementia in Alzheimer’s disease, severe strokes, split identities and other
phenomena. Malabou asks a double question founded in negativity, for
which she aims to recoup the possibility, both in reason and in the capacity
to recognize as fact. “Is there a mode of possibility attached exclusively to
negation? A possibility of a type that is irreducible to what appears to be
the untransgressable law of possibility in general, namely, affirmation.”16
For her, the trick whereby one cannot avoid the regime of affirmation, since
even to recognize the negative is to affirm it, is to avoid the difficulty of
making a recognition of the negative.17 The structure that makes possible
this trickery of affirmation, of this double negative that always pulls an
affirmative out of its empty hat, is partially the effect of language in which
a “no” always has a presence. In a certain sense this is a related problem
to the unrepresentability or the unknowability of the void, of nothing.
Destructive plasticity instead marks a break, a fundamental event around
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which there is no possibility for a flickering of meaning between a positive
and a negative, but instead a snuffing out of what had been. For Malabou,
“destructive plasticity deploys its work starting from the exhaustion of
possibilities, when all virtuality has left long ago.”18 In this work, Malabou
provides a significant means for the recognition of the devastations within
the scale of a person, itself a thing unfolding on many scales: within the
brain; at that of memories; behavior; motoric function and so on. There
is no inherent limit to the virtuality of a person other than its constituent
coupling with actuality. What Malabou maps so well, although using a
different conceptual vocabulary to us, are the modalities of damage that
may constitute such actuality at the scale of the brain.
Devastation in common
At another scale, as Elinor Ostrom notes, devastations occur to commons19
and are not limited to any particular scale, size or location. Devastation, in
fact, may sometimes be the only common we are left with. One example
is the waste commons of the North Pacific Gyre. Plastic, plastic-particular
waste and microplastic waste (used in substances such as deodorants) have
been found even in the rather more remote and more disconnected Southern
Ocean.20 As the waste enters into the bodies of fish or albatross, there is the
generation of a set of second- and third-order poisonings, and first-order
throttling and blockages, as the plastic objects take up space in stomachs,
making them unable to fully digest food.21 With the entry of this relatively
new kind of entity, ecologies become unstable, yet difficult to map due to
the redistribution of life and non-life, related—with no obvious counterfactual—to the question of the proof of an absence, of the new forms of
death and life.
In relation to a commons of devastation, such as that of Bhopal, where
those structurally least able to bear the burden of pollution have been
gifted with the opportunity to freely have it absorbed by their flesh, water
and children, new political subjects may arise. There is a certain resonance
here with the way in which uncanny or alien forms may flourish in the
Zone, as described by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in Roadside Picnic.
The devastated Zone has another mode of becoming and its potency as
a mutational field is what is most stunning in Stalker. Such a response
to devastation is part of what art often offers, a material imagination of
adaptation, mutation, or horror—an aesthetic parallel to evolutionary
models of symbiosis, commensality, and parasitism that allows for such
conditions to be sensed.
But the problem with human culture in relation to the manifestations
of devastation is that it is so often stuck in the positive, the little twinkle
of redemption at the end of every 35mm apocalypse. There are very few
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aesthetic figures (film director Kira Muratova is an excellent counterexample) that can contemplate the dark without drawing a resolutely
positive lesson, but taking the time to stare without jerking back. Perhaps
this is a lasting legacy of Judeo-Christianity, transformed into the AngloSaxon gift of compulsive optimism; and perhaps in turn the belief in the
intensive and vital capacity of change has something of fantasy or of
wishful thinking to it; one that is less that of a conceptual and aesthetic
imagination enacting and invoking new worlds, and more that of a soothing
tale of things sorting themselves out in a jolly cosmos where irresolvability,
futility, and meagre meaning do not figure.
Poor human
Writing about devastation, it is impossible to waltz around the human. Like
a grand piano in a bedsit, the human gets in the way in so many special
ways: with abstract thought and the question of the obliterating destruction
of the transcendental, the question of the empirical, as the cause of climate
change, as the late subject of history and in all the luxurations of woe in
what has been linked to some of the powerful figurations of the subject.
Ecology as a whole can be seen as an increasingly tensile condition in what
has come to be called the Anthropocene, the geological era defined by the
impact of humans, often dated from either the start of agriculture or from
the industrial revolution. There is a depletion of biodiversity, and a homogenization of ecospheres, that is, in the latter case, due to the generalization
of certain kinds of organisms around much of the planet.22 The distinct
quality of devastations, however, is the generation of erasures as well as the
formulation of novel admixtures, interactions and objects.
If we’re to take Kerry Whiteside’s analysis that there has been a divide
in Anglophone ecological thought between the anthropocentric wing that
regards nature as a value-laden notion whose meaning is renegotiated in
relation to human needs, and those arguing for a nonhuman view of nature
as “wilderness,” then we can contend that the concept of the Anthropocene
displaces these tensions. What the idea of the Anthropocene does is recenter
such debates, providing for a few tensional foci: the threat to the human
(framed in ontological terms), the danger posed by the human (susceptible
to social, political, and ecological analyses), and the condition of ecology,
where nature is historically evolving earth in its wider cosmic position
in the Milky Way. By including the human within the term itself, the
Anthropocene assigns more (negative) value to the anthropos.
After all the efforts at de-anthropologizing theory, and all the various
phases it has gone through, this is a bizarre situation: the human is not the
center of creation, but yet is its transmogrifying if not annihilating force.
By becoming less central, removing itself from the position of dominion,
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the specter of finite and full objectivity, the rule of reason, where such
positions are in turn occupied by mathematical models, algorithms, data
patterns, international agreements, the human also becomes a small
schizophrenic element, sleepless, exhausted and—most importantly—
responsible. Humanity becomes an objective force changing the planet: the
Anthropocene is the age in which the human is both the most powerful and
central, and simultaneously the least so.
The concept of the Anthropocene has enjoyed somewhat garrulous
popularity and has been criticized for, for instance, generalizing humans
into a single block of a species and failing to account for differences
in “biophysical resources, cultural perceptions and global power structures.”23 Perhaps a detour to Dostoevsky and his idiot Myshkin could
provide another way of looking at this exercise of assigning responsibility:
in Myshkin’s sensorium, he is ready to take responsibility for all acts and
events in the world onto himself. This is an ethico-aesthetic gesture, an
ontological structure of feeling that is in tune with the condition of devastation: being implicated, being inside. Writing about the Anthropocene,
Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that “species thinking”—posited as occurring
at the moment when a human needs to understand herself as a species—is
untenable, both because it entails a return to essentialism, and is also a
condition that it is impossible to experience.24 Writing about the concept
of species more broadly, Manuel DeLanda also notes the necessity to
think species and individuals in a non-homogenous way across scales—a
statement founded on a Deleuzian critique of Aristotelian generalization
in favor of the virtual-actual distinction, with the virtual common to all
animals.25 A non-Linnean and non-Aristotelian thinking of species and
ecology as well as a generalized ecology in some way relate back to the
conundrum outlined by Chakrabarty, involving natural history in relation
to a history of modernity and capitalism and calling for thinking in both
chronologies, traversing between “capital and species history.”26 Since
species history is fundamentally a site of contestation and invention, in
addition to the marking out of chronologies, such a call means working out
a whole range of new conceptual vocabulary.
How can difference be contaminated by too much difference? How
might a philosophy of difference account for plastic in albatrosses’ bellies?
The cross-cutting of systems of stratification that yield plastics and yield
albatrosses—the behavior of pelicans and the territorial life of plastics,
given that just a few of these intersections create devastating conditions
with an intensive character or networking of scales—does not bring
transition to another state such as a deterritorialization, but an inflection of
actualization that, while destroying the actual, also metastasizes the virtual.
Devastation is not always a catastrophic event. It can be slow and
pleasant (sugar dumps in bodies) or unnoticeable; it can be cumulative,
mutative, familiar. The non-linear causality of devastation holds but does
not create complex things of wonder, as various machines of evolution,
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or thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium are said to do. It creates
something for which we have no image. Science has no teleology and the
philosophy of difference proposes complex models of causality and yet the
processual unfoldings of evolving life are supposed to be right, true, and
wonderful. So what about when they are not?
Witnesses and warfare
Such a condition suggests something that deserves to be recognized. As it
moves across scales, devastation requires a sliding subject, some abstract
form of thought following scales, registers, atoms, organisms, habitats,
languages, chemical compositions, pain, hunger, changes of structure.
Malabou asks, what might be a phenomenology of damage? And in this is
nested a clutch of questions. Within the scales of destructive plasticity and
the richly varied susceptibility to damage of the brain, who or what, and
with what instrumentation and sensitivities, is there to make an account of
such an event? Since there is not always an other who can make an account
of the ways a devastating change becomes manifest, or even a self marking
the ways in which it becomes other to itself, what modes of witnessing are
adequate to devastation? Is devastation always happening to an entity to
which such an undergoing can be delegated and deferred?
In materialist ontologies the suffering, diminution, pollution, cancerous
growth, changing ph levels, melting ice have scales and modes of existence
larger than humans can conceive, experience, and project. Just as there
is to life, there is an incomprehensibility to devastation. A problem for
ecological science today is trying to comprehend—from experience, from
imagination, from a fastidious testing of samples (of core ice, of tree rings,
of atmospheric gases, of climatic records); trying to understand the roots,
conditions, and counterfactuals of this incomprehensiveness. The problem
of who or what is thinking and watching the devastation and for whom and
at which scale it occurs, means also trying to establish the means by which
such accounts can be elicited, at the same time as recognizing that a full
unfolding of the condition is unknowable.27 The simultaneously empirical
and abstract status of devastation is a problem! It is one that calls for an
abstract empiricism, one capable of making a reflection on the constitution
of such a problem on multiple levels and scales. Perhaps, it is one that might
resonate with the versions of the multiverse in quantum mechanics, string
theory and modern cosmology,28 in which the myriad of existing universes
all require their own observers or poets, only a few of which happen to
be constituted by a species that habitually speaks in terms of an “us.” But
this is not simply a problem for thought, and its iteration on a solely philosophical or scientific-technical level. As devastation may not be so evidently
extreme, nor about immediate finitude, and can be differentiated from
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obliteration at the far end of its continuum, it is devastation that becomes
employed as a political tool, performs as rhetorical playground, as data to
be calculated, is objectified into things to be traded, such as toxic waste,
and is regarded as something from which some value can still be extracted.
Deleuze proposes, instead of the viewpoint of the Beautiful Soul attended
to above, a Nietzschean affirmation of aggression and selection played out
in differential terms, which may involve a sophisticated ability to work
with what Bernard Stiegler calls the Metis of politics, an art of war that
is neither walled off from metaphysics nor naturalized by it.29 Perhaps
articulating something of this condition, there is a certain confluence of
operations between warfare, or the exercise of violent power (with or
without the monopolies of the state), and the dimensions of the unthinkable
manifest in abstract empiricism. Both are condemned to undertake operations within certain kinds of fog.30 As such, the recognition of devastations
is rendered partial by their inexplicable sense, in the same way that one
must distinguish between the climate and the weather as operative at
different though interlinked scales. The ethico-aesthetic and medial dimensions of the condition of devastation are significant and yet difficult to
recognize as they are folded within various rationalities and shielded by
epistemologies. One kind of devastation is certainly an occurrence without
an ostensible aesthetics, since there is nothing left to sense it. Such sensing
unites the question of the thinking subject or sensitive entity with those of
the empirical, sensible, and the aesthetic as well as with those wars where
devastation is deployed as a force.
Legendarily, the destruction of Carthage is one such occasion, like a
curse extending to the seventh son of the seventh son, one that outlasts
our capacity to imagine or to remember it since by the time such a curse
is half-done its root is forgotten. The story of Carthage was that it was
destroyed by the Roman army of the Third Punic War and then broken
down, brick by brick, with even the ruins ruined, not as Alfred Jarry would
have it by making beautiful new buildings, but by an irrevocable and
omnipotent dismantling, and with the land being ploughed over with salt,
rendering it forever unfarmable. Yet the devastation of Carthage as a site
for human life, at least in terms of the poisoning of the land with salt, turns
out not to have occurred. The historian Appian’s description of the annihilation of the city, in revenge for the victories of Hannibal, makes clear the
Romans’ aim of total obliteration. No one left to recall the life of the city or
what it was like to be its victim, yet there are some grounds, it appears, for
its history, since at least it was written. This operation on memory is part of
the condition of devastation. The problem with thinking about devastation
is multiple. Such an enquiry occasions the problem of the witness: not only
in terms of the question of what, if anything, remains to constitute a sense
of an account, but also in terms of understanding the becoming of nothing
or a radical change—how can such phenomena be recognized, if at all, and
how is knowledge about them produced?
Devastation
335
The concept of the witness endows sensing with primary importance. It
is not about thinking (philosophy) or measuring (science), or gathering and
giving evidence. Witnessing unites sense with memory, where evidence rests
in bearing witness—a process that can be performed by a subject as well
as by an object, e.g., a stone, a log. In turn, both science and poetry unite
in attempting to elicit modes of witnessing, or better, chains of witnessing,
from an event, to its registration in a change in certain molecules,
substances, or capacities, to an instrument that is sensitized to them, to a
mode of description and comparison that is adequate to them. Yet, as has
been described in numerous ways, to witness is also an act.
Devastations move both between the ecological and political scales and
across standard notions of both object and system. They are something
that happens that renders the tabulations of positive and negative and the
perspectival limits they imply, perhaps operative at certain scales, transductable into such formats at certain times and from certain perspectives
or scales, but moot at others. Here, the problems of mediation, intellection,
perception, shift, combine, and re-sort.
Ecology is intimate to humans in every conceivable manner, and indeed
composes them both over evolutionary time and in the lifespan of an
individual, but is also the condition in which they find themselves stuck.
There is a certain degree of intolerability to the finitude of a planet, particularly one in which climate damage has become a kind of political and
military gaming field, one operated upon largely by an infuriating indifference that is voluminous in its churning of its own impressive incapacity
to act. One of the conditions then of the current sense of devastation is a
generalized claustrophobia produced across the immensity of the earth as it
hangs amid this fog of a climate.
Part of this claustrophobia is a sense of strife turned, against its nature,
into a force of conjoinment. As a People’s Liberation Army strategy
document from the last decade entitled “Unrestricted Warfare” noted,
furthering Clausewitz, ecology has become a means of waging war—one
unlimited in its scope.31 Perhaps it is this systemic factor that is becoming
significant in the present era—the ineptitude of established political or
economic forms being their designated means of addressing and imagining
a clever exploitation of the situation. The means by which this war is to be
fought are in the processes of figuring themselves out and are to be found
in the domains of energy and fuels; water and pollutants; the morphological
manipulation of terrains via ice-melt such as that of the northern coast of
Europe and flooding, such as that of all low-lying countries; and several
other means. Following on from the consideration of their strategic usage,
and the problems associated with them, leading to the adoption of the full
range of both negligence and opportunism at the level of states’ reactions
to ecological crises, devastations also impose particular kinds of conditions
for knowledge about them in terms of the kinds of cunning required for
their exploitation.
336
GENERAL ECOLOGY
What are the means to speak of the becoming of different kinds of
devastations, of blossomings that obliterate? Some, indeed most, things
cannot be known by organized forms of knowledge because there are not
only so many of them, but also due to the problem of scaling second-order,
observational knowledge—coming up with the techniques of inference,
hypothesis, experiment, and modeling, among others. This condition in
turn causes problems of proof, leaving precious moments of doubt available
for exploitation by those with an interest in maintaining it. In order to close
down the operative parameters science produces instruments and methods
and practices that fillet reality for its juicy bits, taking part at times in this
systemic occlusion, and at other times articulating fundamental conditions of multi-scalar inter-relations. Devastations operate in the condition
that Rachel Carson notes in Silent Spring: “Seldom if ever does nature
operate in closed and separate compartments.”32 A characteristic mode
of devastation for instance is that found in the exponential increase in
concentrations of poisonous chemicals as they move through a food chain.
Samples of poisoned predator and prey species can be subject to biopsies,
but, echoing the relation between species and individual, not the entirety of
the population concerned.
As with the case of Carthage, devastations are, among other things, an
operative component in systems of war. The capacity for them, the carelessness
with which they are handled or flaunted, the opacity with which they are left
as the world moves on, characterize their strategic value. Such a form of
becoming of munitions is, for instance, active with the residual and freshly
seeded crops of landmines, chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs,
nuclear weapons and their equivalents in industrial accidents: a constituent
part of modern warfare in both its implemented and threatened states, as
part of its operation as calculus, trauma, and frenzy. Each of these forms of
weapon gains part of its power from the violation of ethics that they imply,
and also for the unknowability of the violation of the future that their use
unleashes. The calculation of the cost–benefit ratio of landmines for instance
sees them deployed widely and rapidly as a means of asserting control over
a territory, making it impassable. The condition of wild-seeding of such
weapons sees them left in the ground for decades, a momentary tactical or
strategic advantage lasting in swathes of unfarmable, impassable land. The
deployment of nuclear weapons triggers the exercise of devastations as the
actual settles into a state of strategically engineered “irresolvability.”
The political plastic, as Eyal Weizman calls it, is generated out of the
interaction of forces, potentials, and the affordances of entities such as laws
turned into calculuses of the permissible and the bendable; the reach of
weapons systems; landscape measures; and also out of potentials of retaliation, of destruction and modelizations and the analyses of such.33 Indeed,
the international history of the Cold War could be written through the
interlocking systems for devastation and the mechanisms for making them
implicit but calculable, known but ineffable, operative yet unused.34 What is
Devastation
337
interesting about such plasticity is that, like that discussed by Malabou, but
operative at different scales, it has its limits, yet these are only discovered
or used as momentary tropes within a larger set of fixings and changes in a
sort of parametric emergence of a situation out of things without measure.
The question of devastation in relation to sense, witness, and warfare can
be seen as a question of measurement and is treated with a remedy of
calculability. Calculation of the unknown extinction is one artifact of this
condition and should perhaps be recognized as crystallizing the dire conditions of devastation in relation to the problematics of knowledge. These
kinds of try-outs of little devastations, calculated and modeled diminutions,
a training and development system anticipating the larger-scale devastations
to come actually presuppose a condition of general calculability which in
turn is a response to, or forms a conceptual pair with, the condition of
irresolvability.
What is notable however about the question of devastation is that
the techniques of observation that attempt to capture its characteristics
proliferate according to context, but, as methods, need to be repeatable in
order to gain greater traction on the problem. But since devastations often
operate by the becoming of loss as well as by the growth of something
unknown, they are paradoxical, since what we are able to recognize of
them is both a form of presence, and an absence, producing a version of
the logical problem of the evidence of absence. How do you prove the dissipation of the virtual? You may need a vivid imagination, or perhaps you
may simply need to be glacially cold, painstaking. Perhaps indeed the latter,
since devastation is, in a certain sense, the knife-edge upon which present
social forms find their seat.
Dumps in bodies
Certain ideas about nature have a tendential form of operation in that what
is sectored off as nature becomes non-conceptual, passive, overwhelming.
There is a certain overlap between emphasizing the awesomeness and
unknowability of the sublime and the idea that nature can absorb all that
is thrown into it.35 The mighty and eternally flowing river Yangtze makes
a perfect chemical dump. The North Sea can be overfished, it is imagined,
in perpetuity. The steppe stretches so far that it can absorb anything.
Overcome with the power of nature, coupled with the operations of other
ineffable mechanisms that condition knowledge, such as markets, the
unknown is used as a dumping ground. If we are to think of the media
of ecology then, the earth is a means of mediation, a pretext, a hyperabsorbent nappy for an incontinent humanity.
As well as dumps in seas and in landscapes, there are other kinds of
volume being exuded, but into the flesh of human bodies: surplus production
338
GENERAL ECOLOGY
that must be forever devoured, regurgitated, chewed, and gorged. As is well
known, there is an epidemic of obesity in the world in which human bodies
become the sites for the dumping of certain kinds of surplus. Obesity itself
becomes an ecological crisis since it involves an increase in the volume of
gross human biomass.36 (Based on 2005 figures from the WHO, increasing
population fatness is projected as having the same implications for world
food energy demands as an extra half a billion people living on the earth—
you need more food to sustain higher weight.)
Causes are multiple and of varying kind and interpretation. Aside from
the variable genetic predispositions of individuals this situation of growth
is characterized by: changes in food and access to quasi-foods; increased
mediation of food into a signature of surplus that is yet unmatched by
homo sapiens’ ability to devour and offload it; lack of food and abundance
of access to foods with high calorific value and lack of other kinds of
nutrition; the persistence of a kind of body evolved in the context of
hunter-gatherer forms of life into conditions more suited to species able
to benefit from high quantities of sugar.37 Generally, more physiologically
simple species, such as slimes, bacteria, and algae are more directly able to
translate such abundance into reproductive activity.
This in turn can be figured as a form of devastation. What we find with
obesity however is that more structurally complex organisms can be said
to internalize and mediate certain devastations at the same time as they are
the grounds of them. This condition of the internalization and mediation
of economically and politically expedient surplus is what characterizes the
obesity epidemic as a peculiarly contemporary devastation.
Obesity has many factors but they are conjoined in the particularities
of the way humans articulate more general biological characteristics. Food
is mediated within the body by hormones, particularly the homeostatic
factors, such as ghrelin, which helps signal hunger, and leptin, which
signals the state of satiety. These hormones may interact with dopamine,
released by the ingestion of food found to be delicious, yet decreasing in the
amount yielded the more is consumed. Since the obese have less dopamine
receptors, its activity becomes less capable of producing the required effect.
Within the body, multiple other systems are involved, such as the activity
of fat cells, which are not simple warehouses for energy, but are also
productive—generating fatty acids and hormones, among other things.38
In turn, conditions such as diabetes, cancer, stroke, liver failure. and heart
disease also have their particular capacities of formation.
As Guattari notes, systems of endocrine regulation may hold “a determining place at the heart of assemblages”39 giving a particular stubbornness
or lubricious ease of implementation to certain social configurations. Such
capacities of the body can be hooked into by particular substances and
the assemblages around them, for instance generating what appears to be
a virulent conatus between an agricultural policy, political tactics, human
appetites, and the condition of obesity.
Devastation
339
Richard Nixon’s need for the support of farmers (in the run-up to the
1971 election) generated, via the promise of federal funds to grow the
crop, the intensification of the farming practices of the American Midwest
around corn. The achieved surfeit of corn required its uses: most obviously,
in feeding to a glut of cattle and in manufacturing high fructose corn
syrup (HFCS) for the American, and thus global, diet.40 Once a product
and a market was created, it persisted, as did the federal subsidies. HFCS
is found in soft drinks, processed meat products, bread, sauces, cereals,
and many other food and foodlike substances. In those in which extensive
processing has decreased flavor or substances used as food in which flavor
is not naturally occurring, it is useful as an additive. Eating or drinking
HFCS represses leptin, and thus the eater’s capacity to recognize that it
is full or sated. Such a process need not occur with the full knowledge of
what is occurring in any of the participant humans, nor in the agencies,
markets, instruments, glands, intestines, brains, plants, policies, political
intrigues, taste organs involved. Such a conjunction is sorted, amplified,
ablated, contused, digested, and stored by the interactions of the predilections, intent and desires of the particular systems brought together in the
ensemble.
Human bodies are places for regular substance panics (such as those
associated with acrylamides, saturated fats, Bisphenol, plasticizers, etc.)
in which ecologies of complex chains of media from the instruments and
recording devices of labs, the persuasion mechanisms and institutions to
which they are attached to those of televisions and the mechanisms falling
under the scrutiny of communications couple with those ecologies tangled
and forged inside organs and food and logistics systems. Characteristic
of these is the reaction to the discovery that human milk becomes toxic
when it concentrates chemicals such as PCBs stored in the mother’s adipose
tissue throughout her life (obesity perhaps being a necessary requirement
of contemporary life in that we need sufficient space to store all the
toxic chemicals we are exposed to; our other commons). The agency of
such chemicals, residues of mindlessness towards matter, turns the body
inside out, rendering moot the question of the scale to which it is most
fundamental.
Here, the question of movements of dissipation and concentration of
chemicals in a dispersed set of states and sites within an ecology becomes
crucial (whether such materials are ideally to be recycled or warded off) and
ties in with the question of energy—how much energy is needed to gather
all that must be recycled, or to recoup all the matter that has spilled into
a condition in which it is poison.41 Beyond a certain point, which is not
always so far, there is a devastating becoming which makes certain kinds of
known lives untenable.
340
GENERAL ECOLOGY
Notes
1
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Gary Genosko (London:
Athlone, 2000). Guattari touches on questions related to devastation when
he discusses pollution, algal blooms, and Donald Trump.
2
Gilles Deleuze, “La Conception de la différence chez Bergson,” Etudes
Bergsoniennes 4 (1956). Translated as Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson’s
Conception of Difference,” in Desert Islands and other texts, 1953–1974,
ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2004).
3
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press,
1968), 83.
4
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London:
Athlone, 1994), xx.
5
Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Press, 2010).
6
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (New York: Zone Books,
2012).
7
Rachel Nuwer, “Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly,”
Smithsonian, March 14, 2014. Available online: http://www.
smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arentdecaying-properly-180950075/?no-ist(accessed November 20, 2015).
8
Jean-Hugues Barthelemy, “‘Du Mort Qui Saisit Le Vif’: Simondonian
Ontology Today”, Parrhesia 7 (2009).
9
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound. Enlightment and Extinction (London:
Palgrave, 2007), 237–8.
10
See Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the
Mutations of Desire (London: Continuum, 2004).
11
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007), 256.
12
Melancholia [Film], dir. Lars von Trier (Denmark: Zentropa, 2011).
13
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet, The Horror of Philosophy, vol.
1 (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013).
14
Artists too attempted to turn people’s gaze back on to the physical event—
notably, Übermorgen, who declared the spill the largest oil painting in
history, reframing aerial pictures of the event in such terms.
15
See “Oilwatch—Home”, Oilwatch, last modified November 21, 2015,
http://www.oilwatch.org/.
16
Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on
Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2013), 73. Tracking the structural linkage of possibility to affirmation,
Malabou notes that Kant’s freedom to say no becomes, for Hegel, a
rounding principle of the doubling of negation, thus, an affirmation, where
“categorical refusal is not possible.” Negative possibility, that is formative,
Devastation
341
for Malabou, is of another order: it “refuses the promise,” “makes existence
impossible,” “prohibits … the other possibility.”
17
Brassier with his project of nihilism reads Nietzsche differently, putting
the operation of affirmation into doubt. He proposes a discussion of the
transcendental scope of extinction (through solar death and extinction of
abstraction).
18
Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident, 89.
19
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for
Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
20
“Study Reveals Widespread Plastic Distribution in Antarctic
Waters,” Tara, a schooner for the planet—Expeditions—Science—
Environment—Education—Art—Events, last modified August
14, 2011, http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/en/m/science/news/
study-reveals-widespread-plastic-distribution-in-antarctic-waters/
21
Here there is a significant differentiation from the gestation process of
ambergris that forms a mass around certain solids such as the remains of
undigested squid beaks in the bellies of sperm whales. See Christopher
Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
22
Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change
Newsletter 41 (2000).
23
Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique
of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review, published
online January 7, 2014, doi: 10.1177/2053019613516291.
24
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical
Inquiry 35 (2) (2009). This is something that Chakrabarty sees as being
epitomized in Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a
Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (1995).
25
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2008),
267–8; Manuel DeLanda, “Ecology and Realist Ontology,” in Deleuze/
Guattari and Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009). See for a related discussion, Steven Shaviro, Without
Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009), 89, fn. 11.
26
Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 220.
27
Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the
Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
28
See Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End. The Many Lives of the
Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
29
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005) and
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
30
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, abr.
Beatrice Heuser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46: “War is the
realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is
342
GENERAL ECOLOGY
based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and
discriminating judgement is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the
truth.”
31
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA
Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999). Available online: http://www.
cryptome.org/cuw.htm (accessed November 21, 2015).
32
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; London: Penguin, 2000), 52.
33
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from
Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011).
34
Liang and Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare.
35
See Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental
Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
36
Sarah Catherine Walpole et al., “The Weight of Nations: An Estimation
of Adult Human Biomass,” BMC Public Health 12 (2012): 439. Available
online: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/439 (accessed
November 21, 2015).
37
See, inter alia, the work of Rudolph Leibel, Columbia University.
38
E. E. Kershaw and J. S. Flier, “Adipose Tissue as an Endocrine Organ,”
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 89 (6) (2004).
39
Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013). See also Alexander A. Bachmanov et al.,
“Nutrient Preference and Diet-induced Adiposity in C57BL/6ByJ and
129P3/J Mice,” Physiology and Behavior 72 (2001).
40
Jacques Perreti, “Why Our Food is Making us Fat,” Guardian, June 11,
2012.
41
Paul Burkett describes the problem in relation to the question of
thermodynamics, where it is true that “if we have enough energy, we could
even separate the cold molecules of a glass of water and assemble them into
ice cubes”; but “in practice … such operations are impossible … because
they would require a practically infinite time” (62). This problem applies in
particular to those “elements which, because of their nature and the mode
in which they participate in the natural and man-conducted processes, are
highly dissipative” and / or “found in very small supply in the environment”
(63). In short, “the sombre message of the second law (that dissipation of
matter and energy are unavoidable consequences of their use) mutes the
seemingly optimistic message of the first law (that matter and energy are not
literally consumed in their use)” (64). Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A
Red and Green Approach (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
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