Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Provides a significant picture of the ecological crisis from the interdisciplinary perspective of postcolonial cultural studies, in order to map the emerging virtual and ecological territories of the twenty-first century "electropolis."
This book spins a historical fable about the trends in European thought that have contributed to the rise of industrial civilization and to the ecological crisis. It explores alternative visions of nature and culture, from Romanticism to ecological theory, in an effort to rewrite the story of natural and cultural history. Its themes include ecological poetics, technological artistry, evolutionary learning, the play of communication, and the struggle for a viable ecological ethic.
"The linking of ecology and postmodernity is expected, and here done well, but the link with the phenomological life-world is a very perceptive touch and one crucial to both ecology and postmodernity. Just at the moment when a reader might have placed White in a non-aesthetic corral, he adds a chapter on literary ecology, a discussion of how the ecological and postmodern interrelationships are brought into play in literary worlds."— Joseph Natoli, Michigan State University
"White has given himself a heroic challenge by bringing together several current fields of scholarship, literature, and philosophical speculation into the all-encompassing whole of the book title: Postmodern Ecology. He has admirable command of the materials and moves knowledgeably among biological ecology, communication theory, structural anthropology, philosophy, literature, and contemporary popular culture."— Fred E. H. Schroeder, University of Minnesota, Duluth
"Intellectually, to argue against, and more importantly, to simply think our way out of the dead end of modernist ideologies, we need radically alternative perspectives. White, and others, argue that such perspectives are already around, but need to be mobilized. This book is a contribution to the discussion of which perspectives these should be and how they can be mobilized in some larger view of human and transhuman interests."— Jay L. Lemke, City University of New York
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Cybernetic Imaginations Old and New: Communication and Control in Living Systems
Toward a New Demonology: The Confluence of Mind and Nature
Infodynamics: The Creative Fusion of Mind and Matter
Toward a Recursive Vision of Postmodern Diversity
Ecological Feminism: A New Dialogue between Man and Woman, Nature and Culture or How to Stop Fighting and Start Playing
Chapter 1: Postmodern Ecology and the Crisis of Modernity
The Languages of "Nature" and "Culture": Ecological and Postmodern Discourses
The Convergence of Postmodernity and Ecology
The Project of Modernity: A Historical Fable about the Domination of Nature
The Foundations of Modern Science
The "Human" Empire: Science, Technology, and Capitalism
The Mastery of "Mother" Nature
Classical and Medieval Antecedents: The Great Chain
Splitting the Ecosystem: The Ecological Crisis Implicit in Modernism
From Ancient Mythos to Modern Logos to Postmodern Ecologos
The Humanists Strike Back
Ecology and Postmodernity: Toward a New Critique of Modernism
I: Writing the Story of Natural History
II: Toward a Neostructuralist Ecology
III: A New Look at an Old Myth: From Genesis to the Joyous Science
The Moral of the Story
Chapter 2: Ecology and Lifeworld
Spirit in Flames: Toward a Postmodern-Ecological Phenomenology
The Poetry of Evolution: Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Radical Cybernetics: Life as Communication
The Charm and Terror of Digitation
Two Evolutionary Models
Stepping Backward: From Learning to Evolution
Toward New Evolutionary Personae
Seeds of Ecometaphorical Identity: From Arizona to the Amazon to Walden Pond
Chapter 3: Ecosociality: From the Universal Logos of Communicative Rationality to the Situated Mythos of Ecofeminism
Communicative Action and the Serious Ascent toward a Rational Society
Communication and the Ecometaphorical Differentiation of Society
The Play of Nature and Culture
Steps toward a Multicultural Mind or La Pensée Sauvage Talks Back
Who Is that Masked Woman? or Superbarrio Meets Ecofemina
A Stitch in Time: The Quilt of Ecosociality
Chapter 4: Ecopoetics: Literary Ecology and Postmodernity
Ecological Poetics
Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
What Is Literary Ecology?
The Origins of Literary Ecology
Literary Ecology in Mile Zero and Vineland
Chapter 5: From the Ecological Wasteland to the Cybernetic City: Communication, Evolution, War, and Play
The Play of Communication
Toward a Living Demonology
Cybercity, Here We Come: Play in Virtual Reality versus the Manichaean Struggle for the Electropolis
Notes
Works Cited
Index