Kinsella / West-Pavlov Temporariness

On the Imperatives of Place
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0103-5
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 372 Seiten

Reihe: Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften - Challenges for the Humanities

Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changesthese times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporarinessseeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility. This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival. They write across hemispheres, they interanimate the specific experience of place and history in Germany, Ireland, Western Australia, the Adriatic coast, Africa, New England. 't?mp(?)r?r?n?s is the chance collaboration of two writers and intellectuals that could never have come into existence before it did and that can never be repeated. Philip Mead, University of Melbourne

John Kinsella is Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University, Perth (Australia), Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge (UK), and the author of over 40 volumes of poetry. Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literarures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen (Germany), Research Associate at the University of Pretoria (South Africa), and convenor of a DAAD-funded network project on 'Literary Cultures of the Global South'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kinsella, John

West-Pavlov, Russell

Leseproben

Eco-futures Opening Speech

In all we do, whoever we are, wherever we consider ourselves as coming from, we should be aware of the impact we have as individuals, and collectively, on the natural environment. We should be critiquing our very presence. That is not to say that we shouldn’t ‘be’, not at all, but that we should be of being—its contingent privileges, and . And every word we use in discussing our presence should be scrutinised.

For example, the word ‘cost’ itself. What does it mean in this context? Are we reducing habitation and ecology to a system of profit and loss, of wealth accumulation? Obviously not, but we don’t have to be poets to know that words carry weight beyond our intentions. Yet as poets, we can always neologise—where a word is lacking, create one!

For me, when I talk of environment, I am usually talking of what most would call ‘the natural environment’. This might suggest an environment untrammelled by humans, or it might also mean an environment in which humans co-exist with other life-forms in a more ‘harmonious’ way. The problems of ‘harmonious’ aside—for ‘harmonious’ will only, in the end, ever refer to the human condition, not the non-human—I will say that I mean ‘natural’ ‘human-made’, forms of environment, in the same way that ‘landscape’ is actually about human impact on the natural environment.

We also need to consider the ‘human-made’—the ‘built environment’—in all discussions of environment and ecology, because ecology is necessarily anthropomorphic, and should be critiqued and understood as such. From the garden through to the house, the village through to the city, from the park through to the forest, environmental language is built out of comparatives, slippages, gains and losses. Environment is also about immediacy, about the conditions under which the human—and, for me, as vegan and (an?) animal rights activist, —subject is present. It’s a complex notion for what is often the simplest descriptive reference to nature and place.

So, as I will be talking about ‘environment’ and activism—which is an infinitely complex variable in itself—I do so with the understanding that its many meanings can easily shift in and out of focus as I move through this text, this speech. And given that we are dealing with ‘eco’ and ‘future’ in this festival, this discussion, we are confronted by a question of ecological environment specifically, and what is likely to remain the same (little) or change (a lot) as we go forward through the years.

We all know ‘oikos’ is house—in fact, a whole discourse has developed around that transition from the ancient Greek into the ecology of modernity. I’ve always found the word in its biological usage, the relationship of the organic to the inorganic physical world, a colonialist appropriation. The state of ‘our house’ or ‘the house’, depending on the grammatical article you select, is both an objective and subjective condition. We wish to keep house well, we wish to keep house well; we wish to wreck house, we wish to wreck house. There are choices of action and choices of possession in this. And .

Surely we need to ask whose house it actually is, and whether or not it has been ‘stolen’. Further, as we feed on technology, we should ask whose house is being robbed to give us our consumer comforts. Because you can be sure human houses are being robbed, as well as animal and plant houses. Consumerism is theft.

To my mind, many of us in Australia are calling it house when it’s actually someone else’s house. We are on Aboriginal land. Fact. Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe we can all co-exist, and I am deeply committed to an open-door policy regarding immigration and refugees (in fact, is the name of the poetry book I am writing at the moment). But in the case of the exploitation of the house for wealth-accumulation, there has to be compensation, or better, the house shouldn’t be wrecked at all. Co-existence is possible and desirable, but it should come under conditions respectful to traditional owners and custodians. And I say this as one who doesn’t believe in ‘property’ or ‘private ownership’.

But what of the environments and their ‘houses’ that can and should exist outside the human? Well, there are many of these, and some actually exist inside the human! They are ecologies of bacteria and viruses that thrive in the human body, their environment, their house. Some of these bacteria we consider ‘good’ and to thrive in, say, our gut, but many are destructive to the human organism and we try to eliminate them. Survival. And there are some non-human living environments that experience human presence as that kind of contradiction: sometimes useful and necessary, most often not. Survival. The relationships are complex. Some talk of ‘balance’ in these things. Others talk about accumulated cultural knowledge as a means of pragmatic and generative co-existence. Language grows to accommodate.

As a writer, and a poet in particular, I think I have to be aware of all these houses, environments, ecologies. Even when I am ranting against a particular destruction, I need to do so in an informed way; consider all the possible interpretations; critique the words I am using. Nothing in language, for me, is random, though language seems to resist this confidence and introduces elements of the random I can’t track or control, and thank goodness for that. Language is not just a tool—a tool of control, yet also empowerment—but also, for me, a with a strength outside human subjectivity. Language is of animal and plant, of rock and vacuum, as much as human. It is elemental. Language is part of all ecologies, all environments, and is many houses at once.

When I write poetry against invasiveness, I do so knowing language will be critiquing me as much as I it, and that it will likely work as a weed, a garden escapee, and invade the very ecologies I am seeking to protect. For that’s the difference between, say, the invasiveness of colonial usurpers introducing the fox into Australia for the purposes of hunting-entertainment, and the fox escaping their ‘jurisdiction’ and going ‘feral’ and colonising the Australian landmass in the process. Two forms of colonialism: one is an act of choice for self-benefit (the introduction of the fox) and the other a case of survival (the fox expanding its range).

Now, like the cat, the fox has devastated the natural environment, and is shot, poisoned, and displayed as trophy throughout the country. A large part of this killing is pleasure-based. I know of many hunters who thrill-kill foxes, and if they didn’t get that thrill they’d be spending their time getting wasted. Actually, many wasted while shooting, but I mean even more wasted. It’s a sick joke. The pleasures of control are part of the colonial experience, and in the ongoing colonial state of being that is ‘Australia’, this fits as a kind of environmentalism, a warped form of ecologism.

To kill off the foxes and cats is part of an ecological future for native bushland, and yet it’s also the signifier of colonial presence, cruelty, and hypocrisy. As farmers and miners and land-developers clear thousands of hectares across Australia every single day for their various self-interests and ‘needs’, they remove native habitat. As I have said before about foxes and cats, goats and camels, pigs and other introduced animals, they become the scapegoats. But more relevantly, the environment becomes an excuse for a form of ‘leisurist’ colonialism that undercuts even the settler myths of difficulty, struggle, and loss that have real groundings, but are manipulated by profiteers for the purposes of propaganda.

For me, the future is . Platitudes about ‘planning for the future’ seem like obfuscations of obligation to the ecologies of now. Such ways of thinking and speaking come from decades of ‘comfort’ in thinking and talking about impending environmental catastrophe. Awareness of the biospheric catastrophe caused by humans and confronting humans—and I am not talking about catastrophising thinking here, but actual catastrophic human behaviour—has grown exponentially since the 1950s, producing such major works of ecological awareness as Rachel Carson’s 1962 volume with its powerful critique of the impact of pesticides on environments (Carson 2000).

Works such as Carson’s are of the present as much as the future, the damage being done that destroys the now as much as what’s to come. But still we always operate as if we have time to heed the warnings, to act in environmental as well as human interests, often as if they are separate needs. They are not. But even back then, warnings of disaster were generative: change now and there is hope.

It is different now. We are in the endgame, and I don’t say this to cause distress, but to say that if the future isn’t understood as being , we will have acquiesced to the powers of greed and dispossession, of self-interest and oppression, and embraced electronic gadgets and consumerism, surfing the last waves of natural habitat and biospheric health out into the dead zone.

This is not a speculative fiction; it is the reality we have narrativised into a movie of our shared existence, with identity melded into socially policed categories that can be ‘liked’ or ‘not’.

This is the context out of which I write, we all write. I think linear time—the idea of forward ‘progress’—is a con. As...