RESISTING ECOCULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract

Ecoculturalism ought to have transformed cultural studies over a decade ago. Yet it has not. I examine the troubled articulation of cultural studies and the ‘eco,’ focusing on what I perceive to be cultural studies’ resistance to, and difficulties with, ecoculturalism. In the end, I seek to make good on the transformative potential of the ‘eco’ by advocating a seemingly counterintuitive move: that ecoculturalism be jettisoned in favor of a revitalized commitment to cultural studies.

Keywords:

• ecoculturalism
• cultural studies
• articulation
• technological assemblage
• becoming-with-horse
• cyborg

Acknowledgements

I extend thanks to Patty Sotirin for generous readings and thoughtful insight.

Notes

1. Slack & Whitt (1992) called for an ‘ecoculturally informed cultural studies’ that acknowledges a necessary inconnectedness between the cultural and the biotic (or the other-than-human world), abandons anthropocentrism, and rethinks its project in light of human relations with the other-than-human world. In what was a correct assessment, we wrote then, ‘We anticipate the reluctance of cultural theorists to enter this ecoculturalist terrain based on a fear that to reorient cultural studies thus would be to change its project’ (p. 589).

2. Cultural theorists who have for some time been attending to environment, ecology, and nature include Jody Berland (1994) Andrew Ross (1991), Carole Stabile (1994), Jennifer Daryl Slack and Laurie Anne Whitt (1992, 1994), and Mackenzie Wark (1994).

3. Athusser (1970) posits a fourth, the scientific, which does not hold up very well in his analysis and, like other scholars, I choose to leave it out of the equation.

4. In spite of these cultural limitations it is still possible to use the cyborg to develop an academically responsible (feminist) ethic, as Joanna Zylinska does in The Ethics of Cultural Studies (2005, pp. 138–158).

5. Pat Parelli's Natural Horse-Man-Ship (1993) exemplifies this approach. Although I do not contest his horsemanship, his ‘keys to a natural horse-human relationship’ reads like an operations manual. Is the horse here machine, the human the organic, and horse-man-ship merely cyborg identity? It may be that Parelli is simply so committed to his mission and to selling books as a measure of his success that he speaks in the language of an operations manual to make inroads. It is an improvement to treat horses with the kind of acknowledgment Parelli gives them, but the discursive text does not look like becoming-with-horse.

6. Dorrance (1987) is taken to task severely by Amazon.com reviewers for failing to explain ‘his method.’ I take this as an unreasonable demand to speak from within the very assemblage Dorrance is trying to escape.

7. Amazon.com recommended this text (Boone 1976) as one I would probably be interested in given the several books on horses that I purchased from them. This suggestion alone draws a link between it and the listening-to-horses movement.