Doing little justices: speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics

Abstract

This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the article proposes the concept of ‘doing little justices’ as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of ‘little justices’ is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The article concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence.

Keywords:

• anthropocene
• deleuze
• environmental education
• environmental ethics
• immanence
• new materialism
• whitehead

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Both Deleuze and Whitehead emphasise the singular-plural nature of reality, but lean differently towards a ‘pure’ monism and a ‘pluralistic’ monism respectively. This difference is noticeable in their concepts of immanence, as Deleuze (2001) poses a ‘pure’ plane of immanence that is indivisible and immanent only to itself, while Whitehead (1967) poses multiple variations and qualities of immanence in relation to nature, or the Universe, as an immanent totality. Whitehead’s system of thought is ultimately a monist philosophy, but an unusual monism in which the notion of immanence is multiplied, organic, creaturely, relational, experiential and processual (Whitehead 1978, 19). Whitehead therefore leans more towards a pluralist monism than Deleuze or Spinoza. While Spinoza posits affective modes and their attributes as the manifold expressions of a single substance, Whitehead retains only the modes themselves as ‘sheer actualities’ or ‘becomings’ without any underlying substance. For Whitehead the basic units of reality are ‘actual occasions’ that are self-causing and immanently creative, rather than inheriting a final causation derived from a single underlying substance (such as God, Being, nature or matter). Hence, Whitehead attributes the emergence of complex systems (such as bodies, societies and ecosystems) to the patterning of interconnected events within the ‘extensive continuum’ of nature as an immanent totality, or ‘common world’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Rousell

Dr. David Rousell is Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he co-directs the Biosocial Research Lab (www.biosocialresarchlab.com). David’s completed his PhD at Southern Cross University in 2017, where he also served as Research Fellow in Sustainability and the Arts between 2014 and 2016. His PhD project involved the construction of an immersive network of site-specific art installations, multimedia interfaces, and pedagogical interventions across the learning environments of a university campus. David has a background as a sculpture and installation artist, and has exhibited his work in galleries and museums across North America, Europe, and Australasia. His research has been published in international journals and books, including Children’s Geographies and the International Handbook of ChildhoodNature Research. David’s recent research and artistic projects have focused on creating multi-sensory and immersive responses to the Anthropocene in collaboration with schools, universities, and community arts organisations. His current work in the Biosocial Lab explores the creative potentials of sensory technologies as ‘atmospheric media’ for socially-engaged research and artistic co-production.