On the Fence: Media, Ecology, Marx

IF 2 2区 社会学 Q1 CULTURAL STUDIES
Critical Inquiry Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI:10.1086/723721
Reinhold Martin
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air.
围栏上:媒介、生态学、马克思
本文认为,土地的征用、描述和耕种是媒体史和政治生态学的核心问题。最近在媒体历史和理论方面的工作将土地耕种视为一种原始的文化技术或物质操作,这是其意义的基础。然而,这样的工作并没有将这种从地面上划线开始的操作视为一种劳动形式,从而成为一种政治经济维度,与卢梭对财产起源的描述相当。约翰·贝拉米·福斯特(John Bellamy Foster)展示了马克思早期发展的新伊壁鸠鲁唯物主义如何在19世纪中期的科学农业的指导下,导致了福斯特所说的马克思的“代谢裂痕”理论,即破坏了由人类劳动介导的自然和社会之间的代谢交换。本文通过展示土地的媒介政治如何支配福斯特等生态马克思主义者所描述的辩证过程,回到了批判理论的未竟事业,即将文化批判与自然批判重新结合起来。具体而言,本文通过亨利·查尔斯·凯里的工作,考虑了农业和工业用地的物质生产,以科学农业为依据,并将种植园奴隶制作为一个限制案例。以这种方式重新思考土地的政治经济,将媒体历史和理论中占主导地位的文化唯物主义扩展为一种更全面的历史唯物主义,这种历史唯物主义足以适应一种生态环境,在这种生态环境中,所有曾经坚固的东西都真正融化或燃烧成了空气。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Critical Inquiry
Critical Inquiry Multiple-
CiteScore
2.80
自引率
0.00%
发文量
88
期刊介绍: Critical Inquiry has published the best critical thought in the arts and humanities since 1974. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent critics, scholars, and artists on a wide variety of issues central to contemporary criticism and culture. In CI new ideas and reconsideration of those traditional in criticism and culture are granted a voice. The wide interdisciplinary focus creates surprising juxtapositions and linkages of concepts, offering new grounds for theoretical debate. In CI, authors entertain and challenge while illuminating such issues as improvisations, the life of things, Flaubert, and early modern women"s writing.
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