In keeping with Fredric Jameson's founding claim in The Political Unconscious that Marxism provides not just one more hermeneutics of literature and culture, but a project that integrates all other hermeneutics to their historical determination, this essay will argue that ecocriticism, perhaps the youngest of contemporary literary hermeneutics, likewise can and should be dialectically assimilated to the project of a Marxist literary and cultural criticism. In redescribing ecocriticism as the analysis of modern literature's determination by the category of the "environment" within the successive iterations of the capitalist mode of production, however, I will also argue that Marxist literary criticism must be inflected in a new way. Insofar as politics, understood in their broadest sense, designate social struggles over how life (human and nonhuman alike) will be used as a means to a collective end that is also life, I will propose that the "absent cause" of history, which in the proverbial last instance determines the form of modern literature and culture, must be understood as a biopolitical unconscious.The craving for an ultimate and unconscious cause - exit God, hello the Marx Bros? - is reminiscent of claims by fans of the Akashic Field theory of "past, present and future universes" as an "evolving" "collective consciousness" that unites the living and dead and that provides an "empirical" "scientific" basis for human rights law. (I beg to disagree.)
Medovoi indicates that -
In recoining this classic Jamesonian term, I am joining it to Michel Foucault's well-known analysis of the rise of "biopolitics" during the early nineteenth century, the historical moment at which, Foucault argues, life itself for the first time became the object of politics. If, in fact, it was both human and nonhuman life that became explicit objects of regulatory or governmental power at around this time, as part of the political reckoning with the demographic and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, then for quite some time now we have been facing a political modernity in which life, or "bios", is at the core of capitalism’s mode of regulation. What the media typically call the "environmental crisis" is better understood as the current face of politics itself, namely the many different kinds of geopolitical struggle to reshape the circuits of power that flow between planetary life and accumulation on a global scale. Just as the early industrial phase in the capitalist mode of production established the preconditions for Marx's ability to critique and historicize the key categories of classical political economy, so now the contemporary movement toward a "green" regime of capital accumulation — one that seeks a "sustainable" relation to planetary life — permits us to historicize what Jameson called the "path of the subject", the key concepts, categories, or reading habits upon which ecocriticism depends: the "environment" or "ecology", indispensible abstractions that (like labor or exchange value) have only become generalized concepts through the work of an ensemble of concrete historical processes in need of investigation. A rigorous eco-Marxist literary criticism today will first need to grasp the historicity of these terms, and then retroactively develop a symptomatic reading of literary and cultural texts that attends to their complex determinations by the same biopolitical history of capitalism that (by way of a different circuit) gives rise to the critical apparatus.Ending with a bang, not a whimper? Medovoi concludes that
Much of the rhetoric of ecopolitics today in fact works precisely in this historical tradition, arguing that we will have to "green" our relationship to the environment in order to make capitalism more sustainable. The political goal of a properly Marxist ecocriticism will not be to save the environment. It will be to abolish it.Meanwhile, Fatema Ahmed in the LRB notes an interview with farceur Slavoj Žižek in Cahiers du Cinéma, in which he notes that his piece on Avatar was written without seeing the film -
as a good Lacanian, the idea is enough, and we must trust theory. Žižek promises that he will see the film and then write a Stalinist 'self-criticism'.Presumably he'd get just as much publicity if he changed his name to Salvador Dali and aped the antics of Avida Dollars. Ahmed continues that -
The good Lacanian goes on to inform the Cahiers editors that he wrote about The Talented Mr Ripley before seeing it, and that although he has seen Psycho and Vertigo (the interviewers sound quite jittery by this point), there's a long chapter on Rossellini in Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out and, no, he hadn't seen the films when he wrote it. Out of respect for Lacan? Not this time: "As a good Hegelian, between the idea and the reality, I choose the idea."
