"Cheap Nature" outlines the way that capitalist world-ecology arose and became a dominant global force.
Patel and Moore identify Descartes' philosophy as the starting point of an ordering consciousness. Here is the Renaissance shift to a single point of reference and subsequent "intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as the opposite of Society" (p46). This idealized opposition facilitated the rapid rise of European colonialism.
Descartes' revolutionary idea had two parts (p51). First, mind and body are entirely separate things, referred to by Descartes as "thinking things" and "extended things." Thinking things make up Society, and extended things make up Nature. Second, that Society must exert power over Nature. The results were fourfold: either-or replaced both-and thinking (a matter of perspective, as in the Harvey reading), identifying discrete 'things' became more important than the relationships between things, the domination of Nature by science became inherently good, and the idea and means of "the colonial project of mapping and domination" were born (p54). Mapping, then, became the key to conquering and cheapening nature, establishing capitalist world-ecology.
(aside, the topic of mapping made me think again about the collection, storage, and use of personal data, and of Palantir Technologies - a data analytics company that's worth checking out)
Two more vital concepts from the chapter: Proletarianization and private property. Proletarianization is forcing people into increasing dependence on the cash nexus for survival and the transformation of human activity into something that can be exchanged in the commodity system (p58). Private property reduced the commons that people could use to produce for themselves, destroying the rights and responsibilities that went along with the commons and replacing them with new relationships centered on capital.
Patel and Moore summarize that "The three processes of cultural apartheid through the Enlightenment, proletarianization, and the privatization of property were at the core of capitalism’s cheap nature strategy, one that turned the work of human and nonhuman alike into cheap things." (p62). The result is what they refer to as the Capitalocene. The close of the chapter addresses the crises that have risen. Like the opening, it also notes the role that Indigenous People have in resisting capitalist world-ecology, and how that same ecology says that it is "developing" them while in actuality at work to annihilate them. (The popular Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu has come under criticism for using this language toward the Uyghur minority group)
The distinction between res cogitas and res extensas is a vital one for the Enlightenment era and sets in motion a whole series of binaries that are not only isolated into separate categories but also placed into a position of hierarchy and domination. It is a great point to identify that the activity of "mapping" becomes a crucial, necessary procedure. This is in many ways the moment of the birth of geography. In turn, the authors here and many of the other essays, begin the work of producing another kind of mapping--for example the connections between scales.
ReplyDeleteGreat work pinpointing the two terms of private property and proletarianization. One is an object and one is a subject. The authors aim to show that capital systems creates at the same time a concrete organization of the world and a corresponding subjectivity. System, Landscape, Identity. This is very much the sentiment of that quote on page 62.
Keep making links between the keywords and in your responses, keep an eye on the link between these three levels of analyses. It is the relationship between them that we want to grasp. Also, keep an eye in this book on these stories of resistance that you mention. What are they doing in the chapters? Why do the authors include these stories?