Reading about colonization in "Cheap Nature" resonated in a lot of different areas. This is a book that I often feel as though I need to set down often to contemplate all the connections to other disciplines and areas. Certainly we can relate the colonizing mindset Columbus had in his frustration of not knowing the capitalist potential of an entirely new continent to the Adelaide Zoo and the differentiation between the onlooker and the constructed nature of the exhibits.
I also relate the ideas of Descartes and Bacon, specifically those on page 52-53, to everything from "Manifest Destiny", to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, to the Bible. Specifically the hierarchy of society over nature, a world divided into binaries, and equating white men to God. I feel a pretty intense sense of deja vu every time some white male historical figure come to these conclusions (ones that people have been making for hundreds of years) and be celebrated for them.
For example, in his essay "Eureka", Poe says that there is nothing greater than the soul and comes to the psudo-pantheistic conclusion that God exists in each man. At the time this was thought of as subversive and is even now reflected on as a kind of mad genius, but Descartes was saying a similar thing when he divided everything into res cognitans and res extensa. A similar thing is stated in the idea of Manifest Destiny in dividing and prioritizing the colonizer over the colonized. Even on a basic level the Christianity is founded on the notion that man was created in the image of God. As I read A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things I am frustrated by the sheer volume of examples that relate to these ideas and how they are still being upheld in academic and non-academic circles alike.
I definitely agree that this book is one that most be processed slowly and I find in my quiet moments thinking of it. It’s a lot of concepts brought together and most of it is extremely dismal. I greatly enjoyed your summation of Poe’s essay. I believe that most people still hold that view but would never say it is such a bold way. That is the culmination of the separation between Society and Nature and it justifies our consumption of all nature.
ReplyDeleteYour pointing toward the way this logic is at work organizing early every instance of the world is crucial--it is indeed an ideology that scales from the body to the globe and historically from the Enlightenment to the present. The logic is the link that connects them. And in observing the methodology of this logic we can become aware of it in all kinds of places. Two things to also keep in mind. First, the logic emerges from a social practice and it might be worth looking back at David Harvey's writing on the Enlightenment to identify how these binaries surface as a result of the division of manual and mental labor that makes capital and private property possible. Second, while the logic is pervasive from Manifest Destiny to colonial invasions to experiments for COVID vaccines, it is also necessarily /differentiated/ in a particularly ideological form in each historical moment. Each "one-up" of time-space compression produces its own different version of this ideology. So we want to track the differences across these similarities. For example, that Adelaide Zoo landscape /must/ change for this precise reason--even though it is still always working to validate (or perhaps we should say /in order to validate/) the existence of zoos.
ReplyDeleteWhat Poe said in Eureka isn't even too radical. In Christianity, the holy spirit exists within the believer most [Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans] believe this happens at baptism), making every Christian a vessel for God - "You also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance." (Eph. 1:13,14)
ReplyDeleteI agree 100%, although the language of discourse has changed, I really think the essence of what happened colonization - rich white males are at the top near god, and everyone needs to obey - has not changed.