Cubitt, Sean. 2019. “Ecocritique.” Media+Environment 1 (1).
https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10784.
STATES OF MEDIA+ENVIRONMENT
Ecocritique
*
Sean Cubitt
Keywords: communication, mediation, environing, ecocritique
https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10784
against environmentalism
Every enterprise needs to start with a careful consideration of its tools and
materials. In our case, that means looking carefully at the words media and
environment and the conjunction between them. Environment presumes
something that environs and something environed. It seems safe to presume
that the only ones talking about environing are human and that the
environment is the nonhuman that surrounds them. For the last two hundred
years, humans have inhabited two environments, the natural world and the
factory, and now we are entering a third, the information environment.
Scholars use the word environment to help distinguish the science of ecology
from the social construction of environment, but at the cost of demeaning
the very thing they most want to value. Ecocritique is a way of thinking these
concerns critically, by placing them in crisis, at a decisive moment, as in the
crisis of a disease at the turning point between recovery and terminal decline.
The state of crisis that calls for ecocritique is not just the hinge point in history
we call the Anthropocene. Crisis is a condition. It has lasted as long as there
has been an environment that is something excluded from human affairs. We
imagine an ecology as a condition where everything connects with everything
else. The problem with this concept is that it presumes there are things to
connect; but the truth is that there are only connections, and the connections
produce the "things." In the company of media scholars, it is safe to propose
instead the formula: in an ecology, everything mediates, and everything is a
medium. Graminivores mediate plants mediate sunlight. The Edenic state is
primal mediation. The crisis arises when a species converts mediation into
communication. Communication separates senders from receivers, signs from
what they refer to, and signal from noise. Of these distinctions, the exclusion
of noise is the one that most clearly mutes universal mediation in favor of
messages between humans about the world.
* Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Professorial Fellow of the University
of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of Light: Genealogies of Visual
Media, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood
to the Mass Image (due 2020). Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on political aesthetics,
media art history, ecocriticism, and practices of truth.
Ecocritique
This environmentalization of the world, excluding it from participation in
human affairs, is the basis of rule (and of all the divisions that subsequently
plague humans, as Plumwood [1993] made clear). What humans exclude
becomes externality, economists' term for resources that do not have to be
paid for. Being an externality excludes from economic activity and condemns
to economic passivity. Exclusion from communication excludes from politics.
Mouffe (2005) and Rancière (1999) observe that slaves and women in the past,
prisoners and migrants today, were and are governed with no voice in their
governing. That is what is meant by stewardship: no matter how benevolent,
it is a mark that humans rule, and what is excluded, externalized, and
environmentalized is ruled.
The distinction between primal mediation and governmental communication
tempts ecocritique to side with the primal ecology. That would be a mistake.
It is a law of physics that time goes only one way and of history that it only
repeats itself as tragedy and farce. We cannot go back to the inchoate flux
of primal mediation and should not wish to. That primordial soup where
everything mediates is symmetrical in every direction, a perpetual directionless
flow. The more universal our communicative systems become—for example, in
the internet of things, logistics, and electronic finance—the more it resembles
this directionless soup. The difference between them lies in nuances: between
the perpetual and the universal, the meaninglessness of individual events in the
old order and their insignificance in the new. The aspiration of the information
order is perfect communication, of the kind imagined in theories of the free
market, a cybernetic model too often mirrored in cybernetic models of the
self-equilibrating natural environment. In this way, contemporary
communications stand at the brink of achieving an artificial ecology. In the
form it takes today, communication has even erased the distinction between
present and future so characteristic of primordial ecology, through the
mechanism of debt, which spends tomorrow's money today and makes the
future the dustbin of today's waste. The job of ecocritical media scholars is not
to praise a lost equilibrium but to build the conditions for a future that neither
mediation nor communication countenance.
For all its attempt to perfect a system in perfect harmony, when
communication divided senders from receivers, it introduced a temporal
difference between them. This explains the otherwise absurd pursuit of
instantaneous communication, the paradox of immediate media. This would
be mere duration if it weren't for the fact that the excluded world persists in
the form of noise, heat, and radiation, interference, glitches, and hiss. Worse
still, the technical system itself is noisy, resistant to the power that tries to force
it to be nothing but an instrument of human intentions. Noise and heat are
characteristics of friction, the friction between planetary and universal systems.
This is what we humans feel in our alienation from nature. We cannot pretend
to be at one with a world that has been so definitively excluded from ours.
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Ecocritique
History is the tale of our estrangement. It is the product of the relation between
what we are as sentient, embodied, breathing, feeding, and excreting creatures
and what we have become as communicative, political animals.
for media
There has been a dangerous lack of ambition in media studies and its various
branches—communications, film, music, literature, linguistics, and so on.
Each branch has nurtured its patch, and specialism is a fine thing, as Bachelard
([1951] 1977) showed. But by reining itself in to these local concerns, media
studies has absolved itself of dealing with the larger scale of human activities,
leaving those to history, psychology, sociology, political science, and economics.
Inspection of these disciplines reveals that all of them devolve on
communications and media, not only in their modes of delivery but also in
their content. Polities, economies, and, most of all, societies are notoriously
abstract things. Communications are material. Communication—embracing
clothing, behaviors, gestures, sex, and cooking—is what humans do. We do not
understand human affairs if we do not understand that they are wholly bound
up in the channels and messages that connect us and that, in a communicative
universe, articulate all our dealings with nature, technology, and information.
We may not listen when Wittgenstein's lion speaks, but by erasing its habitat
and ability to hunt its prey, we communicate to it.
Media scholars are also historical beings, meaning that we are caught in the
tragic rift between perpetual mediation and infinite communication, and like
every other human, we face the blank wall of a future already spent and
polluted. But as humans, even if not under conditions of our own choosing,
we make history and can no more avoid doing so than we can avoid
communicating. To make history requires ambition. Pioneering work in
textual analysis led toward more recent analyses of less obviously ecologically
themed works (Mirzoeff 2014; Fay 2018), implicitly but increasingly vocally
asserting that nothing is understood when the ecological implications of media
are elided. Pioneering work on infrastructures leads toward deeper
understanding of how content and form articulate with the machinery of
production and its colonial roots (Vaughan 2019; Iheka 2018). Not only what
we say but how.
Media research has, in general, respected old disciplinary boundaries too much.
Ecocritical media studies has yet to engage in the kind of work on policy that
digital legal scholars have undertaken (see for example deNardis and Raymond
2017; Lessig 2006; Wu 2006-7; Zittrain 2008). What are the implications of
intellectual property regimes for ecological politics? How do global and
national governance of telecommunications at the critical disjuncture between
corporate and state power impact the deep oceans, near space, and the
extraction, fabrication, and energy industries? Equally, the media field has yet
to expand out from its traditional homes in entertainment and news media
to investigate the dominant media of our time—that is, the media that
Media+Environment 3
Ecocritique
corporations and states use when they dominate (honorable exceptions since
Braverman's foundational Labor and Monopoly Capital [1974] include
Vismann's Files [2008], Rossiter on logistics [2016], Galison on scientific
instruments [1997], and Zieger, Starosielski, and Hockenberry's forthcoming
collection Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media). Workplace media,
databases, spreadsheets, geographical information systems, financial market
and logistical software, information management and planning applications
are too important to be left to lawyers and economists. These are media with
rapid and violent effects, not only on humans but also on how much of which
kinds of fuel are burned delivering which supply-chain components derived
from what mines and wells, where and how waste is dumped, with what effects
on which rivers and deltas.
The unforeseen by-product of the human divorce from nature is that humans
can now greet it as a stranger. If we were still one, there would be no
recognition, no shame, no love. If there had been no loss—and neither
mediation nor communication are capable of considering loss—there would be
no history, and therefore there could be no obligation. Forced to confront the
irredeemable past, humans are forced to recognize the limits of both mediation
and communication as we have inherited them and the necessity of remaking
them. The task of the commons is to end the exclusion of the ruled from their
own government: to create the conditions of a "we" that is no longer only and
miserably human.
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Ecocritique
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