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Recovering a Future: a Critical Inquiry Into Social Ecology DOCTORAL THESIS Recovering a future a critical inquiry into social ecology Spivey, Robert Award date: 2021 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 07. Oct. 2021 1 Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology by Robert E. Spivey, BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of PhD Roehampton University 2020 Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology 2 Abstract Globally, an increasing number of people are confronting accelerating ecological threats, including the unprecedented spectre of climate catastrophe, one of the widely predicted manifestations of which is an increasing incidence of viral pandemics. At the same time, broad social movements have recently emerged to combat increasing social inequality, gender-based oppression, police violence and systemic racism, and ongoing abrogation of the treaty rights and resources of indigenous peoples. A comprehensive effort to address ecological and social issues such as these—and the links between them—is the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin formulated the philosophical basis of social ecology in the mid- to latter part of the previous century., emphasising that efforts fo dominate nature have arisen from a long and tragic history of the domination of humans by other humans. This thesis inquires whether the theoretical formulation of social ecology is adequate to current challenges, especially those arising from anti-racist and anti-colonial theory and activism. In particular, can a dialectical naturalism that seeks to derive an ethics and a politics of confederated directly-democratic municipalities and communities from concepts of nature be justified, given the prevailing postmodern scepticism toward naturalising theory and toward the dialectic? My research looks at the theoretical bases of social ecology in non-reductive scientific investigation, and in a reading of natural evolution that attempts to ‘ecologise’ the Hegelian dialectic. However, I draw primarily upon theoretical resources from an unexpected source in contemporary Continental philosophy rather than in the revolutionary tradition—the ‘new materialism’ of Catherine Malabou. Ultimately, I argue that Malabou’s work—supplemented by that of key anti-racist and anti-colonial writers—offers ways to think through lacunae in social ecology theory so that Bookchin’s project may be relaunched (to borrow Malabou’s terminology) in a form more adequate to the challenges of our historical moment. Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology 3 To My Son Sam, and the Future he Belongs To Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology 4 Table of Contents Introduction and Overview......................................................................................................8 Chapter 1: Capitalism and the Climate Crisis ......................................................................17 Shifting the Spectrum……………………………………………………………….20 Bookchin’s Philosophical Linkage of Nature, Ethics, and Politics ..........................20 Discourses of Nature ..................................................................................................21 The Social Construction of Nature ............................................................................24 The Problem of Nature in the Marxist Tradition......................................................27 Poststructuralist Constructions of Nature ....................................................................33 Notes to Chapter 1……………………………………………………………………40 Chapter 2: Murray Bookchin’s Life and Work .......................................................................43 Overview .....................................................................................................................43 Bookchin’s Ongoing Influence ...................................................................................53 A Reading of Natural History .....................................................................................58 From First to Second Nature to a ‘Free Nature’ .......................................................61 A Dialectical Naturalism .............................................................................................63 The Philosophy of Nature in the Intellectual Context of Modern Scepticism ........65 Scientific Support .......................................................................................................68 Assessing Bookchin’s Social Ecology ........................................................................72 Notes to Chapter 2 ......................................................................................................74 Chapter 3: Social Ecology and Deconstruction ...................................................................78 Jacques Derrida and the Erasure of a Natural Origin ..............................................83 Catherine Malabou and the Critique of the Erasure of Form ..................................89 Assessment of Derrida in Relation to This Thesis ...................................................93 Assessment of Malabou’s Contribution ....................................................................96 Nature, Ethics, and Politics in Jonas and Bookchin ..................................................96 Ventilating the Closure of Social Ecology ..................................................................98 Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology 5 Implications for Praxis .............................................................................................100 Relaunching a Future ...............................................................................................103 Notes to Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................107 Chapter 4: Naturalism in Question, Part 1 ......................................................................... 110 Contextualising Ethical Discourse ........................................................................... 111 Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology ....................................................................... 114 Bookchin’s Response to Eckersley .......................................................................... 117 Directionality in Nature: Glen Albrecht .................................................................. 119 Scientific Support Updated ......................................................................................121 Assessing Evolutionary Directionality ....................................................................127 Progressive Evolution Challenged ...........................................................................130 Rethinking Directionality .........................................................................................132 Objectivity and Diversity ..........................................................................................137 Notes to Chapter 4 ....................................................................................................140 Chapter 5: Naturalism in Question, Part 2 .........................................................................144 Anglo-American Efforts towards an Adequate Naturalist Epistemology.............146 Roy Bhaskar, a Realist Theory of Science ...............................................................148 Between Necessity and Contingency ......................................................................153 Catherine Malabou’s (Deconstructive) New Materialism .....................................154 Malabou’s Productive Reading of Kant: The Transcendental Changes ................155 A Critique of Speculative Realism ...........................................................................159 Heidegger’s Abandonment of the Question of Time ..............................................161 A Critique of Neurobiological Reason .....................................................................161 An Epigenetic Paradigm of Rationality ...................................................................163 Temporal Mobility and the Question of Time ........................................................164 Bookchin and Malabou .............................................................................................165 Notes to Chapter 5 ....................................................................................................174 Chapter 6: The Dialectic in Question ..................................................................................176 Recovering A Future: A Critical Inquiry into Social Ecology 6 Another Dialectic of Nature .....................................................................................177
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