Where There is Weirdness, Critique has Not Run Out of Steam: On Weird Literature, Pragmatist Ecology, and Democracy - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Where There is Weirdness, Critique has Not Run Out of Steam: On Weird Literature, Pragmatist Ecology, and Democracy

Résumé

Ecologists are now terrified. They are afraid of the ghosts of the Anthropocene, the memories of things displaced. They are anguished by the new beings that seem to be popping up everywhere, disrupting their established sense of the order of things. But perhaps most of all, they are afraid that others are possessed by dangerous ontological spirits. Dualists have become existential monstrosities. Liberals are now a lusus naturae. The vestiges of modernity—so Latour—demand “exorcism”. For thinkers such as these, the Anthropocene ordinary is a one with the world of horror fiction. They are not cool-headed narrators. Their desire to dis-enchant the world has made them see others as possessed. Delirious they are as they go on and on about the dangers of dualisms in texts that are themselves dualistic. Ecological thinking needs to get a hold on horror. It needs to reflect on what is really horrifying to avoid making war on made up monsters, or—which would be worse— senselessly torturing innocents or potential allies as witches. Like puritanism before it, ecological thinking needs to get pragmatic. But even pragmatists feel fear. They also fall back into metaphysical fantasies. They do this, because they perfectly well know that the real horror is the human susceptibility to the myth of the given, the fact that—in the words of Emerson—"the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think” , and getting these two worlds right—exactly, and not pragmatically, right—seems to matter more than ever in the Anthropocene. But does it? And is attaining such a cosmic synthesis really a rational pragmatic expectation, or is it only, as we have accepted since Kant, but a disfunction of reason? After all, why should the capacities of reason ally anything stand in exception to the entropy of the cosmos? No reason at all. And yet where there is no hope, there may be understanding of our fear and its promptings towards metaphysics. Where there is no way out, there may too be therapies. Pragmatism, like the eco-weird, is a child of Transcendentalism. The two are twins: the narrative transcendences of the weird making manifest what happens when affect pushes pragmatism to its limits. But the weird, and in particular the eco-weird, is also a cure for pragmatism, a means that pragmatists can use to push back, to get their horror, and their metaphysics, into perspective, and so to rationally confront the horrors of the Anthropocene, attending to what matters, which is not the exorcism of other ways of viewing the world, but the practical task of struggling for realism with our own limited minds and languages. Or so this intervention will argue via its double exposition of the horrors of ecology, and the pragmatic spiritual practice of reading the eco-weird for the planet
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04309228 , version 1 (27-11-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04309228 , version 1

Citer

Brad Tabas. Where There is Weirdness, Critique has Not Run Out of Steam: On Weird Literature, Pragmatist Ecology, and Democracy. Inaugural Symposium, Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird, Sep 2023, Altoona, United States. ⟨hal-04309228⟩
24 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More