Twenty Basic Principles of a New Green Politics, by Alan N. Shapiro

The disasters that we are facing in the areas of ecology, energy and the environment are well-known and they are truly horrific. However, the fact that everyone knows about these disasters is much more a factor contributing to nothing constructive been done about them than it is a factor contributing to something being done about them. In the Society of the Spectacle, the simulacrum of concern, caring and positive action substitutes for the real thing. It relieves us from the burden of really doing something.

Basic Principle #2: The New Green Politics must be well-informed about virtuality. 

A radical-liberal politics which challenges a society that is dominated by media culture and New Technologies must go beyond the naive belief in the ideology of “reality” and instead consciously confront the complex confusion of real and virtual, reality and simulation, that media culture has instituted. We inhabit the “virtual geography” of a global media space, and its operations and effects have yet to be understood. Virtuality is henceforth a scientific field of study that has to be taken seriously. Virtuality is itself (something like a) castastrophe, and the discourse of “reality” serves partly to manage the catastrophe (which is not one) which is virtuality itself.

Basic Principle #3: The New Green Politics must be well-informed about the non-linear nature of time.

Nor can this radical-liberal New Green Politics continue with the assumption that there is a straightforward linear progression of time. The chaotic disorder of the unfolding of time is henceforth a scientific field of study that has to be taken seriously. We are in a “region of historicity” (Derrida) that is a non-Euclidean strangely curved turbulent space-time where the future is to a large extent unknowable.

Basic Principle #4:The New Green Politics must be well-informed about how the anti-utopian ideological mechanisms of our society operate.

Anti-utopian means that a democratic discussion in the arena of politics and the liberal State regarding how the quality of life in society could pragmatically be improved never takes place. The ‘war on terror’, multiple wars against semi-imaginary enemies, and the political-media discourse about permanent endless crises of all kinds and dangers to our security all reproduce on a real-time basis the social-psychological atmosphere of fear, hysteria, and big-drama addiction that is endemic to the spectacular media-political culture.

Basic Principle #5: We must significantly regard Nature as being a special kind of Object that is ‘other’ to us, and not as an anthropomorphized entity to be domesticated and elevated to the legal status of a subject with rights.

Nature was relegated to an afterthought or a ‘desert’ by the entire construction project of modern producer and consumer society. Trying to reverse this by rescuing Nature in an idealized way as something ‘good’ can only go so far. The state of abjection into which we forced Nature must be treated with enduring respect. Nature is not harmless; it is also virulent and dangerous, and this can only be changed partly.

Basic Principle #6: Artificial Life and Technological beings are also of prime importance in considering the life forms which are other than human.

To reconsider plant life and animal life in a new way, we must simultaneously consider Artificial Life. We need a conceptual framework that encompasses all of these entities together. Intelligent technological Objects should be regarded as ‘other to us, as partner-tools which share experiences and environments with users. The design theorist and practitioner Marco Susani elevates technological Objects to the status of a fourth kingdom of the living, asserting that Objects increasingly resemble autonomous organisms, existing alongside the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms.

Basic Principle #7: Science and art must be considered together as a hybrid body and system of knowledge.

The study of living beings must be transdisciplinary. It must encompass both biology and art. Art is necessary to deal with the greater complexity of the living and of the existent. Art must be brought to the table and accorded much higher respect as a field of academic knowledge. Art can be the leader of a very much needed transdisciplinary approach, because it is in dialogue with every field of knowledge. Gianna Maria Gatti: “Art seizes the possibilities of existence of living beings, interprets them, advances unusual combinations of them, breaks up their consolidated connections. Art probes and enhances the value of the deeper regulating principles.”

Basic Principle #8: The reality (and mediality) of ‘the existent’ is nowadays ever more complex, and it transcends the assumption of a distinction between the Natural and the Artificial.

The natural world and the artificial world are no longer in opposition. They must be placed side by side. And the same is true of the previous opposition between nature and culture. In the nineteenth century, in some ways, it was already like this. I think of the great scientist Charles Darwin’s book The Voyage of the Beagle, a work of both science and literature. During his world travels, Darwin examined with the same keen observational eye and cool-headedness the objects of his investigations, regardless of whether they were phenomena of animal wildlife behavior, geology, or human societies.

Basic Principle #9: We must change what we speak of when we speak of Nature.

Nicola Toffolini (Italian artist): “Nature for me is very ambiguous, and we are currently experiencing a strange passage. Nature is one of those words which seems to refer to and include a lot of things, but in fact it really says nothing. Yet we continue to use it. We speak more and more about nature, but it disappears beneath our words. Maybe our concept is completely wrong. Nature has never been so far away as it is today from our actual perceptions. It has become just a screensaver on a telematic device. We imagine nature in some ideal way, but this has very little reality. It is an abstract paradise.”

Basic Principle #10: The ecological catastrophe has already taken place (as a virtual-slash-real catastrophe, to moderate Baudrillard’s one-sidedness), so our goal can only be to “abide in the present destruction” (Elias Canetti), to live the situation that we are in with consciousness and awareness, rather than to dream of going back, to simplistically envisage a paradise regained.

Nicola Toffolini: “We have to go on living. I doubt if we can go back. We have to live in an experimental and conscious way. The way we consume. The way we do commerce. We canot continue to live the way we are living now, this standard of living. We are used to not thinking, and not thinking beyond the needs of today. In Italy, no one really thinks about tomorrow. We have to change this. This is not a responsible way to have a relationship to others.”

Basic Principle #11: The identity of Nature is increasingly integrated with technologies, and technologies assume an identity that is more integrated into the natural dimension.

What is implied in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by producer-director Stanley Kubrick and screenplay co-author Arthur C. Clarke is the imminence of a world-historical change in what technology is for humanity, shifting from being a tool for the ‘domination of nature’ and a weapon in the killing-madness of war to technology redefined as “a Friend of the earth” (T.C. Boyle) amd a helper in the life-affirming organization of peace. Technology will abet us in inventing a new relationship to the Otherness of other human beings on our shared planet, and in dramatically rethinking the existence and status of non-human life-forms, be they animal, vegatable, artificial-virtual or alien.

Basic Principle #12: The interaction of the three forms of living beings analysed by Gianna Maria Gatti (human being, vegetable being, and informatic being) is an embodied metaphor for how we can live in a conscious way with respect to problems of ecology, energy, and the environment.

Gatti: “One could then meditate on these works of art as being the original encounter of three different forms of living ‘being’: the user (human being), the plant (vegetable being), and the computer (informatic being). Their indispensable interaction guarantees the success of the artwork and instills in the user a new awareness: that there exists an alternative to the living as we know it.”

Basic Principle #13: Man both is and is not a part of nature.

Merleau-Ponty wrote about the original meaning of the concept of Nature: “There is nature wherever there is a life that has meaning, but where, however, there is not thought; hence the kinship with the vegetative. Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of a meaning. Nature has an interior, is determined from within.” Hence the importance of the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann’s concept of interiority. Gatti writes about Portmann: “Focusing attention on the study of the form of living beings, Portmann elaborates the innovative concept of ‘self-presentation’: the distinctive and always different way that each organism shows itself to light and thereby relations itself to the surrounding environment; this demonstration is a symptom for Portmann of a precise albeit unknown ‘interiority’, the specific ‘authentic’ mode of being of each individual.”

Basic Principle #14: The classical concept of Nature as described by Merleau-Ponty is obsolete. Thought and intelligence must now be attributed to, and infused into, Nature.

Nature must no longer be thought of as being that realm where meaning emerges without thought. This was the system of a binary opposition between Man as intelligent and Nature as ‘dumb’. The assumption of Nature as ‘mindless’ (in contradistinction to this we mention Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind) had an elective affinity with the ideology and practice of the domination of Nature by Man. Gatti: “They [became] two entities perceived as distinct. In the anthropocentric concept of it that has gradually been elaborated, nature in the world external to man, a world upon which man exercises his domination, on which he lays his imprint to reshape it based on the reading that he makes of it.”

Basic Principle #15: Starting from art, or what I prefer to call ‘the radical illusion beyond art’, we can make a New Green Politics.

Gatti: “Art can be seen as man’s continuous relationship with nature, as one of the ways that man has to reflect on nature – to know it and investigate it, to interpret it and recreate it according to his vision and his intentions, adopting different approaches and using the materials and tools that he chooses over the course of time, to grasp nature in its external appearances and in its internal, biological, evolutionary dynamics.”

Basic Principle #16: Man and nature cohabit the Earth.

Reconcile Man and Nature. This is the important proposition of the exhibition “Le jardin planetaire” (“The Planetary Garden”), that, between the end of 1999 and the beginning of the year 2000, intended to bring into focus interest in this subject in order to restore the sense of the relationship between man and nature in their shared cohabitation on planet Earth. In the crucial phase of the passage from one millennium to the next which is our era, the French event expresses man’s need to reappropriate from his origins, rediscovering the centrality and importance of nature for his own survival.

Basic Principle #17: In filmmaking about issues of ecology, the environment, and energy, we must move away from a ‘realist’ aesthetic which is the assumption of most radical-liberal filmmakers, and start to think seriously about the aesthetics of how to change people’s consciousnesses in the context of the specific media of film.

We can make good cinema about ecological issues. We can make good performances about ecological issues. We can develop a lucid and intelligent aesthetics of environmental disaster — I think of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) as examples of very good films that go in this direction It’s about both feelings and intelligence. Political filmmaking has not worked in changing people’s consciousness because there has been no reflection on which aesthetics and emotions are truly proper to a radical use and potential of that media.

Basic Principle #18: We also need some kind of spiritual, and even mystical, understanding of Nature and Planet Earth, an understanding ultimately related to ‘writing in Derrida’s sense, a sort of deconstructive theology.

Theology is a dimension of transdisciplinary knowledge, and we must not leave out theology from our deliberation of issues of ecology, the environment and energy. If the reader-writer model of the Nature-Man relationship is no longer one of Man ‘reading’ Nature, then we must seriously consider the possible valildity of the reverse hypothesis that Nature is a ‘reader’ of Man, and also a ‘writer’ of stories and texts (especially texts which are embedded in media).

Basic Principle #19: We must create a second Nature: an Artificial Nature.

In Gilles Clement’s exhibition, “Le jardin planetaire” (writes Gatti, my translation): “Biology is the point of reference: on the one hand, to create a living Artificial Nature, parallel to the real one, that in part respects the behavior of the latter and in part forms and develops according to the modalities and time scale that regulate the digital world in which it takes root; on the other hand to act on the concrete material in which to introduce a change whose outcome will be evident and tangible in the same real world: the flowers, the plants which are obtained, in their originality, are organisms which maintain and respect the evolutionary cycle – birth, growth, death, decomposition — are organisms that are added to the natural ones, which can interact with the environment and be influenced by it.”

Basic Principle #20: It is not only necessary to broaden science; it is also necessary to make science more accessible, and to increase citizen participation in public conversations about science.

Rather than entering into the economic debate about whether science is a private or a public good, I focus in my work on another dimension of the sociology of science, identifying a hybrid public/private dynamic where the imagination or ‘collective unconscious’ of popular culture actively affects technoscience. I emphasize that the true originality of Star Trek stories and fan communities engenders a reality-shaping ‘science fiction’ that formatively influences ideas, technologies, and even sciences like physics, informatics, and biology, As participants in techno-culture and in the media, ordinary people are already making science. I wish to augment our perception of this heretofore overlooked existing sociological reality as well as to encourage efforts to enhance and strengthen the public creation of science.

With the military, for example, there already exists a hybird public/private dynamic in the dissemination of technoscience that is institutionally operative. The public funds of the military are invested in the research and development labs of private universities and privte corporations. The military orchestrates technological inventions, uses them for essentially destructive purposes, and then releases them to the public, where they tend to be applied more beneficially. What I draw attention to in my work is a kind of reversal of directionality of this public/private hybridity: the origination of new scientific goods flowing from public cultural resources into the core foundational assets of the commonwealth where they can, in turn, endow private entrepreneurial ventures. The currency of investment in the creation of new science is not strictly monetary; it is also symbolic. Capital and wealth are not only monetary; they are also symbolic. There is a media culture public sphere which is literary, imaginative, playful, psychoanalytical, creative, innovative. This literary imagination drives scientific invention.