Posthuman ecology?

One concept that seems conspicuously absent from discussions concerning posthumanism is ecology and environment. Hayles's emphasis on materiality and embodiment has a quasi-ecological dimension. Haraway's critique of "organic wholeness" serves as an antidote to strategies of imaginative resistance to globalized technological consumerism based on a return to Nature. I think there's more for me to do, or at least research, to determine whether this has been done, in terms of drawing connections between environmentalist (a term I use to connote a popular field of rhetoric and thought) and ecocritical (a term I use to designate an academic discourse) texts and critical posthumanist texts. (As an aside, I think the distinction between "popular" and "critical" posthumanism is perhaps problematic - on what basis do theorists such as Simon claim to be more "critical" than their popular posthumanism peers?)

There are strains of ecocritical thought that complicate what Haraway identifies as the rhetoric of organic wholeness. "Queer ecology," for example, identifies how essentialist conceptions of nature play out in the construction of certain genders. This could be in the ecofeminist mode, in which women are associated with Nature, and men with Culture. Alternatively, narratives of men going out into Nature to escape Culture attempt to locate an authentic masculinity in Nature. Representations of nature as an organic, intact, integral, reproductive system also carry a kind of heteronormative valence. Queer ecology works against these tendencies by seeking to undo the oppositions I have gestured toward above. In Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, Morton performs a very penetrating critique of predominant attempts to theorize Nature, ultimately arguing for the provisionality and inherent non-referentiality of any attempt to represent Nature.

What I would like to suggest is that popular environmental rhetoric is an overlooked counter-narrative to that provided by popular posthumanism. As Zizek muses in the documentary The Examined Life, the voice that tells us to stop, to hesitate, to not tamper with Nature (whether human nature or Nature nature) is the voice of environmentalism and ecology. What concerns me is that in criticizing the ideological limitations of these views, the ideology of organic wholeness, we (posthumanist theorists) do not provide a coherent and accessible alternative conceptual framework. The environmentalist emphasis on the organic serves to draw attention to the potential for industrial technological food systems to introduce undesirable pollutants into the environment, into animals, and individuals. Popular environmental rhetoric also draws attention to the plight of animals used in cybernetic food systems - these animal-machine hybrids certain embody the "nightmare" potentiality of Haraway's ironic political myth. Environmentalists are also right to point out the impossibility of brining nature within technological systems of control - as climate change reveals, the global economic consumer system has not accounted for the material conditions of its own possibility. In other words, both popular and critical posthumanists seldom reflect in a thoughtful way on the ecological and material limits posed to the development of radical posthuman technologies.

I am interested in the possibility of popular environmental rhetoric to function as a site for posthuman interventions in globalized consumer capitalism in part because environmental rhetoric is more intelligible and accessible to people than anything critical posthumanism offers. To put it rather crudely, which would you rather circulate within popular discourse: environmental rhetoric, or transhumanist rhetoric? Most people cannot sustain the indeterminacy, aporia, and eclecticism demanded by critical posthumanism - at least in my opinion. Perhaps I'm naively reaching for the emergence of some new kind of metanarrative - some utopian fusion of environmentalism and posthumanism, a technophilia and biophilia that acknowledges the limitations imposed by material embodiment...