2011
11. 15
Ways of Life | 02 -- Our servile lust for the environmental technosciences not only intensifies our near-total surrender to the modern myth of functionalist efficiency (previously socio-mechanical, now eco-electrical) but, more dangerously, overexposes our selves--our passions, our desires, our willful capacity for delight (viz., all that has come to be rationalized as aesthetics)--to the frigid distancing of objectivity, which asserts superiority over those so-called subjective qualities despite its own historical contingency and the speciousness of its own unbending claims to "blind sight." Consequently we heroically tiptoe around the central problem, which in fact is not a problem at all (not in the narrow technical sense in which we now conceive that term) but rather a twinned project. On the one hand: the gradual, patient erasure of dreadful ways of living that continually find their alibis in our so-called solutions; and, at the same time (and here we confront the absurdly difficult part), to carry out that erasure in ways that do not amount to a repudiation of all that is excessive and unjustifiable. In other words, to reimagine our ways of living without organizing a cold, barren, negation of life.
"Science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings, but the time for that, too, will come." That time, it seems, has come. And alongside our Cyclopes, suffused throughout them, we find ourselves in need of a platform for rumination, a way of seeing, an orienting schema--or at least a primitive compass--for preserving our insanity; for protecting our ecstatic will from the boredom of myopic clarity; for refashioning the practical and conceptual conditions under which something like freedom might still be possible (wasn't that the original dream of urbanism?). "The bastions of rationality in which the technical sciences used to operate are collapsing--but we are moving in, we must live in them." All of this requires a countervailing force to resist the rote scientization of all ecological sensibilities, which in itself, utterly devoid of any glossy instrumentation, would constitute a kind of ecological urbanism. Indeed, the great promise of something like ecological design rests not in its ability to fashion terminal and partial palliatives for sustaining our degenerate modes of civilized existence, but in its capacity "to create concepts that are always new;" to foment a biophilic disposition that does not materially undermine itself. To foment, in other words, something like a philosophy, teeming with ideas for living--not merely surviving--amidst the suspect moral certitude of objective environmentalism. (J May, The Control Papers)
