[-empyre-] AMAZON IS BURNING

Thu Sep 19 02:10:15 AEST 2019

A lurker here ... thanks for the thread. "A thousand years ago" indeed.
Even an eight year interval under the present exploding plastic inevitable
airborne toxic event is a lost slave ship of failure. Pankaj Mishra's book
review of David French scraped the bulbous lard of privilege and rummaged
around thusly back in the day (2011):

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-curzon-without-an-empire/270145

"Even stranger gaps exist in *India*, which, though subtitled *An Intimate
Biography of 1.2 Billion People*, finds no place for the nearly 800 million
Indians who still depend on agriculture for a living. The quiet catastrophe
in rural areas—the collapse of water tables, spiralling debt, the poisoning
of cultivable land, and tens of thousands of farmer suicides—is absent from
*India*. French does talk to one man with a farming background at length;
but the latter turns out to be an upwardly mobile adivasi at a
Californian-style vineyard owned by Sula Wines. Claiming that Mahadev Kolis
“normally prefer” Chenin Blanc and Madeira, he leads French into upbeat
speculation about the “democratisation of wine-drinking” in India."

Parasamgate bodhi svaha.

DW

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:20 AM Oliver Kellhammer <okellhammer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I've been remiss in acknowledging I am writing from the unceded
> territories of the Lenape people on what was once a lovely tidal swamp and
> is now Loisaida on the island of Manhattan. It may soon be a tidal swamp
> again, due to climate change and sea level rising.
> Regarding Tsing/Haraway's excellent use of the term 'Plantationocene',  I
> wrote an article in the early 90's on the use of deforestation as a kind of
> propaganda in Canada
> See here =>http://www.oliverk.org/node/174
> By propaganda, I mean propaganda for capitalism. Forest ecosystems as
> stewarded by First Nations tended to be less about property and more of a
> complex mosaic of rights to harvest resources from a commons. Primary
> forests *by their very existence* threaten the notion of property as they
> preexist it and thus are outside the capitalist object. So there is a
> semiotic requirement by capitalism to transform primary ecosystems and
> non-capitalist/indigenous cultures into tree farms/plantations so as to
> obliterate anything outside the expanding capitalist hyperobject. It's not
> just about profit but about obliterating the cultural memory of lifeways
> outside of property and capital. I think this is what accounts for some of
> the ferocity of the deforestation in Amazonia but also in British Columbia
> and elsewhere. It is profoundly ideological – a hate crime. Capitalism
> cannot tolerate anything outside itself as it is the ultimate invasive
> species. The art system is deeply engrained in the capitalist machine (as
> we all know) and functions as a kind of image laundering mechanism. Some
> self-criticism is always in order.
> Appropos this => Another old article from what seems a thousand years ago
> (1989) but the situation is now so much worse with the likes of the Sackler
> family. What are the alternatives to complete subsumption? How do we create
> permacultures of resistance and alterity?
> http://www.oliverk.org/node/177
> (Money Laundering and the Arts)
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 8:22 AM margaretha haughwout <
> margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Dear All,
>>
>> It seems a good place to draw from the excellent link Shu Lea posted
>> early on -- a discussion between Haraway and Tsing on the Plantationocene.
>> Here it is again: https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/
>>
>> From Haraway and Tsing's discussion we can understand that the
>> Plantationocene (as opposed to the Anthropocene) is a "situated, historical
>> set of conjunctures" that dramatically reduces species diversity, requires
>> forced labor (of a local labor force or one brought in from outside -- "
>> through indenture, unequal contract, or out-and-out slavery"), is often
>> genocidal, exhausts its own base (exhausts soils, water, people, plants,
>> etc.), and it unleashes pathogens due to the disruption/ removal of
>> habitats and species (as Oliver pointed out in a recent conversation,
>> viruses don't give up if their normal host goes missing).
>>
>> Tsing recognizes too that the factory labor system emerges out of the
>> plantation, through its model of discipline and alienation. And Haraway
>> argues that forced labor isn't exclusive to humans in the Plantationocene
>> (we can draw from Jason Moore <https://jasonwmoore.com/> here too); she
>> urges us to recognize the forced labor of other species including machines.
>> Also the temporalities of these simplified ecologies and the laborers are
>> speeded up -- the "generation times" accelerate. Here we might also think
>> of Elaine Gan <https://elainegan.com/>'s important work on rice:
>> https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689859/pdf
>>
>> According to Haraway, "The capacity to love and care for place is
>> radically incompatible with the plantation."
>>
>> A final point I'll mention here is one that Tsing brings up -- that the
>> conjuncture between disciplined plants and disciplined humans is one we as
>> inheritors of Plantationocene legacies now equate completely with
>> agriculture, with the totality of growing food. But there are many ways to
>> grow food. The Amazon is after all, a garden.
>>
>> -M
>>
>> --
>> beforebefore.net
>> --
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I thank Fabi and Sergio for their latest comments, as for shifts to
>>> happen in our current state of entropy, it must come from those most
>>> marginalized and disenfranchised. Food grown, harvested and processed when
>>> just, cooperative and intrapersonal labor is closest to the biological and
>>> psychological technologies of the farm / garden / meal / hospitality, is
>>> the most resource-full.
>>>
>>
>> ...
>>
>>
>>>  “THE PLANTS And now this [sic] what the Creator did. He decided, ‘There
>>> will be plants growing on the earth. Indeed, all of them will have names,
>>> as many plants as will be growing on the earth. At a certain time they will
>>> emerge from the earth and mature of their own accord. They will be
>>> available in abundance as medicines to the people moving about on the
>>> earth.’ That is what he intended. And it is true: we have been using them
>>> up the present time, the medicines which the Creator made. He decided that
>>> it would be thus: that people would be obtaining them from the earth, where
>>> the medicines would be distributed. And this [sic] what the Creator did: He
>>> decided, ‘Illness will overtake the people moving about on the earth,
>>> and these will always be there for their assistance.
>>> <https://www.instagram.com/p/B2ik5K7h-H1/>’ And he left on the earth
>>> all the different medicines to assist us in the future.”
>>>
>>
>>
>>> Whether in New York State, Brazil, DR Congo, or western China, we can
>>> always count on these technologies and those who sustain them, to be
>>> reframed as oppositional weapons by those in power. While cooking in
>>> Conflict Kitchen’s kitchen with Culinary Director Robert Sayre whose father
>>> is the co-founder and scientist at Pebble Labs and Trait Biosciences in
>>> Los Alamos <https://www.pebblelabs.com/>, our conversations would
>>> inevitably converge between “science for whom” with Richard’s newest
>>> cassava research in West Africa, the ongoing conflict in Syria on the
>>> morning radio, yet another customer at the window who wanted our menu to be
>>> solely vegan, clogged grease traps and overstacked dishes, continued
>>> gentrification in one of Pittsburgh predominant Black neighborhoods with a
>>> just opened white-owned ‘hip-hop and fried chicken joint’ down the street
>>> from a recently forced out Black-owned music venue
>>> <https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/05/the-new-urban-fried-chicken-crisis/526050/>,
>>> international reporters who wanted only the most superficial story of
>>> artists challenging Trump, our newly formed staff union (I was management),
>>> or the death threat that we received during our Palestinian iteration.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>> ... Not being able to live off the land, not understanding that you have
>>> to make money to pay for that electric bill or food at the grocery store in
>>> town instead of hunting: it was a big transition for many of the families
>>> there. … That land was Native people’s home. It was a third of the Seneca
>>> Nation’s territory. It was the richest, most arable farmland near the
>>> water. And now it’s completely destroyed” (Anonymous, Conflict Kitchen
>>> Haudenosaunee food wrapper interviewee, 2016).
>>>
>>> Indeed, techne - a tool - whether art, food or knowledge, can and should
>>> be wielded as a weapon of defense and resistance, in turn:
>>>
>>> SOUP
>>>
>>> From Entering Onondaga
>>> Joesph Bruchac (AKA Planting Moon), 1977
>>>
>>> One time Coyote
>>> drank soup from
>>> Turtle’s pot
>>>
>>> Turtle wasn’t home
>>>
>>> Coyote stepped
>>> behind a pine
>>> to take a leak
>>> trickle became a river
>>>
>>> Help me, I can’t stop
>>>
>>> river turned into flood
>>> covered the land
>>> swept Coyote’s people away
>>>
>>> Don’t mess around
>>> with other people’s things
>>>
>>> ~~~~~
>>>
>>> “I am challenging the occupation by living only off the fruits of my
>>> land. In this way, the land itself is empowering me to resist”
>>> <https://www.instagram.com/p/B2ilQ4whkhJ/> (Khalid Daraghmeh, Conflict
>>> Kitchen label on olive oil products from the Daraghmeh Family Farm, 2014).
>>>
>>> ~~~~~
>>>
>>
>>
>> let me bring up this recent (2019) post-
>>
>>
>>   Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway
>>   and Anna Tsing
>> https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/
>>
>> a good pot-mix.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.oliverk.org
> twitter: @okellhammer
> mobile: 917-743-0126
> skype: okellhammer
>
>
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-- 
Dean Wilson, PhD
1(609) 772-2719
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