Desert Conditions: Ecology, “Metabolism,” and the Frustrations of Action

• In Event: Critical Theory and Historicity: (Re)imagining an Emancipated Future

Abstract

In this paper, I reconstruct the rhetorical and political stakes of a powerful historical imaginary: that there exists an ecological threshold of soil or resource exhaustion so devastating that humanity will be compelled into transformative action. In this, I offer the first reading of Hannah Arendt’s critique of a distinct strand of German “metabolic theory,” which pursues “the activation of capital’s absolute limits” associated with the “destruction of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction.” The paper offers a novel account of the significance of Arendt’s reading for contemporary ecosocialist and critical thought while also highlighting paths not taken in what Arendt might call “the frustrations of action” under capitalism. Reading alongside Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, the paper also intervenes into a regnant but stalled debate within critical theory about the domination of nature with and against the emancipatory horizon of a still-Promethean Marx. Engaging with histories of guano and soil exhaustion panacea—in short, with the rendering-international and imperial of soil post industrial-revolution—the paper also reconstructs debates and anxieties about the politics of soil, race, and territory from pre-war German thought to the present in order to reanimate Marxist and democratic-theoretical accounts of the possibility of the collective actor under conditions of environmental disaster and what Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro has called the imaginary of “finite earth” in anticolonial and feminist thought. In this, the paper also demonstrates the possibilities and limits of the Arendtian and Marxian conceptions of action as they are taken up, or occluded, by diverse strands of democratic theory.

Author

• Nica Siegel, Amherst