A Constellation for Political Ecology: Working Through the Eclipse of Reason

Abstract

The long delay of political ecological thought as the recollection of a planetary society is the topic of this short socio-analysis of four political ecological themes raised by Noam Chomsky at a lecture (public program during the summer program for the Institute for Social Inquiry) at the New School in 2021, reiterating that thinker’s points on epistemicide, anti-democracy, atomic war, and climate change. These themes in their decisively 21st-century iteration have an older provenance in the work of Frankfurt School scholars—Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer—whose work on “nature” and positivism have only been devisibilized—eclipsed—in academic and nonacademic reception. This socio-analysis is double: it briefly recounts some of these themes in a critique of political ecology in this late constellation, seeking to raise into relief that historical gap and onto-genetic mode of forgetting that has claimed much of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. And observing contemporary political ecological theory and its object orientation, the social structure of observation—theory—that performs this same act of historicist oblivion and contextualist obviation is the theoretic purpose of this study: to demonstrate a constellation too quickly taken as closure, that we are also part of, and subsequently, for our part, have overlooked.