Kate Soper

Re-thinking the `Good Life` The citizenship dimension of consumer disaffection with consumerism

Citizenship and consumption have frequently been regarded as oppositional and even mutually exclusive domains of activity and theory. Recent consumption practices and discourses — although they raise many complex issues both empirically and theoretically — have begun to revise this perception. This article offers reasons for enlarging the framework of thinking about the contemporary `civic or `republican aspects of consumption in order to include considerations that have been little registered even in the argument of those whose special interest is in the environmentally concerned citizen or `ethical consumer. It argues for the need to recognize the extent to which moral concerns may now be coinciding with more self-interested forms of disaffection with `consumerist consumption, and revisions in thinking on the part of affluent consumers themselves about the `good life and what conduces to human flourishing and personal fulfilment. Theorized under the concept of `alternative hedonism, attention is paid to the ways in which affluent consumption is both compromised by its negative effects (including congestion, pollution, overwork, stress) and pre-emptive of other possible pleasures and satisfactions. This theoretical approach is presented as distinctive in allowing for a consumer whose privately experienced and self-interested needs may come to encompass public goods and the gratifications of a more socially accountable consumption. The article advances a case for viewing the `alternative hedonist reaction to consumerism as further adding to the ways in which consumption may be said today to be acquiring a `republican dimension and emerging as a site of citizenship, and thereby of pressure for a sustainable consumption.

Unnatural times? The social imaginary and the future of nature

These are highly charged times for thinking about the nature of ‘nature’ and its relations to the ‘social’. On the one hand, we are poised on the brink of biotechnological interventions that are opening up a whole new domain of human interactions with ‘nature’, indeed have the potential to go well beyond interaction, into unprecedented forms of creativity. Such developments are hugely exciting to many because of what they might promise for the elimination of disease and the enhancement of human health or well-being. On the other hand, we are also suffering unprecedented forms of unease precisely in virtue of our new found powers to control and even create ‘nature’, and caught up in new anxieties verging on panic about the ways in which environmental ‘nature’ is, or seems to be, spinning out of control because of climate change and its unpredictable character and consequences. To add to the confusion, there is the seeming incapacity of affluent Westerners to act in any but the most contradictory ways in response: huge anxieties about the impact of genetic programming on future personal autonomy go together with continuing disregard for the ways in which global economic relations deny millions of less privileged individuals the minimum of self-realization. Faced with the indisputable need to cut carbon emissions to the minimum, people continue to drive and fly as never before, and are currently encouraged to do so in the UK by a government that has given the green light to major airport expansion even as it issues advice to its citizens on energy-saving lightbulbs. There are complex, and in some ways quite contrary, discourses on nature underlying these responses to our times. Many of these are what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘nature-endorsing’: discourses that lament the loss or erosion of nature, emphasize human dependency on the planetary eco-system, and demand that we both acknowledge environmental limits and revise our consumption with a view to keeping within the confines they impose. Nature endorsers are sometimes committed to overtly normative and metaphysical conceptions of the nature of nature (viewing it, for example, as possessing ‘intrinsic value’ or as a source of redemption from social alienation, or as that

Introduction: the ecology of labour

Some may be surprised to find a journal of ecocriticism devoting a special issue to the topic of human work. The surprise is understandable on a fairly restricted view of ecocriticism as focused on texts invoking the ‘natural world’. But ecocriticism surely also involves a broader commitment to thinking about humanity–nature relations and their ecopolitical transformation. The issue proposes a move away from what Greg Garrard has termed a ‘poetics of authenticity’ towards a ‘poetics of responsibility’ (Garrard 2004, pp. 168–169). It is conceived, that is to say, within a framework whose ethico-political concerns are less with the redemptive qualities of a (supposedly) unmediated encounter with nature than with the impact and possible corrective role of culture and human action. What most matters within this frame is not how better to respect or get back to nature (in the sense of achieving some more immanent relationship with it), but how to imagine and move towards a future that both provides for human flourishing and avoids environmental devastation. A successful environmental politics almost certainly will be rooted in an enhanced sensibility to and aesthetic appreciation of nature, but any transformation of the socio-economic structures and technological instruments through which human societies relate to nature will also depend on revised ideas and cultural representations of progress, prosperity and human well-being. A central place in these must be taken by the question of work as a primary demand on human time and energy, the key site of both human and environmental exploitation, and the axis around which global capitalism revolves, together with its educational systems and its ever-expanding consumer culture. Labour deserves the critical attention of green thinkers because it is both integral to the functioning and reproduction of our environmentally rapacious economy, and a fundamentally formative influence on the individual’s subjectivity, intellect and worldview. The essays presented here (whose arguments we summarise towards the end of this Introduction) reflect the global and historical reach of capitalist labour relations, charting their impact in Australia, South Africa and the Caribbean as British and European interests exploited the resources of those regions. These accounts of colonial and postcolonial violence and resistance are framed by contributions that draw on the critique of capitalism that also originated in Europe. One important emphasis of that radical tradition was its vision of a future in which workers would work less. Marx’s critique of the capitalist extraction of surplus value implied from the start the possibility that a socialist economy could realise this value in the form of free time: time not spent on producing further commodities for sale, and so not expended in resource-consuming ways. There are affinities between contemporary green aspirations for a less consumerist society and this radical tradition which has likewise envisaged a post-capitalist order centred on a more reproductive satisfaction of primary or basic needs, and a less workdriven existence for everyone. GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM, 2016 VOL. 20, NO. 2, 119–126 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2016.1164984

Alternative hedonism: the world by bicycle

Our subject is speed in perhaps the commonest use and meaning of the word: speed as the pace at which we move across the earth. Our especial focus is on the bicycle, a machine both slow and fast, as it is still — in some places increasingly — ridden in the countries of the rich world. We draw above all on our knowledge and experience of England and Britain, but refer also to the USA, and to the northern European nations where cycling holds a significant place in the culture and ecology of urban transport.