Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Devastation
(Co-authored by Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova)
A discussion of general ecology might reasonably, since it pertains at least partially to humans, include a discussion of devastation, obliteration, slow collapse. An ensemble of means to talk about emergence, becoming, individuation and so on exist in relatively plentiful form in contemporary theory. Becoming tends to always ›win‹. But can we talk about the becoming of an oil spill, or a radioactive leak? What are the ethico-aesthetic dimensions to such occurrences? Equally, as such events get coupled with contemporary media cultures, how do they produce real limits to mediation, sensing, information and knowledge. Ecological thought obliges us to recognise that such events are not only devastations of the actual, but of the virtual – a resource, it seems, in diminishing supply. This paper will also suggest that such events can also be seen in more distributed fashion. Recent reports about the sheer volume of the biomass of humans being a contributory factor in climate damage and the related epidemic of obesity in the west, linked by complex means to factors such as the dumping of ultra-refined, nerve-damping, sugars into the food-chain, suggest that devastation and the psychic crises that accompany it as bodies are plugged, more or less orifice to faucet, to capital, take on profoundly medial dimension: not simply as moral, and physiological, panic but as something constitutive of the nature of becoming in the present era. As the Devil remarks to Faust, in viewing the phenomena of nature: »all I can see is a monster, forever devouring, regurgitating, chewing and gorging«. This monster too should be a fundament of any media ecology.