Studies in Arts and Humanities VOL02/ISSUE02/2016 Social Ecology and Aesthetic Criticism (original) (raw)

While ecocriticism has become a respected field in literary theory and in the broader landscape of aesthetic philosophy, it could benefit from an enhanced ethical-political framework which social ecology – an underrated critical theory developed by Murray Bookchin – could provide. This essay attempts to tease out the potentials for such a framework, integrating the insights of social ecology, ecocriticism, Critical Realism, and John Dewey's aesthetic concepts into a layered idea-set used for the study of all kinds of aesthetic objects, from popular art to the gallery arts. Its key principles are the emergence of aesthetic objects (including formal artworks) out of congealed human experience, the relation between organism and environment in assessing meaning, the breakdown of implicit or overt hierarchies within a work, and the idea of the artist and art-critic as a "gardener". We live in an era of crisis and catastrophe. While nuclear war occupied the minds of the general populace and the artists alike throughout the second half of the 20th century, the subsequent neoliberal era has given way to a more fragmented set of species-destroying prospects. Everything from killer-robots, to viral epidemics, to totalitarian statism, to mass surveillance, to bio-genetic mutations appear in popular fiction as new threats to human survival. The social imaginary of a large part of our culture has responded to neoliberalism, with its rhetoric of triumph and the optimistic " end of history " , by taking a turn for the apocalyptic. 1 However, an apocalypse need not be an altogether gloomy affair. The English word comes from a Greek word, which, translated, means " lifting the veil " , uncovering what was hidden, revelation. Moments of downturn may show us everything that could go wrong, but, if examined the right way, can also provide insights for how to transform things for the better. That, in brief, could be framed as the central problem of the arts today, including the world of criticism which attempts to make sense of it: how to " lift the veil " in such a way as to reveal not only potentials for doom and dystopia, but potentials for hope and utopia – or rather eutopia (good place) as distinct from an impossible outopia (no place). 2 Whether a contemporary person's mind is fixed on dystopian pessimism or eutopian hope, one topic of our cultural apocalypse is becoming more and more salient as a whole: