Ian Buchanan
There is at least a risk that there will be no more human history unless humanity undertakes a radical reconsideration of itself.
— FĂ©lix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (p68)
There can be few messier or more urgent problems facing the world today than the state of its oceans. âThe last two hundred years have seen marine habitats wiped out or transformed beyond recognition. And with an ever-accelerating tide of human impact, the oceans have changed more in the last thirty years than in all of human history before it.â Needless to say that change has been anything but beneficial. Indeed, it has been nothing short of devastating, and the carnage continues. âIn most places, the oceans of have lost upwards of 75 percent of their megafauna â large animals such as whales, dolphins, sharks, rays and turtles â as fishing and hunting has spread in waves across the face of the planet.â For some species numbers are down by as much as 99 percent and there are dozens more that have literally disappeared.[1] And that doesnât even begin to cover the full extent of the destruction. One must also mention algal and jellyfish blooms, acidification, coral bleaching, the appearance of and spread of deoxygenated âdead zonesâ, rising water temperatures and the incredible volume of biological and non-biological pollutants and rubbish that has been pumped into the ocean without a second thought for either the present or the future. âYet outside the world of marine science, this global catastrophe pass[es] largely unseen and unremarked.â[2]
One might say the same of that other global catastrophe that very few people in power want to see, but the sad fact is the destruction of the ocean is only partly attributable to climate change. This is not to say climate change isnât wreaking havoc on life beneath the worldâs blue expanses because it most certainly is and its effects have been amply documented. But long before scientists noticed that the âs atmosphere was heating up, the oceanâs biomass was already failing rapidly due to a deadly combination of chronic overfishing and unchecked pollution. Focusing on climate change and ignoring overfishing and pollution is disastrous for the future of the ocean because even if we were to attenuate or better yet halt climate change, the ocean would still be in desperate need of our help. Fish stocks have fallen so dramatically that in many cases they will never recover, regardless of what we do. Indeed, in most cases it has reached the point where only a long-term moratorium on fishing would be sufficient to begin to reverse the effects of population decline. And even then, that would only work in places where the ocean hasnât been rendered toxic either by the presence of pollution or an overpopulation of predators such as jellyfish which under bloom conditions can exterminate all other lifeforms in their vicinity as they have done in the Black Sea.
The islands of rubbish floating in the oceans today have gotten so outsized they are literally beyond remedy. If we do not address these issues on a planet-wide basis then irrespective of what we do on the climate change front the ocean will die. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that today the ocean needs us, particularly when it comes to the already insurmountable, but steadily worsening, problem of rubbish, where the scale of the problem has grown so large it is difficult to comprehend. The gyre in the north-east Pacific is now known as the Great Eastern Garbage Patch. It has become an enormous meshwork of flotsam â largely plastic rubbish â the size of Texas. âJust like the mats of floating seaweed that so amazed the sailors of old, great rafts of plastic, fishing lines, nets, ropes and a thousand and one other bits of junk have accumulated within the gyres.â[3] This cesspool of waste spells death to the marine creatures forced to try to live in its midst. Leatherback turtles and Laysan albatross, to name but two species, are steadily vanishing from the earth because they cannot distinguish between inedible plastic and nutritious food.
Closer to shore, the problem is just as great, and though this land-based rubbish is undoubtedly more visible than the rubbish-choked gyres in the middle of the Pacific it does not appear to have attracted any more attention, much less urgency of action. Again, the scale of the problem is difficult to comprehend. For example, a 2001 survey of the beaches in Californiaâs Orange County estimated that there was 150, 000 items of visible rubbish for every kilometre of beach. For the county as a whole this amounted to over 100 million pieces of rubbish. But this is barely the tip of the iceberg because most plastic rubbish is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Sometimes referred to as mermaidâs tears, millions upon millions of micro-sized pieces of plastic, the raw materials of the plastics industry, are washed into the ocean every day, some remaining at the surface, forming a âstrange attractorâ for all the toxic scum floating elsewhere in the ocean, some falling to the bottom, some just drifting endlessly.
An alarming new twist is that most cosmetics manufacturers now add sub-millimetre-sized plastic granules to hand lotions and face creams. They are too small to be filtered out by sewage works, and most particles are washed to sea, where they can be ingested by tiny plankton, which mistake them for food like copepods or fish eggs.[4]
This is in many ways a more pernicious problem than the regular-sized plastic rubbish problem because it means that toxins are entering the eco-system at the bottom of the food-chain where, as Rachel Carson instructed us half a century ago, its effects are multiplied exponentially. By the time it gets to humans it has become many times more toxic and deadly.[5]
We are often told that the problem with plastic rubbish, in particular, is that it takes thousands of years to degrade, the implication being that plastics might be tolerable if they were to break down more rapidly. But it turns out this isnât true. Plastic does break down, and much faster than weâve been given to expect, particularly in seawater, and when it does it amplifies the problem of ocean borne rubbish by serving as a kind magnet for toxins. The particles of biodegrading and fragmenting plastic âare not just harmless roughage. They concentrate toxic compounds on their surfaces, sometimes to levels a million times or more above concentrations in the seawater around them [âŠ] In one Japanese experiment, polystyrene beads soaked in seawater for several days picked up PCBs. When they break down, plastic particles release toxic compounds like flame retardants, styrene, phthalates and bisphenol A into the sea.â[6] The latter is used to coat the inside of cans used for food, but has been banned in most first world countries because it has been discovered to have endocrine-disrupting properties. Marine life eats this plastic and then at some point enters our food chain, thus completing the vicious circle of toxins out and toxins in.
To address any of these problems we need to â as Naomi Klein puts it â change everything.[7] Neither climate change nor the death of the ocean can be averted by individuals â not even millions of individuals â shopping for âsustainableâ commodities and being conscientious about reducing packaging and recycling the recyclables. Weâre not going to be able to shop our way out of this slow-motion catastrophe. We need to change the way think about what life means â we need to ask ourselves what we owe the planet and act accordingly. If we take seriously the imminent threats to life on then we are called to change our understanding of how our lives on this planet can and should be lived. This goes beyond individual lifestyle choices. It has to do with the premise and structure of the global economy and the imperative to grow. As Klein puts it, everywhere on our economic system, contemporary capitalism, is at war with the planet. Unfortunately, it seems Jameson was correct in quipping that we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
That failure of imagination may well be the death of us all as a species. And Jameson is doubtless correct in insisting that the failure of the imagination is one of the more pernicious ills blighting contemporary society. We seem to be incapable of imagining something better than what we have, except in the highly localised sense of a new commodity. The irony of this is that our imagination is impeded by an unwillingness to give up on the world we have â we are deeply attached to all the apparently âgoodâ things capitalism has to offer, from smart phones to refrigerators and cars. And it isnât hard to understand why we should be so attached to these things capitalism has provided. They have enabled us to create a world in which the needs and especially the comforts and conveniences of individuals are uppermost. It against this that we have to measure our demands on individuals to change their behaviour â when even separating oneâs own trash is made to seem like too much of an ask, then what hope does the planet have? The irony is that this entire world that weâre unable to give up, to throw away, is premised on trash. To live as we do, we must constantly throw things away.[8] Throwing stuff away makes us the kinds of subjects that we are.[9] And that is surely the core of the problem â changing everything means changing ourselves and that is hard to do. We generally expect others to change so we can stay the same, which is why free-riding is one of the key politico-philosophical problems of our time.
Thus, there is probably no more important critical and political question today than the question of what prompts us to act? What would get us to change everything, including ourselves? In critical theory there are essentially only two answers to this question: (1) we either do what we know we must (Kantâs categorical imperative is the sine qua non of this position); or (2) we do what we feel we must (Bennettâs vital materialism is in many ways the sine qua non of this position). Adherents to the latter view of things describe it as either embodied or material and they castigate adherents of the categorical view for being either disembodied or immaterial. The limits of the former are that it is idealist and in being so implicitly tyrannical because the set of things we must do are not defined or decided upon by ourselves. They are instead imposed from the outside and often without any awareness of or interest in history or indeed culture. Not only that, imposed rules are not rules that we necessarily feel ought to be heeded, so they do not necessarily compel action. They are dry and abstract and often feel outdated and in need of revision, so we ignore them.[10]
Against the categorical imperative, materialism in its many guises has tried to elaborate a theory of ethics built on the idea that âweâ respond to things and that our response to things contains the seeds of a new way of thinking about contemporary life. This is the position of Gay Hawkins in her quite wonderful book The Ethics of Waste. But I have to say this position unsettles me because I cannot quite bring myself to trust in the idea that a global feeling for rubbish will arise to save us from what we throw away. And though this is a slightly glib â throwaway, if you will â way of putting things, there is nonetheless a serious point here. The material turn in contemporary critical theory stakes our future on feelings â noticing and responding to things â and it is by no means clear that our feelings can be relied upon to motivate us to act, much less show us how we should act. One of Hawkinsâ key theoretical touchstones is the work of Jane Bennett who, as it happens, offers what I think is a very telling anecdote about rubbish in the opening pages of her book Vibrant Matter. Doubtless her remarks here were only intended to set the scene for her discussion of what she calls vital materialism rather than carry the weight of that discussion. But to me itâs precisely the throwaway way she treats the problem of rubbish that is telling and as I will explain in what follows it opens a larger set of problems that I have with materialism in its present incarnation.
Bennett writes:
On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Samâs Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:
one large menâs black plastic work glove
one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one while plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood
Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing â between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workmanâs efforts, the littererâs toss, the rat-poisonerâs success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits or projects.[11]
She goes onto say that the debris caught her eye in the way it did âbecause of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not have noted the little bottle cap, and so on. [âŠ] In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them [âŠ].â[12] Unfortunately, she does not say anything more here about the nature of the relationships between these items and the street, or the weather, or indeed herself, save the way they caught her eye. In point of fact, the only reason she thinks of the items as an assemblage is because her glance happened to take them all in at once. Bennett attributes her perception of these objects to a happy combination of her own perceptual openness and what she calls the âthing powerâ of the objects themselves.
The concept of thing power is somewhat surreal-sounding. It is said to call âto mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not. It draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve.â[13] Ultimately, Bennett is struck by the materiality of the objects and experiences an epiphany of sorts to the effect that, as she puts it, it hit her âin a visceral way how American materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever shorter cycles, is antimateriality.â[14] This is echoed in Hawkinsâ work. Her point is that as a planet, we consume as though our consumption is immaculate and does not produce waste. We delude ourselves into thinking that when we throw trash in the bin it is somehow thereby âtaken care ofâ and we donât give a second thought to the eventual resting place of that trash. Not only that, we tend to think of trash âas simply a natural outcome of human existence; life inevitably begets rubbish.â[15] Therefore we are not really obliged to think about it, any more than we think about the many other facets of human existence that in the first world (at least) we assume we are entitled to and tend to take for granted â the air we breathe, the water we drink, the sunshine on our backs and the ground beneath our feet. We assume all those things will be life-giving and safe, but the reality is that our disregard for what happens to our trash is jeopardizing our existence to the point where, as Paul Virilio so memorably put it: âOne day the day will come when the day wonât come.â[16]
Bennettâs work raises several questions, besides the question of whether or not a contingent tableau can truly constitute an assemblage, which Iâll leave aside.[17] To begin with, there is the idea of âthing powerâ itself, which strikes me as an oddly inert conception of power inasmuch as it does little more than call attention to itself, and even then only when our perceptual apparatus is properly primed to notice it. If thing power depends on perceptual priming then it is hard to see how one can maintain the idea that it is in fact a power. By the same token, if we only notice things because they have thing power then what must be said of all the things that we do not notice? Are they without thing power? If so, who decides? Is it only in the eye of the beholder? Can powerless things acquire thing power on their own or does it require a perceiving subject to bestow it? Even if we set aside these â to me quite strong â criticisms of thing power, it is still hard to see what actual purpose it serves, in a critical sense, because all it seems to do is point in a very conditional way to a process by which we become aware of a thingâs existence. Given this rather banal function it is somewhat surprising to find that for Bennett, thing power is the central plank in the ethics of what she calls vital materialism. Ethics, she says, begins with âthe recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality. We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.â[18]
The ethical significance of the perceptual openness and heightened âawarenessâ of nonhuman vitality that Bennett calls for here is debatable because there is no clear link in her thinking between awareness and action. But more to the point, and this is my real anxiety, it is hard to see how this could be scaled up to a planet-wide action. As several commentators have pointed out, particularly with respect to social media, raising awareness is not by itself either an ethical or political act because it does not entail any specific form of action. There can be few people in the well-informed first world who are not aware of such major issues as climate change and the steady destruction of the earthâs habitats from the Amazon rainforest to the deep sea, yet little or nothing is being done or even demanded to change this situation. This is not to dismiss the occasional victories won against this or that development, whether that is a new coal mine in a heritage listed rainforest or a new channel dredged through a delicate ocean ecosystem, but it is to say these campaigns are still long way short of the general uprising that is required to âchange everythingâ as Naomi Klein puts it.[19] Even if one concedes awareness is a necessary precursor to action, it is not the same thing as saying it is a sufficient cause of action. Interestingly, Bennett herself seems rather unsure of what vital materialismâs ethics in fact is because elsewhere in her book she says â in a puzzlingly tentative way â that perhaps âthe ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in oneâs response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participatingâ.[20] This is in many ways far less satisfactory than the original formulation because all this amounts to saying is that perhaps one ought to look out for oneself.
The key question, for me, is what does Bennett mean by âparticipatingâ when she says the âethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in oneâs response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participatingâ, because it seems to suggest that the assemblage is always somehow pre-given, an existing arrangement of things that one enters and responds to like a player in a virtual reality game such as Second Life. Bennettâs political sympathies are clearly reformist not revolutionary. She can envisage changing things and upsetting the status quo, but not overturning everything and starting again as some more radical environmental thinkers, Naomi Klein among them, are beginning to demand. This was made clear in an earlier work, The Enchantment of Modern Life, written a decade before Vibrant Matter, in which Bennett wrote that she believes that âa modified organisation of commodification and advertising could respond to the structural injustices in existing patterns of consumption [which she acknowledges includes the production of waste] without seeking to eliminate the enchanting effects of commodities. It is the form of commodification, not the fact of it, that is problematic.â[21] Her rationale, which she says she shares with Deleuze and Guattari, is that commodity capitalism is not the âtotalizing powerâ it is said to be by its critics and defenders alike and that within it there is always a positive ethical potential that we can exploit in order to move it in a direction more in tune with the needs of environmental sustainability, and what might be termed social justice.[22]
The idea that there is such a thing as an ethical form of capitalism is surely the most pernicious of all the social and political fantasies circulating today because it obscures the most basic of Marxâs lessons, namely that capitalism is inherently exploitative inasmuch as the employers always derive greater benefit from labour than the people who perform that labour. There is no way round this basic fact. Inequality is the engine that drives the machine of capitalism. And false consciousness is what prevents us from seeing this. To which we must add David Harveyâs important insight that contemporary capitalism derives its profits by externalizing its costs â it doesnât pay either a full or fair price for the resource it extracts; it doesnât pay either a full or fair price for the infrastructure it relies on for its business (e.g., roads, railway lines and ports); and it certainly doesnât pay either a full or fair price for the waste it produces.[23] Climate change is seen as the price âweâ â i.e., we the people who live on planet earth â pay for economic prosperity. These are old lessons, to be sure, but as Naomi Kleinâs recent writing on climate change makes clear, theyâre as fresh and as relevant now as they ever were. As she puts it, âOurs is a culture of disavowal, of simultaneously knowing and not knowing â the illusion of proximity coupled with the reality of distance is the trick perfected by the fossil-fuelled global market. So we both know and donât know who makes our goods, who cleans up after us, where our waste disappears to â whether itâs our sewage or electronics or our carbon emissions.â[24] If the ethical task is to respond to the assemblage we are participating in, then that surely means we have to start with the assemblage we are all participating in, namely the planet as a habitable place.
What does responsibility entail in this context? On big questions like this, vital materialismâs ethics is anaemic, particularly when compared to more didactic and unforgiving systems such as Kantâs âcategorical imperativesâ. If things have thing power â why donât these things awaken any ethical feeling of responsibility? Indeed, why donât they awaken any feelings at all? Awareness is not a feeling. It may be a precursor to a feeling, but by itself it is blank, nothing more than a general preparedness to feel. One can see this clearly in the way Bennett speaks about her awareness of the objects encountered on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore. Not a little surprisingly, it does not awaken feelings of grief or sympathy for the dead rat, which is treated as detritus (like all the other objects in her contingent tableau) and evidence of an unknown rat poisonerâs success. But not as a once-living creature whose death is to be mourned, or at least pitied. Given that the central goal of vital materialism is to perceive the life of all non-human things, including those things which are not usually considered to have a life, such as inorganic matter (e.g., bottle caps and plastic gloves), it is perhaps to be expected that it would not single out the rat as a once living creature and thereby accord it âspecial treatmentâ, but that does beg the question: what is the ethical value of the heightened perceptual awareness Bennett associates with thing power if it fails to perceive a difference between the living and the non-living?
What I find most frustrating in Bennettâs account of her encounter with rubbish on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, however, is the complete absence of any discussion of the ethical implications of the fact that what she encounters is perceived as rubbish. She says nothing about the fact that the items are perceived as not only being without any value in themselves, but as having no possible value in the future or any possible further use. They are simply there and one expects nothing of them, neither to remain there nor to disappear. In describing the items as debris she explicitly frames them as the by-product of some kind of destructive episode that drained them of their value. And though she attempts to recall, dimly, some of the processes that might have led the items to being there, she does not thereby endow them with value. They are simply a âheap of fragmentsâ to recall Jamesonâs salient phrase â salient because it occurs in the context of a discussion of contemporary art which, in Jamesonâs view, no longer requires us to reimagine the lifeworld of the its representations as we did, say, in the case of Van Gogh. Now art objects are simply there and we make sense of them, or not, according to our own lights and not by power of our historical imagination. At the back of this then is Jamesonâs diagnosis of the contemporary world that it is has forgotten how to think historically. I am tempted to say the same diagnosis can be made here because Bennettâs analysis of the objects she encounters displays the same lack of interest in history that Jameson finds in postmodern art. And while she offers an oblique acknowledgement that contemporary consumer culture is a frame â in Butlerâs sense â in which one has to situate any possible discussion of these objects, she does not make the obvious connection that as a participant in consumer culture, however conscientiously, she is nonetheless is a cog in the machine that sustains what she refers to as American materialism.
The unasked ethical question here is this: Are we responsible for the rubbish we encounter? Although she doesnât take up this question herself, Bennettâs vital materialist ethics would suggest that we are responsible for the rubbish we encounter. However, she does not specify what that responsibility entails. To that end, I want to suggest that although Judith Butlerâs project is quite different from Bennettâs, it is nonetheless instructive to read their work together here because Butlerâs conception of ethics also turns on the power of things to capture our attention, but in contrast to Bennett she prioritizes the living and she attaches action to awareness. She writes:
If certain lives are not perceivable as lives, and this includes sentient beings who are not human, then the moral prohibition against violence will be only selectively applied (and our own sentience will only be selectively mobilized). The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?[25]
Consistent with the vital materialist way of seeing things, Butlerâs ethics places the onus on the perceived object to awaken in the perceiver the ethical sense of responsibility and obligation to act. The difference is that the ethical task for Butler does not stop with merely opening oneself to an awareness of nonhuman vitality, but also insists that an awareness of any form of vitality must also entail the taking on of a responsibility toward that vitality and a general acceptance that all forms of life are inherently precarious and requiring our care. This ethical task is thrust upon us, unbidden from a ânameless elsewhereâ, interrupting the normal course of our lives, binding us to act in spite of ourselves.[26] Butlerâs name for this feeling is grief. But we may generalize and simply say that it is a mode of ethics that the world demands of us the moment we perceive that some part of it needs us.
This is perhaps the moment to turn to the issue of what advantage there is to be had in calling Bennettâs âcontingent tableauâ an assemblage. It seems to me Bennettâs insistence on the randomness of both the encounter and the things encountered functions as an explanation and alibi for the fact that neither the encounter nor the things encountered excite any kind of a response from her. She is unmoved by the death of the rat and she is uninterested in the source of the items she finds with the rat because she does not think of herself as either the cause of the objects being where they are or responsible for and (as Deleuze says) before the objects that she encounters. She is willing to acknowledge that her perception of the contingent tableau is central to its existence as an assemblage, but not that the objects have any claim on her save her attention. If this is the case, if the elements in her assemblage make no claim on her, if they are merely random objects randomly encountered, then there is nothing to separate them from a heap of fragments. In other words, it cannot really be considered an assemblage. The elements in an assemblage are never contingent or purposeless. This is why I have suggested that âarrangementâ is better translation of agencement than assemblage.[27] It foregrounds more obviously the strong element of agency that underpins Deleuze and Guattariâs original conception of the term. We cause our assemblages to be the way they are inasmuch that if they were arranged differently we would not be able to endure them. The only contingency she seems interested in is the one that led her to see the objects, not the more consequential set of contingencies that led to them being there in the first place.
The larger point I am trying to make here is that although we all inhabit a planet that is 70 percent ocean, the reality is that except in very precisely defined cases it is not part of our lives in any meaningful â i.e., ethical and political â way. It is there, we notice it, but noticing it makes no claim on us. And Iâm not convinced that ânoticingâ is sufficient to compel action. Indeed, it strikes me that we need to return to a Kantian position of doing what we know is right regardless of how feel about it. We donât even recognize or give thought to the myriad ways in which our everyday activities â showering, washing dishes, laundry, sewage, and so on â all impact on the oceanâs health via pipes that lead directly from our homes. Nor do we think about, much less act on, the fact that our cars and other fossil fuel-powered machines are steadily choking the life out of the ocean by contributing to the greenhouse effect which is raising ocean temperatures and acidifying its waters. Every time we place rubbish in the bin we reiterate that our assemblage has no place for the environment in it. And until that way of thinking and acting changes, the planet remains in peril and we as its inhabitants continue to live in a fantasy world.
[5] Carson 2000 [1962]: 50-60.
[8] This isnât news. As long ago as 1955, Life magazine was already declaring that ours is a âthrowaway societyâ. A few years later in 1963 Vance Packard described us as âwaste makersâ as in his best-selling book of that name, which it must be pointed out was pitched as a kind of moral panic about moral values rather than a concern for the environment.
[17] See Buchanan 2015 for extended discussion of the assemblage.
[18] Bennett 2010: 14 (italics mine).
[23] This is a recurrent theme in his work, but for a succinct explanation of his position See Harvey 2012.
References
Bennett, J. 2010 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Buchanan, I. 2015 âAssemblage Theory and its Discontentsâ, Deleuze Studies, 9:3, pp 382-392.
Butler, J. 2009 Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Butler, J. 2004 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.
Carson, R. 2000 [1962] Silent Spring, London: Penguin.
Deleuze, G. 1994 Difference and Repetition, trans P Patton, NY: Columbia.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1994 What is Philosophy? trans H Tomlinson and G Burchell, NY: Columbia University Press.
Diamond, J. 2005 Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the last 13 000 years, London: Vintage Books.
Guattari, F. 2000 [1989] The Three Ecologies, trans I Pindar and P Sutton, London: Athlone Press.
Harvey, D. 2012 Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, London: Verso.
Hawkins, G. 2006 The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, Sydney: UNSW Press.
Jameson, F. 1991 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logical of Late Capitalism, London: Verso.
Klein, N. 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, London: Allen Lane.
Law, J. 2004 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge.
Roberts, C. 2012 Ocean of Life: How our Seas are Changing, London: Allen Lane.
Virilio, P. 1997 Open Sky, trans J Rose, London: Verso.
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the founding editor of Deleuze Studies and the author of the Dictionary of Critical Theory (OUP).