“… a thing cannot be understood or even talked about independently of the relations it has with other things. For example, resources can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to make use of them and which simultaneously ‘produces’ them through both the physical and mental activity of the users’” (D. Harvey, Limits to capital, 1980: 212)

The presentation will consider how organic and non-organic ‘stuff’ is both sustained and continually transformed through metabolic processes that fuse together both physical dynamics and social relations/processes. This transfiguration of matter constitutes a socio-ecological process through which new socio-natural configurations come into being, are transformed, or disappear. This continuous enrolment of non-human matter within circulatory circuits of socio-ecological metabolism operates in conjunction with particular imaginaries and fantasies of what ‘sustains’ a given socio-ecological order. Such imaginaries or fantasies invariably dwell in the registers of ‘growth’, ‘development’, ‘progress’ or ‘sustainability’. Nonetheless, such imaginaries and their symbolic expression customarily disavow or repress the inconsistencies, conflicts, and antagonisms that run through the metabolic circuit and render it inherently unstable, contradictory and contested, and, thereby, political. The Borromean figures of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic constitution of metabolic circuits will be briefly illustrated through a rudimentary metabolic excavation of ‘the Electrical Vehicle’.

свернуть