Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play

This book spins a historical fable about the trends in European thought that have contributed to the rise of industrial civilization and to the ecological crisis. It explores alternative visions of nature and culture, from Romanticism to ecological theory, in an effort to rewrite the story of natural and cultural history. Its themes include ecological poetics, technological artistry, evolutionary learning, the play of communication, and the struggle for a viable ecological ethic.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Cybernetic Imaginations Old and New: Communication and Control in Living Systems Toward a New Demonology: The Confluence of Mind and Nature Infodynamics: The Creative Fusion of Mind and Matter Toward a Recursive Vision of Postmodern Diversity Ecological Feminism: A New Dialogue between Man and Woman, Nature and Culture or How to Stop Fighting and Start Playing Chapter 1: Postmodern Ecology and the Crisis of Modernity The Languages of "Nature" and "Culture": Ecological and Postmodern Discourses The Convergence of Postmodernity and Ecology The Project of Modernity: A Historical Fable about the Domination of Nature The Foundations of Modern Science The "Human" Empire: Science, Technology, and Capitalism The Mastery of "Mother" Nature Classical and Medieval Antecedents: The Great Chain Splitting the Ecosystem: The Ecological Crisis Implicit in Modernism From Ancient Mythos to Modern Logos to Postmodern Ecologos The Humanists Strike Back Ecology and Postmodernity: Toward a New Critique of Modernism I: Writing the Story of Natural History II: Toward a Neostructuralist Ecology III: A New Look at an Old Myth: From Genesis to the Joyous Science The Moral of the Story Chapter 2: Ecology and Lifeworld Spirit in Flames: Toward a Postmodern-Ecological Phenomenology The Poetry of Evolution: Steps to an Ecology of Mind Radical Cybernetics: Life as Communication The Charm and Terror of Digitation Two Evolutionary Models Stepping Backward: From Learning to Evolution Toward New Evolutionary Personae Seeds of Ecometaphorical Identity: From Arizona to the Amazon to Walden Pond Chapter 3: Ecosociality: From the Universal Logos of Communicative Rationality to the Situated Mythos of Ecofeminism Communicative Action and the Serious Ascent toward a Rational Society Communication and the Ecometaphorical Differentiation of Society The Play of Nature and Culture Steps toward a Multicultural Mind or La Pensee Sauvage Talks Back Who Is that Masked Woman? or Superbarrio Meets Ecofemina A Stitch in Time: The Quilt of Ecosociality Chapter 4: Ecopoetics: Literary Ecology and Postmodernity Ecological Poetics Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland What Is Literary Ecology? The Origins of Literary Ecology Literary Ecology in Mile Zero and Vineland Chapter 5: From the Ecological Wasteland to the Cybernetic City: Communication, Evolution, War, and Play The Play of Communication Toward a Living Demonology Cybercity, Here We Come: Play in Virtual Reality versus the Manichaean Struggle for the Electropolis Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Daniel R. White is Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at The University of Central Florida. He is also the author of Asian Wisdom: India, China, and Japan.

Review :
"The linking of ecology and postmodernity is expected, and here done well, but the link with the phenomological life-world is a very perceptive touch and one crucial to both ecology and postmodernity. Just at the moment when a reader might have placed White in a non-aesthetic corral, he adds a chapter on literary ecology, a discussion of how the ecological and postmodern interrelationships are brought into play in literary worlds."-- Joseph Natoli, Michigan State University "White has given himself a heroic challenge by bringing together several current fields of scholarship, literature, and philosophical speculation into the all-encompassing whole of the book title: Postmodern Ecology. He has admirable command of the materials and moves knowledgeably among biological ecology, communication theory, structural anthropology, philosophy, literature, and contemporary popular culture."-- Fred E. H. Schroeder, University of Minnesota, Duluth "Intellectually, to argue against, and more importantly, to simply think our way out of the dead end of modernist ideologies, we need radically alternative perspectives. White, and others, argue that such perspectives are already around, but need to be mobilized. This book is a contribution to the discussion of which perspectives these should be and how they can be mobilized in some larger view of human and transhuman interests."-- Jay L. Lemke, City University of New York