The mythical potential of planetary urbanization

Keywords: Ocean, political ecology, planetary urbanization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Ulysses, according to Horkeimer and Adorno, was the prototype of the bourgeois man because he firstly reified and measured, with his sea trip, the pure, exceeding force of the myth. Moore, Farinelli and others argue that it was through cartography that Modernity extended Ulysses' move to the whole globe, first conceptualizing and then using nature as an external object. The climate change reveals this operation in an epochal way, namely the end of Nature as external, its hyperobjectuality (Morton). So, what to do, how to think and produce worlds? Let's go back to Ulysses, to when, in front of Polyphemus, he literally manages to escape him by keeping the rhythm of the sea. That is, let's stay here, in front of the climate change and try to make another decision. Schmitt argues that while Venice simply sailed the sea, English empire became great thanks to a radical spatial revolution rooted in thinking itself not through the land but through the ocean element. Thus, it is possible nowadays to gain – revealing the surplus nature its critical charge by embodying the crisis of capitalism - this symbiosis to the critique? What could it mean to trace the mythical, oceanic root of planetary urbanization? Could we think about a potential planetary urbanization as a political ecology of nature-as-excess, which coexists with rather than reifies, the rising, surplus ocean? With my contribution I propose to address these questions from the perspective of those who work aboard a cargo ships and from the portscape.