Beyond economy, society, and environment : toward a politics of ecological livelihood in Maine, USA

Abstract

Struggles over just and sustainable futures are commonly posed as conflicted encounters between the domains of economy, society, and environment. Whether one must choose between inevitable trade-offs, seek balances, or enact harmonizations, this triple schema stands as a pervasive articulation in contemporary thought and political practice. Yet such terms of engagement, this thesis argues, are not inevitable. The trio of economy, society, and environment is a contingent, historically-produced configuration that, while powerful, continually fails to fully organize the world it purports to describe. Accepting it as given risks stifling crucial possibilities for composing worlds and lives otherwise. How might the enclosures of this trio and its accompanying forms of discipline and subjectivation be challenged and unraveled? What other ways of thinking might help to articulate new ethical modes of collective life on an increasingly volatile earth? Situating these questions in the context of contemporary struggles over "development" in the state of Maine (USA), this thesis enacts a simultaneously critical, deconstructive, and generative engagement between theory and fieldwork. Forty in-depth interviews with Maine policy professionals working in economic development, social service, and environmental advocacy, plus close readings of publications associated with their work, are placed in mutually-transformative conversation with key threads of poststructuralist, postdevelopment, and posthumanist political theory. This encounter is re-worked in three iterative stages, inspired by the "pragmatics" of Deleuze and Guattari. First, a critical tracing identifies ways in which common mobilizations of the three categories often serve to reproduce capitalist hegemony, nature-culture divisions, and the marginalization of more-than-human living beings and processes. Second, the work of decomposition amplifies the multiplicity of the categories and the many ways in which thought, action, and desire continually escape them. Maine's policy professionals variously resist, evade, or overflow the very hegemonic articulations they are also captured by, enacting lines of flight toward other possibilities. Finally, (re)composition aims to strengthen and consolidate emergent yearnings beyond the trio by elaborating a series of concepts around the language of "ecological livelihoods," aimed toward rendering more visible the multiple forms of interrelation and interdependence that compose our common (and uncommon) worlds, and toward opening up new, experimental terrains for ethico-political articulation, alliance, and transformation.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English