(Post)humanist tangles in social ecology and new materialism

pp. 53-82

in: Meliz Ergin, The ecopoetics of entanglement in contemporary Turkish and American literatures, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter argues that entanglements lie at the core of two prominent schools of ecological thought: social ecology and new materialism. While social ecology, spearheaded by Murray Bookchin, stresses the tangle of ecological and socio-political issues and advocates for a transformative viewpoint in both spheres, new materialism destabilizes the nature/culture dichotomy by reading the production of matter and meaning as co-extensive praxes and by defining phenomena, in Karen Barad's terms, as the "ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies." Ergin reads social ecology and new materialism, respectively, in relation to deconstruction to tease out the different models of entanglement in each school of thought and to elucidate what is at stake in the motif of entanglement. She rethinks these three strands of thought vis-à-vis each other to capture some of the breadth and variety in reconceptualizations of natural-social and material-discursive entanglements.