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A Different Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Today's industrial society is having an encounter with ecology: in April, 1976 the French government presented the National Assembly with documents on the dumping and burning of waste in the sea, as well as on the protection of nature. Electoral campaigns, discussions and demonstrations are centered about the theme of pollution and environment. In the last century the accumulation of waste had already become a problem : “ One of the most important duties of industry is to find a useful employment for waste,” wrote P. L. Simmons in 1875. The advice was heeded if we may believe what J. Gottmann wrote on the matter nearly a century later: “ If our era is to be defined by its most important raw material and one that is truly proper to it, as is done for the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, we may no longer speak of a Steel or Petroleum Age, nor of an Atomic Age (which may come in the future) but of the Garbage Age.” The extraordinary demographic expansion of humanity that has gone from a population of five million in the Paleolithic Age to four billion today gives rise to a monstrous abundance of refuse resulting as much from the natural mechanisms of living as from industrial activity (factory waste) or from the present attitude haunted by the idea of obsolescence (the throw-away society of Alvin Toffler). The outline of a universe submerged in waste matter appears, similar to that evoked by Italo Calvino in Città Invisibili apropos of the town of Leonia: “The refuse of Leonia would gradually invade the world if the interminable garbage heaps were not pressed upon, beyond the last crest, by the refuse of other towns that also push mountains of refuse far away from themselves. Perhaps the entire world beyond the borders of Leonia is covered with craters of trash, each with a continually erupting metropolis in its center. The borders between foreign or enemy towns are thus contaminated bastions in which the detritus of the one and the other serves as mutual support, menacing and mixing together.” The world of Metamorphosis is approaching in which man, transformed into an insect, covered with dust and remains of food, gnaws on the cores and parings of half-rotten vegetables. Science fiction invents a remedy to fit the problem : a planet specialized in storing all the garbage unloaded by an entire galaxy.
1 P. L. Simmons, Waste Products, quoted by S. Moscovici in Essai sur L'histoire humaine de la nature, Flammarion, 1968, p. 419.
2 J. Gottmann, Les marchés de matières premières, Paris, A. Colin, 1957.
3 Italo Calvino, Città invisibili, Turin, Einaudi, 1972.
4 Charles Platt, Garbage World, New York, 1967.
5 Otto Hann, Arman, Paris, Hazan, 1972, p. 32. Cf. Italo Calvino, " The opulence of Leonia is measured by the things that are thrown away every day to make place for new things. "
6 Cole, Freeman, Jahoda, Pavitt, L'anti-Malthus, Seuil, 1974, p. 302.
7 Ibid, p. 302. See also A. C. Crombie, Histoire des sciences de St. Augustin à Galilée, P.U.F., 1959, Vol. I, p. 192.
8 M. Ozouf, " Architecture et urbanisme: l'image de la ville chez Claude-Nicolas Ledoux," Annales, E.S.C., 1966, No. 6.
9 Voltaire, Des embellissewents de Paris.
10 This is particularly true of 19th-century English literature by authors such as Dickens, Ruskin and William Morris.
11 Cole et al., op. cit., p. 304.
12 The conference held in Nairobi August 29 - September 9, 1977, studied the present responsibility of man in the advance of the desert.
13 Wilhelm Abel, Crises agraires en Europe (XIIIe -XXe siècle), p. 41.
14 B. de Jouvenel, "De l'Economie politique à l'écologie politique, " Analyse et Prévision, No. 2, February, 1954, p. 154.
15 Resources for the Future, Bulletin No. 47, September, 1974.
16 Ernest Bloch, La philosophie de la Renaissance, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, Paris, Payot, 1974.,
17 Gusdorf, Les principes de la pensée au siècle des Lumières, Payot, 1971. Gusdorf quotes this text from Bayle: " Promise a pension to those who invent new products for manufacturing or new means of increasing commerce; send everywhere to look for gold, send your fleets to north and south, and let not cold nor heat nor anything else arrest the passion for getting rich. " p. 451.
18 R. Furon, La terre est-elle une mine inépuisable?, Hachette, 1967.
19 J. Swift, Gulliver's Travels.
20 G. Bertolini, " Limites et contraintes du recyclage des déchets solides, " Analyse et Prévtsicn, No. 3, September, 1970.
21 J. Servier, Histoire de l'utopie, " Idées, " N.R.F., p. 187 et seq.
22 Quoted by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, " Un critique de l'écologie poli tique, " in L'idéologie de/dans la science, Seuil, 1977, pp. 228-29.
23 R. Trousson, Voyages aux pays de nulle part, Editions de l'université de Bruxelles, 1975, p. 20. The utopian is often hostile to disorderly nature (p. 24); the naturist myth implies a destructuration to which utopian institutionalism cannot resolve itself (p. 143); modern utopias such as those of Wells, Zamiatine, Huxley, Orwell and Werfel present an urban, mineral and geometric universe.
24 Merle Curti, L'évolution de la pensée américaine, Plon, 1966, p. 297.
25 The fireman Montagne in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the " Mephi " of Zamiantine, the " Colons " of Alfred Döblin, the sutvivors in René Barjavel's Ravage, all find life possible in the heart of nature. See also R. Trousson, op. cit.'
26 Marshall Sahlins, Age de pierre, âge d'abondance. L'économie des sociétés primitives, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 76.
27 Otto Hahn, op. cit.
28 Pierre Restang, Un manifeste de la nouvelle peinture, Les nouveaux realistes, Paris, Editions Planète, 1968.
29 Adorno, Théorie esthéthique, Paris, Klincksieck, 1974, p. 67.
30 Mikhail Bakhtine, La poétique de Dostoïevski, Paris, Seuil, 1970, p. 151.
31 Bakhtine, L'oeuvre de François Rabelais et culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, Bibliothèque des Idées, Paris, NRF, Gallimard, 1970, p. 62.
32 Rosenkranz, a disciple of Hegel, was the first to consider ugliness as a category of esthetics. See also Raymond Polin, Du laid, du mal, du faux; and Lydie Krestovsky, La laideur dans l'art and Le problème spirituel de la beauté et de la laideur.
33 Christian Enzensberger, Essai de quelque envergure sur la crasse, Paris, NRF, Gallimard, 1971. " Dirty at least exists, but clean is nothing and good for nothing; clean is dirty, mad and ill. It is powerful; what is clean never goes away: à bon entendeur salut… ", p. 190.
34 Jean Brun, La nudité humaine, Fayard, p. 179. " Filth is the new temple where the chalice of communion is replaced by a garbage can, " p. 181.
35 Brun quoted from texts by Jerry Rubin (Do It) and David Cooper (Mort de la Famille).
36 Baudelaire, " Une Charogne, " Les Fleurs du Mal, Gallimard, " La Pléiade, " p. 29.
37 This cleanliness itself secretes waste and dirt. " The city of Leonia is reborn every day: every morning its population wakes up in clean sheets, washes with newly-unwrapped bars of soap, puts on brand new dressing gowns, takes an unopened container of milk out of the latest model of refrigerator… Wrapped in clean plastic sacks, the garbage of the day before waits on the sidewalk to be picked up by the garbage truck. " From this comes Leonia's abundance. " A fortress of indestructible refuse which encircles Leonia, towering over the city like a mountain amphitheater, " Calvino, op. cit., pp. 133-34. In the perspective of science fiction this accumulation ends in isolating communities from each other. Cf. Rita Kraus, " La grande decharge, " in Le Monde, June 16, 1972.
38 E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. Une société à la mesure de l'homme, Paris, Seuil, 1978. " Dr. Edward D. David, science advisor to President Nixon, said, referring to the stockpiling of radioactive waste, that one feels uneasy when faced with a substance that has to be hermetically sealed and buried for 25,000 years before it becomes harmless. " p. 19.
39 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, quoted by B. Cazes in Contrepoint, 1972: " I see no cause for rejoicing over the fact that individuals already richer than they need to be double their capacity of consumption of things that bring them little or no pleasure other than that of a sign of wealth, or that a larger number of individuals pass every year from the middle class to the wealthy class, or from the employed rich to the idle rich (…) The best condition for human nature is the one in which no one is rich, no one aspires to be richer and no one is afraid of being overthrown by efforts that others make to get ahead. "
40 Collective work, L'idéologie de/dans la science, Seuil, 1977, p. 205.
41 Quoted in Report 1023/SG/92, presented March 4, 1971 to the OECD by Jacques Henri Gros on " problems presented by industrial use of waterways and the means to fight against water pollution. "
42 Scarcity is an essential dimension of economics. L. Robbins writes in Essais sur la nature et la signification de la science économique. " Economics is the science that studies human behavior in relation to ends and scarce means for alternative uses. " Aron writes in Paix et guerre entre les nations, " Economics as a problem implies only scarcity and poverty " and Daniel Bell in Vers la société post-industrielle (Laffont, 1976) dwells upon this idea: " In all logic post-economic' means nothing, because the term implies a situation in which costs would be zero (economics is the management of costs) or inexhaustible resources, " p. 75.
43 This reduction in the domain of external economics, that is, gratuitous services and damage, undoubtedly ends in a process of appropriation whose nature and beneficiary it would be interesting to study.
44 This theory of the " new scarcity " is that of Daniel Bell, op. cit., p. 401 et seq. He distinguishes three types: cost of information, cost of coordination (participation and regulation) and cost in time (growth mrefies time).
45 L'idéologie de/dans la science, p. 198.
46 Even linguistics calls upon innateness. Noam Chomsky, who cannot be accused of political conservatism, wrote: " The linguistic theory (or universal grammar) is what we may suppose to be a biological fact, a genetically deter mined property of the species: the child does not learn the theory but applies it in developing his speech… ", Noam Chomsky, Dialogues avec Mitsou Ronat, Flammarion, 1977, p. 144. " This grammar represents linguistic know ledge. In presenting it we have given an explanation of the fact that someone who speaks a language knows this or that: the procedure of discovery is part of his genetical baggage, and in applying it to his experience, he constructs this grammar, his knowledge of the language. " Ibid, p. 124.
47 S. Moscovici, La société contre nature, 10/18, 1972, p. 391. Cf. the same author, Essai sur l'histoire humaine de la nature, Flammarion, 1968.
48 Dennis Gabor, Inventons le futur, Plon, 1964, p. 110.
49 Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique, Ed. de Minuit, 1975, p. 18.
50 Herbert Marcuse, L'homrne unidimensionnel, Ed. de Minuit, 1968, pp. 191-92.
51 Ibid., p. 190.
52 Ibid., p. 189.
53 Jürgen Habermas, Profils philosophiques et politiques, Les Essais, Gal limard, 1974, p. 236.
54 Ernst Bloch, Le principe Espérance, I. "Bibliothèque de philosophie, " Gallimard, 1976, p. 249.
55 Ibid., pp. 200-201. Bloch pursues, " The lines of force (fire, lightning, sound); the forms of chosen objects (the palm, the cat. the human face. the crystalline style of Egypt, the luxuriant style of the Gothic) are so many desig nations of these real numbers. A part of the world with profoundly engraved traits is revealed to be an ensemble of svmbols of an obiective nature whose mathematics as well as philosophy are still non-existent… We touch here upon the problem of the science of objective utopian figures. that is, in the final account the forgotten problem (Pythagorean) of a qualitative mathematics, a new qualitative philosophy of nature. "
56 Terribly impoverished by machinery. Bloch applies to this process of impoverishment in which Marxism has participated this word of the English savant John Tyndall: " If matter makes its entrance into the world dressed as a beggar it is because the Jacobs of theology have stolen its birthright. " p. 338.
57 Bloch, op. cit., p. 215. " The process of the world which has for substance the matter of possible objectiveness is itself a utopian function. "
58 Ibid., p. 338. We point out that these ideas were not irrelevant to the fact that the author lost his teaching post in Leipzig in 1957.
59 Ibid., p. 252.
60 Gérard Raulet, " Encerclement technocratique et dépassement pratique, L'utopie concrète comme théorie critique, " in Utopie, Marxism selon Ernest Bloch, collection Critique de la Politique, Payot, 1976, pp. 301-02.
61 Serge Moscovici, " Le réenchantement du monde, " in Au-delà de la crise, introduction by A. Touraine, Seuil, 1976.
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