- Title
- A foucaultian critique of the conception of individual subjectivity within contemporary environmental discourse
- Creator
- Konik, Inge
- Subject
- Environmentalism
- Subject
- Environmental policy
- Subject
- Environmental management -- Social aspects
- Date Issued
- 2009
- Date
- 2009
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MPhil
- Identifier
- vital:8422
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/d1016201
- Description
- Certain prominent environmental theorists have accounted for and/or addressed our unmitigated environmentally damaging behavior in cognitive terms, related to a common (misplaced) belief that economic development and technological advancement, among other contemporary processes, will solve our environmental problems. However, I argue that they have not given due consideration to the complex (predominantly non-cognitive/non-conscious) discursive constitution of the individual, and thus seem to adhere to a Kantian notion of autonomy that overlooks such non-cognitive factors. Focusing on this non-cognitive aspect of discursive constitution, I ascribe our ecological apathy mainly to the fact that we have been discursively constituted as docile bodies and prostrate subjects. Further, I argue that, because this process of discursive constitution is primarily non-cognitive, any attempts to remedy our ecological apathy at a cognitive level alone will not be completely effective. Consequently, I propose that a more effective way of fostering pro-environmental dispositions may be for individuals to engage in an ethic/culture of the self that is not exclusively conceptual in orientation, and which is centered on the practice of a counter-discourse that does not constitute the individual as docile and prostrate nor negate the individual’s dependence on the environment. Alternatively, in order to engender pro-environmental civilizational change, it may be necessary to operate within the discursive parameters of dominant/popular institutions, in order to incrementally alter the discourses employed within, and disseminated through, these institutions, in a manner that would lead to the problematization, rather than the endorsement, of the ecologically deleterious technological, political and economic trajectories of our time.
- Format
- 206 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Arts
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
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