Ecological Subjecthood
Creators: name: Davies, Emma
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2020

description: In this thesis I develop an idea I call "ecological subjecthood", I use this term to refer to the recognition of an ecosystem as a subject that has ethical value in and of itself; an entity that matters beyond its utility value for humans. While I do not argue that the language of the "the subject" is necessarily required to promote a greater responsiveness to ecological thresholds, I take seriously the enduring power of "the subject" as an influential concept in contemporary discourses. I articulate an account of ecological subjecthood that might offer insight to inform new ways of living together and engaging with ecosystems. The thesis examines the relationships between personhood, subjecthood, ontology, language and ethics, by drawing on poststructuralist insights to explicate how the recognition of an ecological subjecthood might be realised in political, legal and cultural discourses (what is at stake in "recognition" is a point I explore in depth throughout the thesis). "The subject" as it figures most dominantly in the western philosophical tradition is synonymous with the notion of "subjectivity", drawing together agency, responsibility and ethical considerability. The account of ecological subjecthood I develop evolves out of a poststructuralist understanding of language and ethics, drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers emphasise the performative power of language; demonstrating how power and value become sedimented and disseminated in and through the material-discursive. They reveal that "the subject" (and indeed "subjectivity") always escapes the delimitation that the modern tradition seeks to make (through an appeal to consciousness, rationality, sentience or self-sovereignty). I use the term ecological subjecthood to explore what it would mean to recognise ecosystems as ethically valuable, without recourse to a claim about their "subjectivity" or their utility value to other "subjectivities". This attempt to show how "the subject" might be reinscribed in legal, political and cultural spheres, through the recognition of an ecological subjecthood initiates an ethical approach that shifts the emphasis from agency and sovereignty, to vulnerability and embodiment and increases the possibility of human responsiveness to ecological limits and thresholds. I call this an "eco-literacy". I understand ethics from a poststructuralist meta-ethical perspective, as a negotiation that takes place, rather than any absolute which might be calculated. This negotiation is characterised by the ontological conditions of normativity and finitude and entails navigating both the general and the particular. I understand advancing ethics as a project of advancing and cultivating the conditions that enable this negotiation to be undertaken with a greater degree of responsiveness and thus responsibility. An ecosystem is a multiplicity of living and nonliving elements in dynamic relationships characterised by certain limits. I argue that a more nuanced approach to limits and relationships informed by poststructuralist insights might advance an ethics of engagement with ecosystems.