The Alternative Modernity in Permaculture
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | I propose a paper that extends and develops my master’s thesis project on relationship between permaculture and modernity. This is my very first ESA Summer School application. I tackle the question of how does permacultural worldview square with ideals of modernity? These ideals – concerning rationality, liberty, equality, progress and prosperity – are based in Peter Wagner’s (1994) sociology of modernity. For Wagner, the history of modernity went through three distinct stages thus far. The arrival of each figuration has been marked by modernizing offensives – seeking to regulate irrational arbitrariness produced by previous figuration, while concurrently pursuing emancipation from these arbitrarities. Each refiguration was framed by narrative of progress. While such narrative has withered in the current stage, there is a debate whether optimistic streaks in environmentalism do not reinvigorate it (Wager 2016). The results of my thesis research suggest that permacultural literature does. While criticizing modern agriculture, economy and consumerist lifestyles, permacultural texts continue to adhere to modernizing progressive narrative. Their emancipatory promise includes more-than-human umwelt, their regulatory aims promise to tackle inefficiencies of mass agriculture and industry. I combined exploratory text-mining based quantitative analysis with qualitative content analysis and frame analysis. I worked with 25 books on permaculture. The goal was to identify patterns in worldview and confront them with Wagner’s theory of modernity. Afterwards, I analyzed and interpreted how the literature frames its self-legitimizations and critiques contemporary state of affairs. The paper will follow this research, extending the combination of qualitative content and frame analysis on a broader corpus of permacultural texts. The study aims to cover yet underexplored dimensions of the movement. It proposes a different angle from the more common one seeing permaculture as an alternative lifestyle (Kolářová 2021). Main contribution of my study is in tackling ways in which this optimistic, environmentally-conscious alternative reiterates ideals at the very core of modernity. Therefore, it contributes not only to scholarship on permaculture and similar movements (see Centemeri 2019), but also to the debate about emergence of green critique (Chiapello 2013) or about reinvigoration of progressive ethos (Wagner 2016). |
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