Deepthroat Diary

For there are limits - as Chernobyl and AIDS have savagely demonstrated - to the technico-scientific power of humanity. Nature kicks back. If we are to orient the sciences and technology toward more human goals, we clearly need collective management and control - not blind reliance on technocrats in the state apparatuses, in the hope that they will control developments and minimize risks in fields largely dominated by the pursuit of profit. It would of course be absurd to formulate this in terms of a desire to retrieve past forms of human existence. In the wake of the data-processing and robotics revolutions, the rise of genetic engineering, and the globalization of markets, neither human work nor the natural habitat can return, even to their state of being of a few decades ago. As Paul Virilio has pointed out, the increased speed of transport and communications, and the interdependence of urban centres are, equally, irreversible. The proper way to deal with what we have to acknowledge as a de facto situation is to reorient it - which implies a redefinition in terms of contemporary conditions of the objectives and methods of each and every form of movement of the social. This, precisely, was the problematic symbolically formulated in a television experiment once performed by the television presenter Alain Bombard. The experiment involved two glass bowls, one filled with polluted water from the port of Marseilles or somewhere similar, in which a clearly very healthy octopus was swimming around - virtually dancing - and the other filled with pure, unpolluted water. Bombard caught the octopus and transferred it to the 'normal' water; within a few seconds, it curled up, sank to the bottom, and died.

More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think 'transversally'. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by 'degenerate' images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology, Donald Trump and his ilk - another form of algae - are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents, and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.