Labour: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities

What will it take to change the future? Towards the end of Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that to create a more ethical future, we need questions that bring “representation back to the world of labor.” But, he continues, “[t]hey are not even, in the final analysis, questions but seismic events. Practical events, where thought becomes act, and body and manual experience ... labor.” Our work in the Environmental Humanities needs a similar kind of manual gearing, because for any kind of ethical and, indeed, livable future on the planet, we not only need new ways of thinking about the world, but new ways of being in and of the world. In this regard, it might pay to state the obvious: the environmental crisis is not a magical side effect of industrial civilization. This situation was built, not conjured. Imagining the crisis as collectively wrought invokes the sweaty, material and embodied effort invested in making the crisis and invites speculation as to what kinds of labours it will take to actively create a different future.