Power-Knowledge Relations in the Field of Political Ecology

Abstract

The environmental crisis irrupted in the modern world in the 1960s and 1970s as a manifestation of a crisis of civilization: a crisis of the hegemonic ways of understanding the world; as a crisis of scientific knowledge and techno-economic reason that became institutionalized in the globalized world, interfering with the natural courses of life and destroying the essential conditions for the sustainability of life. For political ecology, the construction of a sustainable world raises the epistemological challenge of questioning the conceptions and paradigms of science and the power strategies that underlie the sustainable development discourse that, given its "effects of meaning" and enacting of the metabolism of the biosphere, degrade the sustainable conditions for life. Building a sustainable future requires the deconstruction 2 of the juridical forms (Foucault, 1998), the economic rationality and market logic (Marx, 1965) and the logocentrism of science (Derrida, 1976(Derrida, , 1978(Derrida, , 1982 -the instruments of power in knowledge inherent to the hegemonic rationality of modernity-that have "abgrounded" our unsustainable world. Moreover, it becomes essential to derive theoretical-political strategies capable of bringing about a process of social reorganization in line with the ontological conditions of life. 2. Deconstruction designates the critical purpose of post-modern philosophy to dis-cover or unravel the conceptual framework and the social effects of metaphysical thought. One of these cores consists of the whole set of binary oppositions (object-subject; reason-intuition; nature-culture) established by the Cartesian division between res cotigans and res extensa that affect the way we talk and write and understand sexual, racial and social differences. This controversy is not solved by the demand to establish ontological monism (Bookchin, 1990(Bookchin, /1996; for a critique, see Leff, 1998) brought in to dissolve the radical difference between the Real and the Symbolic, from where the human condition emerges in the order of Life. Deconstruction is the task of questioning metaphysics. The deconstructionist perspective in political ecology allows us to analyze the pathways which, through the history of metaphysical thinking, have led to the formation of frames of thought and theoretical paradigms, legitimized by the dominant rules of science, establishing hegemonic ways of understanding the world and determining the approaches for intervening in nature. In this context, theoretical deconstruction in political ecology is called upon to unravel and reveal the strategies of power in knowledge (Foucault, 1980) that are intertwined with the logic and rhetoric of the discursive development of the scientific disciplines from which political ecology wants to distinguish itself to establish its own disciplinary identity and political objectives with a study program on the power relations that permeate the socio-environmental field.

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