International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Jennifer Doyle (University of Waterloo, Canada)
The Green Space of Dream Space and the Eco-Oedipal Condition

Applying an ecocritical approach to Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora, suggesting that first the semiotic is simultaneously the feminine, and the Earth, that the thetic is consumption in all of its variance, and finally, the symbolic is capitalism/the law of the father, I will make a case for an Eco-Oedipal condition in urban environments by sussing out semiotic nods to ecological longings in city space. Though capitalism is not the economic system in use everywhere, I believe it is the most fruitful, and familiar form, from which to investigate consumption and its potential thetic implications in the World. While Kristeva’s work on the semiotic chora has generated academic inquiry in everything from cultural geography to literary theory, this series of positions within an ecocritical frame appears to be a stone left unturned (to pick up the spatial and topological metaphor).
            There is an ecotopic longing that informs our engagement with the non-human world in a way that is visually embodied in our urban spaces. By placing the investigation of eco-topic longing in urban space, I will highlight the distance obtained by environmental intervention that disrupts placeness and obscures but does not obliterate the ecological impetus to belong, and to be a part of, the Earth. I am using the term Earth in the Heideggerian sense. I will demonstrate that our repression of “Mother Earth”, in all of its various guises, is often most apparent in the urban space where human desires for order and consumption to stave off death, superficially outweigh the desire for a chorographic state of beingness. These longings/ desires, however, come to the surface repeatedly in the decorative impulses of urban architecture, park systems and both city maintained and individually created plantings of flowers, vines, etc.
            Work on an Eco-Oedipal condition is essential. Our conscious selves need to recognize the drive that moves us toward the Earth as primal, to recognize the human organism as one dependent on Mother Earth as essential, and to dream the dream of deep ecology. As Jonathan Bate writes, while ‘the dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth... our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination”. This is important in terms of the way we handle consumption and in terms of how we relate to the Earth. A shift in our thinking is required in order to experience placeness, and placeness is necessary for belonging (in the way Lawrence Buell handles discusses the role of environmental imagination) which would, ideally, alter the way we perceive the Earth and in turn, alter our interactions with her.
            As Andrew McMurry outlines this in his work: Environmental Renaissance, the problem lies in making everything expendable, exacerbating a mentality of greed, based on the fear of death, evolving out of a deeply felt lack of placeness. Our topological impressions of reality need to be gently realigned so as to accommodate the ground, the field, the shifting support for all life endeavours -- the semiotic chora/the Earth. This paper will outline an approach to this disconnect and lay a groundwork for Eco-Oedipal inquiry.