The Three Sustainabilities

Energy, Economy, Time

2021
Author:

Allan Stoekl

Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future

Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from an ambiguous feel-good appeal to the consumer? Allan Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching on questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion.

Allan Stoekl shines a bright light on the paradoxes of sustainability. At its best a hazy moral good and at its worst a pretext for smuggling toxic relations into an astroturfed future, sustainability discourse is a symptom of the global North’s increasingly irrational clinging to the promises of modern progress. What is so important about Stoekl’s book is its subtle and imaginative approach to rethinking sustainability and its discontents from the epistemic grounds up.

Dominic Boyer, Rice University

Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from an ambiguous feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival, their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of the role of humans in the survival of a world that is quickly disappearing—and perhaps in the genesis of another world.

Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching on questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion. He argues that there are three varieties of sustainability, seen from philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. One involves the self-sustaining world “without us”; another, the world under our control, which can run the political spectrum from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New Deal; and a third that carries a social and communitarian charge, an energy of the “universe” affirmed through, among other things, meditation and gifting. Each of these carves out a different space in the relations between objects, humans, and their survival and degradation. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others.

Along the way, Stoekl cites a wide range of authors, from philosophers to social thinkers, literary theorists to criminologists, anthropologists to novelists. This beautifully written, compelling, and nuanced book is a must for anyone interested in questions of ecology, energy, the environmental humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and posthuman aesthetics, or religion and the sacred in relation to community.

Awards

Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Michelle Kendrick Prize — Honorable Mention

Allan Stoekl is professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. His books include Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minnesota, 2007).

Allan Stoekl shines a bright light on the paradoxes of sustainability. At its best a hazy moral good and at its worst a pretext for smuggling toxic relations into an astroturfed future, sustainability discourse is a symptom of the global North’s increasingly irrational clinging to the promises of modern progress. What is so important about Stoekl’s book is its subtle and imaginative approach to rethinking sustainability and its discontents from the epistemic grounds up.

Dominic Boyer, Rice University

Contents

Introduction

First Order. Base Sustainability

1. Objects, Energy, the Chora

2. Animals, Scale, Death

3. Statues, Language, Machines

Second Order. Restricted Sustainability

4. Technocracy, Energy Economics, Utopia

5. Solar Architecture, Sadism, Heterogeneity

6. Anamorphoses of the Future

Third Order. General Sustainability

7. Sustainability’s Return

8. Marxism, Meditation, Consumption

9. The Dead, the Future: Scrounging and Gifting the Ruins

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index