POLITICAL STYLE, FORMALISM, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

This chapter assumes that the concept of power occludes relationships and repertoires that are important elements of political action, experience, and judgment, and that theories of political aesthetics should be reconsidered to address the civilizational problems of the Anthropocene era. The discussion reviews the conventional demarcation between aesthetics and politics, summarizes how the concept of political style has articulated in scholarship and public culture, emphasizes key considerations regarding method, and elaborates formalism as an orientation for working past the distinction between nature and culture. This orientation is available as a political style of ecological formalism that is evident in the work of the writer and activist Gary Snyder, most notably in his book The Practice of the Wild. This style draws on principles of relationality, wholeness, scale, beauty, and abundance, among others. It is opposed to the “stinginess of thought” in modern governmentality, and it offers a practice of mindfulness, an “etiquette of freedom” for inter-species relationships, and an “ecology of language” that is attuned to the diversity encoded into speech communities. I suggest that by developing ecological formalism scholars might contribute to developing more just and sustainable communities.