Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism by Soper, Kate
Citation (APA): Soper, K. (2020). Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Introduction Bookmark - Page 1 · Location 73 Page 2 · Location 86
We need, in short, to challenge the presumption that the work-dominated, stressed-out, time-scarce and materially encumbered affluence of today is advancing human well-being rather than being detrimental to it.
1. Society, Nature, Consumption
Page 13 · Location 237
... green thought and writing, hitherto overly centered on the depletion of the natural world, now needs to focus less on the destruction of nature and its impact on a--supposedly unreformable--consumerist way of living, and more on human political culture and its reconstruction.
Bookmark - Page 13 · Location 241
The main aim must be to challenge the supposedly natural (in the sense of inevitable and non-political) evolution of both the capitalist growth economy and the consumer culture it has created, to undermine the sense that this development has been essential to human well-being, and to argue that we will prosper better without it.
Page 15 · Location 275
They caution us against a 'grand narrative of the Anthropocene' whose grandiose focus on interactions between the human species and the Earth system.
Page 20 · Location 349
We need to contest mainstream presumptions that technology is 'natural' and economics purely 'social', but to do so we must maintain an analytic divide between the natural and the social in the first place. This requires resistance to some of the more irrational and neo-animist tendencies of contemporary cultural theory.
Page 20 · Location 356
Posthumanism in its 'new materialist' formulation has also invited us to think of inanimate objects as exercising agency no less extensively and effectively than human beings. (n27)
Page 26 · Location 443
I am also quarrelling with those who insist on the importance of a redemptive awakening to human continuity with nature, rather than on the (often grim) exceptionality of human economic and social practice. Indeed, if human forms of consciousness and agency are on a par with those of the rest of nature, then no special responsibility for ecological collapse can be attributed to humans, and no eco-political strategies for redemption can be expected of them. Paradoxical as it may seem, the belief that humans occupy no special place in nature is likely to confound rather than advance the ecological cause.
Page 27 · Location 452
The uniqueness of human responsibility--which simply cannot be extended to rivers, volcanoes, or even dogs--remains an insurmountable dilemma for posthumanism.
Page 28 · Location 472
The fact that it is precisely because we have been told for so long that there is no post-capitalist alternative that it becomes important to envisage one. (n41)
Page 30 · Location 505
It is another to ignore the extent to which workers as consumers are collusive in the reproduction of the capitalist economy--an issue on which much of the left has so far been extremely evasive.
Page 30 · Location 507
... socialists are still much too ready to subscribe to conventional views on the 'good life' and what constitutes a 'high' standard of living.