#kate soper

[twinkubus]

Instead of improved productive efficiency being used to shorten the working week so we could enjoy growing and preparing more food for ourselves, companies profit from selling us fast food and ready-cooked meals. Deprived of the leisure and facilities to make our everyday journeys by foot or bike, we are co-opted into weekend 'health walks' (with Apps to monitor them) or persuaded to buy stationary cycling and treadmill-walking sessions in the gym. We might have longer holidays, in which we could travel more slowly and experience more genuine relaxation, but meanwhile the tourist and therapy industries provide profitable mini-breaks and stress relieving services. When products are advertised and sold on the basis of their authenticity and naturalness, the market promises to salve nostalgia for the very losses inflicted by its own advances into everyday life.

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living

[thesobsister]

The rather brilliant Kate Soper just posted this to YT yesterday: the 2014 premiere performance of her piece Here Be Sirens, a vocal piece for three sopranos.

The text is described as follows: "Book by Kate Soper, with additional texts by Plato, Theobaldus of Cambridge, Homer, Erasmus, Raimbaud de Vacquiras, Tibullus, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, Iamblicus, Dante, John Milton, and Sappho (trans. Anne Carson)." It is elsewhere described as "the daily life of three sirens, who kill time on their island as they await an endless procession of doomed sailors."

So that gives you a bit of an idea where she's coming from even as she subverts the expectation of heavy, academic writing with humor and oddness.

[nextwavefutures]

How to live without growth

Kate Soper argues that we can live well by focussing on the things that we know promote well-being. It’s the politics of getting there that are difficult. New post on the next wave.

A review of Kate Soper’s book ‘Post-Growth Living: For an alternative hedonism’. Obviously we need to stop pretending that we are going to fix climate change without some changes in behaviour by consumers in the global North. Usually this is an outcome that is described as politically unacceptable because it is portrayed as wearing hairshirts and eating a diet of nothing but nettle leaves. But…

[read-write-thrive]

chest dysphoria core

[probablyasocialecologist]

The call to consume less is often presented as undesirable and authoritarian. Yet, the market itself has become an authoritarian force – commanding people to sacrifice or marginalise everything that is not commercially viable; condemning them to long hours of often very boring work to provide stuff that often isn’t really needed; monopolising conceptions of the ‘good life’; and preparing children for a life of consumption. 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.

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

A rising tide and a bigger pie: Economic growth has long been considered such an obvious boon that it’s pursued by governments across the world as a matter of course. But in 2016, when a London professor warned an audience in Newcastle that Brexit would lead to a precipitous drop in Britain’s gross domestic product, that well-worn measure of economic activity, one woman’s heckling caught him by surprise. “That’s your bloody G.D.P.,” she shouted, “not ours!”

The eruption tapped into a suspicion supported by reality: Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats. Prosperity even in the most prosperous countries hasn’t been shared. But all the attention to inequality is just a crack in the edifice of economic orthodoxy. Now a much more radical proposition has emerged, looming like a wrecking ball: Is economic growth desirable at all?

Less than two decades ago, an economist like Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy,” was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se.” Yet today there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that — in journals, on podcasts, at conferences. Consider some of the books published in the last several years: Tim Jackson’s “Post-Growth: Life After Capitalism,” Kate Soper’s “Post-Growth Living,” Giorgos Kallis’s “In Defense of Degrowth,” Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson’s “Exploring Degrowth,” Jason Hickel’s “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.” The proliferation of the term is as good an indicator as any: The literature of degrowth is growing.

In 1972, the French theorist André Gorz coined the word décroissance to ask whether “no-growth — or even degrowth” in material production was necessary for “the earth’s balance,” even if it ran counter to “the survival of the capitalist system.” Gorz was writing the same year that “The Limits to Growth” was published, a report by a group of scientists warning that surges in population and economic activity would eventually outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. “The Limits to Growth” was initially met with skepticism and even ridicule. Critics pointed to humanity’s undeniably impressive record of technological innovation. As one representative economist put it, “Our predictions are firmly based on a study of the way these problems have been overcome in the past.”

And so degrowth remained on the fringes of the fringe for decades, until increasing awareness about global warming percolated into public debates in the early aughts. The realization that we hadn’t innovated our way out of our ecological predicament, along with inequalities laid bare by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a more widespread distrust of the conventional capitalist wisdom. Maybe relentless economic growth was more poison than panacea.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Reframing Narratives With Ecocriticism, With Dr Jenny Kerber

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.

What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our lives, it helps to have tools like ecocriticism at our disposal.

Join Ariel and Dr. Kerber to think through terms like “wilderness” and “nature” and “the Anthropocene”. How do we hold on to hope, despite critical engagement with the dark side of our environmental narratives? 

References:

A bit more about the WLU Land Acknowledgement

Dr Kerber’s profile at Wilfrid Laurier U

“The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon

 Elizabeth May

Kerber, Jenny. "Tracing One Warm Line: Climate Stories and Silences in Northwest Passage Tourism." Journal of Canadian Studies 55.4 (July 2022): 271-303.

Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human

David Huebert's Chemical Valley

Lord Byron's "Darkness"

Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures

[thensson]

Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism, by Kate Soper

[wantremover]

2023 was the first year i really Got Down with reading, so I want to share a chronological list of everything i finished reading this year!

- Haikyu - Haruichi Furudate - Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism - Kate Soper - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind So Nice I Read It Twice - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami - This Is Your Mind On Plants - Michael Pollan - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese - Byung-Chul Han - Teaching Critical Thinking - bell hooks - Tai Chi Chuan: The Philosophy of Yin and Yang and its Application - Douglass Lee - The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han - Hikaru no Go - Yumi Hotta - The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin (reread) - The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin (reread) - The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts - Returning The Sword To The Stone - Mark Leidner - Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind - Molly McGhee - Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones - 三体 The Three Body Problem - 刘慈欣 Cixin Liu (reread) - Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber - A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin

and about half these books changed my life!

[northwindow]

24 & 25 for the asks ! <3 hope ur all better soon !

thank you! 💛💛

did you DNF anything? why? i was in a very fiction mood this year and dropped off of a few nonfiction things. i think i'll go back to eros the bittersweet by anne carson and post-growth living by kate soper. i also started matter and desire: an erotic ecology by andreas weber and may or may not return (one of those books i was agreeing with but not learning from?)

what reading goals do you have for next year? i want to read more books that are at least a few decades old and have "lasted" in some way... not necessarily the most canonical of the classics, but things that have been beloved and meant something over time. i read one too many instantly forgettable new releases this year 😬

[beguines]

Marx's early critique of bourgeois society is humanist and romantic through and through. It is humanist in the sense that the concept of the essence of the human being occupies a central role as the basis of critique. It is romantic in that it is founded upon an idea of an original, lost and natural unity which ought to be restored. This is a form of critique based on typical romantic ideals about immediacy, naturalness and wholeness. The political project which follows from such a critique necessarily takes the form of the reconstitution of a natural order, i.e., the emancipation of human nature or the abolition of capitalism in order to allow humans to become what they are underneath their alienated existence. This kind of romanticism can be found in most forms of humanist Marxism. Lukács, for example, denounced the division of labour on the grounds that it "disrupts every organic unified process of work and life and breaks it down into its components". In his view, capitalism brings "the essence of man into conflict with his existence" and creates a "fragmented" and "deformed and crippled" human being. Stavros Tombazos claims that "Marx's revolutionary project is nothing other than that of the reconciliation of the individual with himself, who by his own initiatives must search for his own fragments, recover the lost time and return 'home,' purified from slavery thanks to a long journey through the maze of alienation". Bertell Ollman similarly accuses capitalism of reducing the human being to "a mere rump" and conceives of communism as "a kind of reunification". A contemporary Marxist humanist also formulates it as follows: "Liberation from capital requires that the proper relationship between subject and object be established". Such romantic criticisms rarely specify what it would mean to establish such a "proper" relationship. As Kate Soper puts it, quoting Marx's 1844 Manuscripts: "To be told that 'man himself should be the intermediary between men' or that 'men should relate to each other as men' is not, in fact, to be told anything specific about the form their interaction should take". John Mepham's account of the pitfalls of romantic humanism is even more to the point:

"The phrases 'man himself' and 'as people' trade on some untheorised ideal of the really human, some vision of true humanity being expressed in social life. They are functioning as metaphors in which idealised relations between individuals are illicitly mapped onto a utopian scheme of patterns of relations in general, relations in which social organisations (political organisations, institutions, collectivities of all kinds) have entirely disappeared. The disjunction between 'the human' and 'the dehumanized' as forms of social mediation, is empty of cognitive content, for the valorization of the former is based on nothing more than an implicit, essentialist individualist philosophical imperative."

Critiques of capitalism in the name of human nature rarely go beyond solemn invocations of an ideal of the truly human, and when they do they tend to depoliticise critique by conceiving the abolition of capitalism as the restoration of a natural harmony.

Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

[twinkubus]

All this is well known, and in its essentials it follows the usual course of boom and bust capitalism with its material legacy of new but long-unoccupied buildings and half-completed con- struction work. This 'junk space', found across the globe, is subject to the Alzheimers-like deterioration described by the architect, Rem Koolhaas. It is the residue of a capitalism that, according to David Harvey, 'builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time.'

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living

[heroimagination]

Kate Soper — Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say [m/ score]

[ulkaralakbarova]

A struggling young writer finds his life and work dominated by his unfaithful wife and his radical feminist mother, whose best-selling manifesto turns her into a cultural icon. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: T.S. Garp: Robin Williams Helen Holm: Mary Beth Hurt Jenny Fields: Glenn Close Roberta Muldoon: John Lithgow Mr. Fields: Hume Cronyn Mrs. Fields: Jessica Tandy The Hooker: Swoosie Kurtz Pooh: Brenda Currin John Wolfe: Peter Michael Goetz Cushie: Jenny Wright Referee: John Irving Ellen James: Amanda Plummer Woman Candidate: Bette Henritze Rachel: Katherine Borowitz Real Estate Lady: Kate McGregor-Stewart Michael Milton: Mark Soper Stew Percy: Warren Berlinger Ernie Holm: Brandon Maggart First Coach: Victor Magnotta Helicopter Pilot: Al Cerullo Stephen: Ron Frazier Marge Tallworth: Eve Gordon Pilot (uncredited): George Roy Hill Film Crew: Producer: George Roy Hill Screenplay: Steve Tesich Novel: John Irving Editor: Stephen A. Rotter Director of Photography: Miroslav Ondříček Producer: Robert Crawford Jr. Executive Producer: Patrick Kelley Casting: Marion Dougherty Production Design: Henry Bumstead Art Direction: Woods Mackintosh Set Decoration: Robert Drumheller Set Decoration: Justin Scoppa Jr. Costume Design: Ann Roth Hairstylist: Bob Grimaldi Makeup Artist: Robert Laden Movie Reviews:

[influencermagazineuk]

Kate Middleton and Prince William Issue Rare Joint Statement Over ‘Incredible Sadness’

Tom Soper Photography, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Prince William and Kate Middleton have issued a rare joint statement on social media following a tragic Spitfire crash near an RAF base. In a somber post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Prince and Princess of Wales expressed their "incredible sadness" over the accident that resulted in the death of the aircraft's pilot. The crash occurred during a Battle of Britain event on Saturday in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. The royal couple shared their heartfelt condolences through their official @KensingtonRoyal account, stating, “Incredibly sad to hear of the news this afternoon from RAF Coningsby. Our thoughts this evening are with the pilot’s loved ones, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, and the wider RAF family. W & C.” The crash happened in a field near RAF Coningsby, and authorities and first responders arrived on the scene shortly before 1:20 pm. A resident who witnessed the event described the aircraft's troubled takeoff to GB News, stating, “It was definitely a spitfire. But it sounded sluggish when it took off at about 1:20 pm. It had just taken off and we could hear it cough and splutter. It was about 100m in the air. I saw it turn to the left and flip over. We couldn't see it over the trees. There were about five to eight fire engines and the Helimed too.” A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence confirmed the tragic news, saying, “It is with great sadness that we must confirm the death of an RAF pilot in a tragic accident near RAF Coningsby today. The pilot’s family have been informed and we ask that their privacy is respected at this difficult time.” The Lincolnshire Police also released a statement, noting, “The man was the pilot and sole occupant of the aircraft. Police are not in a position to confirm his name but his next of kin have been informed. Nobody else is thought to have been injured as a result.” The police statement continued, “The incident was called into police just before 1:20 pm today (Saturday, May 25) and emergency services were immediately dispatched to the scene. Sadly, the injuries the pilot sustained were not survivable and he was declared deceased at the scene. Investigations are ongoing into the cause.” The crash has deeply affected the local community and the wider RAF family, as it occurred during a commemorative event meant to honor the historic Battle of Britain. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which was involved in the event, is known for preserving historic aircraft and performing at events to commemorate the bravery of those who fought during World War II. The loss of one of its pilots in such a tragic manner has left many in mourning. The joint statement from Prince William and Kate Middleton underscores the gravity of the incident and their support for those affected. The royal couple's message conveyed their deep empathy and shared the collective sorrow felt by many. This incident is a stark reminder of the risks faced by pilots who fly historic aircraft, often maintained meticulously to keep the memory of wartime heroes alive. As investigations continue, there will be a focus on understanding the cause of the crash to prevent such tragedies in the future. The RAF and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight will undoubtedly reflect on this loss while continuing their mission to honor the legacy of their predecessors. The outpouring of condolences from the public and notable figures highlights the profound impact of the crash. For those who witnessed the event and for the family and friends of the pilot, the grief is immeasurable. The community around RAF Coningsby, a base with a rich history of aviation and service, will be offering their support to the bereaved. As more details emerge, the investigation into the cause of the accident will be crucial in providing answers and ensuring that the legacy of the pilot is honored appropriately. The joint statement by the Prince and Princess of Wales has brought attention to the tragedy, emphasizing their role in offering solace during such difficult times. Read the full article

[probablyasocialecologist]

Some might argue that we accept the dominance of the market simply because of an innate desire constantly to work and consume more. But if that were so, the billions spent persuading us to buy would hardly be necessary. As Justin Lewis has said, ‘the growth of consumer culture has been made possible by a parallel growth in the advertising industry. The more we have, the harder the industry has to work to maintain demand.’ Many social theorists, including some who take a pretty positive view of consumerism, doubt the directness of its gratifications, and analyse it instead as compensation or substitution for other losses. They see it, in other words, as reconciling us to deprivation and alienation rather than as intrinsically satisfying (a view echoed in the less erudite recommendations of shopping as ‘retail therapy’).

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism