Critics have celebrated Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2018), for the way that it distills key ecocritical ideas that gained traction in the humanities in the 2010s. Echoing New Materialists’ insistence that we set aside subject-centered ontologies that reduce non-humans to an instrumental status, the novel endows trees with agency, even granting them the ability to speak in a language that human beings might learn to understand. This essay pushes back again...| Nonsite.org
Because even structuralists like Reuther and Charles Killingsworth shared with the Keynesians the viewpoint that interests of capital and labor were harmonizable and that economic problems were therefore fundamentally technical, the deeper political significance of the differences went unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. The effect was to obscure the systemic roots of economic inequality in American capitalism, in fact eventually to render it invisible as inequality.| Nonsite.org