Entangled Milieus

The milieu emerges from an onto-epistemological entanglement where meaning and matter, or discursive and material practices, co-constitute the shared, living environments of human subjects and more-than-human entities alike. In these entanglements differentiation is the norm, and thus conflict and tensions are unavoidable, particularly in zones in which anthropocentric action accounts for radically asymmetrical environmental transformation. The striation of landscapes through the imposition of large-scale infrastructures; the devastation of ecosystems through resource extraction; rampant sprawl at the hand of real estate industries; the exhaustion of soil quality through agro-industrial monocultures; and the pollution and contamination of entire habitats are but a few examples of the detrimental actions over the environment typical of global neoliberal capitalist interests, and their blind advance toward the dead-end of ‘progress, growth and profit’. The growing awareness of the -often irreversible- impact of these actions upon the landscape triggers a host of responses and reactions, from environmental and social struggles and resistance, to incommensurable attempts to ameliorate the damage through a discourse set in techno-deterministic ‘solutionism’, a myopic managerial approach that time and again fails in its futile pursuit of so-called ‘least resistance paths’.