This talk will focus on John Boorman’s cult 1974 film Zardoz as an exemplar of what Galluzzo calls “Critical Aquarianism”—a constellation of 1970s-era artists and thinkers who anticipate such present day phenomena as “degrowth” and Kohei Saito’s decelerationist “eco-communism.” Much of the sixties-era counterculture, like the modernist ideologies it superficially questioned, still equated liberation or freedom with endless growth conceived in quantitative terms. Both old and new lefts, for example, wanted more—from the orthodox Marxists’ liberated forces of production to unleashed appetites and unhindered individualism promoted by large swathes of the counterculture. What distinguished the disparate artists and thinkers that Galluzzo is calling “Critical Aquarian” was their focus on limits and self-limitation as key to a more substantive form of liberation. And it should be said that ecology and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis played a significant role in this line of thought, although—as this talk hopes to show in its reading of Boorman’s film and its relationship with the overpopulation panic of the late sixties and seventies—this discourse of limits was distinct from or even opposed to the technocratic neo-Malthusianism, in many ways indistinguishable from neo-colonialism, that dominated a mainstream environmental movement that too often viewed nature (and non-white peoples) as standing reserve or resources to be managed so as to efficiently maximize capitalist growth patterns.
Register here: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvfuihrjMrHNYrl7nMDTBDqd-YIv4bXbmy
Anthony Galluzzo is a writer and academic from New York, whose work focuses on degrowth utopias and a constellation of thinkers he dubs Critical Aquarians, offering an alternate route out of the current social and ecological crisis. Galluzzo’s new book Against the Vortex (Zer0 Books) is available here: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/against-vortex-zardoz-degrowth-utopias
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