The formation of the moral superiority industry: From the Communist International to garbage recycling

Abstract

In the light of the notion of genealogy coined by Michel Foucault, the article presented here raises the hypothesis that the self-government modality crystallized and promoted as the most legitimate and rational for dealing with contemporary environmental issues, as can be accompanied by the documentary Seaspiracy (2021), by Ali Tabrizi, is likely to be genealogically retraced by the analysis of the imbrication between three discursive series that go back to forms of problematization that would have nothing to do with environmental themes, namely: the problematization around the theme of the war on drugs, whose emergence took place in the late 1950s, as well as the problematization around the theme of liberal feminism and the problematization around the theme of participatory art, both from the 1960s. Therefore, a set of documentaries will be used as an empirical source. In fact, it will be a matter of suggesting that environmental diagnoses and therapies are not explained by the contact between subjects and nature, but by the history of problematizations in certain fields and social practices that are rarely close to the social debate on the environment.