Thinking Nature v. 1 /8/ - Towards a Philosophy of (Dejected) Nature : Natural Conceptualization, Eco-Aesthetics, and the Blues of Green Affect and Economy Ben Woodard /0/ - The Question of Nature Despite(or perhaps because of) the political, ideological and intellectual fervor surrounding nature and the ecological crisis more specifically, there remains little clarity in regards to the concept of nature itself and whether the designation 'nature itself 'ever had any coherency to begin with. Extending one's view to philosophy, history, and the sciences reveals only a chaotic storm of dualities, contradictions, and vaguenesses. Such a noetic mess has led to ecological theorists such as Timothy Morton to suggest that nature, at least nature we've known it, does not exist and that ecology should proceed without it; that ecology is a leaner and far more useful concept in times of environmental peril. I want to argue that while Morton's critique of the use of nature is valid, that nature, as a concept, cannot be relegated to the trash bin of history and instead requires rigorous clarification and redefinition. Most critically, the concept of nature needs to be decoupled from the anthropocentric concerns which have unfortunately warped its perceived contours. Nature, it will be argued, holds a certain realist and materialist weight (however buried in the ideological fat of new age religion, romantic novels, poetry, and nature specials) that ecology lacks (at least in academic practice if not materialist exercise). Philosophy, while purportedly having the capacity to cut through such obfuscation, has offered few texts which adequately address nature directly and throughly with four notable exceptions being Merleau-Ponty's Course Notes on Nature, Whitehead's Tarner Lectures on Nature, RG Collingwoods Ideas of Nature, and Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis. Instead of investigating these texts independently and comparatively, I wish to weave them together to form a brief history of the idea of nature, supplementing them with a cursory discussion of some philosophies which post-
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date, or otherwise fall outside of, their treatises. As an addendum to this history I will also address how nature is frequently split between between what Hadot calls the Orphic and the Promethean, between the worship of nature and its imperialist (or capitalist) exploitation, and how this split has prompted the search for a third way out. This third way however attempts to leave behind nature as a conceptualization, a move which cannot be sustained. This move, I wish to argue, is due to both a focus on the particulars of nature (in both philosophy and ecology) over any sense of totality or an over simplification of the particulars in the shadow of an obscure or transcendental entity as well as a tendency towards economizing nature for the sake of 'capitalist progress.' Furthermore, any philosophy which attempts to think nature in the wake of not only a ruinous history and inconsistent contemporary engagement, as well as the development of ecology which is, poorly grasped and intellectually separated from the discursive baggage of the ecological movement, needs to address not only the proliferation of concepts of nature but the nature of conceptualization itself. Simply put, since conceptualization is ultimately a natural phenomenon, thought is nature's attempt to think itself and therefore nature can no longer be 'out there' as a set of objects or as something formally separate from human beings; a fact which questions the numerous divides which have accompanied the history of the concept of nature. /1/ - A Brief History of the Concept of Nature The Classical view of Nature, that of the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics which was generally accepted up through the Medieval tradition, functions as a kind of inarticulate dynamism with entities such as Fate or the One working as the ontological engine. This dynamism centers on the question of a fundamental cause, or set of causes, of Aristotle's four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), or of Plato's world soul following from the demiurge. In the classical view, nature is something that humans are immersed in without nature existing as a separate being. In this sense, the 2
question of being and thinking is obscured. As Collingwood observes, mind permeates all of nature in the Greek view1 and nature was a set of interconnected things2 whether ultimately composed of substance3 or patterns and forms.4 Donald Worster argues that this Platonism carries forward in the ecological movement beginning with the work of Linnaeus whose work we'll describe below. Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle's inauguration of the modern conceptualization of nature replaced the focus on causes and teleology with that of laws. Boyle also marked the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Bacon and Boyle's formalization was an attempt at limiting overly speculative takes on nature following from the classical/scholastic/medieval tradition. Through empirical observation Bacon and Boyle attempted to rid the concept of Nature of its metaphysics replacing it with the tools of observation and the methods of rationalism. This conception is also further developed by Hume. This work necessarily began to remove humans from nature as the question of nature's intelligibility and subsequent utility became an issue. Galileo's argument that nature is written in math5 immediately begins to demphasize the dynamics of nature which are unobservabe. Nature must be tortured in order for her to reveal her secrets.6 Following from these laws Descartes and Malenbranche set up Nature as an ideal exteriority or ideal being. Descartes replaced the traditional dyad of matter and form with extension and rejected the finalism of earlier forms of nature as producing objects towards a particular end. Malenbranche's occasionalism argued that God was the causal link between objects and phenomenon. Spinoza's formulation indexes the divinity of Malenbranche whereas Leibniz's monism made use of the laws of modern science. Again, following Collingwood, the issue is how are mind and nature connected as
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R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, (Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 3. Collingwood, 30 Collingwood, 42 Collingwood, 53 Collingwood, 102 Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 35.
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Christian divinity seems to tear them apart7 despite the insistence of thinkers such as Berkely that there must be some relation.8 Perhaps, as Hadot suggests, Christianity has killed nature's divinity altogether.9 Kant's critical work which threw down the gauntlet between the empirical and rationalist philosophies, put forth a Humanist conceptualization of Nature, or of Nature as Construction. Kant's Nature functioned simultaneously as a grand noumenon (a seemingly infinite being, indexing the rationalists, and unknowable because of the limits of human thought and not infinite in itself) and as phenomenal in that it is sensed as an extension of phenomenal objects (thereby indexing the work of the empiricists). Kant's noumenal nature as several commentators and critics have pointed out, is a dead set of things and not an active or dynamic entity. Schelling's Romantic form of nature attempted to undo the formal division of nature by Kant which Schelling saw as ignoring the non-phenomenal aspects of nature (namely fields and forces). Whereas Schopenhauer saw Schelling as merely muddying the difference between Kant and Hume, Schelling was performing a Kantian critique on Kant himself. Where Kant critiqued Hume for not providing an empirical ground for the non-empirical capacity of receiving impressions, Schelling likewise critiqued Kant for being unable to provide a transcendental ground for the transcendental ideal of the subject itself.10 Hegel's nature attempts to finally put to rest the breach of mind-nature essentially results in absorption of nature into mind.11 Take the following from the Phenomenology of the Spirit: “Brain fibres and the like, when regarded as the being of Spirit, are no more than a merely hypothetical reality existing only in one's head, not the true reality which has an outer existence.12
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Collingwood, 7 Collingwood, 113 Hadot, 84 Adrian Johnston, Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, (Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 73. 11 Collingwood, 130 12 GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 210.
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Following the romantic conceptualization it becomes increasingly difficult to discern a clear conception of nature following Schelling and the other thinkers of German Idealism. The explosion of phenomenological thought following the second world war has an uneasy relation with nature, complicating Kant's humanist point that nature is predominantly an effect of ourselves. In Husserl for instance, Nature becomes a totality of objects linked by some obscure field of becoming or blanket of sense. In this sense any metaphysics of nature becomes indiscernible from a hyperbolic phenomenological hijacking of metaphysics, where the subject, flesh, etc become the world. This increasingly vague metaphysical framing of nature coincided with the rise of Scientific Naturalism, or the view that Nature consists purely of observable phenomenon, could be seen as furthering the project of the empiricists and rationalists by eliminating the necessity of metaphysical scaffolding in favor of scientific methodology. Nature, as a contemporary concept, is either elided as unnecessary in the face of scientific progress (the progeny of empiricism and naturalism), divine while simultaneously actual (a combination of the worst aspects of the ideal and romantic) or always-already constructed by the human subject without any natural or real core (a mix of the worst aspects of the ideal and critical stances). A strand of philosophy often thought to bypass these formulations is the process philosophies of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead. While these thinkers focus on processes subsequently linking their philosophies back to the dynamism found in the classical conception of nature, they are divided from one another on major points and, as I will argue, do not grasp nature in its processive functioning. The reasons for this are the various anthropocentric groundings they utilize such as Bergson's emphasis on sense and affect or thinking over nature in terms of process, Deleuze's virtualization of immanence (over actual fields) and Whitehead's eternal objects all which subordinate the processes of nature to the thought (or more accurately experience) of the subject. Furthermore, Bergson and Deleuze's valorization of the concept of life allows for an evasion of the mind-nature 5
question which so troubled all thinkers of nature prior.13 In all aforementioned contemporary conceptualizations of nature, as well as the process philosophies mentioned above, the following issues remain: 1 - Thought remains fundamentally unnatural and must be guaranteed through the transcendence of the subject (phenomenology), of thought (naturalism, Bergson), of the virtual (Deleuze), or of the spiritual/eternal (Whitehead) or from the otherwise formal separation of nature and the source of thought which thinks it (most ecological and cultural discussions on nature). 2 - Nature is largely determined by its products (Extensive being, Bodies, Objects, empirical data, Laws) and not by its productivity or metaphysical capacity. 3 - As a result of these two points nature remains a correlate of thought in Quentin Meillassoux's terms, structured by and according to human subjects. The statement which serves as the refutation of these limitations as well as a call for the rehabilitation of the philosophy of nature is the following: Nature is simultaneously a productivity and an infinite set of products responsible for the generation and capability of human subjects and their capacity to think. This assertion heavily indexes the work of Schelling as well as the dynamism of the classical conceptualization of nature. My aim here is to outline a concept of nature-in-itself that does justice to contemporary science and as well as the formal insistence of metaphysics. Such a formulation of nature-in-itself, however (as will later become clear) opens a space for a concept of nature-for-us which is fundamentally uneasy and horrifying. In order to articulate the phenomenological queasiness resulting from a radically productive nature without any transcendental guarantee or distance we will take detours into both affect and aesthetics. For now it will suffice to determine how Schelling's concept of nature provides the best articulation of nature and nature's relation to thought. But before this it is important to analyze what is fast becoming the dominant mode 13 Collingwood, 139
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of thinking nature, that of ecology. /2/ - Ecology's Nature As was suggested earlier, ecology functions as a reference point for both an interdisciplinary science as well as a theory of nature or the environment in the humanities and popular culture. As a science ecology is a multifaceted enterprise torn between biological and physical models as well as between intensive studies of specific life forms and attempts to construct systematic analyses of nature, ecology, the environment, or some other term for the generative mechanisms of the natural world. Beyond this ecology is further divided in terms of objective (or positivist views of science) versus subjective or social constructivist science.14 The term ecology itself is used to mean ontological and identitarian connectivity as well as biological and metaphysical holism and/or reductionism as well as meaning a world constructed of processes and a non-anthrocentric world.15 The initial definition of ecology from the work of Ernst Haeckle was simply that of the interconnectivity of existence16 but what exactly is being connected in terms of either process or thing, as well as the overlaying hierarchies of these processes and things, further complicates ecology's coherence. In the Philosophy of Ecology the early formalizations of ecology, it is argued, were focused on biological communities as superorganisms following the research of Clements17 a set of theories existing today, at least in spirit, in Lovelock's Gaia theory.18 In his text Nature's Economy Donald Worster suggests that ecological thinking begins with Carl Linnaeus and Gilbert White.19 Linnaeus was a 17th century natural scientist who wrote extensively on oeconomy or the management of the natural world.20 Worster argues that Linnaeus' view of nature is 14 David R Keller and Frank B Golley “Introduction: Ecology as a Science of Synthesis” in The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. David R Keller and Frank B. Golley, (University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 1. 15 “Introduction,”p. 2-3 16 “Introduction,” p. 9 17 David R Keller and Frank B Golley “Entities and Process in Ecology” in The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. David R Keller and Frank B. Golley, (University of Georgia Press, 2000) p. 24 18 Ibid, p. 28 19 Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2 20 Natures Economy, 37
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distinctively Arcadian (or Orphic in Hadot's sense) and opposed the rise of the mechanical nature of Newton, Descartes, and Gallileo.21 Linnaeus' views on a harmonious organismic nature was reiterated throughout the romantic position and is particularly evident in the work of Thoreau, Emerson, Blake, and other transcendental idealists.22 These organic views were highly influential on Clements and the ecologists who followed in his footsteps. Ecology following the poor applicability of Clements' theories (particularly in the wake of the Dust Bowl) took a more focused approach in the 1950s23 in line with more and more materialistic approaches in ecology, particularly in the work of Henry Gleason. Opposed to Clements' romanticism, Gleason was influenced by Karl Popper24 and believed that nature could only be studied in isolated patches where there was succession but without any necessary positive progression. That is, while succession was an important ecological mechanism, its existence did not presuppose any large scale harmony within nature and between species. Arthur Tansley championed the concept of ecosystem25 attempting to complicate and combine systematic and individualistic approaches to ecology, individualistic approaches developed by Gleason.26 The influence of physics on ecology in the first half of the twentieth century is particularly evident in the work of the Odum brothers as ecology was thought in terms of energy flows and circuits.27 These individualistic as well as flow tactics, Worster argues, agreed too readily with the industrialization of nature, changing ecology from a protective discipline to an economizing one.28 However, the development of theories of emergence resurrected the paradigm of organismic
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Nature's Economy, 39 Nature's Economy, 100 Nature's Economy, 28 David R Keller and Frank B Golley “Rationalism and Empiricism� in The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. David R Keller and Frank B. Golley, (University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 1. Nature's Economy, 301 Nature's Economy, 239 Nature's Economy, 302 Nature's Economy, 304
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philosophies in the thoughts of ecologists such as William Morton Wheeler.29 These more organismic theories of ecology where further pushed out by the mathematical and material grounding of ecology in the 1960s through the application of thermodynamics, bio-economics and other ecological sciences.30 Again, following Worster's history, the romantic/organismic tendencies of ecology, while struggling to find scientific ground, gained ethical traction in the post-nuclear age of ecology31 popularized by works such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring32 – an ethical move culminating in Lovelock's aforementioned Gaia.33 The final dialectical swing of Worster's history is that long term stability in nature cannot be guaranteed (contra-Gaia) given the rise of probability34 and chaos theories35 but, regardless, the dream of a harmonious nature refuses to fade away. Daniel Simberloff echoes much of Worster's history in his brief piece “A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism” in which he describes the progression of ecological systems as a set of Kuhnian Paradigm shifts which struggled, and continue to struggle, against the legacy of metaphysics which, for Simberloff, is something equal to the specter of high level ideality.36 More broadly, the development of ecology has been an ongoing battle (similar to that in philosophy) between more mechanist and more organicist modes of thought, a battle punctuated by the incorporation of other strands of science (such as palentology, geography, biogeography, chaos theory etc.) into ecology as well as a questioning of the scientific use of the two modes (mechanism and organicism) and whether they can be dismissed as mere metaphysics even in their most reputedly scientific forms – that of emergence and chaos. The assumption that either organism or mechanism can 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
Nature's Economy, 320-323 Nature's Economy, 332 Nature's Economy, 340 Nature's Economy, 347-349 Nature's Economy, 378 Nature's Economy, 401 Nature's Economy, 405 Daniel Simberloff, “A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism” in The Philosophy of Ecology, ed. David R Keller and Frank B. Golley, (University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 80.
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be dismissed and that ecology can become pure science is akin to claiming that one can operate postideologically, which as Zizek has pointed out, is an ideological move. To move beyond metaphysics is a metaphysical move despite the wailing of fevered Derrideans. In its use in the humanities, ecology is split into various camps two of which Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu identify as replacing a nature that exists only as an ideological construct (following theorists such as Timothy Morton) and nature as a knowable thing which must be cataloged and argued for (following such theorists as John Bellamy Foster). Canavan et all see this as an impasse (one which echoes Hadot's Orphic and Promethean split) which can only be overcome by ecocritique (not to be confused with an early form of ecocriticism dominate in the 1990s).37 What exactly comprises the methodological contours of such ecocritique is unclear other than it is a form of cultural studies focused on the relationship between human culture and the environment. As a particularly strong form of ecocritique Morton's work argues for the erasure of nature at large arguing that no such thing (outside of ideological discourse) has ever existed. However while Morton's advocation of the importance of the ecological thought (as a deep sense of connectivity) is paramount, how this thought is utilized as well as its own historical contingency is, as we have seen, unclear. In other words, ecocritique throws out the baby of nature with the bath water of nature writing, subsuming ideas of nature under what these ideas point to. Foster's form of ecocritique on the other hand, downplays the conceptual necessity of nature in favor of statistical analyses of the parts of nature. These schools of ecocritique mirror the split between Clements' and Gleason's scientific ecologies, as conceptual connectivity versus non-conceptual individuality. Ecocritique is, along with several other contemporary approaches to nature and the ecological crisis more specifically, a third way, a means of operating in the middle ground in order to circumvent the splits and contradictions which we have been diagnosing. These forms of thirdness, as we will see, 37 Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Introduction� in Polygraph 22 (Duke University Press, 2010), ed Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, p. 13, 20.
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reinscribe the problematics they attempt to move beyond.
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/3/ - Third Paths, Third Ways or The Problem of Thought over Nature The possibility of a third way of thinking nature immediately assumes a combination of the dominate modes of worship and workshop resulting in a need for a respect for nature combined with a utilization of nature. Ostensibly, this seems a perfectly reasonable approach for any ecologically sustainable future. This third strategy of maintenance (situated between worship and workshop) still maintains a formal separation of human beings and the natural world which in turn proposes the denaturalization of the concept. Maintenance functions as a dialectical synthesis of the Orphic and the Promethean tendencies in nature. Traditionally maintenance has been associated with nature conservation and figures such as Olmstead. The strategy of maintenance assumes a degree of maintainability of the natural world, that humans have the access and knowledge to produce, repair, and re situate natural and unnatural objects (or manufactured objects which unpredictably alter the known natural) which can effectively affect natural and unnatural objects, the interrelations between them, as well as nature beyond its simplification as a collection of objects, that is, as a set of forces. This complexity also ignores whether or not such problems are reversible and the degree to which nature is knowable, and whether this knowability is a negative or a positive condition. This knowable vs unknowable nature is found in the acceptance of chaos theory into twentieth century ecology outlined by Worster. The chaos and complexity of ecology is aptly appropriated in Morton's The Ecological Thought, a complexity which questions the gap between the knower and the known and the nature in between. In the text Morton points out that the ecological thought is the viral thought that everything is connected38 This connectedness is a decent into mutation and self destruction39 in which the knower is lost in the mesh of nature. Humans attempt to separate themselves in the guise of the beautiful soul, where the
38 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 1-2 39 The Ecological Thought, p. 59-60
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thinking subject ideally distances itself from the monstrosity of nature.40 But this distanciation is impossible as lifeforms are made of other lifeforms41 which form a mesh which is simultaneously too big and too small to grasp.42 Maintenance as a third-way then cannot uncritically combine acradia and imperialism, the Orphic and the Promethean, the paradise and the workshop but has to take them both apart given the inexorable co-implication of nature's forces and entities, including the thought and the thinker of nature. Instead of a substantial third, of the third as a combination of the orphic and promethean (or worship and workshop) a third approach must be the mutual break down of the other two ways of conceptualizing nature. I want to argue that an Erebian concept of nature (or a dark romantic or dark vitalistic or darkly ecological) conceptualization of nature is the realist concept of nature most useful to ecological projects. Donald Worster argues that to maintain the gloom of nature is untenable, that a dark nature is tied to the imperialist view of nature, that that which is dark must be destroyed.43 Yet this doesn't seem to be the case at all for the dark romantics or for other theorists of nature. As Worster writes in regards to a decadent interest in nature: “the enthusiasts of fear were in their own peculiar way seeking a reconciliation between man and nature. But it was a bond of violence they found; to be one with the world, for them, was to embrace all the tumult, horror, and darkness in it, to commit oneself to struggle and defiance”44 But, if we have argued, we are already part of nature, nature cannot be struggled against or destroyed in imperialist strife, but is something in which we are always already dissolving into. It is initially difficult to imagine an ecological project in which nature is a threat or a misery engine. Yet this is always a nature-for-us, that is nature is dark for us and not in-itself. Clearly there are 40 The Ecological Thought, p. 66 41 Timothy Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, The Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul” in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, vol. VI, (Falmouth: Urbanomic, p. 197. 42 “Thinking Ecology,” p. 198. 43 Paul Wapner, Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2010), p. 14, 90. 44 Nature's Economy, p. 125
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aspects of nature which are observable (phenomenal nature) and those which are not (noumenal or nature as forces and powers). The awareness of this very division, and that nature in itself is a philosophical mess, an onto-epistemological indistinction, implies a darkness which is a unknowability, an uncertainity, and a negativity. Schopenhauer's view of nature as constitutively divided between will and representation is instrumental here. Whereas Whitehead maintains an odd separation of thought and nature45 Schopenhauer's philosophy of nature maintains the problematic of thought as well as nature as fundamentally processural – nature as a matrix of sensible objects is only one strata of nature. That is, instead of a division between humans and nature, there is a division between phenomenal nature (or nature as it is observable to sense - not just human thinking) and nature as formative and processional. Thought itself can be split in the same fashion as there is thought as biochemical process and thought as conscious experience. Thinking nature becomes nature thinking itself through us - a process upset by our thinking our thinking, by putting nature 'over there' through affect and aesthetics – tactics to be discussed below. The problem, especially evident in continental philosophy is that thought thinks itself yet posits it is thinking reality 'out there' such is the central argument of Laruelle's non-philosophy. For Laruelle, philosophy collapses immanence and transcendence46 or the churning of matter and materialism with the work of thought in the form of philosophical decision. Any third way, or third path out of the arcadian and the imperial needs to avoid any collapse of thought and materiality either under the aegis of thought (thereby overstating human privilege) or under the aegis of matter (in that all of nature can be reduced to pure materialism without regard for the biases and without reasonable consideration of the difference between conceptualization and reality while still recognizing that thought is a natural process. The purportedly nature-friendly-philosophy of 45 Alfred NorthWhitehead, The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College November 1919, (Ecolibrary, 2006) p. 2 46 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) p. 134
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Gilles Deleuze is particularly guilty of the collapse of thought and materiality. As Brassier points out in his critique of Deleuze in Nihil Unbound, Deleuze gives priority to a field of experience47 a field which is a synthesis of ideality and sensibility, where the transcendental work of the faculties correlate “intensive thinking and noumenal nature�48 thereby atomizing consciousness as such in a pseudo pan-psychist move.49 For Deleuze, everything thinks. Deleuze's transcendental empiricism requires the pre-thinkability of all existence thereby causing all difference and novelty to be held under the aegis of thinking. The idea of nature as history in ecology and in philosophy performs this collapse in a particularly insidious manner. Collingwood's history of the idea of nature ends with this point, arguing that the model of Hegelian spirit is the dominant mode of thinking nature as a form of (humanized) process. Where Deleuze's thinkability endlessly shrinks the gap between generative nature and the thinking which attempts to grasp it, the Hegelian maneuver historicizes this thinking elevating the gap between thinking and being into the engine of ontology. In other words, the for-us of spiritualized thought or mentalized nature becomes absolutized so that any nature is a nature of our own activities – where a kind of conservation renders nature an only partially colonized sphere separate from us only in space-time, nature becomes subsumed in human activity or a history to come. Nature is subsumed under thinking either as psychical novelty, historical process, or as a socalled materialism, which as we have seen in Laruelle, functions as merely the thinkable fodder of thought itself. If thought can think itself as natural, as coming from nature, then this thought (perhaps the ecological thought of interconnectivity) requires unthinkability since thought cannot be ontologically privileged above other components of the mesh, of the murky web of life and non-life. 47 Nihil Unbound, p. 190 48 Nihil Unbound, p. 191 49 Nihil Unbound, p. 195-196
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Yet, at the same time, the material differences between things cannot be flattened without annihilating the usefulness of differentiation in philosophy and the sciences. To properly think nature the philosophically outmoded division of conceptualization and materiality, or between the phenomenal and the noumenal must be properly resurrected. But, in the case of nature, both the affective and the aesthetic cloud any hope for conceptual clarity. Against Beautiful Soul Syndrome which Morton argues wants to dictate the appropriate aesthetic relation between humans and nature50, we need to begin the downward spiral of dark ecology, or dark vitalism or dark romanticism which cannot amputate the beautiful soul since such a surgery would repeat the distanciation central to the beautiful soul.51 But a dark or obscure proximity cannot simply ignore the divide of the noumenal and the phenomenal, as this divide continues to operate in the environmental crisis and the divide has scientific and philosophical utility. A different form of aesthetics is required to comprehend a nature which is dissolved yet interconnected, thinkable yet fundamentally unknowable. /4/ - Aesthetic Problems Cape Wind is a project off the Nantucket store to create a massive wind power plant by installing a hundred some turbines which would generate enough power for almost half a million homes. While approved and now underway it was opposed, and continues to be opposed, by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Of the groups various reasons for opposing the construction (threat to birds, fisherman, land seizure etc) the oddest is the threat of Aesthetic Pollution – a combination of sound, light, and noise disturbances, that will ruin the naturalness of the sound. These disturbances of course are only compensating for safety issues which the Alliance themselves say are necessary. Ostensibly, the opposition to the Cape Wind project is that the windmills will be an eyesore to the wealthy landowners of Martha's Vineyard. 50 “Thinking Ecology,” p. 221 51 “Thinking Ecology,” p. 222
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The strangeness of an aesthetic concern overriding the need to produce environmentally sustainable power to protect the current and future products of nature is abundantly clear. That natureas-view (or nature-for-us) overrides the physical necessity of nature-in-itself appears as a complete absurdity yet given the already mentioned nature this can hardly be a surprise. Both the dream of harmony and the dream of mastery rely on an aesthetics of nature which is either Edenic-pastoral or demonic-predatory. These aesthetic paradigms are primarily ideal constructions (as perhaps are all systems of aesthetics) which for the former gloss over the violence of nature whereas the latter widens the gap between human and nature to put nature in a place to victimize humanity. As is clear in Morton's Ecology without Nature, nature is an entity anchored more in the writing of nature than in any experience or knowledge of nature in the real. Morton discusses ecomimesis as a form of nature writing which wants to go beyond the aesthetic in its invocation of an outside52 and is both excursus and exemplum invoking a poetics of ambiance.53 Or, in other words, ecomimesis, as the common aesthetic engagement with nature, uses illustrative anecdote to render a surrender to the world of nature around the author. Ecomimesis is a non-aesthetic or self denying aesthetic as it attempts to make an authentic experience without the distance of usual aesthetic objects.54 In a somewhat similar fashion, Whitehead identifies a recurring problem within the philosophy of nature as over emphasis on theories of substance without appropriate articulation of how substances are perceived and/or perceivable.55 This problem leads Whitehead to collapse, as does Deleuze, the sensed and sense into one realm of experience, one stream of events. Following Steven Shaviro, Whitehead places aesthetics at the center of philosophy as it is aesthetic experience, or radical empiricism, which circumvents the categorizing of rationality and explain the events which make up 52 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 30. 53 Ecology without Nature, p. 33 54 Ecology without Nature, p. 35 55 The Concept of Nature, p. 9
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existence. Yet, as Morton has showed, any sense of direct or unmediated aesthetics should be met with caution. While Morton addressing writing and not the experience of being in nature itself, clearly any sort of accessible immediacy between thought and thinker is questionable. While the world 'out there' can affect thinking entities without rationalization56 this does not abnegate the difference between becoming and representation. How this relates to affect will be discussed below but for now what we are interested in is the purportedly immediacy of the aesthetic particularly in regards to nature. Shaviro's account of Whitehead points out that his rejection of hylomorphism or matter as to-be formed by sense57 is integral to Whitehead's denouncement of epistemology on the whole.58 While potentialities have grains, how one differentiates between the aesthetic event that potentiality spurs in a particular thinker from the systematic affect of a particular aesthetic influencing that thinker (whether unconscious or conscious) is unclear.59 That is, to return to nature, a stroll in the woods may often elicit a feeling of calm but whether this calm is our own raw experience of patching together these events of organisms into some fluidity we place ourselves in or whether such a calm is, in a moment of autointuition, the effect of years of associating edenic values with edenic appearances, becomes difficult to parse. The immediate eventfulness of sense experience must be rejected as an aesthetic experience as it must be a tincture of sense data, auto- or unconscious reflection/intuition and the tangible histories of both small and large scale aesthetic paradigms. In a move borrowing from both Schopenhauer (and oddly Schelling) the immediacy of the body-as-object does not denote a seamless event-stream of sensible becoming but a plethora of disjunctions. In other words, the experience of being embodied entities in the world demonstrates how 56 57 58 59
Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics, (MIT Press, 2009), p. 57 Without Criteria, 53 Without Criteria, 30 Without Criteria, 54
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while our bodies seem to give us immediate impressions of that which is around us, this immediacy becomes crossed with not only both conscious and unconscious reflectivity, but also displays how the connection between our bodies' senses and our minds, are far from agreeable. In his text Cold World Domic Fox opens with: “Sadness does something to the way we see the world. In the experience of deep sadness, the world itself seems altered in some way: coloured by sadness, or disfigured by it. Rather than living inside us, as our normal passions do, our sadness seems to envelop everything” (2) this “cosmos in suspended animation” is a world “voided of both human warmth and metaphysical comfort. This cold world is the world made strange, a world that has ceased to be the 'life-world' in which we are usually immersed and instead stands before us in a kind of lopsided objectivity” (4) and in regards the aesthetic “the cold world is that world in which matter is no longer given form [...] becoming a ease ground of disconnected phenomena” in which “something becomes visible that was formerly indiscernible: the 'inorganic life'of anonymous natural processes.”60 In Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett invokes both affect and an inorganic twist of Morton's ecomimesis: “The project, then, is to theorize a kind of geoaffect or material vitality, a theory born of a methodological commitment to avoid anthrocentrism and biocentrism.”61 For Bennett, affect can go beyond itself in the possibility of impersonal affect, as a form of ethic or politics.62 She writes: “Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing [...] I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to passive 'intractability' [...] When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableu that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me.”63 A darkened or cold aesthetics allows the vertigo of ecological interconnectedness to become thinkable as not-what-it is for us as if such connectivity was open to thought without being frozen would about to a privileging of thought over ecology. Whereas Whitehead acknowledges that 60 61 62 63
Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria, (Zer0 Books, 2009), p. 70 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2009), p. 61 Vibrant Matter, p. xi Vibrant Matter, p. 4-5
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representation slows down and cuts up reality, both his and Deleuze's potentialities unknowingly privilege thought by ignoring the problem of access, rerouting thinking through a epistemologically flawless articulation of sense. Process philosophies, which are arguably the dominant mode of thinking nature (along with phenomenology and Heidegger's system of thought) collapse materiality and thinking in a way that does not adequately account for the source or limitations of thinking. To return to the Cape Wind project the aforementioned dejection is useful to differentiate between actual connectivity and aesthetic connectivity. My assertion here is that the windmills on the water are not ugly but appear out of place aesthetically as they do not adhere to commonly accepted barriers of the natural and of pleasant nature, or nature as landscape or more simply 'the view'. If a dejected aesthetics breaks apart the world than what cannot be broken apart, or collected in that aesthetic (nature as a set of generative processes) becomes far easier to recognize. The windmills can be taken as that which vouchsafes the earth as an energetic system of nature which provides stability allowing various forms of life to continue their existence. Any environmental aesthetic must be inherently self destructive in this way as any immediacy of sense cannot appropriately apprehend nature as a generative mechanism. As Morton notes: “Melancholy has a 'sickly' quality of excessive devotion, excessive fidelity to the darkness of the present moment. Yet isn't this excessive fidelity exactly what we need right now? Dark ecology oozes through despair [...]Depression is the most accurate way of experiencing the current ecological disaster.�64 Dejection however, does not guarantee a more sensible thinking of nature, as the less systematizable effect of affect must be addressed as it is easily co-opted and fed back into the nature for us over nature in itself. /5/ - Post-Nature Affect or Avatar and its Discontents James Cameron's recent film Avatar hyperbolically stages interspecies war between the Orphic 64 The Ecological Thought, 95
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and the Promethean tendencies in nature, between greedy ultra-capitalist human beings and the nature loving Gaia worshiping Na'vi, regurgitating commonplace environmental wherewithal (read affect) with slightly twisted aesthetics reconceptualized in a techno-futuristic dream. In the film humans devastate the ecology of the Na'vi homeworld Pandora in order to acquire a precious element. The Na'vi embody the gross stereotype of the noble savage but updated so that their connection to nature is not merely holistic but biological; they can literally tap into other living creatures (and the planet itself) through a spinal cord like apparatus hanging from the back of their heads. Ideologically, the film makes a brilliant move as it not only dredges up the history of a kind of native-porn (Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, etc.) but connects this animism to the hope for a meaningful online life – thereby fusing the primitive life world and the convenient connectivity of quotidian technological life – where human technology gives us the ability to exist as an avatar. Na'vi bio-tech (though it is dressed down simply as their natural-being) allows perfect interface with other forms of life as well as resurrection through an arboresent trans-migration of their consciousness. That is, the film promises that we can acquire a connectivity that seems to erase itself allowing technological progression to return to a pretechnological unity with nature which brings the comforting aspect of religion along with it as well. This is mirrored by the main character Jake Sully who inhabits an avatar of a Na'vi only to eventually, through his experiences with them, have his conscious transported into an actual Na'vi body. After the film's release reports began to spread of Avatar Blues – of a depression resulting from realizing that the world outside of the film (our world), and nature in particular, is lack luster. From the site Avatar Forums a thread was started called “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” in which fans discussed their feelings of feeling disconnected. The weirdness of Avatar blues is a case of affect being strangely codified into sadness. Affect, as Brian Massumi describes it is a kind of emotional intensity prior to being translated into a thinkable emotion as well as that which remains after emotional processing. Thinking back to both Whitehead 21
and Deleuze, affect is only first sensed and then thought with thinking coloring or disseminating the affect throughout our cognitive ecology, an ecology which nature writing, such as Avatar, attempts to close to self-analysis. Avatar functions, like the odd resistance to Cape Wind, as an affective (rather than aesthetic) override of nature-in-itself. The strange post-Avatar depression is not connected to the degradation of nature, or nature as we've imagined it out in the world, but an ideal nature invented for the sake of digital cinema. Na'vi nature is not an idealization of existent nature but a fabricated nature meant to solidify the lost sense of Gaia or an all together alien nature in which we wish to live – Avatar suggests the possibility of living in a past that never existed via a future all too speculative. Through its affectively-aesthetic mode, Avatar reproduces a feeling of being in nature, which is a throughly alien or Pandorian nature, which redoubles the lostness of Edenic-Orphic nature, as it melancholically suggests that such nature is always-already lost yet simultaneously suggests, in an almost decidedly un-political way, the possibility of a futuristic Orphic relation to nature, a nature elsewhere that never was but may be. Nature-for-us (after the immediate experience of nature as representation) appears externally as aesthetic and internally as affect with the sublime (the beautiful horror of it all) functioning as a short circuit between the two. Whereas Deleuze and Whitehead seem to grant rationality over the dominion of sensed thought and thought as sense, the messiness of nature and the affective and aesthetic digestion of it, overwhelm the thinking of nature. Nature is always already going through us in terms of energy expenditure and ideas as real patterns as external yet accessible to us. Aesthetic and affective relations are less about projecting and more like a filtering process. That is, the aesthetic and affective are productions of nature which are turned in on themselves. The natural world, as a cold world, is as inorganic as it is organic, and as much or more will than representation. Against the (albeit complex) Orphic form of nature in Avatar, the problem is not any lack of 22
connection with nature but too much of a connection, a connection that is the subject of a fetishistic disavowal. We are horrifyingly over-connected, we are part of a self mutilating universe65, yet we act as though we stand apart, as if our creations are fundamentally different from those of a nature over there. The question is whether ecology is up to the task of breaking the concept of nature from the pincers of Orpheus and Prometheus as well as from under the weight of management, management which too easily fuels capital and the industrialization of nature. As Worster notes, the new ecology of the 1940s was focused towards making nature a profitable entity66 a tendency alive and well in the greening of corporate advertising where, like Avatar's complexification of the Orphic, green capitalism attempts to make the imperialist or workshop tendency of thinking nature appear as its opposite, as the cheap romanticizations of the Orphic. To combat this a dehumanizing of the concept of the economic is required.
In the opening pages of The Accursed Share Bataille begins with an implicitly ecological parable: “When it is necessary to change an automobile tire, open an abcess or plow a vineyard, it is easy to manage a quite limited operation. The elements on which the action is brought to bear are not completely isolated from the rest of the world, but it is possible to act on them as if they were [...] But things are different when we consider a substantial economic activity such as the production of automobiles”67 and furthermore “Man's disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way. Humanity exploits given material resources, but by restricting them as it does to a resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters (a resolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal), it assigns to the forces it employs an end which they cannot have”68 Bataille's point is an incredibly important but simple one – it is only that our thinking too quickly shelves force within 65 66 67 68
This image I borrow from Thomas Ligotti's discussion of Julius Bahnsen in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Nature's Economy, 289-291 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol 1., (Zone Books, 1991) p. 19 Accursed Share, 21
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idealization. To strike against the economic model once again Bataille writes: “Economic science merely generalizes the isolated situation; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, that of economic man.”69 Economy and management becomes simultaneously naturalized (this is just what is done) and idealized as an in itself under the flag of business). Economics appears as simultaneously rational and yet purely chaotic, as something reliable and useful but also completely contingent and ultimately disastrous.70 Yet, unlike nature, economics, or at least its advent, can be traced back to a particular set of entities, those heaps of gray matter responsible for the collectivity of all of human thought. Bataille's point is worth raising again, the material force of economy (of nature) is subsumed under human work. The greedy destructive forces of Avatar are willing to destroy an entire ecosystem in order to get an element that is valuable, but its value is determined only by high price, by an ideal and arbitrary mark of value. The arbitrary forces of nature become the arbitrary actions and thoughts of human managers or arche-idealists whose failings are traced not to the limits of knowledge in the face of the real-as-it is but the limits of those particular thinkers or the models amidst the economic system. Capitalism greens itself only to the extent that it pushes value into newly exploitable ecologies of thought. /6/ - Conclusion or Towards a Dejected Nature Finally ecological concepts are useful to incorporate into a leaner philosophy of nature towards the development of what Jane Bennett has called a “topography of becoming.” Such an energetic topology is necessary to avoid wading into a philosophy-of-becoming, an ontology of anything goes. Becoming must be architecturally flushed out, leveled, with epistemological and ontological contours and the limits of both (or the possibility of limits) both proximal and constitutive. Furthermore, becoming requires definition in relation other ontologies not rooted in being. As a small beginning I want to propose a difference between forces, processes and powers. Forces are, 69 Accursed Share, 23 70 For an extensive philosophical engagement with the contingency of financial markets see Elie Ayache's The Blank Swan
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to the best of our knowledge, fundamentally ungrounded, they seem to come from themselves in the universe. Processes are like forces but are more localizable, they produce effects on objects and other kinds of processes with objects themselves being processes either as the retardation of processes or convergence or conflict of multiple forces. Lastly, powers belong to definite singularities, and can be easily reproduced by human beings via technology. Power is possessed and exercised but not are not determining. Beyond a better articulation of becoming, a theory of relations is also required. Ecology cannot be only everything is connected or it is no more useful than all is becoming – there are soldifications, stratifications, and other limits and individuations. At bottom there is only an onto-epistemological indistinction where not only are the limits of being and knowing are indeterminate but where one bleeds into the other is blurred. Immanence, as the flows of energy and subsequent objectifications or interruptions of those flows, is what makes up processes and materialities. From these processes and materialities we have the possibility of sense which can be viewed as the most basic component of life, the possibility of movement, intentionality, and so forth. Beyond this we have extilligence, the reflectivity of sense to export its abilities into tools and other forms of intellectual export. What has traditional been taken to be transcendence in philosophical systems I want to appropriate as the shift between the nested hierarchies named above. Furthermore, these modes of existence are articulated within each of those stratifications differently. Here, as Anthony Paul Smith has suggested, ecology (or in Morton's term the ecological thought) needs to infect thinking from all edges. The philosopher faced with the ecological thought, and with the formal limits of philosophy presented by Laruelle, is most likely met with a sense of melancholy, as the complexity of the world becomes equally horrifying, daunting, confusing and so forth. Putting nature 'over there' elides such issues but, as we have seen, creates legions of more damaging ones. 25
Melancholy is a formalized affect, an affect which is the inexact intellection of a particular process, and aesthetics is another process of objectification, another layer on affect, another attempt to return to the raw but a return that must be recognized when it actually means to point towards the raw, the real churning of nature and when it means only to circle back to the idea of there being something outside of the idea. Transcendence in ecological thinking is not the useless fancies of the mind but the the possibility of actuality, actuality as new forms of thinking, new processes, new materializations, and perhaps even new regimes of sense, irrupting from the onto-epistemological indistinction of existence. Here we can redefine the problems of nature previously outlined: 1 – Thought is a natural power which seems unnatural because it is divided between non-being or ideality and objectification resulting from both objectifications and processes at 'lower levels' which cannot be articulated by either. That is, processes not completely thinkable form the brain which generates the power of thought a process which attempts to capture (intellectually) processes and objects in relation to one another. As we've seen, interconnectivity is not something to be proven, but something which needs to be adequately 'spaced out'. 2 - Nature must be thought primarily in terms of its productivity, as that which makes forces, processes, powers and objectifications possible and multiplies processes and objects between them. In totality, nature is a productivity which is self-destructive, a chaotic mess which cannot be seen as harmonious, stable or meaningful, thought is the failed attempt at nature trying to think itself (Schelling). 3 - As a result of these points nature escapes thought in the last instance leaving thought, or at least those that would privilege the exploration of thought, melancholic. Ecology and dejection are not incompatible nor is disenchantment incompatible with philosophy. That science has throughly disenchanted the world is preposterous, science and philosophy porosotize the world, atomize it, dissolve it, and reconstruct but hardly disenchant it – as long as 26
enchantment is taken to be in the things (forces, processes, powers) themselves and not dependent on the emanating brow of the philosopher. Things are dispositional and the constituent nature of universe, the nature of nature, is one of ultimately ungrounded forces, processes, and powers. If nature is dejected, or dark, or some other form of teeming malignant blackness, it is so for-us and not in itself, as it does not care (it does not have the capacity to care and if it did, why would it for the human race, this insignificance)? We would like to have done with nature but we have only started to understand what it means to be a part of it.
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