With Nature

Warwick Mules

Description

With Nature provides new ways to think about our relationship with nature in today’s technologically mediated culture. Warwick Mules makes original connections with German critical philosophy and French poststructuralism in order to examine the effects of technology on our interactions with the natural world. In so doing, the author proposes a new way of thinking about the eco-self in terms of a careful sharing of the world with both human and non-human beings. With Nature ultimately argues for a poetics of everyday life that affirms the place of the human-nature relation as a creative and productive site for ecological self-renewal and redirection.

Introduction: Wanted – A Nature Philosophy 

Part I: The Things of Nature 

Chapter 1: Nature Otherwise 

Chapter 2: Saying Nature

Part II: Nature Philosophy 

Chapter 3: Schelling after Kant 

Chapter 4: Unground 

Chapter 5: Positive Freedom 

Chapter 6: Virtual Nature

Part III: Poetics 

Chapter 7: Heidegger’s Thing 

Chapter 8: Poetics: Benjamin and Celan

Part IV: Technology 

Chapter 9: Benjamin: Collapsing Nature 

Chapter 10: Nancy: Renaturing and Bio Art 

Conclusion: Towards Ecopoetics 

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Performing Arts
• Cultural studies
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783202928
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Cover image photograph: Warwick Mules
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Copy-editing: MPS Technologies
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-573-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-291-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-292-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
 
 
To Helen
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Wanted – A Nature Philosophy
Part I: The Things of Nature
Chapter 1: Nature Otherwise
Chapter 2: Saying Nature
Part II: Nature Philosophy
Chapter 3: Schelling after Kant
Chapter 4: Unground
Chapter 5: Positive Freedom
Chapter 6: Virtual Nature
Part III: Poetics
Chapter 7: Heidegger’s Thing
Chapter 8: Poetics: Benjamin and Celan
Part IV: Technology
Chapter 9: Benjamin: Collapsing Nature
Chapter 10: Nancy: Renaturing and Bio Art
Conclusion: Towards Ecopoetics
References
Notes
Index
Preface
The fundamental threat facing humans today is our inability to live in a non-exploitative relation to the natural world. Our environments are currently unsustainable and nature has become absorbed into a simulated world of technological process. But the threat conceals a profound difficulty: the inability to think about our relation to nature other than in terms of technologically produced ‘nature’ already present to us as something self-evident; something waiting there for us to exploit, enjoy, manage and protect. Nature ‘for us’ is our nature, the nature we possess according to subjective needs, wants and desires. However, the technologies employed to conquer the earth are now so thoroughly entwined in our way of life, we risk becoming enslaved by them. In seeking to find a more sustainable, less exploitative way of living with nature, we risk becoming further entwined in our own techne – our ‘way of being’ through making and producing things – unable to think outside it. One answer is to find a counter- techne that leads us out of our current relation with technologically produced nature such that we can think otherwise. This book is a response to the challenge to think of the human-nature relation ‘otherwise’, to set us on another path, another way of being with nature.
The book undertakes this task by opening up a line of critical thinking beginning with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s critique of reason, exposing a gap in reason subsequently addressed by post-Kantian philosophy as a means of grounding thought in the movement of nature itself ( poiesis ). In particular, I examine the work of the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling whose nature philosophy sets the scene for thinking with nature within the limits of critique. By following Schelling’s insights through to more recent attempts to ground thought in poiesis (Heidegger, Benjamin, Nancy), my aim is to think with nature without surrendering the rigour of critique.
Thinking with nature exposes technology to its own limits and reveals a counter- techne turning otherwise within it. A name for this counter- techne is art. The work of the artwork is to open technology to possibilities unthinkable from the technology itself. Thinking with nature is to think from the stance taken by the artwork both with and against technology so that it is turned otherwise, leading to the uncertain ground of a radical openness. Standing on this uncertain ground allows us to rethink the human-nature relation in the hope of another way of being with nature. By following the turning of art out of technology, we may be able to see another, more just, non-exploitative way of being with nature.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge a number of people who have helped and encouraged me in my endeavours with this book. In particular I would like to express my gratitude to Helen Miller for her constant support, ideas and suggestions throughout the writing of the book. I would also like to thank Rod Giblett for his encouragement as well as the challenge his own work set for me in developing the argument of this book, and Tony Thwaites for helping me gain a better grasp of how to think the ‘that’ of things. Others who have helped in my journey with this book include David Baker in our conversations about the philosophy of science, Grayson Cooke and Phil Roe for many discussions related to theory and visual arts, Nick Mansfield and Nicole Anderson for our lively discussions on Derrida and Heidegger. I would also like to thank Colin Shingleton who generously shared his thoughts on Heidegger and Schelling with me. I am also grateful for the support and collegiality of many others, including Emily Potter, Stuart Cooke, Joseph Carew, Gene Flenady, Jane Stadler, Gabriella Blasi, Martin Rice, George Petelin, Elizabeth Stephens, Greg Hainge, John Ryan, Juha Tolonen and Carole Mules.
Sections of Chapter 7 of this book were published in ‘Heidegger, Nature Philosophy and Art as Poietic Event’ in Transformations , no. 21, 2012.
Introduction
Wanted – A Nature Philosophy
I
The title of this book With Nature signifies a hope that critical thinking in the humanities and arts can retain its long-forgotten connection with nature. Today, speaking and writing about nature requires a detour through the subject who speaks, so that nature is pushed to the background as something other, while the speaking itself takes centre stage as the outward sign of a reflection designed to gain knowledge of nature: to gaze upon it, control it and live in it, or even to say that it does not exist. Nature becomes ‘other’ to its rationalization in the saying. This book confronts the limits of this saying, and opens it to other ways in which nature might be said. My aim is to retrace a way of saying the ‘being with’ of nature buried in the writings on nature by the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling and following through to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Nancy. Schelling’s long-neglected nature philosophy ( Naturphilosophie ) provides a way of thinking that promises to think with nature, not against it. A critique that sets out to think with nature suspends the detour through the subject and draws nature back into the critique. The task of critique is then shifted from defining and defending the subject’s right to speak about nature, towards thinking with nature as a possibility and what it might bring forth and enable.
The book counters a tendency in ecocritical writing to forget nature. 1 For instance, in his book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics , Timothy Morton argues that ecocritics should stop using the word ‘nature’: ‘The main theme of the book is […] that the very idea of “nature” which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an “ecological” state of human society. Strange as it may sound, the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art’ (Morton 2007, p. 1). What is Morton’s point? He is saying that by invoking nature as an all-encompassing ‘Thing over There that surrounds and sustains us’ (p. 1), we are inventing an elusive phantom that always ‘gives us the slip’ (p. 2). This elusiveness of nature is something that happens in the literary writings about nature itself, which he then proposes to explore: ‘ Ecology without Nature takes nature out of the equation by exploring the ways in which literary writing tries to conjure it up. We discover how nature always slips out of reach in the very act of grasping it’ (p. 19). Nature is not an untouched domain ‘in itself’, but the other of nature writing itself. Morton’s mode of critique is thus negative. 2 It produces nature as the negation of writing and the thinking subject in whose name such writing takes place. On this score, Morton’s position falls in line with a conventional position in both the humanities and the sciences that, since Kant, limits critique to what it can know about what it critiques, and consequently negates what it critiques in coming to know about it.
In the humanities and science disciplines, nature is understood as the negation of the human. Nature is that which the human is not. As such, human thinking cannot be said to access nature directly, but only indirectly, either through representations or through special kinds of aesthetic experiences or apodictic intuitions. The consequences of this kind of saying of nature have been especially limiting for the arts and humanities, as it places them at a disadvantage with respect to the sciences in articulating accounts of nature. While the sciences develop positive representations of nature through the facility of apodictic truth supported by mathematical certainty, the arts and humanities confine themselves to self-reflections on nature forever running up against their own limits.
For the humanities, nature can only be addressed as a subjective construct or inner experience, and not as an objectively verifiable thing or event. Unlike the sciences, which secure knowledge of nature and natural things through methods of objectification and verification, the humanities employ ad hoc approaches and scholarly interpretations applied in localized sites and texts, producing speculative knowledge about the things of nature with no grip in the world of objective facts. Unlike scientific knowledge that universalizes from the particular, approaches of the arts and humanities tend