Philosophy After Nature - Hardcover

Rosi Braidotti; Rick Dolphijn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786603853 ISBN 13: 9781786603852

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017

Synopsis

The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.

Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.

About this title

About the Author

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.Her most recent books are : Posthuman Knowledge (Polity, 2019), The Posthuman Glossary (coedited with M Hlavajova, Bloomsbury 2018), Posthuman Ecologies (coedited with S. Bignall, Rowman &Littlefield 2019) and Conflicting Humanities (coedited with P Gilroy, Bloomsbury 2016). Amy K.S. Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Shue Yan University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Philosophy After Nature

By Rosi Braidotti

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-385-2

Contents

1 Introduction: After Nature Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, 1, 
PART I: AFTER MATTER, 11, 
2 Information and Thinking Michel Serres, 13, 
3 'Die Natur ist nur einmal da' [Nature Is There Only Once] Françoise Balibar, 21, 
4 Generic Mediality: On the Role of Ciphers and Vicarious Symbols in an Extended Sense of Code-based 'Alphabeticity' Vera Bühlmann, 31, 
5 The Resonance of Disparates: Spinoza, Damasio, Deleuze and the Ecology of Form Rick Dolphijn, 55, 
PART II: AFTER MACHINES, 71, 
6 Media Entangled Phenomenology Mark B. N. Hansen, 73, 
7 On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism David Roden, 99, 
8 Circuits of Desire: Cybernetics and the Post-natural According to Lyotard and Stiegler Ashley Woodward, 121, 
9 History as an Ecological Niche: Beyond Benjamin's Nature Damiano Roberi, 137, 
10 Nature, Technology and Conscious Evolution: A Post-human Constructive Philosophy Debashish Banerji, 151, 
PART III: AFTER MAN, 177, 
11 Being without Life: On the Trace of Organic Chauvinism with Derrida and DeLanda Richard Iveson, 179, 
12 Returning to Text: Deconstructive Paradigms and Posthumanism Danielle Sands, 195, 
13 Primary and Secondary Nature: The Role of Indeterminacy in Spinoza and Bartleby Christopher Thomas, 209, 
Index, 223, 
About the Authors, 227, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

After Nature

Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn

MODERNITY AND NATURE

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' – yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

The quote above is the opening paragraph of an early text from Friedrich Nietzsche. It is a text that has been interpreted in many different ways throughout the past century. Yet, as we are rereading it in light of the crises that mark today's world, its take on (post)humanity, on human 'knowledge' and above all its take on how human knowledge positions (and repositions) nature, strikes a startling relevant note. This text from 1873 provides a perfect framework for unfolding the different analyses presented in this book. Our volume deals with the contemporary state of discussions about nature in philosophy and the humanities. More specifically it addresses our collective dis/ in/ability, in/capability and ir/responsibility in relation to this issue.

We come after nature in so many ways. First, because 'we', the dwellers of the Anthropocene, are facing the disastrous consequences of our reckless exploitation of the planetary resources. Second, we come after nature in understanding the role played by our capitalist culture and market economy in both unsettling the nature-culture divide and in complicating it further through all-pervasive technological mediation. Let us develop these points further.

In the framework of the shared anxiety about the future of the human species, which is now officially recognized as living in the era of the Anthropocene, it has become somewhat more acceptable to speak in terms of a nature-culture continuum. The categorical separation between the nonhuman habitat and human deeds has been challenged by a combination of elements: the climate change on the one hand and the limitations of economic globalization on the other. We can safely state that all the contributors to this volume foreground the impact of capitalism as one of the main factors in the current crisis, which has been ironically called the 'Capitalocene' (Jason W. Moore), the 'Chthulucene' and the 'Plantationocene' (Donna Haraway) and the 'Anthrobscene' (Jussi Parikka).

This volume adopts a materialist approach, which assumes that the actual motor of the historical development of modernity, with its emphasis on progress through science and technology (and resting on the Enlightenment ethos of emancipation through reason), is capitalism itself. The logic of advanced capitalism that we want to defend in this volume is drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's pertinent analyses of capitalism as schizophrenia. Extremely simple at some level, this system can be defined as a never-ending search for ever-growing profit. This axiom is so evident that its loyal believers assimilate it to human nature, thereby elevating greed and self-interest to the height of an evolutionary human trait. We follow the critical Spinozism of Deleuze and Guattari in two parallel ways: We question the possessive individualism hypothesis and its aggressive view of evolution and then propose to replace it with a monistic ontology that supports a cooperative vision of human relationality and its evolutionary capacity.

The profit motive is the unquestionable axiom of capitalism. Traversing the territorial order that stratified the earth in affiliative circles, in fixed hierarchical regimes, the capitalist motor has deterritorialized these patterns for more than two centuries now – decoded them rigorously. It did so not according to a rational monetary logic based on trade and commodities but according to the irrational flows of capital as a desiring machine.

In order to secure the flows of capital (i.e. in order to minimalize the resistance against these flows), the project of modernity makes use of the simplest dualisms, often absolutizing ancient presuppositions and hierarchies. This dualistic device opposes male to female, white to black and the West to the rest. It is important to note that in the end, for capitalism, it is not the actual content of the terms that matters as much as their sustained opposition. Capitalism is the negative of society, of culture, of any kind of social formation. Or as Deleuze put it in one of his lectures:

Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities. If we admit this, what does this represent: the capitalist machine, it is literally demented. A social machine that functions on the basis of decoded, deterritorialized flows, once again, it is not that societies did not have any idea of this; they had the idea in the form of panic, they acted to prevent this – it was the overturning of all the social codes known up to that point.

In other words, capitalism is not interested in any one specific, let alone 'dominant', code; it only works by decoding, which means that it does not come with any specific form of knowledge. Rather, it practices a serial dis/ re-organization of information in order to secure the flows of capital. The multiple racisms and the sexisms and all other dualisms find their basis in what we can call a 'culturalism', an organization of the world that more and more alienates itself from nature, which it constructs as its extreme limit. This social constructivist method, however, begs the question of grasping the shifting relationship between nature and culture, which is currently reshaped by the flows of deterritorialization of advanced capitalism. The transcendent force needed for the capitalist machine to keep on producing rests on the systemic undoing of the ties that bind the clever animal – Anthropos – to nature. This disconnection allows for the undoing of the territorial, planetary as well as social ties that have enabled life in the first place.

This 'undoing' of the bonds between human life and nature postulated rational consciousness as the flight into transcendence, projecting the burden of physical materiality – and consequently the natural world order – unto the bodies of the 'others' of the European subjects. These sexualized, racialized and non-human 'others' have paid a heavy price, in both material and symbolic terms, for their supposed association with the natural order. The closer to nature, the further from social and legal rights, from the cultural and social entitlements and from the future that 'the clever animal' had in mind. And this is actually what Nietzsche himself was noticing when he discussed 'the problem of the actor' (in The Gay Science)5: He mentions Jews and women (which were, along with 'natives', the 'others' of the nineteenth-century discourse) in particular, as people obliged to act, to play a social role, to adapt themselves to a 'truth' that was never theirs.

Even the great emancipatory projects that emerge from the interstices of modernity postulate human freedom as the emancipation from our collective dependence upon a natural order. Long before Nietzsche, in the eighteenth century and in the aftermath of the French revolution, both Wollstonecraft and Toussaint Louverture embraced the Enlightenment project as the possibility of a general human liberation from servitude, oppression and dependency. They severely critiqued the orders that build upon a dismissal of nature (moving away from the allegedly inferior nature of women towards the abstract technicities of culture). This uniformizing ideal of progress, as it moved the western world away from nature, blinded us to the immanence of life. It also alienated us from the different futures that were not in line with the Enlightenment ideals. It is these alternative future scenarios that are becoming more feasible and necessary in the era of the Anthropocene, and which are emerging as new paths of becoming.

With capitalism as its motor and nature as its extreme limit, modernity has introduced a highly segregated non-cohesive and schizoid society that acts according to the flows of capital. Modernity has by now realized much of the future it had anticipated, including a massive ecological crisis that may have revealed itself only recently but is definitely here to stay. The financial inequalities of globalization since 2008, notably the crisis that hit Wall Street (and the rest of the world), also increase the disenchantment with the project of modernity as does the necro-political governmentality of our terror-infested times. When Félix Guattari published his Three Ecologies in 1989, he foresaw integrated world capitalism, the post-media age, the decline of social cohesion and companionship. He argued forcefully that such a situation demanded a rethinking of what he called ecosophy: an ethico-aestheticopolitico challenge to Enlightenment philosophy as a whole. Guattari encourages us to rethink modernism as a whole in order to understand the many crisis that had been announcing themselves for so long. With similar visionary claims as Nietzsche, Guattari foresees the interweaving of the convulsive social and political crises that, by now, have made Donald Trump the forty-fifth president of the United States:

More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think 'transversally'. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by 'degenerate' images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology, Donald Trump and his ilk – another form of algae – are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents, and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.

As stated above: Traversing the territorial order that stratified the earth in affiliative circles, in fixed hierarchical regimes, the capitalist motor has deterritorialized these patterns for more than two centuries now – decoded them rigorously. It did so not according to money and commodities but according to the flows of capital.

BEYOND DUALISM

At a deeper conceptual level, therefore, 'we' come after nature in understanding the limitations of dualism as both a principle of political economy and as a system of thought that for centuries has dichotomized the relationship between mind and body, nature and culture, human life (bios) and non-human life (zoe).

As the careful readers of the history of philosophy know, however, the awareness – both cognitive and moral – of the continuity between the poles of these false dichotomies has been emphasized before. Insights and explicit warnings about the nature-culture continuum can be found back at the dawn of western modernity, in another year of turbulent transition. They are best represented in the impressive corpus of Frederich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings brilliantly bring together the timely and the untimely when it comes to the relation that we have with the earth. Contrary to the dominant philosophers in Western tradition (like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant), Nietzsche never considered knowledge to be our ability to understand everything that surrounds us. Nietzsche did not think in terms of mind versus matter, nor did he subscribe to any of the dualisms that define modernity up until today. But he did see how the 'modernist' humanism, implicit in the opposition of mind versus matter, not only dominated our thinking (especially since the early nineteenth century), but actively gave form to our world, realizing its own gospels by alienating our ideas from the world that surrounds us.

For Nietzsche, then, knowledge is about the organization of information, and this is by all means a territorial organization that organizes the face of the earth and the people along with it. For Nietzsche, knowledge equals administration, and it is something very different from thinking and wisdom. Knowledge is about building up of consensus and, as such, it mendaciously distorts the way we think about otherness, about the earth and, in the end, about 'life'. Nietzsche's doubled reading of 'knowledge' is spot on. It proves that even at the turn of the last century, at a time marked by the greatest successes of the modernist project and its technological apparatus, a time in which the dark sides of progress did not yet show its devastating effects on geology, one did not have to be blind to the consequences of our reckless belief in this progress.

Nietzsche shows us that it was possible to see, from the very beginning, that the speeding-up of the capitalist machines will alienate us from the earth and lock us up in our territories far away from the soils to which we, in the end, always have to return. This is the project which today, in many ways, urgently needs rethinking. Now, more than ever, we need a philosophy that is after nature, after how we have been struggling with this concept in the history of thought, how we need to rethink it now that we have come to realize that our previous philosophies of nature so blatantly failed. We need a philosophy that is able to read the undercurrents in thought, in the earth, giving rise to another earth – the earth on the other side of thought.

Rereading the general critique on humanity (human knowledge) that Nietzsche expresses, and keeping in mind that he claimed to write for a new earth and a future people, it is tempting to read his ideas as if directed at the peoples living in our days. As if we – living on an earth that has been suffering more than enough from these mendacious ideas more than a century later – would have understood the devastating consequences of dualist thinking by now. The very serious warnings that Nietzsche gives the reader are still poorly understood by the master narratives of our time. Perhaps the situation is even far more serious than that; perhaps the many crises that rule the world today (ecological, financial, and political) proves that we have grown blind to the consequences that these dualisms had, for us, for our thinking, for technology and for the earth.

The pertinent question is, then, this: How is this 'knowledge' that we have called modernity capable of continuously realizing itself? How come its rigid dualisms keep disturbing the earth and all of the relations in which we have to live our lives? The answer to this question is as simple as it is haunting: It is because of capitalism.

Nietzsche's tragic joy in both asserting the flaws of western modernity and pointing to brand new paths in thinking resonates with the contributions in this volume. First and foremost among them is the work of Michel Serres, who stresses that it is time we start accepting this new truth – that we exist after nature and that this condition, far from being a crisis, opens up new perspectives for critical thinking. We need to ask ourselves, 'How did we inevitably end up here?' Serres brilliantly summarizes this as follows:

From reading a thousand history books, we also naively believe that the past behavior of the Roman people continuously clamoring for panem et circenses, bread and games, was the result of their decadence – or at least its manifestation. Not at all: it was the cause. To believe that a society can solely live on bread and games, the economy, spectacles, consumption, banks and television, as we do today, is such a fundamental misunderstanding of any collectivity's real functioning, that this exclusive and erroneous choice will simply hurl it to its demise, as we saw in Rome.

Being so caught up in the systems of consumption, and thus unable to see the vast desertification induced by the capitalist machineries for the last two centuries, one wonders whether this clever animal has not vacated the stage for some time. Maybe the exacerbated sense of subjectivity and worldliness that capitalism continues to sell is just like one of those bright stars that we see glittering in the sky but that in reality had ceased to exist long ago.

the bond that connects us to the world, the one that binds the time passing and flowing to the weather outside, the bond that relates the social sciences to the sciences of the universe, history to geography, law to nature, politics to physics, the bond that allows our language to communicate with mute, passive, obscure things – things that, because of our excesses, are recovering voice, presence, activity, light. We can no longer neglect this bond.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786603853
• ISBN 13: 9781786603852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 236