Philosophy After Nature

Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn, Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786603852
• eBook ISBN: 9781786603876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

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 Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.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.

Chapter One

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.¹

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,² it has become somewhat more acceptable to speak in terms of a nature–culture continuum. The categorical separation between the non-human 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).³

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.⁴

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-aesthetico-politico 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.⁶ 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.⁷

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter One Introduction: After Nature
• Part I After Matter
• Part II After Machines
• Part III After Man
• Index
• About the Authors