Ecology has been tainted by belief in an alleged wisdom of Nature. We see this ideology, above all, represented in the film Avatar. Nature, we are told, is harmonious and is governed by negative feedback loops. Where positive feedback loops refer to some process spinning out of control as in the case of the capitalistic pursuit of surplus-value that always pursues excess, negative feedback loops are governed by self-correcting activities that always seek harmony and balance. Like the thermostat on an air conditioner that turns on the AC whenever the temperature gets too high and shuts off whenever it gets too low, Nature, we say, is homeostatic, seeking a particular balance. This constant pursuit of balance is perhaps cruel, killing off some individual entities so that others might live, but it is a balance nonetheless.
As depicted in Avatar, especially in the theme of the sacred tree, nature is thus a sort of divine Wisdom. There is, we are told, this Wisdom to Nature that always balances things out, returning them to order. And, of course, it is not difficult to detect the neo-liberal ideology of Capitalism at work in this thought. Within neo-liberalism we are not to interfere with markets because markets will always right themselves, being the homeostatic or negative feedback mechanisms that they are. So too when we speak of self-organizing systems. There is a Wisdom to the crowd that necessarily rights itself if left alone. At this point, the narrative becomes predictable. If systems don’t right themselves, then this is because of the hubris of humans that intervene in the Natural ™ dynamics of systems, pushing them out of kilter. We attribute a divine Wisdom to these systems that is corrupted by human intervention, thereby speaking as if humans are something other or outside these systems, corrupting them from without. Just as the Nazi speaks of the Jews as a corrupting outside or alien invader of society that, were they eradicated, would allow society to achieve the organic community that is natural to it, we speak of Nature as this wisdom beset by a parasite that need only to be eradicated to harmoniously balance itself.
read on!
Yet, in a Derridean fashion, we must seek the conditions under which Nature is susceptible to such contamination. After all, must not Nature be susceptible to contamination in order to suffer these positive feedback loops? Must there already be something within Nature itself that allows it to run out of kilter in this way? Where has this homeostatic Nature ever existed? Need I cite gamma ray bursts that fry, no doubt, planets pervaded with life? Or what of plagues or periods of high volcanic activity that played such an important role in destroying pre-cambrian life? Or what again, of plagues of locusts or species that manage to get the upper hand, wiping out all sorts of other species? Where has there ever been this Wisdom of Nature that regulates things and that is only beset upon from without. No doubt, at this very moment, there are planets with rich ecosystems being devoured by black holes. And indeed, there are galaxies colliding, destroying the delicate balance of solar systems where life is dependent on being a certain distance from their stars. Their are even rogue planets that travel their aleatory journey throughout galaxies, destroying gravational balances of solar systems that harbor life.
The story of bright ecology is always the same, sad story with us humans: the story of a Providence, as formally articulated in Leibniz’s thesis of the best of all possible worlds, that watches over being and organizes it in the best of all possible ways. If we could only see, as Leibniz argues in The Discourse of Metaphysics, the complete painting, we would see that what appears to be chaos and horror is in fact beautiful order. We seek to inscribe normativity in the fabric of being and trust in a providence of Nature. Meanwhile gamma ray bursts fry planets teaming with life and asteroids pound the earth.
The Wilderness is not a bright ecology, but a black ecology. It is not an ecology that traffics narratives about the special Wisdom of Nature, in a ridiculous belief in the homeostatic essence of Nature, but an ecology that recognizes only relation. That relationality includes trues, distances from the sun, the moon, but also plastics, institutions, groups, the architecture of buildings, cane toads that have migrated to Australia, iPhones, and all the rest. There is no Heideggerian piety about the river prior to the electricity generating damn here. There is only an exploration of relations where humans are treated as being amongst beings, not sovereigns of beings. As Michael puts it,
The sort of ‘wilderness thinking’ I support is not simply based on metaphors but evokes and enacts the literal and empirical sense of the term. Our planet is a vast ecological niche with wild (untamable) processes and entities. And as we emerge from this generative matrix of material-energetic (ecological) potencies we find ourselves thrown into a dark and tangled reality. This sometime obscure, sometimes illuminated field of possibilities (forces and affordances) is literally a wilderness full of objects, flows, agencies, complexes and differential powers. And we are literally animals coping and adapting to these ‘forces’ through whatever means available. We are, as it were, necessary explorers in the wilderness of being. That is to say, being as such – as the totality of distributed beings and the possibility spaces between them – is fundamentally ecological.
The Wilderness is not over there but is what we dwell in. Sometimes a bad grain harvest kicks off the French Revolution. And clearly, for anything that we do, there are all sorts of aleatory results that are unexpected. Indeed, these results are unexpected not simply because of they produce effects that we didn’t expect– as in the cinematic version of I Am Legend –but also because we ourselves are transformed and must adapt to the technologies and cultural institutions we create. “Man” is an empty square or moving target without essence as a result of his/her own productions.
At the heart of black ecology is the idea of Enlightenment. Kant said that Enlightenment consisted in humans rising above their self-imposed immaturity. Part of that immaturity lies in learning how to think for ourselves and no longer relying on the authority of figures such as the Church, Marx, or Adorno. Yet another part of that immaturity lies in our crypto-idealist fantasies where we believe in a divinity of Nature that always acts in the wisest of ways. With black ecology we begin to recognize that our normative identities do not reside in Nature itself, but are active decisions we ourselves make. Like Angel’s character in Angel Heart we come to recognize the norms that we ourselves have legislated, as well as our own culpability in the state of affairs we face. We no longer believe in a Providence of Nature just as we no longer believe in a Providence of Capitalistic markets, but come to recognize our own culpability and freedom. We recognize films like Avatar as the insidious deep ecological fantasies that they are. No one is calling the shots and there’s nothing inherently nice about the wilderness.
Larval Subjects . 
June 9, 2011 at 6:21 am
That’s my kind of black!
June 9, 2011 at 11:42 am
If you haven’t already seen it, you might be interested in Adam Curtis’ new documentary series, which looks at systems theory and the idea of balance in relation to markets and ecosystems. I think his analysis is problematic, but it’s certainly worth watching.
Episode 1, on neoliberalism: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011k45f/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_Love_and_Power/
Episode 2, on ecology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011rbws/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_The_Use_and_Abuse_of_Vegetational_Concepts/
June 9, 2011 at 1:42 pm
I can’t help but detect a kind of nihilism here. Or, let me ask a question: if emerging from our self-imposed immaturity (as to the homeostatic nature of Nature, Capital, etc.) means renouncing our ideas of Providence, does that mean that we also renounce efforts to regulate and correct what is clearly going wrong and swinging violently out of balance? (No.) If lack of Providence is clearly recognized, isn’t it up to us to balance things to the greatest extent possible, for the most of us possible? (Yes and no.) Doesn’t it shift the responsibility to US as conscious beings to create a world where “authentic” relations are made possible, even if not always harmonious? (Yes.) If any species is capable of this, it seems to be “ours.” And ours is the only one who can discuss it (due to technologies, languages, etc.)
I’m always afraid that the insistent anti-anthropological view does itself more harm than good. I think many of us keep wanting to say: “yeah, I get it.” It feels like you are fighting a strawman. Alas, I don’t expect I will convince you to lighten up with it. But don’t we have to admit, at least, that no beetle or stone can read said insistence, or comprehend it, but that only we can? Ultimately, it’s hard for me to see how insisting on it this way doesn’t in the end rebound back to “us” (I don’t say “us humans,” but just “us” (I agree we are an empty place or moving target)). I also fail to see how the ontological responsibility that dark ecology implies doesn’t fall squarely into our hands, into our community of hands– not to the exclusion of other beings, but to the extent that OUR community must embrace or make room for other beings, ourselves included. It becomes OUR work, our ant-hill while allowing for other anthills, if you will. But part of that allowing-other-anthills, and I think the major part, would comprise “focusing” on our anthill, our sand moving skills and strategies.
Can you imagine an eagle going around incessantly saying to other eagles, “Look guys, it isn’t just us here, there are rats and humans and lakes and chilling winds too! It isn’t always pretty out there!” I don’t think so. But you can imagine an eagle making a nest for its young, teaching it by example how to hunt and fly, following the migration patterns, etc. If the point is that there is no species-specific endeavors worth going after, isn’t this nihilism? Then we would have reduced ourselves to a species smart enough to recognize itself in its ugliness and yet dumb enough to think its only answer to its ugliness is to devalue itself, to cautiously situated it in the web of wild being, etc.
So my point is two-fold. I’m wary that the idea of OUR community gets lost in all our devaluing of the “human.” I’m probably just totally misapplying the theory here. But the second point is this: how can you ever say, even in your most blue-faced insistence on saying we are just beings amongst beings, and not the sovereign rulers of being– how can you ever admit that insisting on this isn’t ultimately for our sake, that we are the ones that hear this [English speakers, well-versed or not], and no other species? This “our,” I know, includes and must include all beings: we say it not only for our species, of course. But we— whatever we are, the ones who can read this, the ones who are attracted and repulsed most of all by one another, who send letters, who think, etc.–we are the ones who say it. I’m curious how that “we” (of the ones who can articulate “we” as such) makes its way into this anti-anthropological theory.
I apologize for the long comment and my rehashings. I don’t know how else to speak sometimes. My best to you (all)…
June 9, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Sigh fragilekeys. No, pointing out there’s no providence in nature does not mean we shouldn’t intervene. The very fact that there’s no providence entails that we should intervene. This should have been entirely clear from the final paragraph.
June 9, 2011 at 3:14 pm
I think black/dark ecology is precisely the opposite of nihilism, if only because it moves us to be explorers rather than ‘masters’, open-ended thinkers rather that slaves to our own mythic constructions (i.e., ‘Nature’ ideology). As Levi says, dark ecology gives Enlightenment thinking a much deeper force and resonance. Whereas if everything was illuminated there would be nothing to learn or become – there would be a lack of meaning-full-ness. Dark ecology, then, is the antithesis of a more pernicious ‘bright nihilism’.
June 9, 2011 at 3:27 pm
fragilekeys,
I can’t imagine a world where eagles aren’t eagle-centric. The point of considering the inherent value of other beings beyond the human is to widen our awareness, as opposed to narrowly ignoring human concerns. What we are after here is a post-humanism as opposed to a non-humanism or anti-humanism.
There’s plenty of room for honoring humanity, and for taking up specifically human projects, but i would strongly argue that we can only truly ever do so adaptively, or intelligently when we have a wider appreciation for the distributed force and complexity of things.
June 9, 2011 at 5:00 pm
@fragilekeys–As regards the the loss of community due to the “devaluing” of the “human” it strikes me that the very opposite was the case and point of the post–it is precisely in recognizing the human species as just one-among-many that allows its notion as a species to emerge. I think here of tribal/kin relations. The injunction of the father figure when devoid of any outside other tribe, for instance, becomes a terrifying thing. But it’s that precisely in this dissonance between selves/tribes, between “my” people (or ego) and “their’s” (or other), that a notion of “mineness” emerges–and not just in the Levinasian moral sense but in the phenomenal sense of what-this-is that I am in. Recognizing the otherness of the other (strangeness of the stranger) is not devaluing to the self but a liberation of it.
June 9, 2011 at 6:03 pm
I haven’t been following your posts recently so I’m probably missing something, but still I’m surprised, happily so in fact, to find you characterising ‘black’ ecology as that which would ‘only recognise relation’. To me this seems to entail or at least imply a departure from the object of object-orientated ontology, if not the letter. Though at an ontological level relations are extraneous to objects, in so far as we are interpolated into an ethical or perhaps de-ontological situation of existing in and amongst the unravelling of these relations, such nodes become an epistemological priority.
Is ecology then the reality, and hence the relationality, of the human as itself a special kind of object? No need to prefix any post- I don’t think, as this persistent process of re-adaptation is what we should have known all along. Similarly I’m not so fond of the ‘black’, too close to a kind of slick branding for my tastes. Hasn’t an overcoming of a fallacious idea of nature (and indeed culture) always been nascent within ecology, ever since Darwin? But beyond the quibbles, I’m most excited about the recuperation of an ethico-political project emerging from the encounter between Speculative-Realism and ecology. Elsewhere, but somehow in a complimentary fashion, I’ve noted a burgeoning awareness of the ecological promise of Marx’s thought (whatever its limitations), and I believe this is a trend worth nurturing. Jon Goodbun article in a recent edition of Field is a good account of this trend: http://www.field-journal.org/
Without taking issue with your characterisation of at least one version of nature, the notion of an ecologically invested cybernetics, even first-order cybernetics, is far from being reducible to a universalisation of negative feedback. Even Norbert Wiener was not really so crass, though I think he did dangerously overestimate the human capacity to manage order. Ross Ashby, meanwhile, who actually devised a homeostatic machine, had a much more sophisticated and critically nuanced notion of stability than is sometimes recognised. For Ashby, (who ultimately downplayed the role of feedback in self-organising systems) stability was in effect always dynamic. What becomes increasingly important in Ashby’s work is the part played by the environment, or better Umwelt, as the embodiment of a black-box. The latter, in effect, marking and masking the withdrawal of a world in excess of the system which it hosts.
This leads me to my last question, which is admittedly far from fully-formed as yet. In my limited understanding black ecology might well reject the idea of the environment, as simply a revised version of nature. Is this the case? And if so how does such an approach frame the un-knowable object against which it must measure its own unfolding?
June 9, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Food for thought:
June 9, 2011 at 7:20 pm
By the way, Inquisition live in the vicinity of Prusik Peak: http://www.rockrepublik.net/data/artists/148/x1/47.jpg
June 9, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Matt,
Interesting comments. OOO has never rejected relations (Graham’s Guerilla Metaphysics is even devoted to a discussion of relations), but rather rejects the thesis that substances are their relations. Substances can always break with relations and shift in and out of relations. I use the term “ecology” as that branch of OOO that investigates the differences that relations make in assemblages.
As for the concept of “environment”, I do not endorse the thesis that environments are something pre-given or already there. Rather systems (objects), in my view, constitute their own environment. Here I’m deeply influenced by the autopoietic systems theory of Maturana, Varela, and especially Niklas Luhmann. Chapter four of The Democracy of Objects is devoted to this issue. Consequently, for me, environment is a key concept but it is not a fixed and pre-given container as is often argued.
June 9, 2011 at 7:41 pm
with the sort of all-encompassing wilderness you posit here is there not room for something like the God that emerges out of the primordial apeiron of Schelling’s “dark ground” for the self-birth of God? in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom Schelling delineates a God which is thoroughly grounded in the dark cosmological chaos of the universe but which, as Heidegger points out, is not of this ground. the God is the divine mind of Order, Clarity, and Enlightenment, yet He/She/It emerged from the “whirling, wave-wound sea” of dark existence
cannot in this same manner humanity be seen as that which has emerged from the darkness of nature in the wilderness, still in that wilderness but not of it? as we slowly disentangle ourselves from the heteronomous forces of existence that surround us, we more closely approximate freedom. yet human society is itself dominated by a force no less volatile and voracious than an earthquake or swirling typhoon. the idea of a self-regulating, harmonious marketplace in which all checks are balanced in the end is surely a fiction, but so is the idea of the paternal state, looking out for its citizens and rescuing them from the predatory and unrelenting market by imposing regulations, higher graduated income taxes, and state welfare programs. in either case we are still bound to the heteronomous logic of the society of exchange
only when society is subjected to the self-conscious control and guidance of its forces of production, democratically participatory, and freed from aeons of ignorance and superstition can human agency in the autonomous, Kantian sense exist. so long as we remain vulnerable to the periodic catastrophes of nature or the inevitable crises of capitalism we are trapped within the kingdom of necessity, and cannot attain to the kingdom of freedom
June 9, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Thanks for this post. I’ll add my voice to those asking ‘why black’?
I’d also say that the fact that anything is at all is due to a fundamental imbalance: see the recent Radiolab show on Symmetry, which is largely given over to the lack of symmetry in faces, in atoms, in matter itself (eg there’s slightly more matter than antimatter: that’s why there’s anything). With that in mind, there’s no need to speak only in terms of gamma rays destroying things. Puppies are here too because of asymmetry.
For the development of the idea of a ‘balance’ of nature in the 13th century, see Joel Kaye’s essay in the anthology Engaging with Nature (eds Hanawalt and Kiser)
June 9, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Hi Karl,
Why black? I guess it’s the residual punk in me. I find that popular discussions of ecology and environmentalism tend to have a sort of bright and verdant tone that attributes a divine wisdom to nature. I’m trying to do two things: on the one hand, I’m trying to argue against this notion that nature is harmonic and balanced such that humans are the only perturbing force in nature. We’re one perturbing force among many. Second, I’m trying to “de-green” ecology, so as to move it away from the idea that the ecological pertains only to green and brown “natural” things. In my view, ecology studies not simply the green and brown, but relational networks of all sorts, whether human or otherwise. In this regard, Marx was a profoundly ecological thinker not because he had a lot to say about “nature”, but because of the way he investigated the constitution of things such as value, workers, peasants, etc. My recent interview with Figure/Ground might give you a sense of how broadly I conceive the ecological. You can find a link to it in the side bar. At any rate, when you de-divinize “nature”, reject the idea of it as a homeostatic and wise system, it seems you get something like amblack ecology or what Morton has called a goth, noir, and dark ecology.
June 9, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Interesting. Have to think more about this! It kind of questions the whole notion of the planet as an autopoietic system (Gaia/Lovelock) or at least the idea that the lower atmosphere and biosphere are ‘coupled’ in ways that certainly have no special interest in preserving humans…
I think the beginning of Stengers untranslated ‘Aux temps des catastrophes’ (the sequel to Capitalist Sorcery which is translated) has something on this – will check later and report back
June 9, 2011 at 11:07 pm
Levi, fair answer. We wouldn’t be here at all without perturbation. We are and we are already no longer ourselves because of the constitutive perturbation of all things. Likewise for everything.
And of course you don’t need my imprimatur, and of course I look forward to reading the Figure/Ground interview, and I do see the need to resist the stupidity of ‘green’: but I do wonder whether the turn to ‘black’ (with all that implies from Bauhaus to crust punks to Black Metal) makes sense only in relation to an expectation that balance is good/notBlack and that imbalance is somehow a negative, grim, chthonic, or scary feature.
To embrace imbalance as black strikes me as preserving a kind of disappointed or abandoned expectation rooted in a false (and only 700-year-old) conception of something called nature. Why honor or preserve that expectation at all?
I wonder whether Apathy is a better response. Or excitement. Although I don’t know what colors these would have.
June 10, 2011 at 4:58 am
Perhaps you might find resources in trope of the gothic, Levi. Much of this discussion regarding just what ‘black’ and ‘dark’ connotes seems to point in this direction. Now, I’m not a literary theorist, but consider Bonnie Honig’s fascinating discussion of the difference between the horror gothic and female gothic in her Democracy and the Foreigner. She starts by taking Rorty to the task for castigating the gothic as a sort of defeatist worldview in which “human agency is nugatory, hope is naive, it is useless to struggle, and the future holds no promise of change” (Similar claims to fragilekeys!). She says that this conception of the gothic only applies to the horror gothic, and not the female gothic, which, instead of “provid[ing] us with a sense of paralyzing paranoia in the face of monstrous forces beyond our control, nor a clear distinction between the forces of good and evil, but [instead provides] a healthy caution to be wary of authorities and powers that seek to govern us, claiming to know what is in our best interests. From female gothics, we get a valuable exhortation to take matters into our own hands.”
Those ‘authorities and powers’ could well be the ‘authority of nature’ too, I’d wager. She continues: “The best female gothic heroines are takers. They take it upon themselves to leave their suitors or to discover the truth about their husbands, who may or may not be out to get them. Whatever they discover— it doesn’t matter what, really—the exercise of detection teaches them agency, and they become less vulnerable to their husbands (good or bad) because they have learned their powers. Gothic heroines never take total control of their lives. They are gothic heroines, after all, and so they usually remain vulnerable: they end up with a man who still might be a murderer, or they uncover only some but not all the secrets that haunt them. Female gothics teach us not only the powers but also the limits of self-conscious agency”, and adds that “Democratic actors should find both lessons valuable”. If we replace the word ‘husband’ with ‘nature’ here, I think we get a close approximation to what you might be trying to get at in your post.
I mean essentially, this is how I take the significance you place on the notions of ‘dark’ and ‘black’: not as something scary or negative, but ambivalent. And this can be the launching pad to link a hundred other thoughts: Freud’s reflections on the feminine as a ‘dark continent’ (feminine gothic?), Burke’s depiction of nature as that which elicits the Sublime in the affective mode of both horror and admiration (the feminine Thing quaLacan?)… I’m mostly just throwing things against a wall to see what sticks, but your post has a lot to explore! Anyway, just thought I’d defend against the understanding that darkness must necessarily be imbued with a negative shade…
June 10, 2011 at 10:42 am
how about Spinozist ‘joy’ as a response? A new degree of freedom…will post some notes on Stengers ‘Catastrophic Times/Aux temps des castastrophes’. Might interest some readers – not translated for a couple of years yet… there is a thesis there for any french readers….
June 10, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Ben,
A few points. First, for OOO there is no chaotic apeiron, but rather it’s objects all the way down. As a consequence, there’s no prior chaos out of which things subsequently emerge. If there is a God– and I don’t believe there is –that God would be finite (not a totalizing whole) and other objects would be every botnas withdrawn from this god as objects are withdrawn from one another. Second, I just don’t think that autonomy in the kantian sense exists. We are heteronomously determined in all sorts of ways ranging from the unconscious ways our physiological body exists to the way in which the instruments we use modify us and produce aleatory results in all sorts of ways. We need a theory of autonomy that takes this into account. Wishful thinking about complete autonomy of the sort Kant describes does us no good. Finally, third, because objects are withdrawn, their effects can never be fully managed or regulated. There will always be unintended effects and consequences. This entails that a fully self-directing social form is an impossibility. I believe that we need to cultivate a greater sense of these aleatory and contingent effects that arise from withdrawn objects in our interactions with them and overcome our infantile fantasies of complete mastery and control.
June 10, 2011 at 5:09 pm
re: The idea of a homeostatic, negative feedback capitalism in equilibrium with itself, I would contend that this is not peculiar to neo-liberal capitalism but also to the classical liberal and monopoly versions of capital. Lukacs’s major insight in History and Class Consciousness, that society under capitalism begins to assume the form of a ‘second nature’ with self-regulating laws that can be timelelessly understood, would seem to anticipate your argument that the allegedly harmonious system of ‘nature’ suspiciously reflects the harmonious system of free market ‘capital.’
You are also correct to point out that ecological catastrophes often set off socioeconomic crises, though these crises are perfectly capable of arising on their own. A bad harvest and an ensuing famine are enough to create political unrest nearly anywhere, especially when large disparities of wealth exist.
June 11, 2011 at 12:09 am
Levi’s post prompted me to look again at Isabelle Stengers ‘Aux Temps des Catastrophes’ (2009) which discusses at some length the question of the ‘intrusion’ of Gaia.
The book is concerned with how we might break down the sense of powerlessness (a kind of ‘capitalist sorcery’ and resist the destructions of capitalism….
This a rough translation of some pages……: If you are interested I can do a little more but I didn’t want to post such a long ‘comment’. I thought some people might be interested as the book is not translated….
“What we need to respond to is ‘The Intrusion of Gaia’.
To name Gaia as that which makes an ‘intrusion’ is to characterise it as blind to the damage it causes.
This is why the response is not a ‘response to Gaia’, but a response both to what provoked its intrusion and to the consequences of this intrusion. Gaia, in this essay, is neither the ‘concrete’ earth, nor what is invoked to affirm our connection with this earth. It is a question of intrusion, not of belonging.
Choosing the name is a risk as it is a matter of also making feel and think those who would be scandalised by the idea of a blind and indifferent Gaia. Stengers wants to conserve the memory that in the 20th c Gaia was first connected with a scientific proposition – and to avoid an opposition between science and knowledge called ‘non-scientific’.
What Stengers calls Gaia (and was baptised as such by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock in the early 1970’s) is the dense set/ensemble of relations coupling what had previously been treated separately (oceans, atmosphere, climate, soil…biosphere). Giving the name Gaia to this set of relations emphasised two consequences of this research:
What we depend on, and which is so often defined as the ‘given’, the globally stable context (cadre) of our histories and calculations is the product of a history of co-evolution, whose first artisans were microorganisms. And Gaia ‘the living planet’ must be recognised as a ‘being’ and not assimilated to a sum of processes, in the same way that we recognise that a rat, e.g., is a being.
It not only has a history but its own regime of activity arising from the way the processes that constitute it are coupled in multiple ways, the variation of any one having multiple repercussions on the others. To question Gaia is to question something that holds together, and the questions addressed to a particular process put into play sometimes unexpected responses from the whole.
Lovelock perhaps exaggerated a little in affirming that this coupling assured a type of stability like that of a living organism in good health, the repercussions between processes having the effect of diminishing the consequences of a variation. Gaia seemed like a nursing mother whose health should be protected.
Today our understanding of how Gaia ‘holds together’ is much less reassuring. The question posed by the ‘greenhouse effect’ raises a cascade of responses that scientists are only beginning to identify.
Gaia is more than ever rightly named because if it was honoured in the past as fearsome, that to which farmers addressed themselves because they knew that they depended on something bigger than them, something that tolerated them, but a tolerance that should not be abused.
A margin of tolerance has been broken (which satellites and Innuits know). Gaia is ‘touchy’/sensitive and that is why she should be named like a being.
We are no longer dealing with a savage and menacing nature, nor a fragile nature to be protected, or with a nature to be exploited. The image is new. Gaia, the one who intrudes, doesn’t ask anything of us!
That Gaia asks nothing expresses the specificity of what is happening, of what it is a question of trying to think, the event of a unilateral intrusion which imposes a question without being interested in the response. Gaia herself is not threatened, unlike the many living species that will be eliminated by a change in their environment. Microorganisms will continue to participate in its regime of existence, that of a ‘living planet’. And it is precisely because it is not menaced that it rejects epic versions of human history which depict Man standing up on his feet and understanding that he was master of his destiny, free from all transcendence. Gaia is the name of an original or forgotten form of transcendence: a transcendence deprived of the high qualities that would allow to be invoked as shelter or guarantor, or resource; a touchy assemblage of forces indifferent to our reasons and projects
The intrusion of the type of transcendence that I name Gaia makes exist in our lives a major unknown which is here to stay (there is ‘after’ this intrusion). This is not just a bad time we’re passing through, followed by a happy ending. If we listen to Lovelock, today become a prophet of disaster, we need to reduce the population to 500 million, which means the eradication of the great majority of humans by the end of the century. Gaia doesn’t ask for this murderous and obscene eradication (based on so-called rational calculations), she doesn’t ask for anything. (Isabelle Stengers).
to be continued…
June 11, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Alex, great comment, and thanks.
June 12, 2011 at 1:57 am
Levi,
While I enjoy your posts immensely, I have much to say about this and hope it contributes to some nuance and rigor around
1) Positive feedback and negative feedback are adaptively entwined in ecological and biological systems.
I’m a bit exhausted with this “new” trope in “dark” ecology as not being “balanced” – it is an extremely old and simple insight based on disturbance ecology which itself goes back to the early 1900’s. I’m wondering if this backlash is a kind of needless ressentiment against a current cultural trope on the harmony of nature.
One thing is clear, without appreciating the partial truth of “the balance of nature”, any critique already undermines itself by taking the same one-sidedness it seeks to avoid. From our body temperature, to the buffering of our blood acidity with bicarbonate, it is clear that there certainly is a minimum balance at a biological and ecological level otherwise we simply wouldn’t be here. Any cursory look at a biochemistry text book shows an unbelievable array of these factors. But the problem may be bigger than this.
Systems ecologist sven jorgensen argues quite convincingly in his texts that within ecology only systems with some minimum stability can exist since the other ones have “died out” long ago due to catastrophic collapse. Yet what occurs within nature, and which I have seen no theorist appreciate is the enfolding of positive feedback loops into negative feedback loops. The folks who wrote panarchy call it the adaptive cycle, but I find their approach much too simplistic and general.
This is similar to lactation (a biologically controlled positive feedback loop) in which at a higher level of scale, positive feedback loops themselves are periodic enough to constitute adaptations. At the ecological level you see this with trees that ONLY open their cones when fires occur, such is their adaptation to periodic disturbance. Wind pollination of trees is also an example of using the disturbance of wind (which can also fell the same trees).
It is also not a matter of “just stability” because “overstability” can also cause collapse. evolutionary conservation biology is acutely aware of what they call “overstability” and “evolutionary suicide” in which the evolvability of a system is too low and though a species may still survive, it is highly likely to go extinct because it cannot evolve fast enough. This can also occur in situations where there is overstability, and where perturbations don’t create a minimum “evolvability.”
Last example here – with so called “nature” – a recent book called tending the wild shows how extensively indigenous cultures in western america had managed the landscape: “producing” the “pristine wilderness” as we thought it was. This is an extreme example of the human capacity to construct niches. Yet again, everything hinges upon adaptability and evolvability. These thresholds may be high (which is why extinction events can give rise to, say, the cambrian explosion), though they are also uncertain.
So to me, the positive negative feedback focus is completely besides the point. They are minimums on which the whole rest of the dynamics evolve from.
2) “The inexistence of nature” & Nature as Laruellian One
I’m also somewhat appalled by how quickly the theory community latched onto Badiou’s “Nature does not exist” – which is essentially the same thesis in Morton’s work (minus the kind of interdependence Morton does seem to appreciate). Nature as a kind of synthetic One which does not exist except as a projection of a romantic subjective stance.
I certainly agree with the idea that organisms constitute their outside, though I also believe that the outside constitutes the organism, so this is somewhat fuzzy to think the problem in this way. The simple way to deal with this is to recognize that the outside itself is receptive to something else which then become inward-outwardly constituting (as certain molecules are susceptible to light and then these become “constituted” into an eye). The discipline of sensory ecology shows this incredibly well and the evolution of sensation shows this well (especially considering the thesis of your first book that there is intelligibility at the heart of the aesthetic-sensible itself).
My point is simply that thinking the infinite is crucial to any realist project, and when folks say “nature” doesn’t exist, they can forget that nature can simply be rethought AS the laruellian One, or a plane of absolute immanence, what ever you want… Nature can be rethought “as” mesh.
An aside – Stephen Crane captures the sentiment of nature not as romantic wholeness, but as indifferent abyss. My point is that getting rid of the concept of nature seems overly responsive to the romantic notion of it.
Lastly, with regard to nature as “withdrawn” or “dark” – Saying objects withdraw from each other, to me, reintroduces finitude back, but this time into things themselves. It is fine as a kind of critical empiricism to say this, but to say it as an ontological claim seems very bizzare to me. The same thing with nature. If OOP is to survive it can’t reintroduce finitude at the level of “withdrawal.” What can withdrawal BE other than a kind of potentiality (finitude) injected into objects. This is why the deleuzian event was so powerful, not because of its neo-vitalism, but because it made of “potentiality” a kind of reality based on open-system dynamics. I don’t see how OOP improves upon this with the idea of withdrawal. In fact, I find it somewhat regressive and I’m lost as to why you chose this direction after your first book.
3) The “wisdom of nature”
I find it almost completely unsurprising that I have yet to find anyone on these posts who has any kind of wilderness living experience. I have known people who have lived 15 years in the desert – this isn’t man vs wild, this is some old timer nobody knows about. If you ask him how he did it he’ll tell you that he learned from nature. I’m not saying his response is precise or theoretically accurate, but lets take a second and not rush and accuse him of ideology” – no, the man has lived in the desert for 15 years. There’s something else going on here. (and might I add, is this not an act of bartleby ethics zizek talks about actualized more than anything zizek has ever done? ).
The common defense I hear theorists make to the injunction to “get outside and then come back and see how your theory is changed” is a retort that completely misses the mark – “there is no outside.” I beg to differ, and see this reaction as incredibly ironic, reactionary, and paradoxical.
Here is how – The statement that “there is no outside” seems to me to simply be a way to stay completely within the balance bound, negative feedback loops of our own academic and relatively dead and overly stable indoor environment. If theorists did sleep outside in a thunderstorm, or be forced to make tools from the trees and plants nearby, I believe they would experience an “outside” in a very real sense. NOT in some romantic notion of nature. But rather in a very real sense of simply apprenticing with a system of dynamics which are completely foreign to the experience of that person. This is to say, its outside of their outside (their composed environment).
Has anyone on these posts spent days tanning a deer hide or processing dead animal or tracked a bobcat to its den? Has anyone wandered and eaten off the land for days? I have – and there are absolutely things you learn from these experiences that can be called a kind of “wisdom.” I don’t need to label this as nature, but I’m not dismissing it because some avowed wholeness doesn’t exist. Another way to say this is that, the wisdom of nature is not due to the wholeness of nature but due to the specificity of its inter-relatedness. Weak reductionism meets holism.
I have no problem with the idea of their being a “wisdom to nature” – we find that the most thermodynamically efficient motors are ATP-snthase, close to 100% efficiency. Much of our medicine (40% or so) is originally derived or modified from plants. The ventilation systems of some ants is staggering, and the social systems of the bonobo’s can teach us a bit about peacemaking. Learning from biological and ecological adaptations (“designs”) isn’t just some component of green capitalism we will have to get over – it is a component of ANY system where we live intelligently with our environment in an adaptive and evolving way.
I hardly see how examples of hurricanes and other large scale disturbances somehow makes the mutualisms, the resiliencies, the incredibly intricate and complex feedback relationships, the adaptability, the evolvability, etc. devoid of any importance. Besides, these examples themselves feedback into adaptive responses and negative feedback loops (such as mangrove forest ecology being sustained by hurricane dynamics through creating forest gaps through disturbance).
Biological systems don’t let positive feedbacks just “occur” – they use them and this is what contributes to their evolvability. They pre-adapt to them. They incorporate them into their own dynamics. So it is only half the picture to say the organism creates the environment. Indeed, in some ways it does. And in some ways it IS the environment, both materially and adaptively.
Really thinking this positive determination gets nature out of the “dark” AND out of the “light.” I simply don’t get this pseudo-polarization.
And again, if folks went into the woods, they would learn from the squirrel what trees to tap and learn from the vultures where the nearest kill sites were, they would know from the birds where the coyotes and hawks were, and they’d learn how to stalk from the bobcats and herons. If people want to call this wisdom – fine, whats the big deal? Its anthropocentric? Of course it is. But completely ideological or inexistant? Hardly.
I understand green-washing is rampant, and movies like avatar tend to emphasize the romantic aspects of all of this – but throwing the baby out with the bathwater seems hardly a way to move forward.
I’m curious as to how you respond to all this and hope it results in some lively dialog.
Warmly
-Tom
June 12, 2011 at 9:05 pm
tom, I would endorse just about everything you write. The phrase ‘there is no outside’ would surely only be used by some poor lost textualist????
Btw, I have tried grown vegetables and keeping and killing, chickens. Currently live in northern nz. 3.5hrs from the nearest university…..
i think you would like Stengers discussion in Aux temps des Catastrophes about the ‘intrusion’ of gaia.
I also remain uncertain about the different uses of ‘withdrawal’ which not quite the same for Levi an G. harman.
Graham has recently emphasised that he is not an atomist (everthing is thus an aggregrate). But he also claims that real beings are ‘wholes’ that cannot be partially known….wholes sound like irreducible monads?????
June 12, 2011 at 10:44 pm
Tom,
I really have nothing to respond to with respect to your remarks except to say that your three points thoroughly misrepresent my claims and you need to read more carefully. I do not say anything remotely like what you attribute to me in your three points. Above all, in your first point I think you fundamentally miss my points about positive feedback loops. Many environmentalists seem to have this mythological, semi-theologucal idea that nature is homeostatic in character. While there are homeostatic systems in nature, it’s simply not the case it is necessarily so. There are all sorts of natural phenomena among both the living and inanimate that throw things out of balance. We should recognize that there’s nothing inherently natural about homeostasis, but that this is OUR value, and for obvious reasons. Second, you seem to miss my points about nature not existing. They are drawn from Latour, not Laruelle and Badiou. The point is that the world of humans and culture is not outside of nature but is thoroughly embedded with it. The idea of a nature/culture divide is, I believe, a profound impediment to ecological thought and engagement, because it treats culture as if it’s quaranteened from the natural world. If you believe nature is a PLACE where we “go to”, you’re a part of the problem not the solution. Finally, in your third point you seem to entirely miss the point of my criticism of the wisdom of nature, making the rather bizarre claim that I’m talking about wisdom WE acquire from nature. I said wisdom OF nature, not wisdom we acquire from nature. These are two entirely different things. The point is that there is a reigning, albeit often implicit, thesis that nature has its own wisdom that always rights itself and returns to homeostasis. In popular culture we see this facile ideology represented in films like Avatar where the planet engages humans to return to homeostasis, or in The Day After Tomorrow where the massive storms cleanse the environment. Anyone who knows even the smallest amount of geological history knows this is poppycock. We need only look at the atmosphere of the planet Venus to see how absurd and childish the way this is thinking. You seem to think that when I point these things out I’m making prescriptive claims. For example, your worries about my remarks about positive feedback seem to be premised on the idea that you think I’m suggesting we shouldn’t worry about positive feedback. But that’s exactly what I’m not claiming. I’m claiming that we can’t look to some divinization of nature to find a set of normative criteria as to why homeostasis is prefable. Nature is indifferent to homeostasis or the lack thereof. Rather a preference for homeostasis comes from us. The whole problem with treating homeostasis as intrinsic to natural processes is that it generates an attitude where we shouldn’t intervene because intervention unsettles natural balances. It’s exactly the same reasoning we hear from rightwing ideologues who argue that we shouldn’t intervene in markets because they naturally regulate themselves. I’m sorry you feel that my subsequent work marks a regression from my first book on Deleuze. I feel exactly the opposite, obviously. At any rate, making such remarks is not exactly a way to start a “lively” discussion and I’ll be bowing out of discussion with you after this response to your rather confused and reading comprehension challenged post.
June 13, 2011 at 5:51 am
Levi:
Insofar as for Marx humans are supposed to eventually achieve agency over their own social formation by destroying its basis in capital and transforming itself into the simultaneous subject-object that autonomously ‘makes’ its own history, shouldn’t humanity also seek to liberate itself from the heteronomous bonds imposed on it by nature and seek to remake nature as well?
June 13, 2011 at 7:07 am
Hi Levi,
I’m sad to hear this response from you, as I believe your response may be predicated on misunderstanding what I wrote. I have slowed down and quoted you more frequently to prevent further misunderstanding. I have emphasized essential arguments instead of details I may have incorrectly inferred.
And before we begin, I am continually intrigued and inspired by your current work and do not find your work regressive at all. The very bottom says more about this and how your understanding of what I said was not in alignment with what I intended to communicate.
I’m hoping we can give this another shot, as I do think my critique if understood correctly, will support rigor and nuance around what you are writing about. Rather than try to clarify misunderstandings that have occured, I want to try again.
If at the end of this post, you feel the same way you began, I will understand if you choose to discontinue dialog with me.
Let me check in with you to see if I understand the main thrust of your blog entry. I have made my understanding visible so if it is incorrect you can speak directly to it.
–Making sure I understand you–
I see this as 4 main points:
1) Nature is not Homestatic
Levi: “Nature, we are told, is harmonious and is governed by negative feedback loops. Where positive feedback loops refer to some process spinning out of control as in the case of the capitalistic pursuit of surplus-value that always pursues excess, negative feedback loops are governed by self-correcting activities that always seek harmony and balance. ”
My Interp: You are wanting to point out that the idea of a so-called “wisdom of nature” is predicated on a(n ideological) misrepresentation of nature as a corrective negative feedback loop machine that restores balance. You are critiquing the validity of this idea.
If this is what you are saying, I only partially agree for reasons I will reiterate below.
2)
Levi: “So too when we speak of self-organizing systems. There is a Wisdom to the crowd that necessarily rights itself if left alone. At this point, the narrative becomes predictable. If systems don’t right themselves, then this is because of the hubris of humans that intervene in the Natural ™ dynamics of systems, pushing them out of kilter. ”
My Interp: The idea of the so-called wisdom of nature is to essentially let it be (conservationist), which strikes you (and me) as pernicious to ecology since nature is not “out there” but relates essentially to culture, to human involvement, etc. The “divide” between man and nature you see as creating more of a problem then a solution.
If this is what you say, I am in 95% agreement and that is enough for now.
3) Nature is already-contaminated (already unnatural)
Levi: “Must there already be something within Nature itself that allows it to run out of kilter in this way? Where has this homeostatic Nature ever existed? Need I cite gamma ray bursts that fry, no doubt, planets pervaded with life?”
My Interp: That nature is already “contaminated from within” – it is already “unnatural.” understanding these relations and openness to “contamination” is what the dark ecology of relations not emphasizes. You are questioning whether homeostasis exists at all and if we can more appropriately think of things another way.
If this is what you are saying, I strongly disagree, for reasons I will reiterate below.
4) The subject is not a subject of natural wisdom
Levi: “With black ecology we begin to recognize that our normative identities do not reside in Nature itself, but are active decisions we ourselves make.”
My Interp: That the “(post)-human subject is something that we make of ourselves and cannot be legitimately derived or justified from some so called wisdom of Nature.
If this is what you are saying, again, I only partially agree which I will reiterate below.
— end of recap —
–beginning of critique–
1) Regarding point 1 (“nature is not homeostatic”), I want to simply refer you to my original post where I mention several examples of negative feedback without which we would simply die. And perhaps I would say this: how do you adequately think negative feedback in a logic of relations? It is clear to me that negative feedback exists at physical, chemical, biological, and ecological levels.
My point in my original post, to which I do not find a response from you, is that positive and negative feedback loops are essentially entwined in biological systems. This means that a dismissal of negative feedback, of homeostasis, etc. as ontologically unreal is to me, simply question begging (well how then are we alive without homeostasis?), and biologically and ecologically inaccurate. I am still curious how you deal with this, and I’m still confused since I find no response directly to it.
3) Regarding point 3 (“nature is already-contaminated”), I tried to point out examples where again, this so-called contamination is itself “used-up” by biological and ecological systems. The examples that stand out here are hurricanes creating gaps in mangrove forests which sustain the forests through succession dynamics, and also jack pine trees which have cones that only open in fires or wind pollinated trees that also topple the trees down.
This is essentially the same point as point one in different clothing. I find no direct response to this from your post back. I also see it as directly related to what you are discussing. So I’m really hoping you respond.
4) regarding point 4 (“the subject is not a subject of Nature”), I was merely making the claim that natural-subjectivization is not always ideological, as someone living int he desert for 15 years clearly doesn’t care about capitalism.
There is more to say here but I don’t want to push it unless moretrust emerges between us.
—
Regarding your response to me: “nature is indifferent to homeostasis” – again, only partially true. Many systems ecologists find that open systems can have fairly consistent dynamics that involve physical and chemical mechanisms of free energy capture (again see sven jorgensen), at this level, nature is not indifferent to homeostasis because homeostasis can accelerate free energy capture by maintaining efficient flows (metabolism).
So I’m fairly certain that while I may have fumbled on some inconsequential details or lent myself to misreading, there are particular arguments to which I find directly related to your theses, and which potentially undermine their importance or universality.
Lastly, to be seen, i do not think your work now is regressive at all. Not by any means other wise I wouldn’t be so excited to keep reading your work. If you re-read my quote, I say that I believe the particular choice to follow a line of thinking within OOP that treats objects as withdrawing from each other is regressive because it reintroduces negative thinking back into ontology. It is ONLY with regard to this particular point that I am baffled as to what went into that decision, and I find Deleuze more appropriate in this regard. If anything, I wanted clarity about what led you to choose this. Otherwise I continue to love your work (with constructive criticism of course) and can’t wait for DOO to come out.
Sincerely hoping this leads to a different kind of relation
-Tom
June 13, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Hi Tom,
I’m not by any means arguing that homeostasis or negative feedback exist. They do. What I’m denying is the thesis that it is the default or essence of nature, such that positive feedback is an aberration or contamination of nature. In my view there are systems that are homeostatic in character and other systems that are characterized by runaway trends. Neither is more nor less natural than the other. I would also agree that living systems are dependent on homeostasis.
I’ve written a great deal on just what I mean by withdrawal. In my ontology, withdrawal pertains to the dimension of potentiality in objects and is quite different from Harman’s concept of withdrawal. It’s much more Deleuzian in flavor. I distinguish between what I call the “virtual proper being” of objects and their “local manifestations”. The dimension of virtuality or the withdrawn dimension of objects is their potentiality to become in a variety of ways depending on their circumstances. Local manifestation is the actuality of an object depending on the local circumstances or relations it enters into. Objects, for me, are withdrawn in the sense that they always contain a reserve of potential that renders them irreducible to any of their local manifestations.
There are two main reasons that I believe the concept of withdrawal is of vital importance. First, I follow Deleuze in the claim that objects are external to their relations. By this I mean that objects can break with their relations and enter into new relations. As ecotheorists, I believe this is precisely what we’re investigating. We’re investigating what happens when objects are introduced into new fields of relations such as the introduction of gasses and chemicals into ground water and air as a result of fracking for natural gas or the introduction of can toads the Australian ecosystem. We’d like to know something of the difference these new relations produce (and, of course, they’re often rather unpleasant differences). Additionally, unless entities are external to their relations I’m unable to see how change is possible. Second, I believe this concept is important as it prevents us from reducing entities to their local manifestations, attending to the manner in which actuality is dependent on relational context or vector fields in which entities become. Take the example of the difference between the laboratory geneticist and the applied biologist. The laboratory geneticist treats the genome as already containing the essence of the entities phenotype. The genome merely needs to be activated and the phenotype will come to be regardless of circumstances. The applied biologist, researching a particular genome of wheat, however, understands things differently. She will grow wheat based on this genome in a variety of different environments (high altitude, low altitude, rich soil, poor soiod, etc, etc) to see what phenotypes are produced as a result of these different environments. Here the genome does not already contain the phenotype, but rather the genes are one causal factor among others, where the form the wheat eventually takes is a product of the interaction of these causal factors. The local manifestation is the result of an interplay of these factors.
The position of the applied biologiat is what my concept of withdrawl is attempting to think. It tries to avoud our tendency to treat the qualities of objects as already being contained in objects from the outset (like information already inscribed in a genome) so as to draw attention to the context and environmental dependency of what entities become. In my view, there are tremendous implications of this both for the sort of way in which we conduct research, as well as social and political thought.
Once again, my critique of the concept of nature is not designed to suggest that everything is artificial, nor, above all, to suggest that everything is cultural. Put in more positive terms, you could say that I hold that everything including culture, is in nature. The point is that nature is not somewhere we go on the weekend with our kayak, but that nature is what is. We’re always in it, even when we’re in the middle of New York. In my view, we need overcome the notion that nature is another place, somewhere we can go, to understand how deeply entangled we are in the world and avoid the view that ecological engagement is merely a project of preserving pretty places we’d like our children to be able to enjoy as well. No, nature and the destruction of those pretty places involves even the welfare of the heart of New York city. It can’t be separated out in this way.
Second, I think we continue to suffer from a pre-modernist, pre-darwinist, conception of nature. In the pre-darwinistic framework the “natural” is what is intrinsic to a being. Thus, for example, you get racists suggesting that other racists are “naturally” physical and primitive (rather than intellectual), you have those defending heterosexual privilege claiming that we have certain “natural” sex drives such that homosexuality and bisexuality are forms of deviance, and sexists suggesting that women are “naturally” a certain way. This is the old Aristotlean teleological conception of potentiality where potentiality is understood as a vector of becoming that has a pre-encoded target. This idea of nature, which continues to be so rife in sociobiology, is something, I believe needs to be overcome. We need to weed out teleology wherever we find it continuing in our thought of nature and conceive nature, along the lines of Darwin, as differential becoming.
June 13, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Hi Levi,
Thanks for this response and thank you for taking the time to spell out your concept of withdrawal, it clarifies much for me.
I admit to conflating your & Harman’s concept of withdrawal and fully endorse your very different meaning of it. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say about nature not being “out there”, so “place that we go” and that indeed, New York City is nature too. I agree that natural systems have dynamics that that are both runaway and equilibrium based. I also couldn’t agree more about your evo-devo conception of genotypic actualization which is very in line with current science.
I do believe however that while teleology as something with a pre-encoded target is a simplified misconception of how things work, i do fully endorse a kind of weak and non-deterministic telos (a “directionality”-under-equilibrium circumstances, a determinacy) or a kind of “weak inherency” (wherein robin eggs hatch under certain periodic environmental conditions which allow robins to replicate and evolve… ) I imagine this is what you mean by virtual proper being. I’m simply trying to stress that banishing teleology totally without affirming a kind of weak telos that appears under equilibrium can be equally problematic for ecotheorists. That replication in evolvable conditions requires a weak telos that must be thought adequately because they form the specific conditions for life in its replicatability and its evolvability.
Also, I find that when people walk outside and call that nature, they don’t mean nature as “universe” they mean nature as a kind of specific set of ecological relations which you accept are essentially dependent on homeostasis (Levi: “I would also agree that living systems are dependent on homeostasis.”). I’m not defending the pre-modern ideological notion of nature, and find your critiques true, though perhaps I am wanting some distinction between the kind of “dead niche” of an office or a house and a “living niche” of being “outside in a forest.”
I’m merely stating that there is a real (and very important difference) between our web of relations “inside” a house or office and our web of relations “outside” being more directly affected by wind, rain, sun, and other organisms. This is no small matter to me, and I think emphasizing how nature is all of it without also emphasizing this difference can lead to ironic and tragic consequences for ecological theorizing.
If this difference is appreciated, we can see that when people talk about the “wisdom of nature” they aren’t talking about the wisdom of venus’s atmosphere, or gamma ray bursts, they are talking about what can be learned from our “earthly natural system of high ecological productivity or biological adaptiveness” While it may be more accurate to say that nature also includes venus’s atmosphere and catastrophic events throughout geological and cosmological time,
I’m fairly confident that this is not what folks are referring to when they speak of “wisdom” in nature. They mean the dynamics and adaptations of productive ecosystems. They mean mutualisms. They means functional and pragmatic redundancy. They mean high thermodynamic efficiency. It means efficient free-energy capture and storage. They mean precisely the specific way organisms on earth and ecosystems deal with positive and negative dynamics in adaptive ways. It may look one sided- but it merely a matter of emphasis. To me, holding both approaches and all these distinctions is the only way to come to a complete eco-theory.
Yes – we certainly are choosing what we learn from nature carefully (since if we mimicked parasitic wasps this may not lead to a kind of world we want to live in). So what I’m saying is that we need to be precise about what we are weeding out and what we are keeping. And part of that means determining really precisely what the weeds are.
Sincerely,
-Tom
June 13, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Tom,
My point is that it is not simply events like periods of high volcanic activity or gamma ray bursts that produce runaway feedback, but nonhuman organisms have produced such changes as well. A good example of this is the rise of eukaryotes that, over much time, saturated the atmosphere with oxygen which, in turn, played a key role in kicking off the precambrian extinction do to the climate change it produced. There’s a temdemcy to think of life amd ecosystems as inherently homeostatic, but this simply isn’t true. Fortunately there are many living systems that are homeostatic in character, but they aren’t intrinsically or necessarily so. Runaway feedback can arise from a number of differemt places including nonhuman life. What I’m trying to critique here is not a focus on homeostasis or the recognition that homeostasis is vitally important, but spiritualizations of nature that treat it as necessarily embodying some wise, self-regulatory providence. Such spirtualizations of nature are, in my view, every bit as bad as Leibniz’s god that has a reason and plan for everything. In my view we jeed to overcome warm and fuzzy conceptions of nature that sees it as all about well regulated ecosystems, fuzzy cute bunny rabbits, and flowers. This cultivates an attutude of non-intervention which, I believe, is lethal. I also think that the semantic gloss you provide about “what people mean” when they talk about “nature” is something to be fought rather than defended. This is what I was getting at with my concept of dark enlightenment. That concept is destructive in a variety of ways I believe I’ve outlined. Gamma ray bursts, volcanos, black holes, Venus’s atmosphere, and runaway feedback produced by early eukaryotic organisms are every bit a part of “nature” as well regulated homeostatic systems. If we’re to have sound ecological thinking we need to get a little more dark, a little more realistic about what nature really is, and much more skeptical of Avatar-like narratives about the wisdom of nature. Absent this we introduce all sorts of confirmation bias into our ecological investigations that lead us to ignore those elements of nature that don’t fit with our spiritualized conception of nature as a wise, self-regulating steward of itself.
June 13, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Hi Levi,
I deeply appreciate you taking the time to respond to what must have been a bit frustrating to read and respond to. This most likely marks my last post about this entry.
For clarity and closure I want spell out what I’ve taken from this regarding our positions.
—
For you, it is important to emphasize those components of nature that are not homeostatic, giving examples such as the eukayotic oxygenation of the atmosphere. You find these to validate a perspective that nature cannot be conceived as a homeostatic balance seeking system.
For me, this represents only part of the story… Eukaryotic oxygenation of the atmosphere is a form of niche construction (this is a technical ecology term) which is then taken up by evolving organisms and forms nutrient cycles (such as organisms adapting to “toxic” oxygen and forming the carbon dioxide / oxygen cycle). This is often the case in natural systems. So for me, to emphasize the non-homeostatic OR the homeostatic both seem one sided. Whatever ecology we are trying to create must be light and dark. I am concerned this has not been recognized in our dialog yet, for it is the main thing I want to contribute and is at the heart of all of my contentions.
—
For you, it is important to overcome the idea that nature is wise and that this wisdom is constituted through a kind of balance-making self-regulating gaia that is teleologically disposed to take care of itself is inaccurate, wrong, and doesn’t serve ecology.
For me, positive feedback and negative feedback are so related in living systems (the positive being those elements which “disturb it”, “preturb it” or “evolve it”, the negative which sustain conditions of replication), that this attack seems one-sided and overboard. I can see how the spiritualization of nature-as-wise is averse to you, and represents a bad theologization and marks the end of thought. I can also see an over-emphasis on the dark end of things being a similar theologization in the opposite direction. This again, I do not believe was recognized in our dialog.
—
For you nature is indifferent to homeostasis (sometimes its there and sometimes its not), and our emphasis on it represents a kind of ideological confirmation bias and preference that can operate to serve a status quo (particularly in capitalism). Teleology must be weeded out at all costs, and in its place, a darker ecology without providence must replace it.
For me, the statement “nature is indifferent to homeostasis” is bizzare since it bypasses the determination of systems, contexts, and objects, and ultimately, neutralizes the dynamics of living systems against a non-living background. The eukaryotic cells that produced an oxygenized atmosphere were doing so because oxygen was a “waste product” of the organisms homeostatic functioning (again the relation of pos and neg important here). Other organisms evolved enzymes and organs to deal with this and now we breathe. This situation is typical. This to me represents a weak telos that isn’t absolutely determined but IS directional. If people have spiritualized this, and if there are ideological overtones, the solution to me is not to throw it all out, but instead to think it more rigorously and clearly. This means including light and dark into our theory of nature. “Black ecology” seems just as one-sided as Leibniz’s god to me.
—
Is this understanding of our positions mutual? If we disagree that is fine, I just want a sense that you are really disagreeing with ME and not some misunderstanding of my argument (like I did with your “withdrawal.”).
Sincerely,
-Tom
June 13, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Tom,
We’re getting a little bit closer, but I still sense you’re attributing normative positions to me. Let’s take your gloss on eukaryotic oxygenation. Yes, you’re absolutely right. The precambrian extinction and cambrian explosion (i.e., formation of new niches) were rendered possible by this. That’s great. But as ecological activists, we’re not engaged in the production of any set of niches whatsoever (climate change is producing a whole new set of niches), but rather we’re interested in the preservation of a particular set of niches (the ones we happen to rely on). My point is that we cannot look to nature for norms that would tell us to prefer this set of niches rather than another. Nature is normless. We should be upfront about this, that’s all.
Regarding your point about the deep imbrications of negative and positive feedback in living systems, it’s not this I’m denying. What I’m objecting to is an implicit set of values I often see read into nature in the ecological literature where negative feedback is coded as “good” and positive feedback is coded as “bad”. In my view, negative and positive feedback just are. There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about them. They’re just realities of being. With that said, I’d entirely agree that for a variety of organisms, including us, positive feedback is often a very bad thing. My point is just that we can’t read these norms from nature itself. These things just are. They’re neither good nor bad.
I think the fact that you see the statement “nature is indifferent to homeostasis” as bizarre really gets to the crux of the matter. All I’m saying is that nature could care less whether early eukaryotes maintain themselves or continue, whether or not a solar system with a beautiful eco-system gets devoured by a black hole, etc. From the standpoint of organisms, however, the story is quite different. If, for example, the sun around which a planet with a complex ecosystem orbits begins to exhaust its energy thereby expanding and pressing the eco-system of that planet out of kilter, it makes quite a difference to those organisms in that ecosystem.
I am not suggesting that we should throw out all homeostatic talk by any means. If you read The Democracy of Objects when it comes out, you’ll see just how much I have to say about these things. Also, if you’ve followed this blog for long you’ll know that I talk about phenomena like homeostasis endlessly (i.e., I think your remarks in your second to last paragraph are a straw man). I am saying that we should stop treating homeostasis as the default “true nature” of nature and cease seeking to read norms of nature itself, and recognize that we have our own norms and preferences in these matters and that these values are coming from us. Nature is and can be both cruel to its critters and warm and kind to its critters. A dark ecology is just an ecology that refuses to reduce nature to warmth. I confess I’m a pretty pessimistic guy and I get a little nervous whenever people begin talking in warm and fuzzy terms. It’s not that I want positive and destructive feedback in ecosystems. I don’t. It’s that I want a mature atheistic ontology that refuses any divinization or providence within being and that recognizes that to the same degree there are happy furry rabbits, flowers, and delicate interdependencies, there’s also all sorts of nasty ugliness and that all these things are.
June 13, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Levi,
Really glad to hear this. For brevity I have two question:
1.
Levi: “I am saying that we should stop treating homeostasis as the default “true nature” of nature and cease seeking to read norms of nature itself, and recognize that we have our own norms and preferences in these matters and that these values are coming from us”
Through my dialog with you I realized that I am deeply interested in finding prescriptive norms that are minimal to living systems. Without this, its as if there were a normless being of nature and the norms of man – Doesn’t this reintroduce the very separation between man and nature we are trying to avoid?
2.
Levi: “I think the fact that you see the statement “nature is indifferent to homeostasis” as bizarre really gets to the crux of the matter. All I’m saying is that nature could care less whether early eukaryotes maintain themselves or continue”
I also realized that the notion of nature being indifferent is like saying the universe is meaningless. This statement is actually a meaning-for-us disguised as an absolute statement of truth (it is actually meaningful to us that the universe is meaningless, as opposed to a pure meaninglessness which itself is indifferent to meaning and meaninglessness) [this is why depression is associated with meaninglessness, if it everything was truly meaningless, the meaninglessness itself without be meaningless and it wouldn’t impinge upon us in an emotional way]. This is the frame of the bizarreness of your statement to me. With this in mind, how would you respond to the idea that nature is neither indifferent nor partial to homeostasis, but rather is instead indifferent to indifference and to partiality. I think this is a more precise way to say: “it simply is.” This also deals with the above problem of the separation (it must not be “unnatural” to have normative prescriptions). What do you think?
June 13, 2011 at 6:45 pm
[…] response to my black ecology post, Ben raises an interesting question. Ben writes: Insofar as for Marx humans are supposed to eventually achieve agency over their own […]
June 13, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Hey Tom,
I’ve worried over your first point as well vis a vis reintroducing the human-nature separation. Basically my take is that such a separation is premised on the idea that for man nature is an “elsewhere”. In other words, it presupposes the nature/culture schema I’m trying to undermine, treating norms as if they arise purely from humans. To deal with this problem I try to emphasize the manner in which humans are imbricated with non-humans to such a degree that we cannot determine whether the norms are coming from us or the nonhumans, i.e., the norms arise through an interplay of the two together. Did I already have such and such a set of values such that I merely used the internet in this way or did the internet, in an important way, generate this set of values and goals within me? The first claim would suggest that we always already have certain goals and norms within us and merely project them onto things in the world. The second sees these goals and norms as emergent from the interactive process. It’s this latter that I’m aiming for.
Absolutely no objection to your second proposal.
June 13, 2011 at 9:09 pm
I’m delighted to read this, and am intrigued to see where you go.
Thanks again for this exchange.
-Tom
June 14, 2011 at 1:04 am
[…] it, Thomas Meli and I, after a rather rocky start, have really had a rather stellar discussion (starting here) about ecology and what ecology is about. Tom really practices what he preaches both in terms of […]
June 14, 2011 at 7:41 am
[…] sense,” and not, as Curtis seems to suggest, a scientific refutation of it. (“Black ecology” would then be a further development of the same […]
June 24, 2011 at 10:43 pm
‘Ecosystem myth has sinister uses’
I’m posting this link her to a Guardian weekly article by Adam Curtis, but not sure if it will be seen….maybe it should go somewhere else
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts
V. Interesting piece on General Smuts (holism) and Arthur Tansley (ecosystem). V. relevant to the preceding discussion on homeostasis, self-organization and ‘the great universal law of equilibrium’ (haha).
November 3, 2011 at 5:21 pm
[…] I’ve always wanted to be a tree, or a shapeless density, like a potato. It’s why I love sleeping so much. I am sure many people have felt the same way, particularly during times of stress (when is waking time not stressful?). I also think of the expression “I wish I could crawl into a hole and die” (cried out in the midst of overwhelming daily stress) which is the desire to become worm, become earth, become mineral, become not nothing, but a folded obscurity in a different kind of being for whom the experience of time is infinitely slow/fast or incomprehensible. Sometimes I imagine the human bean as such a sinking towards un-time. In decay we become closer to this black ecology. […]
November 10, 2011 at 9:16 pm
[…] by Johannes on Nov.10, 2011, under Uncategorized I don’t know if anybody clicked through one of the links that Feng put up in her last post, but I did, and I came upon this interesting discussion about ecology by Levi R. Bryant. […]
March 19, 2012 at 1:23 am
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