Initially the shift to conceiving societies and cultures as ecologies seems slight. After all, in the traditions of social and political thought, societies have largely been thought both in terms of relations and processes. If ecology consists not in thinking nature but in thinking beings of any sort in terms of relations, then it would seem that describing culture as an ecology changes nothing. And in some ways this is true. All that was there before in social and political thought remains. It is not so much that something is lost with this move as the domain of entities relevant to culture is significantly expanded.
In Book III of the Ethics, Spinoza resolved to treat the emotions as phenomena of nature and to investigate them accordingly. Something similar happens when cultures are treated as ecologies. Thinkers such as Latour have argued that modernity is based on a split between nature and culture. Nature is one kingdom, with its own laws or principles; and culture is another kingdom with its own laws and principles. Generally nature is treated as the domain of causality, while culture is treated as the domain of meaning, the sign, or the signifier. Under this model, investigating nature amounts to investigating causes, while investigating society means investigating meanings. A wall is thus erected between nature and culture.
Like Spinoza, I want to investigate culture as a phenomena of nature (though as I’ve argued elsewhere and can’t get into here, this means transforming our understanding of nature). Put a bit differently, in thinking cultures as ecologies I want to think societies in nature. This doesn’t mean that I want to reduce things such as signs, signifiers, and meanings to biology and neurology like the evolutionary sociologist or something silly like that. Meaning has its own manner of functioning as meaning; and while dependent on biology so far (perhaps AI’s are on the way that operate with meaning), cannot be explained in terms of biology. Meaning has to be understood as meaning qua meaning, according to its own principles.
No, understanding culture as in nature means something quite different than giving reductive explanations of all cultural phenomena. It means breaking down that wall between nature and culture. Culture isn’t just meaning, but involves all sorts of natural elements as well without which it couldn’t exist as it does. In other words, ecological conceptions of society are premised on the thesis that there are certain material conditions for the existence of culture. Here we must take care, for “material conditions” immediately brings to mind Marx and his famous account of production as the ground of society and the forms society takes. These are, indeed, material phenomena, yet in the ecological conception of society the material conditions of culture are not anything themselves produced by culture; at least initially. These material conditions include things such as the existence of an atmosphere, fauna and animals of all sorts, energy in the form of calories and of others sorts to power tools, gravity within a certain range, temperature within a certain range, etc.
I am not, of course, saying anything new in pointing all this out. Other theorists have articulated it as well. Then again, here I am not interested in saying something new but in saying something true and playing some small role in drawing the attention of others to it. Cultures, like organisms, I want to say, are material beings that interface with a broader physical world, both drawing matters from that world and releasing matters into the world. And here I wish to say these material factors exercise a power of their own on the form that social relations take that often goes unspoken in our critical theories. Yes, meaning is a key component of culture. Yes meaning is something we need to investigate in our social and political thought. However, we also need to attend to this broader dimension embodied in technologies of all kinds, infrastructure, features of geography, and the larger natural world in which cultural worlds are embedded in manners similar to Amazon rain forests and coral reefs.
Larval Subjects . 
January 26, 2015 at 9:07 pm
Have you investigated Sloterdijk at all on these questions? He generally cites Heiner Mühlmann’s ‘The Nature of Cultures’ when he wants to talk about cultures as entities. Sloterdijk’s mixing of this kind of socio-biology and grand, sweeping Spenglerian history makes me a little uneasy but it is interesting. Understanding cultures as tensegretic structures (i.e. as holding together in relations of tension) makes a lot of sense. Although, of course, the temptation is to understand culture as cultivation, as care, as enriching and enlivening. In this sense culture could be understood as a kind of surplus that arrives when beings achieve more complex modes of being than simple Darwinian selection (Elizabeth Grosz makes more or less this argument). A kind of froth of irreducibility that rises up from natural selection without ever leaving it to form some sort of other plane (the froth is nothing without constant up-frothing). Culture is ‘what makes life worth living’ for beings self-aware enough to *need* a ‘life worth living.’ It is not what transcends life but what mediates the deadly contradiction of consciousness (something to which we could easily grant various animals to greater or lesser degrees).
January 26, 2015 at 9:14 pm
I have not. I generally find his work to be very scattered so i havent spent much time with it.
January 27, 2015 at 12:49 am
Reblogged this on The Not So Solid Earth.
January 29, 2015 at 10:06 pm
Thank you for the post. I wonder if treating cultures like organisms really does the work of breaking the barrier between nature and culture. This treatment of culture seems akin to saying: a person has subjectivity, but also inhabits a material body. Yes, cultures have material bodies, but this changes nothing if the body is defined as something that can be distinguished from the natural environment, and an organism is just that: something that can be distinguished from its environment. The barrier remains.
Generally, I like to think of this problem in the opposite way. Not “culture is ecological”, but “ecology is cultural.” Treating the material body of a culture as something pertaining to culture–having meaning–is profoundly cultural. I suspect the truth is this: there is no nature that is not cultural.