Countering Technocratic Rationality, Approaching Nisargaśṛṅgāra

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2017

This article aims to bring forward a critical reflection on a renewed relation between nature and technology in the Anthropocene, by contextualizing the question around the recent debates on the " ontological turn " in Anthropology, which attempts to go beyond the nature and culture dualism analysed as the crisis of modernity. The " politics of ontologies " associated with this movement in anthropology opens up the question of participation of non-humans. This article contrasts this anthropological attempt with the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who wants to overcome the antagonism between culture and technics. According to Simondon, this antagonism results from the technological rupture of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century. This paper analyses the differences of the oppositions presenting their work: culture vs. nature, culture vs. technics, to show that a dialogue between anthropology of nature (illustrated through the work of Philippe Descola) and philosophy of technology (illustrated through the work of Simondon) will be fruitful to conceptualize a renewed relation between nature and technology. One way to initiate such a conversation as well as to think about the reconciliation between nature and technology, this article tries to show, is to develop the concept of cosmotechnics as the denominator of these two trends of thinking.

Questões Ecológicas em Perspectiva Interdisciplinar, Vol. 2; Nuno Pereira Castanheira & Jair Tauchen & Agemir Bavaresco & Draiton Gonzaga de Souza (eds.); Porto Alegre: Editora Fundação Fênix., 2022

In the Anthropocene humans are said to wield more power than ever over the rest of nature, but at the same time they feel helpless in the face of forces which they themselves have created. This chapter deals with the question of why the forms that structure our relationship to nature appear so resistant to change and how these forms can be criticized and resisted. I start by turning to the question of reification, which is central to my discussion since it helps us understand why the social forms of capitalism appear resistant to change. While on the one hand defending a Lukácian concept of reification against Honneth’s attempt to reformulate it, on the other hand I point to the need to interpret Lukács’ concept of reification so as to make it applicable not only to society but also to nature. Secondly, I ask how a de-reification of nature is possible. Within critical theory, efforts to answer this question have repeatedly run up against the so-called “Lukács problem”: if dialectics is needed to overcome reification but is limited to the social realm of human praxis, as Lukács appeared to claim, how can it be used to de-reify nature? Thirdly, I argue that Adorno’s idea of constellations points to a solution to this problem. In Adorno, however, the link between constellations and praxis is unclear. Before concluding the chapter, I therefore turn to recent examples of environmental activism to illustrate that link.

452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la literatura y Literatura Comparada (Universitat de Barcelona), 2019

2024

The wildness of wild nature is threatened by technocratic management. Preserving this wildness is paradoxical as wildness refers to a characteristic of the world not under direct control or subject to high levels of deliberate intervention or technical design. Yet, in an era of ubiquitous climate change and other inescapable anthropogenic impacts, this seems inevitable. This paper offers a novel perspective on this seeming paradox with the concept of poetics. The paper distinguishes and defines the concepts of technics and poetics in original ways, while distinguishing between two main forms of technocracy, thus offering an innovative assessment of technocracy in relation to the concept of poetics. This incorporates Heidegger's interpretation about the specific interrelation of modern science with technology, and his view that an expansive, phenomenological perspective on the world is a needed counterbalance to technology. The paper is not meant however to be specifically Heideggerian scholarship. It thus leaves out detailed synopses of Heidegger's positions, which have been addressed to a great extent elsewhere. It incorporates a variety of thinkers and writers to justify its basic premise, even as Heidegger's insights form a basic structure. The paper addresses conservation management as a form of discourse and representation. Thus, its primary critique and resolution as presented here focuses on properly shaping these. The concept of poetics is expansive enough to unify key elements of wilderness philosophy and the insights and knowledge systems of indigenous cultures. Each of these are thus also addressed.

Of Rocks, Mushrooms and Animals: Material Ecocriticism in German-speaking Cultures, Otago German Studies, ed. Cecilia Novero, 2017

Our notions of nature have been severely unsettled in the wake of the environmental crisis of the 1960s. From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring over the constructivist phase of the 1980s and the recent turn to a new materialism, the ecocritical discourse that has unfolded over the past decades has been shifting between emphasizing material and immaterial aspects of the non-human. During the first early wave of the 1960s and 1970s, concrete material considerations dominated, such as the effect of DDT on birds or the limits of ecosystems to adapt to changes. Particularly in the 1980s, this led to a focus on the social constructedness of ‘nature.’ More re-cently, the ecocritical discourse has been swinging back again, turning against constructivist critiques to recover the materiality of nature against its deconstruction. Relying on Theodor Adorno’s model of negative dialectics, this paper offers to read this shift as a dialectical move-ment upon the discourse’s object of inquiry. Following the movement then the essay traces a concept of nature, that does not have to reduce its object to either corporeality or incorporeali-ty, but detects it rather as the tension between the two. By keeping the dialectic from coalescing into a synthesis, and by merely unfolding it through confronting the assessments of nature with each other, it becomes possible to keep open the understanding of nature as process. Rather than as a solid entity, such an approach describes nature as a continuous dialectical movement that alternates spontaneously between instances of material manifestation and presence, and immaterial aspects of productivity and change. Thus, a critical concept of nature that hopes to resist human claims of appropriation foreshadows.

in: A. Berti, A. Ré Anahí (Eds.), "Actas del VII Coloquio Internacional de Filosofía de la Técnica", Editorial de la UNC, Córdoba 2017, pp. 91-100., 2017

This paper exposes a philosophical anthropology of technology, grounded on the concept of Neoenvironmentality. Starting from a reinterpretation of the idea of man’s humanity, this approach culminates in a new definition of technology. The historical impossibility of postulating man’s essence makes still necessary to individuate elements that characterize him in a specific way. In this regard, “essence” or “human nature” are here replaced with anthropic perimeter. The core of the anthropic perimeter consists of man’s worldhood, i.e.: man is that being that has a world, while animals merely possess an environment. Due to his lacking biological endowment, man is bound by nature to create his own oikos. Man is “worldforming”, a technological being by nature. On the other side, the ecological interface of animal is environment: a natural mould to which it adheres immediately. Following Heidegger’s suggestion, man’s worldhood and animal’s environmentality are derived from a pathic premise. In the case of animal, such pathos corresponds to a captivation that upholds its fusion with its relative vital space. On the contrary, man possesses a fundamental mood, which enables him to transcend his within-the-world rootedness. It is thaumazein, theorein (contemplation). Starting with this anthropological assumption, technology emerges as the oikos of contemporary humanity. In this systematic guise, technology demands a total adaptation from man. In order to achieve this, it inhibits his thaumazein/theorein, while producing an artificial captivation that assimilates him to an animal condition, i.e. an environmental one. Technology stands out as (neo)environment that decrees the corresponding feralization of man. The phenomenon of Neoenvironmentality produces the secularized transcription of a theological dialectic. Caught by a soteriological anxiety, the feralized man entrusts himself to technology itself supposing it will correct his “promethean gap” through an indefinite enhancement. The telos of the techne as Neoenvironment is to reshape the anthropic perimeter

This paper discusses the practices of self-perfection and care for the environment, intended to the health and to the physical, mental and spiritual well being. It focuses on the points of intersection between ecological and religious practices that engender processes of "sacralization of nature" and the "naturalization of the sacred". The empirical field of interest is the religious practices of ecological groups and the ecological practices of religious groups. As methodological and theoretical references, we have elected the contributions of Merleu-Ponty's philosophy of perception, Bateson's ecological psychology, Thomas Csordas' phenomenological anthropology and the ecological epistemology of Tim Ingold, in a way that these perspectives are joined together with the intention to collapse the dualities between mind and body, subject and environment, nature and culture. When considered as the body of the world, we find in the landscape concept a point of convergence of these different approaches. Thus, the hypothesis that we suggest is that the landscape, while the body of the world, may be taken as the soil of culture, in the sense that the human subject, in his/her corporal condition of a being in the world, is not only implicated in the landscape, but that the landscape is his/her very condition of engaging in the world and in culture.

This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith's proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith's work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that enable a historicized and geographically contextualized understanding of the making of natures.

An analysis of the work of artist and activist Ravi Agarwal, arguing for the reconstitution of the social contract as the ecological contract.

Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2021

Spanning twenty years, from 1982 (Koyaanisqatsi) to 2002 (Naqoyqatsi), Godfrey Reggio’s so- called Qatsi Trilogy (that also comprehends Powaqqatsi, 1988) is a very compelling and significant example of how documentary film can move far beyond the positivist claims of an objective reproduction of “reality”, of a neutral observation and of a primacy of content, and directly confront itself with the complexity and ambiguity of our experience. The Qatsi Trilogy has contributed to the process that has expanded documentary film towards art film and essay film and that has brought, in contemporary art, to what has been described as a documentary turn. In Reggio’s trilogy the indexicality of images is embodied within an aesthetic project that stages the very act of seeing and the very production of images themselves, so that the films become a metacinematographical meditation with multiple philosophical implications. This result is achieved by Reggio through many “spectacular” filming and editing techniques (such as aerial shots, time-lapse recording, super slow motion, etc.) and through the soundtrack (the iterative musical score composed by Philip Glass, the power of which contributes in making the Qatsi Trilogy an audio-visual symphony). An in-depth analysis of the Qatsi Trilogy turns out to be very relevant for a twofold reason. First of all, despite the success and deep aesthetical impact of Koyaanisqatsi, the trilogy has been rarely studied as a whole. Secondly, the trilogy deals with themes that are at the center of the current debate, such as the nature/culture relationship and its ecological implications. From this point of view, Koyaanisqatsi in particular has been seen as a Manichean and dichotomous essay film, that unilaterally condemns the devastation perpetrated by techno-scientific civilization on the pristine beauty of nature. But recently some more convincing perspectives have been presented, that underscore how the main feature of Reggio’s films is to de-familiarize our perception of things, be it nature, be it city-life in modern metropolises, be it third-world environments and cultures, be it the war of information that permeates the global world. In doing so, Reggio develops a meditation on technology and on machines, a meditation that obviously concerns cinema itself as “eye of the century”. In Koyaanisqatsi Reggio explicitly stresses that the aerial shots he so widely uses have a military background. They are thus linked to what Paul Virilio would call the “logistics of CINEMA 12 · ABSTRACTS 4 perception”. These technologies are aimed at surveillance, automation and control and so build and reinforce that “mimicry”, that synchronization of the emotions and standardization of behavior that characterize the industrial age within the framework of a subjectivist humanism. This leads directly to derealization as a possibility connected with the society of information, where weapons of mass destruction are enhanced by weapons of mass communication (see Naqoyqatsi). But technology itself (see Reggio’s editing process) offers possibilities that go far beyond the usual construction of perception and of meaning, and that challenge us to understand technology outside an “anthropocentric-instrumental” framework.