Ecology Without Nature

Ecology without nature is a provocation. Marshall McLuhan infamously pointed out that the end of nature is the birth of ecology; that once we’ve began to think ecologically, nature as such has been lost to technics. Philosophers of media and technicity have pushed this further: there is nothing left that hasn’t already been technicized. But if this is true, then what are we doing when we study ecology (as well as physics and biology)? What is nature—especially after its end? And what would it mean to think ecology without it?

This course will take on different perspectives from the philosophy of nature, media philosophy, literature, and critical ecology to answer these questions. We take as our primary conceit that to know nature one must first know media: in other words techniques like observing, measuring, writing, and objectifying the world also shape our view of the distinctions between nature versus culture, human vs. animal, domestic vs. wild, and so on. Moreover, these media techniques allow a theorization of that world in what comes before and after the human. The question is not exclusively scientific or political; rather it’s also about what cannot be made or undone by human hands (Spinoza recognized this theologically when he drew an equivalence between God and Nature—Deus sive Natura). While the conventional view of nature may be rooted in Romantic notions of the world that historically coincided with the totalizing forces of capital, this course tracks the uneven and contested purview of that coincidence: What remains when both the romanticized ‘outside’ (nature) and the technicized ‘inside’ (ecology) begin to show their limits?