Politics of Nature

It is somewhat ironic that just when scholars seem to be reaching an academic consensus critiquing the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, and to be replacing such an exceptionalism with a contextual and processual understanding of the human species, we are suddenly told that we are living in a new geological era named The Anthropocene. Just when we had begun to overthrow such anthropic tendencies in philosophy and the social sciences, we are faced with the undeniable presence of the human in the entire ecosystem , from deet-resistant mosquitoes to the ozone hole in the heavens. If humanism understood the role of the human as exceptional in the positive sense of enacting progressive transformation on the world as defined by the Enlightenment, the centrality of the human in the Anthropocene lies in a different and regressive transformation, not of the cultural world but of the geological earth, in what is an unprecedented ecological decline. Such a dissolution of the nature/culture divide is thus also a dissolution of the disciplinary divide between natural and human sciences, since moral issues can no longer be separated from biological concerns, and politics can no longer be separated from nature. To resolve the Anthropocene will thus require the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines addressing both scale and value, for though we must measure the ozone and the acidification of the oceans, we must also revise the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices and ideologies, establish a new understanding of the collective co-determination of human and other forms of life, and educate our species about its newfound responsibilities for both the human world and the nonhuman earth. Yet notwithstanding widespread recognition of the dissolution of the nature/culture divide that is intrinsic to Anthropocene discourse, there is considerable disagreement about when and how such a divide came about, and the role this divide plays as cause and/or effect of the Anthropocene. The scientific discourse claims that prior to the Anthropocene, human niche culture in the Holocene did not interfere in any significant way with natural processes, which were independent of human society. Actor-Network Theory and many social scientists claim on the other hand that the nature/culture divide has never existed, and that it was simply a short-lived invention of modernity to set an active subject against a passive world to be exploited. Yet other social scientists disagree with both of these positions, and claim that not only has the distinction between nature and culture always existed, but it continues to exist in the Anthropocene, requiring social scientific rather than scientific expertise in order to come to terms with its political and economic causes. For these scholars, the Anthropocene term is itself misleading for its universalizing of homo sapiens as responsible for the geological shift.
What are we to make of these conflicting interpretations of the nature/culture divide, and how might they influence our understanding of the Anthropocene, and of possible responses to it? With such contradictory interpretations, the Anthropocene has come to represent the node in a theory debate with important consequences for understanding who we are and how to respond to the crisis and envision our future on the planet earth. This paper will seek to disentangle these different positions, and evaluate the solutions each position provides to
ensure a future for life on the planet. If the scientific position reduces nature to a garden that must be managed by technology to allow for neoliberal lifestyles to continue and Actor-Network Theory reduces human agency to a material force no different from that of technological tools and thereby justifies a form of technological determinism where might makes right, the political positions either call for the demolition of capitalism and with it the nature/culture divide it created, or for the rehabilitation of the nature/culture divide that was destroyed by scientific
determinism in order for a social critique of the Anthropocene to be possible at all. Though each position helps us to understand the stakes of the Anthropocene, none are able to develop a politics of nature that interprets the dissolution of the nature/culture divide in such a way as to
imagine a polis shared by human and non-human actors. Instead of reducing such politics to a play of material forces or to the human management of the non-human world, such a shared polis requires a transversal ecology capable of rehabilitating solidarity and communication between human and non-human actors. The ecosophy developed by philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari will be proposed as just such a transversal solution, since it develops a mental, social and environmental ecology that is able to incorporate the perspectives of human and non-human subjects into a shared politics of nature.

Looking at zoos from the perspective of zoo personnel, this article explores the importance of vision in the zoo’s presentation of its animals as well as the major technologies that the zoo uses to intensify such animal visions. On the one end of the spectrum, zoogeography and immersion design are used at the zoo exhibit to enable zoogoers to see animals in their naturalistic settings. On the opposite end of the spectrum, animals are caged and cared for in the highly artificial settings of the zoo’s holding area, with little or no exposure to the public gaze. In between these most visible and most invisible zoo spaces, the zoo also contains numerous other spaces with varying degrees of animal visibility. The zoo’s gift shops, carousels, and promenades, despite not being exhibit spaces per se, nonetheless relay an important message that translates the zoo’s mission of nature conservation into small acts of capital. Drawing on thirty-five semi-structured, in depth interviews conducted between May 2009 and December 2010, mostly with zoo directors, curators, registrars, and designers, the article moves beyond the established Foucaultian and post-Foucaultian notions of panopticon and exhibition to suggest that, rather than being an end in itself, the act of seeing practiced at the zoo serves to reify nature as a pre-existing entity and to reeducate the populace about the proper relationship between humans and animals.

Today's environmental emergency requires specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing. The consequences of anthropocentric ways of producing, consuming and living are becoming painfully clear. Design played (and often still plays) a role in this, and therefore has in many ways contributed to feed this anthropocentric mindset, considering human interests separated from the ones of the planet's. Design has a shared responsibility in this-what Fry calls-"de-futuring process" (1) produced by anthropocentrism, and it is hence obliged to recognize the risks connected to this anthropocentric mindset and its consequences. In this regard, designers are currently, and increasingly, becoming aware that an ontological shift is needed. What does it mean to take this "ontological turn" seriously? Which thinking in contemporary philosophy and anthropology can help designers-and particularly the ones dealing with subfields of design such as Participatory Design and Design for Social Innovation-to develop non-anthropocentric, non-de-futuring reflective practices that might account for the radical interrelationship between people and the planet? Which kinds of transformative reflective practices might these modes of thinking possibly nurture?

In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meaning it is in the first place a heuristic tool, inviting us to inquire into historical changes and into today’s features of governmentality as well as of biomedicine or other techno-scientific apparatuses involving life in a way or another, whether human or not. But we believe its relevance goes far beyond a demand for empirically grounded descriptions: it is intrinsically an act of politicisation within the biopowers, and an act of theoretical re-problematisation of politics as well, that both need an ethnographic approach attuned to the actual forms taken by power relationships. Taking Latour’s and Foucault’s respective approaches and shifting from the power-knowledge apparatuses theory (The Will to Know) to a new theory of action and of discourse (Politics of nature, Reassembling the social), we sketch the outlines of what politics can mean at the time when government is not only exerted on individuals or populations anymore, suggesting it entails some cosmopolitics encompassing other-than-human living entities.