{"id":6655,"date":"2020-07-27T18:20:50","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T18:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=6655"},"modified":"2020-11-23T05:57:36","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T05:57:36","slug":"following-in-the-footsteps-of-nature-an-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/volume-15-no-3-2020\/introductory-note-volume-15-no-3-2020\/following-in-the-footsteps-of-nature-an-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Following in the Footsteps of Nature: an Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

By Neli Dobreva, \u00c9cole des Arts de la Sorbonne, University Paris 1 Panth\u00e9on Sorbonne<\/p>\n

This special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum<\/em> contains select papers from the research seminar Environmental Aesthetics and Citizenship<\/em> (https:\/\/estenci.wordpress.com\/<\/a>), coordinated by Neli Dobreva, Oleg Bresky, Mogens Chrom Jacobsen and Oliver Kauffmann at the \u00c9cole des Arts de la Sorbonne, University Paris 1 Panth\u00e9on Sorbonne, in partnership with the research circles Patterns of Dysfunction in Contemporary Democracies. Impact on Human Rights and Governance<\/em>, coordinated by Mogens Chrom Jacobsen, and Appearances of the Political<\/em>, coordinated by Carsten Friberg–all of them within the Nordic Summer University (NSU). This project was supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers of the Nordic Countries in cooperation with Foreningerne Nordens Forbund (FNF), the University of Aarhus (Department for Philosophy of Education and General Education) and the European Humanities University \/ The J. Althusius Institute.<\/p>\n

The Seminar Environmental Aesthetics and Citizenship<\/em> took place in Paris, France, at the \u00c9cole des Arts de la Sorbonne, University Paris 1 Panth\u00e9on Sorbonne, during two semesters of the academic year 2018-2019. The guest editor Neli Dobreva would like to express her gratitude to the Dean of the \u00c9cole des Arts de la Sorbonne, Marie-No\u00eblle Semet-Haviaras, for her support and willingness, which allowed the Project to succeed.<\/p>\n

The debate started at the NSU Summer Session in 2018 at Faro Island in Sweden, when all the NSU circles first got in contact with each other and began working together. One of the first considerations was how to collaborate between circles, exploring the ways in which human-rights militancy and, more generally, the protection of human rights are affected by the international human rights system and the way this regime enters State relations and, on the other side, the ways in which we could connect the sensory or sensitive (le sensible<\/em>) experience, such as the aesthetic one, through the ongoing global debates about: the environment, ecology, humanity and non-humanity, post-humanity and trans-humanity, citizenship and environmental migration through the lens of representations, Anthropocene-centered discourses on degrowth, the ethics of de-extinction, the education on citizenship and urban participative democracy, the politics of care and common good, etc. Of course, all these questions were so inspiring and the debates so rich, that we opted for an interdisciplinary experimental seminar: Environmental Aesthetics and Citizenship<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Three main authors, one artist, and their recent works inspired us to start the discussion and to launch the Seminar. Fortunately for us, they did us the honor of participating and giving a talk, and thus brought their own contribution to the Project. Here, I would like to express all my gratitude to Nathalie Blanc, who is the French pioneer in eco-criticism, an artist, researcher and geographer, specialized in the realm of Urban Nature, environmental aesthetics, and environmental mobilization and activism. As a founding member of the French internet portal of the Environmental Humanities<\/em>, she was also the French delegate (2011-2015) of the European Research Network COST \u201cInvestigating cultural sustainability\u201d[i]<\/sup><\/a> as well as a privileged researcher of the European program \u201cHow Matter Matters\u201d (2016-2019). Her book with Barbara Benish,\u00a0(2016) Form, Art, and Environment: Engaging in sustainability<\/em> (London, Routledge), was naturally the inspiration for the title of the Seminar as well as the direction that we decided to follow, questioning the place of art in the discourse of political ecology and the politics of care through the ecological vulnerability in the context of the everyday needs of urban \u201csurvival\u201d, including the politics of sustainable food, urban farms and urban soils within the Project \u201cSOLS FICTIONS\u201d, dedicated to the urban soils of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Blanc\u2019s shared experience within her participation in the European research program How Matter Matters<\/em> (2016-2019) and her political ecology discourse led us to another eminent author who is pursuing a twenty-year polemical work strongly engaged within the philosophical ontology and axiology related to the philosophy of technology and the production of sense<\/em> in a time of crisis<\/em>. We mean the philosopher, researcher, Professor in Epistemology and Gilbert Simondon specialist, Jean-Hugues Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my, who had just published his new work (2018) La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de l\u2019invention. <\/em>Pour une architectonique philosophique de l\u2019\u00e2ge \u00e9cologique<\/em> (Paris, \u00c9ditions Mat\u00e9riologiques). Revisiting the idea of the \u201ccrisis of sense\u201d within a very particular philosophical language, dismissed by some of his critics as too fractious, he proceeds to connect it to the \u201cecological crisis\u201d, thus establishing the bases of a future system that should be radically anti-dogmatic for the individuation of the ultimate sense<\/em>. For him, in this system, Simondon\u2019s ontological genetics, or genesis \u201cg\u00e9n\u00e9sique<\/em>\u201d, is finally re-founded. That becomes possible by including and redesigning Simondon\u2019s \u201cphilosophy of ontological information\u201d, linking it to the \u201cphilosophy of economic production\u201d and the \u201cphilosophy of axiological education\u201d, each of which precedes their reconfiguration outside ethics and, especially, the \u201cethics of low\u201d in its totality. Introducing an idea of a philosophy of the paradox<\/em>, Jean-Hugues Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my opened for us the question of how one should connect these three principles (\u201cphilosophy of ontological information\u201d, \u201cphilosophy of economic production\u201d, \u201cphilosophy of axiological education\u201d) to the ongoing debate of the ontological link between human and non-human in terms of sensory experience, i.e. the aesthetic one, and how we could revisit the individuation of sense<\/em> overwhelming the modern paradigm of the separation between nature and culture by introducing the question of \u201caxiological education\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rethinking Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic Experience<\/em> (Peter De Bolla, 2002), we discovered Jean-Michel Durafour\u2019s book (2018) Cin\u00e9ma et cristaux. Trait\u00e9 d\u2019\u00e9conologie <\/em>(Paris, \u00c9ditions Mim\u00e9sis). A philosopher and Professor of Aesthetics and Films Studies, Jean-Michel Durafour\u2019s work opened up our discussion to the consideration of living beings<\/em> and non-organic forms of life<\/em>. His innovative ontological conception of iconology<\/em>, as thinking of images as material beings, includes a comprehensive aesthetic theory of images as artworks, popular culture, scientific imageries and ethnology. Thus we could revisit the \u201cartist\u2019s gesture\u201d explored by Jean-Marie Shaeffer (Adieu a\u0300 l\u2019esthe\u0301tique<\/em>, 2016), and the materiality of the aesthetic experience as a \u2018one-dimensional\u2019 iconology inducing a \u2018one-dimensional\u2019 ontology. Durafour is thus exhuming Aby Warburg\u2019s idea about images as \u201cexpressions of equal dignity\u201d and subjects of a \u2018flat\u2019 iconology as well as a \u2018flat\u2019 ontology going back to Duns Scotus\u2019 idea of \u201cbeing as unequivocal\u201d. What is particular here is the empirical use of the field of cinema as primary material exploring the hypothesis that through material experiences (e.g., the context of viewing experience, the framework, the digital apparatus, the experimental and animated film), we could go beyond the mere cinematographic domination of images. This hypothesis should be probably confirmed by a clause on \u201cgeneral iconology\u201d. And that is the point that provokes the central interest of Durafour\u2019s work, already developing since his previous writings: the \u201cgeneral iconology\u201d is distinct from any allusion to Alain Roger\u2019s Court trait\u00e9 du paysage<\/em> (1997) and is within the linguistic (nominal) intersection of iconology and ecology, hence diverging from the growing (nominal) use of \u2018ecology\u2019 and \u2018economy\u2019. Furthermore, that \u2018clause\u2019 becomes the main pivot in relation to Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my\u2019s \u201ceco-logical age\u201d and Blanc\u2019s pragmatic approach to the aesthetic (environmental) objects. Consistently, Durafour claims a \u201cchristalographic Aesthetics of film\u201d. Nevertheless, Le trait\u00e9 d\u2019\u00e9conologie<\/em> includes the relationship to biological theories, as well as ecology, ontology and anthropology lingering within the images. Questioning images takes place at the very particular intersection between art and science (i.e. physics, natural history, genetics) in relation to film. Thus, his \u2018iconology\u2019 reposes on metaphysical, ontological and biological principles as a specific discourse about images.<\/p>\n

Durafour\u2019s suggestion of new anthropological, ontological and ecological practices applied to images disrupts and involves the possibility of an \u2018alter-iconology\u201d. Consequently, the \u2018econology\u2019 is an \u2018iconology\u2019, which reposes on a relationniste<\/em> type of ontology: the world is not composed by inert or living entities, but these entities are the product of their relationships with each other. The chief example is \u201cloneliness\u201d as a modality of being-in-relation with: without the experience of the other, one should not be able to understand that he or she is alone. It is in that tradition of \u2018relationnisme\u2019 that Durafour rethinks here the \u2018econology\u2019 based on the history of the philosophy and contemporary ecology. From there comes his redefinition of the iconology as a specific idea of the image, which is the relational composition of the image itself and its iconographic environment (milieu): artistic images, scientific theories or imageries, philosophical doctrines, literary works, cultural products, etc. We are interested in images, says Durafour, and that is because they are \u201cbeings-in-between\u201d (inter-esse<\/em>). From the idea of relationisme<\/em>, follows that the concept of perception should be enlarged to the existing whole. He is using the precept from N.A.Whitehead of the \u201cperception without cognition\u201d: thus Durafour includes non-organic forms of life in the understanding of a singular \u2018prehension<\/em>\u2019. We could recall here Jacques Lacan\u2019s \u201csardine can\u201d (Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse<\/em>, 1973) that is gazing at us, while the Real<\/em> is challenged by its entirety. Accordingly, images could exist without being perceived by the particularity of conscious human cognition. The question that then appears concerns the production of the images themselves (en soi<\/em>) and without the correlation image-observer. Thus, we should think that the relationships that images are entertaining within their iconic environment should not be reduced to the relation between them and the humans, nor to other relationships familiar to humans. Hence Durafour, inspired by E. Kohn (How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human, <\/em>2013), suggests rethinking an iconology beyond the human perspective of it. This point also maintains and encourages us to think about the object without the limitations of mere human access, as opposed to the dominant post-Kantian tendency. Furthermore, Durafour continues his reflection by discussing the relationship between relationnisme<\/em>, correlationnisme<\/em> and anticorrelationnisme<\/em>, following his thesis on \u2018econology\u2019. In that we gleaned three main theses about it as a science about the living relationship between images. Including that: a) images in general are non-organic forms of life; b) images maintain between each other and within their iconic environment mutual and co-evolutional relationships such as \u201cexpressions-in-between\u201d (entr\u2019expression<\/em>) and material ones such as \u201cperception-in-between\u201d (d\u2019entre-perception<\/em>); c) iconology is a science about these relationships.<\/p>\n

Following this inspiring scholarship, our attention was attracted to Pauline Julier’s recent artistic presentation. In her work Naturalis Historia <\/em>(2017) (https:\/\/ccsparis.com\/event\/pauline-julier<\/a>), a movie and a moving-images art dispositive (apparatus), the artist Pauline Julier is asking: what is \u201creal Nature\u201d? Inspired by the works of Professor Wang and his team on a coalmine in China, where an unexpected tropical forest appeared under the geological strata engulfed by a volcano, Julier is realizing a very personal artistic but also documentary work that is underlining multiple challenges for the environmental humanities. Recalling the eminent work of Pliny the Elder and his Naturalis Historia<\/em>, Julier invites us to make an inventory of the World, as he did, combining art and science, archeology and ecology. The discovery of that forest\u2014the oldest one before human and even animal life emerged\u2014is also a clarion call for witnesses to archive and document a piece of Naturalis Historia<\/em>, which is expected to mobilize our contemporary imaginaries. Thus analyzing Julier\u2019s work, we could see that it includes the main problematic approached by Nathalie Blanc, Jean-Hugue Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my and Jean-Michel Durafour. Expressing a special form of art and science work<\/em>, in the context of the everyday\u2013the care<\/em> of the everyday, life forms<\/em> and life styles\u2014 Julier is developing something original that we could call an environmental aesthetics<\/em>. With this in mind, we considered her artistic practices as proposing aesthetic and ethical-moral objects acting as ways of seeing new-old life forms<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Keeping in mind the above-mentioned arguments, the contributions from this special edition of Nordicum-Mediterraneum<\/em> emerging directly from our Seminar revolve around the issues of environmental challenges, educational campaigns, political and environmental sustainability, non-political, apolitical and supra-political aspects of human life, human rights, democracy (including citizenship), transhumanism, post-humanism, political eco<\/em>-logy, gender studies, atmosphere, identity, atmosphere, pathic aesthetics, ecology, environment [Umwelt<\/em>], environmentalism and ecological aesthetics.<\/p>\n

Expanding Democratic Citizenship: Education Through Bildung. Klafki Confronting the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/em><\/p>\n

Our first contribution, by Asger S\u00f8rensen, explores the issues related to including in the contemporary democratic education template a theory of Bildung<\/em> inspired by Wolfgan Klafki (Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik<\/em>, 1963): the cultural Bildung<\/em> as problem-solving in addition to political democracy for educational outreach. It is important to stress that the work of Klafki did not have an influence beyond the borders of the German-speaking world, with the exception of Denmark, where his work received an enthusiastic reception. S\u00f8rensen shows us how important it is to maintain an axiology for citizens\u2019 education, at all social and political levels. Participative and direct democracies are highlighted in a way to show how a collective aesthetic experience could contribute to the common good. The Bildung<\/em> theory appears to be very appealing for the contemporary world, especially when thinking about climate migration and the ethical debate about de-extinction. It also seems to be a useful template for questions of gender and religious discrimination including the problematic of human rights through citizen education and Bildung<\/em>. Moving beyond Rawls, Durkheim, Habermas et alia, S\u00f8rensen ultimately claims that only by emphasizing the metaphysical value of every individual human being can democracy, Bildung<\/em> and citizenship education hope to cross cultural boundaries and divides, so as to establish an attractive and legitimate background culture of mutual trust.<\/p>\n

Remarks on Science, Epistemology and Education in Bruno Latour\u2019s <\/em>Down to Earth<\/p>\n

Olivier Kaufman is interrogating issues of \u201csoil\u201d and citizenship in Bruno Latour\u2019s recent works, namely:\u00a0 From which epistemic stance can \u201csoil\u201d be seen, and how, precisely, is the ensuing description carried out? Criticizing Latour\u2019s scientific-epistemological stances of \u2018Galileism\u2019, Kaufman suggests that there are other models that we could follow, especially in order to look more closely at the differences between the thesis of Latour on a \u2018view from nowhere\u2019, which is \u201cmisguided and wrong in the details\u201d for Kaufman, and the alternative stance toward the \u2018Terrestrial\u2019 that Latour is arguing for. The ability to form conceptions towards a view from nowhere is constitutive for being able to think. Kaufman recalls Thomas Nagel\u2019s book The View from Nowhere<\/em> (1986), where Nagel has argued in detail for this epistemological \u2018fate\u2019 of human beings \u2013 a kind of \u2018double vision\u2019, since we can transcend our subjective selves \u2013 although not fully so. For Kaufman that is an essential part of our pursuits of truth \u2013 that we are able to attempt putting ourselves to the side, including being able to acknowledge another subject\u2019s point of view. At the same time, Kaufman considers a missing element in Latour\u2019s attitude towards education, encouraging us to revisit the discarded \u2018old forms of subjectivities\u2019, i.e. attitudes, myths and rituals, as we develop new templates offering a survival perspective for our human future.<\/p>\n

Ecology of Sense(-making), Political Eco-logy and Non-ethical Refounding of Law<\/em><\/p>\n

In his contribution, Jean-Hugues Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my shows his concern about \u201chealth of both nature and culture<\/em>\u201d and thus the necessity for the deconstruction of the duality of nature\/culture. In that sense he gives an example concerning \u201cTranshumanism and many other new ways of thought\u201d that \u201care still \u2013 implicitly but undoubtedly \u2013 under the paradigm of the duality nature\/culture, since their position needs in the last instance a discontinuity between nature and culture\u201d. Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my underlines a paradox between the evolutionary theory of transhumanism (as its goal is to build an immortal post-human) and the naturalist claim about language and consciousness: \u201cThe only way to keep an evolutionary framework while considering human self-construction is to admit the finitude of human being as historicity or self-construction which prolongs evolution and reveals the fact that biological life itself has no essence [\u2026], the very strange fact is that naturalists do not even consider the non-human animal when they assert that \u2018consciousness\u2019 is reducible to its physico-chemical substratum\u00a0: in their minds, the\u00a0\u2018problem of consciousness\u2019 is a problem which concerns human beings only.\u201d For Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my, the transhumanist position is ideological, taking advantage of speculative techno-capitalism so as to dream of a post-human era instead of worrying about the future of the planet. On the contrary, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my defends the so-called current geological age \u2018Anthropocene\u2019, which at least, through its ultimate and dramatic consequences, reveals the indirect index of the crisis of sense(-making)<\/em>, which results from the misunderstanding of human finitude \u2013 that is to say: human non-originarity (or being-derived) and therefore human mortality. Inspired by Husserl and Heidegger, but moving beyond their thought, and debating implicitly as always with Simondon and Bachelard, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my is developing his own theory on sense(-making)<\/em> as noematic, three-dimensional and over-representational of the ob<\/em>-jects of thought. Accordingly, \u201csuch an archi-reflexive semantics<\/em>, which provides an unprecedented modality of the self-\u2018knowledge\u2019 that philosophy must be, can be considered as a fundamental ecology of sense(-making)<\/em> \u2013 and of its crisis -, because sense<\/em>(-making) is the \u201cmilieu of all milieux\u201d which make sense within it<\/em>\u201d, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my says.<\/p>\n

From that modality follows the articulation of multidimensional sense<\/em>(-making), engendering a philosophy of ontological information<\/em>, a philosophy of economic production<\/em> and a philosophy of axiological education<\/em>. Claiming that the \u201cLaw is not the system of compatibility between the \u2018free-wills\u2019 of \u2018moral persons\u2019, but the system of compatibility between the needs<\/em> of all the human and non<\/em>-human subjects that might suffer from not satisfying their needs\u201d, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my introduces the idea that \u201cthe political eco<\/em>-logy which should permit us to go beyond the debate between the post-Rousseau \u2018political philosophies\u2019 of the \u2018social contract\u2019 and the post-Marxist \u2018political economies\u2019 of \u2018suspicion\u2019. In this new theoretical context, freedom and justice are needs because needs are what ensures health \u2013 against suffering – and not just survival\u201d. Claiming that axiological problems are educational problems and denouncing how Western thought confuses health and happiness, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my moves to the question of \u2018re-founding\u2019 the Law: \u201cfurther thinking about a new and non-ethical notion of responsibility<\/em> is now possible: my being-in-debt towards the universal ecosystem means that my semantic non-originarity translates itself into a responsibility within the political-economic problematic \u2013 exactly as it translated itself into a non-substantiality of beings within the epistemological-ontological problematic, and into a contingency of our being and values within the pedagogical-axiological problematic\u201d. Thus, if the Law re-founded in a non-ethical way is not breaking the relationship to Nature where that clause does not exists, but \u201cthe entirely refunded Law has for vocation to become what will allow the planetary ecosystem\u2019s balance to be maintained beyond the anthropocenic ruin of the forces which have founded it so far as equilibrium\u201d, Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my argues. In that way, the duality human\/ non-human would be deconstructed and thus we could recover an equilibrium within the sense<\/em>(-making) and the environmental, so as to finish with the eco<\/em>-political crisis of sense<\/em>(-making).<\/p>\n

The Human Rights of Privileged Victims. A Marxist Satire on Shouting Matches<\/em><\/p>\n

The thought-provoking discussion of Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my\u2019s proposition about the \u201cLaw re-founded in a non-ethical way\u201d continues within the contribution of Giorgio Baruchello. Stressing the fixed social inequalities \u2013 in terms of gender, religion, social status and the imposed status quo <\/em>\u2013 and seeing human rights overwhelmed by the over-privileged 1%, Baruchello adopts a very pragmatic approach, one could say almost an anthropological one, replacing the old semantics of the \u201cclasse bourgeoise<\/em>\u201d with current terms such as \u201cthe corporate elite\u201d, \u201cthe job creators\u201d, or just \u201cthe rich\u201d. Highlighting the old principle of divide et impera<\/em>, Baruchello shows how this old-as-the-World principle is still in operation, especially in times of crisis, observing: \u201cWhen religion cannot do a good enough a job, viable alternatives exist: race, nationality; region-, party- or even football-based affiliation can be often as effective\u201d. In these terms he faces the great ongoing debate on disparities between men and women. The gender discourse is an example of how popular attention is diverted from far more important questions and what is pointed out is that such a debate is subverting the middle class as well as the academic environment. The question should be: is that a false direction to take in hand the problematic proposed within the refunding of the Law in a non-ethical way<\/em> that \u201chas for vocation to become what will allow the planetary ecosystem\u2019s balance to be maintained beyond the anthropocenic ruin of the forces which have founded it so far as equilibrium\u201d, as Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my claims? According to Baruchello: \u201cMen and women spend endless time and effort squabbling about the so-called \u2018male privilege\u2019 and an alleged set of attendant disparities, rather than combining their efforts in order to pursue better wages, better working conditions, sensible monetary and fiscal policies by State authorities, true economic security and autonomy, a life-saving stop to the all-embracing profit-motive that is destroying the planet, as well as emancipatory self-ownership and democratic self-stewardship\u201d.\u00a0It seems that the same considerations concern the economic apparatus (dispositif <\/em>in terms of Foucault), the decision-making societies from all levels up to the European commission\u2019s technocrats. In comparison, the female representatives are more and more duped into participating in commonly understood patriarchal structures, and even though some of them enjoy careers and prestige, they are still subverted by the same regime of domination. The working place is also an environment, an urban one, and also the one that has to be the habitus<\/em> and the habiter<\/em> in everyday life.<\/p>\n

However, gender roles could also have some positive aspects in the contemporary debate, especially when it concerns Western women who are winners in that case. But socially, this debate replaces the problematic of the \u2018working class\u2019 and especially what has been going on in Europe for decades: for Baruchello, \u201cEurope\u2019s working class has emigrated to China under the banner of \u2018globalization\u2019\u201d. As a result, the egalitarian principle could not satisfy centuries-old traditions of non-emancipation. And that is a concern for both men and women, according to Baruchello. The question of human rights is completely displaced and still very alien from the one concerning the duality human\/non-human through the refunded Law<\/em> and its vocation to allow the planetary ecosystem\u2019s balance to be maintained beyond the anthropocenic ruin of the forces which have founded it so far as equilibrium, in terms of Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my\u2019s claim. Yet, one could think about some possible issues as a contrapuntal presence within that very pessimist landscape of the contemporary Western world. Supposing, for example, that the Law is not refunded according to a non-ethical template, so that human rights could still be evolved as a counter-power against the 1%. That would be the point that is underlined in the contribution of Carsten Friberg.<\/p>\n

Identity and Aesthetics. Atmosphere as an approach to the appearance of the concrete person<\/em><\/p>\n

Carsten Friberg approaches the question of human rights by conceptualizing \u2018sensitivity aesthetics\u2019. For him, sensitivity (le sensible<\/em>) relates to the forming of both identity and perception. (Here we could recall Durafour\u2019s position on \u2018perception\u2019 that we already discussed.) Friberg illustrates his assumption following the Baroque writer Baltasar Graci\u00e1n\u2019s reflections in Or\u00e1culo manual y arte de prudencia<\/em> (1647). The appearance and the perception of what we call identity are very often displaced from the very idea of it. Therefore aesthetics could be approached as a matter of sensorial perception that supplements the reduction of complexity in a conceptual identification. Assuming that the human being evolved in relation to its environment \u2013 cultural, social and natural \u2013 Friberg claims that: \u201cWe embody social relations as well as perception and sensorial relations to ourselves and the environment the way we have learned to\u201d. To enforce his assertion, he introduces the concepts of \u2018atmosphere\u2019 having in mind the works of Gernot B\u00f6hme and the \u2018pathic aesthetics\u2019 of Tonino Griffero. But the way he emphasizes the sensitive (sensible<\/em>) dimension of identity leads us to pay attention to \u201chow the consequences of strong ideas of identity prove not only to be insensitive and prejudiced but can result in the neglect and dehumanization of individuals\u201d. Here is the question of citizenship as related to identity: What makes me human, individual, having rights and belonging to this<\/em> or that<\/em> identity? Who am I? And what makes me an individual having rights, i.e. defending my rights of being, having a legal protection issued from belonging to a national, juridical community? Is that a passport, a \u2018soil\u2019, a community, etc., that makes me capable of affirming my identity? In that sense we are still far from establishing the pretended sensitivity (le sensible<\/em>) as criterion of identity. Nevertheless, we should assume that there is that emotional, sensitive side of the question of identity that is subversive, on the one hand, of my environmental life-long education and belonging to a milieu, and, on the other hand, of my own subjective experience, which could be also a choice of who I am and who I want to be. That could be an allusion to Pierre Bourdieu\u2019s thesis on class reproduction and of the initial ignorance of the milieu to which \u201cI\u201d belong. As Friberg says, it is about how environment matters, because we are guided and influenced by cultural artifacts, specifically aesthetic artifacts, judgment of taste, education and absorption of sensitivity as such.<\/p>\n

The intervention of the so-called new technologies does not simplify the problem: should \u201cI\u201d, or my identity, correspond to a \u2018fingerprint\u2019? Does identification of a body, even though it is \u2018mine\u2019, express a state of mind, character, or sensitivity? Accordingly, for Friberg: \u201cThe relationship between aesthetics and identity should be apparent when recognizing the relationship to the forming of senses, feelings, and body\u201d. From this stems the axiological role of aesthetics, as related to the values of a community, its appearances and shared experiences such as social roles, nationalities, gender choices and storytelling within it. So the \u201cI\u201d as a free subject is surrounded by all these spheres, milieus and environments in his everyday being. Carsten Friberg relates his problematic to B\u00f6hme\u2019s understanding of \u201catmosphere as a fundamental concept of aesthetics\u201d. Within that concept, perception, experience, the body, individuals, objects and the environment are merged inside the affective and sensitive (le sensible<\/em>) experience of the environment. The concept of atmosphere, in this sense, means that perception is a kind of diplopia experience that should not determine the phenomenology of seeing, perceiving and feeling: it is the extension of the aura of all these elements as \u201catmosphere of a place\u201d or \u201cperceiving atmospherically\u201d. However, it is important to underline, and Friberg stresses it, that this specific experience which B\u00f6hme reveals, of ecology as an organic environment, is not merely including nature into the aesthetic experience, as a bodily or corporeal one, hence alluding slightly to A.G. Baumgarten\u2019s conception of aesthetics, but to this \u201corganic environment\u201d [Umwelt<\/em>] extending to the non-organic forms of life. Thus, the concept of atmosphere reveals an aesthetic experience without necessarily including nature, but rather its very Kantian sense of disinterestedness. In spite of this, it is somehow anthropocentric and caring for the human sensitivity to aesthetic judgments integrating \u201cthe human being as a sensorial and bodily being affected by its surroundings\u201d. And this is the pivotal point of Friberg\u2019s presentation that changes our fundamental relationship to the world: aesthetics without nature and recovering identity through environmental aesthetic experience perceived atmospherically.<\/p>\n

Environmentalism Without Nature\u00a0? Steven Vogel\u2019s post-natural environmental philosophy<\/em><\/p>\n

Adopting an opposing position in his contribution, Sune Fr\u00f8lund analyses the thesis of Steven Vogel\u2019s \u201cpostnatural\u201d environmental philosophy as expressed in Against Nature. The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory<\/em> (1996). Although criticizing it and pointing out its ambiguities, Sune Fr\u00f8lund argues for an overwhelming ambivalent attitude to nature that prevails in his writings, influenced by the Critical Theory tradition and integrated by Vogel\u2019s pragmatic constructivist epistemology. This novel approach grapples with B\u00f6hme\u2019s analysis, which we just saw in the contribution of Carsten Friberg, where the question of \u2018pathic experience\u2019 was underlined.\u00a0 What Fr\u00f8lund is exploring here is the way in which we could succeed in bypassing the specific attitude to nature coming from philosophers such as Luk\u00e1cs, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, and Marcuse. However, the idea of post-natural environmental philosophy<\/em> is also much closer to Bruno Latour and Jacques Derrida, concerning the former\u2019s separation between nature and culture qua ideological and political construction and the latter\u2019s postmodern theory in general. Fr\u00f8lund exposes Vogel\u2019s arguments against the misleading place given to nature by Luk\u00e1cs, who claims, \u201cNature is a social category\u201d and, at the same time, rejects Engel\u2019s \u201cdialectics of nature\u201d. The question that follows, and Fr\u00f8lund is stressing it, is \u201chow is it possible to think of an \u2018environment without nature\u201d? Contesting the philosophers from the school of Critical Theory, but also using their arguments, Fr\u00f8lund insists that what Vogel claims, \u201chelps us see that the overcoming of this alienation consists in realizing that nothing in the material reality, not even nature, exists un-mediated by human construction and labor\u201d, which includes the position of Luk\u00e1cs (\u201cReality is not, it becomes\u201d) and the Marxist concept of \u201calienation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hence another question appears, following Bill McKibben: \u201cWhat if we drop the very idea of Nature?\u201d And that question is the very recognition of the way humans succeeded in leaving their mark everywhere within Nature as a trace of their activities. From this recognition results, as Fr\u00f8lund underlines, Vogel\u2019s concept of \u2018environmentalism\u2019, which should replace the separation between nature and culture and allow the organization of human existence around its own actions in everyday life: \u201cThe world is not something we find ourselves in; it is something we have helped to make. But at the same time it is something that helps to make us: we are who we are because of the environment that we inhabit. The environment is socially constructed; society is environmentally constructed\u201d. Recalling the importance of the concept of \u201clabor\u201d through Kant, Hegel and the Marxist use of it, Fr\u00f8lund underlines Vogel\u2019s attempt to represent a new type of materialism<\/em> in which the idea of practice is taken seriously as physical labor or as material practice.<\/em> Accordingly, we should accept that everywhere within our \u201csub-lunar terrestrial world\u201d there are residues from an \u201canthropogenic impact\u201d. Vogel\u2019s\u2019 argument for that is: \u201cif cognition is a practice there is no cognition of anything beyond practice, i.e. no cognition of anything unaffected, unconstructed or unbuilt like nature is assumed to be\u201d \u2013 and that is his incontestable pragmatic constructivist epistemology. However, it is evident that, as humans, we need to have a coherent environmental theory and for that we need to reconsider the concept of \u201cnature\u201d. For that we need, in turn, to denote a former existence of a pre-anthropogenic, unconstructed world. And furthermore, we need to show that nature was before and will be after the human action on it.\u00a0 Fr\u00f8lund stresses that point, too: \u201conly if environmentalism were able to acknowledge that there is nature before and after anthropogenic impacts, it is possible to determine which of our actions has or will change nature to a degree that threatens our survival\u201d.\u00a0 To save his \u201cmaterialism\u201d, Vogel affirms that even an artifact has a \u2018nature of its own\u2019 and may \u201cexceed [its] relation to human construction\u201d. At the same time, Fr\u00f8lund assures us that nature only \u201cplays a kind of cautionary role\u201d or \u201cnominal\u201d role in his theory, and that he only sanctions the word because it reminds \u201cus of the limits of our abilities and the need to be careful and modest about our attempts to transform the world\u201d. With that we could recognize the contradiction of a theory that maintains human cognition as material experience capable of overwhelming nature within its practice, but at the same time recognizing the need for a coherent acceptance of it. As a result, Fr\u00f8lund articulates the problem arising within this new type of materialism<\/em> defended by Vogel: \u201cWhat is Nature at all?\u201d. Is it a question of constructivist cognition or the continuation of a fight between environmentalists about the idea of nature, as Latour (2017) suggests it as \u201cle Terrestre<\/em>\u201d that more or less plays the role of the old concept?<\/p>\n

The Nature-culture Continuum through Moving Images: From <\/em>Vegetable Pompeii (Pauline Julier) to NATURALIS HISTORI\u00c6 (<\/em>Pliny the Elder)\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Continuing the debate, and especially, restating the question \u201cWhat is Nature?\u201d, my contribution to the present collective work is a type of \u2018field \u00a0work\u2019 (an art project of Pauline Julier), using images as \u201cprimary materials\u201d, asking questions such as \u201cwhat if before humans there was, and after there would be, Nature?\u201d. The question that I am asking is: \u201cis it possible to make an inventory of the World before humans disappear?\u201d And if we should follow a new materialist practice still dreading the duality nature\/ human society, how should we defend the complexity of the \u201canthropogenic impact\u201d? Combining art and science, archeology and ecology, Pauline Julier invites us to rethink the discovery of a forest, maybe the oldest one ever, before human and even animal life emerged, as a witness, archive and document, in order to mobilize our contemporary imaginaries and eventually to act. I am arguing that this project, put in the context of the everyday, provokes our cognitive capacities for care<\/em>, life forms<\/em> and life-styles<\/em> in respect to environmental aesthetics<\/em>. With this in mind, I am considering her artistic practices as a materiality of the aesthetic experience dealing with ethical-moral objects<\/em> in terms of Saito (2007). By considering the artist\u2019s responsibility in the process of producing, I am exploring her artwork as a gesture, and the artistic action as a projection of society\u2019s \u201cforms of life\u201d (Wittgenstein; Braidotti). Seen this way, the artist is<\/em> an author-producer<\/em> (Benjamin) of a \u201cform of life\u201d. That understanding of the artist is indebted to Dewey\u2019s notion of \u201cthe experience of experience\u201d, which recognizes that the aesthetic experience is not separate from the life<\/em> experience. That should be considered as the will of the artist to repair the ethical connection to the environment, which is by itself the sharing of ethic and aesthetic experience (Nathalie Blanc; Jacques Ranci\u00e8re). In that sense the sharing of the sensitivity is repaired. This, in turn, opens the way towards an environmental aesthetics<\/em>. Accordingly, Julier shows us that it is not scientific inventions that discovered Nature but, on the contrary, that is the Nature, as a subject of our human devastating actions on it, which is contributing to our scientific research and understanding of it. And the way in which we dispose of objects brings us to some sacred significance: Nature existed before us humans, and will exist after our own self-provoked extinction. Another point we address is how the attempt to escape from that, as the transhuman and the posthuman conditions are trying to do, would be to approach images that Julier is showing through the scholarship of Jean-Michel Durafour and his concept of \u201ceconology\u201d:\u00a0 images as \u201cbeings-in-between\u201d creating a link between human and non-human nature. I demonstrate next how we, from our human position, should face and reconnect the inhuman part of images, i.e. Nature.<\/p>\n

I am infinitely thankful to Giorgio Baruchello for inviting me as a guest editor for this special issue of <\/em>Nordicum-Mediterraneum. I would also like to express my gratitude toward my colleague Mogens Chrom Jacobsen, who made the success of our Project possible, and Kelly Cogswell, who helped with the text.<\/em><\/p>\n

[i]<\/sup><\/a> I am using double quotation marks when it is a straight citation of a word or expression and single quotation marks to stress the importance of the concept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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