Dissertation Construction 06

Wilderness Matters: Understanding Interconstituent Ecological Lifeworlds

06

Posthuman Ecology

I have once again rearranged my title by dropping wilderness in the predicate and inserting 'ecological' where it was. I have 'wilderness' in the subject so why say it twice. Also, I think I will move from tagging myself as a sociocultural ecologist to a posthuman ecologist. What in the world is that? Well, I suppose another option is Posthuman Dimensions of Natural Resourcismist, but let's not go there. I make the posthuman move in recognition that to be dasein is not only to be be human. To be somebody is to be anybody -- any body of matter. This relates to Heidegger's "in-order-to" and "for-the-sake-of" structures in "worldhood". It comes from Harman's (2002) takeaway in Tool-Being. And, What is Posthumanism we ask, well, luckily Carey Wolfe (2010) has given us a work entitled just that. 

Tool ecology

First, the 'towards-which' and 'for-the-sake-of-which'. These are both relational aspects of what we may call 'the equipmentality of equipment' or to use Harman's (2002, p. 25) term, "referentiality". It is significance (Bedeutung) and meaning (Sinn) that constitute referentiality. (Note: my investigation will be into the worldhood of wilderness (wildhood as the existential ontological structure of the wild) and to get at that worldhood requires an ontography of the significant entitities and the meaning erupting about them. This means an investigation into the ontological structure of the gear (Zeug as a rhetorical concept and literally in the German, ) that yokes together the constituent lifeworlds (niches) and at a greater scale, their worlds.) There are two senses of 'reference' and these may be mapped onto Heidegger's most foundational insight, the ontological difference. The two senses are of the 1) ontic (existence) and the 2) ontological (existential) and they are analogous to the two aspects of referentiality: in-order-to (Um-zu) and for-the-sake-of (Um-willen) which also map directly to significance and meaning.

"The tool's 'meaning' [significance] is nothing other than the visible termination of its underground action. Just as the meaning of a signal-arrow is the region to which it alerts us by point, just as a word evokes its meaning by deflecting attention away from itself,"....the "second, concealed [ontological] kind of 'meaning' is analogous to what I have called the tool-being of the entity, an act of primal effectiveness that eludes every possible view" (Harman, 2002, p. 26). 

Gear plays a role in the referential totality of the environment of somebody. That is, gear are signs with flickering significance pointing at the "in-order-to" structure of somebody's being. That is, gear are ontic references toward the ontological environment (Um-zu bracing the embrace of the Umwelt). The gear (Zeug) works to turn toward other gear that supports the lifeworld of somebody. The lifeworld is not the same as the world at large. Again the ontic-ontological relations come into play. Map the lifeworld to the ontic and the world to the ontological and we have another iridescent relationship of beings and being. 

Harman makes the posthuman move by insisting that dasein is not only a human capacity. All beings are dasein. It is not just the case that everybody is somebody. It is also the case that every body is somebody. To use Heideggarian language. Everything is somebody. Instead of fleshing out Harman's posthumanism, let's move to Wolfe's (2010) understanding.

Posthumanism

Wolfe first gives us what posthumanism is not. It is not the notion "that 'the human' is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether" (p. xv). That would be more of a transhumanism. He offers it with reference to Lyotard's regard for the postmodern. Posthumanism "comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prothetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms....it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical" (p. xv).

Wolfe's work, (like that of other systems thinkers that (overtly or by insinuation) embrace a semiotic perspective, Luhmann, Maturana & Varela, and Brier) "enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significance, and affective intruments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on.

As cryptic as it reads, posthuman ecology does what was done in the timelessness of the ancients, it couples the mother(board) Gaia with the blacksmith, Hephaestus.