| object
| - by Hannes
Bergthaller
by Hannes Bergthaller
04-01-2018
thread: critical
ecologies
PDF
https://doi.org/10.7273/f996-kc08
This essay was peer-reviewed.
critical ecologies
Included in the Gathering:
Natural
Media
Bergthaller's essay originally appeared in the collection,
Ecological Thought in Germany. It is reprinted here, with
permissions from Lexington Books, as part of an ebr gathering on
Natural Media (December 2019).
I.
Niklas Luhmann made no significant contribution to
environmentalist thought. He was one of the most radically
ecological thinkers of the 20th century. If these two statements
seem contradictory, this is largely because environmentalism has
successfully positioned itself as the only adequate expression of
ecological thinking. One of the most fruitful aspects of Luhmann’s
theory of social systems for the environmental humanities, I hope
to show in the following, is that it allows one to question
environmentalist common sense, to disarticulate our conceptions of
ecology and environment from each other, and to formulate a
perspective which takes ecological concerns seriously while at the
same time enabling one to understand the peculiar mixture of
successes and failures, as well as the processes of institutional
and conceptual fraying, which have characterized the trajectory of
environmental movements since their meteoric rise in the 1960s and
1970s. From such a perspective, I will argue, social systems theory
appears neither as an ally nor as an enemy of environmentalism; it
cannot hope to contribute to its success, nor can it bring about
its failure. What it can do, however, is help environmentalists to
transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud 1955:
308).
It is safe to assume that this is not how German
environmentalists initially viewed Luhmann’s work. His best-known
statement of his views on ecological problems can be found in the
volume Ecological Communication, which was originally
published in 1986, almost simultaneously with fellow sociologist
Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, in the year of the Chernobyl
accident, and at the very height of Germany’s environmental
movement. Risk Society was widely lauded as having
correctly read the signs of the times; it became a popular
bestseller and a central point of reference in environmentalist
discourse over subsequent decades – a development surely aided by
the fact that his account was broadly sympathetic to
environmentalists’ view of themselves as vanguards of a new era
(which he labelled “reflexive modernity”). By contrast,
Ecological Communication argued that the environmental
movement was running afoul of basic structural principles of modern
society, that its tendency to communicate its concerns in terms of
fear and moral outrage was at best ineffective, and that the goals
it had set for itself were therefore unlikely to be attained.
Luhmann did not help his case by presenting it with an air of cool
detachment punctuated by mordant irony. Unsurprisingly, his message
proved to be unpopular. Ecological Communication never
reached beyond a small audience of specialists.
Yet it is important not to mistake Luhmann’s rejection of
environmentalism’s self-descriptions for a dismissal of its
ecological concerns. If anything, the opposite may be closer to the
truth. After all, Luhmann cultivated a pose of Olympian aloofness
with respect to the vagaries of public debate and generally avoided
addressing fashionable topics. Ecological Communication
was based on an invited lecture he delivered to the
Rhenish-Westfallian Academy of Science in 1985, where he had been
asked to address the topical question whether “modern society”
could “adjust itself” to ecological dangers (Luhmann 1989: xvii).
Although he answered this question in the negative, the very fact
that he chose to expand his remarks on that occasion into an entire
monograph (which remains one of the most concise expositions of his
theory) is a clear indication that he regarded it to be of more
than passing interest – an impression that can only be confirmed by
his subsequent writings, where he frequently reiterated the view
that, while “ecological problems have always accompanied the
evolution of society,” they “have dramatically intensified over the
past century” (Luhmann 2012a: 73).
The ecological crisis has long ceased to be a fashionable topic.
Obviously, this does not mean that it has disappeared from the news
– on the contrary, there continues to be a steady drumbeat of
reports about the dire state of the biosphere. However, we have by
now become thoroughly inured to the mismatch between the alarming
nature of many of these reports and the ways in which society
reacts to them. They are usually accompanied by appeals to
politicians, companies, and individual consumers to assume
responsibility, to take immediate action, to radically change
course, and so on. More often than not, these appeals are followed
by assurances that everyone is doing what they can. It never takes
very long before all this fades back into the white noise of mass
media communication, while politicians, companies, and consumers
each go their own merry way – plunging environmentalists more
deeply into despair, but also feeding the conviction that more
needs to be done to persuade society of the gravity of the dangers
it faces. At the same time, however, it is becoming less and less
convincing to locate the roots of the problem in a lack of
environmental consciousness. After all, in most technologically
advanced countries, the majority of the population is perfectly
aware of ecological problems. Rather than a larger megaphone, a
more trenchant critique, a new ethics, or yet another blueprint for
ecological reform, it seems that what may be needed most is an
explanation why society is so strangely intransigent to attempts to
steer it in the direction of greater ecological sustainability.
Many of the recent developments in the field of ecocriticism can
be understood against the background of this realization that
environmentalist thought as it developed during the second half of
the 20th century has reached a point of exhaustion. Timothy
Morton’s notion of a “dark” ecology which would dispense with
Romantic conceptions of Nature (Morton 2016), Bruno Latour’s
political ecology, and the various versions of new materialist
theory (Coole and Frost 2010) promise a fundamental overhaul of the
very categories by which we understand the relationship of human
beings to the biosphere. All of these approaches argue that the
solution to the ecological problems of contemporary society should
be sought in a new ontology, which they venture to supply. This
ontology must be “flat,” i.e., it must do away with all hierarchies
of being, and most importantly, it must dismantle anthropocentrism,
understood as the idea that human beings occupy a privileged
position in the cosmos (Levi-Bryant 2011: 245-247). Rather than
aiming to protect a nature that is somewhere “out there,” distinct
from the social world humans inhabit, we need to understand that we
can never be separate or truly alienated from nature. The
materiality of the human body insures that we are radically open to
and interlaced with other forms of life and other kinds of matter.
This “intimacy,” as Morton likes to call it, entails an ethical and
political responsibility for our ecological others.
Such proposals do represent a sharp departure from the
conceptual vocabulary that earlier forms of environmentalist
thought had employed in discussing ecological problems. And yet,
they generally shy away from the most radical implications of their
own premises, and always eventually retrench to recognizably
humanist appeals to the better angels of our nature. Humans are not
singular, we are told – and yet, they are singularly responsible
for the ecological crisis. The ecological embeddedness of human
beings puts their self-sovereignty radically into question – and
yet, it is presumed that they are able to refashion society in
accordance with ecological insights. However new the new ontologies
may be, the problems they are supposed to remedy are framed in
strikingly familiar terms. Latour, for example, describes modernity
as founded on an ontological dualism which prevented those in its
grasp from recognizing their real ecological dependencies. In fact,
then, the ontology of the moderns is not really a bona
fide ontology at all, but just another form of false
consciousness – and Latour never offers much of an explanation why
they cling so tenaciously to this perverse delusion.
II.
These shortcomings can be summed up by saying that new
materialist theories, just like earlier versions of
environmentalist thought, fail to conceptualize society in
ecological terms. With regard to biological organisms, we take it
as a matter of course that they are unable to control their own
evolutionary development. The genetic makeup of a species changes
in response to changes in its environment. In the process, it
changes the environment of other biological species in its
surroundings, who will likewise change in response. The coevolution
of biological species is thus a process in which “everything is
connected to everything else,” as Barry Commoner’s famous “first
law of ecology” has it (Commoner 1971: 16) – but by the same token,
it is also a process which is beyond control. Ecological evolution
consists in a tangled web of causal connections so complex that no
single species would be able to steer it in any particular
direction – if only because other species in the ecological system
would react to such attempts with changes of their own. In the
version of systems ecology Commoner helped to popularize, the
feedback loops which link species to each other were assumed to
ensure the equilibrium of the system as a whole (for that reason,
Commoner’s second law of ecology stipulates that “Nature knows
best”; Commoner 1971: 20). Of course, the view that ecological
systems naturally tend towards stable conditions is one that few
scientists in the field would today accept without much
qualification (although it continues to dominate popular notions
about ecology; Kricher 2009). For the purposes of this essay,
however, the important point is that ecological evolution is a
process which advances “blindly,” as it were, without a discernible
purpose or goal, and which is so complex that the future
ramifications of any given change are practically impossible to
calculate in advance.
On this basis, environmentalists argued that humans should avoid
meddling with ecological systems whenever possible. However, as
Luhmann points out, they did not bother apply this insight to the
one system which appeared to be causing all of our ecological
problems: even while “respect for ‘natural balances’ increased
[...], one’s own society was exposed to an incisive critique that
was replete with demands for intervention, as if it was not a
system at all” (Luhmann 1989: 5; italics in the original). As
the context of this passage makes clear, Luhmann saw his own theory
as providing a remedy for this inconsistency. Indeed, social
systems theory drew very heavily on developments in cybernetics and
general systems theory which had also driven the contemporaneous
rise of systems ecology. Luhmann had studied briefly with Talcott
Parsons during the early 1960s, and his project of a general theory
of society can be seen as an attempt to rework Talcott’s structural
functionalism on this new theoretical foundation, by conceiving of
society as a self-organizing, evolving system.
A crucial building block in this effort is the concept of
autopoiesis as it was developed by the Chilean biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela during the 1970s (Maturana and Varela
1980). Maturana and Varela had originally coined the term to
designate the dynamic process of self-generation characteristic of
living organisms. Autopoietic systems persist by recursively
processing their own components – a cell, for example, uses the
instructions encoded in its own genome to synthesize proteins which
maintain the cell membrane and eventually serve to produce further
copies of the genome, which is used to synthesize proteins, and so
forth. Such systems can therefore be described as operationally
closed: even though they must rely on an ambient flow of molecules
and energy, their structure is entirely a product of their own
operations. Luhmann argued that society should be conceived along
similar lines: just like a biological organism uses its own
elements in order produce the elements of which it consists,
society can be understood as a network of communications which
reproduces itself by generating further communication. And just
like the reproduction of a cell depends on conditions which it
cannot control with its own operations (e.g. the surrounding
temperature or the presence of particular chemical elements), so
the autopoiesis of communication depends on a host of environmental
factors which lie outside of its control, but which in either case
cannot directly determine the evolutionary trajectory of the system
(except in cases where they destroy it).
In this theoretical context, the term “environment” assumes a
much more specific meaning than that in which it is commonly
employed in the environmental humanities. From a systems
theoretical viewpoint, an environment must always be thought of as
correlative to a system – only where there is a system that is able
to distinguish itself from its surroundings does it make sense to
speak of an environment, to begin with. Indeed, what makes the
system a system is only this: that it can distinguish between self
and non-self, that it can observe and, through its own operations,
reproduce the distinction between itself and its environment.
However, as long as the system persists as a system, it
cannot cross the boundary by which it is thus constituted – it can
mark the difference only “from the inside,” as it were (in the form
of what Luhmann, following the British mathematician George Spencer
Brown, refers to as a “re-entry”; Luhmann 2012a: 105-108). The
problem is one that literary critics will be familiar with from
poststructuralist accounts of linguistic reference: the meaning of
an utterance cannot be anchored to a stable referent in the object
world, but rather emerges from the endless play of linguistic
différance. Similarly, Luhmann argues that communication
proceeds by processing the difference between itself and that about
which it communicates. Communication must refer to a world (because
pure self-reference is as impossible as pure hetero-reference), but
the world to which it refers can never be anything other than a
product of communication. It is in this particular sense that
Luhmann designates social systems theory as a form of radical
constructivism (Luhmann 2002, 46-50).
It must be emphasized that this does not imply that society is
somehow autarchic or independent of ecological conditions, or that
nothing exists outside of communication. It does mean, however,
that communication can only deal with the world on its own terms –
that is to say, with more communication, and therefore selectively.
Only because of this self-limitation is the system able to persist
as a system, at all; only by operationally closing itself off from
the world as a totality does it become able to open itself
selectively to those aspects of the world which are relevant to it.
The system itself determines which elements of the surrounding
world it will be determined by. The environment of a system thus
never coincides with the world as it is “in and of itself”– very
much as in Jakob von Uexküll’s biological theory of animal
“Umwelten,” the term denotes only that part of the world which a
particular system can perceive and react to. An external observer
may be able to see that there are also other things which the
system cannot see – including, perhaps, processes that may be of
vital importance for its ability to survive – but insofar as the
system is constitutively blind to them, they do not form a part of
its environment (in von Uexküll’s terminology, one may say that
they instead belong to its “Umgebung,” or surroundings; Sprenger
2014: 17).
From the foregoing, it should be clear that the peculiar
relationship obtaining between a system and its environment cannot
really be understood in terms of simple causes and effects. Using a
concept from Talcott Parsons, Luhmann initially described it as a
process of “interpenetration.” Following his reception of Maturana
and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis in the 1980s, this term was
supplemented by the concept of structural coupling. In
Ecological Communication, he describes the relationship
with the metaphor of resonance: just like ambient sound waves can
induce an object to change its state without directly “touching”
it, a system can perturb another system to which it is structurally
coupled, even though the two systems always remain strictly
distinct from each other. Importantly, it is the internal
organization of the system which determines whether and how it can
be perturbed in this fashion: “A differentiated system can be made
to resonate only on the basis of its own frequencies” (Luhmann
1989: 16). To make a wine glass shatter, the singer has to hit the
exact frequency at which the glass swings of its own accord; the
same note would have no significant effect on a brick. Similarly,
autopoietic systems always have a limited “bandwidth” – they can
only respond to a limited spectrum of events. The greater the
internal complexity of a system, the more sensitive it becomes to
its surroundings, and the more complex is its environment
(contrast, for example, von Uexküll’s famous example of the tick,
which registers only rough degrees of light and darkness, the
presence of butyric acid, and temperature, with the wealth of
stimuli more complex organisms such as parakeets or dogs are able
to process).
With regard to communication about ecological problems, it is
crucial to keep in mind that ecological processes do not really
form a part of the environment of society in the above sense, at
all. They can only affect communication indirectly, because the
relevant environment of communication consists first and foremost
of what Luhmann calls “psychic systems” – that is to say, of mental
processes, which are likewise organized autopoietically, and which
are also structurally coupled to organic bodies. As Hans-Georg
Moeller writes, social systems theory thus replaces the traditional
mind-body dualism which has dominated Western philosophy since
Plato with a “systemic triadism”: instead of two substances, we are
dealing with three different types of processes – physiological
bodies, consciousnesses, and communication (i.e., society; Moeller
2012: 56). These systems form environments for each other and can
therefore be understood as participating in an encompassing process
of ecological co-evolution. But, once again, this also means that
none of these systems is in a position to steer or control the
others: what happens with my physical body (including my brain)
affects, but does not causally determine what happens in my mind
(and vice versa), just as what happens in my thoughts
affects, but cannot causally determine what happens in
communication (and again, vice versa). Each of these three
autopoietic systems possesses an evolutionary dynamic of its
own.
This picture is further complicated by the structural
specificities of modern society. Just as a biological organism is
constituted not as a single, fully integrated system, but rather
consists of several interdependent processes (for example in the
neuronal, the hormonal, or the immune system), so society is
internally differentiated into subsystems. These subsystems have
taken a variety of forms during different historical periods – in
many ancient societies, for example, the most important social
subdivision was the family. Through their membership in a
particular household, human beings were automatically assigned a
position within a particular social stratum, which in turn
regulated their access to social and material resources. Following
a well-established sociological tradition, Luhmann argues that the
most distinctive characteristic of modern society is its
differentiation into function systems which assume universal and
exclusive competency for a particular domain of social reality and
elaborate their own criteria of rationality. Each of these function
systems is constituted as an autopoietic system in its own right
and constructs its intrasocietal environment in terms of a
distinctive binary code (e.g. government/opposition in politics,
truth/falsehood in science, payment/non-payment in the economy, to
name only some of the most obvious cases).
One important corollary of this form of social differentiation
is the breakdown of traditional ontology. A functionally
differentiated society effectively “multiplies its own reality
(Luhmann 1996: 191), as each function system construes the world in
its own terms (and has a tendency to mistake that construal for the
world itself). In contrast to earlier proponents of functional
differentiation, Luhmann dispenses with the notion that the
function systems could be integrated by some overarching principle,
and he gives up the notion that any of them could enjoy primacy
over, regulate, or control the others. As a result, a generally
binding consensus about “what is and what counts as valid” is no
longer possible: “what functions as a consensus is a makeshift
solution which is recognizable as such.” It remains distinct from
the realities which the various function systems synthesize for
their specific purposes, but which “can no longer be added up to a
comprehensive view of a world in the sense of a congregatio
corporum or a universitas rerum” – added up, that is to say,
to a world in the properly ontological sense (Luhmann 1980: 33; my
translation).
Compared to earlier forms of social organization, functional
differentiation allows society to attain a higher level of internal
complexity and thus increases its ability to register and process
environmental complexity. The price for this, however, is an
“abandonment of redundancy” which exposes society to new kinds of
risks: unlike in earlier forms of social differentiation, in which
the basic units often combined several social functions within
themselves, the function systems can no longer mutually “step in
for another even in a supportive or supplementary capacity. In the
event of a government crisis, science cannot help out with truths.
Politics has no capacity of its own to devise the success of the
economy, however much it might depend on this success politically
and however much it acts as if it could. The economy can involve
science in conditioning money payments, but however much money it
deploys, it cannot produce truths.” (Luhmann 2012b: 99). This lack
of redundancy makes modern society inherently more irritable and
therefore less stable. Just as the complexity of a biological
organism tells us nothing about how well-adapted it is to its
environment, so the greater complexity of modern society is not as
such a mark of evolutionary fitness. In contrast to the
modernization theories which played an important role sociology in
the decades after World War II, Luhmann also does not believe that
“the achievements of the various function systems would mutually
support and confirm one another” (Luhmann 2012a: 343). More often,
one finds that the function systems resonate with each other in
unpredictable and often problematic ways; a single social event can
have dramatically different effects in the different function
systems: “Payments of money to a politician that play no role in
the economic process [...] can become a political scandal.
Theoretically insignificant scientific discoveries can have
agonizing medical results. Legal decisions that hardly have any
effect on other decisions in the legal system itself can form
roadblocks for entire political spheres” (Luhmann 1989:
117-118).
III.
At this point, it should already be clear why Luhmann was so
profoundly skeptical with regard to the projects for an ecological
reform of society. Ecological processes cannot “enter” into
communication in any direct fashion – they can only affect the
biological bodies which constitute the environment of psychic
systems, which in turn constitute the environment of communication.
If my body becomes ill because of toxic substances in its
ecological environment, my consciousness will register this in the
form of pain, or of a failure of bodily functions. In response, I
may seek to make these symptoms a topic of communication – but
whether and how this topic resonates, which further communications
it will instigate and what social effects it will have, is entirely
beyond my control. It is determined neither by the ecological
environment, nor by my body or my consciousness, but only by the
network of communications that is society. For the most part,
however, our awareness of ecological problems has very little to do
with how they affect our bodies. Rather, we are aware of them as a
topic of communication: we read about global warming in the news,
perhaps (less likely) in a novel, or (even more unlikely) in a
scientific article; we see images of oil spills on television or in
an art gallery. Even if our own body became sick from cancer, we
would never think of connecting this fact with, for example, the
presence of plasticizers in the ecological environment, if we had
not learned from the mass media that such substances have been
linked to an in increase in the statistical incidence of cancer.
Our consciousness reacts to such communication with thoughts and
emotions – perhaps with grief, awe, bafflement, or despair – but
these mental events must remain without consequence unless they
fasten themselves again to communication and, in the process of
doing so, avail themselves of the various semantic templates (e.g.
words, images, money, laws, or votes) which society furnishes for
that purpose. The urgency we attribute to the ecological crisis is,
in this sense, entirely a product of communication. That is the
reason why it is so frustratingly easy to compartmentalize it – to
feel deeply moved by it when we take a walk in the forest or watch
a nature documentary, say, but rather but less so when we go to the
supermarket and have to buy groceries on a limited budget.
The capacity of modern society to react to changes in its
ecological environment is largely circumscribed by the respective
capacities of the function systems to resonate with their relevant
environments. In Ecological Communication, Luhmann
predicted that the function systems would be able to respond to
ecological problems only in terms of their own communicative codes,
in accordance with their system-specific rationalities – and that
these responses would not be sufficient to obviate its cumulative
effects on the ecological environment. With thirty years’
hindsight, his assessment appears remarkably prescient: the legal
system has evolved environmental legislation; the political system
has seen the emergence political platforms for ecological reform;
the economic system has found ways of translating ecological costs
into the languages of prices – and of making consumers pay for
“green” products. The education system has integrated ecological
issues into its curricula, while science has produced ecologically
oriented subdisciplines (among them, as a late-comer,
ecocriticism). These changes have often had significant positive
effects, but it is abundantly clear that they do not add up to
anything even remotely like the ecological revolution which the
environmental movement during its heyday was hoping to foment.
If one accepts the systems theoretical account of modernity, it
should also be clear why attempts to rekindle that old flame are
bound to fail – even and especially when they pin their hopes on a
newly refurbished ontology. According to Luhmann, the problem of
the original environmental movement was precisely that it failed to
reckon with functional differentiation (which had already put paid
to the old Aristotelian ontology). In presuming to speak for the
whole of society and its ecological environment, environmentalists
were arrogating for themselves an impossible observer position
which simply is no longer available in modern society – or, more
precisely, an observer position from which one could not
communicate without lapsing into disabling paradoxes: “It
contradicts every principle of social differentiation to
re-establish the totality of the system within the system. The
whole cannot be a part of the whole at the same time. Any attempt
of this kind would merely create a difference in the system: the
difference of that part which represents the totality of the system
within the system vis-a-vis all the other parts” (Luhmann 1989:
121). Where environmentalists liked to think of themselves as
representatives of the more-than-human world, their opponents and
critics often saw only little more than a bunch of self-righteous
white urbanites. More importantly, however, there simply exists no
institutions which would be able to remake society in accordance
with ecological criteria. Modern society has neither top nor
center, and no position to which such demands could be meaningfully
addressed. Social processes, like the processes of ecological
co-evolution on which they depend, are beyond control.
As long as one clings to the exorbitant hopes and fears on which
environmentalist thinking has thrived, such arguments can only
sound cynical or dangerously defeatist. But that would be missing
the point. Social systems theory does not seek to make any
prescriptions about what people should or should not do – and its
purpose is certainly not to discourage environmental activists from
engaging in environmental activism (which would, in any case, be no
less futile than trying to convince the average American
conservative of the need for a global tax on carbon emissions). It
is, in the first instance, simply an attempt to arrive at a
theoretically consistent and heuristically productive description
of the reality of modern society – an extraordinarily ambitious
work of sociological theory, written for an academic audience, in
adherence to the conventions of academic writing. At the same time,
however, it is also a self-critique of critical reasoning – that is
to say, of the long tradition of philosophical thinking (running
from Plato’s philosopher king all the way to Jürgen Habermas’
“noncoercive discourse”) which sought to improve society by
subjecting it to rational criticism, purging it of false beliefs,
and bringing it in line with fundamental realities that too many
people, for whatever reasons, have failed to recognize.
That environmentalism belongs into this tradition is signaled
already by its heavy investment in the notion of ecological crisis.
As Reinhard Koselleck has shown, the idea of crisis has its roots
in Hippocratic medicine, where it denoted the moment at which the
doctor must intervene in order to restore the health of a patient.
Only during the modern period did it emerge as one of the most
durable and productive semantic forms by which society observes
itself, one that is inextricably linked to the concept of critique.
The idea of crisis necessarily entails time pressure, uncertainty,
and the compulsion to act (Koselleck 1986: 66). To describe one’s
present as a moment of crisis is to conceive of it as a time of
transition in which one must take decisions and pick sides. To have
a critical attitude to society means nothing other than to be aware
of crisis – and to identify the means by which a decisive change
for the better could be brought about. To maintain such an
attitude, one must set oneself apart from the object of critique –
one must view it “from a critical distance.” For the critically
minded, the only alternative to critique is affirmation, or the
mindless acceptance of the status quo. In Luhmann’s view,
this theoretical attitude is played out: “The distinction between
affirmative and critical fails to connect with what is empirically
observable [...] because it excludes the possibility that what has
realized itself as society gives rise to the worst fears,
but cannot be rejected. This is the case if one considers
the evolutionary improbability of self-supporting structures, the
extreme autonomy and mutual interdependence of the function
systems, the dramatic ecological problems, the narrowness of the
temporal frames that are possible for politics and the economy, and
much else” (Luhmann 1990: 233; my translation).My argument here draws on an unpublished conference paper by
Elena Esposito, titled “Krisis and Critique” and delivered at the
conference Contemporary Perspectives on Systems Theory,
University of Macao, September 16-17, 2016
Given that “the ecological crisis” has now persisted for well
over half a century and shows no signs of abating, we may finally
become able to accept the view that holding a critical attitude to
society may in a sense be no more or less meaningful than holding a
critical attitude towards ecological evolution – and that rather
than producing new iterations of environmentalist critique, we may
wish to examine the commitments entailed by concepts we often use
unthinkingly, as if they referred to a world that was indifferent
to how we communicate about it. I would like to think that the
recent tendency to speak of ecological problems in terms of our
having entered a new geological epoch named the “Anthropocene”
points in this general direction: while this was partly born of the
impulse to once more up the ante and recapture the urgency of an
earlier phase of environmentalism, it has in fact had something
rather like the opposite effect, short-circuiting and confounding
ingrained rhetorical reflexes. The notion of a geological epoch is
almost by definition incompatible with the concept of crisis. And
with regard to many of the sociogenic processes that are now
reshaping the biosphere, and which are addressed under the heading
of the Anthropocene, it makes indeed very little sense to frame
them in such terms (especially if “ecological crisis” is used in
the singular). There is no longer any realistic prospect of
“critical interventions” (whether they would take the form of
collective political actions or of individual consumer choices)
which could, for example, reverse climate change and return the
planet to ecological conditions as they prevailed in earlier times.
The best that can be hoped for is that society will somehow be able
to mitigate the ecological degradation climate change is expected
to bring, and to buffer itself against its negative consequences.
Rather than referring to these problems as symptoms of a crisis, it
may be more useful to repurpose a different concept from classical
antiquity and understand them in terms of an ecological climacteric
– that is to say, as signs of a permanent, irreversible change in
the conditions of life (West 1971).
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Cite this Essay:
Bergthaller, Hannes. “Beyond
Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social
Systems”, Electronic Book
Review, April 1, 2018,
https://doi.org/10.7273/f996-kc08.
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