The relation between aesthetics and nature, broadly construed, appears doubly overdetermined. Firstly by the (now largely abandoned) discussion of the sublime and the lingering phantoms of thinking nature aesthetically in terms of the picturesque, the untouched and the pristine which followed the degradation of the sublime. And secondly, by an intertwined set of artistic practices that have emphasised the attempt to avoid the use of nature as fodder for art (and other material practices). I will attempt to trace this bifurcatory map of nature and aesthetics as it recapitulates the temporal derivation of aesthetics from nature. F.W.J. von Schelling’s thought, I will argue, allows for a concept of artistic practice that indexes nature’s formalized productivity without being determined by it.
The sublime can be understood as an instance of human nature as seen from afar, the picturesque an instance of being too close to nature as human. These tactics are discussed by Timothy Morton in terms of ‘critical distance’ and ‘framing’, though I wish to enact an implicit critique of the object-oriented philosophy he draws upon as I proceed. Problematically, the two relations of distance and framing feed into one another. The fundamental tactic of the Kantian sublime is to wire the towering tidal wave, together with the flowing lava, back into the powerful finitude of the subject as observer, based on that minimal distancing. Framing, on the other hand, begins from a more surefooted subject; it takes the world as a problem which we pass through in order to come back to our own capacities—not to solve the problem, but to revel in our own finitude.1
An essential question then: What would an ecologically focused speculative aesthetics be, other than a redoubling or exacerbation of this oscillation? The obvious response, it would seem, would be to either reinstate the Kantian sublime but orient it toward transcendental realism by moving the split of sense regarding space from the subject to the object. Or else to restructure our interaction with nature in order to seriously reconsider all material production as having a real irreparable cost; i.e. to reverse framing so as to constantly be framing our action according to nature, always attempting to determine our speculative yet real or deromanticized finitude.
One pressing problem is that these possibilities have already been papered over by more affordable (and aesthetically overdetermined) versions: The absorption of the sublime via a transcendental realism is preempted aesthetically by the fantasies of eco-catastro-porn. And on the other hand, critical material production is easily buried in what I call a ‘cute’ ecology. In the former, nature exceeds our grasp but only through our staging of the fantasy of ecological collapse. The absolutely huge and absolutely destructive, or more precisely purportedly unmappable complexity of ecological disaster seems to be simultaneously a mathematical and dynamical sublime. Yet these fantasies maintain a split between the world and earth, as the end of the world allows for another to emerge, one that invariably begins under the auspices of utopia. Cute ecology, on the other hand, relates to but surpasses the aesthetics of ‘greenwashing’ capital which, by urging superficial changes to consumption practices, aims to make capitalism compatible with ecology (very much in line with Žižek’s ‘capitalism with a human face’). Our regular, or even increased, purchases guarantee some amount of ecological stability in another part of the world, but a stability only in so far as it is representable to us. As opposed to the tacit passivity of catastro-porn, cute ecology allows for a more proactive posture, in that it allows individuals to get upset and to take (economic) action to protect particular species or landscapes they find aesthetically appealing.
In both eco-catastrophics and cute ecology, the tension between local and global is paramount, but serves primarily to reinscribe the incapacity of the human, in the wake of the sublime, to do anything other than vicariously experience it and then pass it off to preexisting governmental or capitalist safety nets. This massive global level stands in contradistinction to the atomized consumer, who can only view themselves, and even large organizations, as incapable of addressing any aspect of ecological crisis, never mind ecological crisis as a whole. This in turn leads to the abandonment of large-scale conceptual schemas: What could the terms ‘nature’ or ‘ecology’ mean, given the ineffectuality of ecological intervention? Furthermore, since these interventions evidently bind us to capitalist practices, we either doubt the potential of developing truly green technologies because of the bottom line, or simply dismiss designed technological solutions (as in the anti-technoscience attitude often found within ‘Continental’ philosophical thought).
As for cute ecology, Morton has argued that cute animals bring a dangerous sentimentality to ethics and create obstacles to thinking ecologically. However he still seems to think that there is some use for the cute as opposed to an ‘into the wild’ mentality. Morton argues that it is the barrier between the cute and non-cute that needs to be removed—but how could this ever be possible? While renegotiating the conceptual bulwark of nature’s aesthetics is problematic enough, cuteness goes far beyond the aesthetics of nature. A cute ecology has strange consequences for environmental aesthetics, as for example when endangered animals are chosen to be taken to zoos for preservation only if they can attract sufficient revenue. Cuteness determines the cultural capital of animals, and endangered species in particular. The problem for any speculative aesthetics of nature is that this kind of affectivity comes at the price of epistemology. The problematic aesthetic of cuteness can be further articulated following Magnani’s use of Gibson’s concept of affordance: affordance is defined as the action potential of part of the environment in relation to the perception of the individual. This is discussed by Magnani in terms of ecologically rooted chances.2 In Magnani, perception is understood as an act, not a reaction between agent and environment. In this sense, the manipulative nature of cuteness can be interpreted as the technological extension of the hardwired disposition to be protective of the features of the young—paedomorphism across species lines (which sounds worse than it is!).
In comparison to the multiple shifts of perspective Kant must perform to justify the appreciation of the sublime, the cute appears as an asymmetrical acceleration of the aesthetic fascination of our own potential as gene carriers. Cuteness is an asymptotic poison flowing out across every form of aesthetic mediation. Yet cuteness points, in however warped a way, to the material potential of nature, constricted as it is in our being of our species. In cute ecology, design asymmetrically synthesizes ecocatastrophics; as such, it is the best means of overturning an ecological aesthetics trapped in the double-bind described above, without challenging the naturalness of our concepts of nature or being increasingly divorced from our interaction with nature (whatever that means) and the forms of thought stemming from it. Ecological design attempts to be hypermodern on the outside while eco-friendly on the inside, which indicates a return to a naturalness; a stability made of fantastic nature but without material nature. As recent discussions with Simone Ferracina3 make clear, the trick becomes how to sell uncomfortable design that erodes the packaged stability of nature-as-home. But how can you unbind sedimented desires from each of the articulations of renewal—one global, one local, though each points to its other: the cleaning of the earth for ecocatastrophics, the saccharine promise of new life for cute ecology?
Our purported distance from nature and its opposed framing assumes a prior nature-thinker distinction, a distinction internal to thinking but one that is illuminated by Schelling. Following his reading of Kant’s methodology, which reinstates the problems of representation, Schelling identifies a problem complicated by a nature, which is not prethinkable. This nature is a complex of dynamic forces that creates in spite of itself an identity of spacetime which, in trying to rip itself to pieces, produces actualities as well as nature’s continuum of movement. Taken up by human minds, movement engenders productive computation and intuition through embodiment, and is translated in the transcendental as a timing and spacing out of thoughts on construction. Given such a nature, design becomes a form of auto-manipulation where the production of objects warps our own concepts of nature while also requiring the reduction of nature to manipulable materials in order to think design as such.
Here one can see the ecological benefits of Schelling’s claim that the plastic arts represent nothingness as inexistent as opposed to impossible or otherworldly. Designed objects seek to materially embody new forms that can capture at once nature’s forming of us and our forming of nature. Usually treated as the transcendental side of the equation, the creation (or perhaps more accurately discovery) of form suggests the capacity of new objects to produce new methodologies or new fictions, the possibility of manipulating concepts so as to assist in the production of the actual. Ecology requires an aesthetics of manipulation that emphasises the razorblades of contingency over the fantasy of catastrophe and the futurity of cuteness (or maybe the cuteness of futurity).
But here another bifurcation arises, that between the creation of norms or productive fictions and the production of manipulative objects. The sinew between them is a realist philosophy of nature, a nature that forces thought into a moving production of itself, within nature’s entropic tendency towards self-rendering, towards restless proliferation—with the caveat that we depend on the actual in a way nature does not.
1. See T. Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, University Press, 2009).
2. L. Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Berlin: Springer, 2010).
3. See http://simoneferracina.com/.