Multiple Ecologies and Transdisciplinarity

A series of interesting new posts have sprung up which seem to be preliminary descriptions of various three fold ecologies. First, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) student Adam Robberts posted his thoughts (here) on the mutual interdependence of what have traditionally been identified as ‘nature, culture and knowledge’. Here is his introduction to the piece, which he tells us is a part of a larger work in progress:

Nature, culture and knowledge are collectively assembled elements of a complex and shifting mosaic. Intrinsically relative, these three elements, I argue, are mutually enacting and inseparable. “Nature” is inevitably an abstract construction, a horizon upon which cultural-scientific modes of knowledge organize highly specific elements of a more complex reality. Nature is organizationally open in an observer-dependent way. Likewise, culture and science do not simply “construct” a vision of Nature that is absent of historical and ecological contingencies. The naïve empiricism of the positivist philosopher, alongside the equally impoverished idea of the “social construction of Nature” is, in the context of a twenty-first century ecological science, inadequate.

Adam then marks out some thoughts on the role of subjectivity and enacted knowledge in the understanding of ecological issues:

The following work is maps out the possibility and validity of this idea: that there is an ecology of knowledge, concepts, and paradigms that are mediated through, and reciprocally infolded with, specific political and technological practices.

The whole post is well worth the read - as Adam brings Kuhn, Alf Hornborg and others to bear on what Adam wants to suggest are the three interpenetrating ecologies of media, nature, and knowledge.

In a follow-up comment I ask Adam if he has considered the connections between his own work and Guattari’s ‘ecosophy’ – specifically with regards to Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ (environmental, social, mental). In addition, I assumed Adam’s affiliation with CIIS would have also exposed him to Ken Wilber’s own triumvirate of perspectival realms of the real, which could possibly be compared to both Adam’s and Guattari’s triple ecologies.

Adam then responded by posting what seems to be another except from his work in progress specifically addressing the connections one might explore between the work of Guattari, Edgar Morin, and various other thinkers who have three fold approaches to ecological thinking (here).

Here is a particularly interesting bit:

In arguing for a complex, relational epistemology, Hornborg acknowledges that human cognition, or knowledge, whatever its form, is always a mutually constellating act that designates simultaneously the knower, as a subject, and the known, as an object of knowledge. Emphasizing this relationship, Hornborg explores the recursivity of the subject-object split and cites that such a relational epistemology is foundational to the work of biological scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as well as anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s “ecology of mind” (2001).

All in all I resonate with the general resemblances Adam is calling upon here. And an important point emerging from Adam’s overview is how researchers must respect the irreducible complexity of ecological and human phenomenon, and begin investigating the intricate dynamics occurring among phenomena that we normally describe in exclusive terms such as nature, culture, the individual, the species, and society. The world is much more interconstellating than has so far been understood by scholars and researchers in all specialized disciplines, and all future practical interventions will rely of our varied capacity to engender more adequate portrayals of existing reality.

With an interestingly similar strain of thinking, Levi Bryant has a posted a link to a PDF version of a recent talk he delivered at Georgia Tech titled, “The Faintest of Traces”. In the paper, Bryant lays the ground work for a post-Lacanian, object-oriented philosophy that posits 3 interlocking realms of the real that constitute social assemblages of all kinds.

As usual with Bryant, there is much to be appreciated in the paper as a whole, but I found the following passage perhaps most striking:

Clearly the domain of meaning must be an important component of social assemblages, yet it cannot be the entire story.

Something is missing. In his essay “Where are the Missing Masses?”, Latour marks the void of these components in sociology. As Latour writes,

According to some physicists there is not enough mass in the universe to balance the accounts that cosmologists make of it. They are looking everywhere for the "missing mass" that could add up to the nice expected total. It is the same with sociologists. They are constantly looking, somewhat desperately, for social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly. When adding up social ties it does not balance. Soft human and weak moralities are all sociologists can get. The society they try to recompose with bodies and norms constantly crumble. Something is missing… Where can they find it?... To balance our accounts of society we simply have to turn our attention away from humans and look at non-humans.

According to Latour, the missing masses that haunt our analysis of social assemblages are nonhumans.

Bryant, following Latour and others, asks researchers to explicitly acknowledge the role “nonhumans” play in the constitution of any given social matrix. Nonhumans contribute to the regularity of social relations in often hidden yet persistent ways, and must be considered along with the semiotic and the psychological dimensions of social assemblages.

Bryant then goes on to modify Lacan’s famous Borromean knot formulation in a very interesting way. Whereas Lacan posited three interlocking registers of the Imaginal, the Symbolic and the Real, Bryant offers to elucidate the symbolic, phenomenological, and material dimensions of the overarching domain of the Real. As Bryant writes,

By encompassing all three domains in the circle of the real, I am emphasizing the flat ontology I’ve developed elsewhere in my book The Democracy of Objects. Flat ontology seeks to place the heterogeneity of entities that populate our world on equal ontological footing. In other words, it refuses to reduce the domain of the symbolic to the material, nor to reduce the material to a construction of the cultural. Instead, it strives to think the interaction of these domains, treating them all as being equally real. [p.7]

Bryant is then quick to point out his motives behind his reformulations:

“With this modified version of the Borromean knot it is my hope that diverse branches of theory can be integrated and thought together… The point, however, is not to simply embrace all of these diverse domains, but to instead investigate how they interpenetrate and interact, influencing one another so as to produce the social assemblages that populate our world.” [p.7]

Of course, as someone who consciously and intentionally operates outside of disciplinary structures I can only support any endeavor that seeks to inject authentic interdisciplinary (or perhaps transdisciplinary?) sensibilities into philosophical thinking. As previously noted, in relation to the future of the anthropological enterprise, I believe we have not yet seen the kinds of innovative projects or multi-dimensional models that might arise from a truly creative and rigorous cross-fertilization between the humanities and the sciences. However, I believe the work of John Protevi, Manuel DeLanda and various medical and ecological anthropologists are definitely moving in that direction.

And it is precisely the pluralistic and transversive character of Bryant’s and Adam’s triadic formulations that makes them so relevant for transdisciplinary thinking in general. Such thinking attempts to differentiate the multiple ecologies at work in the world and enrich any future expanded explorations into the nature of reality.

As anthropologist Alf Hornborg writes:

“The recurrent, triadic scheme is not arbitrary but reflects the complementarity of perspectives on human-environment relations deriving, respectively, from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities” (2001:192).

I think an acknowledgment of the various ontological and epistemological ecologies Adam, Bryant and others identify would also require us to begin deploying much more pluralistic methodological practices - approaches capable of exploring, mediating and cross-translating the varied ecological, semiotic and existential phenomena at play within particular situations.

Just think how much better our researches and practical interventions would be should we take an even wider yet deeper view of the world?