Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking

The ecologization of thinkingErichHörlNils F. SchottTranslated byJEAN-LUC NANCYAn ecology properly understood can be nothing other than a technology. We are witnessing the breakthrough of a new historical semantics: the breakthrough of ecology. There are thousands of ecologies today: ecologies of sensation, perception, cognition, desire, attention, power, values, information, participation, media, the mind, relations, practices, behavior, belonging, the social, the political — to name only a selection of possible examples. There seems to be hardly any area that cannot be considered the object of an ecology and thus open to an ecological reformulation. This proliferation of the ecological is accompanied by a shift in the meaning of “ecology. ” The concept is increasingly denaturalized. Whereas previously it was politically-semantically charged with nature, it now practically calls for an “ecology without nature. ” Thus it not only abandons any reference to nature, but even occupies fields that are definitively unnatural. At the same...