A Thousand Ecologies:

The Process of Cyberneticization

and General Ecology

Erich Hrl

Ecological Encyclopaedism
Lcologie, tche de la pense/ecology, the task of
thinking1 says Michel Deguy. Our task of thinking, to
be precise: our task of thinking today and to come, our
next task of thinking. But the question then remains:
what is this future task all about? What are its outlines?
What are its stakes? From where has our becomingecological been written? And how is this emergence of
a general ecology as opposed to a restricted ecology,
which is taking place before our very eyes, to be char
acterized? Deguys exact phrase, the task of thinking,
employed to highlight the urgency and scope of the eco
logical question, had originally been used by Heidegger
to sum up the end of philosophy and the reversal of
thinking that had been caused by the technological fulfillment of metaphysics as cybernetics. This choice
of phrase is highly significant, as shining through it, at
least between the lines, Deguy allows us to perceive
a reference to the process of cyberneticization as
the technological condition of the general ecology of
thought. This also to an extent goes against Heideggers

1 Michel Deguy, cologiques

(Paris: Hermann, 2012), 31.

own use of the formula, and as such is an expression of

the technological unconscious of our era: Heideggers
mid-1960s observation may since have turned out
to have been very accuratein so far as it recognized
early on the enormous scope of the cybernetic chal
lenge to the dogmatic image of thought, and in so doing
anticipated the replacement of traditional categories
and leading differences (Leitdifferenzen) by concepts of
command and control; nevertheless, his own account
of what he called the future task of thinking remained
ultimately strangely vague and sometimes even domi
nated by a counter-technological poetics.2 This lack
of clarity in relation to the wider noo-political horizon
of the cybernetic age may in the first instance have been
due to Heideggers ultimately inadequate conceptual
izations of the history and historicity of objects, which
were excessively dominated by an instrumental image
of technology. Heidegger did not fully explore a real
thinking of technological becoming, which would include
the becoming of technology itself, arising from a funda
mental transformation of the sense of technology as
such, beyond its traditional tool-equipment/instrumen

2 Martin Heidegger, The End of Phi

losophy and the Task of Thinking, (1964)
in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed.
David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper,
1977), 37392. See also Erich Hrl, Das
kybernetische Bild des Denkens, in Die
Transformation des Humanen. Beitrge
zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik, eds.
Michael Hagner and Erich Hrl (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 16395; for

121

an account of the fundamental ambivalence

in Heideggers reading of cybernetics,
in which cybernetics are seen not only to
represent and implement the end of the
age of Enframing (Gestell) but also the
entry into a new epoch in the history of
being, see Erich Hrl, Die offene Maschine.
Heidegger, Gnther und Simondon
ber die technologische Bedingung,
Modern Language Notes, vol. 123 (2008):
194217.

A Thousand Ecologies

tal and mechanical derivations.3 Furthermore, even

as, for his own part, he continuously problematized and
attacked the anthropological, that is, the humanistic,
order, his own thinking was still too anthropocentric to
be able to describe the future cybernetic and neocybernetic couplings of people, living beings, and tech
nologiesin other words, of human and non-human
forcesand to draw from them the necessary concep
tual-political consequences. Neither was it able to
describe the new fundamental experience and the new
fundamental position under the technological condition, each of which is not only de-subjectivized and
de-objectivized, but also, as we shall soon see in great
er detail, presented as technically distributed, pro
cessualized, indeed environmentalized in a radically
technological form, and which in their essential environ
mentality are hard to grasp using Heideggers con
ceptual arsenal.4
The description that is now possible, half a century
after Heidegger, of the task of thinking as ecological,
has its strong diagnostic and conceptual-political bases
precisely in the evolution of technological objectivity
that has been observed since: the sense of the ecologi
cal as suchwhich determines both the task of thinking
and the horizon of the cybernetic ageclarifies and
unfolds itself, first and foremost, on an object-historical
basis. Contrary to all of the ecological preconceptions
that bind ecology and nature together, ecology is in
creasingly proving to epitomize the un- or non-natural
configuration that has been established over more
than half a century by the extensive cyberneticization
and computerization of life.5 The radical technological
mediation that has been implemented since 1950
through the process of cyberneticizationand which
today operates within the sensory and intelligent
environments that exist in micro-temporal realms, in
pervasive media and ubiquitous computingcauses

3 Heidegger does have incredible diag

nostic intuition for the coming cybernetic
age, which is what makes his thinking on this
subject so valuable. He did not, however,
produce a systematic study of the histori
cality of equipment (Zeug), although he
frequently alluded to its having as many
eras or epochs as the historicality of Be
ing. See also Hubert Dreyfus Heideggers
History of the Being of Equipment, in
Heidegger: A Critical Reader, eds. Hubert
Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Black
well, 1992), 17385.

4 For Heideggers anthropocentrism,

as well as for the inherent limitations of
his anthropocentric conceptualization
of environmentality (Umweltlichkeit), see
Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, La question de
la non-anthropologie, in Technique,
monde, individuation. Heidegger, Simondon,
Deleuze, ed. Jean-Marie Vaysse
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), 11732;
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans.
David Wills (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008), 14160; Giorgio Agamben,
The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin
Attell (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University
Press, 2004); for the concept of neocybernetics see also Bruce Clarke and
Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), Neocybernetic
Emergence, in Emergence and Embodi
ment: New Essays on Second-Order
Systems Theory (Durham, NC.: Duke
University Press, 2009), 125.

the problem of mediation as such to come fully into

focus, exposing it with a radicality never seen before.
As such, it is both a problem and question of consti
tutive relationality; or, more preciselyto paraphrase
Gilbert Simondonthe problem of an original relation
ship between the individual and its milieu, with which
it has always already been coupled and which would
not simply constitute a ready-made, prior natural
environment to which it would have had to adapt, but
which must rather be conceived as the site of its
originary and inescapable artifacticity, with which it
is conjoined, and with which it makes its appearance
together; a co-evolution, or to use a term employed by
Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparution.6 One could initially
suggest that ecology marks out both the present and
future positions in the history of sense through which
precisely this question of the primordiality of relation
imposes itself. Relation must be understood as some
thing that precedes the forming of the terms of the
relation (subject, object, individual, groups, indeed
all forms of collective human and non-human agents):
predominantly, it must traverse all modes and levels
of Being, from the micro to the macro, meaning that it
is a modality of being.7 The phrase Being is rela
tion8which Didier Debaise rightly recognizes as a
key phrase of contemporary thought as well as an
expression of our current ontological stateencapsu
lates the fundamental principle of general ecology. In
other words: in the insistence and virulence of the
question of relationality, the core of our eco-technicity
is revealed.
In line with Simondons fundamental distinction between
three forms or stages of the encyclopaedic spirit, the
ecological task of thinking can, as a whole, be viewed
as constituting what I propose to call the forthcoming
fourth type of encyclopaedism. This is exactly what is
at stake with the general ecology of technology and

5 Timothy Morton, with his well-known

phrase Ecology without nature, opposes
the fundamental ecologo-centric belief
that amalgamates ecology and nature (the
latter understood in its modern sense,
as an antonym of technology and culture,
as an equilibrium, and as a state to which
it is worth returning). Morton ignores or
misses the object-historical basis of his
own critique of ecologo-centrism, i.e. the
question of the historicity of the concept
of nature itself and that of its potential
and necessaryreconceptualization.
See Timothy Morton, Ecologocentrism:
Unworking Animals, SubStance, issue 117,
vol. 37.3 (2008): 7396.

122

6 Tracy B. Strong translates comparution using the Scottish common law term
compearance, referring to the act of
appearing in court. See Jean-Luc Nancy
and Tracy B. Strong, La Comparution/
The Compearance: From the Existence
of Communism to the Community of
Existence, Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 3
(August 1992): 37198.
7 Gilbert Simondon, The Genesis of the
Individual, in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan
Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York:
Zone Books, 1992): 312.
8 Didier Debaise, What is relational
thinking? in Inflexions, no. 5 (2012): 111.

Erich Hrl

media. Simondon, who himself mapped out a complex

ecology of participation based on the individual-milieu
dyad and on the concept of the pre-individual, and
who can thus without doubt be viewed as one of the
pioneers of a general ecology,9 differentiates between
the ethical encyclopaedism of the Renaissance, the
technical encyclopaedism of the Great Encyclopaedia
and the Enlightenment, and finally, the technological
encyclopaedism of his own cybernetic era. Each type
of encyclopaedism is, principally, an expression of a
societys fundamental desire to attain an adult and free
state, since the regime as well as the conventions of
thought patronize the individuals and keep them in an
artificial state of infancy.10 Thus it is quite clear that for
Simondon it is the force of the scientific, ultimately of
technical thinking and of invention, that liberates and
universalizes, enabling what he terms transindividuation
by breaking up the closed social systems that control
the processes of psychic-collective individuationat
least for a moment, before (re-)dogmatization takes
place.11 In particular, the evolution of technical objects
proves to be the driving enlightening force. What
matters is that all encyclopaedisms as such are always
coupled with the history of technical objects. This
coupling is crucial, even extending as far as the emer
gence of so-called open objects, open machines,
and technical ensembles, which are to be regarded
as operators of a new, cybernetic Enlightenment that,
according to Simondon, eventually occurred in the
mid-twentieth century: Cybernetics is giving to man
a new type of majority.12 In this way, Simondon char
acterized, in 1958, the third, technological encyclopae
dism. Due to the operationalization of finality as such,
which is probably its core undertaking, cybernetics
ends the long-lasting regime of finality and the subordi
nation to always already given ends. Simondon writes:
Man overcomes enslaving by consciously organising

finality.13 By putting an end to the regime of means

and ends, universal cybernetics (Simondon himself
who sharply criticized the first-order cybernetics of
his day as well as its fascination with automatism and
its fixation on adaptationspeaks of an allagmatic,
a transversal, unifying theory of operations) exposes
mediation as such for the first time in history, forcing
the question and the problem of mediation out into
the open and making its organization the central issue
of the era. This is, at least, cybernetics enlightening
aim: according to Simondon, it enlightens the open
processes of social and individual life. In this sense
technology reduces alienation.14 Mediation as such
now becomes the core problem of encyclopaedism
in our time.
Since these remarkable observations on alienation and
on the enlightening spirit of cybernetics were made,
not only have we advanced ever deeper into the organi
zation and operationalization of mediation, not only
have we given way to the promised openness of psy
chic-social processes and to the opening up of media
tion; but at the same time, the all-encompassing
cyberneticization and computerization of our form of
life has brought with it a new form of closure, a new
dogmatism, and a new form of bondage through media
tion and processuality. The cathexis and exploitation
of mediation and processuality by the big data indus
tries that todayfollowing Guattaridominate our
post-media era, form, at the very least, the scene of our
contemporary alienation; and it is against this that we
have to invoke a new, fourth, indeed ecological encyclo
paedism, which is able to work out the new sense of
mediation and processuality at the level of the evolution
of technical objects and of the historicity of objecthood or objecticity in general, advancing relational
thinking.

9 Mark B. N. Hansen offers an initial

elucidation of this field in Engineering Preindividual Potentiality: Technics, Transin
dividuation, and 21st-Century Media,
SubStance, issue 129, vol. 41.3 (November
2012): 3259; see also my article, Simon
dons General Ecology (forthcoming).

13 Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des

Objets Techniques, op. cit., 103

10 Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode

d'Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris:
ditions Aubier, 2005[1958]), 956.

11 Transindividuality is a relation, which

connects individuals not by means of the
constitutive individuality that originally
separates them from one another, nor by
means of that which is identical in every
human subject, such as the a priori forms
of sensory perception, but via this charge
of pre-individual reality, this natural
charge which is preserved alongside the
individual being and contains potentials
and virtuality. (Ibid., 248) The invented
technical object is both symbol and vehicle
of the transindividual relation. (See also
ibid., 247).

14 Ibid., 106.

12 Ibid., 104. For the concept of the open

object, see Gilbert Simondon, Technical
Mentality, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and
Technology, ed. Arne de Boever et al. (Edin
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012),
1118.

123

A Thousand Ecologies

The historical evolution of objectswhich is the strict

est precondition of ecological encyclopaedismhas
long since begun to exceed all objectivity as such, so
that the concept of the technical object has itself be
come, because of its fundamental environmentalization,
problematic, if not obsolete. Mark B. N. Hansen
describes the present and future condition thus: We
must reconceptualise the coupling of human and tech
nics beyond the figure of the technical object. In
the wake of computational technologies that distribute
sensibility beyond consciousness, the correlation
between human-implicating individuation and technics
has moved beyond what we might think of as its objec
tive stage [] and has entered a properly processual
stage in which technics directly intensifies sub-percep
tual dimensions of human experience. [] The technical
object had to make way for technical processes that
operate through far more complex imbrications with
human activity.15 Instead of a technical mediation
of perception, todays concern is the more indirect
technical mediation of an environmental sensibility.16
In contrast to the ever-repeated refrain of a new imme
diacy, into which we (re)enter in the age of ubiquitous
computing, ubiquitous media, intelligent environments,
and so on, we are in fact now dealing with the absolute
prioritization of mediation. The reconceptualization of
processuality and relation, non-subjective subjectivity
and experience, which correspond to this new objecthistorical position, and ultimately the redescription
of agency and collectivity under the condition of a radical
technical distribution, all this amounting to a workingthrough of the question of what (technical) mediation
today actually means, as well as the corresponding
amendment of the traditional ontological and epistemo
logical frames that necessarily results from this: all this
comprises the task of thinking in the age of the fourth
encyclopaedism, which will be ecological; and this is
precisely what the title of a general ecology stands for.
General Ecology of Media and Technics
The great upending of the history of sense, in which we
have found ourselves for more than half a century and
which encompasses all possible universes of values and

realms of being, has been characterized by a profound

evolution of technical objects and a far-reaching set
of consequences for the culture of sense (or senseculture/Sinnkultur). Firstand this is the genesis of
a new sense of technologythe work-tool, the instru
ment, the utensil, and finally even the machine become
object-historically obsolete. Along with this, in par
ticular, that which is associated with the corresponding
objective formations, is devalued, including the principle of the model of the working subject, its concen
trated action or active power and its peculiar meaningfocused sense-culture; object-relations and worldly
relations as dominated by instrumental, use-oriented
objects; and the corresponding ontological scheme
which frames this use-oriented sense-culture, namely,
hylomorphism. The transcendental subjectthe epito
me of this traditional sense-culture which, virtually
from the moment of its recognition, has itself also been
in a perpetual state of crisisreveals itself to be an
untenable illusion. Secondlyand this is the genesis of
a new sense of sensethere is a parallel rise of techno
logical ensembles and networks as new directives for
the sense-culture. With these directives, the formation
of fundamentally passive objects by active subjects,
which had previously been the central activity of the
sense-culture, is now moved a bit further into the back
ground, as technical objects in general lose for the
first time their minority position in the sense-culture
and take on a majority and autonomous status. The
power of action is dispersed among and through them
and is no longer focused on or assigned to the workingmeaning subject. This dispersion concerns not only
subjectivity and the subject, but incorporates, as we
have already seen, objectivity and the constitution of
the object itself, namely in the form of its dispersal into
distributed technical processes. This entails the active
and self-acting, not to say intelligent technological
(in an eminent sense) object-cultures, or rather pro
cess-cultures, which are more and more migratory
and submerged within our environments, informing our
infrastructure, processing the backgrounds of our
being and experience with the highest computational
intensity, operating in new, micro-temporal regions,
and which are shaping the face and the logic of contem
porary cyberneticization. Contemporary technical

15 Hansen, Engineering Pre-Individual

Potentiality, op. cit., 51 and 55.
16 Ibid., 48.

124

Erich Hrl

ensembles and networks reveal a formerly concealed,

yet in principle original participatory constitution,
proving in fact to be agents of a primordial participa
tory condition, which they now make legible. They
represent non-signifying, multi-agential assemblages
and ultimately demand the elaboration of a radical
relational ontology of participation able to give an
account of this situation. It originates the new senseculture of technologywith multiple, transversal agen
cies beyond the centralization and monopolization of
the working-meaning-perceiving human subject. Its
decoding is the challenge faced by the new encyclo
paedic effort.17
The more advanced contemporary theories of media
focus on this environmental constitution, on which the
general cyberneticization converges. The enormity
and urgency of the need for ontological and epistemo
logical reconceptualizationwhich reveals itself in
the course of this working-throughconversely gives
current media theory a key role to play in contempo
rary theoretical endeavors. Mark Hansen, whom one
could refer to as one of the first main protagonists
of this attempt, has analyzed the radicalized technical
distribution of agency by twenty-first-century media
as an explosion of environmental agency (rather than
concentrating on the formerly privileged individual
agents of human subjectivity); and in so doing, he has
grasped the conceptual difficulties of a non-reductive
understanding of non-trivial environmentality.18 In view
of the multiscalar medial surroundings, he stresses
the necessity of a radical environmental perspective
upon which a radical generalization and reconceptual
ization of subjectivity beyond the modern human
subject could be based.19 According to Hansen, media
today, due largely to the colonization of everyday life
by digital devices, smart chips, and sensors, have
relocated from the site of the classical media functions
such as recording, storage, and transmission to a
platform for immediate, action-facilitating interconnec
tion with and feedback from the environment. Here,
the meaning of technological media itself is transformed
and an unprecedented media function emerges, which
indeed ultimately brings to light the absolute inevitabil
ity of mediation and the primacy of technicity: the
recent developments in technical distribution, which is

also to say, in the technical infrastructure of the envi

ronment have for the first time brought into the open
and made accessible a human condition that is origi
nary, establishing what Hansen calls our originary
environmental condition.20 Hansen has begun to
explore the very originarity of this condition, to carve
out the ways in which twenty-first-century media
the host of contemporary technologies that record and
analyze data beyond the reach of our human sensory
apparatus and that operate in Libets missing half
second21are media which engineer the very sensi
ble continuum by which experience occurs:22 sensa
tions, feelings, or rather micro-sensibilities and microtemporalities, are edited, worked, or processed by
environmental media cultures. As a result, potentiality
as such, the process of individuation, indeed of becom
ing, mutates into a form of media-technological engi
neering. Put bluntly, todays media no longer target
human subjectivity as such (perceptual consciousness),
writes Hansen, but rather aim directly to target the
non-subjective subjectivity at issue in worldly microsensibility.23
Luciana Parisi (to cite another important voice in media
ecology) likewise very plausibly conceives of the corre
sponding techno-medial configurations that cyber
neticize the modes of sensation by advancing the bioinformatic integration of sensors, mobile media,
and digital atmospheres, as technoecologies of sensa
tion.24 Drawing on Lynn Margulis concept of the
ecology of symbiogenesis (an autopoietic ecology of
the community of microorganisms of which we are
made, in a broader sense an original ecology of the
living, running from the micro- to the macro-scale,
from prokaryotes to the autopoietic planet of Gaia, also
encompassing media and technology), Parisi has re
ferred to this new cybernetic affectivity that brings
together the biological and the digital, as symbiosen
sation: the felt experience of a nonsensuous related
ness between organic and inorganic matter adding on
a new gradient of feeling in the thinking-flesh.25 In her
earlier work on the new digital matrix of our age of
algorithms and of its new computational aesthetics,
characterized by the processing of large quantities
of data such that algorithms are exposed as new, nonhuman key actors, Parisi goes deeper into the analysis

17 For a more precise description of the

technological shift in meaning, see Erich
Hrl (ed.), Die technologische Bedingung.
Beitrge zur Beschreibung der technischen
Welt (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 753,
especially 723.

21 Ibid., 57.

18 Mark B. N. Hansen, System-Environ

ment-Hybrids, in Bruce Clarke and
Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), op. cit., 11342.

19 Mark B. N. Hansen, Medien des 21.

Jahrhunderts, technisches Empfinden und
unsere originre Umweltbedignung, in Die
technologische Bedingung, ed. Erich Hrl,
op. cit., 367.
20 Hansen, Engineering Pre-individual
Potentiality, op. cit., 33.

22 Ibid., 56.
23 Ibid., 57. See also Mark Hansen, Ubiq
uitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric,
Collective, and Microtemporal Model of
Media, in Throughout: Art and Culture
Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed.
Ulrik Eman (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press,
2013), 6388.

125

24 Luciana Parisi, Technoecologies of

Sensation, in Deleuze |Guattari & Ecologies, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York:
Palgrave, 2009), 18299.
25 Ibid., 192.

A Thousand Ecologies

of so-called algorithmic environmentscomputa

tional environments bursting with algorithmic objects.
The cybernetization of media has turned them from
articulations of (human) expression, or from the
aesthetic power [] to modulate affects into pre
hensive machines of the un-articulable and un-repre
sentable.26
Jussi Parikkas description of digital culture as univer
sal viral machine, analyzes viral codes as non-human
actors and as a constitutive part of the general media
ecology of network culture,27 as entities internal to
the media ecology of digital capitalism.28 He developed
a conceptual perspective of media as an ecology29 in
light of the contemporary media condition: his take on
unnatural ecologies led him to elaborate what he calls
a milieu approach, mapping media beyond the usual
confines of technology and human intentions30 as
intensive capabilities that are constitutive of worlds,
and as brains that contract forces of the cosmos,
cast a plane over the chaos.31 Media, he writes,
contract forces, but also act as a passage and a mode
of intensification that affords sensations, percepts, and
thoughts.32 And if, up until now, Parikka has primarily
employed media ecology as another media ethology
of the living, he has more recently focused on the com
plementary aspect of a media geology of the non-living,
a kind of media history of the deep time of matter,
of the minerals and of the underground of our media
culture.33
Finally, to name one last example, Bernard Stieglers
pharmacology of the current media-technological
condition, and his critique of the associated hyperindustrial system of experience along with the symbolic,
aesthetic, and spiritual misery it produces, focuses
on the problem of an escalating destruction of the mind
and of both psychic and collective disindividuation
caused by the systematic exploitation, depletion, and
destruction of desire. He works on reformulating
political economy as a libidinal economy of sublimation

and the production of spiritual values, whichand this

is what is noteworthyhighlights the originary technic
ity of object relations and the primordial artifactuality
of desire that lies at its core. Stieglers analysis demon
strates that the distributed technical milieu of the
current processes of individuation and disindividuation
is now increasingly being recognized as a libidinal
ecology, or, as he puts it, as an ecology of the spirit.34
Stieglers entire pharmacology of care revolves around
this new ecology, which can be understood to be three
fold, as a re-articulation of psychic, collective and
technical individuation.35
One could cite many more neo-ecological studies, from
Katherine Hayles technological redescription of cogni
tion;36 via Dirk Baekers next society of the computer
ruled by the ecological principle;37 Brian Massumis
investigations of environmentality and the contem
porary ecology of powers38 as our coming form of
governmentality; to Matthew Fullers neo-materialistic
media ecology.39 These programmatic discoveries
show how a new semantics describing the contempo
rary techno-medial condition is beginning to crystallize
around the concept of ecology, whereby the concept
of ecology itself is situated indisputably in processes
of displacement, reformulation, and indeed revaluation.
Notably, this is not about the mere metaphorization of
a term that, in its original definition, would be bound to
strictly biological, ethological, or life-scientific refer
ences. Quite the opposite, it is more likely the case that
the traditional concept or discourse of ecology causes
a breakthrough and imparts a principle form to the
conceptual constellation, which as a consequence in the
course of techno-medial development, ascends to the
level of a critical intuition and model for the description
of the new fundamental position. Canguilhem already
anticipated precisely this when he wrote in 1947: The
notion of milieu is becoming a universal and obligatory
mode of apprehending the experience and existence of
living beings; one could almost say it is now being con

26 Luciana Parisi/Erich Hrl, Was heit

Mediensthetik? Ein Gesprch ber algo
rithmische sthetik, automatisches Denken
und die postkybernetische Logik der
Computation, Zeitschrift fr Medienwissenschaft (ZfM), no. 1 (April 2013): 3551.

35 Ibid. Dominic Pettman, in Human Error:

Species-Being and Media Machines (Min
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), 17177 emphasizes the anthropo
centric tenor of Stieglers key distinction
between dsir (desire) and pulsion (drive).
According to Stiegler, humans are libidinal
animals: only humans have desire and are
capable of sublimating drives into desire,
whereas animals are driven only by instincts
and drives. More is needed on the relation
ship between drive and instinct. But this
anthropocentric bias, which is a fact, is
already inscribed in Stieglers thinking of
the originary technicity of man as the fun
damental primordiality of (de)fault and lack.
This key figure within his theory of technics
and desire must be read simultaneously

27 Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagion

(New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 10.

31 Ibid., xxvii.
32 Ibid., xxvi.
33 Parikka developed this perspective in
a lecture he delivered at the Bochum Col
loquium for Media Studies (bkm) on January
16, 2013, titled: An Alternative Deep Time
of The Media: A Geologically Tuned Media
Ecology.

28 Ibid., 5.
29 Ibid.
30 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minne
apolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010),
xviii.

34 Bernard Stiegler/Frdric Neyrat,

Interview: From Libidinal Economy to the
Ecology of the Spirit, Parrhesia, no. 14
(2012): 915. See also Erich Hrl, Wun
sch und Technik. Stieglers Genealogie des
Begehrens, in Bernard Stiegler, Hypermaterialitt und Psychomacht, ed. Erich
Hrl (Zurich: diaphanes, 2010), 733.

126

as both a de-anthropologizing as well as

a re-anthropologizing operation. This
anthropocentric inscription in Stieglers
libidinal ecology is the inherent limit of his
ecology, always already constraining it,
bending it back from being a general
ecology into a restricted one. Stieglers
adherence to the concept of the (technical)
object at the point of entering into a dis
tributed process-culture repeats this
same political-theoretical operation. It is
therefore unsurprising that his theory
leads further and further towards a
neo-humanistic position whose remain
ing anthropocentric content is yet to be
discussed and clarified.

Erich Hrl

stituted as a category of contemporary thought.40

In my view, this is exactly what we are now witnessing:
the technological object-cultures with which we are
coupled are currently driving the ecologization of
sensation, with the additional consequence, however,
of ecologizing cognition, thought, desire, and libido,
as well as power and governmentality. In this respect,
these new object-cultures form the pivotal moment
in a correspondingly altered sense-cultural situation,
whose technological unconscious from now on can
generally be referred to as an ecological unconscious.
In so doing, they unhinge the sovereignty and power of
enactment accorded to the meaning-giving transcen
dental subject, which found its model in the working
subject and had been long since subverted by technol
ogy. And it is these unnatural ecologies which have
begun not only to bring about the far-reaching ecologi
zation of sense-culture, but are also furthering the
ecologization of the critical theory which accounts for
them, and necessitating a general ecologization of
thought.
There have already been many attempts to come
to terms conceptually with precisely this new technoecological sense of sense, which can no longer be
grasped through the key distinctions and premises of
the era of meaning. These attempts have developed
concepts including (but not limited to) assemblage,
ensemble, montage, composition, hetero-genesis,
symbiogenesis, being-with (tre-avec, Mit-Sein), beingtogether (tre-ensemble), appearing-together/com
pearance (comparution), as agency or as the entanglement of human and non-human entities or actors. One
of the true challenges and focal points of todays con
ceptual politics is to redefine completely the constitu
tion of sense-culture across many areas, using the
aforementioned concepts, which collectively have
begun to constitute the new general ecology as well
as the basis on which subsequent epistemological and
ontological reforms can take place. I would argue that

this is where the central conceptual- and theoreticalpolitical battles and innovations of the past decade can
be found, as well as their entire puissance.
Jean-Luc Nancy, most recently, has made a far-reach
ing attempt at an appropriate redescription, working
for more than a quarter-century on the upending of the
constitution of sense through technology. Until recently
there has without doubt been in Nancys work a certain
fixation on human actors and agency, which charac
terized his thought of the being-with and thus inevita
bly revealed the limits of his thinking on technology
and of his reflections on the historicality of sense. In
his work De la struction he abandons precisely this
fixation in favor of a cosmo-political if not cosmo-tech
nological condition. He has now begun, in a certain
sense, by placing it on an equal footing with our techno
logical condition, to conceive of the pure technicity of
the being-with and the new sense-historical position as
radically distributed: What we are given consists only
in the juxtaposition and simultaneity of a co-presence,
whose co has no specific meaning beyond the conti
guity or juxtaposition within the limits of the universe
itself.41 It is precisely in this exposition of struction,
in the sense of struo as accumulation (amasser) or
hoarding (entasser), that the lesson of technology
would be located, according to Nancy. In the technologi
cal age, and this is the key point, a shift, a curving of the
phenomenological dispositive manifests itself, in the
course of which the mere appearing-with/compear
ance is rendered as the sense of the world.42 It is no
longer, as it was before, about an existential (and in
turn, anthropocentric), but rather, a bare categorical
with. This revelation (in the sense of denudation)
marks precisely, according to Nancy, the sense-histor
ical situation of struction, in which we are (re)located
through technics and on account of which it is incum
bent upon us to discover everything anew; and above
all sense.43 Shortly thereafter he further deepened
this lesson and identified the catastrophe of sense,

36 Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media And Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012).

41 Jean-Luc Nancy, Von der Struktion,

in Die technologische Bedingung, ed. Erich
Hrl, op. cit., 5472, 63.

40 Georges Canguilhem, The Living and

Its Milieu, in The Knowledge of Life, eds.
Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 98.

42 Ibid., 66f.
37 Dirk Baecker, Studien zur nchsten
Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2007), 225.

43 Ibid., 72.

38 Brian Massumi, National Enterprise

Emergency: Steps Towards an Ecology
of Powers, Theory, Culture & Society,
vol. 26, issue 6 (2009): 15385.
39 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies:
Materialist Energies in Art and Techno
culture (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press,
2005).

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A Thousand Ecologies

to which we have been exposed, and thus explicated the

becoming-catastrophic (Katastrophisch-Werden)
of sense itself, the itself-shifting (Sich-Wenden), the
being-comprehended-in-revolt (Im-Umsturz-begriffen-sein), the collapsing-upon-one-another (Auf-einander-Einstrzen) as the core of the great sensehistorical transformation.44 On the basis of intercon
nection he eventually recognized the key charac
teristic of the present condition in a general ecology
of sense: Nancy is explicit that this concerns a kind
of generalized environmentalism (environnementalisme
gnralis), in the course of which everything is envi
roned, enveloped, and developed according to the
interconnectedness of what has been called the tech
nological unconsciousunconscious meaning above
all, here as elsewhere, the interwoven fabric of all
beings.45 Whilst Nancy had previously brought the
concept of eco-technics (cotechnie) into play in
order to describe the general becoming-technical of
the world, it is now, ultimately, a generalized ecology
itself that figures as the pivotal moment in our highly
technicized sense-culture. Put simply, the contem
porary sense-historical position is, in a generalized
sense, environmental.
If general ecologization thus represents a significant
moment in the movement of our era and leads, under
the new technological condition, into a new ecological
paradigmto echo Flix Guattarithen it also entails
an extensive revaluation of the sense of ecology. Eco
logical discourse has repeatedly invoked figures of
the undamaged and unscathed, the unspoiled, intact,
and immune, the whole and holy. It participated in a
reaction to the machine, and to the uprooting, delo
calization, and expropriation which resulted from what
Derrida called the tele-techno-scientific machine:46
in this unswerving drive to remain unscathed,47 figu
rations of the self, of the being-with-oneself (Bei-sich-

44 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, L'quivalence

des catastrophes (Aprs Fukushima)
(Paris: Galile, 2012), 20.
45 Ibid., 59.
46 Jacques Derrida Faith and Knowl
edge: The Two Sources of Religion at the
Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Samuel
Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and
Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA.: Stanford
University Press, 1998). For an essential
text on the immunopolitics of the unscathed
see Frdric Neyrat, Biopolitique des Catastrophes (Paris: ditions MF, 2008); and
likewise, his book L'Indemne. Heidegger et la
destruction du monde (Paris: sens et tonka
diteurs, 2008).

47 Derrida Faith and Knowledge,

op. cit., 45.
48 I hesitate to call it, as Timothy Morton
has, ecology without nature. It is not
essentially a matter of rejecting nature
as such, but rather, of a new thinking and
reconceptualization of nature; namely, as
the nature-technics with which we are con
fronted by the necessity of general ecol
ogy. Those celebrating the end of nature
misjudge natures historicality. With regard
to the possibility of a speculative view of
nature at the level of the technological con
dition, such as Simondons pre-individual
nature, see for instance Debaises What is
relational thinking? op. cit.

sein) and of the being-at-home (Zu-Hause-sein) are

always preferred, such that it pertains only to a restrict
ed ecologyecology as religion. The general ecology,
on the other hand, which is emerging as the next eco
logical principle in the wake of the re-evaluation of
the sense of ecology, obeys another, different, general
economy. This is an unnatural, non-natural, and, one
might say, subtractive ecology; an ecology that elimi
nates the immunopolitics of ecology.48 It is an ecology of a natural-technical continuum, which the general environmentalization through technology and
the techno-sciences and the concomitant explosion
of agency, schematizes as the core of our current and,
even more, of our future basic experience.49
Wild Ecologies
The French psychoanalyst and theoretician Flix
Guattari tried from the late 1970s on to translate and
convert this movement into a philosophical-political
program. He not only drafted a heterogenetic image of
being that is highly virulent todayteeming with crea
tive processes and emergencesbut also ended up
evoking a new image of thought: one that is pre-person
al and pre-objective, resembling the logic of primary
processesa polyvalent eco-logic.50 The elaborating
of this new ecosophical logic51 was assigned as the
task of a mental ecology, which has already cut through
both the collective-social and the material-technologi
cal ecology, and has thereby been able to outline the
general ecologization. However, the background of all
these interests was also (and not least) for Guattari
formed to a large extent by media-technological issues:
on the basis of the potential of post-media practices
from video, Super8, pirate radio to video text/minitel, interactive databanks, and finally, the computerGuattari

49 Although the difference between

a general and a restricted ecology is a
systematic differenceformulated in
line with Batailles distinction between a
general and a restricted economy which
Derrida referred to so concisely as an
economy of sensethere is also a certain
historical bias within this distinction. I
think we have a tendency to move from a
restricted to a general ecology, at least in
terms of conceptual and political theory. A
re-reading of Bataille would demonstrate
that his own general economy is already a
general ecology. I need only mention the
text Lconomie la mesure de lunivers
(1946) where he speaks of the principle of
life itself being an economy of the sun, and
even of le sens du soleil, the sense of the
sun. Many thanks to David Wills for insisting
that the relation of general economy and
general ecology needs more development.

128

50 Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies,

trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London:
Continuum, 2005[1989]), 30. For a
heterogenetic image of being, see his The
new aesthetic paradigm, in Flix Guattari,
Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian
Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995[1992]), 98118.
51 Guattari, The Three Ecologies,
op. cit., 34.

Erich Hrl

became predominantly interested in the emerging

forms of a subjectivity that is detached, not just from
the person or subject, but also from the human, and
which undermines in particular the subjectivity that has
been serialized, standardized, and normalized by the
mass media. Finally, according to Guattariand this
is the cruxanimist cartographies of subjectivity52
should take account of a non-subjective subjectivity that
is distributed in a multiplicity of relations. Guattari
held that which is being implemented upon us through
media technology to be a machinic animism,53 a
techno- and media-animism, as I would call it, precisely
because this coming order might display a certain
similarity and resonance with the non-modern, radically
participatory assemblages of wild animisms, i.e. as
semblages or collectives that prioritize participation
as the primary and constitutive relation. The crucial
intuition that the ecological encyclopaedism of the
present must incorporate, with which it must connect
and which it must work out in all its breadth, is the
intuition of the virulence and valence of the concept of
participation for the conceptualization of a strict rela
tional thinking: only the latter is able to cope with the
modes of subjectivity and objectivity that are distrib
uted through environmental media technologies, and
the irrefutably multi-agential, distributed nature of
the agency that this entails.
The great theoretician of primitive mentality and men
tor of a radical participatory thinking, Lucien LvyBruhl, already wrote in his Cahiers in 1938: For the
primitive mentality, to be is to participate.54 With this
phrase, he established the motto for describing wild
Being and its non-alphabetical sense, which today, on
the basis of media-technologies, is acquiring a surpris
ing topicality and coming close to being re-invoked.55
All of the growing number of neo-animists of the pre
sent, who study alternative conceptualizations of col

lectives, belongings, kinships, and cosmologiesfrom

Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway
through to the whole spectrum of post-humanistic
approachesbear witness to this. There is also,
in particular, a strong new interest in animism within
ethnology and social anthropologyI need mention
only the work of Nurit Bird-David, Philippe Descola,
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Alf Hornbog, and Tim
Ingold; although all of these approaches are very differ
ent from one other, what they have in common is the
presentation of animist systems as radical, relational
ontologies and epistemologies. These purely relational
systems appear to act as alternative cartographies
for a non-modern reframing of our present and future
technological world. The wild cosmologies may serve
as metamodels for the urgent cosmo-technological
reconceptualization of participation as constitutive relationality and therefore too of agency, relationship and
relatedness, experience and subjectivity, all of which we
need if we are to understand our no-longer-rejected
originary environmental condition in a non-reductionist
way. As Viveiros de Castro puts it, we need richer
ontologies56 than the traditional ones, through which
we can account for this condition.57 But at the same
time, it is of course always important to approach and
intensify these questions counter-animistically, in order
to stay on the lookout for forms of participation, which
at least in (neo)animistic contexts, go beyond the pre
vailing focus on modes of belonging, to the interrupting
of belongings, to participations without participation,
for example, imitation.58
In a certain sense, Simondon (to return to him once
more in closing) is also a pioneer of this non-modern
mapping of environmentality. By making the question of
participation central to the general-ecological consti
tution, which led him to formulate an entire metaphysic
of participation, he also recognized, at least in its rudi

52 Flix Guattari, Entering the PostMedia Era, in Flix Guattari, Soft Subversions. Texts and Interviews 19771985,
ed. Sylvre Lotringer (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2009), 3016: 302.

56 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Ex

changing Perspectives: The Transforma
tion of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian
Ontologies, in Franke (ed.), Animism,
op. cit., 22743.

53 See also Angela Melitopoulos and

Maurizio Lazzarato, Machinic Animism,
in Animism (Volume I), ed. Anselm Franke
(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 97108.
54 Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, Carnets (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1949),
22.

55 In my book Die heiligen Kanle. ber

die archaische Illusion der Kommunikation (Berlin: diaphanes, 2005), I have
extensively detailed the extent to which the
elaboration of the concept of animism at the
end of the nineteenth century and beginning
of the twentieth, and particularly in the
work of Lvy-Bruhl, already represented
a reaction to the rise of an essentially nonalphabetic, electromagnetic transmission
culture, and was thus already essentially a
first, historically marginalized indication of
the post-alphabetic situation.

57 Already in 1988, Paul Bouissac noticed

the tendency toward a scientifically based
neo-animism which could radically trans
form not only the attitudes of contemporary
humans towards animals, but the whole
gamut of cultural definitions and philosophi
cal assumptions upon which the twentieth
centurys global civilization has been
constructed. He also spoke of a necessary
shift in cosmology which seems to be a
prerequisite for steering human industri
ousness in a more adaptive direction. (Paul
Bouissac, What is a human? Ecological se
miotics and the new animism, in Semiotica,
vol. 77, no. 4 (1989): 497516, here 514.)
58 Thanks to Mark B. N. Hansen for
raising this issue in a discussion we had.

129

A Thousand Ecologies

mentary form, an upcoming neo-animistic disposition.

His evolutionary theory of technical objects did not
just begin with an originary magical unity: the latter
is characterized as the relation of a vital link between
man and the world, defining a universe that is simul
taneously anterior to every distinction between object
and subject, and consequently also to every appear
ance of a separated object;59 whereby here, absolutely
nothing occurs unmediated: he emphasizes that the
mediation is still neither subjectivized nor objectivized,
consisting of nothing more than the simplest and most
fundamental of all structurations of the milieu of a living
entity.60 In this sense, animistic systems are ways
of representing an originary and unavoidable mediation.
But Simondon also contemplated beyond this a kind
of displaced recurrence of this condition within our
radical techno-ecological formation, which brought
in pre-subjective and pre-objective dynamic network
milieus that are always developing, becoming (rather
than retaining a fixed structure)and which, indeed,
are themselves the structuring agencies most respon
sible for shaping our contemporary existence and
experience. Of course, Simondon at the time could not
yet have divined the full extent, indeed the ubiquity of
these milieus, as that which was to bring about the total
cyberneticization. In taking the size of the networks,
technical reality turns back at the end of its evolution
towards the milieu which it modifies and structures (or
rather, textures) by taking account of its general lines;
technical reality adheres to the world once again as
at the point of departure, before the tool and the instru
ment.61
This is not to claim that we would ever have been ani
mistic, or ever will be. It is rather a question of the many
minor ecologies whose description began under this
heading and which we can only today begin to grasp, in
light of the general-ecological effort with its full capac
ity for modeling the non-modern work of mapping the
present and coming techno-medial world. It is a matter
of that which almost certainly lies at the heart of the
ecological encyclopaedisma thousand ecologies.
Translated from the German by James Burton,
Jeffrey Kirkwood, and Maria Vlotides

59 Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des

Objets Techniques, op. cit., 163.
60 Ibid.
61 Gilbert Simondon, L'Invention dans les
techniques. Cours et confrences, ed. JeanYves Chateau (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 101.

130