The impossible, necessary outside of nature
A Luhmannian intervention into post-humanist ecology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12716699 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hannah Richter (0000-0001-5680-6888, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 553-570 |
| Publication date | 2023-07-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Globalizations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1474-7731 • E-ISSN: 1474-774X |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14747731.2023.2235921 |
| OpenAlex | W4385175230 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 31 |
In the wake of climate change, social theory has been subject to a surge of new materialist and posthuman approaches that reconfigure ontology and politics beyond the modern nature/culture binary which the Anthropocene has rendered untenable. But their (re-)turn to ontological speculation brackets the socio-epistemic situatedness and productivity of the way we think nature and its relationship to society. This paper reads Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a posthuman perspective that can address the epistemological blind spot of materialist-ecological thought. Luhmann’s ecology aligns with the former on the posthuman framing of shaping power, the productivity of an environmental outside that remains unknown, and the call for political modesty which follows. On the other hand, Luhmann’s theory poses a critical challenge to materialist-ecological thought: the society/environment binary is here constitutively necessary, and its mapping onto a nature/culture binary functionally advantageous for subjects and social systems because it offers opportunities for complexity-reduction
Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Framing (construction · Materialism · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Social science · Sociology · Embodied and Extended Cognition · History · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Innovation, Technology, and Society · Philosophy · Ecology
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The past shall not begin
Critical systems theory
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Beyond criticism and crisis
Politics in the Time of Covid
The Environmentalitarian Situation
Democracy of Objects
Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions
The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future
The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment
The Modernity of Science
After Lockdown
The World Without Outside
Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism
Questioning New Materialisms
An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett'sVital Materialism
Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |