In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism’s traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism (...) and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of new environmentalist themes is taking place. (shrink)

This article focuses on Auguste Comte’s understanding of the organism–environment relationship. It makes three key claims therein: (a) Comte’s metaphysical position privileged materiality and relativized the intellect along two dimensions: one related to the biological organism, one related to the social environment; (b) this twofold materiality confounds attempts to reduce cognition to either nature or nurture, so Comte’s position has interesting parallels to the field of ‘epigenetics’, which sees the social environment as a causative factor in biology; and (c) although (...) Comte ultimately diverged from the ‘postgenomic’ view in crucial ways, he remains a forerunner of the trend towards viewing the social and biological as entangled. Tending to these dimensions challenges the view that Comte is notable from a classical standpoint but ignorable from a contemporary one. It consequently invites renewed attention to his theoretical system. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 434-451, September 2022.

Debates in ecological social theory are characterised by dualisms of nature and society. The author proposes the notion of ‘ecological aporias’ to account for these dualisms, focusing on three landmark examples of ecological thought over the past four decades from Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. He shows the persistence in this work of paradoxes and intractable contradictions revolving around the nature/society dualism. Rather than trying to dissolve these ecological aporias, he draws on recent work in eco-deconstruction to (...) suggest that the ecological is itself an aporetic category and that this enables a new perspective for political ecology in an age of climate crisis. Rejecting Latour’s identification of political ecology with the politics of dwelling, he argues that climate change demands we recognise forms of life irreducible to the ontological security on which the concept of the ecological has long been based. (shrink)

Drawing on sources such as home furnishing manuals, hygiene and household guidebooks, as well as literary texts, this article examines how the nineteenth-century domestic interior can be regarded as a functional environment regulated by textiles. In the debate about the correct usage of furnishing textiles in line with contemporary aesthetic and sanitary standards, women were held responsible for regulating these textile environments. While on the one hand this led to a supposedly natural and mechanical conflation of women and domestic space (...) which has often been interpreted as restrictive and encapsulating, my aim is to identify a specific feminine agency that has its origin in the home but is not limited to it. By tracing the negotiations of this gendered textile expertise in different fields of knowledge and forms of representation, this article reevaluates the relationship between textiles, domesticity and femininity in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Artikel wird untersucht, inwiefern Textilien in den einrichtungstheoretischen, medizinisch-hygienischen und literarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Wohnen im 19. Jahrhundert als funktionale Umgebungen des Lebendigen entworfen werden. Damit sind zugleich geschlechtliche Zuschreibungen verbunden, die die Frau als Verantwortliche für die Regulierung dieser textilen Umgebungen ausmachen. Während es so einerseits zu einer naturalisierenden und mechanisierenden Überblendung von Frau und Wohnraum kommt, ist mit der Verwissenschaftlichung und Technisierung des Wohnens andererseits eine weiblich konnotierte Expertise verbunden, die nicht allein auf den Innenraum des (...) Hauses begrenzt ist. Der Artikel nimmt die Verhandlungen textiler Expertise und Gestaltungsmacht in unterschiedlichen Wissensbereichen und Darstellungsformen in den Blick, um das Verhältnis von Textilien, Wohnen und Weiblichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert neu zu perspektivieren. (shrink)

This essay explores the rhetoric used by Russian zemstvo physicians, scholars of medicine, and sanitary inspectors to share their expertise with regard to health problems in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Borrowing the conceptual framework of emotional practices introduced by Monique Scheer, it interprets an appeal to revulsion and sensorial evidence, employed as “templates of language and gesture,” that medical practitioners produced both to mobilize the emotions of their audience and to support their own professional stature. The (...) author relates elements of this judgmental rhetoric to the Russian public domain of the late nineteenth century and discusses the entanglements of hygiene, prevention, and revulsion that contributed to the emotional landscape of the post-reform era. (shrink)

The Umwelt investigated in this essay is a textualized world that a person dwells in, perceives, and experiences, as presented through classical Chinese poetry. It is a world formed and shared among other things and creatures in nature and it is a network of renewed correlations not so much descriptive of qualities as evocative of an environing world in which one feels himself as being-there disposed and attuned to things. What is universal is also mediated by the experience of a (...) particular person at a specific moment. In this essay, I shall delve into the correlation and the interaction between the environing world in reality and the Umwelt constructed in poetry in the Chinese context. I will examine the experiential patterns of the subject through various examples provided by the seventeenth-century poet and critic Ye Xie, and discuss how they coordinate and account for the Umwelt textualized in classical Chinese poetry. I shall probe particularly the notion qi for the construction of the Umwelt, and examine Ye Xie’s argument that the truth of the universe is revealed in poetry. I argue that nature does not appear in the poetic world as respective objects, but particular aspects or shades of things from the first-person point of view. The Chinese thought of “Being-in-the-world” means much more than the spatial location, but a sense of engagement and involvement. The oppositional relationship between the subject and the object is superseded by the resonance of oneself with his Umwelt through personal life experience. Ye Xie proposes that the highest function of poetry is to convey the ultimate truth of the universe. However, the truth expressed through poetry is not the transcendent order of reason; it is inherent in phenomena in the instance rather than being permanently universal. This is a Chinese way of truth setting itself into work, as truth is not a universal or definitive understanding of the world, but a guidepost and stimulus for the personalistic and concrete experience of one’s life. (shrink)

On a June weekend in 1959, an elite group of sociologists, philosophers, editors, artists, and television producers gathered in the Poconos to discuss media. Their invitation was to “Mass Media in Modern Society,” an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Tamiment Institute and Daedalus, the house organ of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. What constituted mass media in 1959—and who publicized media, then a new concept in the vernacular, as a topic of mass concern—were the thirty-five celebrity panelists’ unresolved and (...) obsessive themes. Turning to the minutes from the conference as well as its two afterlives in print, this essay disambiguates the nascent media concept’s ideological, technological, and environmental implications, five years before Marshall McLuhan’s breakthrough text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Within the panelists’ responses is not a coherent theory of media but a multitude of overdetermined media metaphors—and a model for understanding media as such, then and now. The mid-twentieth-century consolidation of the media concept is where most of its greatest theorists (from Raymond Williams to John Guillory) conclude their analyses, but it’s where this study begins. (shrink)