immanence

French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, in his The Three Ecologies, was the first to articulate the threefold nature of ecology, but he failed to provide a clear articulation of why there should be three and only three ecologies — not two, not one, not four or more. What is the ontological justification for this threefoldness?

In my work I provide that justification in terms of a process-relational ontology, but it generally takes me a fair number of pages to build the case for it (e.g., here or part 1 of this). Here I want to present a clear and concise statement of why we should think of ecology in three different ways. And I want to make clear how it constitutes a theory of ecomedia, or ecomediality.

I should start by saying that these ideas are not accepted within the field of scientific ecology. But they aren’t meant to be. Scientific ecologists study the first of the three; the others require other methods.

Ecology 1: Objectivity/Materiality

The science of ecology studies the relationships between things, especially between living organisms and their environments. Sometimes it focuses on those organisms and how they interact with each other; sometimes on relational systems and processes, such as carbon and nitrogen cycles, ecosystems, and other forms of interaction involving material and/or energetic substances.

They study these because they are things that can be studied — observed, measured, and analyzed scientifically. They are objects of a scientific “gaze” (or stance), a way of looking at and approaching the world that takes the world to be made up of observable, measurable phenomena. Let’s call this our first ecology. I tend to call it “material ecology,” since it consists of matter as opposed to mind (or idea, or something else immaterial), though technically it includes energy, information, and other observables. Scientific ecology is the ecology of the observable world, the world that we can study from its outside. We may be part of it, but when we study it, we bracket our subjective experience out of the picture; we aim, instead, for objectivity.

Ecology 2: Subjectivity/Sociality

Once we acknowledge our role in this study, a role that is enabled by the fact that we are beings that can study things — because we observe and interact with the world around us — then we also have to acknowledge that what is central to us is not those “things” but the fact that we experience anything at all. We are subjects. Experience is central to our subjective life; without it there would be no “we” or “us” to study or discuss anything. And if experience is central to the life of humans, there is no good reason to assume that it is not also central to the life of other living things. There are good arguments that experience or something like it — at least a kind of responsiveness (which A. N. Whitehead called “prehension”) — is also central to things we might not consider “alive.”

If this is the case, that experience is central, then what is experience? It is an event of relationship between subjectivity, or an experiencer, and objectivity, or the experienced. Every act of experience, every relational event that makes up the universe, consists of some relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Every smallest bit of “universe” is a relational process. (That’s process-relational ontology in a nutshell, and it’s shared with Buddhism and various other metaphysical systems. But let’s leave that aside for now.)

Our first ecology, then, which is the one that scientists study, is an ecology of objective things — an ecology of objects (which may also be an ecology of processes). Our second ecology is an ecology of subjects. It has to do with the subjective dimension, or “subjective pole,” of a world that includes, and that in some respects is made up of, experience. This second ecology is the study (-ology) of the systemic relationships characterizing the subjectivities that make up our world: it includes the “I” who looks at you, the “you” who looks back (and who is its own “I”), and the acknowledgment of “youness” and what it does to our relationship.

I call this a social ecology because it is about the sociality by which agency is acknowledged and distributed throughout a system. For humans, it of course consists of other humans, but there is no necessary reason to leave others (nonhumans) out of it. Indeed, most humans have historically included many kinds of nonhumans within their social ecologies: animals perhaps, but also mountains, trees, and various entities understood to be responsible for one thing or another, which we might now call gods, spirits, angels, or “forces,” “Gaia,” and so on.

If scientific ecology is an ecology of its — of objects — then social ecology is an ecology of I’s, you‘s, we‘s, and they‘s. It’s an ecology not of carbon, nitrogen, food webs, or DNA programs, but of agency, recognition, and the negotiation of subjectivity and objectivity. Who will get to qualify as a subject, with whatever rights that confers, and who will be cast into the category of objects? With what sorts of negotiations and agreements will we temper our actions with respect to each other and to other others? In Ken Wilber’s integral ecology, this would be called an ecology of interiorities. We might call it an ecology of mutual recognition and respect.

Ecology 3: Prehension/Mediality

What, then, is the third ecology? Recall that a prehension — the basic relational act — consists of a relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. A subject responds to or somehow takes account of an object or set of objects. How this is done makes all the difference. The third ecology is an ecology of the hows that constitute the world, the ways that subjects respond to objects and, in doing that, reshape both those objects and themselves. Subjectivity arises in respect to objects and responds to those objects.

This how of relationality is a matter of perception (what is perceived and how it is perceived), which makes it a “perceptual ecology.” And it is a matter of mind (for subjects that have the capacity for the sense-making or interpretive behavior we call thinking, cognition, mentation, et al), which makes it a “mental ecology” (Guattari’s term for it). The word “mind,” to my mind, sounds too disembodied; it’s caught up within the dichotomy of body-versus-mind, so I prefer focusing on the “perceptual,” which emphasizes the interaction between perceiver and perceived.

An even better term would be “medial,” which puts the focus on the mediation occurring: the precise ways in which a subjective arising responds to the data in its mental and perceptual fields, the things it encounters and acts upon. The third ecology is an ecology of mediation. “Mediation” is also confusing, since the word “media” tends to be thought of either infrastructurally (the media of telephones, television, the internet, and so on) or informationally (the data transmitted by media infrastructures). But it has the virtue of making plain that things — such as our sensory organs, or the bodies and technical media that make sociality possible — make a difference in our subjective perception, and that they also affect the objective materiality of the world. There are what draw the two together; without them, in fact, there is nothing.

In a genuinely process-relational account mediation is everything, because it is the processual, relational eventing by which the world occurs. (This view comes pretty close to that of media philosopher John Durham Peters.) As I’ve emphasized in my writing, it’s the mediation — the prehension, the taking up and “worlding” of things — that is ultimately real, while the ecologies of subjects and of objects are a study of the residues, the collected objectifications at either end (the objective and subjective ends) of the real events of the universe.

So in this tri-ecological framework, there really is only a single ecology — an ecology of ongoing becoming by way of mediation, an ecology of processual, relational, mediatory becoming. Process-relationality is mediation. But to understand this “single ecology,” we have to take it in its objective materiality (its material ecologies) and in its subjective relationality (its social ecologies) in addition to the perceptual, relational, transformational mediations that actually make it up. The third ecology, the medial-perceptual ecology, is an ecology of the taking up and modification of substances and relations.

Conclusion

Why are each of these three ecologies important?

Without the first, the ecological study of objective materiality, we wouldn’t have as clear an idea of what is happening in our “natural environments.” The science of ecology has revolutionized our understanding of the world; it wouldn’t have been able to do that if it hadn’t abstracted itself from subjective perceptions. Science’s “bracketing out” of subjectivity arguably aided us in better understanding our effects on the world (even as this same bracketing made it possible for us to have greater impacts on that world; that’s the paradox Bruno Latour has spent a career writing about).

Without the second, the ecological study of subjective relationality, we lose our capacity for ethical and political action. Of course we already practice social ecology; we just don’t call it that, and as a result we also tend to restrict it to the human. Social ecology is an ecology, a study of the world, which encompasses the ethical and political dynamics by which all things relate to each other.

And without the third, the ecological study of mediation, or of perceptual mediality, we render ourselves incapable of understanding the most important innovations in human sociality today — the media by which we make sense of and alter the world. Language has been a powerful medium for doing exactly that. Other creatures do it differently: by echolocation, by magnetoreception, and so on. Today we have learned to use much more technologically sophisticated media for making sense of and altering the world, and these have had an even more profound impact on that world.

Media do not just “describe” the world (more or less faithfully), nor do they merely “carry information” from one place to another. They constitute the world, making possible the objectivities and subjectivities by which that world is organized. That is what makes this approach a theory of ecomediality. By defining media as broadly and inclusively as possible, and by articulating what it is that media do — how they enable the subjectivation and objectivation by which we get a world of “subjects” and “objects,” those (ostensibly) deserving political treatment and those merely deserving of instrumental action — we get an account of the world as relational process, a world that we respond to aesthetically (perceptually), ethically (socially), and logically (both scientifically and politically).

In ending, I should reiterate that this framework is rooted in Whitehead’s particular formulation of a process-relational ontology. Whitehead offers us a way of understanding why there are three ecologies, but also how they are really just one. Whitehead’s goal, in his later writings, was to account for and overcome the “bifurcation of nature,” that bifurcation by which the world has gotten separated — at least in the minds of “educated” westerners — into the subjective (mental, perceptual, not really real) and the objective (material, real). Once we understand that these dualities are abstracted from the basic process that constitutes reality at its (ongoing) core — the relational, prehensive event — we can understand why they arose, but also how to overcome that opposition. We do it by reintegrating their study into a study of all three, and by giving them equal credence while remembering that the material and the social are abstracted from the relational-prehensive-medial.

Charles Sanders Peirce (the other philosopher I draw on a lot, but whom I avoided mentioning in this post) offers us another perspective on the relationship between the three. But that’s a topic for another day.