In response to my last post, Levi is arguing, as Graham has before, that relational ontologies have had their day, that “it is relational and processual thought that has become a habit that prevents us from thinking, not object-oriented thought,” and that “For the last century we’ve repeatedly said ‘things are related’ to such a degree that claims about interdependence, relation, and interconnection have lost a good deal of meaning” and “become stale metaphors and worn coins.” He continues:
“Rather than beginning with relation, context, interdependence, interconnection, etc., what would we learn if we instead thought of autonomous objects perpetually shifting and jumping between relations? My wager is that this would teach us a great deal more in the ecological framework than endless talk of holism and relation. We would begin to ask how substances perturb networks, rather than treating networks as static and fixed systems where all is harmonious and balanced as we tend to do now.”
It’s true that there is a popular view of ecology as positing systems that are, ideally, “harmonious and balanced.” (We might call this the Disney Lion King version of reality.) Ecologists themselves used to speak about certain kinds of networks (ecosystemic “climax communities”) that way in the 1920s and 1930s, and in some cases up to the 1960s or so. Some environmentalists still use those tropes on occasion today. But if everything actually was “harmonious and balanced,” would there be any need for environmentalism at all, since there’d be no need to concern oneself with re-establishing some modicum of “harmony and balance”?
