Callin podcast №3 | Culture and Nature

Hello, my Name is Christian Fischer, I am a Landscape- resp. Environmental Planner, -Landscape-ecologist and Nature-Protectionist. I also studied the sociological Systems-Theory developed by Niklas Luhmann and I am exploring Systems-Theory-Concepts to find out to what extend they are applicable within the framework of Environmental Planning and Nature Protection.

Today we finally arrive where I wanted to go to in the first place, namely the implications of systems-theory-concepts for nature protection. But don’t worry, we will still be fairly theoretical about it, at least for the first half of this talk, but in a hopefully more accessible way and in a way that allows us to finally derive real practical implications for nature protection.

So just to remind you, for an observation, that is the operationality of the system, that IS the system, differences need to be actualized. Its all about the differences, that make a distinction. These differences resp. distinctions are the code of the system. If we chance the code, we chance the system. Think of systems-theory like you would think about computer science and coding, just that we don’t write the code for an app for example, we fiddle around with the code of the psycho-social-system of consciousness resp. society. That’s way cooler, then programming a boring app.

And here we go. We take a difference, which “form of the form” is equivalent to the “form of the form” a difference we already know, namely “system and environment of the system”. And again, the environment of the system is whatever system is not, so basically the unobserved, unmarked, we coud also say unfunctionalized space of the system. I repeat that over and over, because it’s really crucial to understand this.

We want to find a similar difference like the one of “system/environment of the system”

I would say culture is a system, right, and what is “not culture”, I think that’s nature. So the difference we play with today is culture / nature and therefore wo look at the form of the form of this difference:

· I understand culture as functionalized nature,
· that would make nature the unmarked or unfunctional space of culture
· and also nature the necessary precondition of culture,
· therefore making culture an emergence out of nature.

It might sound as if I am just announcing these points to be true, as if I would just make it up or proclaim that this is the case, but it’s not that simple, What I do is to look at the meta-structure, the so called “form of the form” of this difference and by realizing its similarities and equivalences to the main difference of the whole theory (system/environment) all I actually do is to point at them and say: Hey, look, did you notice? Subsystems or deductions of the main-system. That’s all I do. That’s all it is. Deduction.

And now lets try to be a little more practical.

When we look at nature from a utilitarian perspective, most people agree, that nature is unfunctional and its unfunctionality is something we all enjoy and since we´re all enjoying it, guess what, it is super functional. So the unfunctionality of nature is observed as something functional.

And I do not deny that, this is the utilitarian perspective, and I am not trying to negate this perspective, I actually understand it and to some extend also agree with this perspective. I would just say, that’s not the whole picture.

There is another theorem that applies here. The “unity of the difference”. When we talk about system as observance, whatever we observe is system, then, even if we observe the environment of the system and thats basically whatever is not system, whatever is not observance… so if we observer whatever is not observance, guess what, we observe. We can’t get out of the system.

The unity of the difference of system and environment of the system is system. If we observe the unobservable, well, then we still observe, even if what we observe is marked as unobservable. But the important point here is, that whatever we observe can not be the unobservable, because if it was, we couldn’t observe it.

So the unfunctionality of nature is something very functional, We all love unexplored nature, we all love national parks, where nature can do its thing, without us interfering. And we love to explore these landscapes and we love to study them and just enjoy them for their sheer wild beauty.

BUT if we do not understand, that all that which we value so much, which we study, which we love so much for its wild beauty, is only there, because there are spaces and areas, that we never touch, we never explore, that are completely indifferent for us and to us and therefore completely unfunctional and unobserved in its wild autopoiesis.

If we only protect what we can observe as the so called unfunctionality of nature, we completely ignore, that whatever we observe from nature is just the tip of the iceberg and that the whole complexity of this truly unobservable, unfunctional, unmarked, wild and towards us, completely indifferent whole, is actually the necessary precondition for not just our culture but also for what we can observe as this tip of the iceberg of nature, that we might call the functional unfucntionality of nature. That ultimately is also culture, I would argue.

What I am trying to say here is: if we just contemplate the tip of the iceberg, we don’t know shit about icebergs. We can see the tip of it, but if we don’t understand that there is so sooooo much more underneath, we will follow the destiny of the titanic.

There is a reason, why in a national park there are different zones, and the core of it all is a zone where humans do not interfere at all. Because it is the necessary precondition of its autopoiesis.

And what does autopoiesis mean: Autopoiesis is the ability of a system to create and recreate itself in a constant process of emergent self-organization. A concept that goes back to Huberto Maturana.

What I am trying to say here is that we as human beings are cultural beings, we are an emergence out of a nature that used to be not just unfunctional for us but completely indifferent and from our perspective, even hostile towards us. Nature never cared about us, we as an autopietic emergence out of nature, cultivated nature and by doing so, created our culture in a process of emergent self-organization.

So nature, as indifferent and unfunctional and even hostile as it was for and towards us, in the beginning of our emergence as cultural beings, has always been our greatest obstacle as emerging cultural beings, but also, at the same time, nature has always been the necessary precondition of our emergence as cultural beings.

And I would argue, its wise, not to ignore that. Sure we want and need to cultivate nature, this is our success strategy, but I think, we are at a point where we are actually capable of cultivating the whole of nature, so I think its about time we understand the other side of this equation. Namely the fact that if we succeed to much in our effort to cultivate nature, we are in the process of destroying the necessary precondition of our existence.

So if humanity wants to evolve further in connection with nature, we should make sure that there is actual nature left, that could irritated us enough to keep the autopoietic evolutionary process that brought us here, alive and operational.

And therefore we need the real unfunctional, indifferent and wild nature, all of it, not just the bits and pieces that we observe as functional in its so called unfunctionality but all of it, the whole untamed beast of nature, that is our indifferent mother.

That’s why I think we should give nature much more, truly unfunctional, unobserved space.

Not just for us but also out of responsibility for other emerging species on this planet. Otherwise, we will fundamentally change what we are and are becoming.

I think we should be aware of this threshold moment in our evolution, otherwise we would blindly chance the ultimate necessary precondition of our future evolution.

What if there is no more nature, what if we functionaliszed and cultivated all of nature? What then? Well, then we still live in duality and another side will take the place of nature.

But if we then operate with, lets say the difference of culture/technology instead of culture/ nature, we chance the fundamentals of our existence. That is a big decision, and I think, we should at least be aware of it.

This is a transcript of my third callin.com-podcast, listen to it here.