The seminar explores the stratified and contended history of the concept of ‘environment’, so as to unravel the political and social meanings historically assigned to it from its evolutionary genesis (1809-1855) to the so-called cybernetic turn (1946-1959). In doing so, this seminar provides a historical and conceptual path through the semantic shifts the concept is subjected to when employed to define other crucial references of modern and contemporary political discourses, such as ‘species’, ‘nature’, and ‘technology’. By focusing on three specific turning points in the conceptualisation of ‘environment’, this seminar aims at showing how it has been adapted to serve variegated political goals: from justifying the ‘natural’ persistence over time of social and political inequalities, to contesting their naturalization; from legitimizing an anti-revolutionary conception of historical transformations, to contesting capitalistic society.
The first session will offer a theoretical and methodological framework for critically engaging with the concepts and categories that are crucial for the seminar. These include the history of political and social concepts as a methodology for studying the history of political thought; the topicality of the concepts of ‘species’, ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ in the political and social theories of the 19th and 20th centuries; the historical, political and semantic thresholds that need to be considered for a history of the concept of ‘environment’.
The next three sessions will each focus on a specific historical and theoretical moment of redefinition of the concept of environment at the intersection of natural sciences, and social and political disciplines. The first session will present how Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer redefined the natural history of the ‘species’ through references to the ‘environment’, so as to legitimize the historical-political conformation of collective bodies. The second session will present Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ critique of the evolutionary naturalisation of social relations which calls for a historicisation of the relationship between humans and their environment. The final session will present the reappraisal of the evolutionary genesis of the concept of environment in key exponents of the cybernetic turn, such as Norbert Wiener and Garrett Hardin, as it represents a crucial moment of definition of the enduring conceptual and material nexus between ‘environment’ and ‘technology’. A conservative and normative of the relationship between humans and their planetary environment emerges in the same historical period in which environmentalism starts affirming itself as a political movement to criticize capitalistic, colonial, and war policies globally.
