The nature industry : reflections on culture at the end of nature
At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century the concept of nature assumes a new visibility. I argue that this visibility, which takes the form of an anxiety about 'the end of nature', can be linked to a sense of crisis surrounding the possibility of life in late capitalist society. An understanding of the 'end of nature', I suggest, can best be achieved by returning to the work of Theodor Adorno. In particular, the figure of the constellation seems to offer a effective mode of analysis for addressing the complexities contained in this cultural phenomenon. The cultural texts I have chosen to juxtapose are drawn from a series of seemingly unconnected areas of cultural life: a parkway, a utopian novel, an exhibition of chimpanzee paintings, a dystopian novel, a series of popular films and a number of philosophical essays and cultural commentaries. I say seemingly unconnected because my thesis attempts to show how the general sense of 'the end of nature' emerges in different ways in these different discursive forms and representational arenas. What emerges from this constellation of elements is an image of nature as that which holds and conceals the irreducible contradictions of living in consumer society. The image makes visible how things like landscapes, animals and human bodies, become marginalized and/or reduced to commodities sometimes even in the very act of trying to conserve them. What also becomes evident in the phenomenon of the end of nature is an inflation in the value of the concept of 'nature'. If in some ways, the new value acquired by nature seems simply to repeat an earlier movement, in which reified nature becomes the desired alternative to the degraded landscape of industrial production, this interpretation does not sufficiently account for the extent and intensity of recent interest in nature. This inflation in the value of nature is not only a tum away from history. It also involves recognizing something about the agency of what is not human. Nature returns as a sign of loss and of value not only because of real environmental concerns, but also because, in a lived condition of increasing abstraction, it contains the promise of something outside.
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Department of English Language and Literature