CAROLIN

WIEDEMANN &
SOENKE ZEHLE
DEPLETION
DESIGN:
A GLOSSARY
OF NETWORK
ECOLOGIES
A SERIES OF READERS
PUBLISHED BY THE
INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES
ISSUE NO.:

8
 CAROLIN
WIEDEMANN &
SOENKE ZEHLE
DEPLETION
DESIGN:
A GLOSSARY
OF NETWORK
ECOLOGIES
62 THEORY ON DEMAND DEPLETION DESIGN 63

Recommended Readings
ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE
Barad, Karen. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to TIMOTHY MORTON
Matter’, Signs (3), 2003, pp. 801-831.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind, foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. In order to activate ecological awareness fully, we must drop the concept Nature, which I capi-
talize in order to emphasize how it is not “natural,” but rather an artificial construct. Nature is
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover Publications, 1998. nowhere given to me in my phenomenal experience. I see rabbits, I see thunderstorms, I hear the
mewing of cats. But I fail to see or otherwise sense Nature. Perhaps then Nature is the totality
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. of a certain set of things. I go about constructing this set: birds, fish, mammals … Yet by defini-
F.L. Pogson. New York: Dover Publications, 2001. tion the set always excludes something. Let us add nonliving forms such as iron deposits and
chalkhills, which are made of lifeforms - as are most of the top levels of Earth’s crust. This set
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Ethology: Spinoza and US’, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds) Incor- excludes what lies below the crust and, say, the electromagnetic shield around Earth that protects
porations. New York: Zone Books, 1992. it from solar rays, and so enables life to evolve. So let us now include nonlife in our set. I must
then include the Sun, without which the chemical soup could not have developed into strands of
Fox Keller, Evelyn. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. New York: Columbia complex proteins. And there is no way to stop the inclusion arbitrarily at the Solar System, since
University Press, 1995. comets containing organic chemicals and the sheer fact that stars are made of all kinds of other
materials prevents the set from being closed. Yet once Nature covers absolutely everything, it
Fox Keller, Evelyn. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Meta- also includes spoons, computer software and traffic cones.
phors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Nature only works as a concept when it is normative, and this normativity is predicated on a
Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘The Thing’, in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, difference between Nature and non-Nature. Since I can’t decide in advance what to include in
foreword by Peter Eisenman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of the set - since the set of everything just is absolutely everything - Nature becomes useless as
Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. a concept. Modernity has been the story of how science has undermined a stable, rigid concept
of Nature, precisely because it has shown how boundaries between life and nonlife, and further-
Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Continuum, 2007. more between sentience and nonsentience, are not thin or rigid enough to produce distinctions
that count beings as Natural or non-Natural. Darwin’s devastating insight, for instance, was to
OED online (March 2000[1989]): http://www.oed.com/ Oxford University Press. show that lifeforms arise from non-life, and that lifeforms are made up of other lifeforms. Further-
more, he demonstrated, there is no rigid boundary between a species, a variant and a monstrosity.
Thus what we encounter when we comprehend Earth in a Darwinian way is a vast assemblage
of entities, some of whom we call chimpanzees and some of whom we call butterflies, and so on.

These entities are unique and distinct - a chimp just isn’t a butterfly - yet they are all related in
an evolutionary sense. But there is no way to chop up the evolutionary stream in an arbitrary way,
without being involved in paradoxes that resemble both Zeno’s paradox concerning temporal suc-
cession, and the Sorites paradox concerning what constitutes a heap or bundle of things. Zeno
demonstrates that if we assume that time and space are a series of concrete, constantly present
units, motion between two points cannot occur, because any movement can be subdivided in-
finitesimally, thus resulting in stasis. Yet objects seem to move all the time. Thus it would be ex-
pedient to drop the idea that temporal and spatial frames of reference are constantly and rigidly
present, as difficult as that may be. The Sorites paradox relates to entities that are vague - and
plenty of ecological entities, such as forest or habitat are easily understood to be vague, so the
paradox applies quite obviously to them. If I remove a single leaf from a tree, I still have a forest.
If I go on removing leaves, and then branches, and then trees, the same logic applies all the way
64 THEORY ON DEMAND DEPLETION DESIGN 65

down to no trees whatsoever. Thus I can conclude, wrongly, that there is no forest. But it is quite The thing in itself is profoundly withdrawn from (human) access. We can think about it, but we
evident that there is something unique and specific about a forest. Likewise I can start with one can’t experience it. What we can access are empirical and sensual phenomena. Kant opened
tree and say correctly that I do not have a forest. I can go on adding thousands and thousands of up a disturbing gap in the real, a gap between empirical phenomena, and what he suggestively
trees, and the same logic applies. Thus there is no forest. If we want forests to exist - and this is calls the Unknown = X. Ecological phenomena such as climate and biosphere provide extremely
a good idea both philosophically and ecologically - we might as well accept that forests are not elegant examples of phenomena that can be thought - often with the aid of computing devices -
directly and constantly present. but not directly seen or touched. The rain falling on my head in subtropical Houston is not directly
global warming, but since it occurs in the early twenty-first century, it may well be. This means
Likewise, when we consider sets of lifeforms - sets that constitute the things ecology talks about, that the raindrops are not directly present in a way that makes them real - they are manifestations
such as biome, ecosystem, and biosphere - we discover vague entities that are nevertheless of something deeper. Kant makes this observation using the very example I have just employed
distinct and unique. A meadow is not a football field. And yet when we try to isolate what is es- - that of a rain shower.
sentially meadow-ish from what isn’t, we fail or end up with paradoxes. This is because meadows
are sets of things that aren’t meadows. Thus we have to allow that at least some things that are Ecological phenomena are bound up with a kind of nothingness, a gap between phenomena and
real - crickets, meadows and daisies for instance - are sets of things that are not members of things, a gap that is disturbing insofar as it is irreducible. Thinking ecology means thinking noth-
themselves, thus violating Russell’s prohibition against the set paradox. Ecological entities such ingness, which is another and deeper reason why Nature is a defunct concept in a post-Humean,
as woodlands and fields just are contradictory and ambiguous in the way that Russell feared. A post-Kantian - that is, contemporary—age. Using Nature to talk about ecology is like using a
single lifeform is a set of things that are not that lifeform. Since we can, and must, think without medieval weapon against a ballistic missile. And a fake medieval weapon at that.
recourse to the metaphysics of presence, the very notion of “present” can and must under intense
scrutiny. Difficulties and paradoxes arise when we don’t. Moreover, the precise difficulties and Since we can’t directly point to the depth of a thing, any metaphysics founded on a notion of
paradoxes that arise in thinking Nature have to do with the ways in which we tend to cleave to a constant presence is hampered. There is just not enough evidence in the (human) phenomenal
certain default ontological view. On this view, to exist means to be constantly present. world to justify it. Some of the most spectacular discoveries of modern science have been to do
with things that cannot be seen or touched because they are not constantly present, at least not
In a somewhat schematic way, this prejudice about what it means to exist hampers knowing the to three-dimensional sentient beings of limited intelligence. Evolution is the emergent pattern
kinds of beings that lifeforms and ecosystems (and so on) actually are. Such views are a hango- produced by the interaction of a set of algorithmic procedures that occur at the DNA level. I can’t
ver, we must conclude, from a pre-Humean, pre-Kantian era of Western thinking that decided directly point to evolution. El Niño is an entity that occupies a high dimensional phase space of
upon certain metaphysical truths, without thinking fully enough concerning how those truths are weather patterns over the Pacific. I can’t directly point to El Niño, an entity that was among the
grounded. For instance, before Hume it was likely that one thought that everything has a cause very first high dimensional climate events to become detectable and thinkable in the later nine-
and that if one traces the causes back far enough, one reaches something like God, a causa teenth century.
sui (self-causing being). Yet this was never satisfactorily demonstrated, so that Hume reduces
causality to mere statistical correlation. It’s just very likely that when I smoke a cigarette, I will Climate is a vastly complex set of derivatives of weather that executes its functions in, again, a
get cancer. But I can’t ever prove a direct causal link. This is because there is something fishy high dimensional phase space that is not available to my senses. But I can think all these things.
about the notion of causes as constantly present, metaphysical entities that subtend their effects. A gap has opened up in understanding between phenomena and reason. I claim that this gap
Modern science just is Humean in this sense, which is why global warming science is constantly is the result of a deeper, or rather more pervasive gap, between appearances and things: this
hampered by climate change denial. For the same reason that it’s easy for a tobacco company to epistemological gap is just the Kantian, human-flavored version of a gap that occurs between and
insist that you can’t prove decisively that smoking causes cancer, a denialist can argue that you among every single being in the universe.
can’t prove that global warming is caused by humans.
To be real, on this view, is to have an irreducible gap between how you appear, even to yourself,
Thinking in this modern way requires an upgrade, the sort of upgrade that Kant provided as the and what you are, which is profoundly unavailable. What you are is profoundly withdrawn. So
deep reason for Hume’s assault on clunky theories of causality. There must be things that are what manifests? Quite simply, appearance or form: what Kant calls the phenomenal. Now phe-
already given to our intuition, argues Kant, things such as time and space. These intuitions are nomena appearance or form is by definition a sort of story about a thing. Phenomena provide
the a priori synthetic judgments that allow for the possibility of thinking causality, for instance. information about things. This information is by definition a kind of past. The form of a thing is its
There is always already a conceptual frame in place, as if there were a gigantic but invisible ocean past. A raindrop tells a story about how a cloud formed, how it rose into the atmosphere, how it
of reason at the back of our heads. This ocean is not directly accessible, but it is thinkable. It is began to precipitate and fall. That form is the past becomes clear after a brief consideration of
correlated to things, insofar as mathematical truths are true thoughts about reality. From this we special relativity. There is a speed limit on the flow of information - information transfer cannot be
deduce that there is a reality, not from seeing or touching things such as raindrops. simultaneous. Thus the appearance of anything arrives after time. When we pursue it further, this
view means that time is an emergent property of a thing. Kant supposed that it was the form of
66 THEORY ON DEMAND DEPLETION DESIGN 67

thinking - the way thoughts follow one another in succession. less we choose to consider the possibility that things can violate the speed of light, it is necessary
to accept that things do not occupy a metaphysically present, constant series of points in space
But we can generalize Kant to include anything at all, on Einstein’s view. Any body emits a and time, but rather than they “space” and “time” (intransitive verbs) as part of the ways in which
spacetime field that causes other entities to speed up or slow down relative to its position and they appear.
momentum. That there is a spacetime vortex around Earth was recently verified by the use of a
host of incredibly accurate gyroscopes in orbit. Kant restricted this “spacing” and “timing” to (human) cognition alone. But there is no reason,
apart from anthropocentric prejudice, to restrict his argument to the correlation gap between
What I shall now call the essence of a thing is not some dull substrate beneath its appearance, humans on the one hand, and everything else on the other.
but is rather the thing in itself, as a withdrawn being that cannot be accessed phenomenally. We
are about to enter a world of paradox, since the phenomenon just is this thing’s phenomenon: an Ecology involves thinking on temporal and spatial scales that outstrip our normal frames of per-
octopus does not appear like a toaster. There must therefore be a difference within a thing, a rift ception and comprehension, thus making the gap between phenomenon and thing highly potent
between its essence and its appearance. If appearance or form is the past, then what is essence? to our reason. For two hundred years humans have discovered entities that severely challenge
Consider a poem. We don’t know what it means yet - we can read the words, but we have a lim- the temporal and spatial scales on which we think, act and perceive. These spatiotemporal scales
ited grasp as to what it might mean. Is this not the case with any entity whatsoever - an emu, a - global warming lasts for 100 000 years, for instance - undermine by sheer force of magnitude
saltshaker, a gyroscope? The essence of a thing is a kind of not-yet: it has not yet revealed itself. the prejudice that there is one relatively stable and rigid spatio-temporality. This prejudice now
appears to be exactly what it is, a human flavored distortion of reality. Massive biological and eco-
And it will never fully reveal itself. It will not reveal itself n now-points from now. It will not reveal logical entities such as climate, biosphere and evolution have put more nails in the coffin of an
part of its essence, ever, indeed - for its essence never arrives, neither fully nor partially. Thus we anthropocentric world, just as Galileo and Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was moving, and
can only conclude that the essence of a thing is the future. This does not mean “future” in some just as Kant demonstrated that (human) intuitions give (human) significance to things.
predictable or quantifiable sense, but rather a radically quality of futurality. What exists in the case
of any entity whatsoever is a sliding of the past and the future, never touching, since the future Romantic Models
never truly arrives, yet it is real insofar as the thing is real. The future manifests as a kind of noth- Of course Romanticism is taken to mean Nature poetry, in particular by later literary trends that
ingness, then: it is not the case that it doesn’t exist at all, because this would mean that there is want to perform what I call modernity talk: “Everything before us was old and naïve and uncom-
no thing in itself, no saltshaker, no tree, no ecosystem. But it is also not the case the essence of a plicated, now everything is new and self-reflexive and complex.” Ironically, if you are a Romanticist
thing, namely its futurality, is metaphysically real in the sense of constantly present. Furthermore, you know that this was the moment at which modernity talk was born! So Romanticism is already
it is by now clear that there is no such thing as the present in some metaphysical, constant sense. a nostalgia for Nature and Nature poetry, in other words, for a poetry that never existed until its
The present is always decided in the relations between things, and may be arbitrarily specified to demise was mourned.
arbitrary degrees of precision: one nanosecond, one day, one century, one geological era.
So Romantic poetry is very much without Nature, even when it’s telling you that an impulse from
What is called present is simply a kind of queasy relative motion without boundaries that can be a vernal wood is better than reading loads of books. Actually this particular poem, “The Tables
established in advance, a “nowness”. If this were not the case, if the present were a truly existing Turned” by Wordsworth, takes the form of an injunction to stop reading it, an injunction that is by
thing, it would have a fixed boundary and would thus be subject to Zeno’s and Sorites paradoxes. definition impossible to obey, that is, if you want to understand the poem and what it’s telling you.
If time were atomic in this sense, nothing could happen, because moments could either be sub- It’s telling you to stop reading books and go outside. As Derrida argues, quite beautifully I think,
divided to infinity, or never succeed one another. As strange as it sounds, a view of reality without the inside–outside distinction is already the beginning of onto-theology. And the one thing that
a metaphysically real present is easier on the mind eventually, because it leaves lots of room for the Humean–Kantian revolution rules out is onto-theology.
things to happen. Because of the strange rift between past and future - and the fact that an ob-
ject is as it were “strung out” between these temporalities - an entity is always a little bit “in front So we could reduce Wordsworth’s poem to the sentence “Do not read this sentence.” This sen-
of” itself. As obvious as it seems, inertia, which is the fact that things tend to remain in motion un- tence is of course a strange loop that does two things that are contradictory, at once: it tells you
less checked in some way, is very difficult to explain unless it is the case that a thing is displaced not to read it, and it is an injunction that you must read. This is also the logic of the SUV, which
from itself, in-different to itself. This in-difference can now be observed empirically at a tiny scale, is advertised correctly as a traveling sofa fitted with a television screen (the windshield), out of
a scale that is nevertheless considerably larger than the quantum level at which we now accept which you can see reality, but from a safe distance. So we could say that even this poem, which is
that coherence happens, namely the smearing of a thing, the way a quantum cannot be localized. supposedly quite fiercely ordering you to go into the great outdoors, can’t help forcing you, even
more surreptitiously, as a condition of possibility of reading that you should be out of doors, to
That a thing is smeared in this sense is now visible to the naked eye in the case of a tiny metal stay in your chair, reading. Nature here is already not fully present, in the sense that I can never
paddle about thirty microns long. It can be seen to vibrate and not to vibrate simultaneously. Un- grasp it fully, that I get the guilty feeling that I will never be able to shake the irony out of my
68 THEORY ON DEMAND DEPLETION DESIGN 69

head and stick it in a tree successfully, that I will never be able to live up to the injunction. This of course, since ecological entities such as plutonium and global warming are precisely so mas-
is by definition the case, since I have just read a poem about why I shouldn’t be reading a poem. sively distributed in time and space that they force us to realize that most of what we think of
as “present” and “presence” is indeed a human scale construct that is purely arbitrary. It is as it
Now let’s consider Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy”. The climax of the poem is a beautiful ex- were the case that an entity is a kind of isotope of itself that exhausts itself eventually, through
ample of a Wordsworthian anticlimax. We end up with the correlational circuit between the Boy the inner gap between what it is and how it appears. In the end, Plutonium 239 fades, and even
and the “visible scene” he is apprehending. T.S. Eliot makes this kind of language into a very tight a black hole, the densest thing in the Universe, fades out by exhaling Hawking radiation. What is
loop in Burnt Norton when he writes that “the roses / Had the look of flowers that were looked called present then is particular to any given entity, and is simply the way its appearance even-
at.” Nature is a something or other that is only real insofar as the Boy completes the circuit, and tually exhausts its essence. By essence I mean futurality, rather than some metaphysically real
the poem supplies an analogy for this when it talks immediately about “that uncertain heaven, re- substrate of the thing, whether that is atoms or primordial matter or even human discourse or the
ceived / Into the bosom of the steady lake.” The lineation and punctuation here underscores the measuring device with which I measure the thing.
role of blankness and nothingness, since to read the next line is to allow one’s eyes to be received
into the bosom of the steady blankness of the paper on the right hand side of the poem. The sky So ecology forces us to see that we are in this weird, impossible space between past and future,
is a vague blur reflected in the water on whose shores the Boy is standing, the water becoming caused by the noncoincidence at every point in experiential space of past and future, which slide
an analogy for his mind. Nature becomes a wavering mirage at the very moment at which maxi- past one another like trains in a ghost station. And we can see that Romantic poetry is the place
mum communion with it seems to have been achieved. Wordsworth is fully Kantian here, as we’ve where this uncanny sliding begins to be thought.
seen in Kant’s use of the example of raindrops: these raindrops, these actual wet droplets falling
on my head, just are phenomena, not simply in my concept of them, but in my direct perceptual Recommended Readings
experience - they are not the things in themselves. Even as it falls on my head, even as it is my Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
actual head, or my actual status as a human, that is to say this actual sentient being standing
here in this rain shower, the thing in itself is phenomenologically the most distant thing from me. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. New
York: Verso, 2001.
The very most we can say then is that if Wordsworth is showing us some kind of essence here,
then it’s a weird essence that lacks the metaphysics of presence. The reality of the Boy seems Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith. Boston and New York: Bed-
to evaporate as well, as we see not his insides (how could we?) but the lake, then we get the ford/St. Martin’s, 1965.
caesura and the verse paragraph break, and the Romantic ironic chill as we realize that the nar-
rator is standing by the Boy’s grave. The point is that quite a way before this, at the very moment O’Connell, Aaron; M. Hofheinz, M. Ansmann, Radoslaw C. Bialczak, M. Lenander, Erik Lucero,
of communion, the Boy and Nature have already dissolved. M. Neeley, D. Sank, H. Wang, M. Weides, J. Wenner, John M. Martinis and A. N. Cleland, “Quan-
tum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator,” Nature 464
We are left with an experience of a reality that is as vivid as it is unreal. There was a Boy - the title (March 17, 2010), 697–703.
makes his non-presence quite explicit, a non-presence that is also a true existence, not simply
nothing at all, but a kind of nothingness, a meontic rather than an oukontic nothing. The form Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen
of the poem announces that form as such just is the past. The essence of the Boy is phenom- Green. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992.
enologically unavailable, and can’t be located anywhere on the surface of phenomena, no matter
how hard we examine the Boy, the lake, and what he did, and so on. What seems to be present
evaporates into an uncertain futurality, as the poem’s imagery fades into reflection of reflection,
and then there is the lineation gap, which makes us wonder what happens next.

If anything, what we have here is a kind of weird relative motion between past and future, without
the present. The Boy and the landscape are weirdly futural, they are not-yet - they exist yet their
existence can’t be isolated or pointed to, it is precisely nowhere in ontically given space. Yet it is
real: there was a boy. It is as if, anticipating Levinas, Wordsworth is saying that the il y a of exist-
ence without existents is actually a “there was,” never a “there is,” that the existence of things is
just this weird, strung out quality between past and future, without a present, or (which is saying
the same thing) with a present that I can specify to arbitrary precision - one nanosecond, a million
years, 24.1 thousand years (the half life of Plutonium 239). That last example is quite germane,
Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies
Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and
political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages.

We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics
of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too
slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused
on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective
agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the horizon of depletion, to ask
what it means to sustain ourselves, each other, again. Of these and other knowledges so
created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps.
Contributors: Marie-Luise Angerer (Cyborg), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Exhaustion, Soul Work),
David M. Berry (On Terminality), Zach Blas (Queer Darkness), Drew S. Burk (Grey Ecology),
Gabriella Coleman (Anonymous), Heidi Rae Cooley (Ecologies of Practice), Sebastian Deter-
ding (Playful Technologies, Persuasive Design), Jennifer Gabrys (Natural History, Salvage),
Johannes Grenzfurthner & Frank A. Schneider (Hackerspace), Eric Kluitenberg (Sustainable
Immobility), Boyan Manchev (Disorganisation, Persistence), Lev Manovich (Software), Sonia
Matos (Wicked Problems), Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature), Jason W. Moore (Cri-
sis), Anna Munster (Digital Embodiment), Brett Neilson (Fracking), Sebastian Olma (Biopoli-
tics, Creative Industries, Vitalism), Luciana Parisi (Algorithmic Architecture), Jussi Parikka
(Dust Matter), Judith Revel (Common), Ned Rossiter (Dirt Research), Sean Smith (Informa-
tion Bomb), Hito Steyerl (Spam of the Earth).

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