Ruins of Gaia: Towards a Feminine Ontology of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, ‘Mother Nature’ makes space for ‘Gaia’, a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's ‘formulas of sexuation’. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a ‘masculine’ ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a ‘feminine’ ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint.

Keywords

ecology Lacan nature ontology psychoanalysis urban

… it is simply nature itself that melts into air. (Žižek, 2018: 34)

Nature is Dead, Long Live Gaia!

If it is true that the Anthropocene is ‘the most pertinent philosophical, religious, anthropological, and … political concept for beginning to turn away for good from the notions of “Modern” and “modernity”’ (Latour, 2017a: 116), then it is because this concept crucially affects the ways in which humans locate themselves in the world. In the Anthropocene, ‘we’ can no longer perceive the world ‘out there’ as something external to us, but have to consider ourselves as a geological force, which is fundamentally intertwined with the material realities of this planet. This ‘forms an ontological rupture’ (Yusoff, 2016: 9) for modern thinking, because if humans are inscribed within nature, they lose their superior status as taking a privileged, evaluative and distanced stance toward what happens with the world. The Anthropocene ‘challenges certain distinctions that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West’, which manifest in an ‘ontological break between the human being as subject of entitlement and the object of nature’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 40). Every anthropocentric ontology therefore starts by ‘celebrating what modernity had repressed’ (Conty, 2018: 74). Putting an end to the modernist repression, the Anthropocene allows us to overcome the idea of nature as being the stable or distinct background against or upon which culture is established. An ontology that aligns with our anthropocentric condition ends up with nature as ‘the Other’ of culture: ‘Thank God, nature is going to die. Yes, the great Pan is dead’ (Latour, 2004: 25).

After the blurry boundaries between nature and culture returned ‘from the repressed’, other concepts are needed to capture the space that has formerly been occupied by the concept of nature. Gaia is certainly one of the most powerful concepts that ‘returned’ to fill the void of nature. Deriving from the semi-fictional writings of James Lovelock in the mid-1960s, the Gaia hypothesis has been prominently revitalized by Isabelle Stengers (2015) and Bruno Latour (2017a, 2017b) in order to introduce a ontology of the Anthropocene (Clarke, 2017). The basic idea of Gaia is to think of the Earth as a living organism, a biosphere that not only creates the conditions for life but is itself alive. On the strength of Gaia, we can no longer face nature as an ‘objective’ matter of fact:

We are no longer dealing (only) with a wild and threatening nature, nor with a fragile nature to be protected, nor a nature to be mercilessly exploited. The case is new. (Stengers, 2015: 46)

However, while for Lovelock, Gaia still often ‘seemed to be a good, nurturing mother, whose health was to be protected’, as Stengers (2015: 45) puts it, the Anthropocene makes it necessary to radicalize the Gaia hypothesis: ‘Gaia is not Mother Earth, a divine ancestor from whom our collective supposedly descends’ (Latour, 2004: 199). Following Latour, Gaia allows us to question the difference between nature and culture in a similar way as the feminist revolution questioned the difference between men and women. Just as feminists reject the category of ‘man’ as the universal with ‘woman’ as its supplement or derivative, nature and culture should be considered as equally constructed signifiers. Gaia encourages us to stop taking culture as the signifier ‘that makes the category marked and thus detached from [nature as] the unmarked category that serves as its background’ (Latour, 2017a: 16). Latour therefore speaks of Gaia as ‘nature/culture’, a figure that brings nature and culture together instead of separating the two. Furthermore, Latour emphasizes that Gaia is ‘no more a religious figure than a secular one’, but rather, ‘an injunction to rematerialize our belonging to the world’ (Latour, 2017a: 219). She allows us to reject every notion of ‘materiality as something inert and passive’ and to intrude upon all those who think ‘that the world they live in is made up only of objects, of simple matters of fact’ (Latour, 2017a: 208). Gaia can thus be understood as the latest stage of Latour's comprehensive intellectual project to do justice to matter and to promote a fully ‘material’ materialism (Latour, 2007). As soon as we face Gaia, ‘[w]e are obliged to ask the materialists: “Please give us back our materiality”’ (Latour, 2017a: 244).

While Gaia appears, in this sense, as ‘a radically materialist event’ (Stengers, 2008: 6), over the years, critics have observed a certain danger underlying the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis has continuously and vehemently been criticized as a problematic figure of ‘whole-ism’. For example, according to an early critique by Yannis Stavrakakis (1997: 127), ‘[o]ne of the ultimate consequences of the Gaia hypothesis … is that whatever humans may do, a new harmony will be reached’, so that Gaia becomes a ‘representation of nature’ as ‘a harmonious nature’ (1999: 93). More recently, Levy Bryant (2011: 277) comes to the drastic conclusion that Gaia is ‘either a fascist or a totalitarian’, since she takes everything as being part of herself. And following Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) approaches like Gaia tend to depoliticize matters of nature, since they cover up the antagonistic struggles our world faces today. Gaia, in this sense, does not allow any constitutive split and instead follows the fantasy of a symmetrical or ‘flat’ ontology ‘that permits a phantasmagorical scripting of a fully socialized nature’ (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018: 15). The case seems clear: by bringing nature and culture together, Gaia turns out to be nothing but a ‘more or less personified whole’ (Morton, 2018: 47).

A common feature shared by these critiques on Gaia's holistic and totalitarian ontology is that they are in some way inspired by the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. While this shift to psychoanalysis might seem surprising, as one could call into question why a therapeutic practice like psychoanalysis has anything to say about the ontological relationship between nature and culture, Lacan was already well aware of the potential to turn psychoanalysis into an ontology: ‘that one day someone will come along to make an ontology out of it’ (Lacan, 2018: 163). Following from this, there have been various attempts in recent years to further engage with the ontological implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis, proclaiming that Lacan ultimately allows us ‘to admit that there is no reality as a self-regulated Whole’ (Žižek, 2020: 52). This paper has a related influence. If it is true that ‘any cutting-edge materialist ontology … nowadays must situate itself in Lacan's long shadow’ (Johnston, 2013: 4), then also the debates surrounding Gaia and the Anthropocene have to be situated in this shadow. In the following, however, I will not refer to Lacan as a challenger, but as a defender of the Gaia hypothesis. My basic aim is to show what happens to Gaia, if we read her not as a figure of ‘whole-ism’ but, on the contrary, as precisely the figure that disturbs every possible balance and completeness. I call for an ‘anti-totalitarian’ and ‘anti-fascist’ ontology of the Anthropocene by relating Gaia to a Lacanian reading of ruined nature. Gaia is ruined in the sense that she does not constitute a ‘self-regulated whole’, but on the contrary confronts us with the inconsistencies taking place in nature itself. This allows us to grasp the ‘being’ of Gaia without letting her cover up ‘the split’ that both ensures and questions her existence. What turns Gaia into ‘a radically materialist event’ is not that she allows us to grasp nature as being One with culture nor that she offers a fully ‘material’ definition of the Earth. From a Lacanian standpoint, rather, the event of Gaia is her ongoing disturbance of any notion of Oneness and her ability to pave the way towards the void taking place at the heart of reality.

The World as Ontologically Incomplete

In order to dispel any doubt that Lacanian psychoanalysis could help us to engage with reality beyond its clinical context, I want to begin with a passage in which Lacan himself aims to define psychoanalysis. In an interview from 1974, he gives a minimal definition of psychoanalysis by stating that psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with ‘the Real’ as ‘what does not work in a world’:

I don't know if you are aware of this, but psychoanalysis is concerned especially with what doesn't work. Because of this, it concerns itself with what we must call by its name – I must say that I am still the only one who has called it by this name – the real. The real is the difference between what works and what doesn't work. What works is the world. The real is what doesn't work. … This is what analysts deal with, such that, despite what one may think, they are confronted with the real far more than even scientists are. Analysts deal with nothing but that. (Lacan, 2013: 61–2)

Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, relies on the difference between reality, or world, and the Real. The Real can neither be located inside nor outside of the world, but follows a strange spatial logic that Lacan aptly coined ‘extimacy’, something closely related and yet still detached from reality (Kingsbury, 2007). There would be no Real without reality, because the Real is an immanent contradiction of the (symbolic and imaginary) organization of reality. However, the Real is also no part of reality, or better, it is a ‘non-part’ of reality. As such, the Real reveals ‘the mystery of the unconscious’ (Lacan, 1999: 131) insofar as it marks the inherent limits of reality (just as the unconscious marks the inherent limit of consciousness).

Lacan surely does not have planet Earth in mind when he refers to the ‘world’ in order to distinguish the Real. The Real does not relate to a physical reality but refers to a given social order ‘that works’ for the subject. To further pursue the implications of a psychoanalytic reading of the Anthropocene, we should take Lacan more seriously than he took himself. Therefore, I engage with the philosophical work of Slavoj Žižek. Throughout the last decade, Žižek has vehemently called for a Lacano-Hegelian reinvention of ‘dialectical materialism’ (Žižek, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2020), a term primarily related to Stalin's dogmatic ‘state philosophy’ and, through this, to one of the most discredited orientations of 20th-century philosophy. Žižek's effort at bringing dialectical materialism back to life is driven by the attempt to introduce dialectics into matter itself (Pohl, 2020). Antagonism, for Žižek, is not a category restricted to the realm of the social, but takes place within the world as such: ‘dialectical materialism transposes back into nature not subjectivity as such but the very gap that separates subjectivity from objective reality’ (Žižek, 2014: 12). Without directly mentioning Lacan's take on the world from the quote cited above, Žižek's new dialectical materialism therefore elicits the most radical consequences from Lacan's assumption that something ‘does not work in the world’. One of the examples he uses to illustrate this point is The Thirteenth Floor, a movie where the main character drives to a place in a desert in California to discover a location beyond which the world itself becomes a wireframe model. For Žižek (2020: 7), there is a materialist truth at work in this film, namely ‘the proof that our reality is itself a simulation which was not perfectly actualized everywhere’. The world does not revolve around an impenetrable density of matter, but around its own inconsistency, the Real, as the ‘ontological incompleteness of reality itself’ (Žižek, 2009: 90; Pohl and Swyngedouw, forthcoming).

Following Žižek's use of Lacan ‘to psychoanalyze our whole world’, as Alain Badiou (2005: 41) once put it, a variety of scholars have already started to work on a Lacanian approach to the Anthropocene. Lacanian theory has been employed to engage with the role of fantasy (Healy, 2014), anxiety (Robbins and Moore, 2013), enjoyment (Fletcher, 2018) and the political implications (Swyngedouw, 2013, 2015) within the Anthropocene. In the following, I will take a step back to see what Lacan has to say about ‘nature’ itself and how this relates to the Anthropocene. How does Lacan capacitate us to capture the shift from Mother Nature to Gaia? I argue that this shift, which classifies the Anthropocene, resembles Lacan's view of the world as being marked by the Real. If the Anthropocene means that ‘we’ can no longer perceive the natural world ‘out there’ as something external to us, but have to consider ourselves as fundamentally intertwined with the material realities of this planet, then the Lacanian conclusion we can draw from this is to transpose the Real into the ontological realm of the world itself. In the Anthropocene, it is the world, and not only the humans living in this world, which lacks coherence, stability and fulfillment.

Sexed Realities

To further pursue the implications of a psychoanalytic ontology of the Anthropocene, I draw attention to the question of sexuality. In the introduction, I mentioned how Latour uses the social struggles over the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as a metaphor for the shift from nature to Gaia. For Latour, the step from Mother Nature to Gaia resembles the feminist call for the equal treatment of men and women. After Gaia has entered the scene, nature and culture become equally ‘marked’ categories, just like after the feminist revolution, men and women are to be treated equally. Psychoanalysis allows us to radically pursue the implications of this remark. However, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, feminine and masculine do not refer to either nature or culture; they instead indicate two ways to grasp the division between nature and culture. Masculine and feminine each incorporate both, nature and culture, but in different ways, and the shift from nature to Gaia does not resemble a fusion of masculine and feminine but rather a shift from masculine to feminine. Before going into further detail about this shift, I want to give a brief overview on the Lacanian reading of sexual difference.

Masculine		Feminine
__		__	__
∃x	Φx	∃x	Φx
There is at least one x that is not phallic		There is no x that is not phallic
			__
∀x	Φx	∀x	Φx
Every x is phallic		Not-All is phallic

During his teaching in the early 1970s, Lacan developed his canonic ‘formulas of sexuation’ through which he determined the (ontological) status of sexual difference in psychoanalytic theory. The formulas are organized into two columns (see above). The (left) masculine side is defined by the universality of the phallic function and its constitutive exception. It is based on the principle that there exists One, Lacan's emblematic figure of the big Other, ‘determined by having said no to the phallic function’ (Lacan, 2018: 178), which means that this One is not ‘castrated’. While castration is key for psychoanalysis, one has to bear in mind that Lacan does not use this term in relation to the loss of the penis, but to refer to the subject's entanglement with the Real as the antagonism that cuts through the social. For Lacan, subjectivity starts only with castration: every idea of some-One, who is not castrated, is a (no less significant and influential) fantasy. However, the masculine logic follows the fantasy of such an exception:

The exception (of a non-castrated One) functions as constitutive, that is, as the negative reference point, or the limit that permits everything else to be constituted as such, that is, to appear as everything else, or as a whole. (Zupančič, 2017: 51)

Whereas the (left) masculine logic of sexuation is based on the existence of a non-castrated Other, the (right) feminine logic follows the premise that every-One falls under the regime of castration–there is no exception. From the standpoint of the feminine logic, there is no x that is not part of the phallic function (Lacan, 2018: 178), which means that there is no ‘negative reference point’ that permits everything else to appear as a whole. Thus, an essential aspect of these two logics is that both are contradictory in different, albeit asymmetrical, ways. While the masculine logic only reaches (a fantasy of) completeness through the assumption of an exception, the female logic does not allow any exception and thus also no (fantasy of) wholeness. The feminine logic revolves around the strange figure of the ‘not-All’, which is not simply the opposite of a Whole/All, but a whole that includes its own negation.

As mentioned by various scholars throughout the years, Lacan's logics of sexuation have a number of spatial implications and can therefore be understood not only as a way of approaching the sexuation of the subject, but also as an approach to reality itself. While the ‘“masculine” ontology’ is based on the ‘spatial logic of an illusory “outside”’ (Eyers, 2012: 89) from which one is able to assert the wholeness and coherence of the social order, the feminine ontology ‘has no external limit and thus no outside’ (Copjec, 2002: 100); it creates the state of the not-All, which ‘is simultaneously without a relation to outside and thoroughly “out of itself,” with no “internal structure” as a point from which it could relate to externality’ (Žižek, 2017: 127). The feminine (topo)logic therefore leads to an immanent incompleteness or ‘disparity’ of reality that ‘points towards a Whole whose parts do not fit together, so that the Whole appears as an artificial composite, its organic unity forever ruined’ (Žižek, 2016: 10).

Before going on to further elaborate this ‘ruined’ wholeness of reality that results from the feminine logic, I want to insist that the Lacanian approach of sexual difference does not relate to a binary separation between men and women: ‘We have to bear in mind that masculine and feminine are not positive entities but formal structures of two types of antagonisms’ (Žižek, 2020: 117). While Lacan's formulas of sexuation do not abolish the difference between masculine and feminine, they retain these categories not to essentialize two opposing principles (like yin and yang), but rather to consider them as two intrinsically conflicting logics. The feminist legacy of such a reading of sexual difference, as Alenka Zupančič (2017: 36) aptly points out, is that it forces us to think of sexual difference not ‘as a question of belonging to two separate worlds’ but ‘as a division, a split of the same world’. My following aim is to, quite literally, demonstrate what it means to understand our world as being split into the two logics of sexuation. I therefore seek to offer an answer to a question raised by Jesse Proudfoot and Paul Kingsbury (2014: 255), whether ‘one might use a psychoanalytic concept such as sexuation to psychoanalyze socio-spatial phenomena’ by drawing all the consequences from the assumption that ‘neither work nor language but sex is our (human) point of breaking with nature, the space where we confront ontological incompleteness’ (Žižek, 2020: 61).

The Natural Difference

Following Žižek (2008: 206), psychoanalysis confronts us with ‘an uncanny inner split of nature itself into nature as balanced circuit regulated by instincts and nature as “unruliness”’. In the following, I will show that these two notions of nature lurking within psychoanalytic thought not only appear repeatedly throughout Lacan's teaching, but also resemble Lacan's two logics of sexuation.

The first idea of nature as a balanced circuit and solid ground makes several appearances throughout Lacan's work, for instance at one point where he states that ‘[n]ature is there’ and that it is not worth saying anything more about it because whatever we say about nature has no consequences for it (Lacan, 1968). Lorenzo Chiesa (2016: 61) reads this phrase together with a passage from Hegel's biography. When Hegel climbed the Alps, his sole response from the top was: ‘Es ist so’ – ‘It is what it is’ (Hegel, 1986: 618). There is nothing (more) to say about the mountain, not because it does not exist, but rather because it only exists. Nature is ‘out there’, it ‘works’, and that is it. This sort of witnessing the world in ‘its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it in our hubris’ is, according to Žižek (2010: 80), a ‘fantasy at its purest’. More precisely, we should say that it is a masculine fantasy at its purest. Here, nature is structurally positioned as being the One outside of culture, as being not part of culture: ‘Nature keeps standing there not as an impenetrable Real in itself, but as the Imaginary, which we can see, like, and love, but which is, at the same time, somewhat irrelevant’ (Zupančič, 2017: 79). From the standpoint of the masculine fantasy, culture is castrated, while nature is relieved from castration. However, this does not mean that nature has no influence on culture. On the contrary, nature is here actively positioned as an exception in order to define culture as such. Simply speaking, nature is what culture is not, which means that nature is the One, which enables culture to become fully itself. While culture is out of joint, nature is in equilibrium; while culture is chaotic, nature follows its inner laws; while culture is inconsistent, nature is harmonious; while culture is lacking, nature lacks nothing, and so on.

While in the masculine logic, ‘Nature as a big Mother is just another image of the divine big Other’ (Žižek, 2016: 31), the feminine logic follows the premise that ‘the big Other does not exist’, which basically means that ‘mOther’ Nature is here castrated, marked by the Real. There is no harmony or equilibrium and no balanced circuit regulated by instincts, because nature does not exist in itself: ‘what specifies Nature per se is that it is not a nature’ (Lacan, 2016: 4). Such a feminine notion of nature relates to what Lacan also calls ‘rotten’ nature: ‘it is quite clear that nature is not as natural as all that, it is even in this that there consists this rottenness which is what is generally called culture’ (Lacan, 1977).

Nature, in this sense, cannot be grasped as being opposed to culture, because culture is always already part of it. In a talk given in 1971, Lacan (2017: 31) therefore states: ‘Don't imagine that I’m one of those who pit culture against nature, if only because nature is precisely a fruit of culture’. While this argument sounds commonsensical for many scholars today, it is crucial to insist that Lacan’s feminine logic also abolishes any possibility of nature/culture to constitute a whole. While the feminine formula rejects the logic of the Two (nature vs. culture), it also does not lead to a new All (nature/culture). In contrast to the masculine ‘fantasies of Nature as an avatar of the (nonexistent) big Other, the One-All’ (Johnston, 2019: 59), the feminine logic culminates in an understanding of nature as ‘not-One’ and nature/culture as ‘not-All’. A feminine ontology therefore not only destroys the idea of nature and culture as two opposing entities, it also ruins every hope for fusing the two.

In the following, I will demonstrate that this ‘ruined unity’ of nature/culture becomes visible precisely through objects of ruination. The nature of ruins cannot be compared to that of the mountain in Hegel's biography, because it does not exist as pure and distinct from humankind but is imbricated in the socio-historical processes to which both nature and culture belong. Adrian Johnston (2019: 60) emphasizes that already ‘Hegel appreciates not natural entities displaying material substantiality as inert, solid stasis (such as mountains), but instead, natural events manifesting a no-less-material insubstantiality as dynamic, fluid kinesis’. Precisely such an insubstantial and dynamic nature is what takes place in ruins.

Logics of Ruination

In order to avoid the ‘conceptual and material “messiness”’ that marks many approaches dealing with the Anthropocene (Johnson and Morehouse, 2014: 440), I situate my Lacanian approach within a particular object. In the following, I seek to demonstrate that there is no better object to understand the shift from mOther Nature to Gaia than the ruin. In ruins we can situate the shift from the masculine logic of Mother Nature as a divine image of the big Other to the feminine logic of Gaia as immanently out of joint.

While the majority of ruin scholars do not consider their work as contributing to the debates of the Anthropocene (and vice versa), recent attempts to understand the rising popularity of ruin aesthetics, often dismissively coined as ‘ruin porn’, mention that ‘the visualization of ruins has gained a new inflection in the Anthropocene’ (Zylinska, 2017: 9) and that the ruin becomes ‘an expression against the thoroughly anthropocentric discourse that pervades contemporary culture’ (Lyons, 2018: 5). The strange correlation between the popularity of ruins and the Anthropocene lies in the rising awareness of the role humans play for the physical shaping of this planet. Walter Benjamin (2003: 177–8) once stated: ‘In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting’. A similar argument structures the debates surrounding the Anthropocene, as stated in the introduction. In a world where boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, no longer serve the purpose, the ruin obtains an emblematic function. Scholars have repeatedly stated that ruins allow us to follow ‘the transgression of the divide between nature and culture’ (Qviström, 2007: 271), as they produce no stable objects, but ‘hybrid mixes of culture and nature’ (Steinmetz, 2008: 211). Ruins are prime examples for what Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’, tangled beings that ‘have no clear boundaries, no well-defined essences, no sharp separation between their own hard kernel and their environment’ (Latour, 2004: 24). Within processes of ruination, nature can therefore no longer be ‘framed as other – something external to culture’ (DeSilvey, 2017: 111). In other words, ruination is not a marker for nature's ‘return’, but rather for its ‘death’. Within decay, nature, conceptualized as a stable background outside of culture, comes to an end, which is why ruins offer ‘the possibility of renegotiating the porous border between social and ecological ontological orderings’ (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013: 477).

Proceeding from this, scholars have vehemently criticized the idea of a ‘return of nature’ that prevails in the mainstream narrative of ruination. While this narrative dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and Georg Simmel's essay The Ruin from 1911 in which he addresses the ruin with reference to Goethe as a ‘return to the “good mother”’ (Simmel, 1959: 262), recent scholarship has primarily engaged with the ‘return of nature’ through a critical evaluation of ruin porn. Especially Detroit, for years ‘[t]he headquarters of ruin porn’ (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 183), has become a preferred site for academic engagement with ruined nature because the city offered abundant footage to import the narrative of a ‘return of nature’ into the post-industrial city. In two of the most prominent contributions, Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore and The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, we find comments on how ‘[e]ntire portions of the city have returned to their original state of nature’ (Marchand and Meffre, 2010: 224) and how ‘the true engineer’ behind Detroit's disassembly is not human but ‘Janus-faced nature, which renews as it ravages this shadowed metropolis’ (Moore, 2010: 119). Studying the ‘post-industrial imaginaries’ of Detroit's ruin porn, Nate Millington (2013: 285) argues that the problem with ruin porn is that it scripts ‘nature as a distinctly feminine presence, against the agentic and masculinist will of “men”’. Portraying the city as a ‘no man's land’ (Safransky, 2014; emphasis added), ruin porn would therefore locate nature in a female position opposed to masculine culture. From a Lacanian perspective, we can state that such a positioning of nature feeds a masculine fantasy. Nature obtains here the structural position of the non-castrated mOther, who exists beyond our power of disposition and who acts beyond our scope of action. Witnessing the world in its comeback of a ‘pre-castrated state’, ruin porn therefore turns places like Detroit into the ultimate Other, the outside, of culture.

However, a closer look at the exhibits of ruin porn shows that there is another nature lurking within ruin porn, a ‘second nature’, which paves the way towards Gaia. For instance, a motif which can be found in both publications, The Ruins of Detroit and Detroit Disassembled, depicts a clock that strangely resembles the famous melting clocks from the paintings of Salvador Dalí (Figure 1). In contrast to Dalí, however, this clock is not painted, but a result of actual heat; it is melted for real. Another image from Moore's Detroit Disassembled shows an office room with a green carpet. At first sight, one almost gets the feeling that it is a typical carpet that has just become outdated. At a second glance, however, it becomes clear that one is actually dealing with a carpet made from moss (Figure 2). While photographs like this have been criticized for establishing ‘an aesthetic of deindustrialization where nature, not culture, survives’ (Cialdella, 2013: 113), I claim that the point of these images is not to show how nature ‘returns’, but how nature loses its naturalness. What we witness in the melting clock and the mossy carpet is not simply a view that ‘naturalizes and romanticizes Detroit's decline’ (Apel, 2015: 88), but an uncanny nature that is in-itself a rotten fruit of culture. Nature appears here not as a divine mOther, who engineers the city according to her own will, but as something dynamically interwoven with and depending on the influence of culture. In these images, ‘history has physically merged into the setting’, to adopt the phrase from Benjamin cited above. However, it is crucial to insist that the ruined nature pictured in ruin porn does not create a nature/culture in the sense of whole-ism. While ruins, if they are not understood through a ‘return of nature’, are often approached as creating ‘an image of equilibrium between nature and culture’ (Dillon, 2014: 5), the feminine logic rather allows us to understand these images in a way in which neither nature nor culture is adequately represented. In ruins, nature and culture ‘melt’ together, but instead of creating a new whole, they end up creating ‘a chaotic non-All proto-reality’ (Žižek, 2012: 912).

Figure 1.

Melted clock in an abandoned high school. Source: The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Courtesy of the artists.

Figure 2.

Mossy carpet in an abandoned office room. Source: Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore. Courtesy of the artist.

Ruins are therefore what Žižek (2016: 33) calls ‘‘unnatural’ (inhuman) objects, which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature’. It is important to highlight the peculiar quality of the word ‘unnatural’ here, since it helps us to capture the not-wholeness of ruined nature. As Jean-Claude Milner (2000: 57) points out, the prefix un, that is particularly common in German, is not a simple negation but has a strange ‘parasitic’ connotation: ‘Unmensch is not a nonhuman but an undone man, a monster; Unkraut is not an herb (kraut), but a weed, a parasite; the unheimlich is not the inverse of the familiar, but the familiar parasitized by an anxiety that disperses it. … The negative prefix is nothing more than the seal of this parasitism’. We should read the unnaturalness of ruins in alignment with the uncanny or unconscious as something inherently distorted through a ‘seal of parasitism’. Ruined nature is neither natural nor cultural and also not simply a mix between the two; it rather obtains a third possibility between nature and culture, just like the undead obtains a third option between life and death. This also makes clear why it is considered to be ‘shocking’ that Moore's ‘photographs do not represent distant wilderness’ (Cialdella, 2013: 114), because they do not allow any negative reference point from which we could take a proper look at culture, but instead refer to what one might call an ‘extimate wilderness’. The strangeness of the melted clock or the mossy carpet is that they are closely related and yet still detached from both nature and culture. Ruin porn therefore touches upon an impossible, or rather unnatural, point within nature/culture that enables us to see the world with ‘inhuman’ eyes, which does not mean to show how things ‘really’ are independently from us, ‘but something much more uncanny, a radical shift in the subjective attitude by means of which we become strangers to ourselves’ (Žižek, 2020: 362).

Gaia as not-All

So even our Earth is not One… (Žižek, 2017: 26)

With regard to the critique of Gaia as a form of ‘whole-ism’, mentioned in the introduction, we can conclude that a Lacanian standpoint allows us to maintain Gaia as an ontological figure only if it enables us to traverse the fantasy of mOther Nature by demonstrating ‘how little it is part of nature's intentions that this form a whole’ (Lacan, 2007: 33). What defines Gaia is the impossibility for nature to become One with itself, which also means that nature cannot provide any negative reference point for culture to ‘fully’ constitute itself:

The point is not that the universe is the field of an eternal struggle between the two opposed cosmic principles (yin and yang, light and darkness, spirit and matter, and other versions of the sexualized cosmology) which cannot ever be harmonized but that, precisely, there is only One – the Other one (what Lacan calls the ‘binary signifier’) is missing: no ‘vaginal signifier’ supplements the phallic signifier. But now comes the real paradox: this lack of the ‘binary signifier’ doesn't imply a ‘phallogocentric monotheism’, the reign of the One; on the contrary, it curtails from within the One itself – there is no One precisely because there is only One without its complementary counterpart, the Other (one) which makes it One. (Žižek, 2016: 348)

To finally put an end to the ‘eternal struggle’ between nature and culture does not mean paving the way towards ‘the reign’ of either Nature or Culture, nor does it lead to a harmonic fusion of the Two. What Lacan instead forces us to take into account is a breakdown of both nature and culture based on the absence of a ‘vaginal signifier’. As soon as nature no longer functions as the exception of culture, as the non-castrated One, the sphere of culture dissolves and inscribes itself into nature. We end up with an unnaturalness, where nature and culture melt together without creating a new Whole. In the beginning of his eleventh seminar, Lacan (1998: 26) states that his whole teaching tends to exclude the ‘need for a closed one’ and instead follows ‘the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture’. If we read this line together with Žižek's (2012: 771) take that ‘[a]ntagonism is, at its most radical, not the opposition or incommensurability of the Two, but an effect or articulation of the inconsistency of the One’, then we can state that Lacanian theory paves the way for an antagonistic notion of Gaia. Since the Anthropocene is characterized through the absence of any ‘vaginal signifier’, we are confronted with a One that is split from within this One itself:

The primordial gap is thus not the polar opposition of two principles … but the minimal gap between an element and itself, the Void of its own place of inscription … there is only One, the gap is inherent to this One itself – not as the gap between its two opposite aspects, but as the gap between One and the Void. (Žižek, 2006: 36)

Here, we find the precise logic underlying Gaia's feminine ontology. Gaia does not confront us with the gap between or the fusion of nature and culture, but with the lack inherent to nature/culture itself. While previous attempts to search for new materialist ontologies of the Anthropocene directed our focus to the dense material entanglements of Gaia, a Lacanian ontology allows us to focus on the Real that derails Gaia from within. As for Žižek (2009: 287), ‘a true materialism not only asserts that only material reality “really exists” but has to assume all the consequences of what Lacan called the nonexistence of the big Other’; thus we can state that the castration of mOther Nature is an intrinsically materialist project. Such a materialism is no longer a ‘material materialism’ (Latour, 2007) but rather an ‘immaterial materialism’ (Pohl, forthcoming), since it does not seek to offer a ‘fully’ materialized description of reality, but takes the impossibility of such a description as its analytical starting point: ‘In other words, the fundamental axiom of materialism is not “matter is all” or “matter is primary”, but relates rather to the primacy of a cut’ (Zupančič, 2017: 78).

What turns Gaia into ‘a radically materialist event’ (Stengers, 2008: 6) is the way in which she opens the not-All of the world itself. Gaia is eventful, in a proto-Badiousian sense, as she ‘does not ever allow the All or the One to form itself as a closed, and hence exclusionary, set’ (Kordela, 2007: 51). Gaia creates a structural surplus, a void, which traverses every fantasy of letting nature/culture become One-All. From this standpoint, Gaia is not ‘the name of an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence’ and thus can also not be grasped as ‘a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects’ (Stengers, 2015: 47). While this would draw us back to the masculine fantasy of a divine mOther, we should instead emphasize the immanence, or better, ‘immanent transcendence’, of Gaia. While Lacan affirms that ‘some notion of transcendence is needed if one is to avoid the reduction of social space to the relations that fill it’ (Copjec, 1994: 7), the not-All does not turn Gaia into the doorkeeper for a new universal of the Earth as Whole. Gaia's ‘intrusion’ (Stengers, 2015) is therefore first of all an intrusion into the masculine fantasy of Mother Nature, a way of breaking up with the big mOther. Subsequently, the Gaia hypothesis turns into a proof that ‘there is no Nature of nature. That is to say, the barred Real of weak nature, split between itself and its internally generated countercurrents of denaturalization, is all there is, with no encompassing cosmic balance to (re-)absorb this fissuring stratification into the synthesis of a greater whole’ (Johnston, 2011: 166–7). Against this background, the feminine ontology reveals a structural asymmetry underlying the ‘symmetrical’ ontologies of the Anthropocene. Instead of permitting ‘a phantasmagorical scripting of a fully socialized nature’ (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018: 15), Gaia points to the uncanny moment where we lose (our sense of) the world as something ‘that works’ by looking at it with inhuman eyes.

In a speech at the Parliament of the European Union in April 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg (2019: 49) said that ‘our house is falling apart’. She used this phrase to draw attention to the urgency of political action in the context of the climate crisis. Perhaps one should take these words more seriously than they were originally intended. If we understand Gaia as an invitation to traverse the masculine fantasy of mOther Nature, then we should perhaps conclude that our house has already fallen apart, that we cannot protect our world from collapsing, because it is already in ruins. To speak of the Anthropocene as a ‘ruined Earth’ (Beuret and Brown, 2017) would therefore be more than a fictional narrative that we come across in Hollywood blockbusters and science-fiction novels. The ruin is in fact the ontological condition of our planet, which means to say that the end of the world (qua mOther Nature) has already happened. Reinterpreting a statement by Timothy Morton, one could say that such an ontology therefore ‘does not bring about an apocalypse in the sense of a total dissolution of things, but rather it brings about the end of the world as a horizon or limit that exists “over there,” over yonder, like Nature, or indeed, like God’ (Morton, 2013: 94). The world is ruined, a world without any sense of stable equilibrium or harmonious wholeness. Against this background, we should read Latour and Stengers who ‘factor the Gaia concept into a redefinition of the stakes of political ecology’ (Clarke, 2017: 5) together with Žižek's (2010: 35) claim that the starting point of a radical ecology today ‘is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather that of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material which serves no purpose’. A radical political ecology of the Anthropocene starts with the discovery of the unnatural nature taking place within waste and decay – it starts by facing Gaia as ruined.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paul Kingsbury, Friederike Landau, Heidi Nast, and my former working group at Goethe University in Frankfurt for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also very grateful for the fantastic editorial support of Sunil Manghani and Susan Manthorpe as well as the thought-provoking reviews of the anonymous reviewers who encouraged me to strengthen the argument and helped to turn this paper into what it is now. Parts of this paper were presented at the American Association of Geographers Conference, Washington, DC (April 2019), in a session on ‘Lacanian Landscapes’ organized by Paul Kingsbury, Sarah Moore and myself.

ORCID iD

Lucas Pohl

Lucas Pohl is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Geography at Humboldt University in Berlin. He recently finished his PhD dissertation at the Department of Human Geography of Goethe University in Frankfurt in which he elaborated a psychoanalytic approach of urban ruination. More generally, he works on the interstices between geography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis with a focus on social and spatial theory, built environments, and political action.

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