TY - JOUR
T1 - Rethinking Gaia
T2 - Stengers, Latour, Margulis
AU - Clarke, Bruce
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
PY - 2017/7/1
Y1 - 2017/7/1
N2 - At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch.
AB - At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch.
KW - Latour
KW - Luhmann
KW - autopoiesis
KW - biopolitics
KW - cybernetics
KW - ecology
KW - globality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85022030412&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0263276416686844
DO - 10.1177/0263276416686844
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85022030412
SN - 0263-2764
VL - 34
SP - 3
EP - 26
JO - Theory, Culture and Society
JF - Theory, Culture and Society
IS - 4
ER -