Maren Schwieger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Why ›Ecology‹, Which Ecology? Reading Haeckel in Favor of a Minor Ecology.
The description of »the new fundamental position« as »general ecology«, as Erich Hörl proposes in the outline of the workshop, raises the question of the term ›ecology‹. In other words: Why should we favor ›ecology‹ over other recent catchwords, e.g. ›network‹? And why should we use this expression, that Ernst Haeckel firstly coined already in 1866, at all to address and discuss our present and future situation »under the technological condition of a cybernetic state of nature« (Hörl)? This lecture asks for the potential of ›ecology‹ based on the assumption, that, even in its first usage and meaning, ecology cannot simply be reduced to the theory or the emergence of interdependency in biology.
Re-reading allegedly founding texts of ecology as concept and discipline from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the lecture aims to outline the respective conceptual, methodological, as well as instrumental implications of ecology. With special regard to the notion of ›oikos‹, the relations from ecology to economy and politics will be emphasized. Thereby, the lecture offers an ecological resetting, which places the secret protagonists of these texts in the limelight of critical analysis: Moebius' oyster, Uexkülls tick, and the plancton of northern German inland waters. Though all of these figures play a main role for the emergence of key terms of ecology, all of them appear in these texts as somehow remote creatures and as accidental—but in no way by accident. In fact, they are linked to an ecology of the minor, and to a minor ecology aswell, that points to the underlying question of this lecture: In times of an ecological, and even more of a general-ecological paradigm, who or what can (still) be addressed as ›zoon politikon‹?