Contested Meanings: Nature in the Age of Technoscience

The concept of nature is analyzed in contemporary epistemology, science studies (Derrida, Luhmann, Latour, Zizek, Haraway) as well as emerging technosciences (Life Science, i.e. Artificial Life, robotics). Diverse, transdisciplinary stories are getting related: The decline of modern philosophy of nature, the critique of the ´metaphysics of presence´, the emergence of technoscience as well as the development of new ontological groundings in technosciences themselves. In doing this, related movements of denaturalization, dematerialisation and renaturalization in critical theory and technoscience become visible: Posthumanism and deontologization seems at least as much brought forward by technoscience´s new denaturalized ontology as by contemporary approaches in constructivism, deconstructivism and system theory. With a little help from Donna Haraway, and others conditions are worked out for a transdisciplinary concept of nature beyond essentialism, sentimentalization as well as abstract negation and hyperproductionism. This aims at a new concept of nature, which neither neglects the enlightening critique of representation politics nor ignores and thereby supports unintentionally the new posthuman, technoscientific concept of nature without being aware of its groundings and consequences