Domination of Nature

Definition

For Baudrillard the domination of Nature is not primarily a technological or ecological fact but an ideological one: "Nature" is itself the concept produced by domination. "Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else. … Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature" (ch. II, "Marxist Anthropology and the Domination of Nature," p. 55). To name a realm of nature is already to have separated it from the symbolic order of exchange and obligation, and to have posited it as the object of a subject: there is no innocent invocation of nature, only invocations that carry the domination with them.

The concept has three strata in The Mirror of Production. First, an epistemological one: the Enlightenment's split into "good" and "bad" Nature, which Marxism inherits rather than breaks. "Marxism has not disencumbered itself of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment. It has rejected its naive and sentimental side… but it holds onto the religion: the moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered. By secularizing it in the economic concept of scarcity, Marxism keeps the idea of Necessity without transforming it" (ch. II, "The Moral Philosophy of the Enlightenment," pp. 56–57). Scarcity and Necessity are therefore moral ideas in economic dress, not descriptions of the human condition: "Scarcity, which itself arises in the market economy, is not a given dimension of the economy. Rather, it is what produces and reproduces economic exchange" (pp. 57–58). Primitive exchange knows no such law — "in his symbolic exchanges primitive man does not guage himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity" (pp. 57–58) — because it is not organized as production at all (see primitive-societies-as-alterity).

Second, a genealogical stratum. Reading Vernant's account of the myth of Lycurgus, Baudrillard argues that the violence against nature — "the rupture of exchange with and symbolic obligation toward it" — is immediately expiated, and that Necessity, Law, repression and the unconscious are born from that expiation. Law is not the foundation of the symbolic order but its wreckage: "law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic" (ch. II, "Lycurgus and Castration," p. 61). Hence "there is properly neither Necessity nor Scarcity nor Repression nor the Unconscious in the primitive order, whose entire symbolic strategy aims at exorcizing the apparition of Law."

Third, a religious stratum, following Lynn White: "Uniquely in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known. In absolute contrast to ancient paganism and oriental religions, Christianity not only institutes a dualism of Man and Nature but also affirms that God's will is that man exploit Nature according to his own ends" (ch. II, "Judaeo-Christian Anti-Physis," p. 63, quoting Lynn White). Baudrillard's own gloss is that the techno-scientific contradiction with Christian dogma is secondary: "although science, technology, and material production subsequently enter into contradiction with the cultural order and the dogmas of Christianity, nonetheless their condition of possibility remains the Christian postulate of man's transcendence of nature" (p. 63). He adds that the rupture first installs an ethic of asceticism and self-mortification before it becomes a productive ethic — political economy is a secular generalization of the Christian axiom about nature (ch. II, "Judaeo-Christian Anti-Physis").

The concept is thus the negative twin of symbolic exchange: to the extent that humans no longer owe nature anything, nature becomes a resource; to the extent that they owe it, "production" is unthinkable. Regarding nature as an object of labor and knowledge is the same operation as regarding the sign as a representation.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else"; the genealogy from the Enlightenment split to scarcity and Law, and from the Judaeo-Christian soul/Nature dissociation to the "moralizing phantasm of a Nature to be conquered."
• Immanuel Kant — the philosophical register of the "moral philosophy of the Enlightenment" that Marxism, on Baudrillard's reading, keeps while rejecting only its sentimentality.
• Karl Marx — the inheritor who secularizes the split in the concept of scarcity and thereby preserves the idea of Necessity: "Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history; it is the vision of a future 'freedom' based on the conscious domination of nature" (ch. II, "Epistemology II: Structural Limits of the Marxist Critique," pp. 65–68).
• Sigmund Freud — the castration/repression register that Baudrillard derives from the same rupture: Nature, Law and castration share one origin in the loss of symbolic exchange (see castration-anxiety, repression).
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the nature/culture distinction that Baudrillard treats as the ethnocentric precipitate of the split, rather than a universal structure (see nature-vs-culture).
• Jean-Pierre Vernant — the historian of Greek myth whose reading of Lycurgus supplies the genealogy of Law, Necessity and castration; and Lynn White, whose "Judaeo-Christian anti-physis" thesis Baudrillard quotes. (Neither is paged.)

Related Concepts

• Enlightenment — the source of the good/bad Nature split and of the moralizing phantasm of conquest.
• Primitive Societies as Alterity — the counter-formation in which scarcity, Necessity and Law do not exist.
• Symbolic Exchange — the alternative principle: obligation toward nature, the counter-gift, and the exorcism of Law.
• Unnatural Nature — the later, constructed register in which "nature" is produced rather than given.
• Ecology — the contemporary discipline that inevitably invokes the nature it administers; the wiki's ecological pages are the test of whether the concept can travel beyond its philosophical origin.
• Nature vs Culture — the debate Baudrillard's genealogy upends: the distinction is not primitive but a product of the rupture.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's defining statement: "Nature is the concept of a dominated essence and nothing else. … Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature" (ch. II, "Marxist Anthropology and the Domination of Nature," p. 55); "By secularizing it in the economic concept of scarcity, Marxism keeps the idea of Necessity without transforming it" (pp. 56–57); "law, which is called the foundation of the symbolic order and of exchange, results instead from the rupture of exchange and the loss of the symbolic" (p. 61); and the Lynn White citation on "the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known" (p. 63).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the genealogy one event or several analogies? Baudrillard moves from the Enlightenment split to scarcity, to Vernant's Lycurgus, to Christian anti-physis, as if a single rupture were being traced. Can the wiki's ecology and unnatural-nature material sustain that one rupture, or does it document a series of distinct historical breaks?
• Can the concept do ecological work? If "Nature" is only ever the concept of a dominated essence, is any environmentalism possible that is not a further invocation of domination? Or does symbolic exchange supply a non-dominant relation to the non-human?
• Where is labour? The genealogy explains why nature becomes an object for labor, but the concept says little about labor as itself a mode of domination of the human — is the artisanal-mode material the other half of the same argument, or a different one?
• Lynn White's status. Baudrillard cites White's thesis rather than argues it. How much of the concept's force depends on a contested claim in the history of religion?