MEDIA OF NATURE AFTER LATOUR

Sebastian Lederle

Recent returns of “nature” in literature, theory, and politics – from nature writing to new materialisms and the Anthropocene debate – have not simply restored an old object to philosophical attention. They have re-opened a question about mediation: by what means does “nature” appear, insist, resist, and intervene in collective life? This essay proposes that Latour is most useful today when read as a theorist of the media of nature. Across We Have Never Been Modern, Pandora’s Hope, Politics of Nature, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and Facing Gaia Latour dismantles the Modern bifurcation of nature and culture and replaces it with an account of heterogeneous associations, chains of reference, and plural modes of existence. Nature, on this view, is neither a mute background nor a metaphysical totality; it is a set of operational mediations through which nonhumans acquire agency without being anthropomorphized. Drawing on media-anthropological perspectives (Christiane Voss’s conception of anthropomedial relations and Stefan Rieger’s virtuality-theorem), I reconstruct a Latourian concept of nature as a virtual and withdrawing condition that is knowable only through effects – yet effective precisely as withdrawal. A final critical section asks whether attributing agency to nature risks obscuring the specificity of human praxis. I argue for a nonfoundational, media-operative concept of nature: nature does not ground practice, but destabilizes its self-description, enabling a politics of composition without recourse to transcendental Nature.