The Place of Nature in the Narrative Architecture of Modern Culture

An introduction followed by ten theses

Short lecture at ACF, New York
25. Februar 2013
Austrian Culture Forum

 

My lecture will bridge the gap between the topic and methodology of my last book (The Architecture of Modern Culture. Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory) and the subject of the exhibition at the ACF in New York (Un-) Natural Limits. From the very beginning of modern times, “nature” in all ist meanings (land, landscape, resource, physical body, biodiversity, wilderness, as a post-religious topos) has had a specific place in the narrative architecture of modernity and modernism. Especially since Rousseau “nature” has always been embedded in a central counter-narrative that stands in contrast to the core of the great narratives of Enlightenment and techno-social progress guaranteed by the domination and control of nature. Due to industrialization and later digitalization, nature seems to be a disappearing dimension of human existence, but on the other hand it is modern culture that makes nature visible and apparent in a completely new way –nature between destruction and admiration as a quasi-esthetical or a post-religious object (the sublime

Foto Marta Zwierzchoniewska /pexels