Nature is Culture is Nature

Paul Chan: I think of this not in terms of Law, but Aesthetics. Theodor Adorno believed how we could tell if something is beautiful or not, or even more fundamentally, whether something is art or not, by a certain relationship the work has with nature.  It doesn't mean Adorno only championed landscapes filled with trees and rivers. Only that like Kant, Adorno believed we can only judge the force of art by how much it takes in certain notions we get from nature; namely a kind of overwhelming plenitude that escapes our   dehumanizing exchange relations. This was a time, of course, when people thought they couldn't own mountains, or the water we drink, or air. A time when nature still had territory not polluted (in the environmental and commercial sense) by us. Nature provided the philosophical model for articulating the almost speechless sense we feel in front of art worthy of that name: something that--as we experience it--perpetually renews itself and gives us, without asking for anything back, a sense of boundless plentitude and potentiality. In other words, Art as an image of absolute freedom.    

But now we have a very different relationship to nature. In fact it is almost impossible to find nature without a frame of culture. On the other hand, Culture has become so pervasive that it in fact feels like a kind of "overwhelming plenitude" that we once associated with mountain ranges and oceans that stretch beyond our vision.

This might seem so obvious but worth stating: our nature (now, at least for my generation) is in fact culture. The illegal DVDs being sold in Chinatown are like so many pieces of coal harvested from the mines in Allentowns everywhere. And the fight about who owns culture and who gets to use its resources is like the early 18-19th century battles to control and colonize natural resources.