Let us consider critics who contest this nature-picture. Martin
Heidegger ( 1889 – 1976 ), for example, rejects modernity’s ‘‘enframing’’ of
the world, an institutional, mental, and bodily habit whose ultimate goal
is to reduce the Earth to the abject status of ‘‘standing reserve.’’ He calls
instead for humans to become more receptive to nature and to let it be.
Heidegger also contends that the rationalizing zeal of modernity will itself
bring to light that which it cannot rationalize, that is, the ‘‘incalculable’’ or
‘‘that which, withdrawn from representation, is nevertheless manifest
in whatever is, pointing to Being, which remains concealed’’ (Heidegger
1982 , 154 ).
There is a sense in which Heidegger aims to re-enchant the world, to
recapture a premodern sense of the universe as an encompassing whole that
fades oVinto indeWniteness. There, nature and culture regain their primor-
dial cooperation. Other critics of the picture of nature as calculable mechan-
ism, however, eschew the serenity of Heidegger’s counter-vision. They draw
instead from ‘‘pagan’’ conceptions of materiality as turbulent, energetic, and
surprising. For these vital materialists, nature is both the material of culture
and an active force in its own right. Nietzsche is one such materialist. He
describes nature as:
a monster of energy... that does not expend itself but only transforms itself.... [A]
play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many...; a sea of forces
Xowing and rushing together, eternally changing... , with an ebb and aXood of its
forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest,
most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent..., andthen again
returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions
back to the joy of concord. (Nietzsche 1987 , 1067 )
Political theorists described as postmodern or post-structuralist (see Foucault
1970 , 1973 , 1975 , 1978 ; Butler 1993 ; Brown 1995 ; Ferguson 1991 ; Dumm 1996 ;
Gatens 1996 ) alsoWgure nature as resistant to human attempts to order it,
although capable of emergent forms ofself-organization. Like Marx and
Nietzsche, they believe in the power of demystiWcation: Foucaultian geneal-
ogies of madness, criminality, and sexuality; feminist and queer studies of
gender and power; and postcolonial studies of race and nation all seek to
expose the contingency of entities formerly considered universal, inevitable,
or natural. But what is more, these expose ́s insist upon thematerial recalci-
tranceof contingent products. The mere fact that gender, sex, and race are
culturalartifactsdoes not mean that they will yield readily to human under-
standing or control.
modernity and its critics 221