Anne Schreiber is a scholar of German literature and philosophy. She has worked as a critic of contemporary art and on diverse curatorial projects. Her current academic research critically examines the emergence of concepts of systemic organization as a prehistory of notions of the technosphere. 

Becoming a Force of Nature. Non-Violence Beyond the Nature–Culture Divide. “An artwork may depict a seemingly peaceful relation to nature - for instance, in pastoral imagery - while its production and materiality reproduce violent or extractive relations. How, then, can artistic practice relate to materials, environments, and other living beings without reproducing such relations?”

For centuries, human beings imagined themselves as vulnerable to the forces of nature. In recent decades, this relation seemed to reverse: we ourselves had become a geological force, comparable to earthquakes, storms, floods, or fires. In this sense, the Anthropocene could appear as a point in history at which humankind has become a force as violent as nature itself.

This essay critically asks what such a comparison reveals about our understanding of nature itself. The analogy with a natural force relies on an image of nature as a given, quasi-transcendent order and of natural forces as inherently violent. Yet cultural history also offers another image of nature, as the pastoral tradition has long shown: as a site of harmony, coexistence, and relation.

Contemporary debates on the nature–culture divide have further unsettled the idea of nature as a fixed order, understanding it instead as something that emerges through relations between human and nonhuman beings, materials, technologies, and environments. Drawing on historical and recent debates on the hybridity of so-called “nature-culture,” this essay explores non-violence not as passivity or the absence of agency, but as another way of organizing force: a relational practice attentive to interdependence, participation, and the conditions that enable life. 


@annechristinaschreiber