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The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
After Nature?
NEAR THE END OF HIS LIFE, in the 1990s, Niklas Luhmann1 was shocked at the sight of the Brazilian favelas, a sight that appeared to shatter the confines of theoretical explanation or even simple description. For a moment, Luhmann was forced to step out of the jumbo jet of high theory and adopt the low-level eyewitness perspective of an ethnographer:
Anyone who dares to make a trip to the favelas of the big South American cities and succeeds in leaving them alive can attest to this. […] Even a trip to the settlements left behind as a result of the shut-down of the mining industry of Wales will convince you of this. Empirical description is not necessary. Anybody who trusts his eyes can see this — to such a degree of intensity that every explanation fails.
Although the present book will not abandon all theory for anthropology, it will still attempt to do justice to this very real experience of shock, the encounter with what so many theories of modernity have refused to include. In this late-modern “domain of exclusion, humans are grasped no longer as people, but as bodies” — that is, as what Giorgio Agamben called “bare life,” as part of an extra-social state of nature. Not by chance, Luhmann evokes in the same breath as this terrible spectacle of subhuman poverty the bleak industrial wasteland of South Wales (a landscape that has now become a World Heritage Site in Blaenafon's Big Pit), for this state of nature is the unacknowledged complement to modernity.
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