On Natural Technicity

Oikos, Articulation, and the Gift

Abstract

Deconstruction is from the start a matter of ecology, that is, an approach to the interminable articulation of oikos that resituates the traditional determinations of nature, technique, and place. Accordingly, “natural technicity” emerges as a metonym for deconstruction; a thinking of technics not on the basis of artefacts, but as originary articulation, the process of animating and weaving together the oikos and logos of ecology. We begin at the oikos, emphasising its elemental and decisive character for explicating the “eco” that speaks in both economy and ecology. We then turn to the technical articulation of oikos. We suggest that it is precisely through the question of articulation that we arrive at another thinking of technique, the always distinct historical modes in which an oikos takes place, which remain irreducible to an exclusive mode of nature or culture. This leads to a thinking of generalised technicity, understood as the highly differentiated series of responses and relations to what is given, in what we see as a history of articulation in response to the gift—for ecology, the originary gift of the sun’s thermodynamic plenitude.