“On the Aestheticization, Institutionalization, and Dramatization of the Concept of Nature”

Do we need a concept of Nature to have anything to exhibit? From Baruch Spinoza to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is made clear that “Nature exhibits itself,” and that one simply needs to draw one’s attention to the very productivity of Nature to unravel it. But because Nature exhibits itself, its concrete exhibition could be seen as a denaturalization, a corruption of what was naturally given to perception, sensation, and understanding. As such, the apparatuses of exhibition of Nature throughout scientific modernity are a particularly suitable space to understand the constructivism of modern thought and to grasp the economy of what we could call its “ontological engineering”: its symmetrical making of subjects and objects, spectators and artifacts