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One of the major transversal themes of the twentieth century was the rise of environmentality — that is, of environmental awareness in the broadest sense. Beyond the flourishing ecological sciences and associated environmentalist social movements, across a wide range of spheres, from geography to politics, from psychology to computing and the rise of digital media, things that had previously been seen as functioning in isolation — organisms, minds, nations, objects, systems — came to be understood as inseparable from their environments. This entailed a growing recognition not only of the effects of an environment upon a system, but also of the ways such systems or bodies are always-already environmental (the human body, for example, as host for trillions of microorganisms which do not just "live inside" it, but dynamically constitute it). This shift in perception was coupled with a set of historical and material transformations by which bodies, systems and objects are increasingly distributed across their apparent environments. This may be most readily observable in today's "technical distribution of cognition," as our knowledge-oriented activities, from academic study to shopping, operate through an increasingly complex, media-networked, computational environment.² But a similar observation could be made of virtually any kind of entity that formerly enjoyed relative isolation. Some of the countries that were the most 'self-contained" at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the US and China, were among the most internationally dispersed and globally active by its end.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137414595_13

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