Introduction / Issue 38: Ecologies of Excess

Issue 20, "Ecology," which embraced ecology as a framework for the study of visual culture, drawing together trans-disciplinary understandings of ecology as both a classificatory system for media as well as relationships between organisms and their environment.Invoking Jane Bennett's theory of vibrant matter to account for the dynamic relations between ecologies of the "natural," "virtual," and "visual," the "Ecology" issue presciently grappled with the increasingly evident excess of agencies-human and nonhuman alike-that push against the systematic partitioning of human culture from the natural. 1 In the years since this issue, theoretical debates over ways to move beyond the nature-culture divide have intensified.For example, Bennett's attribution of agency to a vitalist "thing power" has met frequent criticism for its mystifying under-theorization of the seemingly transcendental source of such vitality. 2Bennett is not alone, however, in her discursive recourse to a seemingly ineffable "beyond" to describe more-than-human agencies: contemporary theories of ecology abound with tropes of darkness, "chthonic ones," monsters, and ghosts, which all venture to name that which has been repressed, rendered disposable, or made unspeakable in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which domains of cultural and natural ecologies are decidedly no longer-as if they ever were-isolable. 3om bad airs -geographies of breathing, transplantation, and power.