Ecological Encyclopaedism “L’écologie, tâche de la pensée/ecology, the task of thinking”1 says Michel Deguy. Our task of thinking, to be precise: our task of thinking today and to come, our next task of thinking. But the question then remains: what is this future task all about? What are its outlines? What are its stakes? From where has our becoming- ecological been written? And how is this emergence of a general ecology as opposed to a restricted ecology, which is taking place before our very eyes, to be char- acterized? Deguy’s exact phrase, “the task of thinking,” employed to highlight the urgency and scope of the eco- logical question, had originally been used by Heidegger to sum up the end of philosophy and the reversal of thinking that had been caused by the technological ful- illment of metaphysics as cybernetics. This choice of phrase is highly signiicant, as shining through it, at least between the lines, Deguy allows us to perceive a reference to the process of cyberneticization as the technological condition of the general ecology of thought. This also to an extent goes against Heidegger’s own use of the formula, and as such is an expression of the technological unconscious of our era: Heidegger’s mid-1960s observation may since have turned out to have been very accurate—in so far as it recognized early on the enormous scope of the cybernetic chal- lenge to the dogmatic image of thought, and in so doing anticipated the replacement of traditional categories and leading diferences (Leitdiferenzen ) by concepts of command and control; nevertheless, his own account of what he called the “future task of thinking” remained ultimately strangely vague and sometimes even domi- nated by a counter-technological poetics.2 This lack of clarity in relation to the wider noo-political horizon of the cybernetic age may in the irst instance have been due to Heidegger’s ultimately inadequate conceptual- izations of the history and historicity of objects, which were excessively dominated by an instrumental image of technology. Heidegger did not fully explore a real thinking of technological becoming, which would include the becoming of technology itself, arising from a funda- mental transformation of the sense of technology as such, beyond its traditional tool-equipment/instrumen- A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology — Erich Hörl 1 Michel Deguy, Écologiques (Paris: Hermann, 2012), 31. 2 Martin Heidegger, “The End of Phi- losophy and the Task of Thinking,” (1964) in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 373–92. See also Erich Hörl, “Das kybernetische Bild des Denkens,” in Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik, eds. Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 163–95; for an account of the fundamental ambivalence in Heidegger’s reading of cybernetics, in which cybernetics are seen not only to represent and implement the end of the age of “Enframing” (Gestell ) but also the entry into a new epoch in the history of being, see Erich Hörl, “Die ofene Maschine. Heidegger, Günther und Simondon über die technologische Bedingung,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 123 (2008): 194–217. 121