Environmental issues: relational ontologies and hybrid politics

Noel Castree

School of Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

… separating … was severely detrimental to subsequent thinking and has left us with a legacy which is now a real mindbender to try and overcome.

Doreen Massey (1999: 62)

Instead of this bipolar power source – nature and society – we will have only one clearly identifiable [political] source for humans and nonhumans alike, and one clearly identifiable [political] source for entities socialised into the collective.

Bruno Latour (1999: 297)

The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.

Donna Haraway (1991: 150)

I. Introduction

Neil Smith (1996: 49) has argued that we urgently need a new “political theory of nature” that can reconceptualise the means and ends of politics in an increasingly hybrid world. In this report I scrutinise recent attempts in human geography and cognate fields to construct an ‘amodern’ political vocabulary. Since these attempts are underpinned by relational ontologies, I also examine the work of those who are seeking to re-cognise ‘society’ and ‘environment’ in non-dualistic ways.

Two recent books about life in a chimeric universe illustrate what is at stake in these rethinkings of reality and politics. In Ourposthuman future, Francis Fukuyama (2002a) offers a plenary account of the ‘new genetics’. His worry is that the physical mixing of humans and non-humans will prove to be politically debilitating, even dangerous: “The posthuman world … could be one in which any notion of ‘shared humanity’ is lost, because we have mixed human genes with those of so many other species that we no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is” (Fukuyama, 2002b: 7). For Fukuyama, the trangressive potentials of biotechnology threaten the very foundation of political reasoning. In a posthuman world, he fears, we will be unable to assign political rights, needs or desserts since it will be impossible to identify coherent political subjects. One suspects that the majority of Fukuyama’s readers – namely, the general public – will instinctively share his anxieties (especially in Europe, where public criticism of biotechnology has been less muted than it has been in North America, Fukuyama’s home-base). The reason, of course, is that the distinction between humans and non-humans that grounds his complaint is still widely seen as cognitively and normatively ‘obvious’ or ‘right’ (see Galton [2001], Stock [2002], Zuss [2000] and especially Graham [2002] for quite different readings of ‘post-humanity’).

By contrast, this distinction has clearly passed its sell-by date among students of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, John Law, Michel Serres and other post-dualist theoreticians. One of these is Sarah Whatmore (2002), whose Hybrid geographies brings together new and previously published work in a manifesto for relational thought and politics about the human/non-human. In effect, she goes where Latour has only promised to venture. Though, in Pandora’s Hope, he asks “Are you ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together?” (1999: 297), he has yet to flesh out precisely what ‘politics’ might mean in a world of actor-networks. Whatmore, by contrast, explicitly criticises the anthropocentric traditions of political reasoning that remain dominant to this day, and argues for a new settlement in which prions, cows, microchips, prosthetics, growth hormones, elephants and other ‘actants’ might figure as political subjects.

I will say more about the content of a relational politics below. Despite appearances, my point in juxtaposing the books of Fukuyama and Whatmore is not to emphasise the latter’s originality and sophistication at the expense of the former’s all-too-conventional conceptual architecture. Rather, it is to remind us that non-relational thinking about society and environment/humans and non-humans evidently dies hard. If the author of Our posthumanfuture is clearly addressing himself to a public that, in his view, thinks dualistically, we cannot assume that the case has been won in the place where some of the most fertile rethinking of ontology and politics is being undertaken: namely, academia. As we’ll see in the first two sections of this report, geography illustrates this very well. Members of a discipline that is still struggling with a ‘human-physical divide’ in its research and teaching, geographers are finding it hard to think ‘out of the box’ – this despite the work of Whatmore and other relational writers. As a result, this work may not have the wider impact it deserves, either within geography or beyond it.

II. Post-constructivism? Post-naturalism?

Joseph Rouse (2002: 63) has astutely observed that “Social constructivism and realism are neither live options, nor comfortably dead letters”. This is certainly true in human geography, if writings on environment over the last year or so are anything to go by (see also, in sociology Lidskog [2001], Schmidt [2001] and Smith [2001a]). Inspired by Ian Hacking’s (1999) The social construction of what?, David Demeritt (2001a; 2002) has published two analytically crisp essays that try to inject some clarity into ongoing debates over the social construction of nature. Surveying a mass of literature where the terms ‘social construction’ and ‘nature’ are conjoined, Demeritt carefully pin-points the various meanings attached to them by different authors. The result is a set of helpful distinctions that take us beyond asking ‘how is nature socially constructed?’ and which allow us to answer the far richer question ‘what kinds of ‘nature’ are subject to what kinds of ‘constructions’ and with what consequences?’. Demeritt (2001b), in effect, addresses this question empirically in a third, less philosophical essay concerning the construction of scientific knowledge about global warming. This thoroughly researched piece reveals the subtle acts of ‘purification’ among climate modellers and atmospheric scientists that seek to divest the ‘facts’ about global warming of the social interests written into them (see also Demeritt [2001c] on statistical constructions of forest resources).

Demeritt’s work shows that there are still intellectual and political gains to be had from insisting that nature is not simply natural: that in both discourse and practice it is socially made not ontologically given. Skinner and Rosen (2001), who like Demeritt are concerned with science and technology, remind us just how large the political gains can be. In an edited collection of essays on ‘white’ science, they show how ideas of ‘race’ – themselves socially constituted – still get transposed as ‘truths’ of nature today as much as they did during the eugenic experiments of the early 20th century. Theirs is thus a project of what Demeritt (2002) calls ‘social construction as refutation’, a well-worn but still useful act of demystification (see also Porter, 2001). Meanwhile, Braun’s (2002) The intemperaterainforest, a marvellously grounded example of post-structural thinking about environment, is more an instance of what Demeritt (op. cit.) calls ‘social construction as philosophical critique’. In other words, it is less concerned with ‘unmasking’ apparently unconstructed constructions, and more interested in looking at the cognitive and political ‘performativity’ of certain hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideas about the environment. Delaney (2001), in an elegant essay on the law, is equally preoccupied with the ‘positivities’ of those knowledges that demarcate zones of social/non-social reality, as is Robbins (2001a; 2001b) in his studies of land use categorisation in India. Finally, though not about nature as such, Mary Poovey’s (1999) magisterial Ahistory of the modern fact displays a similar sensibility, showing how the idea of non-social facts has been gradually fabricated and normalised in the post-17th century secular world.

If these studies are about bringing the social ‘back in’ to the seemingly non-social, other geographers remain preoccupied with the limits of constructivism and the agency of the non-human. Bridge (2000), deploying a dialectical imaginary, lucidly specifies the material contradictions that the US copper industry has encountered as a result of the intransigence of its resource base, a theme also pursued by Hudson (2001: ch. 9) and Prudham (2002). Somewhat differently, Helmreich’s (2001) study of artificial life (AI), informed as it is by Marx’s critique of the fetish, sees AI as a material externalisation and displacement of labour power that, to be sure, has real effects, but ones that are anything but suigeneris.

So far so good. But if Rouse is right, one wonders why the fascination with social construction – and its limits – remains. However subtly one tries to trace the causal arrows and feedback loops, to say that there is a nature that is socially constructed implies that there is a something (society, social interests, social power etc.) doing the constructing of or on a something else (nature) (Franklin, 2002: 50-56; Irwin, 2001: ch. 1; Murdoch, 2001). Demeritt knows this all too well, of course, and has been a disciplinary leader in advocating post-constructivist metaphors for figuring society-environment relations (Demeritt, 1994; 1998). Likewise, geographers such as Braun are careful not to imply that certain ‘social interests’ pre-exist their displaced ‘expression’ as supposed ‘facts’ of nature. And yet, even so, human geographers seem preoccupied with the mechanisms and outcomes of social construction, even as other disciplines seem to have left the whole naturalism-constructionism problematic behind (Hibberd, 2001; Rouse, 2002). There are arguably good reasons for this. An obvious point is that because many social actors – scientists, environmentalists, politicians and so – still believe that society and nature are (or should be) two different orders of reality, this constitutive fiction has real effects. Notwithstanding Latour’s (1993) declaration that ‘we’ve never been modern’, the point is that most people are unable (or unwilling) to recognise the non-modern condition of their existence. Another reason is that geography remains a discipline concerned with material realities, such that the constructionist-naturalist problematic is for geographers practical and consequential not merely abstract and philosophical. The historian Richard Handler (1991: 65) once said that to be effective critics must “speak a language that power understands”. In this sense, the work of the authors mentioned in this section – all of whom are broadly of the political left – might be seen as strategic attempts to work within the society-nature dualism as a means of subverting it. After all, if Haraway (1992: 296) is right, the signifier ‘nature’ is simply something we cannot not revert to.

III. Disciplinary debates

If the embers of social constructionism are still aglow in human geography, the society-environment dualism continues to exert its influence on the discipline more generally. Massey’s (1999b) essay and the subsequent commentaries (Lane, 2001; Massey, 2001; Raper and Livingstone, 2001) are clear evidence of this. Massey tentatively proposes bringing human and physical geographers closer together by exploring reconceptions of space and time common to both ‘sides’ of the discipline. Quite whether efforts like her’s are as “threadbare” (Whatmore, 1999: 25) as some fear remains to be seen. Certainly, it is unlikely that a project to ‘reunite’ geography’s estranged siblings would go very far in actively reworking the ideas of ‘human’ and ‘physical’ that help keep them apart. Matthews and Herbert’s (2003) Common heritage, shared future is indicative of the problems with forging a rapprochement. One the one side, most human and physical geographers now speak such different languages that a real effort of translation is needed if bridges are to be built. On the other hand, these languages generally refer to two related ontological worlds normally thought to have distinct properties: the social and the natural. Since it’s scarcely plausible that physical geographers will be responsive to such ontological neologisms as ‘imbroglios’ and ‘quasi-objects’ (and who can blame them?!), it’s likely that any meaningful re-union of geography’s two ‘halves’ will be achieved within existing binary mindsets (though complexity theory [Byrne, 1998], non-linear systems thinking [Harrison, 2001], and the so-called ‘new ecology’ [Zimmerer, 2000] offer promising alternatives). Symptomatically, Turner’s (2002) sober appraisal of geography’s place in the modern Western academy suggests that a re-energised ‘human-environment’ geography would be a ‘safe’ and achievable option that could be ‘sold’ to outside funding bodies and the like. This is a long way from the thorough-going disciplinary deconstruction implied by the arguments of the authors discussed in the next section.

IV. After nature: reinventing politics

I noted in my previous report that geography is a profoundly anthropocentric discipline. Unlike, say, politics – a subject that has engaged with ecocentric thinking and, in the process, called into question its own founding assumptions (Eckersley, 1993) – geography has been generally unwilling to think about nature ‘in itself’. In a cognitive and political sense, the ‘otherness’ of the non-human has barely featured in the research of contemporary geographers. This is arguably the case among most critical geographers (with the exception of some of those now interested in animals: Philo and Wilbert [2000]), most physical geographers, and most of those occupying the disciplinary ‘middle ground’ of resource management, human impact studies and hazard analysis. This unwillingness to entertain ecocentrism[1] must also be seen in the wider context of geography’s relative disinterest – until recently, that is – in developing a political theory of nature and environment. It’s a peculiar fact that a discipline which, in part, defines itself as the study of society-environment relations, has conspicuously failed to engage with questions of the political status of the non-human. Prior to Whatmore’s Hybrid geographies, the only major attempts to craft a green political theory were arguably Low and Gleeson’s (1998) Justice, society and nature and parts of Harvey’s (1996) Justice, nature and the geography ofdifference (with James Proctor and a few others writing essays and papers on similar themes; see also the journal Ethics, Place and Environment).

This is what makes Whatmore’s project, and that of those geographers interested in animals, all the more striking and peculiar. The peculiarity stems from the fact that these writers are proposing to develop a relational ontology and politics when geography has by-passed the whole question of whether nature and environment have intrinsic political status (see O’Neill et al. 2001). Because deep ecology, biocentrism and the like are understood as being too naturalist (the mirror opposite of social constructionist), then these geographers propose to move beyond dualism in order to rethink who the subjects of politics might now be. The possibility that nature and environment might have political status in their own right is, it seems, considered implausible. The ontological groundwork for this relational politics has been laid by Whatmore (1997) in her excellent essay on hybrid ethics. But it extends beyond her preoccupation with actor-network theory. Thus Thrift (1999), inspired by the writings of Ingold (2000), has advocated a ‘non-representational’ focus on ‘dwelling’, while Hinchliffe (2002) prefers the metaphor of ‘inhabitation’. Meanwhile, in the US context, Light (Light, Higgs and Strong, 2000) draws upon the resources of pragmatism. The common denominator here is a focus on beings and things that are all seen as material, but possessed of different capacities by virtue of their entanglements with other beings and things (Graves-Brown, 2000; Hinchliffe, 2003). Indeed, a concern with materiality, shorn of both the traditional Marxian distinctions between the ideal and the real and the neo-Kantianism of post-structuralism (e.g. Butler, 1993), is arguably what non-dualist ontologies are all about (Castree, 2002a; Cheah, 1996)

What is at stake politically in these experiments in post-analytical thinking is considerable. Whatmore, Thrift, Hinchliffe and others are arguing that we: (i) need to abandon the traditional idea that political rights, entitlements and deserts only apply to people; (ii) need to confront the very real problem of defining political subjects in a world where the boundaries between humans and non-humans are hard to discern; and (iii) need to expand political reasoning to include non-humans yet without resorting to the idea that the latter exist ‘in themselves’. Among the currently eclectic work on ‘animal geographies’ there are glimmers of what this non-anthropocentric, non-ecocentric politics might look like in substantive terms. But it is Hybrid geographies that champions the ‘amodern’ political cause most vocally. In it, Whatmore illustrates the inconsistencies and contradictions that arise when one sees the domain of the political are a purely human one, while challenging the ecocentric view that non-humans might have inherent political status. She also argues that this political focus on relationally constituted beings does not necessary imply a great ‘levelling down’ in which it is impossible to judge relative political needs and wants of humans and non-humans.

I applaud this attempt to, in effect, give some content to the political manifesto Donna Haraway (1991: ch. 8) so suggestively laid-out over a decade ago. However, apropos Rouse’s comment, it remains difficult to operationalise a non-anthropo-/ecocentric politics (Castree, forthcoming). Whatmore’s necessary deployment of neologisms and metaphors that challenge existing mindsets can be difficult to digest. Interestingly, other recent attempts to think past dualist ontologies and politics seem to revert ultimately to some (subtle) version of dualism, as noted earlier (Castree, 2002b; Fine, forthcoming; Goodman, 1999, 2001; Reardon, 2001). Proctor’s (2001) work on paradox is, it seems to me, an explicit recognition of how difficult it is to ‘exit’ inherited political traditions. Indeed, the relocation rather than supercession of dualisms can be politically useful, as in Peter Singer’s efforts to extend the moral compass to include animals (while ultimately excluding non-sentient others: Singer and Kuhse, 2001). In addition, there are political benefits to denying the non-individual nature of individual humans and non-humans (Jones, 2000). O’Neill (2001) also shows that acts of political representation need not be complicit with a dualistic or anthropocentric metaphysics (though he reduces representation to language, cf. Smith, 2001b). Furthermore, we must also recall that “the dissolution of boundaries is [politically] … problematic if it leads to the denial of real difference …” (Low and Gleeson, 1999: 145). Finally, one wonders if something hasn’t been lost in failing to consider whether the non-human domain might have a radical ontological otherness that deserves political recognition (Robert, 2000; Smith, 2001b; Stephens, 2000). As Massey (1999a: 74) asks, “how do you retain alterity, how do you allow autonomy?” – how, that is, do we conceive of Haraway’s (1992) ‘in/appropriated others’?. To be ‘other’ is not necessarily to be independent, but it is, perhaps, to be unassimilable (Hailwood, 2000) – what Graham (2002: 229) calls “the necessary non-consanguinity between humans and things”. To deny this is arguably to risk “a collapse of wild differences into tamed others” (Coole, 1996: 27). Hinchliffe’s (2001) fascinating account of the UK BSE crisis offers a glimpse of the politics that can flow from this otherness-in-relation. Less a politics of nature, Hinchliffe shows how ‘natural’ entities (in this case a disease) can, if allowed to ‘object’ to their representation in environmental policy circles, contribute to more open, democratic policy debate.