At the core of Latour’s project and prestige, this argument requires some closer consideration.4 It has, to begin with, a quantitative, historical component. It says that the unions have recently proliferated to such an extent that the social and the natural can no longer be distinguished. In the early days of modernity, there were perhaps a few vacuum pumps around, but now the hybrids fill every horizon:
Where are we to classify the ozone hole story, or global warming or deforestation? Where are we to put these hybrids? Are they human? Human because they are our work. Are they natural? Natural because they are not our doing … There are so many hybrids that no one knows any longer how to lodge them in the old promised land of modernity.5
Ostensibly an admission of intellectual confusion – I have no idea how to understand something that is at once a product of human work and not – this is a rhetorical way of puncturing the modern illusion of a sharp demarcation between nature and society. Latour believes, of course, that the two have never been separated in any way, shape or form: hence ‘we have never been modern’. What is new is the sheer ubiquity of the crossbreeds, or the ‘quasi-objects’ or the ‘collectives’, which makes the fantasy impossible to sustain any longer: and once we realise this, we also come to see that ‘Nature and Society have no more existence than West and East.’6 The terms ‘do not designate domains of reality’. They are utterly arbitrary poles on a mental map, nothing more. ‘I am aiming’, Latour declares in The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, ‘at blurring the distinction between nature and society durably, so that we shall never have to go back to two distinct sets.’7 Let the categories dissolve in the real fluid.
We may take this to be the cardinal principle of hybridism, a general framework for coming to terms with the cobweb of society and nature by means of denying any polarity or duality inside it. Hybridism holds that reality is made up of hybrids of the social and the natural and that the two terms therefore have no referents any longer, if they ever did. In his Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, Graham Harman, Latour’s faithful squire, confirms the collapse of the ‘difference’ between society and nature as the pith of his thinking and restates the fix: ‘we must start by considering all entities in exactly the same way.’8 As we shall see, hybridism comes in other forms, with diverging emphases and points of attack, but they are all united in the conviction that ‘society’ and ‘nature’ are two words for an identity, hence superfluous (and noxious) signifiers – and Latour is never far away from them. In Environments, Natures and Social Theory, a recent survey of hybridist approaches, Damian F. White et al. recycle their basic rationale from his 1991 manifesto:
And all the while that this debate is going on, we become more and more aware that we live in worlds of multiple hybrid objects. They keep on popping up: from ozone layers to genetically modified crops, prosthetic implants to histories of modified landscapes. Are they social? Are they natural? Attempts to understand this hybrid world through the purification of objects and subjects into boxes labelled ‘society’ or ‘nature’ has limited utility.9
Note here a claim fundamental to hybridism: because natural and social phenomena have become compounds, the two cannot be differentiated by any other means than violence. Being mixed means being one.
A theoretical zeitgeist of sorts, the claim is on repeat in the writings of all the thinkers we have inspected so far. To take but two examples: due to anthropogenic transformation of the earth culminating in climate change, ‘it is impossible to now distinguish where humanity ends and nature begins’, writes Wapner; producing a similar list again headed by climate, Purdy charges that ‘the contrast between what is nature and what is not no longer makes sense.’10 It is the same epiphany as McKibben’s, coming in two versions: 1.) because they are so thoroughly mixed, society and nature do not exist (call this ontological hybridism); 2.) because of this level of admixture, there is no point, no use, no wisdom in telling the one apart from the other (call this methodological hybridism). Regularly overlapping, they share some significant problems.
HYBRIDISM IS A CARTESIANISM
Observers of the world often come across combinations. Consider students of religion. Syncretism is a rampant phenomenon in the history of faiths, hiding in the depths of most of them and sometimes brought to the surface in the shape of, say, the Druze belief system, in which doctrines of Hindu, Shi’ite, Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, Pythagorean, Jewish and other provenances are drawn together. Now, a scholar of the Druze faith will wonder at the distinctive unity this people has forged out of these fantastically disparate elements. She will study how they have been recombined into a novel totality; how they relate to each other in there; how they entered the faith over time; what particular Druze belief can be traced back to what source, and so on. But she will probably not say this: the Druze faith is a hybrid thing and so we must not try to sift out the Platonic from the Shiite components, whose traces have been lost in this blend; it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins; this is a common occurrence in the world of religion, so let us scrap the categories of Platonism and Shi’ism and the rest of it altogether. Saying something like that would not be considered an attempt to understand the Druze faith. It would be more like a surrender of the task.
In medicine, one studies the effects of substances on the human body: say, tobacco on the lungs. Where would such research have been led by the pronouncement that since tobacco and lungs are mixed in the bodies of smokers, the categories have become obsolete (if they ever were relevant) and hence the effects of one on the other cannot be meaningfully distinguished? Or consider how etymologists study languages. Does Spanish cancel out Arabic and Latin? Or the field of international relations: the European Union mixes Germany with Greece …
Hybridism as a guide to the world would certainly have some interesting political consequences. When Leon Trotsky scanned Tsarist Russia and distilled ‘the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’, he could perhaps have inferred that capitalism was now so deeply enmeshed in Tsarism that it had become pointless to track what parts of Russian social dynamics stemmed from it, let alone single it out for special treatment.11 Then surely anti-capitalist revolution would have been an idle venture. Or, someone might point out that the very physical makeup of the territories occupied in 1967 is patterned by the commingling of Zionist and Palestinian matter – the air in Gaza hums with the sounds of drones and muezzins; houses in al-Khalil have settlers living on top of local families; toxic waste from colonies mix with water in the valleys of the West Bank – and hence purifying this situation into boxes labelled ‘the Zionist project’ and ‘the Palestinian people’ has limited utility, for the contrast between them no longer makes sense.
Now, a hybridist might object that these analogies are unfair. Platonism and Shi’ism are, after all, the same sort of thing. Air adulterated by cigarette smoke and pure air are modalities of the exact same substance. Germany and Greece are but two nations, capitalism and Tsarism two social forms, Zionists and Palestinians two groups of people – their combinations should provoke no surprise. They do not call for a revision of our ontologies or methods; they do not imply that reality is mongrelised to an extent few have seen; the unification of such similar components does not cancel out their difference. But such an objection would only reveal the problem at the root of hybridism. Only by postulating nature and society as categories located a universe apart does their combination warrant their collapse. Only with an implicit conception of them as more substantially unlike each other than any other two things can one conclude that their admixture, in contradistinction to so