In his first book Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, Steven Vogel spins a constructionist programme out of an idiosyncratic reading of the Frankfurt School canon. Here, he points to four senses in which ‘nature is a social category’: one can never step into a nature outside of human preconceptions; the nature scientists claim to study is a product of their own practices – postmodernist stock-in-trade, so far – natural objects are integrated into social life; and they are built by labour.32 Only the last sense, the most original of the four, is retained in Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature. Although he backtracks on his earlier idealism, Vogel here takes constructionism farther than ever before. He sets out from the assertion that McKibben was right: nature has indeed ended, most obviously because of the rising temperatures. Accepting the purist definition, however, Vogel takes McKibben’s thesis to the next step and claims that if nature expires the moment humans touch it, then it must have been dead and gone long before any CO2 plumed from chimneys.33 Not linked specifically to global warming, ‘the end of nature might be something that, in the Heideggerian phrase that seems relevant here, has always already happened’; by axiomatic necessity, nature ‘ceased to exist at the moment the first human appeared on the scene’ – ‘so long ago that we cannot even fix the date’.34
So what is it that seems to surround us now? Not discourses or the ooze from epistemic communities; this is not what Vogel is getting at any longer. We are surrounded by a solidly real environment, but it is a built environment, one that humans have literally, physically constructed from the ground up. Since there is no way humans can ‘encounter a landscape at all without transforming it’, every landscape humans have encountered must be classified as built, far-flung islands as much as conurbations, the deserts as much as the highways, the atmosphere every bit as much as – this is the gist of the book – the shopping mall.35 Not quite the deduction McKibben had in mind, it does follow a quirky but inexorable logic. Paraphrasing Aldo Leopold’s classic injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ so as to get closer to the land, Vogel advises environmentalists to rather think like a shopping mall, for a mall is just as much a piece of the environment as the mountain and no less deserving of protection and awe.36
The variety of constructionism fleshed out here is different from the idealist type: as Vogel stresses repeatedly, he is using the word ‘construction’ in the literal sense, exactly as he would in front of the pyramids. We may thus distinguish between idealist and literalist constructionism about nature; Vogel and Smith have both moved to the latter, while Castree has drifted from the latter to the former.37 Neither, it is important to note, is a straw man. Vogel really means what he says. ‘There is nothing in our environment that we have not, in some sense or other, had a hand in producing’, nothing physical or chemical around us originating outside labour, ‘no raw materials, no “natural resources,” that have not themselves already been the object of prior practices of construction’ – statements on repeat throughout the latest opus.38 All indications are that Vogel wants us to take them seriously. Let us do so. They are not true. Coal is disproof enough: we know that it formed when vegetation slumped into bogs, whose water protected it from oxidation; as the dead plants sank deeper, temperatures and pressure rose; slowly, gradually, the matter solidified into coal, mostly during the Carboniferous era some 286–360 million years ago, when no humans could possibly have assisted in the process. Finding coal in a Borneo jungle is to open a culvert to that past and draw in what no humans had a hand in producing, and the same holds for the extraction of any bit of fossil fuel from the bowels of this planet.39
Very easily – so easily as to court ridicule, but such is now the state of this theory – literalist constructionism can be shown to be empirically false. Fossil fuels are no trifling matters in our environment; neither are the sun, the earth’s crust, oxygen, the element of fire … One would have to go to extraordinary lengths of sophistry to present a case for these as in any sense ‘constructed’ or ‘built’ by humans, and yet they constitute the mise en scène and the sine qua non and whatnot of a warming world. The only way to buttress constructionism against them would be to insist on an extreme version of the purist definition: by any contact whatsoever with humans – be it falling on them or carrying them or passing through their lungs – solar radiation and sedimentary rocks and the air and everything else magically become their products. And when Vogel talks about ‘buildings’ and ‘construction’, he does seem to presuppose something like this metamorphosis. To affect something is to build it. ‘There is nothing we do that does not change, and therefore build, the environment’, Vogel spells out his generous extension of the term.40 With this usage, I could make a rightful claim to have built a pyramid in Giza merely by scaling and throwing black paint on it.
When humans come into contact with a landscape, they necessarily change it; by changing it, they build it; therefore humans have built all landscapes on earth (and logically this should extend to the moon and Mars and other celestial bodies as well). The conspicuous Achilles heel of this syllogism, propping up the whole argument, is the use of ‘build’ as a synonym for ‘affect’ or ‘change’. Vogel defends the conflation by averring that ‘to build something is to “affect” some material and thereby transform it into something new – wood into a bookcase, clay into a pot, silicon into a memory chip.’41 Sure, but this is not what is at stake here. If I cut and mould wood into a bookcase, I have undoubtedly built that bookcase – but if I cut a branch off a tree, have I also built that tree? This is what Vogel’s argument amounts to: not that to build is to affect matter, but that to affect matter is to build it. In the common idiom, this is not what the word refers to. The consequences would be enormous if we were to subscribe to Vogel’s proposed redefinition: look at the marks I have left in my apartment – see, it is I who have built this condominium. Or, as Val Plumwood has pointed out: I affect the persons close to me, indeed change their lives quite thoroughly; hence I could make a claim to have built or produced or constructed them.42 Verily, constructionism runs wild here.
So what does it mean to have built or produced – literally constructed – something? Kate Soper again provides the most convincing answer: the crucial criterion is ‘to inaugurate a product which previously did not exist.’43 When we say that pharaoh Khufu built the great pyramid of Giza, we mean that it did not exist at first, but then this man set in motion a process of construction some 4,600 years ago that brought the structure into being and there it has stood ever since. The human constructor gives rise to an entity. Something like a watch or a computer is indeed built or produced, for it owes its existence to human actions – by affecting select matters in specific ways, humans have created them de novo – but coal and oceans and the carbon cycle fall into another category. So, it seems, does the climate. Earth had it before it had humans.
WHAT IS CONSTRUCTED AND WHAT IS NOT
The metaphor of construction should indeed be taken quite literally: when building something, you do not merely change or affect it but call the structure into existence.44 Ironically, building is the human praxis around which Vogel builds his argument, while entirely missing the quick of it. One could turn instead to William H. Sewell, who delineates the real utility of the metaphor with precision in his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. In contradistinction to synchronic thinking so typical for postmodernity,
the construction