In none of these senses would the climate be a good fit for the metaphor. But in every one of them, the fossil economy would.46
If the term ‘social construction’ is to be meaningful, it must refer to some X that has come about ‘in consequence of a sequence of social events’, to follow Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? A constructionist typically believes that the X in question ‘need not have existed’ had it not been for those events.47 Applied to the realm of nature, such a belief has something absurd about it. Three storylines have the potential to turn literalist constructionism into intelligible propositions: 1.) Human beings were beamed onto an empty planet (or universe) and then constructed nature from scratch, starring in the role of divine non-produced producers. Here it would indeed seem that the X came about through social events. (The question of where the raw materials came from would, of course, remain unanswered.) 2.) Human beings emerged from pre-existing nature, but the moment they did so and started to roam the planet, they annulled it. Fresh from that feat, they then proceeded to build all environments on earth. This is Vogel’s logic, which begs a few questions, including how humans could be at once the direct offspring and the instant annullers of nature (a storyline only conceivable on the basis of the purist definition). 3.) Humans lived for a very long time among pre-existing nature, but in recent years, they have come to wield such detrimental and pervasive influence over it that it no longer is what it was. This seems to be an activity rather different from construction – more like destruction – but the storyline does at least render the earth and everything on it as outcomes of social events. Other questions then arise. If nature ended with late human influence – read: anthropogenic climate change – what forces and causal powers now determine the possible forms that influence can take? Where do they come from? Were the channels into which CO2 emissions run built by humans just now?
The absurdity extends to both varieties of constructionism about nature.48 Perhaps this is why their proponents, who are no fools, cannot avoid slips of the tongue. All of a sudden, Castree mentions ‘a biophysical world that at some level exists’ and ‘knows nothing of the values and goals according to which we discuss, respond to and intervene in it.’49 Smith gives away just the distinction he seeks to corrode: ‘unlike gravity, there is nothing natural about the law of value; no society has lived without experiencing the operation of gravity, but many have lived without the law of value’ – nature in one corner, society in the other.50 Vogel, for his part, posing as the sternest enemy to any use of the term, says things like ‘we human beings are ourselves natural.’ In fact, halfway into his book he spends a whole chapter reflecting on the fate of artefacts at the hands of nature. Every edifice is subject to precipitation and oxidation and entropy and heat and other ‘processes whose fundamental character – whose nature, I might even be willing to say – is not and cannot be fully known to us’, since they ‘are currently [sic] operating independently of humans’, not ‘something we produce’.51 Claims such as these might be intended to provide nuance to arguments sorely lacking in that quality, but the effect is rather to betray some damning inconsistencies.52 Sometimes constructionists appear to insert them as caveats of common sense, allowing them to wash their hands of the implications of their argument – but of course we do not believe that the earth is a fairy-tale! Who could be so crazy? Before and after such brief parentheses, whether composed deliberately or by accident, however, they continue to bracket, relegate, dismiss and exclude nature in their actual accounts of the ways of the world.53 Until inevitably, at some point, they step out into that world and have to repeat the admission. Not even its most militant detractors can dispense with the category of nature, and that must be because no one can.
Similarly for those who grieve its end: McKibben cannot help talking about a ‘new’ nature that behaves differently, but is still, so it seems, that which was supposed to have ended.54 In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy offers yet another variation on McKibben’s necrology, declares that nature is gone for good – ‘in every respect, the world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made’ (in every respect!) – and adds, for good measure, that nature ‘is not the sort of thing that has a meaning’.55 And then, without even noticing it, he spends page after page making statements like ‘our control over nature seems a precarious fantasy’, ‘there is no separating human beings from ecological nature’, ‘we are less distinct from the rest of nature than we often imagine’, ‘trying to build a peaceful and humane world means finding a way to live peacefully with nature’.56 After nature? It does not sound like it. Not even its necrologists can write about the corpse without mentioning its movements, and that must be because it is still quite alive.57
The category cannot be stamped out from human vocabularies. It refers to the part of the inhabited world that humans encounter but have not constructed, created, built or conjured up in their imagination, and that part is very prevalent indeed.58 It preceded us, surrounds us and will succeed us; it was, is and will be spontaneously generated without us; it may be under all sorts of influence, but that does not put an end to it, any more than a continent ceases to be because it has skyscrapers standing on it. When the British made their way through the jungle of Labuan, they did not produce but precisely encountered nature. The moment captured on the lithograph is not the moment when they made the sunlight and the water and the plants and the coal: all these things were there before them, belonging to the part of the world in whose absence they could not have been present. What they resolved to do with that nature was, however, up to them. Here supervened the moment of construction: they began to map, test, sell and buy the coal as material for their fossil economy, their Rome, built not in a day but over the course of the nineteenth century. We should reserve talk about ‘construction’ for that entity and demarcate it from the climate – throw constructionism back into society, as it were, and accept nature as a category sui generis. But that presupposes, of course, that the two can be distinguished from one another.
On Combined Development: Against Hybridism
THE HYBRIDIST MESH
Much contemporary theory cannot get enough of proclaiming that society and nature have become impossible to tell apart because in fact they are one and the same thing. The main source of inspiration for this way of thinking is Bruno Latour. A quantitative indication of his influence appeared when Times Higher Education ranked the writers most cited in the humanities in 2007: topped by Michel Foucault, the list put Latour in tenth place, one notch above Sigmund Freud, 16 notches above Benjamin and a full 26 above Karl Marx.1 Ten years later, one of his greatest fans proclaimed that ‘Latour is starting to look like Michel Foucault’s eventual replacement as the default citation in the humanities – he is quickly approaching that point in the social sciences.’2 And indeed, Latour’s sway over contemporary thinking on the relationship between society and nature is probably without equal. He will occupy a central place in what follows.
The foundational text is We Have Never Been Modern, which begins with Bruno Latour waking up one morning and reading the newspaper and being taken aback by the blurring of the lines between the social and the natural: first there is a story about the ozone layer (this is written in 1991). Atmospheric scientists warn that the hole is growing, while manufacturers and politicians prevaricate on phasing out the depleting substances. ‘The same article mixes together chemical reactions