Denaturing Nature
Levi R. Bryant
Space Art Studio
London 7/5/12
1.
Two Contradictory Imperatives
Today, more than ever, we find ourselves faced with two contradictory imperatives. On
the one hand, we are faced with the imperative of returning to a materialism, a naturalism, a
realism. This imperative arises under the limitations imposed by certain theoretical culminations
arising out of correlationism that reached their zenith in the thought of the 90s. There, with the
absolutely necessary turn to the social constructivisms and linguistic idealisms, the being, the
material world, came to be read as a blank screen upon which we project our meanings, giving it
structure and content. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism as the elementary
matrix of critical practice, the aim was to show that what we take to be a natural essence is, in
fact, socially constructed and therefore capable of being otherwise. Just as Marx showed that
value is not an intrinsic property of things but a result of human labor, the emancipatory theorist
would show that gender differences are not intrinsic differences proper to the biology of the
sexes, but rather that they are socially constructed and historically variable. Despite the massive
emancipatory contributions made by this theoretical practice, the problem was that it swallowed
the world up in culture, rendering us incapable of thinking the contributions of material beings to
being independent of signification. While seldom saying so explicitly, we came to think of
ourselves as Atlas, spinning the world out as we wish from our language and social practices,
without the material world itself contributing anything of significance. The material world
became a blank screen. If this proves worrisome, then this is because it renders us incapable of
thinking the climate catastrophe within which we are living; but also why oppressive social
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formations take the form they do. If we are to adequately think climate catastrophe, this
apocalypse within which we are living, then we cannot treat beings such as greenhouse gas
emissions, livestock emissions, ozone holes, technologies, storms, and plagues of locusts as real
material beings that cannot be reduced to texts. While there is indeed a text that accompanies all
of these things, these things themselves are all too irreducible to texts. On the other hand, I
assert, it is not simply beliefs, texts, narratives, norms, and signifiers that form the fabric or glue
of our social world. No, roads, rivers, fiber optic cables, satellites, trains, planes, cell phones,
buildings, local fauna, and so on also significantly contribute to the form social assemblages
take. If we are to engage in emancipatory practices, it is not enough to simply debunk ideologies
and show how identities are socially constructed. We must also understand the ways in which
material entities mold the social relations possible for us and devise means of intervening in
these material assemblages to free up new paths of interaction. Both of these reorientations
require a materialism, naturalism, and materialism.
On the other hand, the concept of nature has, throughout history, functioned as a despotic
tool of oppression on behalf of majoritarian culture. “Nature” has historically denoted the
domain of essence and the invariant, opposed to the domain of artifice, and the historical. In this
context, to say something is “natural” is to say that it is governed by an invariant essence that
makes it what it is. By contrast, to say that something is “cultural” is to say that it is artificial,
that it is historical, that it marks a swerve from nature. Here the tree takes the form, the
phenotype, it takes by virtue of its nature, its essence. A walnut cannot grow into an aardvark
because there is an essence that governs what it can become. A bird builds its nest by virtue of
instinct, its essence, not by virtue of learning, training, culture, and invention. All of this sounds
obvious until we note how this concept of nature has been deployed in the name of various
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oppressive practices throughout history. Wherever we see attempts to justify oppressive social
structures we also see appeals to nature of some sort or another to explain both why certain
disadvantaged people belong where they are and why others have the right to rule. Of women it
was said that they were naturally incapable of reason, that they are dominated by emotion, and
that therefore are akin to children. And just as children need parents to protect and care for them,
the story went, women need men to make decisions for them, to care for them, to protect them.
Left to their own devices they would “run amok”. Similar claims were made about blacks by
slave owners in the American south; and, of course, the economic elite have always argued that
they enjoy their privilege due to superior breeding and that the poor are poor by virtue of their
inferior breeding. Noblesse oblige. The Nazi’s insisted that there was something in the nature of
Jews that made them deceitful and corrupt, while kings and nobles have endlessly claimed that
there is something in their nature, deriving from God, that grounds their rule. And today, of
course, we see all of these strategies of justification playing out in socio- and psycho-biology.
Nature has been a dangerous concept used to justify oppression and oppression. It is for this
reason that the social constructivisms, demonstrating the manner in which these essences are in
fact fetishes in Marx’s sense of the word, have been so necessary. Faced with this abuse of
nature, we thus find that we need a denaturing a nature, a conception of nature that neutralizes
essentialism.
Two contradictory imperatives that are nonetheless imperatives. We must respond to
both of these imperatives and find a way to navigate this Charybdis and Scylla of panculturalism and essentialist naturalism. Towards this end I believe we need a chiasmatic
crossing of properties between the domains of nature and culture. We need a concept of culture
that becomes a bit more natural, a bit more material, that is no longer seen as other than and
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outside nature, but which is understood as itself a formation of nature. And we need a concept of
nature that becomes a bit more cultural, that is no longer a domain of essence in opposition to
artifice or techne—where the Greek concept of techne we will recall signifies art, invention,
production, creation in both the sense of the fine arts and technology –where nature, like culture,
is understood to be historical, creative, and inventive without essence. This chiasmatic crossing
of properties is the core of my project with what I have called “onticology” or, more recently,
“machine-oriented ontology”.
2.
Denaturing Nature: Darwin’s Queering of Nature
The idea of “denaturing nature” is already somewhat misleading as it suggests that we are
abandoning the idea of nature altogether so as to reduce it to culture. Yet this is not what is at
stake in a denaturing nature. To denature nature is not to reduce it to culture, but rather to desuture nature from the toxic concept of essence that haunts it. Similarly, de-culturing culture
does not consist in abandoning the idea of culture, but instead consists in refusing that gesture
that treats it as something outside of nature. In both instances, we get a refusal of that conceptual
ecology that treats nature and culture as two entirely distinct and separate domains. Following
thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Karen
Barad, culture is seen as inextricably intertwined with nature. While there are natures that are
independent of culture as in the case of the atmosphere of Saturn, there is never a culture that is
independent of nature. Through the practice of a double gesture, nature takes on the properties
of culture, while culture comes to be seen as a formation of nature.
It is above all Darwin that authorizes us to abandon the essentialist conception of nature
inherited from Plato and Aristotle. The humanities, social sciences, and critical theory broadly
construed have not yet caught up to the implications of Darwin. With Darwin, the essentialist
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conception of nature explodes. The index of the essentialist conception of nature is the figure of
the monster. Throughout the work of Aristotle we repeatedly encounter the figure of the
monster, leading one to ask “what are the conditions under which a monster is possible?” When
Aristotle refers to monsters he does not have in mind creatures like the Kraken that arise from
the sea as in the case of the Clash of the Titans. Rather, monsters are, for Aristotle, creatures
such as two headed pigs, Siamese twins, or people born with an extra nipple.
How is it possible, then, for Aristotle to conceive these beings as monsters? These beings
can only be conceived as monstrous in an ontology where the being of an individual is defined
by an essence or form defining both what entities of this type ought to be. With Aristotle, the
monstrous is that which swerves from the telos and normativity of essential form, disobeying
what it ought to be by virtue of its essential nature. Here, then, essence precedes the individual
entities and the individual entity more or less approximates its nature or essence depending on
how perfectly it actualizes that essence. The monstrous is that which egregiously deviates from
its nature. We will note that within essentialist discourses today we still here echoes of this
conception of monstrosity. The Christian right in the United States, for example, conceive
homosexuality as a monstrous coupling. Such a conception is only possible where it is believed
that there is an essential form of sexual coupling decreed by God.
With Darwin, however, nature becomes queer. Let us distinguish between the letter of
evolutionary thought and the sense of evolutionary thought. While there is much that remains
problematic in evolutionary thought as can be seen in the case of socio- and psycho-biology, the
sense of Darwinian thought, the reason that it is a genuine revolution or event, lies in
demolishing the universe of invariant forms that subordinate the individual being to a
transcendent, ahistorical essence. With Darwin, difference—and above all what the Scholastics
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called accidental difference –comes to precede the sameness of form and comes to be that out of
which form or “essence”—now in inverted commas –is generated. Here “species” are statistical
effects of populations or individuals, and individuals are no longer measured by how closely they
approximate ideal form or essence. Indeed, the individual becomes the motor of evolutionary
processes.
The three great principles of Darwinian thought are random variation, natural selection,
and heritability. Random variation means that no entity is a perfect copy of its parents. Thus,
where essentialist naturalism sees entities as copies of a model—the form or type to which they
belong –random variation sees entities as copies of copies without original where each individual
differs slightly from the preceding. We get a world of endless simulacra, of copies without
originals, in the Deleuzian sense. Natural selection signifies that some of these differences
produced through random variation confer an advantage either to survival, reproduction, or
culture; instituting circumstances in which they persist. Heritability signifies that those
variations that are selected for—without reason or necessity –are passed on either through sexed
reproduction or culture. What we call a “species” is thus not a real entity, but a statistical effect
of simulacral similitude within a population of individuals that share resemblances with one
another due to common heritage. These processes are riddled with chance and contingency and
are always capable of being otherwise.
Here we must proceed with care for we often speak of these three processes as adapting
to an environment as if the environment were a fixed and unchanging container to which entities
must conform. However, there are three problems with this view. First, as the developmental
systems theorists have shown and the systems theorists have shown, entities select their own
environments and are not open to every feature of the environment in which they are embedded.
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The environment of a snake and a rabbit are different due to how they are each selectively open
to the world about them, even where they occupy the same Newtonian space or geographical
region. This entails that they will enjoy different selective pressures. There is no one
environment that all entities share. Second, as theorists such as Kim Sterelny have shown,
entities also construct their environments or niches. Beavers construct damns, we construct
cities and homes, ants construct nests. These constructed niches will play a role in how
subsequent generations develop, they will play a role in the phenotype of an individual is
manifested, in ways that cannot be reduced to the exercise of genes. For example, the type of ant
an ant larvae becomes—worker ant, warrior ant, queen ant, etc. –is not a function of the
particular larvae’s genes, but rather the placement of various pheromones about the developing
larvae. Each larvae has the genetic power or capacity to become a worker, warrior, or queen. It
is the placement in the constructed niche that determines what the ant will become. Yet if this is
the case, the environment is not simply a passive thing to which the individual must adapt, but
rather individuals actively construct their niches. Finally, the environment is not a fixed
container because each new adaptation itself modifies the selection pressures to which both the
entity itself must adapt and to which other entities must adapt. Our technologies are adaptations
to an environment allowing us to surmount certain things in the natural world, while also
conferring certain reproductive advantages—for example, the internet increases our possibilities
of meeting other people, thereby expanding our reproductive possibilities. However, we must
ourselves adapt to our technologies or the niches we have constructed, just as other organisms
must adapt to our adaptations producing new speciations. This is among the reasons that
evolution is not teleological. There is no final point it can reach because each adaptation
generates new problems for the whole.
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Additonally, it becomes clear that the sense of the Darwinian event forces us to abandon
genecentric conceptions of evolution. As developmental systems theorists such as Susan Oyama
and Griffiths have shown, heritability, random variation, and natural selection take place at all
levels of existence, ranging from genes, to protein replication, to cells, to constructed niches and
culture (which is itself a sort of niche). There is no unidirectional causality here, but rather a
series of feedback loops in play with one another, often in tension with one another, always
characterized by random variations as a well-spring of creative becoming, without any one
dimension presiding ultimately over what the phenotype becomes.
We thus see that nature has become something very different with the Darwinian event.
Like culture, nature is no longer a domain of unchanging essences, of that which arises
ineluctably from forms, but rather is a domain of invention, creation, and deviation. Nature has
become riddled by contingency, always capable of being otherwise—indeed, destined to become
otherwise –and has thereby become both historical and a world of artifice. As a consequence,
the monstrous disappears; or, at the very least, must be thoroughly reconceived. Furthermore,
since the development of the phenotype of an individual is something that unfolds through an
interplay of genes, protein replication, cellular neighborhoods, niches, constructed niches,
culture, and many things besides, we can no longer appeal to ineluctable biological essences
defining the qualities and behavior of the phenotype or actualized entity. To be sure, genes play
a role, but not the unilateral role of a model defining entities as copies. Functionally the role of
genes is reconfigured as a result of this broader developmental milieu that differs from case to
case. Drawing on Susan Oyama’s concept of “parity reasoning”, genes are but one
developmental factor or potency among others.
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3.
Hominid Ecology: De-Culturing Culture
With the de-naturing of nature that takes place in the Darwinian event the category of
nature becomes far less toxic insofar as we can no longer appeal to fixed essences presiding over
individuals in the genesis of their phenotypes. Rather individuals become open ended
topological fields of vectors of development that become what they are as a result of their milieu
of individuation. Genes are no longer a model dictating what the individual will be, but rather
the developmental field will produce individuals in different ways depending on its
characteristics. A child that develops or grows on the planet Mars is likely to be very different
than the very same child that grows on the planet earth because Mars is about half the mass of
the Earth, thereby allowing the child to grow much larger than another. Likewise, since niches
like culture play a role in actualizing genes in various ways, persons that develop in this cultural
milieu rather than another will differ phenotypically in a variety of ways as well. There is no
fixed blueprint for what a being will become.
With this neutralization of the concept of nature as essence, it now becomes possible to
rethink the nature of culture and nature. The revolutionary content of the concepts of culture and
society was that they allowed us to demolish essentialist conceptions of the social order based
either on the ineluctable teleological unfolding of natural forms in the individual or the Great
Chain of Being where every person is allotted a particular place in the social world by decree of
God. Already we see the erosion of this essentialist conception of social ordering in Lucretius’s
De Rerum Natura, where he distinguishes between those qualities that are in the thing itself like
the heat of fire or the weight of a stone, and those properties that are bi-products of interactions
between entities such as slavery and freedom or wealth and poverty. Lucretius’s point is that one
remains the same individual whether one is poor or rich, a slave or free. That is, Lucretius
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argued that our social identity is arises not from our essence—one is not born a king or a slave –
but from social structure. We are the ones that make this social order, not nature or God. And as
such, we can change it. With this pronouncement Lucretius challenged the regimes of
legitimation for social hierarchy for the world in which he found himself. It comes as no surprise
that they sought to destroy his book. In de-suturing culture from nature we were really asserting
the possibility of us defining what the social order ought to be. We were asserting the possibility
of revolution and anarchistic self-production.
All of this ought to be retained, yet with the neutralization of essentialist conception of
nature it now becomes possible to see culture and society not as a domain apart from nature, but
rather as themselves natural formations embedded within nature. The de-culturing of culture
entails seeing society as an assemblage of material beings within nature and not as a domain
distinct and separate from nature. I have suggested that such a move is necessary for two
reasons: First, without understanding how societies are embedded in nature and are themselves
of nature, we are unable to think the relationship between our social world and the ecological
apocalypse we are living through. Instead we see culture as consisting solely of texts, narratives,
signifiers, norms, laws, and institutions, while seeing the natural as something other or outside of
culture that is of no interest to the critical theorist. Second, I have suggested that the form
societies take does not arise from beliefs, norms, laws, institutions, language, etc., alone, but also
from material entities such as rivers, technologies, roads, communications cables, local fauna,
and so on. Ignoring this risks crippling the aims of the critical theorist and activist thinker, for
one will proceed to pursue change simply by, for example, debunking ideological and cultural
narratives that bind power, while failing to see that we must also address the sticky networks of
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things that I have elsewhere called “regimes of attraction” that channel and structure our
possibilities of acting and relating to one another.
Because the term “society” so persistently leads us to think of the domain of meaning,
text, and the semiotic to the detriment of the material, I have elsewhere abandoned that we
abandon the term “society” altogether, replacing it instead with the term “hominid ecologies”.
While I doubt others will follow me in this gesture, I do think it has three advantages: First, it
reminds us that societies are themselves ecologies embedded in broader ecologies. Ecology is
not the study of nature independent of culture, of coral reefs and rain forests—though it is these
things as well –but rather is the investigation of relations and interactions between entities full
stop. By referring to societies as hominid ecologies, our habits of social and political thought
that draw us to see the social purely as the domain of meaning, signs, and ideologies-- inherited
from the long tradition of human exceptionalism –are weakened and we can begin to see
entanglements or relations among entities that we would not normally associate with the cultural.
Everything that we wished to investigate under traditional social and political thought remains
there just as it was before—ideologies, signifying systems, institutions, etc. –but now we are also
to discern the role that technologies play in our social ecology, microbes like the bubonic plague,
natural events like Hurricane Katrina, geographical features like rivers, ocean currents, and wind
patterns, local resources, local fauna, animals like cows, etc. We also come to think the manner
in which our practices impact the broader natural world and how the impact of these practices
rebound on us in turn.
Second, reference to these ecologies as hominid ecologies rather than human ecologies
places the concept of the human in question. Reference to ourselves as hominids rather than
humans help to suspend a sedimented tradition that unreflectively presumes to know what we
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are, while also presenting the human as a question mark, an empty square, that is without
definition or identity. Just as physical anthropologists and biologists struggle with the question
of just when homo sapiens began, we begin with the thesis that we don’t know what a human is.
While there might be many resemblances among hominids such as ourselves, it might be there
are significant differences among hominids such as ourselves due to the fact that we develop in
different milieus of individuation. Here it is worth recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis that
beings are distinguished by their affects and speeds and slownesses rather than shared qualities,
and that a work horse has more in common with an ox than with a race horse. Similarly,
hominids would differ according to their technological, cultural, and natural milieus and would
be defined by their affects or that of which they are capable rather than their generic
resemblances.
Finally, reference to ourselves as hominids rather than humans helps to remind us that we
are of the animal, that we are ourselves animals, even though, like all animals, we have
capacities and powers unique to us. We are just one type of hominid and there are many others
beside ourselves. Far from hominids such as ourselves being sovereigns of being, we are instead
animals among other animals.
Now the suggestion that society and culture are material and natural entities is likely to
raise objections. When I evoke the terms “materialism” and “naturalism” to name my position, I
only mean that I’m committed to the thesis that there is only matter (whatever that might turn out
to be), interactions, and void. For me materialism means that there are no incorporeal entities,
nor any incorporeal interactions. If any entity exists, then it must be material. If there’s an
interaction between entities, then there must be some sort of material connection. This leaves
completely unspecified what kind of entities exists. All this position says is that if any entity
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exists it will have the common ontological feature of being material as is the case with all other
entities.
However, often the term “materialism” is taken to mean something quite different. In the
social sciences and humanities, materialism is taken to be a synonym for reductionism. To be a
materialist, in this connection, is to be a reductionist. Thus, for example, if you’re a materialist
this means that you would ignore things like systems of signification or meaning, instead
reducing these things to neuronal events or some feature of biology. Well, that’s certainly not a
position I endorse, and the reason that I don’t endorse it is because I think it’s wrong
ontologically. Ontologically, for example, signifiers aren’t restricted to a single brain, but are
transpersonal entities defined by their relations to other signifiers, such that they can’t be reduced
to any particular brain. Brains are certainly part of the story, but we need to be attentive to the
particular structure of phenomena we’re seeking to explain. While signifiers can’t exist without
brains (or computers) of some sort, they are social entities (meaning they can’t be restricted to
any particular individual). All I’m committed to is the thesis that if signifiers exist—and I
certainly believe they do –they are material entities or necessarily have a material embodiment.
This is entirely different than claiming they can be reduced to neurons or genes. In other words,
my materialism is firmly wedded to a theory of emergence.
Minimally, naturalism and materialism mean to me that 1) there is nothing outside of
nature, that there is no transcendent world that acts on ours such as Plato’s realm of the forms, 2)
that everything is natural, therefore that 3) humans are a part of nature and societies are a part of
nature, 4) that there are no incorporeal entities, and 5 that all causes are natural causes. To claim
that there are no natural causes is just to say that there’s no magical causation, no supernatural
causation, that there’s no causation through mysterious entities like “forms”, and that there’s no
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action at a distance. For anything that takes place there has to be some sort of physical
connection or relation. Even texts and concepts must travel throughout the world and cannot be
transmitted faster than the speed of light. In this regard, culture is not something outside of or
other than nature, but is one more natural and material formation among others.
The consequence of this is that I cannot be committed to the thesis that the rhetorician,
the critical theorist, and the critic of ideology should reduce their objects of investigation to
neurons and genes. Concepts, ideas, signifiers, and ideologies are real entities and actors in the
world. I’m committed to the thesis that signifying complexes and ideologies are every bit as real
and material as neurons and genes. The caveat is that if it is true that signifiers, concepts, and
ideologies are real and material features of the world, then it follows they must, like any other
entity, travel throughout the world to be present in the world. We can’t assume that an ideology,
for example, is present in every population of people precisely because signifiers, like microbes,
must spread throughout a population of people. This means that we have to draw on the
resources and techniques of disease epidemiology to discover what and where the ideologies are,
or which population of hominids they inhabit.
The upshot of the thesis that signifiers must travel or proliferate through the world also
entails that there will be very real constraints on the form a society can take and its size
depending on the technological medium of communication favored by that population. As
McLuhan taught us, a society based on speech will only be able to reach a certain size because
messages transmitted orally undergo a high coefficient of random variation as they’re passed
from person to person, undermining the ability for people to share an identity beyond certain
limits in size and duration. Perry Anderson shows how the printing press allowed for the
formation of shared national identities because the print medium is more able to preserve its
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identity across distance and time allowing collective identifications to take place. With the
invention of the telephone and internet communication, it becomes possible for messages to
travel much further, allowing for collective identifications to take place from across the globe.
Already we see how communications technologies play a key role in the form social
systems take. From here it is but a short leap to seeing also how roads, transportation
technologies, rivers, weather patterns, local resources, properties of nonhuman entities such as
rice, etc., play a key role in the form that a particular social assemblage takes. At this point we
see that societies are ecologies and open on to a broader ecology that is not simply of the order of
signification.
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