The polyphony of nature

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumThe polyphony of nature Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Gonçalo D. SantosGonçalo D. SantosUniversity of Coimbra Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOne of my eldest daughter’s favorite picture books tells the story of an incredibly curious tiny little bird who wanted to know what makes birds special (Wells and Azul 2015). The little bird was feeling a bit lost and she thought that she would feel better if only she could find her place in nature. To get an answer, she started to study natural history books and she asked her mother for advice. The mother initially told the little bird that birds are special because they come from eggs, but the little prodigy said that this could not be right because there are animals like turtles that are not birds but also come from eggs. Revising her position, the mother said that birds are special because they all have wings to fly, but the little prodigy was again not convinced because she knew that not all birds can fly and she knew that there are animals like bats that are not birds but are able to fly. The mother was running out of ideas but she tried one final suggestion: birds are special because they are the only animals whose bodies are covered in feathers. The little prodigy tried to look for counterexamples but could not find any, so she was invaded with a strong feeling of happiness as her quest for an answer had come to an end. She finally understood what made her unique as a bird in the big wide world of nature, and it turns out that there is something morally reassuring about finding one’s place in nature. Knowing how things are ordered in nature makes it simpler for one to understand where one belongs and how one should behave as a member of a larger moral community of beings. This is why the little bird—at the end of the story—stops feeling restless and is ready to go to sleep next to her mother like a good baby bird.This story about a little bird finding moral order in natural order helps capture the central theme of Against nature, the most recent book by American historian of science Lorraine Daston. Daston is Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and is a well-known authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In Against nature, she revisits the history of moral usages of visions of natural order in “the Western intellectual tradition” (p. 6) to make the case that human beings are not very different from the little bird depicted in my daughter’s beloved storybook. Humans, too, like to produce classifications of the natural world and to find moral meaning in such classificatory schemes, but the purpose of their classificatory activities is not necessarily—as in the case of the little bird—creating a sense of belonging to a larger community of beings. As Daston reminds us, humans have appealed to nature’s authority for all kinds of reasons, sometimes not-so-good reasons. Nature has been invoked to promote values of equality and solidarity, but it has also been invoked to diminish, enslave, or even kill certain populations. In “the Western intellectual tradition,” this use and abuse of nature’s authority has generated a strong criticism of what has been called the “naturalistic fallacy” from the nineteenth century onwards, but Daston argues that this practice of using natural phenomena as a source of moral norms is so pervasive and persistent across cultures and epochs that it cannot be simply dismissed as a fallacy. Instead of focusing on what is wrong with this type of representation, we should be more concerned with understanding why they are so appealing and what makes them so popular: “Why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make?” (p. 3).Daston describes her book as an exercise in “philosophical anthropology” (p. 1), but she opposes her brand of philosophical anthropology to what she calls “cultural anthropology” (p. 3) on the grounds that her philosophical-anthropological project is more general and transcends questions of cultural and historical particularity. This analytical move will come across as disappointing for Hau readers as well as for social-cultural anthropologists interested in general comparative questions (Ingold 2018). Ever since the publication of Primitive classification in 1903 (Durkheim and Mauss 1963) and Wild thought in 1962 (Lévi-Strauss 2020), many social-cultural anthropologists have sought to explain why natural phenomena are a recurrent figurative model for moral order in different cultures and epochs. But Daston does not engage with this literature, so it does feel at times that the author is trying to reinvent the wheel. To overcome this feeling, I found it helpful to read the book less as an anthropological essay and more as a philosophical reflection on Western moral usages of natural orders reaching from Greco-Roman antiquity up to the present. Daston does admit that this is a somewhat narrow sample of humanity, but she feels that this is the only tradition about which she feels competent as a historian to say anything meaningful. There is, of course, no problem in writing a book about human reason based on the writings of Western scholars and scientists but I think that a book that presents itself as an anthropological project would need at least a chapter situating the “Western intellectual tradition” in a larger landscape of civilizational traditions and their forged conceptual vocabularies.Taking up the challenge of cross-cultural comparison would add significant complexity to Daston’s philosophical anthropology. Daston’s analysis of the history of Western moral representations of nature is full of interesting details, but one often wonders as one reads the book how this history of classificatory practices and schemes relates to those of other civilizations around the world, including those of civilizations without written records. The pioneering work of anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) on ontologies of nature is cited (p. 57–58) but is not discussed in any detail. Daston cites Descola to make the case that there are societies that do not make a clear-cut distinction between the human realm and the realm of nature, and for this reason they do not rely on nature as a unified category capable of bringing additional authority to moral orders. By contrast, “the Western intellectual tradition” developed around a sharp ontological distinction between the natural and the human realms: humans are radically different from the rest of nature because of their capacity for interiority and subjectivity, but nature provides the common ground for all phenomena. This way of “composing the world” (Descola 2014) started to take on a more modern configuration after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century due to a process of naturalization of knowledge that made it possible to turn nature into a powerful source of authority for images of moral order. Somewhat disappointingly, Daston does not explain how this happened and to what extent this transformation was part of a more global epistemic shift associated with the making of modern “naturalist” ontologies, but this is not her main concern.Beyond questions of cultural and historical variation, Daston is more interested in the general question of why there seems to be a human impulse across cultures and epochs to engage with representations that interweave elements of natural and moral orders. The first part of her explanation is Durkheimian. She argues that human beings are constantly producing representations of order because this is a way to overcome deep-seated fears of chaos. Just as the little bird in our opening story is afraid of feeling lost in the big chaos of nature, so human beings prefer any kind of order (even when it is unruly and violent) to total chaos. The second part of her explanation is Lévi-Straussian. Humans do not just seek to find order and normativity in the world, they do it in ways that are shaped by the specific properties of their sensorial and cognitive processes as a species. Daston argues that “for our species, with our sensorium, orders must be grasped and imagined, both literally and figuratively” (p. 57), and this means that humans are constantly drawing parallels between different registers of order. Of course, there is a wide diversity of phenomena (including human-made artifacts and machines) that can be used to serve as models of moral order, but there is something special about natural phenomena. Daston argues that nature possesses several advantages over other possible models of order. Nature is everywhere on display and is so diverse and orderly that it is very tempting to use representations of natural phenomena as models of moral order (p. 59).One advantage of looking at these representational practices not as a fallacy but as a common phenomenon typical of how human sensorial and cognitive processes work is that we realize that we cannot do away so easily with analogies between natural and moral orders. This is what humans do and what historians and anthropologists can do is to study the history of the multiple repertoires of natural order in a given intellectual tradition and to show how these repertoires are used as figurative models of moral order. Standard historical accounts of the making of the Western naturalist tradition tend to emphasize the gradual construction of a notion of nature that is both universal and singular and is opposed to the realm of humans (see the discussion in Descola 2014). This view is very influential but it does not take into account the existence of multiple repertoires of natural order and their tensions and contradictions. One of the most interesting aspects of Daston’s book is that her history of Western moral representations of nature is a history of multiple natures. Daston outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and she shows how each of these three natural orders has been mobilized to model and in some cases justify visions of moral order. It turns out that the story of the little bird with which I opened this article is a typical story of specific natures, but it would be easy to find children’s picture books to illustrate the other two forms of natural order. While stories of local natures are stories of a locally specific natural order made up of multiple interlocking parts in delicate equilibrium with one another, stories of universal natural laws are stories of a uniform and inviolable natural order, everywhere and always the same, exhibiting ironclad regularities.Daston selected these three repertoires of natural order because they can be traced easily in historical records. Each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of “the unnatural.” The little bird in the opening story of specific natures would be horrified to learn about the existence of birds without feathers because this would be a monstrous violation of received wisdom on the order of specific natures. But the unnatural is not just about monsters; it is also about imbalances (as when local natures are disrupted by external forces) and indeterminacies (as when universal natural laws are broken). Each of these three forms of the unnatural came to be associated with distinctive emotional responses: monsters trigger reactions of horror, imbalances trigger reactions of terror, and indeterminacies trigger reactions of wonder. These are the passions that supposedly befall human beings when a major disruption of order (moral or natural or both) is recognized in a given context. For Daston, the very existence of differentiated repertoires of what she calls “the passions of the unnatural” (p. 33) is evidence of sustained and discerning human attention to the orders of nature, and it is quite clear in the face of this analysis that there is not one but multiple forms of natural order.I find this analysis innovative and I think the emphasis on multiple repertoires of natural order has the potential to inspire the development of more dynamic and heterogeneous historical and anthropological accounts of the Western naturalist tradition. Focusing on what Daston calls “the polyphony of nature” (p. 61) has one big advantage over other more homogenizing accounts. Most accounts of the Western naturalist tradition echo the philosophical critique of the “naturalistic fallacy” in assuming that naturalization has turned nature into something that is singular and universal, something that has the power to buttress moral orders—but what if nature never really became singular but is more like a “mille-feuille of meanings” (p. 7), referring to many different things at the same time. Daston appreciates the value of the philosophical critique of the “naturalistic fallacy,” but she makes the case that the history of “the Western intellectual tradition” reveals a multiplicity of notions of natural order that are often contradictory. This means that “naturalization is in fact a weaker strategy than its critics fear: there are natural orders aplenty to support (or subvert) any and all norms” (p. 68). This point is interesting and has the potential to make a contribution to an account of the Western naturalist tradition that is less concerned with the reductionist effects of naturalization and is more concerned with the tensions and contradictions shaping this process. Daston argues that we should not be afraid of moral discourses invoking nature’s authority because nature is too diverse to be reduced to a singular version or model. Nature may seem singular and universal but it is multiple and contradictory.This thought is quite comforting, but it is not clear how this multiplicity is maintained historically and whether there is one particular repertoire of natural order that is dominant over the others and under which circumstances. Most crucially, it is not clear what the effects of this cultural politics of multiple repertoires of natural order are on patterns of human-environment relations, and this leads me to my final comment. Against nature follows the philosopher Ian Hacking in making the case that “human beings are representers” (p. 53), extending this insight to the human propensity to construct analogies between natural and moral orders. It is certainly interesting to use the human propensity to interweave representations of natural and moral orders as the basis for a philosophical anthropology, but it is a mistake to focus only on the symbolic dimensions of these representational practices. The truly important question in the current age of increasing anthropogenic environmental uncertainties is not the question of how nature is represented but the question of how representations of nature mediate patterns of human-environment relations and processes of environmental decay and ruination (Santos 2011).There is a large body of literature within the fields of environmental anthropology and history suggesting that the historical development of the modern notion of nature as a singular entity guided by universal laws went hand in hand with the intensification of regimes of exploitation of the natural environment and this intensification was promoted and guided by new visions of progress and growth that became extremely powerful with the rise of modern industrial capitalism. These visions of progress are still with us and they continue to inform the modern belief that humans are capable of mastering and conquering nature through the ingenuity of science and technology, but this belief is also being undermined by mounting evidence that the modern story of progress and growth is also a story of environmental decay and ruination.Anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015: 19–25) believes that confrontation with these new realities of environmental decay and ruination will open the way for a more substantial critique of the modern ideology of progress and its anthropocentrism, and she calls for the development of a new sensitivity to the multiple rhythms of life and collaborative survival on a planet in which humans are no longer at the center. Tsing uses the term “polyphony” to refer to these multiple rhythms, but she is not talking about representations of nature as Daston does; she is talking about patterns of human-environment relations. She compares the modern ideology of progress to modern forms of monophonic music consisting of compositions with a unified sense of rhythm and melody. But this is not the only way to create music. There are also forms of music that consist of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody and rhythm. Attuning to these more archaic-sounding polyphonic forms of music requires breaking free from the homophonic rhythms of modern musical genres and learning the value of multiple temporal rhythms, but this is not easy, and it is not easy because the global circulation of modern homophonic rhythms is supported by a whole series of ideals, institutions, and politico-economic structures. Tsing applies this musical metaphor to the practice of agriculture. Like homophonic music, commercial agriculture has aimed to segregate a single crop and work toward its simultaneous ripening for a coordinated harvest, quite often through the use of various kinds of farm chemicals. But commercial agriculture is not the only way to relate to the environment through agriculture. There are other kinds of farming with multiple rhythms, with many crops growing together in the same field and with different schedules. These models of farming are less environmentally destructive than commercial agriculture but they are also less profitable, so why shift to polyphonic farming?Daston is trying to convince us that we should not be afraid of cultural representations that make moral appeals to nature’s almighty authority because nature is polyphonic and is made up of multiple orders that often contradict one another. What she does not explain is what the ideals, techniques, institutions, and politico-economic structures are that sustain this polyphonic vision of nature. If homophonic visions are more readily available and attractive, why bother shifting to a more polyphonic register? If little birds like the one in the opening story feel comfortable developing moral narratives around a single natural order with universal reach why bother changing to moral narratives revolving around a more polyphonic assemblage of multiple natural orders?ReferencesDescola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2014. La composition des mondes. Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier. Paris, Flammarion.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDurkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive classification. Translated by Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarIngold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why it matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLévi-Strauss, Claude. 2020. Wild thought. A new translation of La Pensée Sauvage. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSantos, Gonçalo D. 2011. “Rethinking the green revolution in South China: Technological materialities and human-environment relations.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 5 (4): 479–504.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarTsing, Anna. 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarWells, Anne Marie, and Anabela Marisa Azul. 2015. Mamã, porque sou uma ave? [Mommy, why am I a bird?] Coimbra: Coimbra University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGonçalo D. Santos is Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences, University of Coimbra. He is also a Researcher and Group Coordinator in the Research Centre for Anthropology and Health (CIAS), University of Coimbra. He is the author of Chinese village life today (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the coeditor of Transforming patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). He is the founder and the director of the transnational STS research network Sci-Tech Asia (https://www.scitechasia.org).Gonçalo D. Santos[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716597 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Feeling · Genealogy · Literature · Polyphony · Visual arts · Animal and Plant Science Education · Computer Science · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy

• Rethinking the Green Revolution in South China

  Gonçalo Santos•East Asian Science Technology and…•2011

  Add to list

• Anthropology

  Rohan Bastin•Anthropological Forum•2019

  Add to list

• The Mushroom at the End of the World

  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing•Mushroom at the End of the World•2015

  Add to list