How to Talk About Nature When There Is No More Nature to Talk About

HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.-Samuel Beckett, "Endgame" During the last two decades, ecocriticism has been among the liveliest areas of literary scholarship. Its success has come at a price. The more innovative it has become, the less space the new theory has had for nature. If in 1995, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination argued for a shift of emphasis from human to natural history, by 2005 Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature found it necessary to let go of nature because it was a metaphysical concept. Latour's proposition sounded harsh, yet it was right on the mark because, as he explained, "nature is the chief obstacle that has always hampered the development of public discourse" about the environment.1Ecocriticism could, of course, continue on its present track of bidding farewell to "nature in general," as Latour puts it, finishing the project Fredric Jameson defined with some prescience twenty years ago when he said that postmodernism is "what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."2 But a clear alternative to what Timothy Morton calls "ecology without nature" seems to have emerged as well, namely, to try to save nature and reinvent it as part of a new approach focused on sustainability.3 Formulating a discourse on sustainability, understood as a state and a process like "balance," however, presents significant difficulties. As I try to show here, at stake in thinking about the future of environmentalism is a total picture-a whole that is made possible by ecology but that has no discourse to back it up, chiefly because of the rift between humanities and sciences and the imbalance that this rift creates. At this juncture, the question is no longer about the future direction ecology and ecocriticism will take but about how a new universal discourse of sustainability will be formulated. If such discourse is to be universal, then sciences and humanities, poststructuralism in particular, will have to find ways to talk to one another. Among other things, the sciences have to recognize the importance of the theory of cultural constructedness, its views on truth, reality, and so on, and poststructuralism has to make some space for biology and chemistry in its understanding of the foundations of culture.The stakes are the highest possible, because if we do it right, if poststructuralism can speak with science (and vice versa), we all stand to gain a new kind of knowledge and with it, possibly, a new form of existence.A few explanations are in order.First, why nature and not something else? The short answer is because of the totality it represents, a totality of which poststructuralism is rightly suspicious. The history of nature dictates that if ecocriticism is to be a viable discourse, it must find a way to deal with this "chief obstacle," as Latour refers to it, to environmentalism. It must do so not by trying to get rid of nature but by trying to transform our understanding of it, as, for instance, John Meyer argues in Political Nature, when he suggests that ecocritics will have to change their "conception of nature."4 Otherwise, we face the danger of, in psychoanalytic terms, the return of the repressed, as well as the possibility of an ahistorical discourse. That may matter little for a politics preoccupied with the present moment, but it should matter much more for scholarly disciplines tasked with formulating aspects of ecological thinking and being that should have long-term effects. The question is not whether we need a new way of thinking about nature but only how we can formulate this new conception, with or without poststructuralism, with or without science.Second, can we assume that ecocriticism (a sustainable ecocriticism) is all encompassing and that its discourse is total?For ecology, the simple answer follows from the truism that in the environment, as Barry Commoner has said, "everything is related to everything else."5 The environment is the entire globe, and ecology is but a name for a way to make thinking global or all encompassing. Ecocriticism, if it is to follow ecology, cannot help but be universal in this new, literal sense of the term as pertaining to one entity, the globe, which provides habitation for all. (We can say that the ecological universal is that particular that has consequences for the entirety of the ecological system.)Ecology is also universal in an epistemic sense. As Hubert Zapf observes in a discussion of Edmund Wilson, its aims are "to overcome the division of modern knowledge."6 The consilience Wilson seeks is "literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation."7Inspired by Wilson perhaps, in her landmark introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as completing literary studies. As she explains, ecocriticism fills the epistemological gap in literary studies left by other poststructuralist approaches that focus on the social world and, according to Glotfelty, neglect the natural one.8 The completion makes it possible for literary studies to address the "entire ecosphere" and thereby "directs ... attention to matters about which we need to be thinking."9 The closing of the gap anchors, or grounds, literary studies, giving it a definitive, and definitively important, purpose.10Here are a few more recent examples that confirm this allure of the total worldview. John Meyer is critical of an ecology that sees itself as "a new and encompassing worldview," but he nevertheless goes on to argue that "the struggle over nature" is central to "our" "policies, politics, and visions of social order," meaning by "our" "all of us on earth."11 And so, if it is not universal in the sense of completing knowledge, ecocriticism is universal in the sense that it defines the focal point around which all other issues, political, cultural, scientific, come together.Another notable voice against wholeness is Bruno Latour's. In Politics of Nature he notes, for instance, the difficulty of putting together the interdisciplinary toolbox required for ecocriticism, saying that political ecology is "incapable of integrating the entire set of its localized and particular actions into an overall hierarchical program."12 But he too cannot escape the ideology of wholeness, and speaks of the "single issue that arises for all collectives" and of the goal of ecology as the "progressive composition of a good common world."13In Ecological Thinking, feminist philosopher Lorraine Code explains the importance of ecocriticism by contrasting it with the last revolution in philosophy, Kant's Copernican turn, which it is supposed to replace.14 The new discourse too is assumed to be total because it is radically changing the very ground of human knowledge. As Code indicates, ecocriticism defines an entirely new "way of inhabiting the world."15 The new ontology will be created, among other ways, by bridging the traditional dichotomy that was based on a separation between humanity (subject) and nature (object).Even ecological ethics, according to Hubert Zapf, argues for the need for a unity on the level of discourse. He imagines a dialogue that would reconnect "the separate branches of contemporary science" in recognition of the evolutionary diversity of separate disciplines.16 Following Zapf, one assumes that cultural differences would be negotiated in the same way, by acknowledging the diversity of attitudes toward nature (but not a diversity of goals, since the overarching goal, given the fact that we have only one planet, seems a given, one and the same).Thus we can confirm what we already know well: ecological discourse cannot fail to be about the gathering of everything, the whole of nature, and the whole of knowledge into one discourse, or around one issue, which we call the environment. And ecocriticism means that the universality of environmentalism is global, for everyone.17Third, despite universal agreement that ecocriticism must be about all-encompassing, global, or central phenomena, there have been no attempts to explain just how such an ecocriticism squares with poststructuralist theory.18 For instance, Verena Conley's 1997 Ecopolitics, subtitled "The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought," first focuses on the environment as if it were just another category (alongside writing, presence, voice, etc.) and then offers an intellectual history of French thought in the 1960s, in place of an examination of the grounds for the new theory. Conley does much to explain what certain French authors said about the environment and nothing to acknowledge why ecology presents an essential challenge for poststructuralism and why, vice versa, poststructuralism presents an essential challenge for ecology. A recent article by Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote titled "The Sustainable Humanities," published in the PMLA, only confirms that more recent ecocriticism has not done any better on this front. While LeMenager and Foote show how the humanities can contribute to "social-ecology" and even "confront hyperindustrial modernity," and while they call for interdisciplinary collaboration, they do not mention how the humanities can make peace with science, which must be the single most important prerequisite for any discourse that can be in some kind of balance or call itself sustainable.19 In the same issue of the PMLA another contributor, Stacy Alaimo, goes so far as to suggest that ecological practice is "too important to be left to the experts."20In general, ecocriticism seems satisfied with the assumption that deconstruction naturally goes with the new epistemology and secure in the idea that environmentalist posthumanism can be created by undermining the dominant paradigm of "anthropocentrism" as, for instance, Lorraine Code argues in her Ecological Thinking. There is little effort to examine how resistance and deconstructive subversion lead to sustainable practices or how we get from being suspicious of science (and nature) to any kind of environmental policy. Not to mention that the concept of the environment is a wholly new entity without precedent in the humanities, that the new discourse merges or "implicates" human and natural history and does so on a global scale-global scale being a notion that is only beginning to be recognized by philosophy.Fortunately, there are useful poststructuralist studies outside ecocriticism that have dealt successfully with some of these issues in a different context. I have in mind chiefly works on human-animal relations that constitute the latest stage in the ethical turn in poststructuralist theory, works like Kelly Oliver's Animal Lessons.21 They offer an obvious model for how to understand the relation between the human and nature in general. They, however, stop before addressing the context within which the animal and the human interact, underscoring where the limitations of current poststructuralist theory lie.And so we are brought to the key question facing environmentalism today: how can there be a universal theory of sustainability that would be all encompassing (meaning, scientific), would assume the total interconnectedness, centrality, and urgency of environmental issues, and, at the same time, take into account the proposition of poststructuralism that there is no universal (in Kant's sense, valid for all), that a total or all-encompassing discourse is a metaphysical concept, that fragmentariness characterizes phenomena, that there is no central issue, no one theory?To make my task manageable, in this article I focus on showing the ways in which poststructuralism is already talking about nature. I thus demonstrate that there is already such a thing as poststructuralist science, which only needs to be acknowledged as such. As I go, I offer some conclusions and solutions concerning, specifically, how nature might appear in a poststructuralist discourse, as the beginnings of a discussion that must continue.We start with the definition of nature and a founding structuralist text, Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which opens with a general theory of how society and nature interrelate.22 The text is usually understood as marking the beginning of the reign of a theory of cultural construction that denies nature. We are going to read it, to the contrary, as the first theory in the history of Western philosophy that makes it possible for the humanities to address nature because it places nature in its proper (scientifically understood) place in respect to culture.Following Freud, Lévi-Strauss, who like Freud believed himself to be a scientist, supposes that a human is a "biological being and a social individual."23 The question for him was how the two orders, nature and culture, relate to one another. The relation, he thought, could not be a dualism of separated spheres, one biological and one social, because "physico-biological and ... psycho-social stimuli often arouse similar reactions."24 A human subject, then, represents an "integration of the biological and social sources of ... behavior."25 If this is the case, if a human is a biological individual, then, for Lévi-Strauss, a science about the human being cannot be simply a biology, nor, on the other hand, simply a version of cultural construction theory, because the two orders that make up the human species, nature and culture, cannot be distinguished from one another.After this preliminary explanation, Lévi-Strauss focuses on finding a way to address this natureculture entity by looking for an example of an explicitly social rule that is a natural given for our species. His choice is the incest prohibition, which, as a Freudian, he assumes is valid for all, that is to say, universal for all cultures and periods. But underlying this prohibition is a more fundamental concept that we can use for the same purpose of identifying a universal rule regarding the tendency of human beings to organize their social arrangements and to organize them around sexual norms. According to this line of thinking that follows from Lévi-Strauss, humans are naturally social beings who regulate their sexuality and base everything they construct (meaning, their culture) on this type of norm, which they naturally create. This means that for the human species making culture by regulating sexuality is like a spider making a web. We do it with the ultimate purpose of ensuring the continuation of our kind. If this is the case, then the supposition that a human is a biological individual means that she is a product of a culture but that this culture that shapes her is itself a natural creation.If we accept this way of thinking, then, strictly speaking, we accept that all nature is both a natural and a cultural construct, one shaping the other. So, when we define natureculture this way, we ascribe to nature a twofold role: it is a totality that is real in so far as we produce it as such, make its issues urgent to our survival, and so on. But nature is also that force or cause that makes us into beings who can create it (nature) this or that way, as constructed or "real."Understanding natureculture this way as a self-defining entity implies that the human understanding of the world is "man made," that is to say, species specific. If our view of the world is species specific, this means in turn that there could be a knowledge whose terms are other than man made, a nonhuman knowledge made by another species that follows from its ways of being.At this point, before taking up Derrida's poststructuralist understanding of nature, I want to briefly address the last debate about poststructuralist science. I turn to what seems the definitive conclusion offered by Ian Hacking, whose chief question is the right one to be asked, namely, whether science can accept the idea of social construction.26In the polemically titled The Social Construction of What? Hacking argues that science and the social constructionism cannot meet because scientists see knowledge as objective and the social constructionists see it as subjective. Hacking offers a way to bring the two discourses together by explaining that scientific objectivity is epistemic, having to do with the knowledge of things. In contrast, subjectivity in social constructionism (and the humanities at large) is ontological, having to do with the existence of things. The objective conditions of knowing are those that do not depend on any individual characteristic, meaning that if conditions are the same, the interpretation must be the same as well. A "quark" defined a certain way would be a quark across cultures and history, because our explanations and measures depend on conventions, not on the conditions (time, place, context, point of view) under which we accept these definitions. When our knowledge does depend on these conditions, then we are dealing with what Hacking calls ontologically subjective characteristics of knowledge, which are changeable. Assignations, definitions, measurements, and so on are made with a certain intention, at a certain moment, for certain reasons, according to certain criteria, as a part of certain institutions of knowledge, by certain people, in a specific social context, and so on.Science and the humanities can easily mesh if Hacking is correct. Science can have its objectivity, and the humanities its social construction, since the two fields draw on two kinds of standards and two aspects of knowledge. The downside to this strategy is that it is, according to Hacking, trivial from the point of view of science. What science would recognize to be a social construction is just the "idea" of quarks, nothing more.27 Hacking's point here is that science can admit that the names it attaches to phenomena are socially defined, but it remains convinced that constructs do not play a determining role in knowledge.The problem with the view of science that Hacking presents is that it relies on a definition of knowledge that may not be scientific. This is because whatever the knowledge we construct, be it objective in epistemic sense or subjective in the ontological sense, it is always going to be species specific, in the sense defined by Lévi-Strauss, as a particular combination of nature and culture. It is the kind of knowledge that humans alone can produce, that follows from our particular way of being. So, in place of Hacking's distinction between a discourse defined by epistemic objectivity and a discourse defined by ontological subjectivity, I want to offer a distinction between a scientific and a nonscientific worldview, which itself depends on the species distinctiveness of the human animal.The difference between the two views consists, first, in how they regard knowledge. On the scientific view, knowledge has, like language, an independent status and is a representation or an approximation of how we see the world. On the nonscientific view, knowledge has a dependent status; it is dependent on some higher reality common to all species that is represented in a transparent and nonspecies-specific fashion. And, second, I take it that epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity (in Hacking's sense) are two sides of the same coin, both of which are necessary for a discourse to be scientific and both of which are absent when a view is not scientific. This is because epistemic objectivity is not absolute but relative. It is objective with respect to certain, changeable criteria that are themselves ontologically subjective in both senses of this term-they are defined at a certain time and place by certain individuals and, in general, they are particular to our species. (That they are particular to our species means, to repeat, that there is no universal viewpoint that we can use to transcend this particular, subjective-objective nature of human knowledge in order to formulate a science valid for all ways of being.)On the scientific view, the theory of gravity is correct not because physical phenomena-apples that always fall downward from trees-make its explanation obvious but because, much more simply, the claim it makes is correct according to certain criteria. The criteria, again, are codified as such and are subject to redefinitions and potentially endless alterations, including changes in the conditions under which they are created. After all, objectivity is objective in relation to the subjectivity of its criteria, not in an absolute sense. And likewise for any ontologically subjective criteria to meet the standards and be criteria-and not, say, random whims-they need to meet certain epistemically objective standards. (And then, further, this is after all only knowledge produced by humans and particular to their species.)Based on these two suppositions, we can draw a distinction between, on the one hand, a scientific discourse that recognizes that all knowledge is relational, mediated, and constructed around rules specific to it and, on the other hand, a nonscientific discourse that pretends to speak the language of nature and to have a direct, total access to the real world. We call one scientific because it assumes that knowledge is relational, subject to verification, and species specific. The other we call antiscientific, absolute, or literal because it is defined by the belief that a coincidence between discourse and physical phenomena constitutes a self-evident validation of its views and because it never takes the species difference into account.Strictly speaking, the nonscientific worldview is also antiscientific. It rejects any form of knowing, be it scientific or humanistic, because it understands that the world has an inherent order and believes that knowledge is merely an adequate, dependent expression of that order using symbols, in a context that is transparent, with tools that carry no significance. Being one with nature, this view can be either true or false, since its only criterion is self-evidence, or its identity with objects. When the information it provides is true, it is also absolute. The downside of this kind of view is that, since it is literal, the truth of its claims cannot be verified outside of this discourse by an independent account. Because its conclusions cannot be proven to be correct in any other but a self-evident manner, faith is the fundamental dimension of this discourse: it is grounded in our belief that the Creator (or Nature) and we speak the same language.According to the scientific worldview, on the other hand, all knowledge is a construct, even the second law of thermodynamics, which is unlikely to change. It is much like a map, perhaps identical to the territory it maps, but ontologically different from it in that this knowledge-each and every element of it-is in some way constructed by a specific species. When constructed to satisfy epistemic objectivity (the same conditions and assumptions), a quark (a novel) should appear the same to any and all interpreters (that, of course, belong to our species or can understand our viewpoint). If this is not the case, if we do not see conclusions and determinations as being the result of certain independent deliberative processes that are epistemically objective, there can be no understanding. In place of understanding, there would be some kind of direct or absolute intuition, which is what knowledge is on the antiscientific worldview.Following this line of thinking, we reach a conclusion different from Hacking's about why ontological subjectivism and epistemic objectivism are two necessary and inseparable aspects of all forms of knowledge, whether that knowledge be acquired through mathematics or literary analysis. Epistemic objectivism and ontological subjectivism are dependent terms defined in relation to one another. Epistemic objectivism, to repeat, requires knowledge to be recognized as an independent representational form, or a construct, which is the condition for its objectivity. Further, it requires knowledge to be created according to verifiable criteria that are themselves subject to redefinition. Because they can be verified and changed, these criteria according to which our knowledge is objective are themselves subjective (or species particular). This then means that in order for knowledge to be objective it must also be subjective. Without meeting both standards and doing so following a specific procedure, knowledge is mere information.A scientist who believes that she speaks the universal language of nature is not a scientist but a poet of sorts who is in the business of deciphering the natural word. Her theory might still have scientific merit, as did Newton's theory of gravity-Newton, indeed, was not a scientist but an alchemist who authored some important scientific theories-if it meets certain standards for correctness. When the same theory ceases to meet these criteria because, for instance, a new interpretative framework is offered by another theory, then it will no longer be regarded as correct. The same logic applies, or should apply, to the humanities. An author's beliefs do not decide the value of her project. The value of the project rather depends on epistemic standards of our discipline.So far our discussion has only addressed modern notions of science and knowledge; we have yet to define what poststructuralism adds. The chief idea of poststructuralism, namely, that there is no totality, follows from the assumption that knowledge is a construct. Because knowledge is a construct, it cannot be a closed, whole, or total system; that is, there cannot be a full account of it, since each new theory about it adds to the construct. Earlier philosophers, Kant, for instance, recognized the split in knowledge between what it can know (the world as it appears to us) and what it cannot know (the world as such), but Kant went on to add that the representation we create about the world can still be absolute as a representation. Poststructuralism shows that, for structural reasons-because of the nature of representation, which it understands differently than Kant did-the construction of the world cannot achieve such total or absolute closure. This means that our knowledge is open by virtue of what it is. It is incomplete ontologically. According to this line of thinking, science is not only an independent discourse but also an incomplete discourse that cannot fully define itself.The difference between a scientific and a nonscientific view can be also expressed in terms of the much discussed and regularly misunderstood claim by Jacques Derrida that there is no outside-text. The claim means, simply, that there exist no independent criteria (textual or nontextual) according to which we can make a distinction between what a text is and what a text is not. Consequently, nothing stands in the way of poststructuralism calling a text an object and claiming that there is no outside-object.28 This is because to the two claims-text is an object, object is a text-are identical. For the worldview I am calling nonscientific, literalism-text is a text, object is an object, outside is an outside, inside an inside-is guaranteed by whatever extrahuman or alien force it is that holds this self-evident reality together.I now turn to how poststructuralism talks about nature with an examination of Derrida's "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." I have chosen this text because it is a work in which key issues as various as body, subject, politics, community, ethics, and so forth come together and find a sort of culmination around this issue of species difference.29 I begin by agreeing with the rather straightforward interpretation that, in it, an animal teaches a human that he is a human being, the point being to deconstruct the difference between the two kinds. My chief interest is in the supposition on which this lesson is based, that animals and human beings share the same space and so the same subjectivity (though this will not mean that the difference between them disappears).As I try to show, if this is the case, if animals (think of a humananimal) make us human, we cannot stop at animals but must also include all living things that are in that space, supposing thus that there is a certain larger entity (nature!) to which the humananimal belongs. This because we don't want to go so far as to abolish the difference between human and animal but only to explain anew how this difference is defined (in respect to a certain context we call nature or even the universe). The nature of the universal quality that defines the space that is shared by humananimal as well as by other species does not have to be the same as the universal supposed by science (traditionally, a universal based on a kind or genre), but it must be a whole that science can recognize and validate as a concept.The scene or scenario that "The Animal That Therefore I Am" comments on is simple enough. Derrida comes out of the bathroom, meets the eyes of his cat, and realizes that he is naked. Normally, such an encounter confirms to philosophers their superiority over other animals, since, to put it very simply, only one of them can write a treatise about the other. The encounter helps philosophers to explain morality because it distinguishes between a kind that can feel shame from a kind that cannot, a kind that has a face from a kind that does not, a kind that can respond (or confront) from a kind that cannot. Derrida's point is the inverse-human shame is essentially related to the animal in the sense that it was historically conceived based on an encounter between two different species. If the animal cannot feel shame, it still participates, as a negative example, in the definition of it and hence in the determination of the being of being human.30And so, for Derrida, species distinction is necessary for crucial ethical

Ecocriticism · Environmental philosophy · Environmentalism · Ethos · Vision · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism

• The Nature of Comparison

  Václav Paris•Comparative Literature Studies•2020

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• The Environmental Imagination

  Open Access•Lawrence Buell•Environmental Imagination•1996

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• Ecology without Nature

  Timothy Morton•Ecology Without Nature•2009

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• Writing and Difference

  Jacques Derrida, Alan Bass•Writing and Difference•2001

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• Ecological Thinking

  Lorraine Code•Ecological thinking•2006

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• The Elementary Structures of Kinship

  Claude Levi‐Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss•The elementary structures of…•1969

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• "But It Is Above All Not True"

  Open Access•Arkady Plotnitsky•Postmodern Culture•1997

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• Eating Meat and Eating People

  Open Access•Cora Diamond•Philosophy•1978

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• The Social Construction of What

  Ian Hacking•Social Construction of What?•2000

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• The Truth of Ecology

  Dana Phillips•The truth of ecology•2003

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• Earth in the Balance

  Al Gore•Earth in the Balance•2007

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• Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts

  Hubert Zapf•New Literary History•2008

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• Politics of Nature

  Bruno Latour, Caitlin Porter et al.•Politics of Nature•2004

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