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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 and political reactions’: a most remarkable admixture.³ Reading on, the author finds a story about the progress of the AIDS epidemic and the procrastination of medical companies; another one about a forest with rare species going up in smoke; yet another about frozen embryos, and so on – the entire paper is a blur. Wherever Latour turns his eyes, he sees hybrids. There is no way of telling where society ends and nature starts and vice versa; everything happens across the spheres or in the no man’s land between them; the world is composed of bastard breeds and trying to cut it in halves – one social, one natural – can only be done with a sword our better judgement must now sheathe.

At the core of Latour’s project and prestige, this argument requires some closer consideration.⁴ It has, to begin with, a quantitative, historical component. It says that the unions have recently proliferated to such an extent that the social and the natural can no longer be distinguished. In the early days of modernity, there were perhaps a few vacuum pumps around, but now the hybrids fill every horizon:

Where are we to classify the ozone hole story, or global warming or deforestation? Where are we to put these hybrids? Are they human? Human because they are our work. Are they natural? Natural because they are not our doing … There are so many hybrids that no one knows any longer how to lodge them in the old promised land of modernity.⁵

Ostensibly an admission of intellectual confusion – I have no idea how to understand something that is at once a product of human work and not – this is a rhetorical way of puncturing the modern illusion of a sharp demarcation between nature and society. Latour believes, of course, that the two have never been separated in any way, shape or form: hence ‘we have never been modern’. What is new is the sheer ubiquity of the crossbreeds, or the ‘quasi-objects’ or the ‘collectives’, which makes the fantasy impossible to sustain any longer: and once we realise this, we also come to see that ‘Nature and Society have no more existence than West and East.’⁶ The terms ‘do not designate domains of reality’. They are utterly arbitrary poles on a mental map, nothing more. ‘I am aiming’, Latour declares in The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, ‘at blurring the distinction between nature and society durably, so that we shall never have to go back to two distinct sets.’⁷ Let the categories dissolve in the real fluid.

We may take this to be the cardinal principle of hybridism, a general framework for coming to terms with the cobweb of society and nature by means of denying any polarity or duality inside it. Hybridism holds that reality is made up of hybrids of the social and the natural and that the two terms therefore have no referents any longer, if they ever did. In his Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, Graham Harman, Latour’s faithful squire, confirms the collapse of the ‘difference’ between society and nature as the pith of his thinking and restates the fix: ‘we must start by considering all entities in exactly the same way.’⁸ As we shall see, hybridism comes in other forms, with diverging emphases and points of attack, but they are all united in the conviction that ‘society’ and ‘nature’ are two words for an identity, hence superfluous (and noxious) signifiers – and Latour is never far away from them. In Environments, Natures and Social Theory, a recent survey of hybridist approaches, Damian F. White et al. recycle their basic rationale from his 1991 manifesto:

And all the while that this debate is going on, we become more and more aware that we live in worlds of multiple hybrid objects. They keep on popping up: from ozone layers to genetically modified crops, prosthetic implants to histories of modified landscapes. Are they social? Are they natural? Attempts to understand this hybrid world through the purification of objects and subjects into boxes labelled ‘society’ or ‘nature’ has limited utility.⁹

Note here a claim fundamental to hybridism: because natural and social phenomena have become compounds, the two cannot be differentiated by any other means than violence. Being mixed means being one.

A theoretical zeitgeist of sorts, the claim is on repeat in the writings of all the thinkers we have inspected so far. To take but two examples: due to anthropogenic transformation of the earth culminating in climate change, ‘it is impossible to now distinguish where humanity ends and nature begins’, writes Wapner; producing a similar list again headed by climate, Purdy charges that ‘the contrast between what is nature and what is not no longer makes sense.’¹⁰ It is the same epiphany as McKibben’s, coming in two versions: 1.) because they are so thoroughly mixed, society and nature do not exist (call this ontological hybridism); 2.) because of this level of admixture, there is no point, no use, no wisdom in telling the one apart from the other (call this methodological hybridism). Regularly overlapping, they share some significant problems.

HYBRIDISM IS A CARTESIANISM

Observers of the world often come across combinations. Consider students of religion. Syncretism is a rampant phenomenon in the history of faiths, hiding in the depths of most of them and sometimes brought to the surface in the shape of, say, the Druze belief system, in which doctrines of Hindu, Shi’ite, Platonic, Gnostic, Christian, Pythagorean, Jewish and other provenances are drawn together. Now, a scholar of the Druze faith will wonder at the distinctive unity this people has forged out of these fantastically disparate elements. She will study how they have been recombined into a novel totality; how they relate to each other in there; how they entered the faith over time; what particular Druze belief can be traced back to what source, and so on. But she will probably not say this: the Druze faith is a hybrid thing and so we must not try to sift out the Platonic from the Shiite components, whose traces have been lost in this blend; it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins; this is a common occurrence in the world of religion, so let us scrap the categories of Platonism and Shi’ism and the rest of it altogether. Saying something like that would not be considered an attempt to understand the Druze faith. It would be more like a surrender of the task.

In medicine, one studies the effects of substances on the human body: say, tobacco on the lungs. Where would such research have been led by the pronouncement that since tobacco and lungs are mixed in the bodies of smokers, the categories have become obsolete (if they ever were relevant) and hence the effects of one on the other cannot be meaningfully distinguished? Or consider how etymologists study languages. Does Spanish cancel out Arabic and Latin? Or the field of international relations: the European Union mixes Germany with Greece …

Hybridism as a guide to the world would certainly have some interesting political consequences. When Leon Trotsky scanned Tsarist Russia and distilled ‘the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’, he could perhaps have inferred that capitalism was now so deeply enmeshed in Tsarism that it had become pointless to track what parts of Russian social dynamics stemmed from it, let alone single it out for special treatment.¹¹ Then surely anti-capitalist revolution would have been an idle venture. Or, someone might point out that the very physical makeup of the territories occupied in 1967 is patterned by the commingling of Zionist and Palestinian matter – the air in Gaza hums with the sounds of drones and muezzins; houses in al-Khalil have settlers living on top of local families; toxic waste from colonies mix with water in the valleys of the West Bank – and hence purifying this situation into boxes labelled ‘the Zionist project’ and ‘the Palestinian people’ has limited utility, for the contrast between them no longer makes sense.

Now, a hybridist might object that these analogies are unfair. Platonism and Shi’ism are, after all, the same sort of thing. Air adulterated by cigarette smoke and pure air are modalities of the exact same substance. Germany and Greece are but two nations, capitalism and Tsarism two social forms, Zionists and Palestinians two groups of people – their combinations should provoke no surprise. They do not call for a revision of our ontologies or methods; they do not imply that reality is mongrelised to an extent few have seen; the unification of such similar components does not cancel out their difference. But such an objection would only reveal the problem at the root of hybridism. Only by postulating nature and society as categories located a universe apart does their combination warrant their collapse. Only with an implicit conception of them as more substantially unlike each other than any other two things can one conclude that their admixture, in contradistinction to so many humdrum alloys, disproves their existence. The revelation betrays itself – oh, so nature and society were not self-contained galaxies after all! Then we cannot talk about them any longer!

In the background lurks, again, the legacy of an extreme form of dualism. Latour likes to refer to it as ‘the modern constitution’; a more common genealogy derives it from the philosophy of René Descartes. He held that the mind and the body are two ‘distinct substances’. The body is extended in space and constituted of parts that can be sliced off and removed like cogs from a machine, in starkest possible contrast to the thinking mind. If a heart is cut out from a body, that body loses a vital component and ceases to be – but where is the heart of the mind? Where are its arms, its legs, its constituent parts potentially separated from each other? They are nowhere, Descartes argued, for the mind is a thing one and whole, indivisible, indestructible; it does not possess a corporeal shape. The body is a physical substance, but the mind is an ethereal, spiritual sort of thing. This is why the mind can live on and prosper without the body; after death and decomposition, it survives because it is made of utterly different stuff. ‘Two substances are said to be really distinct’, Descartes lays down his central criterion, ‘when each of them can exist without the other’: and here such is the case, Descartes being ‘certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it’.¹² His philosophy is a substance dualism.

In the debate on nature and society, critics of Cartesianism are in the habit of mapping that philosophy onto the pair.¹³ Descartes himself did not speak in terms of these categories – his concern was the problem of body and mind – but many observers have found in Western worldviews the fingerprint of that philosopher, his dualist model simply extended to the analogous realms. And, indeed, the all-too-common conceptual segregation of nature and society can be seen as its logical continuation. If only by default, rather than some explicit alignment with Descartes, a characteristically Cartesian view of nature and society treats them as distinct substances fundamentally detached from each other. There might be occasional interstellar traffic between them, through some tiny pineal gland, but their essences are of opposite kinds and move in separate orbits.

Now, hybridism screams out its hostility to Cartesianism from every page it commands. It poses as the absolute negation of that obnoxious philosophy, since it refuses to countenance any distinction whatsoever between nature and society, to the point of denying their existence. That latter move, however – that rush to jettison the categories as soon as the extent of their entanglement comes into view – is, at a closer look, merely the flipside of substance dualism. Descartes himself spelled out its corollary: ‘to conceive of the union of two things is to conceive of them as one thing’.¹⁴ Anyone who believes that the body and the mind form a union would, he argued, be forced to recognise them as an undifferentiated oneness. By taking observations of their combination as so many reasons to expunge nature and society from the map of the world, hybridism updates this logic for our times. Moreover, it draws all of its rhetorical force from centuries of Cartesian thinking, to which the quantitative, historical component stands in exact proportion, the surprise at the proliferating combinations emanating from the legacy of extreme dualism: of this thinking, hybridism is not so much a rejection as a consequence. It is a negation of it only in the way the hangover is a negation of the binge. It is post-Cartesian in the sense that some scholars are post-Keynesian or post-Kantian: they carry the code of the original creed within themselves, if only in diluted form. Hybridism is to Cartesianism what e-cigarettes are to cigarettes.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IS A PROPERTY DUALISM

The mind, according to Descartes, is nowhere. It does not occupy any location in space. The substance of which it is made is not the kind that sits on a stool or lifts a weight or kicks a stone; it is defined precisely by not having extension, of being altogether otherworldly, cut off from mortal flesh. This philosophy gives rise to a well-known problem: that of causal interaction. If a stone is kicked down a path, it is because some foot has come into contact with it at a place. The foot has imparted motion to the stone, causing it to run over the ground; the two objects have interacted at the site of the collision, and that is how all causation occurs. For one thing to cause the behaviour of another, it must strike, brush, bump into, tickle or in some other way touch that thing at a shared location. But if the mind resides nowhere or only on its own numinous plane, where can it exert impact on the body? If the soul has no spatial position, how could it make contact with something physical? How do the two ever meet? It would be rather more occult than a concept hitting a billiard ball. Neither Descartes nor any other proponent of substance dualism has come up with a minimally satisfactory solution to this problem, and since one of the most conspicuous features of the relation between mind and body is that the two act upon one another, modern philosophy has written off that position as indefensible.¹⁵

But the cognate substance dualism is alive and well in conventional perceptions of society and nature. It is there whenever someone thinks or behaves as though society need not care about what happens in nature, however much the body of nature may bleed – as though it could exist without it. We can easily accept the critique of this version of Cartesian dualism developed by Val Plumwood in her two books Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason: such dualism is there whenever humans put it in their heads that they live in a region levitating somewhere above the biosphere, independent of it, free and able to bracket it off as an inferior order unrelated to theirs, except as a storehouse of resources they can use up in perpetuity.¹⁶ Not so much a philosophical programme declared by avid preachers, more a syndrome than a credo, this dualism is present in everything from neoclassical economics to climate change denial and sheer indifference to issues of ecology. Devised for negligence, it has its own causal interaction problem: it has no idea about how society can cause a crisis in nature or vice versa.

To realise that there is an ecological crisis with great potential to affect humans is to break with substance dualism. We are, it turns out, of exactly the same substance as nature, inhabit the same planet and constantly touch each other all over the place. In terms of the philosophy of mind, this is a commitment to substance monism. From here, however, there are two paths to choose between. One can go on to argue that the social and the natural not only share substance, but that they have no significant properties that tell them apart – a substance monism and property monism. This is the position of the hybridists, of Bruno Latour and, as it happens, of Val Plumwood: there is only one substance, and everything made of it has the same essential attributes (we shall soon see what these are). Then there is the view that society is made up of the same substance as nature, but has some highly distinctive properties – what in the philosophy of mind is known as substance monist property dualism.¹⁷ To tease out this position, we may first turn to Dale Jacquette’s The Philosophy of Mind: The Metaphysics of Consciousness, a masterpiece in defence of it.

The quandary of mind and body that Descartes struggled with to such unsatisfactory effect has not gone away. My brain is a physical entity. It contains cells, tissue, fluid, neurons, synapses, blood vessels, matter white and black and grey. But do these things also make up my mind? ‘My mind’, Jacquette writes, ‘on casual inspection contains memories, desires, expectations, immediate sensations, embarrassments, likes and dislikes. But my brain on casual inspection contains none of these things.’¹⁸ Brain events have weight and colour, but thoughts seem not to. What colour is my thought that Donald Trump is a racist? How much does it weigh? Does it swerve if I turn my car sharply to the right? How could the physicality of that thought as thought be pinpointed and measured? Suppose I attend a concert with Run the Jewels, and suppose the intensity of the performance is heightened by a jury having just acquitted a white policeman for shooting and killing a black man, and suppose a neuroscientist at this moment drops in to subject my brain to observation. She will see neurons firing and flaring like firecrackers, but she cannot possibly inspect or capture my conscious experience as such, the quality of taking in the musical furore or the feeling of shared fury. These subjective states appear nothing at all like the features of a material object. As such, they are not available for third-person observation in the way a microphone or a T-shirt is, nor can they be read off from neuroscientific instruments or described in a strictly physical language.¹⁹

At a first introspective glance, one may indeed be tempted to infer that the mind is something quite disparate from the body. But, then again, we have no hard evidence of disembodied thoughts, no knowledge of minds unattached to brains, no data to suggest that some sort of souls live on after their bodily beds have perished. We have, on the other hand, a surfeit of experiences of the mind directing the body to perform various deeds and of the body interfering with the workings of the mind; as for the latter causal route, anyone who has been under the influence of alcohol or psycho-active drugs can testify to its existence, and the assault on the senses during a concert must surely be the ignition of the mental fireworks. The relation appears to be one of dependence and difference. How can the two be reconciled?

The solution of substance monist property dualism – or just ‘property dualism’, more conveniently – begins with the recognition that the brain is the seat of all mental occurrences. The latter must come to an absolute, impassable end when the former ceases to be. But this suggests that the physical entity of the brain, and the human body as a whole, is a bearer of mental properties, which cannot themselves be reduced to sheer materiality or equated with physical components. They are lodged in the body and inextricable from it: hence they belong to the exact same substance. They are non-physical properties of the body, the sum of which makes up the mind.²⁰ Its signal marker is what Jacquette and other philosophers call ‘intentionality’. A thought is always about something. It points to an intended object, be it the daughter I long for, the food I crave, the argument I develop, the God I doubt, the storm I expect, the stomach pain that troubles me or the fascistisation of society that frightens me. In this context, ‘intentionality’ refers to an abstract relation between a mental state and an object, a link by which the former is directed towards the latter. It is an aspect of the thought itself – it is not this or that capillary or cortex that is about something; considered as a purely material entity, the brain is not turned towards a daughter or a dinner. It gives rise to the mental property of intentional thought, which is distinct from any physical property of the brain and inexpressible in the language pertinent to that underlying level. No one has yet explained how one could possibly scan the brain and pick out the neurochemical state that is about Donald Trump and not about Daenerys Targaryen.²¹

Moreover, when I think about Daenerys Targaryen and ponder her next move in the campaign for seizing Westeros, my thought is about a person who does not exist. Since she is a fictional figure, she cannot be physically connected to the material objects that make up my brain. Here it will not do to say that I am really thinking about the book by George R. R. Martin or the HBO series, since my thought concerns none of these things, but precisely Targaryen herself and her next tactical manoeuvre. I can think of many other things that do not exist in the here and now, inter alia a world that is six degrees warmer. This ability to engage with things that do not (yet) exist – something the brain and nervous system could never do, considered strictly as such – establishes a peculiar orientation towards the future, an openness to various options, the art of formulating a goal, faculties such as imagination and creativity and cunning. It follows that ‘the mind is a new category of entity in the material world.’²² Property dualists like Jacquette are adamant that there is nothing miraculous about this appearance – after all, science teaches us that life, with its amazing properties, evolved spontaneously once matter had organised itself into sufficiently complex patterns.²³ So why should not life at a certain stage of its evolution be able to develop the wonder of the mind? Intentionality is an emergent property that cannot be reduced to the bedrock on which it supervenes, and cannot exist without it. All thought is actualised by events in the brain, and all thought has at least one property the matter of the brain cannot have sensu strictu.²⁴

Property dualism, then, admits of only one substance – matter – but considers the human body a species of that substance in possession of uniquely mental properties. The beauty of this solution is that it avoids the Cartesian impotence in the face of the causal interaction problem while preserving the distinction between body and mind. As much as substance dualism fails on the former count, substance and property monism – or double monism – fails on the latter. Jacquette clinches his case with a particularly powerful example:

What if a history of the Watergate scandal were to be given in a book filled with nothing but chemical formulas describing the brain and other physical events that took place at the time involving participants in the break-in, wire-tapping and cover-up? … Would such a chemical history explain these social-political episodes, even to the neurophysiologist well-versed in understanding chemical symbolism? If anything, it appears that property monist explanations suffer from an explanatory disadvantage in comparison with property dualist accounts of social and psychological phenomena.²⁵

And here we are right back at the relation between society and nature.

While Cartesians spread their intellectual toxin, there was an alternative position: nature and society are material substances tout court, but the one cannot be equated with the other. We have never been in need of being told that we have never been modern, if by this is meant the insight that society and nature cannot be extricated from one another.²⁶ The tribe of historical materialists has always preached as much – indeed, in its very name is inscribed the insistence on human beings as made up of matter, while ‘historical’ implies that social relations cannot be deduced from it. Such relations are exactly as material in substance and utterly unthinkable outside of nature, but they also evince emergent properties different from that nature. Picture a tree. It grows out of the soil, draws nourishment from it, expires the moment it is cut off from it: yet it cannot be reduced to it. Nature is a soil for society, the fold out of which it grew and the envelope it can never break out of, but just as a tree can be told from its soil, society can be differentiated from nature, because it has shot up from the ground and branched off in untold directions over the course of what we refer to as history.²⁷

Bruno Latour, for one, knows this. He is aware that historical materialism has been in permanent opposition to Cartesianism, but he considers it the worst abomination of all – ‘those modernists par excellence, the Marxists’ – because it retains a notion of society and nature as a pair. The error is to perceive a contrast where none exists. ‘The dialectical interpretation changes nothing, for it maintains the two poles, contenting itself with setting them in motion through the dynamics of contradiction’ – worse, it makes ignorance of hybridity ‘still deeper than in the dualist paradigm since it feigns to overcome it by loops and spirals and other complex acrobatic figures. Dialectics literally beats around the bush.’²⁸ The bush, the thorny web of everything, is all there is. One must give Latour credit here for correctly identifying the difference between his approach and that of historical materialism: yes, dialectics is the dance of opposites and requires at least a dyad. Absolute monism rules out dialectics. Only property dualism can capture a dialectics of society and nature.

But what is this ‘society’ we are talking about? We already have a working definition of ‘nature’; one for its counterpart is needed too. A pithy, common-sense equivalent can be readily extracted from the Grundrisse: ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.’²⁹ That thing has developed properties that cannot be found in nature per se. It should now be clear how the matrix of positions in the philosophy of mind maps onto the nexus of nature and society: historical materialism is a substance monist property dualism. It is opposed to both Cartesian substance dualism and hybridist double monism (considering them two sides of the same coin).³⁰ We shall stake out the position in more detail below; for now, let us simply reiterate that there is nothing strange about two things being of the same substance and having distinct properties. Exactly as material, the tree and the chainsaw inhabit the same forest: that is why one can fell the other. But they also follow different laws of motion. That, also, is why one can fell the other.

And so it turns out that double monism has a very pressing causal interaction problem all of its own. If society has no properties that mark it off from the rest of the world – what we insist on calling nature – how can there possibly be such an awful amount of environmental destruction going on?

THE URGENCY OF PROPERTY DUALISM

Substance monist materialist property dualism about society and nature – or ‘property dualism’, for short – implies that there is nothing surprising about the combination of the realms. Rather, it is to be expected as the norm. Following Hailwood, we can say that the entwinement of social and natural relations is made not only possible but inevitable, given that the two are continuous parts of the material world ‘rather than utterly distinct orders of being’.³¹ What changes is how the combinations develop. Some might be innocuous and inconsequential, others benign and productive, others yet malign and destructive, but as such, they will be there for as long as humans with societies stick around. If combinations abound, however, by what procedure do we sift out their components? We may begin by applying a crude test: have humans constructed the component, or have they not? If it is social, then it has arisen through relations between humans as they have changed over time, and then it can also, in principle, be dismantled by their actions; if it is natural, it is not a humanly created product but rather a set of forces and causal powers independent of their agency, and hence it cannot be so disassembled (precisely the distinction Latour is out to erase: between a society ‘that we create through and through’ and a nature ‘that is not our doing’).³² Incidentally, it is often rather easy to conduct this test.

Consider the hole in the ozone layer, a favourite case of Latour’s.³³ One obviously social component of that unity is (or was) the manufacturing of chlorofluorocarbons for refrigerators and aerosol cans and other products sold by companies such as DuPont. One no less obviously natural component is the way the chlorine atoms of those substances react with ozone molecules in the stratosphere: breaking them down in the tens of thousands. The one component is just as material as the other, which is why they were able to interact. As a unity of opposites, the process of ozone depletion can be further analysed in its many other social and natural components, identified with our simple criteria – and as it happens, this is the indispensable premise for any solution to such a combined problem. Only after a process of isolating the social from the natural, hard on the heels of the discovery of their dangerous material combination, could the Montreal Protocol ban companies from producing any more chlorofluorocarbons. It was, in this regard, a bit like Trotskyism and Palestinian resistance. Spurning hybridist paralysis, it attacked the combination at the source of the danger.

Exactly contrary to the message of hybridism, it follows that the more problems of environmental degradation we confront, the more imperative it is to pick the unities apart in their poles. Far from abolishing it, ecological crises render the distinction between the social and the natural more essential than ever. Think of an oil spill. A company unleashes the liquid into a delta. There is a novel unity in place – oil and water are mixed – but this gives us no reason to treat the two elements of the situation as identical, or (the same thing) declare that one has devoured the other. Rather, we would want to know more about their specific properties. On the one hand, we have the biological diversity of the delta, the birthing seasons of the dolphins, the birds migrating in and out, the food chain, the wave action; on the other, the operating procedures of the corporation, the workings of the profit motive, the level of competition in the oil industry, the function of petroleum in the wider economy. To fateful effect, after an event in time, the two sets now lap the same shores, lending urgency to the study of their difference-in-unity – we need to know how they interact, what sort of damage the one does to the other and, most importantly, how the destruction can be brought to an end. This, as Alf Hornborg has recently argued, is the truly vital theoretical task: to maintain the analytical distinction so as to tease out how the properties of society intermingle with those of nature.³⁴ Only in this way can we save the possibility of removing the sources of ecological ruin.

And only thus can we conceive of the fossil economy as a historical phenomenon. Turning someone like Neil Smith inside out, Hornborg writes:

It is possible in principle to trace the interaction of factors deriving from Nature and Society. It should be feasible, for instance, to estimate what the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been today, if the additions deriving from human social processes had not occurred [indeed it is eminently feasible: the concentration would have been around 280 ppm, rather than the current 400+]. Human societies have transformed planetary carbon cycles, but not the carbon atoms themselves. If the categories of Nature and Society are obsolete, as it is currently fashionable to propose, this only applies to images of Nature and Society as bounded, distinct realms of reality.³⁵

Substance dualism makes environmental degradation that originates within society and loops back towards it inexplicable. So does double monism. Transcending the Cartesian legacy requires an abandonment of its philosophy, but by no means does it imply an endorsement of ontological or methodological hybridism, in which the dynamic interpenetration of the social and natural again becomes invisible and, as a consequence, unalterable. It is rather achieved through the development of a property dualism, which recognises that everything is connected to everything else (the Alpha of ecological science) and that some parties behave disruptively within that web (the Omega).

Thus relations of production are material and social but not natural. The carbon cycle is material and natural but not social. Through some events in time, the former moved to take up residence within the latter (like a chainsaw in a forest) – the historical moment depicted in the lithograph from Labuan. Only by seeing the British imperialists as agents on a very, very special mission, cutting their path through a nature whose ways were unknown to them, can we understand the causes and import of their actions. Nature did not impel them to search for coal; society did not set up the atmosphere. The fallout materialised at the intersection.

SOME PROBLEMS IN PROPERTY DUALISM

There is something unfortunate about Descartes and the philosophy of mind setting the terms of this debate. The mere positioning of society as analogous to the mind suggests an idealist baggage. Furthermore, a thought does not consume synapses or neural networks in order to live. No one has heard of a person who has exercised her mind so expansively and gluttonously that she has scooped out half of her brain, in the way it is possible for a human community to, say, deplete its soil through over-intensive farming. Thoughts are not metabolising creatures; their relation to the brain is not absorptive, dissipative, potentially exhaustive like that between humans and the rest of nature. Hence there is a risk of going astray along the parallel, and it is increased by certain problems in property dualism as a philosophy of the mind, on which its critics hammer hard. To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a mental substance and a physical substance can interact. But why should it be any easier to see how mental and physical properties could do so? If something has a non-physical character – a thought, for instance – how could it exercise influence on something as resolutely physical as the movements of a body? Property dualism, say the critics, has applauded itself for ejecting Descartes’ causal interaction problem only to invite it in through the back door. Positing any sort of mental causation of the behaviour of physical objects – notably human bodies – merely restates the insoluble riddle on another level.³⁶

Against this wounding charge, property dualists have devised several defences. Some retort that physical and mental properties are linked together in this particular kind of causation, the two sets not mutually exclusive but rather interdependent and jointly efficacious. Some suggest that certain physical events are ‘enabled’ by states of mind, while others posit the existence of ‘psychophysical laws’ whose inner workings we have yet to understand, but the traces of which we come across constantly.³⁷ If the conundrum has not to this date received a satisfactory and widely accepted solution, there is one very compelling reason to believe that some sort of solution must exist: the phenomenon of human action, topic of the next chapter. If I want to raise my arm in a salute, I do it. If I am subject to an electric shock or epileptic convulsion, my arm might swing upwards in the same movement, but only the former event counts as an action. The readily ascertainable fact that actions happen in this world strongly indicate that mental properties can have causal impact on bodies, even if we do not yet know exactly how they go about doing it. The prices to be paid for accepting any of the two main alternatives – substance dualism, which clearly rules out interaction, and physicalism, which eradicates everything mental – seem prohibitive, leaving us with property dualism as the lodestar with the greatest promise for further explorations.³⁸

But here we shall halt and not go any deeper into the labyrinth of the philosophy of mind. Instead, we shall reformulate property dualism as a specific position on nature and society. The simplest way to understand the category of substance, for our purposes, is to think of an answer to the question ‘what kind of a thing is this?’ A property, on the other hand, is that described by an answer to the question ‘what is this thing like?’ Thus we can say that a flag is a physical thing, made up of atoms and other particles, and so is the stone. But the flag is red and flaps in the wind, whereas the stone is grey and falls to the ground almost as soon as it has been thrown. The two entities are of the same substance, but they have different properties pertaining to colour, shape, mass and weight, and this presents us with no mystery.

Now we can specify four tenets of our property dualism: 1.) Natural and social properties are distinct types of properties. 2.) Natural and social properties attach to material entities of one and the same substance. 3.) An entity can have both natural and social properties, so that it is a combination of the two. 4.) Social properties ultimately depend on natural properties, but not the other way around.

The distinction is one of reality, not a fancy of classification. It can be confirmed, in line with the above test, by asking a question that must necessarily be aetiological: is this property a result of relations between humans, or of structures and processes independent of human activity? Furthermore, we can now easily see that causal interaction poses no problem commensurate to that in the philosophy of mind, for social properties are not immaterial or mental any more than natural ones are.³⁹ The traffic between the two involves no crossing between the non-physical and the physical. If humans have minds, it must be because their complex bodily constitutions have given rise to them, which means that they have minds by nature; hence mental properties are inscribed on the natural side of the coin as much as on the social. It follows that social causation of the behaviour of physical objects is no ontological puzzle.

At this point, we need to take note of another definition of nature: as all that is. Some would say that nature is the cosmos as a whole, the infinite totality in which everything exists, the universe of the physical (and perhaps also the divine). On this view, the gentrification of a neighbourhood is exactly as natural as the rotation of a planet, since both take place within all that is. But using ‘nature’ in this rather trivial sense would be to miss what is at stake in the debate under consideration; no one questions the cosmos, save perhaps for the most dyed-in-the-wool transcendentalists, and no one juxtaposes the cosmic to the social. It is nature, on the realist definition, that occupies both roles. In no way does that definition imply, however, that the social stands on the side of, runs parallel to or floats somewhere above the natural: to the very contrary. Because it is of material substance, and because the material world is natural at root – nature having been alone until society sprung up in its midst – something social must have something natural as its substratum. Being material means being bound up with nature. If relations of production are material, they are also, by definition, built on and maintained through the natural. It is the material that connects the other two in the triangle, but not as a symmetrical or neutral baseline, for matter must fundamentally obey the laws of nature.⁴⁰ On the realist as much as on the cosmic definition, there is no being outside of nature. If this sounds paradoxical, it is because it is so, in a way eloquently rendered by Soper: ‘Nature is that which Humanity finds within itself, and to which it in some sense belongs, but also that from which it seems excluded in the very moment in which it reflects upon either its otherness or its belonging.’⁴¹ We shall try to specify this precarious position more fully and, crucially, return to the notion of ‘substratum’. For now, all of this might become a little clearer if we turn to the concept of emergence.

The classical example of emergence is water. That liquid can douse flames, even though one of its constituent parts (hydrogen) is highly flammable on its own, while the other (oxygen) makes things burn faster. H₂O freezes at zero degrees, whereas at that temperature H and O would both be gases. As the atoms are fixed in a certain arrangement at the level of the molecule, something novel emerges at that level, and the same goes for any number of other molecules, such as CO₂, which has the ability to wiggle in a way that blocks infrared light and sends it back from where it came, notably the earth, trapping heat inside the system. On its own, an atom of C or O could do nothing of the kind. Other famous examples include beehives and anthills: the individual bee or ant has a limited repertoire, often behaving erratically on its own, but the collective system exhibits a marvellously complex division of labour which assigns the member a task.⁴² More formally, an emergent property is a property of the system resulting from the organisation of its parts. Following recent advances in the studies of emergence – the ‘relational’ theory developed by Dave Elder-Vass in sociology, the ‘mutualist’ one by Carl Gillett in the philosophy of science – the source of novelty is precisely the complex relations between the components of an entity, be they atoms in a molecule, neurons in a brain or individual human beings in a society.⁴³ The specific mode by which the collective is composed shapes the roles filled by the components. It is more than just a cliché to say that ‘parts behave differently in wholes’ or that ‘wholes are more than the sum of their parts’.⁴⁴