Toward a Critical Theory of Nature

Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics

Carl Cassegård

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350176270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become 'second nature', Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society's painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.

1

Introduction: What Is a Critical Theory of Nature?

This book sets out to develop a critical theory of nature. By that I mean a theoretical approach that aims at a critique of the reified social forms that regulate our interaction with nature. I will do my best to unpack this formulation in this chapter by clarifying what I mean by key terms such as “critique,” “reified forms,” and “nature.” But rather than diving straight into the explanatory work, I will start in a slightly roundabout way with two theoretical vignettes that will be useful points of reference for the subsequent discussion.

The first vignette takes us back to Ernst Bloch, great philosopher of Utopia and fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School. In an essay from 1929, “The Anxiety of the Engineer,” he paints the following picture of “the Americanized big city” where technology has achieved an apparent victory over nature. The stunning achievements of modern science, he claims, are accompanied by a feeling of vertigo.

The city of ever-increasing artificiality, in its detachment and distance from the natural landscape, is simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable that it is increasingly threatened by accidents to the same extent that it has rooted itself in midair – that is, the city is built upon roots that have grown more and more synthetic. This grandly suspended, inorganic metropolis must defend itself daily, hourly, against the elements as though against an enemy invasion.

(Bloch 1998: 307)

Today, when the cracks in the gigantic system that we inhabit are increasingly visible, we can surely recognize ourselves in this stunning image of pervasive anxiety. Not only do we seem unable to break out of the pathway to a hothouse earth, we also face a future with uncertain energy supply, an ongoing mass extinction and an increasing vulnerability to starvation and diseases. Among many, the anxiety is already giving way to panic and depression. To Bloch’s picture we might add that today’s environmental anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that many detrimental environmental effects only come with a time lag. Not only do we fear that things may go horribly wrong at the slightest misstep, we also fear that they may already be beyond repair. Like Oedipus, we fear catastrophes that we may already have caused, without being fully aware of it. In that sense, the anxiety comes with what Freud calls the uncanny, the return of familiar things that have been repressed. As Tim Morton (2013: 99) remarks, pleasant conversations about the weather have become impossible. Sunny days remind us of global warming and give us bad conscience. The city may imagine itself as rooted in midair, but what is repressed and shows up as anxiety is our awareness that it is in fact rooted in a soil that might be more than inert, obedient matter available for control. Friedrich Engels put it well in a classic passage in which he urges us not to flatter ourselves on account of our human conquest over nature: “For each such conquest takes its revenge on us” (Engels 1987b: 460). As in Bloch’s imagined city, we fear the punishment that awaits us for our technological hubris.

The second vignette takes us further back in time, to Hegel’s Science of Logic, written at the cusp of the industrial revolution in Europe The section on which I want to dwell is probably the clearest expression in his writings of the famous dialectical leap, or Umschlag, from quantity into quality—or to use his own expression: “the sudden conversion into a change of quality of a change which was apparently merely quantitative” (Hegel 1969: 335). According to Hegel, everything that exists is determined by magnitudes, or quantities. If a dwarf grows beyond a certain size it is no longer a dwarf. A piece of barren land must exceed a certain size before we call it a desert. To take a contemporary example, hot days must continue with a certain regularity before we speak of climate change, and so on. The size or magnitude (a quantity) is thus part of what defines the thing (a quality). The specific quantity, or quantum, is “the determination of the thing, which is destroyed if it is increased or diminished beyond this quantum” (Hegel 1969: 333f).

Hegel’s term for the magnitude that defines an entity is “measure.” Measure is paradoxical. This is because we usually don’t find anything in the concept of a thing that pinpoints the exact quantitative limit where a qualitative change must occur. This makes us think that we can vary the quantity without affecting the quality. A forest remains a forest even if we cut down one tree. A heap remains a heap even if we remove a grain of sand from it, and a hair pulled from a person’s head won’t make the person bald. But, obviously, if we keep cutting, removing, and pulling we eventually arrive at a point where the forest and the heap disappear and the person turns bald. What Hegel describes is the so-called sorites paradox (from the Greek word for heap). He concludes that

the destruction of anything which has a measure takes place through the alteration of its quantum. On the one hand, this destruction appears as unexpected, in so far as the quantum can be changed without altering the measure and the quality of the thing; but on the other hand, it is made into something quite easy to understand through the idea of gradualness.

(Hegel 1969: 334f)

In a magnificent passage that comes like a bolt out of the blue in Hegel’s otherwise seemingly apolitical discussion, he mentions the destruction of the State or of great fortunes as two examples:

Quantum … is the aspect of an existence which leaves it open to unsuspected attack and destruction. It is the cunning of the Notion to seize on this aspect of a reality where its quality does not seem to come into play and such is its cunning that the aggrandizement of a State or of a fortune, etc., which leads finally to disaster for the State or for the owner, even appear at first to be their good fortune.

(Hegel 1969: 336)

We should note that Hegel points out that the destruction is always unexpected, and this despite it being easy to understand what causes it. Curiously, it’s not ignorance that makes us surprised but our knowledge. We are surprised because our concepts tell us that small quantitative changes in things won’t affect their quality. We know that removing one grain of sand from a heap won’t make the heap disappear, because that’s part of the concept of a heap. That’s why politicians and capitalists, and others too, are justified in thinking that a little more aggrandizement won’t hurt.

Who can avoid thinking here of global warming? Even though we are aware that releasing greenhouse gases into the air will cause global catastrophe, we go on thinking that a little more won’t hurt. And we are quite correct in thinking so. Surely, it can’t possibly make any difference to the global climate whether we release an additional CO₂ molecule into the air or not, or whether we take the car to work or not. It’s precisely because we are correct that we will be so surprised when the catastrophe arrives. To put it differently, we can’t stand with a measurement instrument in hand and say: now the catastrophe begins. What happens is rather that, when the dialectical Umschlag finally occurs, we realize that the catastrophe has been going on all the time, and that we were in its midst even when things still seemed fine. The shift of perspective surprises us since it projects the origins of the catastrophic process back into the past. To awaken to the catastrophe of global warming is to realize not only that the catastrophe is here, but that it has been unfolding for a long time without us being aware of it, perhaps ever since the first steam engines. The dialectical transformation that Hegel describes is not just a one-way process whereby quantitative changes give rise to qualitative ones. It also involves an opposite movement through which the qualitative shift produces a new version of the past which points out which quantitative processes are relevant and important. That’s why even a sudden awareness of catastrophe often includes the realization that the catastrophe is old. The catastrophe started already when we cut the first tree, removed the first grain of sand, or plucked the first hair.

Hegel tells us that catastrophes can be understood only if we focus on both quantitative and qualitative processes. Catastrophes consist, on the one hand, in complex, interlocking processes of a quantitative nature, but, on the other hand, they are also conceptual Gestalt shifts, or shifts in perspective, that make us see things in a qualitatively new manner. We are compelled to these qualitative shifts by quantitative processes—such as the increase of atmospheric CO₂—but the compulsion is not of a causal nature, in the sense of a law-like regularity or automatic reflection. The Umschlag is not mechanical. It is a response to surprise, just like when we suddenly realize that a heap of sand is disappearing. This shows that Hegel, despite being an idealist, does not disregard experience. Concepts develop in response to experiences, and this development would have been unintelligible without the latter.

As for now, let us just remember that quantitative changes can be subversive. That insight is a source of anxiety but it also provides an opening for idealist self-criticism. It is hard to grasp the brittleness of things if we focus only on their quality, on the way they appear to us through our concepts. No matter how correct and justified we are in clinging to the quality of the world as we comprehend it, quantitative changes continually undermine and destabilize it, precisely because they take place below the radar of conceptual thinking.

Critical Materialism, Second Nature, and Catastrophe

What do these two vignettes tell us about a critical theory of nature?

Hegel and Bloch show how our attempts to master an unruly reality generate both anxiety and surprise. This relation, I suggest, can be grasped as a relation between form and matter. Form consists in the principles that structure our relationship to matter while matter has the potential to undermine form. This relation is central to the critical theory of nature.¹ The book will explore it in a variety of guises, for instance, when we discuss what Theodor W. Adorno calls the non-identity between concept and object or when we discuss Marxian concepts such as value and use-value or reification and metabolism. Exploring this relationship will help us understand both why forms seem so impervious to change and why they’re so brittle. As the two vignettes show, the semblance of stability can coexist with gradual processes and incongruities that, we sense, may develop into sweeping transformations.

That forms can be undermined by matter is relevant not only for understanding how society relates to nature but also to the possibility of critique. Both Bloch and Hegel point to the methodological importance of feelings such as anxiety or surprise for breaking out of the seeming closure or self-sufficiency of forms. Such feelings become a source of critique since, no matter how much society might appear rooted in midair, we sense that this semblance is false and that it remains dependent on elements that it shuts out from view. Marx too focused on the relation between form and matter as the site of contradictions that could be mobilized for the sake of critique. A clear example is the attention that he pays in Capital to experiences of the working day as glimpsed in reports and newspapers (Marx 1990: 340–416). The point of this material is not simply to flesh out his theory with empirical detail, but also to illuminate the contradiction between the dominant economic categories and the experience of the workers. It is inserted with a critical intent, as part of the critique of political economy.

This procedure for bringing out contradictions also characterizes the critical theory of nature and defines this approach as critical rather than traditional, to use Max Horkheimer’s classical distinction (2002a). While traditional theory aims at a neutral description of objective processes in nature or society from the standpoint of a contemplative observer, critical theory seeks to bring out contradictions, sharpen our awareness of them, and thereby strengthen the opposition to oppression and exploitation. Critical theory is supposed to be practical and emancipatory. In relation to nature, this means that its task is not primarily to conduct scientific inquiries into nature, but to sharpen our awareness of how we, as subjects, are related to nature and how we may relate to nature in our praxis.

Bloch’s and Hegel’s mention of cities, states, and great fortunes underscores that criticizing forms is no mere intellectual exercise. Forms are not just mental constructs but also a material reality. Importantly, the forms constitutive of the capitalist economy are reproduced as so-called “real abstractions” (Sohn-Rethel 1978) as part of people’s economic behavior. The value-form, for instance, is reproduced whenever we exchange products on the market whether we are conscious of it or not. As Marx writes, it is reproduced “behind the backs” of individuals since it is part of how capitalism works (Marx 1990: 135). Bloch is lucid in illuminating how the forms through which we relate to nature express the persistence of class and capitalism. It is that persistence, rather than any inherent property in technology per se, that has produced the present situation in which technology “stands in nature like an army of occupation in enemy territory” (Bloch 1995: 696). As we will see, the forms targeted by the critical theory of nature include not only the value-form but all forms that are systematically put into play and reproduced as part of capitalist society’s interaction with nature, including the division between “society” and “nature.”²

In the sections to follow I lay out the outlines of the critical theory of nature. I begin by taking up the concept of the Anthropocene to indicate the contemporary relevance of the dialectics of form and matter. We are then ready to have a closer look at the role assigned to matter in criticizing reified forms and how this role is connected to a distinctive form of materialism, which I call critical materialism. Three terms will play an especially important role: capitalism as second nature, materialism as critical practice, and catastrophes as the language of objects. A critical theory of nature needs, I suggest, to keep all three in view. Having argued for this threefold focus, I move on to explain the book’s usage of the concept of nature and a final section in which I sketch the overall structure of the book.

The Anthropocene, Second Nature, and the Reification of Nature

Much of the anxiety that Bloch discussed in connection with the “city of ever-increasing artificiality” is condensed and heightened to an unprecedented degree in the notion of the Anthropocene, which in recent years has gained extraordinary popularity as a term for the present geological epoch. Why, if it stands for the age in which humankind affects the earth in the manner of a geological force, does it seem so indelibly marked by anxiety, and even panic and regret? If it means that humanity is in charge, why does it seem to spell doom rather than freedom? How do we account for the paradox of the Anthropocene, which the environmental philosopher Clive Hamilton has referred to as the “bizarre situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves” (2017: viif)? We can rephrase this by asking: why do the social forms that structure our relationship to nature appear to be so resistant to change, despite an overwhelming number of people being aware of the catastrophic consequences of not changing them?

The paradox disappears when we recall that the immense powers referred to in the notion of the Anthropocene are not humanity’s but those of a second nature, namely, capitalism. As Daniel Cunha (2015: 68) points out: “That Man is presented as a blind geologic force, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in solar radiation, is an expression of the naturalized or fetishized form of social relations that is prevalent in capitalism.” According to Marx (1993: 196), capitalism generates a semblance of naturalness despite being a historical creation. Its laws come forward as ahistorical and eternal, as a fate that humans are unable to change. Georg Lukács (1971: 128), in whose writings the term “second nature” was applied to capitalism for the first time, defines it as a semblance, arising in society itself, of law-like and objective regularities beyond human control.³ In a sentence that strikingly anticipates the Anthropocene, Horkheimer and Adorno point to the “panic fear” that accompanies the perception of society as a second nature: “men expect that the world … will be set on fire by a totality which they themselves are and over which they have no control” (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997: 29). The fear inspired by the Anthropocene is a fear of our ghostlike fetishistic double, the second nature generated by capitalism that now confronts us as a deadly force threatening all life with extinction.

Analyzing and criticizing the grip of second nature on us and thereby helping us resist it is perhaps the central and most urgent task of a critical theory of nature. Here a word should be said about reification, the process through which the world comes to appear as a second nature. According to popular understanding, reification means treating human beings or human creations as things, but this is not how the concept will be used in this book.⁴ I believe that this popular understanding is at odds with or at least overlooks significant aspects of how the concept was used by the generation of social thinkers who introduced it in social thought—thinkers like Lukács, Bloch, and Adorno. To them reification had little to do with the opposition of humans and things, but rather meant that an object, human or not, appeared to possess an essence or substance independently of the process of its historical mediation. In this sense, even the act of identifying a person as human in distinction to, say, animals or things can be an instance of reification. Reification is not the opposite of the human but of the historical. “For all reification is a forgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their other aspects: when something of them has been forgotten,” Adorno writes in a letter to Walter Benjamin (Adorno & Benjamin 1999: 321). What Adorno describes here is how our perception of the world becomes colored by a reifying thing-form (or form of objectivity, Gegenständlichkeitsform, as Lukács called it). To me, this operation is the kernel of the notion of reification. Reification, in other words, is not just to treat human beings or human creations as things, but to treat any aspect of the dialectically constituted world...