The Progress of This Storm

Nature and Society in a Warming World

Andreas Malm

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786634153
• eBook ISBN: 9781786634146
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each other

In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency to set them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a counterargument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable.

1

On the Building of Nature:
Against Constructionism

AN EPIC CASE OF BAD HISTORICAL TIMING

In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein spots an ‘epic case of bad historical timing’: just as scientists awakened to the magnitude of global warming and called for a drastic change of course, governments, under neoliberal sway, surrendered the very idea of interfering with the self-driving market.¹ Another case can be added. Just as the biosphere began to catch fire, social theory retreated ever further from sooty matter, into the pure air of text. The introduction to an issue of Theory, Culture and Society devoted to climate change registers a late awakening: ‘The world of culture and virtuality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can “bite back”.’² Almost as disarmed as governments, a social theory sequestered in the cultural turn long faced climate change with an ingrained refusal to recognise – let alone intervene in – extra-discursive reality: no wonder it looked the other way.

As the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ climbed towards the 400 ppm mark, postmodernist philosophers advanced the view that what historians do is little more than invent images of the past. The real past, says Keith Jenkins, ‘doesn’t actually enter into historiography except rhetorically’: when the historian purports to relay events, what she is actually doing is giving a passionate speech embellished with cherry-picked data. All interpretations of the past are ‘fabricated’, ‘invented’, ‘metaphorical’, ‘self-referencing’ – having no basis outside of themselves – and hence equally valid; the sole ground for choosing one over the other is personal taste.³ In his already classic rebuttal of such historiography, In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans deploys Auschwitz as an overwhelming master-case; mutatis mutandis, we can expect global warming to be similarly used. To paraphrase Evans: global warming is not a discourse. It trivialises the suffering it generates to see it as a text. The excessive temperatures are not a piece of rhetoric. Global warming is indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of global warming, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.⁴

One premise of the postmodernist philosophy of history is incontrovertible: the past is gone forever and cannot be retrieved for sensory perception. Historians have access only to shards and fragments that happen to have survived the flames of time, and their representations of the past cannot be taken at face value. Consider the picture of the two British men in the rainforest of Labuan. Supposedly painting a scene that once took place in reality, how can we rely on it to correctly depict what happened? From this sceptical attitude – the stock and trade of historians, as so many have pointed out – postmodernists draw the eccentric conclusion that documents like this offer no peephole into the real past, for they are saturated by the power of discourse blocking the sight. And surely, the picture is overlaid with a set of discursive constructs: white men in virginal nature, picking out what belongs to them, finding the path to progress ‘savages’ have neglected, preparing to tame the raw. But it also appears to have a material substratum. We have reasons to believe that it refers not only to other images – of men, nature, progress, order – but likewise to an actual identification of the coal seams of Labuan by British imperial agents.⁵ Among those reasons is global warming itself. If the temperature on the earth is rising, it must be because myriad scenes such as in the Labuan forest have played out in the past: for ‘the causes of real effects cannot be unreal.’⁶ Present warming suggests that neither commanders of the Royal Navy nor latter-day historians can possibly have cooked up all these mountains of evidence for the consumption of fossil fuels in the past. To the contrary, the fossil economy must have been there for quite some time, before it became visible as a historical entity, existing independently of ideas about it – or else we would not be living on this warming planet. A generalised abnegation of the real past guarantees that the history of that economy cannot be written, or written only as free-wheeling fiction, which would scarcely be of any help.

Just as global warming is only one additional, particularly urgent reason to break with the neoliberal political paradigm, so it is but another nail in the coffin of anti-realism. But postmodernist disavowal dies hard. Much social theory continues to dispute the actuality not only of the past, but of nature. In Making Sense of Nature: Representation, Politics and Democracy, summing up decades of research, Noel Castree first subscribes to a common-sense definition of nature as that which antedates human agency and endures, even if in altered form, when human agents have worked on it.⁷ Then he builds an elaborate case for rejecting its existence. Since there are so many ways of thinking about nature, so many variegated meanings attached to it, so many powerful ‘epistemic communities’ – including geographers such as Castree himself – earning a living from representing it, so long a tradition of governing people through spurious reference to it, nature really ‘doesn’t exist “out there” (or “in here”, within us) waiting to be understood’, independent of mind, available for experience. ‘I thus regard “nature” as a particularly powerful fiction.’ Or: ‘nature exists only so long as we collectively believe it to exist’ – it ‘is an illusion’, ‘just what we think it is’ – or simply: ‘there’s no such thing as nature’.⁸ Its only reality pertains to its power as a figment of discourse.

In one of his extended case studies, Castree reads pamphlets from a timber company and the environmentalists fighting its plans to cut down the British Columbia forest of Clayoquot Sound in the 1980s. The former portrayed the forest as a resource to be harvested, the latter as a wildlife sanctuary to be protected for its own sake. Did either side represent it more accurately than the other? Impossible to say. There was no ‘pre-existing entity ontologically available to be re-presented in different ways’, no ‘“external nature”’, no forest as such prior to its being described; asking if Clayoquot Sound is a rare ecosystem is to pose a meaningless question.⁹ All natures are constructed within the social world; the one storyline is as fabricated as the other. One cannot reach beyond the filter of ideas, affects, projects to touch or smell the trunks and the moss as they really are.

What could this mean for global warming? Castree is consistent. ‘Global climate change is an idea’ – emphasis in original – ‘rather than simply a set of “real biophysical processes” occurring regardless of our representations of it.’¹⁰ The ontological status of global warming is that of an idea. So when the villages in a valley in Pakistan are swept away by a flood, or a monarch butterfly population collapses, or cities in Colombia run out of water due to extreme drought, it is not a real biophysical process but an idea that strikes them. The way to stop climate change would then be to give up that idea. Perhaps we can exchange it for global cooling. If we take Castree at his word – climate change is not a process in biophysical reality that occurs regardless of our representations of it, but an invention of the human mind: for such is all nature – these corollaries follow by necessity. It is unlikely that he would endorse them, which suggests that his argument about nature makes rather little sense of it, drawn as he is into the most banal form of the epistemic fallacy: just because we come to know about global warming through measurements and comparisons and concepts and deductions, it is in itself made up of those things.¹¹ We seem to be at a serious methodological disadvantage if we cannot reject that fallacy and affirm that there was in fact nature on Labuan – not in the sense of an idea, but of some objective, extra-discursive reality – in which the British found coal to burn, likewise in nature, with equally real consequences down the road. Understanding the historical phenomenon appears to require realism about the past and about nature.

Now Castree is far from the first to express the view that nature is fiction. Back in 1992, in the heyday of postmodernism, Donna Haraway pronounced that nature is ‘a powerful discursive construction’: it is ‘a trope. It is figure, construction, artefact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction’, and neither can organisms or bodies, which emerge out of discourse.¹² This was a staple of postmodernism, and it remains a popular notion – among certain academics, that is – until this day. In Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, Paul Wapner asserts that nature is ‘not a self-subsisting entity’ but ‘a contextualized idea’, ‘an ideational canvas’, ‘a projection of cultural understandings’, ‘a social construction’ – a view he finds both ‘solipsistic’ and ‘compelling’.¹³ We shall come across plenty of other cases.

That such a cloistered doctrine survives in the age of global warming must be deemed remarkable. It is even more so for the devastating refutations the doctrine has suffered.¹⁴ The fact that all sorts of ideas about nature whirl in and around human minds does not justify the conclusion that these cannot be distinguished from that which they are about: as a matter of course, conceptions of nature are culturally determined, but the referent is not thereby similarly constituted. Ten herders can draw very different portraits of the same goat, but that does not mean that the goat is a painting. If three hikers come down from a mountain with discrepant impressions – the first found it an easy trip; the second is heavily pregnant and could barely make it; the third is mostly struck by the novelty of snow – we do not thereby infer that they must have climbed three different mountains. We believe that the mountain is one, and that it has certain features, such as height, gradient, and extent of the snowpack, that exist in themselves regardless of how the hikers have perceived them. As humans, we cannot say what a storm is like without deploying language, but that does not mean that the storm is a linguistic entity or consists of speech acts.¹⁵

In fact, it is a trivial observation that ideas about nature are products of social life – so are all ideas – and a mysterious proposition that nature equals these ideas and change as they do. That would mean, for instance, that the sun once rotated around the earth and then swapped place with it. Either the actually existing forest contains a rich wildlife or it does not; either the biosphere is warming up or it is not – and how we come to regard the wildlife and the warming is another matter entirely. What Castree espouses, and others with him, is a form of constructionism about nature; although it might depart from the innocent insight that we think and talk when we think and talk about nature, it slides into the proposition that nature is thereby constructed, coming into the world through our ideas, and that no other nature exists.¹⁶ It is a constructionism of the idealist, neo-Kantian, distinctly postmodernist brand.¹⁷

It seems unable to inspire the kind of theory we need. Temperatures are not rising because people have thought about coal or made mental images of highways: that is not how environmental degradation happens. ‘In short’, in Kate Soper’s famous formulation, ‘it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer’, not a text that is heating up, ‘and the “real” thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier’ – what some social theory, even when it professes to deal with nature, continues to obsess about.¹⁸ What would an alternative view of nature look like? In What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, surely the most incisive inquiry into that question ever written, Soper defends the following answer: nature is ‘those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.’¹⁹ That definition deserves to be read again and memorised. Many others have been proposed – we shall inspect some of them below – but we shall treat this realist definition as capturing the essence of the realm we know as nature. The very existence of that realm thus defined, however, is hotly disputed.

THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE?

Can we really say that the climate of planet Earth, as a major component of nature, is independent of human activity – not created by humans? Is it not precisely the other way around now? This would seem to be a case for the theory of ‘the production of nature’. Laid out by Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, it says that nature is anything but independent; it might have been so in some distant pre-human mist but no longer. Nowadays, nature is produced to the core, from within, in its totality, as the forces of capital reshuffle and rework matter in accordance with their logic. When did primeval nature succumb to such awesome social power? Smith is unclear on this point. In some passages, he seems to argue that the production of nature is indeed a phenomenon specific to capitalism; in others, he hints at a much earlier date of human annexation. Unproduced nature ceases to exist wherever one species has set foot: ‘Human beings have produced whatever nature became accessible to them’ – not only over the past few centuries, but as long as they have cuddled in caves and foraged in forests.²⁰ Here, the purpose of the theory seems to be not so much to track a historical shift as to collapse the natural into the social altogether, irrespective of dates and epochs, a priori as it were. Indeed, Smith posits ‘a social priority of nature; nature is nothing if it is not social.’²¹ One geographer who has often stood up for his theory, Noel Castree, states that it ‘is intended to oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature’, postulating a fusion ‘from the very start’.²²

What are the analytical gains of this move? In the first edition of his classic from 1984, Smith precociously mentions anthropogenic climate change as one instance of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition
• 1. On the Building of Nature: Against Constructionism
• 2. On Combined Development: Against Hybridism
• 3. On What Matter Does: Against New Materialism
• 4. On Unicorns and Baboons: For Climate Realism
• 5. On the Perils of Property: Sketches for Tracking the Storm
• 6. On the Use of Opposites: In Praise of Polarisation
• 7. On Unruly Nature: An Experiment in Ecological Autonomism
• 8. Conclusion: One step back, two steps forwards
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index