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Nature*Culture

By Xiaoyao Guo

The age of climate change and ecological exigency has again called to the fore the human subject’s situated relationship with the natural world: Is there even a clear-cut distinction or dichotomy between “nature” and “culture” anymore? And if the differentiation still holds any explanatory power in today’s world, how can the human “culture” better register, represent, and care for the nonhuman “nature” – from biological species to geological milieux – in all their intricate and complex interactions with each other? The conceptual paradigm of NatureCulture, as championed originally and most famously by the feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Donna Haraway, emerges as a direct response and challenge to the intellectual legacy of both the Enlightenment and the high Modernism. Rather than holding onto the dualism between the subject and the object as well as the unyielding sovereignty and integrity of the former, various instantiations of the Nature*Culture paradigm, as encompassed by the asterisk here, propose ways to comprehend and theorize the inseparable co-constitution between the human and the other- as well as the more-than-human in the age of the sixth extinction and the capitalist ruins.

Nature versus Culture: Historical Context

The origin of the dualistic framework between subject and object, between mind and matter has been identified in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650). In proclaiming the absolute existence of the doubting and thinking subject through his now famous motto, “cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), Descartes paved the way for a modern philosophy of the enlightened subject that would become the foundation of the Western intellectual tradition. The Cartesian dualism between subject and object quickly found resonance in a parallel construction between culture and nature which was elaborated through the political philosophy of both Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704), to name two prominent examples. For Hobbes, the brutality of the English Civil War (1642-1651) proved the indispensable governance over the chaotic and violent state of (human) nature as “war of all against all,” necessitating hence the existence of culture as civilizing institutions. Locke explores the nature-culture dualism from his investigation of the philosophy of mind: he uses “tabula rasa” (“blank slate”) to describe the natural state of individuals when born and argues for the importance of “nurture” as imprinting perceptions and experiences onto the mind. Again, it is culture that takes on the crucial transformative role in developing and edifying the inferior nature.

Within the German canon, two moments warrant a brief mention. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) attempts to work out a more complex interactive model between nature and culture in his aesthetic theory. In his differentiation between the naïve and the sentimental poetry, the latter, as the modern form of poetry, is characterized precisely by a removal from, yet at the same time a longing (back) towards, nature. Similarly, in his treatise on the aesthetic education, the natural, sensuous state of individuals is first enhanced through reason to a moral state, yet this moral sense must not be perceived as externally imposed, but as reconciled with senses. This reconciliation can only be achieved through aesthetics. In both cases, culture is no longer the superior and transcending principle but must reckon with its natural origin and destination. More than two centuries later, such a co-constitution will be foregrounded again in an inversed way by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). In their interrogation of the Enlightenment logic, Horkheimer and Adorno teases out the pathology of the Enlightenment as the struggle of the bourgeois culture to detach itself from both the external and the internal nature. Yet in denouncing this dependence on nature, it confirms in turn its very survival instinct as the most natural instinct. Enlightenment examined in this light is far from the human domination of nature, but instead the symptom of repressing nature through and through.

Donna Haraway’s NatureCulture

Responding to the major constructivist turn of feminist theories by the 1990s informed by the postmodern challenge of dualistic thought, Donna Haraway has contributed throughout her prolific career an evolving storytelling that reconciles ontology and epistemology, being and knowing, with her focus on the nature of knowledge. In this context, NatureCulture comes into being as a way of contesting the separation and isolation, and hence any static, dualistic, or deterministic designation of either nature or culture. In Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), Haraway sketches out emergent dog-human NatureCultures through a shared “fleshly” world:

When “purebred” Cayenne, “mixed-breed” Roland, and I touch, we embody in the flesh the connections of the dogs and the people who made us possible. When I stroke my landmate Susan Caudill’s sensuous Great Pyrenees, Willem, I also touch relocated Canadian gray wolves, upscale Slovakian bears, and international restoration ecology, as well as dog shows and multi-national pastoral economies (Haraway 2003, 98).

Motivated by “forbidden conversations” and “oral intercourses” between the two species (Haraway 2003, 2), Haraway proffers a personal and intimate document that threads through theoretical and historical specific considerations of the joint lives of dogs and people. From the evolution and domestication of dogs to their social stereotypes, from the breeding of the Great Pyrenees and the Australian Shepherds to the cross-national shelters of street dogs in Puerto Rico, Haraway interweaves a culturally, historically, and species-specific companionship as co-habitation and co-evolution. Here, Haraway’s insight that “[b]eing do not preexist their relatings” (Haraway 2003, 6) already anticipates the concept of “entanglement” proposed by Karen Barad, one of Haraway’s central theoretical interlocutors. For Barad, entities do not first exist and then interact, but rather come into existence through intra-active entanglement. Intra-action and entanglement, which replace the mode of interaction, thus annul the intrinsic understanding of agency and acknowledge the impossibility of an absolute separation of classically understood objects. By the same token, to speak of NatureCulture rather than “nature and culture” is to emphasize this intra-active mode of co-constitution before the possibility of any separated agents. Precisely as historical, material, and political-ethical conditions does the model of NatureCulture unlock the possibility of entangling nature and culture through what Haraway calls the “significant otherness,” of which dogs are just one example.

Nature*Culture: Alongside and Beyond Haraway

Ever since Haraway’s NatureCulture, more nuanced and complicated understandings of Nature*Culture have followed alongside and beyond the original proposal. Bruno Latour, a fellow STS scholar as well as companion to Haraway in their shared non-dualistic approach to nature and culture, can be read as thinking along the same line with his somewhat different proposal of Nature/Culture. In his Facing Gaia (2017), Latour opens his consideration of the new climate regime and the intrusion of ecology into politics by challenging the wide-spread Enlightenment understanding of humanity as distinguished from nature. Nonetheless, rather than fixed, separate categories, nature and culture are merely two parts of the same concept. The scopic device from the Western painting tradition serves as the paradigmatic metaphor for Latour. The plane of the easel painting as seems to separate the beholding subject and the depicted object as two independent entities; however, it in fact distributes, as a medium, specific roles to both. The subject is now programmed to look at the depicted object in a certain way, and the object is placed, staged, and modulated for that very particular type of gaze from the beholding subject:

What has been invented by Western painting is a pair whose two members are equally bizarre, not to say exotic, a pairing that has not been observed in any other civilization: the object for this subject, the subject for this object (Latour 2017, 17).

It is thus meaningless, as Latour appeals, to suspend or reconcile the so-called nature-culture dichotomy without first acknowledging and investigating the mediating apparatus that distributes nature and culture as such in the first place. Latour’s caution articulates a wager against a “too ready, too soon” identification of our own Anthropocenic genealogy with the planet and a monist, totalizing conceptualization of nature: it is perhaps more crucial to examine what “nature” means in its various modes of being and relating, and to stay with the ensuing incongruencies. The proposal to “stay with the trouble” in the Harawayean spirit hence transforms our understanding of ecology under the age of climate change: “Ecology clearly is not the irruption of nature into the public space but the end of ‘nature’ as a concept that would allow us to sum up our relations to the world and pacify them” (Latour 2017, 36). As Latour’s reading of Caspar David Friedrich’s Great Enclosure shows, nature is no longer the Edenic garden for us to cultivate and contemplate. Its changed countenance nowadays calls for a new mode of perception as well as engagement from us.

Latour’s pressure on the process of mediation and representation of Nature*Culture recalls an earlier moment from the critical genealogy of the nature-culture divide. In drawing an analogy between the nature-culture divide and the gender difference within human society, Sherry Ortner explicates the inferior status of the female gender as cultural construction. However, women’s occupation of an intermediate and a “mediating” position between nature and culture biological, socially, and psychologically could also be reinterpreted as their very superiority:

If woman’s (culturally viewed) intermediacy between culture and nature has this implication of generalized ambiguity of meaning characteristic of marginal phenomena, then we are also in a better position to account for those cultural and historical “inversions” in which women are in some way or other symbolically aligned with culture and men with nature (Ortner 1974, 86).

Ortner’s examination of the cultural apparatus of mediation thus uncovers new ways of grasping culture and nature in their representations by holding onto their difference both in construction and consequences, an issue particularly crucial to the uneven distribution of environmental accountability and justice across the globe, as exemplified in recent postcolonial and indigenous scholarship (see also Environmental Justice).

Another kind of conceptual inversion animates the cultural geographer Nigel Clark’s writing. In his Inhuman Nature. Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011), Clark fleshes out an inversed entanglement between nature and culture based on our very fragility and exposedness. Justified as the concept of the Anthropocene could be in its affirmation of the anthropogenic impact onto nature, we should not forget the inhuman, uninhabitable side of our planet:

As fleshy, sensuous creatures, we have always been exposed to the energy and the inertia, the flow and the congealing, the mobilization and the halting of the earth. It is constitutive of our humanness, I argue, that we are inherently liable to being thrown off course by the eventualities of our planet (Clark 2011, xiv).

As a result, nature always intertwines us, with perils or allures, through its earthly volatility and our fleshly vulnerability. Yet here, the recognition of the overpowering nature is in no way intended to resurrect the nature-culture divide. Rather, for Clark, “[t]o be an open body, in this way, is also to be able to sense the need of others, to be touched, moved, swayed by the plight of strangers” (Clark 2011, xxi). To realize that we are still at the mercy of an alien nature beyond grasp is for Clark the path towards a genuinely precarious yet open-ended entanglement with nature predicated on mutual susceptibility and responsibility.

The variation of the Nature*Culture paradigm continues to proliferate across humanities and social sciences. In laying bare the consequences of the nature-culture dualism for ethnology, the French anthropologist Philippe Descola advocates a reconsideration of the self-other relationship underlying the discipline. Similarly, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s study on the human and nonhuman life of Matsutake captures various forms of Nature*Culture assemblage as mutually “contaminating” and transformative. However, the status of such a paradigm is anything but secure and uncontroversial: a recent debate between ecological theorists Andreas Malm and Jason W. Moore on the analytical value of a methodological dualism showcases Nature*Culture’s yet undecided future within academia. To today’s scholars working on environmental and ecological issues, perhaps it is more productive to see Nature*Culture as an open invitation to keep reflecting upon the murky entanglement between nature and culture: the asterisk should be taken as a road map for immense potentiality as well as a wedge stretching open the conceptual gap between the two poles as the space of co-constitution. Yet this proves to be the very core of any Nature*Culture paradigm: to hold on to the emergent affordances and risks of relating in various specificities. These specificities – historical, cultural, biological, geological, medial, and corporeal, among many others – are the conditions of possibility for environmental humanities: to perceive, (re)cognize, and (re)present nature as neither ontologically other nor purely constructed, but instead as an openness and open-endedness that transforms itself in its constant negotiation with both the representing subject and the represented object. As a conceptual paradigm, Nature*Culture has revealed and will continue revealing to us, the earthbound, who and where we are. 

 

Reference Works:

  • Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
  • Clark, Nigel. 2011. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage.
  • Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
  • Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Cambridge & Medford: Polity.
  • Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London & New York: Verso.
  • Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London & New York: Verso.
  • Moore, Jason W. 2022. “How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life: Towards a World-Historical Materialism in the Web of Life.” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 28, no. 1: 153-168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1127
  • Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, 68-87. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Parikka Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.