It preceded us, surrounds us and will succeed us; it was, is and will be spontaneously generated without us; it may be under all sorts of influence, but that does not put an end to it, any more than a continent ceases to be because it has skyscrapers standing on it. When the British made their way through the jungle of Labuan, they did not produce but precisely encountered nature. The moment captured on the lithograph is not the moment when they made the sunlight and the water and the plants and the coal: all these things were there before them, belonging to the part of the world in whose absence they could not have been present. What they resolved to do with that nature was, however, up to them. Here supervened the moment of construction: they began to map, test, sell and buy the coal as material for their fossil economy, their Rome, built not in a day but over the course of the nineteenth century. We should reserve talk about ‘construction’ for that entity and demarcate it from the climate – throw constructionism back into society, as it were, and accept nature as a category sui generis. But that presupposes, of course, that the two can be distinguished from one another.
On Combined Development: Against Hybridism
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.
