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,
