In the Nature of Things This page intentionally left blank In the Nature of Things University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota We gratefully acknowledge the following permissions: "Voices from the Whirlwind" by William E. Connolly was first published in The Augustinian Imperative-. A Reflection on the Politics of Morality by William E. Connolly, copyright 1993 by Sage Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission. An earlier version of Shane Phelan, "Intimate Distance: The Dislocation of Nature in Modernity," was published in Western Political Quarterly 45:2 (June 1992): 385-402, reprinted by permission of the University of Utah, copyright holder. "Building Wilderness" by Wade Sikorski is drawn from material included by permission of the University of Alabama Press, from Modernity and Technology-. Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man, by Wade Sikorski, © 1993 the University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455-3092 Printed on recycled paper (50% recycled/10% post-consumer) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data In the nature of things : language, politics, and the environment / Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2307-4 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8166-2308-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Human ecology— Philosophy. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Human ecology—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Environmental protection—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Bennett, Jane, 1957- II. Chaloupka, William, 1948- GF21.I53 1993 304.2'01-dc20 92-47101 CIP The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. CONTENTS Introduction: TV Dinners and the Organic Brunch vii Part I The Call of the Wild Chapter 1 The Great Wild Hope: Nature, Environmentalism, and the Open Secret William Chaloupka and R. McGreggor Cawley 3 Chapter 2 Building Wilderness Wade Sikorski 24 Chapter 3 Intimate Distance: The Dislocation of Nature in Modernity Shane Phelan 44 Part II Animal and Artifice Chapter 4 "Manning" the Frontiers: The Politics of (Human) Nature in Blade Runner Michael J. Shapiro 65 Chapter 5 Brave New World in the Discourses of Reproductive and Genetic Technologies Valerie Hartouni 85 Chapter 6 Going Wild: The Contested Terrain of Nature Jan E. Dizard 1 1 Part III Environmentalist Talk Chapter 7 Restoring Nature: Natives and Exotics John Rodman 139 V vi Contents Chapter 8 Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Ruse of Recycling Timothy W. Luke 154 Chapter 9 Green Fields/Brown Skin: Posting as a Sign of Recognition Cheri Lucas Jennings and Bruce H. Jennings 173 Part IV The Order(ing) of Nature Chapter 10 Voices from the Whirlwind William E. Connolly 197 Chapter 11 Ecotones and Environmental Ethics: Adorno and Lopez Romand Coles 226 Chapter 12 Primate Visions and Alter-Tales Jane Bennett 250 Contributors 267 Index 271 Introduction TV Dinners and the Organic Brunch There has grown up in the United States in the late twentieth century a profuse and polyglot discourse about "nature." Profuse because the cate- gory "nature" encompasses so much—the geological, biological, and me- teorological "environment"; animals and plants; human bodies; and the in- herent character or moral essence we seek to discern in all of the above. Polyglot for the same reason. Despite the diffuseness of its object, however, this nature discourse has a kind of structure. It has tended to revolve, at least until quite recently, around two poles, two sets of assumptions, priorities, dreams, and convic- tions. The first is displayed in a scene from Jim Jarmusch's 1985 film, Stranger than Paradise. In it, a young woman who has just emigrated from Hungary to New York sits in the 1950s-style apartment of her American cousin, a sleazy, small-time operator who is not particularly pleased to see her. Both are sullen. He: You sure you don't want a TV dinner? She: Yes, I'm not hungry, (pause) Why is it called a TV dinner? He: Uh. Spose to eat it while you watch TV (pause) Television. She: I know what a TV is. (pause) Where does that meat come from? vii viii Introduction He: Whattaya mean? She: What does that meat come from? He: I guess it comes from a cow. She: From a cow? It doesn't even look like meat. He: (sigh) Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, my vegetables, I got my dessert and I even don't have to wash the dishes. What does it mean that our meat bears no sign of once being something animate? That we call it by names different from the animal it used to be? Why would the sight of a whole dead animal on the table—a sight that was, up until the seventeenth century, appetizing to Europeans —now disgust and disturb us? Perhaps we mask the animal status of our food in order to mask our own link to the animal world: to forget that we, like other ani- mals, die, decay, and eventually become food. Perhaps the sight of a whole dead animal on the table repels because it disrupts our self-image as the beings who transcend the merely natural, because it interferes with our attempt to define ourselves in contradistinction to the merely mortal. You see, you got your humans and then you got your animals and plants. We construct a social world; they are sunk in a natural one. We exist in the realm of freedom; they in the realm of necessity. Humans are intrinsically valuable subjects; nature is a set of resources, raw material for culture. But if this construction was convenient and even efficient, it also has proven to be unstable. The human body, for example, poses a problem for this set of definitions. Like a dead animal on the dinner table, the body is a beastly reminder. And so the body's affinity to meat must be disguised, its status as flesh concealed. Olfactory and visual evidence of digestion, sweat, defecation, arousal must be prevented or masked.1 Humans have long understood themselves in contrast to (and in the context of) the natural, the base, the animal-like. The play of disguises, of hide-and-seek, is an enduring cultural theme. But, even so, we find evi- dence (here and there, at the margins of the social scene) that the con- struction has developed and mutated. Consider the following recommen- dations, made in a seventeenth-century European book of manners: It is not a refined habit, when coming across something disgusting in the street . . . , to turn at once to one's companion ... and hold out the stinking thing for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, "I should like to know how much that stinks." Introduction ix Or this fifteenth-century admonition: Before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled.2 The premodern self needed these rules; we no longer do. We are more civilized; we have, that is, established more space between the human and the animal. Our threshold of repugnance for the animal-like has advanced—the body, like the physical environment, is to be subdued through science and technology, reshaped according to a conscious, ratio- nal design. But to describe the contemporary orientation to internal and external nature in terms of repugnance and mastery is not to tell the whole story. There is more to this grid of stabilities and instabilities. As an external tha we approach and avoid, "the natural" has also been constructed as a source of meaning and truth: something to be valued, cherished. Sometimes these elements —body and other, meaning and instability— come together, visible to the astute observer. Consider, for example, Michel Foucault's reading of the commonsense notion that truth is lodged in one's gut: Part of the modern technology of the self consists in using bodily desire to measure whether or not a person is being truthful. "Do you really mean it?" "Are you being honest with yourself?" These are questions people have come to answer through trying to chart what the body desires: if your body doesn't desire it, then you aren't being honest with yourself. Subjectivity has become yoked to sexuality: the truth of subjective self-consciousness is conceived in terms of measured bodily stimulation.3 Consider, in this same vein, the appeal of holistic medicine, the belief that organic vitamins, fabrics, and foods are somehow superior to synthetic counterparts, and the condemnatory power of the claim that a practice or belief is "unnatural." Consider, in short, the presumption that what is nat- ural is really real and even normal, that the structure of nature has existen- tial and moral significance. A more complete story of the contemporary orientation to nature, then, would say that although we try to master the environment and efface traces of nature in the body, we also regard them as indices of authenticity, as guides to the good. Another way to make this point is to say that "nature" has performed an identity function allied to an ontological one. Nature is the other against which the human is defined, the raw to the culturally cooked. But nature is also the original, the given versus the made, and as such it provides the comfort of an existential foundation. Nature in con- temporary environmental discourse, then, is not only the realm of beasts