Assistant Professor of Sociology, Michigan State University, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

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1 This article was downloaded by: [Michigan State University] On: 19 June 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number ] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Capitalism Nature Socialism Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Steven Vogel's against nature: An environmental ethic for ecological socialists? Alan P. Rudy a a Assistant Professor of Sociology, Michigan State University, To cite this Article Rudy, Alan P.(1998) 'Steven Vogel's against nature: An environmental ethic for ecological socialists?', Capitalism Nature Socialism, 9: 3, To link to this Article: DOI: / URL: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2 Against Nature Constructivism, for Active Materialism Downloaded By: [Michigan State University] At: 13:10 19 June 2010 I accept Steven Vogel's critique of the role of ideas of nature in critical theory. However, I find his alternative insufficient to move beyond the antinomies of active constructivism and passive materialism. Where Vogel and I separate is in our views as to the helpfulness that social constructivism provides to understanding "the 'natural' world of physical things surrounding us." For Vogel, the world is always already socially constructed. As a result, "nature" drops out as a moment of practice. Under his Hegelian eye, practice comes to represent the mediation of thought and activity, as opposed to materialist approaches which emphasize a dialectic of thought and world, thought and nature. This position is clearly the root of his book's title, Against Nature. I will argue for nature though not the nature of traditional materialism. De-naturing practice, Vogel asserts that the practical construction of built environments, whether wilderness or urban in character, "is difficult, is fallible, encounters resistance, requires planning, and so on." 1 The key for him is that the difficulties of practice can be asserted "without having necessarily at the same time to posit a static 'nature' independent of us that produces the difficulty, that causes the failures, that does the resisting." 2 Here we agree. A problem arises, however, when the next question is asked. That question is: "From where does the difficulty of practice come?" If the social environment is always already (and only) a social category, if practice represents a mediation of thought and activity which constructs the social environment, what is it about practice that is concrete and what is it that makes practice difficult? The assumption implicit in the text seems to be that there is something about the concreteness of practice that makes it difficult. 3 Do the difficulties lie in the concreteness of activity? In the constructions of thought? In the concreteness of thought? In the constructions of activity? 1 Vogel, op. cit., p Ibid., pp This seems to me to simply replace "nature" with "concrete," an unsatisfactory move. 28

3 While Vogel notes that his position "is not a decisive argument against those assumptions," he argues that "it does suggest that they are neither so self-evident nor so trivial as they might at first appear." 4 While he is correct that empiricist assumptions about nature are not sustainable, the alternative cannot be a strong constructivism wherein "difficulty" is asserted but unexplored. It is a deep problem that the difficulties of practice remain uninvestigated and it is a contradiction that these difficulties are implicitly attributed to an already rejected, and passively constraining, nature. The flaw in Vogel's argument is that in the process of asserting the active social construction of built environments he denies the contribution to practice of active material and ecological processes. Vogel is right that investigating "the real structure of labor," and "the socially organized practices of mediation that help to produce the 'natural' world of physical things surrounding us," is the key to developing critical theoretical environmental ethics. The terms that must be elaborated are "real" and "physical." We need to explore the mediations of the active materiality of practice and the material activity of nature which co-operate to construct the world we know. This is the approach elaborated by Elizabeth Bird, Andrew Feenberg, and Karen Barad. 5 Bird suggests that strong constructivist approaches avoid the question of the "validity" of scientific constructions and how to judge which are more valid, or useful, than others. The question of "validity" returns us to the horns of Lukacs' dilemma, his confusion about social theory and scientific methods, and the point at which I believe Vogel makes a Hegelian misstep. Concerns about the social and material adjudication of scientific validity and social usefulness represent different formulations of my questions about the roots of the difficulty and why some environments can be envisioned and built while others cannot. 4 Ibid., p Elizabeth A. R. Bird, "The Politics of Nature: An Interpretation of the Environmental Release Controversy Featuring Genetically Engineered Crop Protection." Unpublished PhD dissertation, History of Consciousness Board of Studies. UC Santa Cruz; Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1981); Karen Barad, "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction" in Lynn H. Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), pp

4 Natural-technical objects negotiate with scientists in laboratory and field by offering some signals and refusing others, and by confronting their interpreters with roadblocks, puzzles, contradictions, inconsistency, ambiguity, and surprises...it is not Nature itself that scientific knowledge represents, but the particular negotiation with and reconstruction of a natural-technical object. 6 Practice, here, represents an active dialectic of thought and the world through natural-technical objects, even if the social experience of nature is a reconstruction rather than linear representation. Vogel is right that the world does not determine consciousness. Where he veers off track is in making active idealism the centerpiece of his response to empiricist and romantic materialisms. Environments are thoroughly constructed and yet remain materially active. Where Vogel properly insists on activating the environmentally constructive practices of social and scientific subjects, the alternative presented here understands the relation between active subjects and active environments to be the key. For Andrew Feenberg, practical material consciousness emerges "through the perpetual mediation of the ever-new appearances in which reality comes to consciousness." By labor, culture and nature are transformed in a fashion which elicits generative processes which present transformed labor with new cultural and ecological conditions upon its "return." Throughout the course of scientific development, living nature too evolves under the impact of science, and contributes ever new material to the progress of research...[t]he nature of lived experience has the status of primary reality in which both subject and object participate. Nature is more than a social category and yet is always, and always already, a social category. This kind of active materialism allows us to see nature as more than a social construct which passively or contingently constrains, or makes difficult, the execution of social practice. Active materialism, or as Barad calls it "agential realism," makes possible an understanding of the cooperative negotiations of 6 Bird, op. cit., pp For "natural-technical objects," see Donna Haraway, "The High Cost of Information in Post-World War II Evolutionary Biology," Philosophical Forum, 13, 2-3, Feenberg, op. cit., p Ibid., pp

5 scientific and productive activity without embracing the undialectical, reified, and contemplative assumptions of empiricism. Seeing the material world as the dialectical construct of active subjects and active environmental processes allows us to begin to explore the relation between the spatial and temporal differentiation of labor and nature. Here, the quantitative and qualitative changes in cooperative labor processes are more important than the abstraction that is the mediation of thought and activity in practice. The historical differentiation and homogenization of capitalist labor processes can then be investigated in their material negotiations-relations-contradictions with particular ecological conditions. The future of critical environmentalism lies in the rethinking of the dialectics of social cooperation and ecological negotiation, in rethinking the contradictions of capitalist production and environmental reproduction. A synthetic form of materialism which embraces activist theories of cooperative knowledge construction and materialist theories of negotiated environmental construction is the key to such movement. As with Murray Bookchin's anarchist and mutualist response to the liberal and competitive assumptions of neoclassical and socialist thought, Vogel's book provides an important corrective to the problematic antinomies of nature and practice in critical theory. However, Vogel, like Bookchin, chooses an oppositional position. Bookchin opposes competition and domination with mutualism and communalism and Vogel opposes empiricism and materialism with constructivism and idealism. While the insights of each environmental philosopher are central to moving critical theories of nature and practice forward, the unmediated and totalizing character of their strong theoretical positions is undermined by the dualistic tack they take. The insights of the materialist anarchism of Bookchin and the idealist constructivism of Vogel are necessary, but not sufficient, for the active materialism we need as a predicate to the generation of an ecologically, socially and ethically sustainable future. Alan P. Rudy 9 Alan Rudy, "On the Dialectics of Capital and Nature," CNS, 5, 2, June, See Neil Smith's work on the geographic production of nature and space in Uneven Development (New York: Blackwell, 1984) for one approach to active materialism; see Derek Sayer's work on the cultural mediations of cooperation in The Violence of Abstraction (New York: Blackwell, 1987), for another. 31