Table Of ContentIn the
Nature of
Things
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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,
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publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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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
