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critics regard as untenable and objectionable. First, the physicality and mate-
rial agency of the non-social elements of the world seem to be discounted:
these elements become a
tabula rasa
upon which societies freely inscribe
their hopes, wishes and desires. Second, the door to cognitive, moral or
aesthetic relativism seems to be opened: any and all representations are
(apparently) as good as the next ones because the physical world's capac-
ity to act as a 'court of appeal' - adjudicating on true and false, better and
worse representations of nature - is denied.
To simplify a debate that was far more complicated than I can recount,
these criticisms were voiced loudly by physical scientists and environmen-
talists at the turn of the millennium. For instance, in the well-known hoax
he played on the cultural studies journal
Social Text
, the American physicist
Sokal (1996b: 62) mocked 'those who believe that the laws of physics are
mere social conventions' by inviting them to 'try transgressing those con-
earlier, the edited book
Reinventing nature? Responses to postmodern deconstruc-
tion
was published (Soule and Lease, 1995), in which several authors took
issue with the idea that environmental ethics and conservation might lack
any firm anchor in the realities of the non-human world. How could nature
be protected and restored, they asked, if we cannot separate facts about its
current condition from falsehoods and fantasies?
Phrased like this, the criticisms created a stand off between what Kate
Soper, in her germinal book
What is nature?
, called 'nature endorsing' and
'nature sceptical' positions:
while the one party invokes nature in reference to features of ourselves and
the world that are discourse independent, the other responds by querying the
supposed signifier of the signified - a stance it supports by pointing to the
multiple constructions placed upon 'nature' at different historical periods and
in different cultural contexts
...
(Soper, 1995: 4)
Soper aimed for a
rapprochement
between the two positions, recognising
that each had to imply the other for fear of being self-defeating. Thus, she
argued, 'nature' could not possibly be 'constructed' if societies did not have
material things, such as animals, DNA and trees, to be objects of represen-
tation and material modification in the first place. Conversely, she pointed
out, for people in different times and places these things are never knowable
'in themselves', either in a purely intellectual or even kinaesthetic sense.
Instead, they're always apprehended according to specific social assump-
tions, goals, values and desires. To suggest otherwise would make
us
the
tabula rasa
on which those things we call 'natural' inscribe
their
will. Soper's
'both/and' argument can thus be summarised as follows: what we call nature
exceeds
whatever constructions we place upon it in an epistemological or a
practical sense, but we can never grasp nature's 'autonomy' or 'otherness' in
a way that escapes the reach of these self-same constructions.
