UNNATURAL CONSTRUCTIONS - Making Sense of Nature - page 141

to a conception that human action is organised in distinctive ways
across space and through time, in which power inequalities play a con-
stitutive role in structuring thought and action. 'Capitalist natures',
the Marxists argue, are hybrids of political-economic rationalities
and actions and the material properties of human bodies and non-
human entities. These material arrangements and alterations of 'nature',
Marxists argue, are embodiments of human intentionality and action
that reflect specific social relations of class inequality. The materials
enrolled, however, are not reducible to these social relations but are
a means by which those relations are given form and sometimes chal-
lenged. Nigel Clark (2011) has argued that neither the Marxists nor the
likes of Latour, Ingold or Haraway have yet appreciated the asymmetri-
cal nature of many of our worldly entanglements. He comes close to a
new naturalism that posits 'nature' as something separate from and far
more powerful than humanity.
I'm very sympathetic to these and other attempts to alter the very basis
upon which we understand our place in the world, but perhaps the dif-
ferences between 'constructionist' and 'post-constructionist' approaches to
understanding what we call nature (and its collateral terms) have been some-
what overdrawn. In his book The social construction of what? , philosopher Ian
Hacking helpfully identifies different meanings of the term 'construction' in
recent social science debates, criticising those that seem far fetched. He sug-
gests we might usefully 'retain one element of its literal meaning, [namely]
that of building or assembling from parts' (Hacking, 1999: 49). Just as a
house is a human construction, something made intentionally according
to a design, it's also constructed out of non-human things (bricks, mortar,
etc.) without which the design would be mere wishful thinking. Similarly,
representations of nature, be they verbal or visual, on television or in a
book, are the products of our values and goals (notwithstanding that this
isn't always advertised or obvious). To have any influence on us or on what
they refer to, at least some of these representations must have a tangible
relationship with a biophysical world that at some level exists, regardless
of them - a world that knows nothing of the values and goals according
to which we discuss, respond to and intervene in it. 25 For us, the world of
'nature' has agency and efficacy not 'in itself ' but rather in relation to the
diverse ways we think about and act towards it. As I've shown in this chap-
ter, that relationality is not always made plain in the representations that
arise from and affect it. Here I agree entirely with the likes of Latour, Ingold
and Haraway (see Box 4.1) : if the world's relational character obliged us to
represent it thus, there'd be no need to question representations that cleave
it into bits and pieces. These writers would be out of business, as indeed
would I.