The problem with “nature”

My buddy Riley and I have been having an ongoing debate for most of our friendship, but moreso recently, about the place of nature in our respective thought. In our recent exchanges I realized that by using the term “nature,” I may have been unnecessarily confusing, and my choice of words may not have been best for trying to communicate what I wanted to via the word “nature.”

Though I am definitely interested in things and processes that are natural, the word nature is too loaded with previous connotations. It seems to bring about an image in most people’s minds of something that is elsewhere, not a part of culture/civilization, and generally refers only to things that are unmediated by human beings. But all of these definitions of nature are incorrect in their most basic assumptions. Because I believe that nature cannot be distinct from anything else, which is to say that nature, in my thought, is entirely immanent. Nothing transcends nature, and nature does not transcend anything. And because it can’t transcend or separate from humans, it also cannot exist discretely and cannot thought of as unmediated by human action, especially in the age of global climate change.

So instead of nature I think that it is much better to say matter, or ecology. Matter in this sense, would be everything that there is, assuming that the universe is immanently material. And ecology describes the processes and relations that are inherent (natural) to the universe. I see this as also being the same as Buddha nature, or original nature in Zen. When I talk about nature, I am simply using a word as a place holder for something extralinguistic, a material ecology that cannot be summed up.

I think it is striking that in Bodily Natures, Alaimo does not actually talk much about nature as such. She talks a lot about bodies, about matter, and about the environment. She talks about nature mostly when she wants to distinguish her subject matter from the cliches of nature I critiqued above. The way that she finds continuities between the environment and our own bodies through examples such as pollution and the effects of carcinogenic or otherwise dangerous particulate matter in workplaces leaves little place for “nature.”

When she talks about Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, and its descriptions of the damage done by silica on miners’ bodies, it is never a case of man vs. nature. The silica is simultaneously natural, in its unadulterated geological form, and human/social in its form as silica dust, a byproduct of the mining industry. Similarly the bodies affected are both natural, in their ability to be permeated and changed by other things around them, and human/social, in their portrayal in a court case against the mining company as bodies whose race (African American) decided their degradation.

In fact, Alaimo is very careful never to define something by opposing it to something else, but to define things by their oppositions. So the truth of silica is not to be found in geology or environmental justice studies, but in both put together. There is something very Nietszchean about her refusal to ever rest on a single definition of anything, and I have a great deal of respect for that. As soon as you think she has made a polemical statement, she counters it, and often with a good deal of humility. She draws a lot from Bruno Latour, whom I need to read more of. She uses the following quote several times, which I think sums up very well her intent to study things in their trans-corporeality: “Is it our fault if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?”

For me, nature is located in that simultaneity. Nature is that simultaneity. And, to return to my conversations with Riley, I feel like this is very important, because it gives “nature” a political dimension. This was one sticking point we have been working out, and that I had not been entirely clear on until reading Alaimo. Because the non-human world cannot have an agential politics like that of the human world. But again, I think this conclusion is based on a false premise: that the natural and human worlds are separate. If they can be seen as unified in a network such as Latour describes, then I think the question of “nature” and politics is resolved.

I am excited about these realizations, because I now see a way to better free my interest in nature and Zen from the other-worldly and quietistic fates they are often given. I am not interested in Zen as a religion, or a metaphysical practice, and I am not interested in nature as a “wilderness.” I have felt that it was possible to extract them from those definitions but haven’t really known how to do so. I am excited to see how Alaimo will continue to play a part in this discovery.