The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
and nature – or ‘property dualism’, for short – implies that there is nothing surprising about the combination of the realms. Rather, it is to be expected as the norm. Following Hailwood, we can say that the entwinement of social and natural relations is made not only possible but inevitable, given that the two are continuous parts of the material world ‘rather than utterly distinct orders of being’.31 What changes is how the combinations develop. Some might be innocuous and inconsequential, others benign and productive, others yet malign and destructive, but as such, they will be there for as long as humans with societies stick around. If combinations abound, however, by what procedure do we sift out their components? We may begin by applying a crude test: have humans constructed the component, or have they not? If it is social, then it has arisen through relations between humans as they have changed over time, and then it can also, in principle, be dismantled by their actions; if it is natural, it is not a humanly created product but rather a set of forces and causal powers independent of their agency, and hence it cannot be so disassembled (precisely the distinction Latour is out to erase: between a society ‘that we create through and through’ and a nature ‘that is not our doing’).32 Incidentally, it is often rather easy to conduct this test.
Consider the hole in the ozone layer, a favourite case of Latour’s.33 One obviously social component of that unity is (or was) the manufacturing of chlorofluorocarbons for refrigerators and aerosol cans and other products sold by companies such as DuPont. One no less obviously natural component is the way the chlorine atoms of those substances react with ozone molecules in the stratosphere: breaking them down in the tens of thousands. The one component is just as material as the other, which is why they were able to interact. As a unity of opposites, the process of ozone depletion can be further analysed in its many other social and natural components, identified with our simple criteria – and as it happens, this is the indispensable premise for any solution to such a combined problem. Only after a process of isolating the social from the natural, hard on the heels of the discovery of their dangerous material combination, could the Montreal Protocol ban companies from producing any more chlorofluorocarbons. It was, in this regard, a bit like Trotskyism and Palestinian resistance. Spurning hybridist paralysis, it attacked the combination at the source of the danger.
Exactly contrary to the message of hybridism, it follows that the more problems of environmental degradation we confront, the more imperative it is to pick the unities apart in their poles. Far from abolishing it, ecological crises render the distinction between the social and the natural more essential than ever. Think of an oil spill. A company unleashes the liquid into a delta. There is a novel unity in place – oil and water are mixed – but this gives us no reason to treat the two elements of the situation as identical, or (the same thing) declare that one has devoured the other. Rather, we would want to know more about their specific properties. On the one hand, we have the biological diversity of the delta, the birthing seasons of the dolphins, the birds migrating in and out, the food chain, the wave action; on the other, the operating procedures of the corporation, the workings of the profit motive, the level of competition in the oil industry, the function of petroleum in the wider economy. To fateful effect, after an event in time, the two sets now lap the same shores, lending urgency to the study of their difference-in-unity – we need to know how they interact, what sort of damage the one does to the other and, most importantly, how the destruction can be brought to an end. This, as Alf Hornborg has recently argued, is the truly vital theoretical task: to maintain the analytical distinction so as to tease out how the properties of society intermingle with those of nature.34 Only in this way can we save the possibility of removing the sources of ecological ruin.
And only thus can we conceive of the fossil economy as a historical phenomenon. Turning someone like Neil Smith inside out, Hornborg writes:
It is possible in principle to trace the interaction of factors deriving from Nature and Society. It should be feasible, for instance, to estimate what the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been today, if the additions deriving from human social processes had not occurred [indeed it is eminently feasible: the concentration would have been around 280 ppm, rather than the current 400+]. Human societies have transformed planetary carbon cycles, but not the carbon atoms themselves. If the categories of Nature and Society are obsolete, as it is currently fashionable to propose, this only applies to images of Nature and Society as bounded, distinct realms of reality.35
Substance dualism makes environmental degradation that originates within society and loops back towards it inexplicable. So does double monism. Transcending the Cartesian legacy requires an abandonment of its philosophy, but by no means does it imply an endorsement of ontological or methodological hybridism, in which the dynamic interpenetration of the social and natural again becomes invisible and, as a consequence, unalterable. It is rather achieved through the development of a property dualism, which recognises that everything is connected to everything else (the Alpha of ecological science) and that some parties behave disruptively within that web (the Omega).
Thus relations of production are material and social but not natural. The carbon cycle is material and natural but not social. Through some events in time, the former moved to take up residence within the latter (like a chainsaw in a forest) – the historical moment depicted in the lithograph from Labuan. Only by seeing the British imperialists as agents on a very, very special mission, cutting their path through a nature whose ways were unknown to them, can we understand the causes and import of their actions. Nature did not impel them to search for coal; society did not set up the atmosphere. The fallout materialised at the intersection.
SOME PROBLEMS IN PROPERTY DUALISM
There is something unfortunate about Descartes and the philosophy of mind setting the terms of this debate. The mere positioning of society as analogous to the mind suggests an idealist baggage. Furthermore, a thought does not consume synapses or neural networks in order to live. No one has heard of a person who has exercised her mind so expansively and gluttonously that she has scooped out half of her brain, in the way it is possible for a human community to, say, deplete its soil through over-intensive farming. Thoughts are not metabolising creatures; their relation to the brain is not absorptive, dissipative, potentially exhaustive like that between humans and the rest of nature. Hence there is a risk of going astray along the parallel, and it is increased by certain problems in property dualism as a philosophy of the mind, on which its critics hammer hard. To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a mental substance and a physical substance can interact. But why should it be any easier to see how mental and physical properties could do so? If something has a non-physical character – a thought, for instance – how could it exercise influence on something as resolutely physical as the movements of a body? Property dualism, say the critics, has applauded itself for ejecting Descartes’ causal interaction problem only to invite it in through the back door. Positing any sort of mental causation of the behaviour of physical objects – notably human bodies – merely restates the insoluble riddle on another level.36
Against this wounding charge, property dualists have devised several defences. Some retort that physical and mental properties are linked together in this particular kind of causation, the two sets not mutually exclusive but rather interdependent and jointly efficacious. Some suggest that certain physical events are ‘enabled’ by states of mind, while others posit the existence of ‘psychophysical laws’ whose inner workings we have yet to understand, but the traces of which we come across constantly.37 If the conundrum has not to this date received a satisfactory and widely accepted solution, there is one very compelling reason to believe that some sort of solution must exist: the phenomenon of human action, topic of the next chapter. If I want to raise my arm in a salute, I do it. If I am subject to an electric shock or epileptic convulsion, my arm might swing upwards in the same movement, but only the former event counts as an action. The readily ascertainable fact that actions happen in this world strongly indicate that mental properties can have causal impact on bodies, even if we do not yet know exactly how they go about doing it. The prices to be paid for accepting any of the two main alternatives – substance dualism, which clearly rules out interaction, and physicalism, which eradicates everything mental – seem prohibitive, leaving us with property dualism as the lodestar with the greatest promise for further