The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
to think of an answer to the question ‘what kind of a thing is this?’ A property, on the other hand, is that described by an answer to the question ‘what is this thing like?’ Thus we can say that a flag is a physical thing, made up of atoms and other particles, and so is the stone. But the flag is red and flaps in the wind, whereas the stone is grey and falls to the ground almost as soon as it has been thrown. The two entities are of the same substance, but they have different properties pertaining to colour, shape, mass and weight, and this presents us with no mystery.
Now we can specify four tenets of our property dualism: 1.) Natural and social properties are distinct types of properties. 2.) Natural and social properties attach to material entities of one and the same substance. 3.) An entity can have both natural and social properties, so that it is a combination of the two. 4.) Social properties ultimately depend on natural properties, but not the other way around.
The distinction is one of reality, not a fancy of classification. It can be confirmed, in line with the above test, by asking a question that must necessarily be aetiological: is this property a result of relations between humans, or of structures and processes independent of human activity? Furthermore, we can now easily see that causal interaction poses no problem commensurate to that in the philosophy of mind, for social properties are not immaterial or mental any more than natural ones are.39 The traffic between the two involves no crossing between the non-physical and the physical. If humans have minds, it must be because their complex bodily constitutions have given rise to them, which means that they have minds by nature; hence mental properties are inscribed on the natural side of the coin as much as on the social. It follows that social causation of the behaviour of physical objects is no ontological puzzle.
At this point, we need to take note of another definition of nature: as all that is. Some would say that nature is the cosmos as a whole, the infinite totality in which everything exists, the universe of the physical (and perhaps also the divine). On this view, the gentrification of a neighbourhood is exactly as natural as the rotation of a planet, since both take place within all that is. But using ‘nature’ in this rather trivial sense would be to miss what is at stake in the debate under consideration; no one questions the cosmos, save perhaps for the most dyed-in-the-wool transcendentalists, and no one juxtaposes the cosmic to the social. It is nature, on the realist definition, that occupies both roles. In no way does that definition imply, however, that the social stands on the side of, runs parallel to or floats somewhere above the natural: to the very contrary. Because it is of material substance, and because the material world is natural at root – nature having been alone until society sprung up in its midst – something social must have something natural as its substratum. Being material means being bound up with nature. If relations of production are material, they are also, by definition, built on and maintained through the natural. It is the material that connects the other two in the triangle, but not as a symmetrical or neutral baseline, for matter must fundamentally obey the laws of nature.40 On the realist as much as on the cosmic definition, there is no being outside of nature. If this sounds paradoxical, it is because it is so, in a way eloquently rendered by Soper: ‘Nature is that which Humanity finds within itself, and to which it in some sense belongs, but also that from which it seems excluded in the very moment in which it reflects upon either its otherness or its belonging.’41 We shall try to specify this precarious position more fully and, crucially, return to the notion of ‘substratum’. For now, all of this might become a little clearer if we turn to the concept of emergence.
The classical example of emergence is water. That liquid can douse flames, even though one of its constituent parts (hydrogen) is highly flammable on its own, while the other (oxygen) makes things burn faster. H2O freezes at zero degrees, whereas at that temperature H and O would both be gases. As the atoms are fixed in a certain arrangement at the level of the molecule, something novel emerges at that level, and the same goes for any number of other molecules, such as CO2, which has the ability to wiggle in a way that blocks infrared light and sends it back from where it came, notably the earth, trapping heat inside the system. On its own, an atom of C or O could do nothing of the kind. Other famous examples include beehives and anthills: the individual bee or ant has a limited repertoire, often behaving erratically on its own, but the collective system exhibits a marvellously complex division of labour which assigns the member a task.42 More formally, an emergent property is a property of the system resulting from the organisation of its parts. Following recent advances in the studies of emergence – the ‘relational’ theory developed by Dave Elder-Vass in sociology, the ‘mutualist’ one by Carl Gillett in the philosophy of science – the source of novelty is precisely the complex relations between the components of an entity, be they atoms in a molecule, neurons in a brain or individual human beings in a society.43 The specific mode by which the collective is composed shapes the roles filled by the components. It is more than just a cliché to say that ‘parts behave differently in wholes’ or that ‘wholes are more than the sum of their parts’.44
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