INTRODUCTION: NATURE UNDER FIRE

GARY LEASE

"There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read," insists Nobel laureate Francis Crick, "than the average scientific paper." He, of course, should know. But the natural sciences are certainly not alone in producing thick, even obscure, language. Much of contemporary writing from the humanities can certainly be opaque and difficult, particularly in the areas of theoretical, feminist, neohistorical, deconstructive, and ultimately critical thought. Witness Donna Haraway, eminent feminist theorist and historian of science, who noted in a recent talk at the University of California, Santa Cruz, that the nonhuman world is dialogic—indeed, a coproductive participant in human social relationships. This is not as it should be, emphasizes Haraway, but it is the way things are. For her the question is not one of difference between the human and the nonhuman worlds but rather the nature of nonnature, which she views as a product of techno-science. Haraway finds the most blatant example in the patenting of "invented" animals; here we do not have simply animals as property, an old practice, but animals as human invention. From her point of view the contemporary notion of nature takes the form of a contest over the politicization of nature—that is, the objectification of nature and its distinction from the political and the social.

What can Haraway mean? Perhaps public opinion can help. In a Christmas Day (1993) poll released by the Los Angeles Times, 47 percent of those interviewed thought that animals "are just like humans in all important ways." The boundaries, in other words, between the human species and other animal species are increasingly permeable in our highly self-reflective Western cultures. In fact, the boundaries between the world and humans, after much careful construction, seem to be under fire. Nature is not only personified—"it's not nice to fool Mother Nature," sang one margarine commercial not so long go–but often carefully reduced. The world of human production has frequently operated outside of nature. Cities, transportation, recreation: all those myriad inventions of human culture have been viewed as inimical to the wild and (humanly) uncontrolled state of the world, a condition akin to a New Eden. Haraway wants to focus attention on the fact that even the attempt to rescue the nonhuman from the human, to salvage nature from the onslaught of modern, technologized humanity, is itself a human construction. What, then, is nature? Where is it to be found? Who controls it? Should it be controlled at all? What is the relationship of humans to that nature: are they in it, out of it, or somewhere in between? There is a war over nature in progress and nature itself is in the middle—caught in a crossfire of competing interests.

Such a contest is not over empty prizes. Indeed, it is nothing less than the human struggle for access to reality. And for humans, access to something is what grants control: nine-tenths of the law is possession, goes the old saw, and such clichés have power precisely because they so often are the case. Without access to the understanding of something, one is powerless over it. If one does have that access, however, and is able to control the communication over a phenomenon, then one controls how it is to be understood. A contest over what is allowed to represent reality—and that is what intelligible access is all about—is a struggle over that reality itself. This is the heart of our age's modernism, the process by which we establish what "counts" as reality.

Seen against this background, all our narratives—our many stories about nature and ourselves, whether "scientific" or not—are striving for such representation. In effect, we work hard to establish reality. In this hurly-burly world of contestation, the results are always more exclusive than inclusive. We are constantly deciding what belongs and what does not. In both the sciences and the humanities, pedigrees are the goal—in our stories we invariably exclude far more than we include. And that is also the problem: nature and human are both places (embodiment) and narratives, sites of contestation which can never be resolved. How do we map and present such places? How is such a place visited or experienced? In other words, what are the mechanics of contestation, the strategies and tactics (Clausewitz) of representation ? Or: how can one reduce narrative access to possession, and how can one access the access?

In our postmodern, post-Marxist world, class struggles no longer have anything to do with "truth," with "right" and "wrong," but rather only with the most profound level of ideological battles; in the last analysis it is always a question of life and death, of pure survival. Such contests never result in victory, in completion, in closure. We will not "get the story right," regardless of the tendency of some scientists to proclaim final triumph, and despite the hubris of some historians who announce that their stories have finally portrayed events "as they actually were" (Ranke). Our many representations of nature and human are, in other words, always and ultimately failures. The reason for such failure is, of course, not far to seek: nature and human are not self-revealing, even to a self-reflective species such as the human one. We and our world may well be real, but intelligible access to that reality is constructed and produced and ultimately incomplete. Yet we need to form judgments about these constructions; otherwise we would not be able to tell our stories. This, in turn, underlines the role of power in the contestation over what gets to count in any ruling narrative, and who gets to tell it. It is this struggle that is basically the story of modernism. And modernism is not fun.

"I don't want to just hear about revolutions. All we see or hear is revolutions. I'm sick of them," said Hemingway's female protagonist. But he saw it differently. "They're beautiful," he wrote. "Really. For quite a while. Then they go bad." Nevertheless, he studied them. The result: "They were all very different but there were some things you could co-ordinate." Only under certain conditions, of course; for one thing you have to have enough material. In fact: "You need an awful lot of past performances. It's very hard to get anything true on anything you haven't seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners always lie so."

This is the story being replayed today in the...