Earth on the Frontier: the Environment as Consistent Relation

Chris Malcolm (bio)

A review of Neyrat, Frédéric. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. Translated by Drew S. Burk, Fordham UP, 2019.

Frédéric Neyrat’s The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation is a wide-ranging study of what Neyrat calls “geo-constructivism” (the French subtitle is Critique du Geoconstructivisme): his term for the scientific, economic, and philosophical assumptions that underlie the contemporary engineering of Earth. Composed of thirteen chapters across three sections, Neyrat argues that there is significant overlap between the responses of engineers, architects, biologists, geographers, anthropologists, philosophers, and ecologists to the climate crisis. What they all share, knowingly or unknowingly, is a commitment to an idea of the Earth as malleable. In the first of the book’s sections, “The Mirror of the Anthropocene,” Neyrat covers the more properly scientific discourse of those who, in response to climate collapse, would terraform the Earth and manage or “steward” (57) its damaged state. In the second section, “The Future of Eco-constructivism,” he focuses on the convergence of a major strand of political ecology with contemporary eco-materialist philosophy. These modern environmental discourses are tied together by a techno-fetishism that projects an absence of limits in order to argue for increased access to the management of the world. The logic is one in which the right to damage the environment and the right to manage the process of damage, legitimate one another. The book’s final section, “An Ecology of Separation,” positions itself against these discourses to argue for a nascent anti-capitalist and anti-colonial separation, one latent to the Earth itself, in which nature can neither be controlled nor dominated. The ambitious scope of the text, its unusual form, and its creative object selection allow one to see how long-held relations with nature reappear in contemporary discourses that continue to disavow their own violent character.

The notion that the Earth is dying has been a gift to contemporary thinking on the environment. As the climate crisis enters its emergency phase, the contours of what this death might mean for the planet, and—just as crucially—for its killers, is becoming clearer and clearer. The UK-based activist movement, Extinction Rebellion, embodies this idea, voicing sentiments that include: “our governments have failed to protect us,” “we are facing an unprecedented global emergency” (“Climate Emergency”) that is “beyond politics” (“The Truth”), “we need a mass mobilization on the scale of World War II” (“Rebel Starter Pack”). Read alongside The Unconstructable Earth, we can see what the war of the world for the world is already beginning to look like and in whose interests it is being fought. Nourished by the scientifico-cultural Anthropocene thesis, Neyrat writes that the planet’s apparent terminality has allowed for Earth “[to] become the object of a technological colonization project” (8). The geo-constructivist program is, as Neyrat terms it, “anaturalist” (4), figuring “nature as nonexistent” (4) and, therefore, establishing the “condition for the ontological possibility of technologies whose goal is to replace nature” (5). The moment of the Blue Marble (NASA), according to Neyrat, more properly furnished the conditions for the whole Earth to be considered, paradoxically, as the final frontier: a total object unto itself, one that can be repaired, renovated, improved, and, ultimately, reconstructed.

Like all frontier projects, geo-construction is presented in the rhetoric of development and improvement.¹ And, like all frontier projects, what is to be improved is thought of as already dead in principle, so the improver or developer must also be dead. As Neyrat has it, “humanity is [imagined as] external to Earth not simply because humanity considers itself as some kind of nonliving entity but also because the Earth is considered as being nonterrestrial” (49). In its attempt to develop and improve the Earth, geo-constructivism inherits the ideology of the Space Age and combines it with the aftermath of the nuclear imaginary. We read its ideology as one of techno-fantasy that relies on the apocalyptic investments adopted by environmental discourse, and whose endpoint is the kind of post-raciality in which groups like Extinction Rebellion participate. However, geoengineering, says Neyrat, is a “firefighter technology” acting “after the fact, on the consequences [of our actions]” (33). This belated activity ought to be understood not simply as action that comes too late and is in denial of its own extractive capitalist drive, but as activity that, equally after the fact, aims to reinterpret what counts as life, what losing life has looked like historically, and what it looks like now. The narrative of urgency and threat that characterizes much environmental discourse—the belief that violence like this really is unprecedented, against which Neyrat usefully pushes back—accepts the terms by which geo-constructivism functions and naturalizes its effects. “Climate engineering,” writes Neyrat, “considers itself as ready to save the planet—even if we have to pay for it by way of some collateral damage, such as with periods of severe drought in equatorial Africa and certain parts of India” (32). I found Neyrat’s book to be most useful when it helped me better see how that collateral damage is figured as a necessary cost—not just by geo-constructivists but by environmental discourse in general—and the pervasiveness of the kinds of relationality that sustain those conceptions.

Under the horizon of the nonliving geo-constructivist who rearranges the non-terrestrial Earth, the bulk of the book’s project is to trace how relationships to nature are formed. But hasn’t the Earth, or at least its grounded image, nature, been dying for a while? As critics like Raymond Williams suggest, the concept of nature emerges, dialectically, just as it starts to disappear on entering the modern period, if not before.² Unconstructable Earth chooses to stick with nature as a concept and, thereby, partially stick with the Western dialectical schema occasioned by the nature/culture distinction. It thereby begs the question prominent at least since the time of Marx, and central to, for example, Dialectic of Enlightenment: is a non-dialectical conception of nature, which can also register loss, possible? It’s a simple question, but one from which most studies of this kind fail to escape.³ This is a particular problem, especially when, as Neyrat argues, in almost all environmental thought, “relation takes precedence and must be protected against what ravages it” (148). However, the humanist critique of environmental destruction all too often inaugurates a grieving, rueful and urgent subject and, in so doing, re-substantiates the notion of the “others of Europe” as those who either bear the effects of this destruction or were simply not mourned in time (da Silva 250).⁴

The tendency to reject the nature/culture distinction altogether has, of course, become prominent in posthumanist environmental thinking. Neyrat quotes Deleuze as emblematic of this approach: “It should be clear that the plane of immanence, the plane of Nature that distributes affects, does not make any distinction at all between things that might be called natural and things that might be called artificial” (140). However, this position also resubstantiates Western universality via the nonsubjective backdoor, so to speak, and Neyrat complains it “[liquidates] the possibility of existing for the beings that populate the world” (140).⁵ Indeed, much of new materialist thinking on the environment makes ontological claims about the status of relations between humans and non-humans as repressed historical arguments that are concerned with attempting to resolve culpability and reverse historical damage.¹

Unconstructable Earth faces the problem of the nature/culture distinction head on by suggesting that the two most prominent Western conceptions—that a difference must be affirmed and that a difference doesn’t exist—actually merge. A more humanistic and dialectical claim like “everything is connected” converges with a techno-modernist claim like “everything is uncertain.” Likewise, a more traditionally ethical idea like “nature must be preserved” can be read as the other side of a more contemporary one like “there is no such thing as nature.” This is because, as Neyrat has it, both conceptions imagine as consistent a notion of relation between things and therefore figure relation as “more permeable, more contagious—than we would ever have thought” (12). With this idea, Neyrat arrives at what texts in Indigenous Studies take as a starting point. His claim here would match up with a book like Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, which holds that relations of access characterize settler-colonial extraction and that maintaining those relations is and has been the historical work of the State and of capital.

Before concluding the book with more straightforwardly philosophical arguments, Neyrat spends most of his time on the second of the two nature/culture conceptions and those who think that there is no longer—or never was—a self-sufficient nature: post-environmentalists, geo-constructivists, and eco-modernists. Although varied, this grouping broadly follows a conception of nature as “naturing nature (natura naturans)—that is, the permanent genesis of things, nature as process, as productivity” (135). They consist of resilience ecologists—those who figure a political economy which requires that its subjects adapt themselves to “programmed uncertainty” (71)—as well as all agencies that demand more and greater intervention into the ecosphere. One of the tasks of this group is to define the relational field through the terms of movement and stasis, as well as to “insist on the fact that the environment is not separate from human beings” (86). Post-environmentalists like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, for example, sound similar to Bruno Latour because they understand that “showing that everything is connected is the best way for affirming the idea that the entirety of nature has been anthropomorphized” (93). They therefore find it possible to direct their desire to de-extinction and re-wilding projects in order to more emphatically “resuscitate a nature that was already dead and buried” (53). This discourse suggests that loss is, paradoxically, as irreversible as it is recoverable. “It’s as if the numbing of the Earth,” writes Neyrat, “was one of the necessary conditions for allowing geoengineers to justify their mode of intervention” (56). Only a dying world—whoever caused it to be so hardly matters—would be in need of the kind of management that these thinkers conceive: “it’s this administration a posteriori that they call ‘ecology'” (127). Of course, it turns out that such a position is not possible to maintain. While reconstructing the Earth, “the anaturalist drive of the West will be in need of an ecosphere in order to continually revitalize itself” (115). Therefore, anaturalism requires both a position outside the Earth—Neyrat names it “off-planet” (8)—as well as a concept of nature itself.

So, are we back within the matrix of an ethical humanism that would show that geo-constructivism must construct the notion of nature it then claims it has the legitimacy to manipulate? Not quite. What Neyrat argues throughout is that the nature/culture divide is both rejected and maintained, not only by post-environmentalists but also by older versions of environmentalism. Neyrat quotes John Muir to say that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (147). Again, what we discover as we follow Neyrat through each different position is the insistence on what he calls the “principles of principles”: that everything is connected. “Resistant to any sort of Romanticism [of the Muir type] as much as to any kind of deep ecology,” he writes, “Latour nevertheless founds his ecological political thought on the concept of ‘attachments’; and Stengers speaks of ‘entanglements’ […] Alaimo maintains that the substance of the human being is ‘inseparable’ from its environment” (147). What Unconstructable Earth shows is that the ontologization of relation—its reliability and everywhere-ness—provides the philosophical grounds for the permanence of a principle of accessibility that we can read as colonial and violent. “If the battle against the great divide of nature/culture means to do away with any sort of separation, then this battle will do nothing but nourish a globalized anaturalism” (149), he suggests. For this reason, the final part of the book turns toward a theory of that separation, “without,” he adds, “wholeheartedly agreeing with the Cartesian and post-Cartesian denial of relation (object-oriented thinking and speculative realism)” (149).

Broadly, I am in support of what Neyrat theorizes in the book’s final sections but feel like they perform a certain kind of methodological rigor and philosophical sophistication in a way that produces familiar philosophical modes and thereby avoids more complicated questions of self-positioning and reflexivity. I think it is important, as Neyrat does, to clarify that some relations exist as unknown and remain separate, even if decolonial theorists consider this a given.⁶ And as I suggest above, I also think it’s important to show the theoretical and structural assumptions of the productivist thrust of much post-humanist theory, which can appear to coincide with the politics of a post-racial extractivism. But if I were to be critical, I would wonder whether or not it has become part of the ideology of philosophical method to search for a quasi-transcendental figure that does not fall prey to the errors and mistakes of previous positions. Neyrat writes,

we must then consider as unconstructable that which escapes all construction—whether past, present, or future—and, as a consequence, precedes the primordial… The unconstructable does not escape destruction because it is indestructible, or because it is fleeing from death, but because destruction itself requires the unconstructable. Every action—whether constructive or destructive—requires a contraction, a subtraction, an antiproduction that precedes it as its dark side or counterlining (revers). The unconstructable is the inaccessible transcendental of production, which we will call its transcendental dark side or counterlining. (163)

By holding to this kind of familiar philosophical movement, the book leaves me wondering whether the limit of philosophical critique is to show the failure of a method to account for itself, and to create one that doesn’t. I raise this question—the question of this search, and the rhetoric of its creation—because the book is, avowedly, in the service of what Neyrat calls, in two fleeting sections (one at the end of the introduction and one at the end of the first chapter), “the minoritarian bodies of the Anthropocene” (65). What would the book have been like had these bodies been more central to it? Without this, concluding with the ethic of separation departs from an articulation of violence and moves toward a universalist ethics that doesn’t sit well in this context. As Neyrat writes, “I am connected to others because I am separate, because I bear within me alterity” (150). This is, of course, a question of tradition, archive, and discipline. But for a text that largely breaks with convention on what can count as an object of study in a way that is helpful for environmental inquiry, it’s important to keep in mind that disciplines are also formed as new texts reassert what literatures and cultures are valued. According to Unconstructable Earth, those literatures and cultures still center on the likes of Latour, Spinoza, Deleuze, Schelling, and Meillassoux, which appear not simply as projects to be supplemented by a philosophical addition. But if one of philosophy’s problems is the ability to dream up relation when there is none, as Neyrat convincingly argues, I wonder what it would mean to really write philosophy and to conceive of academic projects with that in mind.

Footnotes

1. For such an argument, see Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property.

3. For a symptomatic example of this problem, see Heise’s Imagining Extinction.

4. On the former, see Affective Ecocriticism. Risling-Baldy foregrounds the concept of “survivance” in order to insist upon the parallel acts of survival and resistance by Native peoples. See her We Are Dancing for You.

5. For more on how this resubstantiates Western universality, see Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

6. For two of the influential texts of the type, see Morton’s Hyperobjects and Bennett’s Vibrant Matter.

7. The idea that colonial, visual, and epistemological regimes cannot see, comprehend, or understand colonized peoples, and that these peoples have their own non-colonial regimes, is commonplace in decolonial thinking. In this context, therefore, the idea of “separation” is assumed. See, for example, Gomez-Barris’s The Extractive Zone.

Works Cited

• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
• Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Duke UP, 2018.
• Bladow, Kyle, and Jennifer Ladino, editors. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Nebraska UP, 2018.
• Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minnesota UP, 2014.
• Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minnesota UP, 2007.
• Extinction Rebellion Massachusetts. “Climate Emergency.” 2020. https://www.xrmass.org/climate-emergency. Accessed March 27, 2020.
• Extinction Rebellion. Rebel Starter Pack. 2019. https://rebellion.earth/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Rebel-Starter-Pack-4-September-2019.pdf. Accessed July 15, 2019.
• Extinction Rebellion. “The Truth.” 2020. https://rebellion.earth/the-truth/demands/. Accessed March 27, 2020.
• Gomez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke UP, 2017.
• Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago UP, 2016.
• Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
• NASA. Blue Marble-Image of the Earth. 1972. https://www.nasa.gov/content/blue-marble-image-of-the-earth-from-aapollo-17. Accessed March 8, 2020.
• Neyrat, Frédéric. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. Translated by Drew S. Burk, Fordham UP, 2019.
• Risling-Baldy, Cutcha. We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Coming-of-Age Ceremonies. Washington UP, 2018.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, Illinois UP, 1988, pp. 271-313.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford UP, 1976.