Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural through Politics

Introduction: Politics on the Terrain of Second Nature

1 Introduction: Politics on the Terrain of Second Nature Crina Archer, Laura Ephraim, and Lida Maxwell The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century have seen a sea change in political theorists’ understanding of “nature.” While much prior Western political thought invoked “nature” as a normative standard or ground for affirming or criticizing political arrangements, political theorists today seldom assume that nature can or should dictate politics. Influenced by poststructuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, and queer theory, political theorists, like their colleagues in related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, have increasingly come to scrutinize dimensions of politics that long seemed fixed or determined by nature. They began to “denaturalize” everything from justice to law to gender to nature itself, revealing their conventional, cultural, politically constructed grounds.1 Though the presumption of politics’ conventional character was anticipated by some earlier political thinkers (such as Montesquieu, Vico, and Hume), today’s loose consensus on the conventional character of political norms and institutions among many (although not all) political theorists—from Richard Rorty to John Rawls to Wendy Brown—is remarkable .2 It reflects widespread recognition in the field that past claims to the naturalness of particular political arrangements had oppressive politi- 2 Crina Archer, Laura Ephraim, and Lida Maxwell cal consequences—particularly for minorities—and hindered emancipatory movements. As Stephen White recently characterized this prevailing mood of contemporary political theorists, “the sense of living in late modernity implies a greater awareness of the conventionality of much of what has been taken for certain in the modern West.”3 Indeed, most political theorists now seek to orient politics upon the terrain of second nature—be it habits, conventions, constitutions, praxis, or artifice—and to rid political claims of their former reliance upon natural givens. Yet if the need to relinquish essentialist conceptions of nature is increasingly self-evident among political theorists, it is also increasingly obvious that political theory must find new ways to conceptualize nature in order to respond to the most pressing issues of our era. Political theorists who woke from the dream that nature could give stable grounds to politics emerged into a world of hybridity. In this hybrid world, it is both increasingly dif- ficult to distinguish nature from politics and decreasingly clear that the effort to distinguish them is worthwhile. This hybrid world is enveloped by a climate warmed by industrial carbon emissions and populated with beings engineered from genetic material and computer technology—beings that defy categorization as either artificial or wild, human or nonhuman, political or natural. Are these hybrids harbingers of, or threats to, a more just and sustainable world? How should political theorists respond to dilemmas arising from events that blur, at a practical level, the distinction between natural givens and political arrangements that the denaturalizing turn accomplished in political theory?4 At the least, our enmeshment in a deeply hybrid world seems to call for us to question whether a theoretical sensibility oriented by the indeterminacy or undecidability between nature and politics has resources to guide us through the ethical and political thickets that arise every day from the hybridity of nature and politics. This introduction and the essays in this volume aim to do precisely that—to ask how and whether the denaturalizing turn remains relevant and offers meaningful political guideposts for a world where the denaturalizing of nature often appears as a dilemma for politics. While the contributors come to a range of positions on this issue, we will suggest by way of introduction to the volume that it would be a mistake either to abandon as anachronistic the denaturalizing turn’s critique of essentialism or to rest content with familiar denaturalizing strategies of invoking “second nature” as a conceptual wedge separating natural givens from political constructions . In our view, the experience of nature’s hybridity and lack of fixity can itself inform and help extend the core insight of the denaturalizing turn, namely, that nature is not a stable ground for politics. Indeed, nature Introduction 3 does not “fix” (remedy or hold in place) politics because nature is always already a hybrid formation constituted through struggles that include (but are not exhausted by) the struggles of human political actors to dominate or emancipate one another and the world’s nonhuman things. We thus propose to repurpose “second nature” as a term of art to encompass the enactment and more or less stable...