How to Talk About Nature When There Is No More Nature to Talk About: Toward a Sustainable Universal

HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.

—Samuel Beckett, "Endgame"

During the last two decades, ecocriticism has been among the liveliest areas of literary scholarship. Its success has come at a price. The more innovative it has become, the less space the new theory has had for nature. If in 1995, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination argued for a shift of emphasis from human to natural history, by 2005 Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature found it necessary to let go of nature because it was a metaphysical concept. Latour's proposition sounded harsh, yet it was right on the mark because, as he explained, "nature is the chief obstacle that has always hampered the development of public discourse" about the environment.¹

Ecocriticism could, of course, continue on its present track of bidding farewell to "nature in general," as Latour puts it, finishing the project Fredric Jameson defined with some prescience twenty years ago when he said that postmodernism is "what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."² But a clear alternative to what Timothy Morton calls "ecology without nature" seems to have emerged as well, namely, to try to save nature and reinvent it as part of a new approach focused on sustainability.³ Formulating a discourse on sustainability, understood as a state and a process like "balance," however, presents significant difficulties. As I try to show here, at stake in thinking about the future of environmentalism is a total picture—a whole that is made possible by ecology but that has no discourse to back it up, chiefly because of the rift between humanities and sciences and the imbalance that this rift creates. At this juncture, the question is no longer about the future direction ecology and ecocriticism will take but about how a new universal discourse of sustainability will be formulated. If such discourse is to be universal, then sciences and humanities, poststructuralism in particular, will have to find ways to talk to one another. Among other things, the sciences have to recognize the importance of the theory of cultural constructedness, its views on truth, reality, and so on, and poststructuralism has to make some space for biology and chemistry in its understanding of the foundations of culture.

The stakes are the highest possible, because if we do it right, if post-structuralism can speak with science (and vice versa), we all stand to gain a new kind of knowledge and with it, possibly, a new form of existence.

A few explanations are in order.

First, why nature and not something else? The short answer is because of the totality it represents, a totality of which poststructuralism is rightly suspicious. The history of nature dictates that if ecocriticism is to be a viable discourse, it must find a way to deal with this "chief obstacle," as Latour refers to it, to environmentalism. It must do so not by trying to get rid of nature but by trying to transform our understanding of it, as, for instance, John Meyer argues in Political Nature, when he suggests that ecocritics will have to change their "conception of nature."⁴ Otherwise, we face the danger of, in psychoanalytic terms, the return of the repressed, as well as the possibility of an ahistorical discourse. That may matter little for a politics preoccupied with the present moment, but it should matter much more for scholarly disciplines tasked with formulating aspects of ecological thinking and being that should have long-term effects. The question is not whether we need a new way of thinking about nature but only how we can formulate this new conception, with or without poststructuralism, with or without science.

Second, can we assume that ecocriticism (a sustainable ecocriticism) is all encompassing and that its discourse is total?

For ecology, the simple answer follows from the truism that in the environment, as Barry Commoner has said, "everything is related to everything else."⁵ The environment is the entire globe, and ecology is but a name for a way...