How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition 9780822387718

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How Nature Speaks

New Ecologies for the Twenty-first Century Series Editors: ARTURO ESCOBAR,

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

DIANNE ROCHELEAU,

Clark University

EDITED BY

Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke

How Nature Speaks The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London

2006

∫ 2006 D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Scala and Helvetica Neue by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Duke University Press is grateful to the University of Tampere Department of Regional Studies for support of this project. The editors’ thanks are due to Mari Pakarinen (Juvenes Print, University of Tampere) for drawing the figures for the essays ‘‘What to Say about Nature’s ‘Speech’ ’’ by Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke, ‘‘Fight Over the Face of Tampere: A Sneaking Transformation of a Local Political Field’’ by Markus Laine, ‘‘Stand/ardization and Entrainment in Forest Management’’ by Ari Jokinen, and ‘‘Calculating the Futures: Stability and Change in a Local Energy Production System’’ by Taru Peltola, and for the appendix. Figure 4 in the essay ‘‘What to Say about Nature’s ‘Speech’ ’’ by Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke is reprinted courtesy of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher; it originally appeared in Dynamics and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Processes, edited by Alan Fogel, Maria C. D. P. Lyra, and Jaan Valsiner, as Figure 8.2, page 206.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

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YRJÖ HAILA AND CHUCK DYKE

about Nature’s ‘‘Speech’’

Introduction: What to Say

1

Speaking of Nature

SUSAN OYAMA

49

Natural Speech: A Hoary Story

CHUCK DYKE

66

Gardens, Climate Changes, and Cultures: An Exploration into the Historical Nature of Environmental Problems 78

VILLE LÄHDE

Participative Thinking: ‘‘Seeing the Face’’ and ‘‘Hearing the Voice’’ of Nature 106

JOHN SHOTTER

IORDANIS MARCOULATOS

Perspective

Rethinking Intentionality: A Bourdieuian

127

Fluids on the Move: An Analogical Account of Environmental Mobilization 150

LASSE PELTONEN

MARKUS LAINE Fight Over the Face of Tampere: A Sneaking Transformation of a Local Political Field 177 ARI JOKINEN

Management

Stand/ardization and Entrainment in Forest 198

TARU PELTOLA Calculating the Futures: Stability and Change in a Local Energy Production System 218 PETER TAYLOR Exploring Themes about Social Agency through Interpretation of Diagrams of Nature and Society 235 JOHN O’NEILL

Who Speaks for Nature?

261

Appendix: Primer: On Thinking Dynamically about the Human Ecological Condition 279 CHUCK DYKE

REFERENCES

303

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

325

323

PREFACE

Does it make sense to think that nature ‘‘speaks’’ to us humans? Metaphors—and nature’s speech certainly is one—are not literally true or false; rather, they are either fruitful and productive or misleading and counterproductive. The essays included in this collection address and assess various aspects of ‘‘nature’s speech.’’ Allocating textual capacities to nature goes back to ancient times, usually with specific ideas about who among humans are able to understand and interpret nature’s texts. In our era, the metaphor of nature’s speech is located in a new framework, defined by ecological problems. Ecological problems in their contemporary guise surfaced into public consciousness quite abruptly in the 1960s. The problems are often understood against an assumed contradiction between human culture and the rest of nature. ‘‘Nature,’’ posed as a polar opposite to ‘‘culture,’’ is assumed to speak to those among the humans who get sensitized to the contradiction. This, however, is deeply problematic, as has often been noticed. Humans are products of nature and live in, by, and through nature, being dependent on natural materials and processes. So, how could an essentialist contradiction arise between humans and the rest of nature? Where could the border zone of such a contradiction be located? This will not do; more serious work is needed for understanding the human ecological condition. On the other hand, a mere list of specific problems, however comprehensive, cannot do the job. ‘‘Environmental science’’ cannot o√er a definitive answer either. Environmental science deals with the specificities of particular environmental problems. Understood literally, environmental science is an oxymoron: the environment includes everything, but science about everything is impossible. There is no end to ways in which this everything can be made the object of some science or other. We have to step back from the specificities of environmental problems but avoid falling into the abyss of the humanity-nature dualism. For this purpose, metaphoric work is needed. This book is about searching for fruitful metaphors that shed light on the human ecological condition. Good metaphors invite people to fly with them.

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P R E FA C E

However, metaphors are not mere patterns of thought; they are primarily grounded in human practices, as firmly as ‘‘grasping’’ is grounded in taking hold of something with one’s hands. In other words, metaphors are also practical tools to be used in grasping di≈cult issues such as the human ecological condition. Tools never come out of thin air. This is equally true of conceptual tools as of practical tools. The essays in this collection make ample use of the conceptual tools of nonlinear dynamics and complexity as well as a whole range of more specific scientific disciplines. If we want to be serious about the human ecological condition, we have to become fluent in the vocabularies of those scientific traditions that address critical aspects of that condition. Perhaps, with time, the metaphor of ‘‘nature’s speech’’ obtains strength and momentum. This collection originated from a research project entitled ‘‘How Does Nature Speak?,’’ organized at the Department of Regional Studies and Environmental Policy, University of Tampere, Finland, and funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation; in addition, members of the research group got support from several research projects funded by the Academy of Finland (‘‘Environmental Politics on the Local Level,’’ 1996– 2002; ‘‘Socio-Economic Conditions of the Sustainable Use of Wood Fuel,’’ 2001–2004; ‘‘Nature, Ideas of Nature, Politicization of Nature, and Environmental Politics,’’ 2001–2004). Hence the considerable proportion of Finns, working in Tampere, among the writers. The project has organized a series of workshops over the years. Most of the overseas contributors participated in one or several of them: Chuck Dyke in 1995, 1998, and 2000; Peter Taylor in 1996, 1998, and 2000; John O’Neill in 1995 and 2001; Susan Oyama in 2000; and John Shotter in 2000.

INTRODUCTION

What to Say about Nature’s ‘‘Speech’’

Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke

Yet the communication between baby and mother, conspicuously between human babies and mothers, is extensive and remarkably precise. If a worried young mother listens to her body’s own response to the baby’s sounds, smells, and touches, she is almost sure to do things right. Here it would be fairly clear what we meant if we said that nature speaks in the relationship between mother and child. For example, we could also say that nature speaks to the mother in the baby’s cry, and to the baby through its mother’s breast. It takes a whole lot to desensitize a mother to the truth of her relationship to her baby. Human communicative interactions with nature more broadly considered are also nurturing and, as we will come to see ever more clearly, mutually nurturing. But in the multiplicity of this communication, the warm, soft univocity of the breast is bedeviled by daunting complexity. In general, the mutual sensitivities are imperfect, ambivalent, and often dangerous. In fact, a look at human history shows us how easy it is to become desensitized to the communicative interactions between ourselves and the world around us—to the plight of endangered species, for example. Ironically, desensitization can occur in the very attempt to understand nature better. It looks as if certain sorts of cognitive access to nature alienate us from nature in other ways, with no guarantee whatsoever that we have achieved the most important access. Perhaps humans are often listening to the wrong things—especially from the point of view of mutual nurturing. We have taken nature’s speech as a guiding metaphor for the investigations collected in this volume. Nature’s speech is an ancient poetic metaphor, but, as a tradition directly relevant to the human environmental predicament, goes back to Romanticism. That tradition viewed A NEWBORN BABY CANNOT SPEAK.

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INTRODUCTION

nature as a benign whole o√ering inspiration and advice to those humans who are open-minded enough to listen. However, the metaphor of nature’s speech has also another pedigree, which contradicts the first one: nature’s assumed language as a divine script, which lays down a fixed order of the world for humans to obey (see Dyke, ‘‘Natural Speech,’’ this volume). This view represents monotheistic fundamentalism. Some variants among the Green movement come close to cherishing such fundamentalism nowadays. Ironically, modern science has its genesis in this sort of monotheism, too. One of the founding fathers, Galileo, is famous for his dictum that nature’s book is written in the language of mathematics. Although Galileo’s role does not allow any simplistic interpretation, his dictum, which he originally used to set divine reason against the Church authorities, was later used to get science committed to monotheistic belief in orderly ‘‘laws of nature.’’ The nineteenth-century Romantic rebellion against scientific rationality never managed to get liberated from this basic belief. Rationalism and romanticism form a dualistic pair of opposites within the same framework. Environmentalism is hovering in an uncomfortable position between rationalistic trust and romantic mistrust in science. But we have much more to say about science later on. Overall, nature’s speech is an ambivalent metaphor. Furthermore, as Dyke points out (‘‘Natural Speech,’’ this volume), human relationships with the rest of nature begin with deeds, not words. We must pay attention to the richness of the material interactions in which our communicative relations with the surrounding world are embedded. Our interactions with nature are based on activity, lived life. We suggest in the last section of this introduction that nature’s speech means nature’s presence in everything we humans do. Nature’s presence means that there are dynamic similarities between processes occurring in the human, cultural realm and in the rest of nature. An improved understanding of general dynamic principles can make nature’s presence more transparent to human imagination and understanding. Thus, putting the goal of this volume in one phrase: our aim is to explore dynamic principles that human society and the rest of nature have in common. As will become clear, this does not imply constructing a unified ‘‘theory.’’ Rather, our aim is to gain insights into relevant dynamic processes, which are transparent in physical and biological contexts but often mixed and hidden in human contexts. Specific

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themes are explored by Iordanis Marcoulatos, Lasse Peltonen, Markus Laine, Ari Jokinen, and Taru Peltola. From other perspectives, the metaphor of speech still retains its worth in specified contexts, as several essays in this volume spell out. We humans speak of nature (Oyama, this volume) and for nature (O’Neill, this volume), and we compose views of nature (Taylor, this volume). Furthermore, speech means two-way communication: we become engaged in participative thinking with nature (Shotter, this volume). Ultimately, the boundary between what is regarded as culture and what as nature is blurred, and we construct linguistic devices to characterize this mixture: we draw a distinction between first nature and second nature (Lähde, this volume). The essays in this volume are tightly integrated in two ways. First, they all speak to one or another aspect of the complexity of our communicative interactions with the world around us. Second, they all attempt to contribute to a coherent perspective on the best way to approach the complexity and multiplicity of our many interactive relationships. The essays were written in conjunction with an extensive study of the newly developed resources of the ‘‘sciences of complexity,’’ and all use these resources to some extent, most often as the primary tools of research. The approach holds out the promise of understanding without desensitization, and the papers are o√ered as evidence in favor of that hope. Chuck Dyke introduces basic principles and concepts of nonlinear thinking and complexity in the appendix at the end of the volume. In this introduction, we take up examples that lean on the appendix; it is useful to get a hands-on feel for the nonlinear mode of thinking. As Kelso et al. (1992, 398) note, exploration of a particular example o√ers ‘‘a necessary window, even an essential step, into uncovering general principles.’’ Other essays in this volume provide thoroughly worked out examples. In our understanding, purely conceptual talk on nonlinear dynamics and complexity, without examples that put flesh around the bones, remains sterile and ultimately counterproductive. Our reasons for this belief will become clear as the story unfolds. Eight focal themes introduce the volume and the essays and serve as a guide to the terms of their unity.

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INTRODUCTION

THE CONDITION OUR CONDITION IS IN

No guarantees: even without our help, nature presents us with a full range of disasters, from gradually accumulating ones such as landslides following long-lasting rains to sudden events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. The term ‘‘disaster’’ presupposes someone who is hurt or something that is harmed; disasters are contextual. Every change in nature is a potential disaster from the point of view of creatures that happen to be in the way. In other words, the view that nature might be a benign steward giving advice to human culture and correcting human mistakes does not stand up. Mistakes leading to disasters do not form a distinct class of their own. Quite ordinary acts pave the way for disasters in the shape of unanticipated consequences, as the history of human-induced environmental destruction abundantly testifies (Marsh 1965; McNeill 2000). As should be well-known by now, human-induced and natural processes merge together in the making of disasters; Ville Lähde explores this relationship in ‘‘Gardens, Climate Changes, and Cultures.’’ Furthermore, disasters are often triggered by minor and apparently insignificant coincidences. Abrupt changes may be latently present in natural systems that appear stable, as with thunderstorms on hot summer days. A disastrous forest fire is most likely when lightning strikes out of the blue sky. Alternatively, gradual, cumulative change in some critical features of a particular system can suddenly lead to a dramatic upheaval. Nature often doesn’t know her own ways in advance; as Gloucester notes in King Lear (I, ii), ‘‘Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent events: love cools, friendship falls o√, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies, in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and bond crackt ’twixt son and father.’’ In short, we are constantly confronted with systems o√ering up contingencies; for our view of system, see the appendix. Possibility space is a useful notion in evaluating the potential range of behaviors of systems of that sort. The possibility space of a system can be approximated by constructing a physical phase space, which is delineated by the important system variables. The dimensions of the space are the ‘‘degrees of freedom’’ of the system, that is, the ways it can change (see appendix). However, the phase space approximation requires two critical caveats.

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Usually, the variables depicted on the axes are not independent of each other. Also, the distinction between variables and parameters, so important in traditional mathematical models, is often ambiguous in nonlinear systems. As is becoming increasingly clear, the possibility space of complex systems may comprise several alternative basins of attraction within which the system’s behavior is quite regular (see appendix). In apparent contrast, however, a surprising jump from one to another may result from a gradual change in a critical characteristic of the system, often called the control parameter. Ecology o√ers plenty of examples of ecosystems that may alternate between two or more states according to variation in a critical environmental factor (reviewed by Sche√er et al. 2001). Lakes polluted with nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen o√er a classic example: a gradual increase of nutrients does not bring any detectable change in the state of the lake for a long time until an algal bloom suddenly takes place. The world system as a whole, or any of its parts such as the climate, oceanic circulation, or ecological interactions, is also vulnerable to abrupt cataclysms following gradual change in some critical system variable (Ste√en et al. 2004). An essential feature of human ecology is that significant change often happens over vast areas and long periods of time in such a creeping fashion that the consequences are hardly detectable locally (Haila and Levins 1992). The same may happen without human influence, too. For instance, both soils and waters in regions covered by continental ice during the latest glaciation have undergone continuous secular change in the postglaciation era, after having been colonized by microorganisms, plants, and animals. Some human actions produce e√ects that have never happened in nature before. New substances have spread into the environment, increasingly so since the explosive growth of chemical industries at the end of the nineteenth century. However, in the course of their physiological processes, every sort of organism produces substances that no other sort does. Plants produce obnoxious chemicals as defense against herbivores; many of these are stronger carcinogens than humanproduced substances. In other words, no strict division line between humanity and other creatures of nature can be found on the criterion of novelty either. Pollution of the environment by new chemicals is an indication of sink problems, which arise through the dissipation of chem-

6

INTRODUCTION

icals used in production into the environment in a diluted form. There is nothing particularly anthropogenic in sink problems. All natural processes, whether in living or nonliving nature, involve the transfer of materials from a source to a sink. This follows from the basic principles of thermodynamics (see appendix). Human-induced sink problems can lead to dramatic consequences, such as change in the composition of the atmosphere, but comparable changes might happen without human influence. Volcanic eruptions change the composition of the atmosphere, too. The conditions of human existence are inseparably mingled with the processes of nature. Given this conclusion, the idea of nature giving advice to humans loses its attraction. It entails precisely such a separation between humanity and the rest of nature that we want to avoid. The perspective we have adopted in this volume is that whatever we can understand about the human condition originates in human, collective, and historical experience. The source of this experience is lived life, that is, nature. Furthermore, other creatures of nature are in an identical situation. We humans are not left quite alone, after all, when pondering the human ecological condition. All creatures speak on behalf of themselves, through their existence. Their voice is their activity, their interaction with the rest of the world.

NOVELTY

Novelty is nothing new in the realm of nature. The origin and evolution of life on Earth was a series of dramatic novelties. Every living creature has been new at some point in time and, in a sense, continues to be new as it changes over its lifetime. Novelty originates recurrently in di√erent spheres of nature. Novelty cannot be calculated in advance in detail, or else it would not be new. Our most important scientific laws, such as the second law of thermodynamics, can tell only what is impossible, not what will actually happen (Dyke 1992). But perhaps it is possible to evaluate the dynamics of novelty in a qualitatively specified way. At least two questions present themselves: How does novelty come about? and What happens to the old when something new shows up? Symmetry breaking is an elementary model of the origin of new phe-

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nomena. Symmetry breaking means that internal di√erentiation arises suddenly in a system that was previously homogeneous (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 12–14). The Bénard cell is an elementary model of symmetry breaking: homogeneous fluid within two horizontal metal plates changes instantaneously into rotating ‘‘cells’’ when the system is appropriately heated from underneath. Lasse Peltonen describes the process in detail in ‘‘Fluids on the Move.’’ The Bénard cell is due to thermal convection. Thermal convection is ubiquitous. Convection mediates the transfer of thermal energy in the atmosphere toward the poles by, for instance, the Hadley circulation on both sides of the equator. It drives continental drift through convective ‘‘cells’’ in the earth’s mantle, and so on (Figures 1 and 2). As Lasse points out in this volume, the Bénard cell indicates another crucial feature of novelty in addition to the spontaneity of the transition: what is new and the conditions making the new possible originate at the same time. Thus, every novelty presents us with the chicken-egg problem. However, in its accustomed form, as a question of primacy, the chicken-egg problem is misleading. Neither the egg nor the chicken has temporal priority; they come about simultaneously. New phenomena can get stabilized through a process sometimes characterized as circular causality (Kelso 1995, 9); in e√ect, this means mutual reinforcement of the new phenomenon and its conditions of existence so the phenomenon is stabilized, for the time being. However, the Bénard cell is also a misleading model precisely because of its reliable repeatability. The conditions making the cells possible in a laboratory setting are imposed from the outside. In other words, the conditions producing the cells and the cells themselves can be distinguished from each other. Climate and weather provide more complex examples of the dynamics of novelty. Weather conditions are in constant flux, and occasionally they produce violent phenomena such as thunderstorms and tornadoes. Here again it is hard to tell apart the conditions giving rise to these abrupt atmospheric disturbances, and the disturbances themselves. This idea of circular causation draws on the research tradition of synergetics, established by Hermann Haken (1983); in his own words, synergetics is ‘‘concerned with the cooperation of individual parts of a system that produces macroscopic spatial, temporal or functional structures’’ (5). The aim of synergetics is to make understandable the origin

1 Thermal convection: the Bénard cell. When a thin layer of suitable homogeneous fluid is heated from below, the thermal energy of the molecules at the bottom increases and their movements intensify; at a critical level of temperature gradient, regular rotating ‘‘cells’’ show up in the fluid.

2 Thermal convection in the atmosphere: the Hadley cell, which circulates on both sides of the equator.

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of macroscopic organization through microscopic processes (see appendix). In the Bénard cell, for instance, the first thing that happens when the temperature gradient appears is that the thermal (‘‘Brownian’’) movements of the molecules at the lower part of the oil layer get more irregular: the range of vibratory modes exhibited by individual molecules increases. The temperature gradient is a control parameter in this system. An increasing value of the control parameter—steeper temperature gradient—first leads to an increase in the ‘‘disorder’’ of the system. At some stage, however, a dominant mode of vibration shows up, and other modes are damped out as entrainment to the dominant mode proceeds (see appendix). The geometry of the possibility space of the system changes as a result. The movements of the molecules are synchronized in a way that was unimaginable when the temperature di√erence was smaller. The synchronized movements are captured, as it were, by a collective variable, the ‘‘cells.’’ Such an abrupt change in the possibility space is perhaps the feature of this system that is most counterintuitive in the light of traditional linear science. In the social sphere, intensifying discussion and debate is to a certain extent analogous to the heating up of the molecules in the Bénard system, as Lasse Peltonen points out (this volume). The creation of a public space, which o√ers a site for discussion and debate, can, in a similar way, prepare the path to intensive political struggles and social changes; Markus Laine analyzes such a process in ‘‘Fight Over the Face of Tampere.’’ At the point of origin of novelty we have symmetry breaking, a rupture. The result is a new possibility space for the whole system. This also makes novelty contextual: novelty is always possible, but any new phenomenon cannot happen anywhere anytime. Climate and weather also demonstrate another important feature of novelty, applicable to ecosocial systems. New phenomena have several characteristic temporal horizons; some of them are local and short term, like afternoon thunderstorms, others involve conditions over large areas over long periods of time (Stevens 1999). The temporal horizons are simultaneously horizons of predictability of particular types of change. The temporal horizon of changes in the weather, and sensible weather forecasts, is less than two weeks. Local weather is shaped by continuous atmospheric events such as low-pressure areas (cyclones), high-pressure areas (anticyclones), and weather fronts. The

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INTRODUCTION

‘‘life cycles’’ of such atmospheric events, from their origin to their ultimate dissipation, are often quite predictable. For instance, cyclones that originate o√ the coast of northern New England in North America and move toward the northeast often dominate the weather of the northern Atlantic and northwestern Europe. Often, cyclones arrive in Europe regularly one after another for several weeks in a row: the weather varies regularly almost on a daily basis close to the Atlantic coast and somewhat less regularly in more continental regions further east. Every strong cyclone that drifts from the Atlantic and hits the British coastline produces an ordered complex of atmospheric movements.∞ Shifts from one dominant weather pattern to another, on the other hand, may happen quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Typically in northern Europe, a blocking anticyclone, a relatively stable high-pressure area, may dominate the weather for up to several weeks. The blocking means that the usual routes of cyclones are changed over a large geographic region. Retrospectively, it may seem that the weather pattern was stable all along, but this would not have been predictable in advance. The exceptionally long and severe heat wave of summer 2003 in central Europe, for instance, was extremely improbable in statistical terms, but it was due to a standing summer anticyclone that resembled innumerable ones recorded before (Schär et al. 2004). Even though local weathers vary unpredictably from one week to the next, the climate of the earth shows predictable patterns of other kinds on longer temporal horizons. Seasonality, of course, is a largely repeatable pattern. Seasonality is so overwhelmingly important in human subsistence that we tend to neglect it; our lives are tuned to the seasonal cycle because we have no choice (Dyke 1997). In addition, the climate includes fairly regular cycles that stretch over several years, such as the North Atlantic oscillation and El Niño southern oscillation. But these, in turn, are amenable to unpredictable change in a temporal horizon of several years. The frequency of El Niño has probably changed during the past decades (Glantz 1996). Some mechanisms a√ecting the climate of Earth operate within really extensive temporal horizons. Continental drift shapes the distribution of land and ocean. As a consequence, oceanic currents and patterns of distribution of heat from the equator toward the poles change as well. Continental drift is happening all the time, but its e√ect becomes apparent as changed continental configurations only in the

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3 Nonlinear (above) versus linear (below) change in the state of the global ecological system as the function of a control parameter, depicted on the x axis.

course of tens and hundreds of millions of years. In a shorter time frame, still very long from the human perspective, we have glacial cycles. They have had a fairly regular temporal horizon of 100,000 years during the past 2 million years or so, apparently influenced by cycles in Earth’s orbit with periodicities of 19,000 years, 23,000 years, 40,000 years, and 100,000 years. During each glacial cycle, the climate has varied a lot in the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 3). The kind of novelty exhibited by climatic variation is, in other words, a relative matter. The gradual cooling of the climate of the earth before the onset of the present age of glaciations some 2 million years ago produced a novelty: continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. However, within the time frame of continental reconfiguration, ice ages are predictable phenomena. Glacial periods have been a recurring pattern in the history of Earth. But the climate coexists with other parts of the earth system, both with its biology and its waters and lands. The weaving together of all the processes in the di√erent ‘‘spheres’’ on Earth’s surface produces novelty in a strong sense: something that has never existed before.

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INTRODUCTION

A crucial type of novelty has come about on Earth through the mingling together of climatic change and biological evolution. Such mingling is, in fact, particularly interesting from our human point of view. As an established phrase goes, modern humans are ‘‘children of the ice age.’’ The hominid evolution leading to modern humans took place in Africa during the past couple of millions of years, in an era characterized by large and rapid climatic fluctuations and concomitant variations in habitats and dominant wildlife. Novelty has been, of course, a predominant theme in human history ever since. A specific feature of this is the modification of the possibility space of human sociocultural evolution through events or processes that are unique. Bruno Latour (1999) presented an interesting interpretation of this history on a grand scale as a history of the ‘‘collective,’’ that is, the mingling together of human and natural elements into ever larger complexes. The important point in Latour’s view is the inseparability of material and cultural elements in this history—in fact, the impossibility of distinguishing between material and cultural elements in the first place. Another feature of human history that has direct bearing on this line of thought is the appearance of cycles in social life with a broad range of return times, from day-to-day and week-to-week routines to the annual cycle and to fluctuations in economic and technological development in longer temporal scales (Dyke 1988, 1997). Without losing our sense of the grand scale of civilizational history, we can take a closer look at more mundane processes that give rise to novelties in political communities on fine temporal scales. Markus Laine is our guide: he analyzes the politicization of the environment in the city of Tampere, southern Finland, from the perspective of the possibility space of local politics. Modernization of the city, accompanied by a promise of economic growth and increasing welfare, was an important source of symbolic power for the governing coalition in the decades following the Second World War. The environment was sacrificed on the altar of welfare promise. As an indication, old buildings were demolished one after another in downtown Tampere, originally without much public notice. This experience is important particularly because the dynamics of demolition were not driven only by economic vested interests such as property speculation. Modernization of the cityscape was another feature of the ‘‘face’’ of the governing coalition. Old buildings in downtown Tampere came to represent sym-

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bolic struggle over the future direction of the city, of Finnish society, and even of the industrialized culture at large. Symbolic conflict, in fact, is a characteristic feature of the environmental awakening that happened all over the industrialized world in the 1960s. Lasse Peltonen analyzes the dynamics of the process on a more general level. The genuine novelty of modern environmentalism consists in the following: the accumulating environmental problems have changed the possibility space of the human sociocultural future, but there is no one-to-one map from observable phenomena to the geometry of the possibility space of human culture. Future human possibilities have become precarious in ways we do not really understand. The environmental awakening is a response to this change, and in itself a factor a√ecting the sociocultural prospects. In a sense, societal issues such as environmental problems carve a state space for themselves, grounded as they are in the activity of committed people (Haila 2002). Taken together, the essays of Peltonen and Laine show us how political novelties emerged out of a particular complex environment, originally structured in the aftermath of the Second World War and resulting ideological configurations, then restructured within that configured space under the impetus of environmental concerns. What would be puzzling when looked at in terms of traditional conceptualizations is fully understandable, not to say paradigmatic, when looked at in terms of nonlinear dynamics.

A METHODOLOGICAL NOTE: ANALOGUE MODELS

We should pause now to consider the methodological commitments we have already made and will continue to make. We have seen that novelty comes about in innumerable guises in complex systems. Furthermore, systems that have physically nothing in common may share dynamic similarities, as our comparison of the Bénard cell, variation in the weather, and the onset of protest movements showed. So, we need tools to evaluate similarities and di√erences in patterns and qualitative features of processes giving rise to novelty. A useful approach for doing so is to use analogue models. In a sense, the mathematical models of dynamical systems theory are themselves

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INTRODUCTION

analogue models. However, the term analogue model primarily refers to a material system that is known in detail and that thus constitutes a real-life model of a theoretical idea. A particular analogue model is a first test of whether a particular abstract notion is realistic at all. Law and Mol (2002) adopt a similar methodological perspective in their exploration of complexity in social processes. Michel Serres (1982) notes that at the root of science in ancient Greece was an analogy: one could measure the height of a pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow at that time of the day when the height of a stick stuck in the ground, and the length of its shadow, were equal: ‘‘To measure the inaccessible consists in mimicking it within the realm of the accessible’’ (85). The pendulum is a useful analogue model (see appendix). As a mathematical object, the pendulum is a simple harmonic oscillator, but strictly speaking, a pendulum is a model of a damped oscillator. The pendulum can be used as an illustration of a harmonic oscillator that exists only as an idealization and that can be modeled only analytically, that is, distanced from material media. In the same way, a mass-and-springs oscillator, or any number of devices or natural phenomena fluctuating regularly between two states, can illustrate the principle of a harmonic oscillator. As harmonic oscillators these are identical, but as analogue models they di√er from each other in innumerable ways. So, knowing the mechanical principle of a pendulum does not help a bit if one has to construct a mass-and-springs oscillator. Analogue models cannot be directly ‘‘fitted’’ from one situation to another. Instead, they suggest qualitatively important aspects and processes that deserve particular attention in studying the other situation. This connects with our notion of possibility space: an analogue model shows features of the possibility space of a particular dynamic process. In a way, the construction of an analogue model works in two steps. First, a model shows that the phenomenon that it describes is possible. A pendulum shows that an oscillator is possible. Second, the model helps, provided it is a good model, to evaluate the possibility space of what it is a model of. Both a pendulum and a mass-and-springs oscillator are useful for studying the possible dynamics of oscillatory movement. The use of analogue models breaks the accustomed rules of ceteris paribus reasoning. Ceteris paribus, ‘‘other things being equal or unchanged,’’ is a necessary methodological rule when, for instance, reg-

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ularities established in the laboratory are applied to field conditions. This is a common worry in all laboratory research. In fact, an experimental setting producing repeatable results in the laboratory is an analogue model; the critical question is, What is it a model of ? Laboratory experiments on population growth and interspecific interactions— competition and predation—o√er good ecological examples. Pioneering experiments conducted by G. F. Gause and others in the early twentieth century gave rise to a generalization called ‘‘competitive exclusion,’’ which maintains that two similar species cannot maintain their populations in a similar environment. It is relatively easy to demonstrate the principle in the laboratory by growing suitable microorganisms together in an aquarium, but the situation outside the laboratory is much more complicated, and the applicability of the principle in the wild has been a source of fierce debates and controversies. As Alan Garfinkel (1981) notes, every explanation establishes an equivalence relation among the phenomena it is assumed to cover. The ‘‘competitive exclusion’’ principle is based on the assumption that the individuals of competing species are ‘‘equivalent’’ in that they always, when occurring together, interfere with each other’s acquisition of food. Such an equivalence assumption makes it possible to construct analytic, mathematical expressions for regularities that were originally observed in a material system. Then the equations become mathematical objects in their own right. Such a shift in the mode of reasoning from analogue to analytic has often been remarkably successful, as the broad applicability of mathematics in the sciences testifies. Thus, for instance, Peter Turchin (2003) shows that a considerable part of the theory of population dynamics can be rigorously derived from a few basic assumptions concerning the nature of interactions among population members. This means that the equivalence assumptions provide adequate closure conditions for the models: on the population level, interactions among all population members can be assumed equivalent, although we know this is not strictly true. But if the assumed equivalence relation were not valid, then the closure would not be valid either. This is notoriously the case with genetic models. Modern molecular research methods have shown that genes are not equivalent in their e√ects and that genetic e√ects come about through complex, interactive molecular networks, not through atomistic causal chains (Moss 2003).

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INTRODUCTION

Analogue models demonstrate specific dynamic principles in concrete form. The pendulum serves a useful function precisely by being easily brought into mind as a material instance of a harmonic oscillator. The Bénard cell similarly provides a material instantiation of symmetry breaking and origin of novelty, as we argued earlier. More complicated dynamic problems can be studied with analogue models as well. Synchronization and entrainment are important processes in a large variety of dynamic systems (see appendix). Mutually entrained oscillators provide models for such systems. However, for modeling the coordination of biological rhythms in organisms, biochemical oscillators o√er more promise than mechanical oscillators (Winfree 1980 is a classic). In other words, when using analogue models, there seldom are strictly specifiable ‘‘other things’’ that could be ‘‘equal or unchanged.’’ Rather, each analogue model tests and makes understandable a particular concept that is important in the dynamics of processes of a particular sort. The Bénard cell demonstrates symmetry breaking. It also usefully demonstrates the role of a control parameter in systems dynamics. The temperature gradient is the control parameter in the Bénard phenomenon: gradual change in the parameter value—steeper temperature gradient—leads to an abrupt change in the system behavior. Lasse Peltonen uses this aspect of the Bénard cell as an analogue model for environmental movements by drawing a parallel between temperature gradient in a fluid and conjuncture in a social context, produced by mutually resonating fluctuations. Once this parallel has been drawn, it is open to challenge and scrutiny. If the parallel seems reasonable after criticism, if it stands the test, then the conclusions about the dynamic similarities gather support as well. The weather-climate system provides a rich set of analogue models of other aspects of dynamic change. We already noticed in the previous section an important feature: the di√erentiation between temporal horizons as well as spatial extensions of fluctuations in weather. Some patterns recur in quite regular forms—tornadoes and thunderstorms— under conditions that are increasingly understood. Such phenomena can be used as analogue models of self-organization produced by strong energy gradients. Meteorologists with practical experience in weather forecasts have good hands-on experience of the dominant patterns in the particular regions they work in. On the other hand, the global climate system as a whole is unique; in a sense, it is an analogue

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model of itself. There is no way of building it up from basic components, as it were. Although the behavior of ideal gases in equilibrium conditions is well understood, gases start doing weird things when they fill up a planetary atmosphere and get energetically coupled with a planetary ocean. Our concept of the analogue model comes close to the traditional concept of case study in the social sciences. Literature o√ers as many analogue models as you wish of human social and cultural dynamics. Shakespeare’s plays build a broad range of analogue models of the psychology of modern humans, as critics such as W. H. Auden (2000) and Harold Bloom (1998) have argued. Captain Ahab (Moby-Dick) builds an analogue model of nightmarish ressentiment felt toward a living creature, the white whale, and perhaps ressentiment felt toward a cruel God. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent builds an analogue model of modern terrorism that aims to disrupt social order through pointless and incomprehensible acts of violence; Kafka’s works build an analogue model of faceless bureaucracy, and his countryman Hasek employs Sergeant Schweik to build a model of bureaucracy with egg on its face; and so on, and so on. Perhaps one has to be a poet to really appreciate the infinite variability of sociocultural dynamics; for instance, Auden wrote, ‘‘The historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives, where classes keep overlapping, where what is believed to have happened is as real as what actually happened, a world, moreover, which cannot be defined by technical terms but only described by analogies’’ (quoted in Kirsch 2000, xiv). We can give another formulation to Auden’s aphoristic thought by picking up some of the concepts elaborated in the appendix. Systems of human interaction are always going to be sensitive to contingencies, hence sensitive to initial conditions, hence subject to potentially chaotic episodes. Contingencies e√ectively reinitialize, for example, redefining and reorganizing problem spaces in the course of solving problems. It is fortunate that they do, for though that taxes our ability to understand, it also makes possible most of the skilled activities we enjoy. In general, the exercise of a skill requires rapid adjustment and retuning all throughout its performance. Two boxers, for example, are a constant source of contingencies for one another. Similarly (oddly enough), many people who are skilled at dispute resolution owe their success to their abilities to ≤

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INTRODUCTION

notice, capture, and utilize fleeting nuances that appear in conversation and to redirect the conversation along the paths suggested by the nuances. They capture noisy fluctuations and convert them into strong signals (see Hutchins 1995; Kelso 1995). There are also prospects for our getting a better sense of ourselves as intelligent doers. What it is to have a personality or character is a lot easier to articulate when we have the concept of an attractor to work with (see appendix). It is worth taking a minute to see how that could work. Obviously, a system that remains within an attractor, even a chaotic one, stops exploring the areas in the state space outside the attractor. This is the main feature allowing us to think of a chaotic attractor as a model of personality, for to have a personality is to confine yourself to a patterned part of the space of human possibilities and eschew the rest—out of proclivity or principle, perhaps. Only the brain-dead will be on the ballistic trajectory relating a single independent variable to a single dependent variable. Some poor souls will end up as periodic attractors, edging close to the linear approximation; the more fortunate will be in chaotic attractors; and the truly blessed will always be on transients, exploring ever new regions of the state space available to them. The last need not be any less reliable friends and partners than the first two, and they are likely (but not certain) to be more fun. Just as in evolutionary biology and genetics, a challenge for history is to be able to explain variety and reliable descent at the same time, patterns of sameness and di√erence. We wind up these methodological considerations with some terminological reflections. Some care is needed here, though. Terminological tuning an sich does not do any useful job. Terms an sich do nothing; terms are needed for particular purposes. We can be happy with normal words but put them to new uses. Besides, all good words are already in use (or misuse), as Susan Oyama (2001) has noted. So, let’s take the need of terms as a practical necessity: we need terms that we can use without blushing. Perhaps the most critical challenge is to grasp that abrupt changes may take place in the geometry of the possibility space of systems believed to be ordered and well-behaved. A possibility for a new phenomenon may arise instantaneously, but the actual realization of that possibility is not predictable, nevertheless. In traditional philosophical jargon, the type of processes we are interested in have no su≈cient

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reasons (Stengers 1997). To emphasize the spontaneity of novelty, potential and capacity are useful terms, despite the problematic connotation of a preformationist ‘‘inner essence,’’ that is, of the new phenomenon being ‘‘really’’ present in advance, although subdued (for a criticism of preformationism, see Oyama 2000a). We might also call the potentials or capacities determinate possibilities—or more simply, gods, as Dyke suggests in his essay. One possible terminological move is to use the term ‘‘potential’’ for characterizing relevant alternative possibilities open to a complex system. Potential is the capacity of a system from somebody’s point of view. The behavior of complex systems often produces single events that stand out against the backdrop of regular average behavior. A tornado is an abrupt event that also brings to light important general features of the weather system of the southern Great Plains in the United States. The weather system has the potential of producing tornadoes. We ought to get sensitized to a similar possibility in other systems, too: abrupt transients may show up in the midst of a regular flow of events (see appendix). Susan Oyama and Lasse Peltonen in their essays address yet another conceptual problem: how to express the inseparable coupling of structure and process. This issue is burdened by an inclination toward structural determinism (‘‘structuralism’’), which is in some ways more sophisticated than atomistic determinism but no less harmful: they both share the assumption that the possibility space of the system under study is smooth and ordered. Pierre Bourdieu adopted the term ‘‘structured structuring structure’’ to characterize the intermingling (Dyke 1988); Lasse Peltonen introduces the term ‘‘heterarchy’’ used by Kontopoulos (1993) and describes its uses in overcoming the structurefunction dichotomy. But again, let’s remind ourselves that these terms are going to remain empty phrases as long as we are not able to provide plausible analogue models that give substance to them.

ECOSOCIAL COMPLEXITY

The use by a number of the authors in this volume of methods developed in the recent study of complexity warrants a few orienting words about complexity. Chuck Dyke presents technical aspects of the concept

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INTRODUCTION

in nontechnical language in the appendix. In this section, we introduce resources that complexity thinking o√ers for understanding ecosocial systems. We have spoken of models as scientific tools. In early Enlightenment science, models figured as much as they do today but were thought of as idealizations and simplifications. The simplifications were predominantly linearizations. This continues all the way up through quantum mechanics. In turn, there is a persistent tradition that the proper idealizations and simplifications are ‘‘dictated by reason’’ (for criticism, see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Stengers 1997). For all the success of this old science, we now know that, far from being dictated by reason, such simplifications had serious limitations and resulted in the di≈culty that only suitably simple phenomena could be understood.≥ Lots and lots of things could be thought of, in e√ect, as elaborately concatenated ballistics trajectories. That is, the single trajectory model did not look like one model among many, but like the only proper model. This di≈culty was obscured by the confident assumption that any complex phenomenon could be broken down into simple ones that could be treated one by one following the standard procedures, and so what we now see as a limitation previously seemed an advantage. We think that the development of schemes of explanation in history and the social sciences followed the same paths of simplification. There are lots of reasons this was so. The least of them was the envy of the natural sciences they are always accused of, though with positivism taking hold as the dominant ideology of the social sciences such envy did have its moments of importance. More crucial, what drove the social sciences to an almost exclusive reliance on the single trajectory (the constant conjunction of an independent and a dependent variable) was the dream that explanations could be proved to be correct. This, too, was inherited in part from the natural sciences, for they had borrowed their rhetorical strategies from the realm of judicial practice, where proof (and the assignment of responsibility as a consequence) was a primary concern. In addition, of course, there is the connection between proof and policymaking. Those who take the advice of academic experts want to be sure that the advice is sound. Another main consequence of the emphasis on proof has been the persistent attempt to totalize one or another simple model. That is, the social sciences started taking account of why things happened some of

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the time, and trying to maintain that is why they happened all of the time. The traditional way to argue this totalization used to be to claim that the scheme totalized was a theory of human nature. This sort of argument seemed powerful during the period of Western colonialism but has been weakened considerably by contemporary feminist and other postcolonial critics. Nonetheless, it persists as a default orthodoxy, largely as a tribute to the degree to which the search for ‘‘laws’’ is thought of as the characteristic scientific activity, and to the di≈culty of finding ‘‘laws’’ of an appropriate generality. Dyke takes this theme up more thoroughly in his essay. To see what nonlinear dynamics does for (and to) us in this context, we have to be very careful not to add our contribution to the history of totalized schemes. In fact, if we take complexity and nonlinearity seriously, we are barred from totalization in any but the most trivial sense. We will be more skeptical than ever about the availability of a ‘‘master narrative.’’ Ecosocial complexity presents us with particular di≈culties when approached from the perspective of traditional scientific thinking. One reason is that they cut through the strongly upheld division between human society and the rest of nature. The dream of scientific proof seems distant in this hybrid zone. In fact, however, thinking about life and thinking about human political community have gone hand in hand in much of European intellectual history, as Michel Foucault (1970) showed. In modern vocabulary, we could say that a shared feature of living systems of any sort, including human social systems, is dynamic stability in open systems far from equilibrium: both living organisms and social systems maintain structure with the help of energy gradients in the environment (see appendix). In such terms, a living organism is a temporarily stabilized complex of parallel and nested reproductive cycles, driven by metabolic exchange. An organism stays alive as long as the processes maintaining its various parts and its constant exchange of materials with the surroundings continue uninterrupted. These processes create critical scales, or spatial and temporal extensions, which determine the life of the organism. The smallest and fastest processes go on continuously within single cells, and in the death of old cells and the birth of new cells through division.∂ Larger-scale processes go on in the interactions of organisms with each other. In the spatial realm, the characteristic

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INTRODUCTION

scales of organisms are defined by their movements and metabolic appropriation of necessary environmental elements. Organisms come in a huge range of shapes and, in particular, sizes. The metabolic processes of organisms also merge with physical and chemical fluxes in their environment, creating ‘‘extended organisms,’’ as J. Scott Turner (2000) argues: organisms often appropriate energy flows that are located outside of their bodies and physiological processes sensu stricto. This is what all organisms do, to some extent. Energy gradients are an a√ordance o√ered by the environment for such animals that are able to exploit them. Di√erent kinds of extended organisms provide a huge range of analogue models for di√erent aspects of dynamic stability. Having left behind the dream of one definitive theory we could lean on, we can try our hands on more systematic analogies between organisms and social systems. In the following, we make a preliminary analogy between organismal physiology and human subsistence, foregrounding the cyclic nature of basic processes that characterize both of these. To set the stage, a characterization of human subsistence: human subsistence depends on the tuning together of a vast complex of parallel and nested reproductive cycles. Small-scale cycles are constituted by the daily acts of human individuals, which, of course, are built on the physiological cycles of the human organism. Large-scale processes are constituted by the metabolism of the community with its surroundings, that is, the local economy. The intuition of us modern humans tends to intervene at this point, exclaiming that such an analogy is meaningless because the reproductive processes behind human subsistence are much more open-ended than the metabolic processes going on within single organisms. This argument has some truth to it, but it is too totalizing. Turner’s notion of an extended organism e√ectively opens up the physiological processes of all organisms to their external environment. We humans are much more skillful, and ruthless, in exploiting this possibility than any other creatures. On the other hand, many critical features of human subsistence are, in fact, tied to spatially and temporally specified productive processes, which themselves have to be maintained by reproductive cycles. The importance of locally specified productive processes is obvious in a historical perspective: local economies with their characteristic cycles have dominated human life in all traditional societies. For

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instance, Fernand Braudel (1989, 66) assessed France as follows: ‘‘Before the industrial revolution, every portion of France’s territory tended to look inward, su≈cient to itself, closed to the outside world. Economic diversity thus echoed regional diversity, shedding light on it, adapting to it, to some extent explaining it.’’ Local economies still have a much more important role than we modern urbanites usually believe.∑ We are also facing a methodological problem in this connection. As Jane Jacobs (1984) has labored to show, a di≈cult problem in assessing local economy is that economic statistics are organized according to administrative units, which are often irrelevant for the dynamics of local economies. In fact, elementary models of the economy of early human communities that Jacobs (1969) has constructed show a remarkable resemblance to Turner’s models of the extended organism. The di√erence is a matter of degree. Several case studies in this volume take up the problem of temporal synchronization in human activities of di√erent types. Lasse Peltonen and Markus Laine discuss the birth and politicization of environmental protests. Ari Jokinen analyzes modern forest management as ‘‘time management’’: the smooth flow of timber from the forests to the market requires that processes in several di√erent temporal horizons fit together. Taru Peltola deals with issues of local economy: how calculations of profitability get a di√erent political meaning depending on whether they locate a productive unit such as a local power plant in a market-driven business context or in a regional-economic context. Let’s also remind ourselves at this point what analogue models are all about: they point at important dynamic features shared between systems that are di√erent from each other. Thus, a fruitful analogy also helps to specify which di√erences matter. The analogy between human subsistence and organismal physiology helps to identify such human interactions with the rest of the world that are missing from the worlds of other creatures of nature. Economic transactions, and their institutionalization in the course of human history (K. Polanyi 1968), form one such type. However, this di√erence should not be exaggerated. ‘‘Transaction’’ is a broad term that can be used without assumptions about human specificity. There is a continuum, in fact: the social life of apes and monkeys is dominated by social transactions, as recent focused research has shown. Communication is another type of interaction that is specialized in

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INTRODUCTION

the human sphere through means and media that other organisms lack; communication creates new spatial scales and also new potential for cycles and entrainment of various sorts (Dyke 1997, 1999). The ability to use symbols in communication is distinctively human (Deacon 1997). Lasse Peltonen points out that language-mediated communication is the location of the social in social movements. Communicative interactions may establish temporary ‘‘discursive membranes’’ which provide operational autonomy for actors in a movement; other animals lack this possibility. On the other hand, however, all animals communicate with each other.∏ As John Shotter points out in his essay, communication is a general feature of our interaction with the world. In this, we humans are similar to other living beings. The rule of communication is dialogue, as opposed to monologue: shared events and shared practices grow out of dialogically structured interactions with others, including other creatures of nature. This, in turn, facilitates shared understanding. At this point, we want to raise another, related question, following Iordanis Marcoulatos (this volume): What about the point of view of the agent? How does ‘‘human agency’’ relate to the picture we are painting? Is self-knowledge possible, useful, or privileged when we view humans as participants in ecosocial dynamic processes? Can I know what I am doing better than others can? The relevant question here is whether the agent can gain control of the boundary conditions of his or her action. Then the agent can know what he or she is doing better than the epistemologist can, because to control boundary conditions is (almost always) to confine a process to a linear regime. So agents have the advantage over epistemologists in such cases. They are reasonably happy to know what they are doing, sometimes, when others do not (Figure 4). Alternatively, agents may not be able to control the boundary conditions of their actions. The paradigm this time is the rolling of dice, and the paradigm of acting in such conditions is described in terms of uncertainty or risk. The paradigm analysis is in terms of probabilities. What the sciences of complexity have to o√er at this juncture is the realization that the analysis of a situation in terms of traditional statistics and probabilities is very vulnerable because of the strong underlying assumptions of linearity and independence (see appendix). In contrast are systems whose boundary conditions evolve as a natu-

4 Branching paths in the developmental trajectory of personality, showing the reduction in available degrees of freedom with age. (Drawn after Lewis 1997.)

5 ‘‘Hysteresis’’ means asymmetry in the behavior of a response variable with increasing versus decreasing values of a control parameter. Hysteresis is common in emotional reactions, such as the frustration-anger relationship depicted here.

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INTRODUCTION

ral part of the historical processes themselves. Not surprisingly, these include the conspicuously developmental processes both Aristotle and Hegel were so fascinated with. The assumption of independence with respect to any of the recognizable subprocesses is highly suspect, as it is precisely the interaction of the subprocesses of development and, in many cases, the interregulation of the subprocesses that dominates the developmental trajectory. These systems operate on earlier states of themselves to produce new configurations of constraints and enablements governing their future development. That is, they gain control of at least some of their own boundary conditions for a time (Figure 5). Sometimes we are such systems, and at other times we find ourselves ‘‘caught up in them.’’ When the latter occurs, the metaphors of the ‘‘whirl of events,’’ ‘‘the march of history,’’ ‘‘destiny,’’ and so on are dusted o√ once again. Our sense of ourselves as minor characters in a narrative over which we do not have control becomes acute. This all goes against the grain of Enlightenment optimism.π It violates the Enlightenment concept of agency as freedom. These days, a lot of people have this feeling with respect to our relationship to the environment. In a sense, the Enlightenment view has always been that we could learn to outrun nature by outthinking it. This capacity could be thought to develop without limits, simultaneously removing all limits to our agency. Thus, our assessment of what we can do, the evaluation of the scope of our agency, has to be carried out in terms of our capacity to deal with complexity. A particularly intriguing set of questions arises when we start to think of our capacity to create complexity. For it may be entirely possible to create unmanageable bifurcations by ourselves—change our world from one where, by and large, we can manage our problems to one where we no longer can do so. In fact, we know about some of the ways that can be done. A nuclear or thermonuclear explosion is an example of a process that we prepare in such a way that it gets (quickly and decisively) beyond our control. Of course, that example involves processes that we understand well enough to predict. The more interesting cases are systems that we inadvertently put in place, processes we unthinkingly get going, that begin to take on a life of their own, that is, begin to gain control of at least some of their own boundary conditions. Notice that we need not be talking about systems and processes that look historically momentous at the time of their inception, nor, given the sensitivity of nonlinear systems to tiny changes in conditions,

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do we have to do anything momentous to them to kick them over into a dangerous regime; Ville Lähde discusses this problem. With these considerations we get close to the themes of the first section of this introduction: we should avoid vocabularies that reproduce the prejudice of human exceptionality. At issue is understanding the merging of human-induced and other natural processes in the shaping of human subsistence. We have previously elaborated theoretical and conceptual ideas on biosocial and ecosocial complexity (Dyke 1988, 1994, 1997; Haila 1998, 2002; Haila and Levins 1992), but a sore need for fruitful analogue models can be identified at this point. No single model can do the job. Several of the essays that follow aim at constructing specific analogue models: of the development of a local energy production system as a sociotechnical process (Peltola); of entrainment of forest management practices by the artifactual device of forest stands (Jokinen); of the transformation of a local political field under the pressure of environmental issues (Laine); and of the origin of social movements (Peltonen). The practical perspective on intentionality, outlined by Marcoulatos, is also at the heart of this challenge. We wrap up this section with comments on ecosocial complexity and scales. Some human activities have an immediate and localized presence, for instance, gardening and farming. In such cases, the spatial extensions of human actions can be evaluated against an ecological spatial hierarchy, as it were (Holling et al. 1995). Gardening is measured in square feet or square meters, farming in acres or hectares. The labor intensity manageable in a garden (hand-picking pests, pulling individual weeds) is impossible on a farm. Such a comparison brings into focus useful specific points in at least two dimensions. First, natural and human-induced disturbances can be compared with each other: a first rule is correspondence in the sense that human activity mimics the dynamics of natural disturbance regimes (Haila et al. 1994; Haila and Levins 1992). Second, assessing local carrying capacity is identified as a well-bounded task. In specific contexts, carrying capacity is an extremely useful concept: there are only so many fish in any particular lake, for instance, and it would be foolish to claim that this does not matter. However, a more conspicuous feature of human culture is to cross local boundaries through trade and other sorts of transactions such as tribute, plundering, and warfare. Cities are localized, but their dy-

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INTRODUCTION

namics are translocal (Dyke 1988; Jacobs 1984). Natural conditions alone do not predict the growth potential of cities; John Muir considered beekeeping the only viable basis of subsistence for the region of Los Angeles (cited in Davis 1990). The growth of a city and the growth of its possibility space occur simultaneously.∫ In the era of capitalism and international trade, this has often happened with amazing speed. Because of recurring scale-crossing leaps in the history of human subsistence, the future of any particular ecosocial complex is very di≈cult to predict. Scale crossing makes the assessment of carrying capacity daunting, too. How do you assess the carrying capacity of Los Angeles? At this point, we have to ask: When do global averages matter? What is the relevance of Malthusian bounding of resource problems? This requires the task of specifying boundary conditions. What are the global boundaries within which sheer quantity is an issue? In localized contexts it often is; Malthus is very much alive in specific situations. What we need is specification as to what those situations are. It is useful to draw a distinction between top-down and bottom-up perspectives to this question. A top-down perspective starts from the commonly heard statement ‘‘Infinite growth is not possible in a finite space.’’ This statement is indisputable, of course, but the real problem is to specify what the space in question is. Global averages do not adequately describe the dynamic relationships between human activity and global ecology. As Harold Morowitz (1992, 76–77) notes, ‘‘We can say almost nothing about entropy on the Earth’s surface, since the system is so dynamic and so far from equilibrium that thermodynamic measures are largely without significance.’’ In fact, global averages are too restrictive and too generous at the same time. They are too restrictive by postulating a uniform ‘‘space-filling’’ growth that supposedly covers the whole globe in the same way, but because of the dynamic nature of the biosphere, this is impossible. Averages are too generous, on the other hand, by neglecting the possibility of global-scale transients that patch together local processes that are ordinarily dynamically separate from each other; global pandemics, for instance, have such a potential. A bottom-up perspective would focus on the conditions of specific processes at specific locations. For instance, processes such as desertification, erosion, salinization of soils, and destruction of forests always take place in particular ways in particular localities both in an ecological and a socioecological sense, and are therefore essentially

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local. A global integration of local destructive processes into a unified big picture is useful for actuarial reasons, but the dynamic relevance of the big picture is a moot issue. Thus, for example, salinization is a serious threat to sustainable agriculture on susceptible soils in specific regions such as Western Australia and many parts of Africa, but socioecologically these have to be addressed as separate problems. This di√erence between top-down and bottom-up perspectives is the source of a standing controversy. But the controversy is a false one: both perspectives are necessary. In fact, a good rule concerning their balance might be that there need not be any balance. Instead, it may be useful to apply ‘‘binary thinking’’ (Elbow 2000), to resort to both perspectives— but one at a time (Haila 1999b). Politically, however, a straightforward Malthusian framing of environmental problems is outright misleading. A general claim that human population growth is a ‘‘cause’’ of environmental threats, or any other sociocultural trends, for that matter, is vacuous because the notion of cause is vacuous. The notion of cause has practical relevance only if it can be connected with a specific mechanism whose workings we understand. This can be achieved in relation to specific analogue models—remove the springs from a mass-and-springs oscillator, and the oscillatory movement stops—but not concerning socioecological situations of any complexity.Ω From this perspective, Haila (2004) criticizes the claim that human population growth is the cause of the biodiversity crisis. Principles of distancing justice, such as are discussed by John O’Neill in his essay in this volume, prove to be important in this context. The evaluation of ecosocial potential includes an ethical dimension. It cannot be done without all those participating who have stakes in each issue. This, in turn, includes both humans and other creatures of nature, and the question arises, Who speaks for whom? Environmental issues have given rise to a variety of ideas and models about deliberative democracy. Ideas of deliberative democracy do not per se provide answers, as O’Neill points out; instead, they may help by revealing conflicts that ordinarily remain hidden. In other words, deliberation enters the real social arena, with real conflicts of interest among human actors. Habermasian communication free of domination will never be realized on a societal scale on any issue of any importance. Critical issues usually cannot be articulated in

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INTRODUCTION

speech; it requires a longer time and a quieter process and deeper, practical interactions to create the confidence and trust needed. To initiate change, we need understanding about how entrainments work in sociocultural processes (Dyke 1999; Dyke and Dyke 2002; appendix).

HARMONY?

There is a long-standing tradition of thinking about the harmony of nature and of our living harmoniously with nature. Part of that tradition thinks in terms of a balance of nature, a static conception we now know to be terribly faulty. But if we avoid the image of static balance, perhaps harmony can provide heuristics for analyzing the mutual relationships of processes, which are in some ways in potential conflict with each other. The synchronization of oscillations in di√erent frequencies within the organism o√ers an analogue model for this concept of harmony. Harmony comes in innumerable guises, so we have many possibilities to choose among. To begin with, we have to sort through the historical resonances of harmony. For us, talk about the harmony of nature may be metaphorical. For the Pythagoreans and other ancient Mediterraneans, it probably was not. Harmony in any system of like phenomena was probably thought of as an instance of harmony in general, as was the harmony of musical tones. With a sophisticated commitment to mathematics in place, harmonies were by and large thought of as ratios. The harmony of nature would then be the achievement of proper ratios. Deviation from the proper ratios would be discussed in terms of excess and defect. These are lasting themes in Plato and Aristotle, for instance. The discussion of pleasure and the good life always turns on such talk. However, the realm in which excess and defect are possible is well circumscribed. There could be no disharmony of the celestial spheres, for their harmony was eternal. In fact, such a redefinition of harmony, shifted from heavenly realms into the sphere of human influence, was historically an important emancipatory step. Crude subjection of humans to celestial harmonies is no easy situation. In many civilizations in the past, celestial harmonies imposed sacrificial rituals on the human order. These were held necessary to keep the cycles going during critical junctions when the

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endpoint of several di√erent calendar cycles coincided; the Mayans are particularly famous for this. The next job in assessing harmony (especially if we look at it anachronistically from our own viewpoint) is to choose those aspects of the system—those possible measurements—that are particularly relevant. There are, of course, as many aspects as you please. Aristotle’s biology is pretty much the study of the meanings of harmony in living beings; we will get back to the consequences of Aristotle’s view a bit farther on. In our own time, the issue of harmony is generally addressed in terms of information content, with generally bizarre consequences (Oyama 2000a). The aim is usually to depict ‘‘information’’ as a universal currency that can be used to explain all sorts of phenomena irrespective of the context. But the meaning of information is relational and contextual; that is, information is a semantic concept (e.g., Deacon 1997). Later in this collection, Susan Oyama introduces developmental systems theory as an approach that helps us to get rid of the image that information might ‘‘control,’’ for instance, the ontogenetic process. The understanding of animal behavior, including humans, brings up similar problems. All animals live in rich, contextually laden environments that are more than full of information of the most variable sorts; it would be a waste of time to try to measure its total amount. Animals get tuned to what is important in their particular environments, or the ‘‘a√ordances’’ of their environments, to use the useful term introduced by Gibson (1979). Laboratory research on animal behavior, on the other hand, has traditionally aimed at constructing atomistic and acontextual study settings, which linearize the behavior of the animals. Also, any tradition that talks of harmony is thinking in terms of some sort of optimization, or some sort of viability, robust satisficing. This makes sense because harmony means some sort of balance between factors, or forces, that are in some sense disparate. Harmony means fitting together things that are di√erent from each other in some relevant sense. However, this means that it is very di≈cult to pull the notion of harmony away from the static, equilibrium imagery we must avoid. At this point, familiarity with music provides good antidotes against the equilibrium imagery. If you know music, then you can think of harmony in a dynamical sense, that is, as constraints and enablements guiding the passage over a temporal span. Harmony is not static

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but arises from tensions in a temporal sequence. Neither is musical harmony to be thought of in terms of a final cadence or an infinitely prolonged chord (like the music of the spheres), but as a structured structuring structure (see appendix) that can, for instance, take you from one key to another ‘‘harmonically’’ very far away. Sometimes the transition is very rapid because nonlinear. Natural harmony can be Coltrane, not Haydn. Now we are back into our ongoing, developing, borrowed language. We can get back to Aristotle using that language. Aristotle says that every living thing has a bios, a way of life, in terms of which essentially functionalist explanations are going to be given for their traits and attributes. Then the theory of ratios is going to take the functional explanations to the point of articulating what we now call harmonies. Many people are harping about how much of the biology Aristotle gets wrong (e.g., reproduction, the brain, the heart), but the amazing part really is how much of the biology he gets right. The parts he gets right most consistently are the parts in which the organism interacts and intersects with the world around it. Hearts and brains do not do that, after all, in any direct way. So they are hard to assess against a way of life and are thus, from the point of Aristotle’s ‘‘research strategy,’’ secondary in any case. Eventually, along another research path, they will end up as elements in the way of life of the organism as well, but this is another story. Aristotle just guesses wrong about how that will turn out. Aristotle’s notion of bios could probably be extended to the ecosocial realm in a fruitful way. In fact, what sometimes is called Aristotle’s practical syllogism is an e√ort to bridge the gap between humans and other animals by debunking the assumed specificity of human intentionality, as opposed to the activities of other animals (Grene 1974; Nussbaum 1978). Iordanis Marcoulatos joins in this discussion. He promulgates an expanded conception of intentionality, which locates intentionality in the physiognomic orientedness of the whole person. He builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory in which practical belief is primarily a state of the body. This approach steps beyond the dualism between mind and body, or subject and object, which is so pervasive in the Western philosophical tradition. What is most urgently needed if we want to make use of the concept of harmony is a dynamic perspective. Aristotle shares a static view with most of his fellow ancients. But working with Aristotle might lead us to

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an interesting bifurcation: humans have an ethos and a polis—as well as a bios. Or so the story goes, for Aristotle and the Christorationalist tradition that appropriates him. Aristotle’s politics was about the possibility of an organized human community. Rationalists want guarantees, but we might dig out from Aristotle that there aren’t any. An interesting phenomenon to think of in this regard is monogamy. It is pretty clearly part of the bios of many birds, but not of many (if any) mammals, and for us it is quite clearly part of an ethos, not our bios. An organism is a fine analogue model for many aspects of harmony. A living organism is an entity that integrates a broad range of metabolic processes. However, in scientific thinking, organisms have been appropriated by an atomistic, linear view of the world. An alternative intuition is needed; this is Susan Oyama’s focus in her essay. Oyama’s alternative intuition is captured in developmental systems theory; through careful, autobiographic considerations, she shows what the shift implies. The task also includes unlearning old, established beliefs that she dubs ‘‘developmental dualism.’’ Unlearning can never be mere forgetting; this would only produce a di√erent version of basically the same blindness. Oyama also points out another pitfall that we have to avoid when criticizing outdated beliefs: as politics is always involved, too (consider the controversy over sociobiology!), political and rhetorical imperatives may drive us to firm and schematic, and ultimately counterproductive, viewpoints. In an adequate conception of an organism, multilevel reproductive cycles get emphasis: organisms are cycles within cycles within cycles. To paraphrase the apocryphal story about William James and the old lady: organisms are ‘‘cycles all the way in.’’ Temporal and spatial scales are connected to each other through the characteristic rates of reproduction of entities on each level. Smaller entities ‘‘turn over’’ at a faster rate than the larger entities within which they are encapsulated. In the physiology of organisms, this structure works quite well: the mean transient time of cells is longer than that of subsystems within the cells (mitochondria, ribosomes, etc.), which is longer than that of biologically active macromolecules (enzymes). As Benno Hess (1968) notes, through such a relative ordering of fast and slow processes, space is transformed into time: slow processes create a structural order that forms the basis of the fast processes. Dynamically, this can happen through the phase locking of oscillators with di√erent frequencies. A

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pertinent example is the entrainment of the sleep-wake and other physiological rhythms to the twenty-four-hour day (Glass and Mackey 1988; Strogatz 2003). So there are rhythmic harmonies as well as tonal ones. We referred to the Aristotelian bifurcation between bios on the one hand, and ethos and polis on the other hand. This dynamic bifurcation is easily transformed into a mere verbal dichotomy, however, such as the phrase ‘‘Humans are social animals.’’ This doesn’t solve any problems, as we ought to know by now: people repeating this and related statements are neatly divided into two groups depending on whether they put the stress on social or on animal. A similar verbal dichotomy has interfered with the genealogy of organic regulation as well: the relationship of ‘‘life’’ to ‘‘nonlife’’ is isomorphic with the relationship of polis to bios, or between economy and ecology in contemporary parlance. Other formulations of the basic dualism are addressed in several of the essays that follow; Ville Lähde takes up nature versus nonnature, and Iordanis Marcoulatos takes up the subject as ‘‘active pole’’ versus the object as ‘‘passive pole.’’ Ultimately, when pondering harmony and related issues, we have to get beyond the static, equilibrium imagery that such thinking in terms of simple dichotomies preserves.

TEMPORAL HORIZONS

Everything that happens here and now is tied to multiple temporal horizons both toward the past and toward the future. The past is present in the shape of such factors that originated before the present and constrain, or shape, the possibility space of dynamic processes at present. The future is present as the possible set of trajectories of those processes. With reference to human action, Pierre Bourdieu notes, ‘‘Practical activity, insofar as it makes sense, as it is sensée, reasonable, that is, engendered by a habitus adjusted to the immanent tendencies of the field, is an act of temporalization through which the agent transcends the immediate present via practical mobilization of the past and practical anticipation of the future inscribed in the present in a state of objective potentiality’’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 123). In other words, the future is present in the present through practical actions that reach beyond the present. Some actions repeat themselves,

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or are repeated, and maintain stability. Routines, for instance, create long temporal horizons through reliable repeatability. Conventions and rules stabilize routines in the longer term (Dyke 1988). On the other hand, some actions open up a novel time horizon toward the future. Artifacts we think will last create by their very existence temporal continuity in the human world, and new artifacts stabilize novelty. Gardening is a good analogue model of the layering and mixing of temporal horizons. First of all, the distant past is present in the characteristics of the soil. This is the geological time horizon within which the soil texture has been molded. It is possible to modify it with constant work, the more intensively the smaller the plot, but there are limits of several types. One can insulate a small garden plot from the surroundings, create an anthropogenic soil, as it were, but this is not possible on the scale of a wheat field. When real large-scale modification is carried through in an agricultural system, and a long-term geological history is written over, ancient layers of time may creep up in another, unexpected guise. A good example is what has followed from the clearing of native vegetation for wheat and sheep in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. As a result of aggressive government policy that stretched over the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, almost 90 percent of the original vegetation is gone. The loss of vegetation and subsequent decline in evapotranspiration has caused the ground water table to rise, and this has brought salt onto the surface. There are huge deposits of salt in the ground in Australia, as a result of eons and eons of transport of it by winds and storms from the surrounding oceans to this ancient islandcontinent.∞≠ Soil preparation in the garden is directed toward the future: the future is present in what the gardener does to improve the soil. The layers of time have a logarithmic structure. Changes can be rapid in the first couple of years, but then the situation gets more and more stabilized and the gardener’s main duty is to maintain the stability. However, soil and weather are in constant interaction. Because of variation among years, the soil conditions can never be completely stabilized. What is done early in the season may turn out harmful later on; improving drainage to lead o√ the water of exceptional spring rains becomes a problem if the weather dries up for the rest of the summer. Soil quality is a control parameter that the gardener would like to control but never can. The climate, of course, is another one. The local microclimate is

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INTRODUCTION

marginally under the control of the gardener, who can construct shields to keep o√ cold winds or sun traps to capture warmth. A greenhouse modifies the microclimate more radically, but scaling becomes an issue again: one can build a greenhouse around a tomato bed but not around a corn field. An abrupt change happens in the characteristic spatial scale of gardening work after the first killing frosts in the autumn. Previously, the days of the gardener were filled with weeding, thinning, and finally harvesting, on the spatial scale of a few square centimeters and within a temporal horizon of a week or two at most. Suddenly, when the last plants have succumbed, soil preparation is on the agenda again, on the scale of the whole garden plot and with a temporal horizon of a few years toward the future (although the work itself has to be completed within a month or two). A similar change happens in late spring but in reverse order, as it were. First, planning and preparation on the scale of the whole garden, under the pretense that a reliable projection is possible for the growth of the plants over the whole summer. Then, along with the first cultivars, weeds and insect pests show up, and the gardener has to toil day in and day out to help the cultivars along. There is no time or energy to think about a picture bigger than one vegetable bed at a time. Moreover, ironically, intensive organic gardening inevitably creates a paradise for pests. Gardening means creating a boundary between the garden and the rest of nature, but this boundary is permeable. Furthermore, the boundary is not located at the physical edge of the plot. It is both inside the plot (weeds and pests have to be removed) and outside the plot (deer and rabbits and hares and birds and so on, have to be kept outside, and physical disturbances such as mudflows from a nearby hillside must be prevented). Gardening was one of the models that Cicero used for the distinction between first nature and second nature, as Ville Lähde notes in his essay. Gardening is not such a lonely and isolated activity as it may seem. It always has the obvious material connections, of course: seeds and tools come from somewhere. In addition, working habits and practices carry along shared routines despite being di√erent for every individual gardener. The work is the more controlled and standardized the closer the gardener works with the markets: uniform standards on the quality of

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the product restrict the degrees of freedom available to the gardener in the cultivation stage. Organic gardening is equally tied to norms and standards as ordinary gardening, if not more so. In a sense, the boundary of a garden is a fractal (see appendix), and its proper maintenance requires constant work. In a vegetable garden, with a return time of one year, the temporal dimension is straightforward. An orchard is more complicated, however (not to speak of an olive grove). As Ari Jokinen points out, forestry presents similar problems of creating and maintaining a boundary, but with a return time of several decades to a century, the task is complicated in other ways. In fact, the prevailing view on what the boundary in forestry should be like is illusory. As Jokinen points out, using agriculture as a model for forestry (silviculture) is a late twentieth-century invention and unworkable in the long term. As Jokinen also points out, on a larger social scale, norms and standards often achieve a prominent role in improving the coordination among a whole range of social and natural actors gravitating around the growing of trees. Modern forestry aims at linearization of forest growth, with the aim of providing a stable flow of timber from the forests into the market and the industrial cauldron. Hence, forestry entails time management: the aim is to get the di√erent temporalities of the everyday life of the forest owner, the transactions in the market, and the growth of forest in tune with each other. The forest stand, an essential artifact of modern forestry, is a tool of entrainment in this complex. Temporal scales matter in politic entrainment, too. Strong entrainments were created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as ordinary citizens were attracted into the national institutions through welfare promise, the development of the welfare state in the hands of Bismarck, Cavour, and others. Markus Laine emphasizes the role of welfare promise in the stabilization of the system of political governance in Tampere in the decades following the Second World War. His analysis demonstrates also that political struggles are about creating the preconditions of a particular future in the realities of today. This relationship between past, present, and future gives meaning to tradition. Institutions such as religions have aimed at bridging the gap between the past and the future; as Bronislaw Malinowski (1984, 89) noted, ‘‘Religious faith establishes, fixes, and enhances all valuable

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INTRODUCTION

mental attitudes, such as reverence for tradition, harmony with environment, courage and confidence in the struggle with di≈culties at the prospect of death.’’ We need to continuously carry tradition from the past to the future. What happened in the past and is worth remembering has already stood the basic test and is carried toward the future by tradition. The past may suggest what the important time horizons are. This might o√er a basis for ecopoetics as a deliberate e√ort to make traditions relevant (Bate 2000).

HOMEOPATHIC KNOWLEDGE AND EMANCIPATION

What use is science in understanding the human condition in the era of ecological problems? In some sense, the answer is obvious: scientific knowledge is necessary because it gives good and reliable answers to many sorts of questions about the environment that we were not even able to ask on the basis of our practical experience alone. Furthermore, science is the only game in town powerful enough to make any di√erence at all in environmental matters (Dyke 1997). However, in another sense, the answer is not obvious at all. It is not obvious that scientific knowledge has any control of human actions, or that knowledge might be reliable enough to be elevated into such a role in the first place. Western science could well be the most conspicuous example of listening to some things at the expense of desensitizing ourselves to other, more important things. This is what generates the question of nature’s speech in the first place. Many critics of top-down, command-and-control environmental management approaches share this conclusion with us (Lee 1993; Ludwig et al. 1993). In what follows, we discuss aspects of the science-society link and then make one positive suggestion. To begin with, some basics. The gaining of knowledge is a social process, and the relevance of knowledge is assessed against interpretative frameworks that specify criteria of relevance. These can never be neutral as regards social power; this is the knowledge-power link whose universality we recognize nowadays mainly thanks to Michel Foucault’s work. The production and use of knowledge about human environments is tied to mechanisms of social power, too, as Foucault (1980) showed in his essays on geography and space, for instance. The condi-

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tions of human subsistence are always evaluated against the backdrop of a social and political order, and threats to subsistence are handled as threats to social order. This was true already in the early stages of the environmental awakening, as the German political activist Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1973) noticed. However, this is not the whole story. In particular situations, particular bits of knowledge speak out by themselves, as it were, and complications about interpretive frameworks do not matter. Simple and straightforward rules and maxims become sounder guides as their subject matter becomes more unambiguously obvious. In the limit, straightforward environmental threats can just be named and avoided. The prohibition of ddt and related insecticides and the international treaty to protect the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere are good examples in the environmental realm. Nature in our everyday surroundings presents us with such obvious threats, too. For instance, concerning poisonous mushrooms, the rule Don’t touch them! is su≈cient; there is no need to know what the poisonous substances are and whether they destroy the kidneys or the liver. A society without institutional rules would be contradictio in adjecto. Foucault’s themes of the will to knowledge, governmentality, and biopower have to be located in this historical framework, as his own reflections clearly demonstrate (see the outlines for his courses at the Collège de France, Foucault 1997). There are no pregiven functional needs in nature or human nature su≈cient to dictate the origin of social order. Humans did not have a place waiting in the world, they had to create it— even conquer it.∞∞ This brings us back to the present human predicament: the challenge is to shift from a mode of conquering the world to a mode of coexistence with the world. Such a shift is possible only if grounded in an ability to reflect on the human condition not only from the inside but also from the outside, as it were. If war is the cipher of peace, as Foucault surmises, then peace can be achieved only by distancing ourselves from war. There is nothing pregiven in the ability to take distance and reflect from afar. The faculty of analytic rationality is not found in nature waiting for us. This, in fact, makes it an even more precious gift, as Ernst Gellner (e.g., 1997) pointed out in many essays. John O’Neill reflects on this conclusion relative to environmental politics in his contribution to this volume.

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INTRODUCTION

In other words, phenomena have to be generalized, and theoretical knowledge is needed, too. We already referred to the dialectical relationship of analogue and analytic models. The latter strive toward generality and build on an axiomatic structure. This is necessary and works fine in properly bounded situations, although there is no way of finding first principles to build on. Aristotle understood this very well—because he was primarily interested in the messy and multiply contingent world of living beings instead of the apparently eternal and harmonious realm of heavenly bodies. Furthermore, practical and conceptual knowledges are not so far apart as is usually assumed. They get mixed together from both directions, as it were. Michael Polanyi (1962) showed the crucial role of practical ‘‘tacit’’ knowledge in science, and the role of practices in science is well appreciated nowadays; Hacking’s 1983 work is a classic of this type. On the other hand, practical knowledge includes generalizing elements. This is how Bronislaw Malinowski (1984, 27), in his Magic, Science and Religion, reflected on the gardening work of the Trobriand Islanders: The success in their agriculture depends—besides the excellent natural conditions with which they are favoured—upon their extensive knowledge of the classes of the soil, of the various cultivated plants, of the mutual adaptation of these two factors, and, last but not least, upon their knowledge of the importance of accurate and hard work. They have to select the soil and the seedlings, they have appropriately to fix the times for clearing and burning the scrub, for planting and weeding, for training the vines of the yam plants. In all this they are guided by a clear knowledge of weather and seasons, plants and pests, soil and tubers, and by a conviction that this knowledge is true and reliable, that it can be counted upon and must be scrupulously obeyed.

In fact, the modern distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge results from the close connection between science and monotheism (Dyke, ‘‘Natural Speech,’’ this volume; Shotter, this volume). Malinowski’s comment on Trobriand gardening o√ers an interesting analogy. He started his essay by noting that early anthropologists made a strict separation between what they called the realms of the ‘‘sacred’’ and the ‘‘profane.’’ The primitives were assumed to lead their lives under the constant grip of the sacred (i.e., threatening supersti-

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tions). Hence, anthropologists did not see what they did not expect to see: that all people everywhere actually live in the profane. They go about their daily tasks in a rational and systematic manner, according to principles that are in no way less logical and bound to the earth than the ones we follow. This was all grounded in firm practical knowledge and hard work. There is nothing wrong with scientific knowledge; the problem is monotheistic knowledge, the positioning of modern science into the realm of the sacred. As Nietzsche (1968) noticed in his Will to Power, both religion and science pave the way for nihilism because they both aim at the unobtainable: absolute certainty. In modern academia, conceptual knowledge is patently distanced from practices of any sort. In his essay in this volume, Peter Taylor investigates di√erent conceptual ideas that people have leaned on in representing the relationship between nature and society by diagrams. His interest lies in the heuristics that the di√erent approaches reflect and draw on. Following Raymond Williams, Taylor notes that people derive their views of nature and natural principles of life from the social order under which they live. The point of his essay is not, however, only to explore di√erent ways used in representing nature but also to become engaged with the underlying, usually unarticulated assumptions of the researchers who present them. Such an engagement may allow more of the complexity of their social positioning to be teased out. The conditions of human subsistence cannot be reduced to simplistic schemes. Environmental science cannot produce credible blueprints, not even credible blueprints for disasters. Ecocatastrophe never happens in the form predicted by scientists. Ecocatastrophes come in multiple guises, in large and small shapes. Ecocatastrophes are due to shifts in the possibility space of crucial ecosocial processes; these are gradual and almost undetectable at first, but then, suddenly, become abruptly manifest with long-lasting consequences. Or perhaps, by contrast, a catastrophe is caused by a sudden change in conditions brought about by a transient. Furthermore, ecological and ecosocial consequences of particular accidents may be largely uncoupled from each other. For instance, the ecological e√ects of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident o√ the coast of British Columbia in March 1989 were largely bu√ered by the robust nature of local ecosystems (see Paine et al. 1996; Wiens 1996), but the

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‘‘contamination’’ of the coastal communities by all sorts of secondary e√ects of the accident and the rescue work that followed will last long into the future. A more dramatic case is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986. The ecological e√ects of radiation had all but vanished a few years afterward (Savchenko 1995), but the e√ects on humans who were exposed will stretch over several generations (Petryna 2002). Nuclear pollution is located inside human bodies and societies (Haila and Heininen 1995). In fact, environmental scientists may actively contribute to ecocatastrophes. While we were preparing this collection of essays, some 4 million head of cattle and sheep died in the British Isles. In fact, the animals were slaughtered. This was to prevent an epidemic of foot-andmouth disease, a relatively harmless virus-borne disease of hoofed animals from which most of the animals infected usually recover—in effect, a mild flu of cattle and sheep. Up to early November 2001, just over 2,000 animals had been proven to actually have been infected. In other words, some 2,000 healthy animals were slaughtered for each infected one. Furthermore, this was no ordinary slaughter, which produces animal bodies and meat. Rather, this was mass killing that produced carcasses and obnoxious waste. The army was called in to take care of the waste by incineration and mass graves. The horror story happened because those in charge of fighting the disease resorted to epidemiological models in their e√orts to prevent the spread of the disease. Epidemiological models are in the toolbox of modern population ecology. Vaccination of the animals was excluded on economic grounds. The established scientific community of Britain, as represented by the journal Nature (see their lead opinion ‘‘Lessons from an Epidemic,’’ 28 June 2001, 977), was primarily interested in the success of the epidemiological approach without paying attention to the sociocultural e√ects of the operation on the farming community of the English and Welsh moorland. The latter, apparently, is not a scientific problem. But at this point, the Trobriand Islanders, among innumerable other people from other parts of the world, would intervene and ask, ‘‘Aren’t we supposed to talk about subsistence? If cattle and sheep farming is not a matter of subsistence, then what is?’’∞≤ We suggest a complementary perspective to the role of knowledge, a notion of homeopathic knowledge. This would be an intuition, or a per-

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ception, of the possibility space within which a certain process of interest unfolds—for instance, the mode of life of a human society. Perhaps one could identify patterns of negative, destructive, threatening dynamics when they get going, and try to do something about them. That is, we could learn to do as our cells do: recognize preimages (see appendix) and act on them. Shakespeare’s dramas are about these, among other things. Shakespeare used a literary technique Harold Bloom (1998) calls foregrounding: the conditions of something happening become visible through the unfolding of the events themselves. We get no formal background for Iago, for instance; we learn only about his treason against Othello and about the consequences. Through formal ‘‘backgrounding,’’ by contrast, Iago might appear to be determined by what happened sometime before, and the whole course of events might seem amenable to a Whiggish explanation. Homeopathic knowledge might help to appreciate the contingency and unpredictability of such processes that lead to negative outcomes. There are Iagos around; there is no way of preventing this in advance. In fact, the denial of Iago means falling prey to Iago. As Auden (2000, 287) notes in his commentary on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, ‘‘The cause of evil is the pretense, like Leontes’, that there is no evil.’’ We cannot beat Iago by pretending that Iago does not exist. A number of political writers have recognized immanent potentials for destructive dynamics in human society. René Girard (1977) and his dynamics of the ‘‘sacrificial lamb’’ come readily to mind: that collective consciousness is every now and then purged through the symbolically important act of hanging the guilty. We can get a systematic feel about such issues by using the vocabulary of nonlinear dynamics and complexity that we introduced earlier. However, this conclusion gets us to an obvious question, sure to be asked. It will be asked most cogently precisely by those who know nonlinear dynamics best. Are you seriously claiming that (say) social systems are nonlinear dynamical systems? No. We know better than that, as this introduction explains. We have a serious ‘‘as’’ and ‘‘is’’ situation on our hands. Our minimal claim is that nonlinear dynamical systems are heuristically powerful models to help us understand social systems and their history. This is the reason we emphasize analogue models as a central methodological tool. But let’s remind ourselves of the background. Adam Smith and his

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INTRODUCTION

followers leapt directly past ‘‘as’’ to ‘‘is.’’ Orthodox economics demands that the market, for example, be a machine. (Hayek, among others, was outraged at this leap.) But worse, that tradition demands that the market system be a machine of an outrageously unlikely type. We understand that now, as we see the range of dynamical systems that exist and can be understood. As Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) might put the point, we have found that to understand complexity, we cannot just turn the crank on a Leibnizian calculating machine. We are going to have to continue to think. What is pretty certain, however, is that a major casualty of this thinking will be our confidence in judgments of historical responsibility. Even in deterministic circumstances, ‘‘the’’ cause of anything serious can seldom be found. The supposed advantages of atomistic reductions are Leibnizian. That is, they promise to provide a single privileged language of explanation within which causes can decisively be established. These are the languages within which the Leibnizian proposal ‘‘Let us calculate!’’ can be brought to fulfillment. It turns out (to make a very long story short) that with the demise of linearity as the accepted model for processes, the Leibnizian dream dies as well.

THE PRESENCE OF NATURE

We wind up this story by suggesting that the metaphor ‘‘speech of nature’’ means the presence of nature. Nature is present in all human action because human action takes place in nature and belongs to nature. This presence is, furthermore, never mere existence but rather continuous change, activity, and shared dynamics on a multitude of levels. In short, nature’s presence means rich, multiply constrained and enabled interactions between humans and other creatures of nature. Communication is an integral element in this presence, as Susan Oyama and John Shotter argue, but nonverbal forms are essential, as the essays in this collection demonstrate. Shakespeare is one who understood the richness of nature’s presence: his works contain an amazing variety of references to nature’s roles in human life. For instance, in the first act of King Lear alone, nature is invoked eleven times in contexts that are di√erent from each other. The ‘‘nature’’ of nature varies from benign to sinister to capri-

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cious to patriarchal—from Cordelia to Edmund to Gloucester to King Lear himself. But interaction and communication imply interference. Those who advocate a policy of noninterference must have an overnarrow conception of interference. Music teaches us an elementary lesson about interference: sound waves that get into interaction with each other can either get amplified or killed o√ (Figure 6). In other words, interference can either be gentle and constructive, or ungentle and destructive. Interference is unavoidable in all interactions. We have to be concerned about its nature. Vincent Icke (1995, 55) draws the following generalization about interference: ‘‘The gentleness of any interaction has some lower bound, which is a given limitation of our Universe that can never be circumvented by skill or care.’’ Icke speaks in this aphorism about the physics of fundamental particles. In the Heisenberg scale, in the interactions among fundamental particles, no gentleness is gentle enough. But the principle can be extended, with appropriate care, to all sorts of interactions, including ecological and social ones. Consequently, we would do well to assess in advance the sensitivity of the entities and processes that are subjected to interference. What follows from nature’s presence, from our interactions with nature, depends on the sensitivity of the situation. Following this line of thought, one part of the human condition is to work and improve unsympathetic first nature into sympathetic second nature. This is a genuinely interactive process of mutual adaptation and nourishment. A requirement for this process to happen at all is that nongentle interactions be kept at bay. The building up of sympathetic interactions can succeed only if the limits of the robustness of every situation are acknowledged. All evolving systems of interactions are vulnerable to destructive interference. Believing in such a vision means believing in the possibility of emancipation. On the basis of these thoughts we might find an ecosocial dimension of emancipation: to keep ungentle interactions at bay in the social sphere. After all, social formations, anywhere and anytime, have any stability at all only if mechanisms have been created that keep interactions at a safe distance from the gentle/ungentle boundary. We might recognize positive a√ordances and resourcefulness as a central species of presence, and being in tune, in time, in rhythm, and in harmony becomes a species of presence as well.

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6 The interference of two one-dimensional waves: the coinciding of two wave crests produces constructive interference, and the coinciding of a crest and a trough destructive interference.

Shakespeare’s nature is not restricted to characterizing the inner essence of the persons in his plays. He also notes the inseparable mingling together of humans and the rest of nature, for instance in The Winter’s Tale (Polixenes in IV.iv): Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art, Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature—change it rather—but The art itself is nature.

From Shakespeare, we could finally learn that human culture and the rest of nature have no ‘‘relationship’’ with each other: culture and the rest of nature are much too intimately woven together for this term to be adequate. Our accustomed language beats us at this point time after time, as we have noticed. What would be more natural than to say, for instance, that humans have adapted to diurnal and seasonal cycles? But this is nonsense: diurnal and seasonal cycles reside inside humans;

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they are essential rhythms of our existence. But there are many more rhythms, and not all these rhythms inherently combine into a harmonious whole. By contrast, they are full of tension and relaxation, consonance and dissonance. In this, human life is no di√erent from the lives of apes and monkeys, dogs and wolves, or beetles and fruit flies. The ‘‘extended organism’’ of us modern humans is vastly larger than that of any other organism. This we owe to what the rest of nature has made possible for us, but this comes with a price: it is di≈cult to get the critical rhythms of the human-created, industrialized, capitalist society to match the critical rhythms of the rest of nature. Nature’s speech thus means nature’s presence, facilitating emancipation but never giving guarantees.

NOTES

As the saying goes, there is no climate in England, only weather. Whether this analogue model illuminates the climatic system of other planets is a moot issue. Atmospheric convections certainly occur whenever there is an atmosphere around, but the other solar planets lack planetary ocean, which is an essential element of the climate system of Earth. Perhaps on a distant planet circling around a sun in a distant galaxy in another galactic system . . . 3 Richard Levins (1966) wrote a classic article promulgating a broader view on the role of models in research; the view is crystallized in his aphorism ‘‘Our truth is the intersection of independent lies.’’ 4 Rensberger (1996) and Harold (2001) have written good and accessible books on the life of the cell. 5 The preceding paragraphs owe much to Fernand Braudel; see Dyke (1988, 1994) and Haila and Levins (1992). Manuel de Landa (1997) draws similar inspiration from Braudel. 6 As every person with experience of domesticated animals or pets knows, animals are quite capable of complex communication with humans. One of us has been completing this text together with a puppy 9 months old. During one writing session, he disappeared for a while in the direction of the kitchen, and a bit later, a loud noise was heard from where he was. Then, the usual tap-tap-tap-tap on the floor, and the puppy shows up and jumps on the sofa beside the computer desk. He sits on his usual place looking shy and worried simultaneously, then looks at me, then looks to1 2

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ward the kitchen, then looks at me again—and then we decide to go together to see what happened (nothing serious, only noisy). 7 And the Judeo-Christian optimism that underlies it: though the Christian sense of the Apocalypse cuts the opposite way, of course. 8 Max Weber (1978) showed that in old times, cities developed their own distinct nature depending on what kind of process instigated and supported their growth. Even in such a remote and small country as Finland, towns still carry the flavor of their origin as military outposts, trading centers on the coast, market (fair) centers in the inland, industrial communities, railroad crossroads, or administrative centers. 9 Nancy Cartwright (1999, 118–24) makes useful points on this, drawing on her notion of the ‘‘nomological machine.’’ 10 The problem was finally acknowledged toward the end of the twentieth century; if no e≈cient countermeasures are undertaken, up to 50 percent of the most vulnerable landscapes will succumb to salinization in the next fifty years. As often is the case, early warnings were voiced decades in advance but completely neglected (Saunders 1996). 11 A reminder on the role of war: ‘‘It was war that presided over the birth of states: not the ideal war imagined by the philosophers of the state of nature but real wars and actual battles; laws are born in the middle of expeditions, conquests, and burning cities. . . . Beneath the omissions, illusions, and lies that make us believe in the necessities of nature or the functional requirements of order, we are bound to reencounter war: it is the cipher of peace’’ (Foucault 1997, 61). The notions of governmentality and biopower are described in Foucault (1991) and (1978), respectively. 12 This reminds us of Wittgenstein’s (1953) note 309 in Philosophical Investigations: ‘‘What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’’ According to G. E. Hutchinson’s (1978) surmise, Wittgenstein scribbled this note after having heard of a laboratory experiment conducted by Raymond Pearl on the e√ect of food abundance on the maturation of fruit flies; to have the design under control, this dutiful scientist included in his experimental setting fly bottles in which there was no food at all.

Speaking of Nature

Susan Oyama SPEAKING ABOUT SOMETHING is also, to some extent, saying how we think it speaks. To say that humans have unconscious drives, for example, is also to say how we believe people reveal themselves to us—in a sense, how they speak or don’t speak. To begin this discussion, therefore, I am going to engage in a little rhetorical exploitation, using Chuck Dyke’s essay (this volume) about ‘‘natural speech’’ to make a point about this theme of speaking. Although I am basically in sympathy with his declaration that Nature doesn’t speak, I suggest that his denial implies a model of the human subject that we can question. I suspect that Dyke does question it, and that he will forgive this use of his spirited contribution: our agreements are significant, our di√erences minor. My suggestion is that if, in a systems-informed spirit, we understand our own natures and behavior to emerge in interaction rather than being ‘‘expressed’’ from within; if we are understood not as cleanly bounded, fixed realities but as always changing, always situated in worlds that are stable in some respects, variable in others; if our speaking is not the conveyance of fixed packets of meaning or ‘‘information’’ from one brain to another but just one mode by which we relate to each other, it may turn out that Nature ‘‘speaks’’ in ways not so very di√erent from the ways we ourselves do.∞ Insofar as this is the case, our speech about the ‘‘speech’’ of other people and about the rest of the worlds of which we are part must be rich, nuanced, tentative, and flexible, and we must always be ready to acknowledge the part we play in the generation of the speakings we observe. Nature doesn’t speak as an autonomous being with a determinate nature, communicating her fixed truths to us, but then neither do we speak to each other this way; once we recast our view of our own natures and our relations with one another, there is much less di√erence between our speakings among

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ourselves and the kind of interactive interrogating and attending used in studying the rest of the world. I begin with a mini-autobiography. The concept of the developmental system was part of an attempt to resolve the di≈culties that attend certain more conventional understandings of life processes and interrelationships, so knowing what di≈culties I encountered should make it easier to understand my particular takes on systems-talk and naturetalk. It should make clear, for instance, why it has been important to me to rework a variety of inside-outside boundaries; to include the environment in the developmental system rather than making it a location, or a mere container or source of materials and constraints, or even an independent but cooperating ‘‘partner’’; to realign the definitions of nature and nurture, thus broadening our views of development, evolution, and inheritance. Some of the key ideas in that realignment, often called developmental systems theory (dst), are sketched. Then I mention some challenges faced by those working with this conceptual scheme. If we are trying to develop an alternative view of life processes, how can we use the language of systems, construction, and interaction in a way that is both shareable and true to the vision we are constructing? Finally, I return to our theme with a speculative coda on agency. Along the way, I hope to show how intimately, and interestingly, the question How does nature speak? is connected to the ways we speak of nature, as well as the ways we speak of, and to, each other.

(MY) LIFE BEFORE DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS

What I do is probably best described as philosophy of biology, but my undergraduate training was in psychology. Psychology is a field completely informed by nature-nurture dichotomies and shot through with allied oppositions like individual-social and mind-body. My graduate studies in psycholinguistics were housed in an interdisciplinary department of ‘‘social relations,’’ which included developmental, social, cognitive, and clinical (but not comparative, experimental, or physiological) psychology; cultural (but not physical) anthropology; and sociology. There is a whole intellectual and social history in that list. On the then existing academic landscape, these were all largely ‘‘social’’ and, to that extent, not ‘‘biological.’’ Then as now, the schisms between biology and

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culture, between nature and nurture, ordered the content of individual disciplines, shaping their very identities as disciplines (and those of their practitioners), and therefore the relations among them. This in turn kept the rifts from being e√ectively bridged, despite the best e√orts of concerned scholars. Meanwhile, successive generations continue to be raised on the intricate geographies, forbidden territories, and blind canyons of these divided conceptual terrains. A classic nature-nurture question, in fact, was the occasion for my dissertation on a sensitive period for second language acquisition: a restricted period when young humans can learn a language with native proficiency. The notion of a preprogrammed timetable regulating exposure to outside forces evoked both embryology’s critical period for tissue determination and ethology’s imprinting (think of ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s ducklings, faithfully following him because he was the first moving object they spied on hatching). Then as now, such time limitations on development were treated as evidence for a ‘‘biological base,’’ indispensable in the era of Chomskian linguistic nativism. As I read in psycholinguistics proper, however, and eventually in various areas of biology, comparative psychology, and philosophy of biology, I became less and less sure of what a biological base could be, or much the same thing, what the alternative was. And if biological bases were unclear, then so were similar terms, such as innate, maturational, genetic, inherited, programmed, and so on, as well as their opposites acquired, environmental, and revealingly, developed. So the basic concepts were surprisingly obscure, and the situation was scarcely helped by the fact that terms were usually not defined but were apparently assumed to be transparent and universally accepted. When a definition was offered, it was typically taken from a closed circle of synonyms, so that if you asked what it meant for something to be maturational, you were told that it was programmed (or biological, or innate), and if you then wanted to know what programmed meant, you were told that it was innate, maturational, or in the genes. I need hardly add that innateness was apt to be defined as programmed or biological, and so forth, to everybody’s increasing irritation. Ambiguous terms were used in a variety of ways without qualification, and as a result, evidence was sometimes mustered with a cavalier attitude that would not be tolerated under other circumstances. Occasionally such definitional circles were unexpectedly revealing: hearing that innate means physical, for instance

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(as I did once, from a behavior geneticist who ought to have known better), makes one wonder, Physical as opposed to what? More often, these (inadvertent) games just annoyed both parties; they revealed that the ‘‘common knowledge’’ was alarmingly murky, and that it was not fun either to ask or to be asked to clarify it.

Common Ground

One thing that made this situation possible was that despite the lack of agreement about particular meanings and usages, many broader assumptions were largely shared. Perhaps most basic of these was what I have called developmental dualism, the belief in two sources of developmental causation, one internal and the other external. Whether these were conceptualized as the genes and everything else in the universe, biology and culture, physiology and learning, or some other insideoutside pair, the internal causes tended to be treated as somehow primary. The genes, for example, are usually thought to control development with a centralized autonomy that imbues their products with a peculiar kind of necessity. Nature speaks through the genes. Or, in the sometimes grandiose rhetoric of the Human Genome Project, in which science succeeded in sequencing ‘‘the’’ human genome, genes are the language in which God wrote the Book of Life.≤ In comparison, external influences on development tend to be treated as secondary: contingent, capricious, di√use. A parallel dualism exists in evolutionary theory, but with the causal polarity reversed. Here, Nature’s voice is external; she speaks by setting environmental problems for organisms to solve, punishing them when they fail. In the evolutionary story, that is, Nature’s voice is the voice of natural selection, typically considered to be life’s primary formative agent over the span of millennia. Selection, in this view, confers the genes’ extraordinary powers on them. Now the secondary influences are internal, supplied by development itself, in the form of ‘‘developmental constraints on selection’’ (Oyama 2000a, chap. 5). Consider Nature, speaking. Logos, as Dyke notes elsewhere in this volume, no longer belongs only to God, or at least, not to the traditional God of organized religion. Setting aside some complications he mentions, we could say that in today’s world (at least that part that doesn’t reject evolution as heresy), natural selection has a monopoly on that

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precious commodity. Historically God’s competitor for authorship of life, natural selection is no idle chatterer; for many people it is the true giver of the Word, the all-knowing, all-seeing shaper of the living world. As Yrjö Haila and Peter Taylor (2001, 95) observe, ‘‘If the essence of natural selection is selection of genes, and organisms are ‘really’ optimization vehicles for their genes, then changes in gene frequencies from generation to generation give a faithful reflection of the environment of the organisms as it ‘really is.’ ’’ Since the advent of gene-level selection, in fact, as these authors imply, the ultimate goal of all life has become narrowly circumscribed. In Richard Dawkins’s (1982) gene’s-eye view, what counts is not the reproduction of the mere organismic ‘‘vehicle’’ but only the propagation of the gene itself, for the sake of whose replication the vehicle exists in the first place. Both executor and beneficiary of the evolutionary legacy, the gene aims, in this account, to make other genes in its own image. All else is instrumental to that goal. In many ways, then, dna becomes the carrier of fate. (Try substituting ‘‘It is written’’ every time you see ‘‘It’s genetic’’—it works shockingly well.) The gene, then, is hailed as Nature’s Chosen (Selected!) Molecule, the agent into which the evolutionary Word is breathed, the worker of the ubiquitous secular miracles of life, including much of development, mind, and behavior. The dominance of the language of language in genetics, in fact, is striking and fits all too neatly with our discussion of Logos: geneticists’ technical vocabulary (not, they insist, metaphoric) is rife with codes, translations, transcriptions, editing, sense and nonsense, along with comparisons of bases to letters, of genomes to libraries. From cognitive and computer science, meanwhile, engaged in constant conceptual and terminological cross-fertilization with molecular biology, come information, transmission, representations, programs, and algorithms.

Genes as Gods

In this context, the gene is the God of Nature made Word in the heart of every cell. ‘‘The ghost in the ghost in the machine’’ in my The Ontogeny of Information (Oyama 2000b) was my attempt to capture something of this gene-god-word-soul connection (see Nelkin and Lindee 1995). The ghost in the machine is the explanatorily redundant entity placed inside a person to account for feelings, wants, actions—the homunculus that

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has so long bedeviled philosophers’ e√orts to make sense of the mind. In like manner, I argued, we imagine a genetic program in the nucleus, as though the actual material cell, with all its complexity and its complex surroundings, were inadequate to do the cell’s work. At the level of whole animals, the gene is also thought to explain behavior, perception, developmental propensities, and more, that cannot be accounted for by the organism’s own intelligence. It is treated, in short, as an alternative intelligence or agency. Thus, the old opposition of the innate to the acquired is recast as a distinction between innate information carried in the dna and information gained through the senses, so that an ‘‘instinctive’’ act is authored by an organism’s genes, not by the organism itself. To observe such an act is to hear (its) Nature speak. No wonder critiques of biological dichotomies are so unstable, even when they are on target. The conceptual background sketched here ensures that the dualisms will be continuously recreated, even in the very discourses meant to eliminate them. Hence my description of nature and nurture as phenotypic products and the developmental processes that produce them, rather than as alternative causal agencies. The companion move is made by shifting temporal scales and defining evolution as change in the constitution and distribution of developmental systems. Instead of being fixed at conception, natures are multiple and changing over the life span. Instead of being the internal cause of development, natures are changing products of development. (As such, they are resources for, and so causes of, their own future development.) A nature is simply a phenotype—an organism-in-transition through the life cycle—whereas nurture is all the developmental processes that contribute to a life.

OVERVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS THEORY

In my work on the concept of the developmental system I have attempted to deal with a whole complex of interlocked problems, including the causal dualisms alluded to earlier. A systems approach to life processes can be characterized negatively, to highlight the di≈culties to which it is a response. Put this way, it is nongenocentric, nonpreformationist, nonreductionist, nonessentialist, and nondualistic. More posi-

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tively, it is a constructivist interactionist approach to development and evolution. But every word in that description can, and will, be contested. A general outline may help. The developmental system consists of the organism and all the developmentally relevant aspects of its environment, micro- as well as macroscopic, biotic as well as inanimate. The system—the organism and its developmental environment—emerges through the interaction (hence constructivist interaction) of many different kinds of resources or interactants, some within the skin, many not. These interactants define, constrain, and influence each other as interactants, for any factor’s role in the system depends on its relations with the others. There is no single, centralized control of the processes of development. Rather, it is precisely the interactions of these changing components that give rise to (constitute) the changing system. The environment here is not just a place or a supplier of materials; it is an integral part of a constructive system. For me, the developmental system, existing as it does on a variety of scales of time and magnitude, gives a synthetic alternative to both developmental and evolutionary dualisms. It reframes traditional research, opening new avenues of inquiry. Although I have tended to resist reducing this approach to a list of principles, the following ‘‘key ideas and methodological strategies,’’ adapted from my book, Evolution’s Eye (Oyama 2000a, 2–7), give a relatively concise introduction to the perspective: 1. The philosopher’s tool, parity of reasoning, is frequently employed in dst. We discern the logic supporting some argument and then apply it to other events or entities with which it has not been used before. We can in this way see if various devices for maintaining a privileged place for genes in biological accounts can consistently be restricted to them alone. If genes are given causal priority even when other factors meet the same criteria, assumptions are being passed o√ as conclusions. 2. In dst, the organism and its environment are both developmentally and evolutionarily interdependent, emerging together by constructive interaction among a changing and diverse assemblage of interactants. Each defines the relevant aspects of the others, and the interacting entities can a√ect each other. Lewontin et al. (1984) have called this the interpenetration of organism and environment. 3. We move from ‘‘genes and environment’’ to multiple changing influences: many kinds of developmental resources and interconnected processes,

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contributing in myriad ways to the organism’s life. Relinquishing the traditional dichotomous scheme gives a more precise view of the way genes participate in actual biochemical processes (i.e., by interacting with their molecular milieus), allowing for a more detailed, biologically perspicacious approach to the changing, multifaceted environments in which any organism lives. 4. We also move from single to multiple scales of time and size. We may work at the molecular level, say, but are prepared to shift to that of organs or whole organisms the better to follow a causal path. We may look at rapid processes as well as slower ones, including those that take place across many generations, to understand the ways they influence each other. In the systems perspective o√ered here, both kinds of level shifting readily lend themselves to ecological investigations, for the organismenvironment relations are ‘‘built-in,’’ so to speak. We can always focus on one level for a particular purpose, for research requires (provisional) limits. It is di≈cult to know the extent of the relevant context beforehand, however, so it is good to have a conceptual frame that keeps contexts present, rather than including them only under duress. What counts as a system—say, for the purposes of delineating the boundaries of the research—is thus a pragmatic matter, to be decided with an eye to the theoretical and practical particulars of the research. 5. The concept of heredity in dst is an enlarged, extended one. Development and evolution need to be connected by a more generous notion of inheritance than theory now permits. In a developmental system, an organism inherits—has available to it—its developmental means or resources. Phenotypic characteristics themselves must be developmentally constructed. Because the organism is a significant resource for its own continued development, of course, previous constructions can number among the present resources. Notice that this not only makes explicit what is assumed in discussions of biological continuity, it also eliminates the need to say organisms are created by genes (maybe with some cytoplasm) because that’s all they inherit. 6. In the developmental systems perspective, biological ‘‘control’’ is a matter of interactive, distributed regulation, reciprocal constraint and influence. Absent is the chromosomal control center that dominates most accounts of development. Yet we can still deal with predictable sequences and outcomes. In fact, one of the virtues of the perspective is that it makes salient all the conditions, entities, and processes that contribute to such stability. 7. The language of transmission thus gives way to descriptions of continual

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construction and transformation: the transformation of organism-environment systems over the life cycle (development) and through successive life cycles (evolution). In a developmental system, means (interactants, resources) are ‘‘transmitted’’ (made available); traits are constructed developmentally. 8. Parity-of-reasoning arguments can be used constructively as well as critically, allowing theoretical extension and unification. As we saw, various criteria for inheritance can be applied to developmental factors besides the genes or cytoplasm. This changes the scope, and therefore the meaning, of inheritance itself. Influences that are usually marginalized now participate fully in a unified explanatory scheme. Factors that were formerly endowed with extraordinary executive powers are now part of the large set of developmental interactants, not master controllers. The manner in which these factors are repeatedly assembled (Caporael 1997) then becomes a major research focus, because the framework encourages research into often overlooked ‘‘background’’ factors, providing a nondualistic frame for interpreting results.

CHALLENGES OF ARTICULATING A CONCEPTUAL SCHEME

How we speak about something, I am obviously suggesting, counts, and I am hardly the first to say so (Doyle 1997; Keller 1992; RehmannSutter 2001). The ways we describe Nature (and her opposite, if we think there is such a thing) imply beliefs about the way she speaks, and therefore what we should do to maximize our chances of hearing her, as well as how to recognize whatever truths she may reveal. Scholars in many disciplines are increasingly committed to taking contextuality and complexity seriously, and have of necessity tried to forge a vocabulary to serve their projects. Some, like me, view life in terms of process rather than sharply defined, individuated ‘‘units’’ and ‘‘mechanisms’’— networks of mutually influencing factors rather than fixed, sharply bounded entities (e.g., Griesemer 2000). These preferences present special challenges, and understandably enough some doubt the utility of systems-talk. Such doubts, along with the misconstruals that often fuel them, are to be expected, and they are not necessarily a bad thing; if they give rise to discussion and clarification, in fact, they are to be welcomed. Given the diverse histories of usage of words like system, anyone using them must steer a tricky path, acknowledging ambigu-

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ities where they exist (everywhere) and heading o√ misreadings without being diverted from the task of elaborating a usable alternative vision (Oyama 2001).

Some Objections to Systems-Talk

One objection that has been raised to the use of a systems approach is that it implies uniform units (Lewontin et al. 1984, chap. 10; Peter Taylor, personal communication August 1998) and so is not well-prepared to handle natural diversity in ecology, for instance. But I suspect that such a uniformity assumption, when and if it exists, comes from particular practices of modeling, which put a premium on simplicity and tractability. Modelers may also believe that results are especially impressive if they start with homogeneous units. (If units are not differentiated in the beginning, the eventual result cannot be attributed to special characteristics of some components, but must instead stem from their interactions.) I am not persuaded that this particular objection is widespread, but it does not apply to developmental systems work, in which the heterogeneity of the interactants—in kind, magnitude, temporal characteristics—is conspicuous. A more frequently encountered worry is that speaking of systems is a way of characterizing development as inherently unpredictable or variable. An invocation of systemic interaction can indeed function in some contexts as a reminder of variability, but it shouldn’t be taken as a code word for it. Any developmental course will be predictable in some ways, unpredictable in others, depending on the inquiry. From study to study, di√erent aspects of the organisms in question will be picked out as recognizably the same, as significant or informative, and variation in other aspects will be ignored as random noise. Yet we know that one person’s noise is another’s signal. My own version of systems-talk doesn’t require denying regularity, or even the extreme predictability found in the production of species-typical features. After all, this is what it means to be species-typical, and part of the point is that a systems approach can accommodate both regularity and variability. There is a final reason for not making unpredictability a constitutive characteristic of systems: to some people, system indicates too much predictability, not too little; to them, it connotes unfailing self-regulation, perhaps on a machine-like cybernetic model (P. J. Taylor and

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García-Barrios 1995; Vayda 1966). For these people, to speak of systems is to invoke a noxious holism (Lewontin et al. 1984), or even harmony, of the sort found in certain writings on the balanced, ‘‘natural’’ environment. But the point is not that a system is predictable or unpredictable, self-righting or not, by nature (if you will), but that all outcomes are interactively constructed, and ‘‘balance’’ or stability is related to the particulars of the situation.≥ As Haila (2000) observes, taking a ‘‘processual turn’’ on ecosystems or populations is to see them not as fixed entities but as repeatedly constructed structures. This in turn questions the dividing line between those entities and their environments. The reliability of such (largely faithfully) recurring complexes, which is what a developmental system is, must be established under varying conditions, and processes producing similar results must be studied, not just black-boxed. As Haila (1999b, 340) points out, serious attention to contextuality imposes an obligation to respect the ways in which environments make existence possible.

The Challenge of Articulation across Fields

For a systems approach to be usable, we need a rich articulation of concepts, findings, and relations among processes. Broader cross-disciplinary articulation is needed as well. Earlier, I mentioned ways in which many academic disciplines are ordered by distinctions between biology and culture or body and mind. In fact, new disciplines typically define themselves by contrast and opposition, like late entrants to a political race. But if nature-nurture distinctions are reworked in the ways being advocated, it would seem that such identities and relations can hardly remain untouched. This second kind of articulation, among academic disciplines, has become increasingly important as systems thinking has been taken up in a variety of areas. Here I refer not only to developmental systems-related writings (Oyama et al. 2001), but also to allied e√orts such as the dynamical systems and autopoiesis perspectives in biology and psychology (Fogel 1993; Thelen and Smith 1994; Varela et al. 1991), some work in social psychology (Oyama 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Shotter, this volume), and B. H. Smith’s (1997) constructivist-interactionist take on science and knowledge. As I note elsewhere (Oyama 2001), dst’s treatment of organisms as integrated with their (developmentally and evolutionarily e√ective) environments makes ecology central to the fu-

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ture extension of the approach. Such organism-environment interpenetration, if taken seriously, undoes dualisms in both developmental and evolutionary studies. That is, not only is the ‘‘nature’’ of the naturenurture dichotomy transformed (as we saw, by being recast as a changing product of nurture rather than its alternative), but ‘‘nature’’ in the sense of the external environment of ecologists and evolutionists is transformed as well.

A SPECULATIVE CODA: AGENCIES AND RESPONSIBILITY

One way to think about much inter- and intradisciplinary variation is that it represents divergent approaches to the question How does Nature speak? and therefore, divergent opinions on the best way(s) to listen to her. Scientists can take the speaking for granted, blithely accepting the notion of a more or less articulate nature, and seek the best way to hear her. If she speaks in (phenotypic) ciphers, we hunt for the (genotypic) code; if her speech is soft and masked by noise, we amass large data sets, average across them, and use statistics to detect her messages; if she favors synonyms and homonyms, we may turn to evolutionary homologies and analogies, or mutated morphologies and their phenocopies. But there are other possibilities.

What Kind of Subject Is Nature?

Acceptance of nature as a unified, authoritative source (authoritative, that is, about her own coherent nature and needs) implies that she has the kind of persistent identity we generally take for granted in our mundane social dealings with each other. As I indicated, if I were obliged to accept this analogy with the autonomous subject, I would stand with Dyke, label myself perhaps a lapsed polytarian, and say Nature doesn’t speak: she is not a subject, at least not that kind of subject, much less a god. And I would say this as one who has spent considerable time exploring the many ways in which quasi-theological views have persisted in ostensibly secular scientific and popular discourse. We can refuse the metaphor out of hand, as Dyke does. But suppose we pause to reflect on this analogy between a personified nature and traditional notions of the autonomous subject. This is where

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the beginning of this discussion was pointing, and I want to go further in that direction now, for altering our conception of the speaking and acting subject alters in turn the possibilities of the trope. Let us glance at the idea of the person as an area of bounded privacy, whose speaking and other ‘‘expressions’’ are true to the etymology of express as ‘‘to press or squeeze out,’’ that is, to bring into the open something that was formerly interior. This is an old theme for me, but I now am shifting my angle of sight. The ‘‘homunculoid gene’’ I criticized in my early writings (Oyama 2000b) was so named precisely to highlight the incursions into scientific talk of commonsense understandings of ourselves (and our deities). Because most of these writings were directed at the widespread habit of analogizing genes to persons, the commonsense understandings of persons themselves went largely unchallenged.∂ Other people, meanwhile, have taken as their primary goal precisely the radical reworking of human subjectivity (e.g., Henriques et al. 1984; E. Thompson 2001; Varela et al. 1991); I also take Shotter’s (e.g., 1984, 1993) e√orts to be in this general tradition. As is the case with Dyke, there seems to be a convergence of sorts. Shotter and I arrive at similar (not identical) formulations via quite di√erent intellectual paths, although at least some of the similarities can probably be attributed to our having encountered similar allergens on the contemporary intellectual and political scenes. In any case, we have, in addition to the options of accepting or rejecting the analogy of nature to the traditional subject, a third option. What if we analogize nature to the deeply questioned, ‘‘decentered,’’ deessentialized beings one reads about more recently. Working with what might be loosely called, after B. H. Smith and Plotnitsky (1997), a postclassical notion of being and speaking, I suppose my answer might then be: Nature speaks as all of us do, which means our interactions with her are as rich and ambiguous, as baΔing and, sometimes, as seemingly transparent as our (other) social interactions and just as di≈cult to conceptualize or theorize (Haila 2000). From what surrounds us and impinges on us we attend to and interpret a changing subset. This is true in research as well as everyday life. We do not pay attention to everything; much less do we give everything equal importance. But our awareness of complexity and possibility does imply an obligation to try to recognize, and sometimes revise, the choices we continually make, at least when we think they will be conse-

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quential. This is not always easy, for what I am calling ‘‘choices’’ include all the influences that are not enough in awareness to be consciously made, the partialities and blind spots, preferences and perceptual sets, the unquestioned assumptions and everything else that customizes our positions in our worlds. Simply to be aware that they have been made, that they are the background that makes our present perceptions and actions possible, even if we do not reflect on their content, is to give circumstances their due in an important way. We no longer look to enduring essences—whether in Nature, other people, or ourselves as observers and as the ones observed. Also absent, then, is any final confidence that whatever we have nominated as the ‘‘source’’ of information is univocally authoritative about its own characteristics, its history, its needs and propensities. There may be practical and ethical repercussions of thinking and acting in this postclassical framework. In the past, I have criticized the widespread tendency to treat dna segments as though they were agents, with intentions, will, and an odd kind of causal autonomy. To counteract these tendencies I have deployed a certain notion of system to emphasize the embeddedness of the chromosomes in networks of entities and influences in which they have power only by being themselves causally dependent. It would be ironic indeed if these uses of systems-talk were to feed another tendency, pernicious in its own way: of viewing systems as agents. Indeed, it seems that some systems-talk encourages us to treat ‘‘the environment’’ or ‘‘the ecosystem’’ as an agent in the old autonomous-individual sense. This is presumably what motivates some of those critics of systems theories mentioned earlier: the fear that once a system is named, it becomes a bounded, essentialized entity, a center of action, if you will—exactly the kind of system I do not intend.

Systems as Agents?

When this happens, ‘‘the system’’ is sometimes treated as an alternative agent, on a par with the persons who are among its components. We are familiar with the debates about social/economic/political inequities and misfortunes: Is the person to blame, or The System?∑ There is a poignant irony in this. Those who are partial to the second answer have frequently been passionate advocates for the disadvantaged, and it has

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long been recognized that the answer is a treacherous one, for it risks depicting as passive and impotent just those who most need to be empowered. When empowerment works, it does so when those people see sensitive points in the network where they can, individually or collectively, directly or indirectly, bring e√ective pressure to bear, that is, by acting, not like helpless components in an all-powerful system, but as (partially) knowledgeable and (inter)active beings. Perhaps less familiar than such debates about social or personal reform are discussions of the allocation of blame for accidents. There have been reports in the popular press of individuals whose actions (or inaction) were implicated in some mishap, but who were judged innocent because the system made an accident inevitable. In very complicated situations, the reasoning goes, involving many objects, people, contingencies, choices, and interactions, if the accident had not happened in the way it did, it would have happened in another way, or an equivalent one would have happened instead. What I find worrisome is not the acknowledgment of complex interdependencies. Indeed, I think they must be recognized if we are to behave responsibly. Instead, it is the background assumption that total responsibility can and should be partitioned in this way, for the more power or agency is attributed to the system, the more helpless we may feel ourselves to be. And if people believe themselves to be causally irrelevant in this way, how likely are they to be acutely vigilant and painstaking at their duties? The danger, then, is the abdication of human responsibility in the face of complexity.∏

Speaking for Nature

The ‘‘we’’ in some of the preceding passages, whether it refers to we scientists, or we intellectuals, or we citizens of developed nations, signals a considerable amount of largely unspoken and unexamined agreement. In such cases, explicit references to what nature is, does, says, or needs are perhaps not very frequent. We are probably more apt to invoke the speaker as such when there is disagreement or doubt. You do not talk about a friend’s self until he says something you take to be out of character—that is, inconsistent with your sense of him. Then you say he was not himself . Or perhaps an acquaintance seeks to mitigate the impact of last night’s abusive remarks by telling you, ‘‘That was the whiskey talking, not me.’’ One even hears, ‘‘Don’t blame me, blame my

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genes.’’ As I have been suggesting, the ways agency is attributed in everyday life, as in science, are various, fascinating, and worth investigating, not least because they tend to imply a certain stance toward responsibility. Surely much of the struggle of environmentalist movements is to carve out a speak-aboutable area of the universe so that it will be noticed, so it can become an object of thought, discussion, and advocacy, and surely one way to do this is to give that area a shape, to make it a presence, by giving it a voice: in short, by having it speak. In fact, I once enlisted Bruno Latour’s (1987, 71–72) description of the scientist as a spokesperson for that which is studied to show how the developmental-systems framework allows me ‘‘to speak for the background—the mute, manipulated materials, the featureless surround’’— in short, for ‘‘the environment.’’ I continued, ‘‘Sometimes, the peripheral is the political’’ (Oyama 2000a, 126).π We seem to face a mismatch. On the one hand there is the postclassical, systemic sensitivity to the particulars of local context, to permeable and changing boundaries. On the other, the kind of rhetorical vividness and immediacy required for political action or for e√ective communication with colleagues. We often have the most impact on those who do not share our conceptual preferences when we can name entities and draw definite lines around them, and when we can describe transactions among them that map readily onto everyday ideas of our own a√airs. And yet in doing so we are already halfway along the road to falsifying the very vision we are trying to communicate. Haila (1999a, 174) again, on the processual turn and our obligations to nature: our main duty, he says, becomes, not to protect named entities but, rather, to respect processes on which the ‘‘recurring self-organization of the entities depends.’’ Elsewhere (1999b) he speaks of scientists’ obligation to seek new possible solutions even when things seem hopeless. Obviously, the point applies not only to scientists, but to all of us, whatever our experience or expertise.

NOTES 1 Just such a view of action is discernible in other contributions to this volume. 2 See Kay (2000) on the history of the shift to informational talk in biology and allied areas.

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3 Later I look at another potential drawback of regarding systems as superagents capable of ensuring their own development and perpetuation. 4 Though there was the occasional skeptical aside (Oyama 2000a, especially chaps. 9 and 10, and 1999). 5 See Peltonen (this volume) on ‘‘agent-centered and structural explanations.’’ 6 I regard the nature and role of human action to be an enormously important topic for those working in a systems framework; the issue of social action, explored in some of the essays in the present collection, is a case in point. Robert Jervis’s (1997, 260–94) book on complex systems discusses possibilities for e√ective action and counsels us to be prepared to find, even after a relatively successful outcome, that the problem is not solved once and for all. 7 In this passage, ‘‘the environment’’ is mainly the secondary term in the contrast between genes and environment, not the environment of the Greens and ecocentrists, though the meanings overlap.

Natural Speech A Hoary Story

Chuck Dyke

I have to reveal my views on spiritual matters. I’m a polytarian. Polytarians have the same relationship to paganism that Unitarians have to Christianity. That is, there are pretty surely no gods, but if there are, there are lots and lots of them. And they’re all over the place. I completely lack faith. The possibility of faith was e≈ciently eradicated in early attempts to make me a Christian. Yet, lacking faith, I retain deep sympathy with paganism. Pagans’ emphasis on bread, wine, olive oil, and oak trees is particularly sympathetic. So, despite any minor di√erences, I feel qualified to speak legitimately from the pagan point of view and, in what follows, do so to the best of my abilities.∞ Monotheism has dominated the dominant world culture for so long that we have lost almost all sense of what this dominance means. Monotheism demands obedience to a defined unity. Unity demands narrow conformity. Plurality, in contrast, admits of variety. The only real possibilities of a freely interacting creativity are pagan. Monotheism, in the end, has no room for creative variety. Even when it waves its hand in that direction as it o√ers us freedom, it simultaneously constrains that freedom to the straight and narrow. When we dimly feel some of the freedom of movement we lack in understanding the world around us, for example, by asking plaintively how nature speaks to us, we very nearly lack the means to trace the loss to its source. Recalling two key moments in the history of dominant monotheism should jog our memory. First is the moment when it was decided that the monotheistic god had created us in his image, thus transferring the right of paternalistic dominance to us. We became uniquely sacred at the expense of everything else. This is demonstrated to Adam in no uncertain terms. From a

TO CONSTRUCT MY ‘‘ARGUMENT,’’

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pagan point of view this is a terrible moment. As Nietzsche might have put it, this is the moment of the death of the gods: the first mass extinction at the hands of humans, the first act of genocide. Later there would, of course, be others. Second is the moment when the monotheistic god arrogates speech uniquely to himself: ‘‘In the beginning was the Word,’’ the logos that Faust was later to have so much trouble with. In fact, if you’ll remember, from that time on, in all three major monotheistic traditions, the monotheistic god is intricately identified with and as the logos. The earlier Hellenic traditions were deftly tidied up to suit the need, then elaborated.≤ These two moments complete a circle of identification, god-wordman-god, that is the canonical act of exclusion establishing the radical alterity of all else. That is, the holy trinity of man, word, and god are the root of all the other versions of dualism that bedevil us in our relationship to ‘‘the environment.’’ Once this chauvinistic arrogation of the word to us exclusively is seen, however dimly, an initial impulse of sportsmanship is to relegitimate ‘‘nature’’ by somehow allowing it the word. Nature must ‘‘speak’’ to us to establish a place in our priorities. But this is silly. When nature could speak, it was all the gods who were speaking. Nature can’t speak without the gods. Once in a while, a chimp can be induced to croak out a word or two, but that’s no help. Any self-respecting pagan can immediately see through the trope of having nature speak, for anything that nature ‘‘says’’ will have to be interpreted, mediated by those to whom the word primarily belongs. So the original act of exclusion will be reenacted over and over again as nature is mediated through one after another interpretive labyrinth. And given the squabbling that goes on among the Daedalian children of interpretation, even in the best of cases, the pagans are not a bit encouraged. Once sacrilized, the circle god-word-man-god can’t be broken, say the pagans ruefully. Prove that to us, say the rationalist monotheists. But what, say the pagans, is a proof ? Well, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it? For proof has long since come to be a thing of words. And that makes it look as if the speakers have all the cards. To combat that master argument, I’m afraid that we must try to beat the devil and, with Faust, explore the possibility that in the beginning was the act, not the word. For when the act is first, and not the word, once again we can appreciate what it is to interact in a life shared with

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nature. The meaning of this shared life may well have been lost with the extinction of paganism, but it can be refound. Or, to put it more accurately, it can be reestablished—an important distinction for us lapsed pagans, for the sense of sharing has to make a go of it this time without benefit of clergy, Druidic or otherwise. So, if the act was in the beginning, nature doesn’t speak to us. It lives with us and we with it: in, around, and through each other in a helterskelter of interactivities of varying profit to us all. In fact, the interactivities are so thick, ubiquitous, and mutually creative that it’s hard to think why we’d want to mark o√ a rigid boundary between ourselves and nature in the first place. We’re closet conaturals. It’s equally amazing that we might be asked to ‘‘prove’’ that we’re interactive conaturals, the evidence being as readily available as it is. Maybe it’s because we’re such bad clumsy destructive conaturals that it seems to require proof that we’re conaturals at all. Under monotheism the epistemic rule is that we must be flattered. We must not be humiliated. The superior dignity and worth of the human species must remain inviolate. Of necessity, we have to interact with the natural other, but we mustn’t be caught out in conversation with it. At this point, it might seem that the problem isn’t the conversation with nature, but the monotheistic terms of conversation. It could, for example, be suggested that the question of linguistic interaction with nature would be a little di√erent if we thought of our talk conversationally—dialectically, in a very old sense—rather than didactically. This would mean, of course, that we would also think of our science conversationally rather than didactically. Latour, Haraway, and others have recently made this suggestion. But this seems to me to be stretching for some way to keep the trope alive. Furthermore, there are serious drawbacks. The first is that we would still be encouraging the priority of language over praxis, with all the well-known consequences to be dealt with yet again. And the second is that in trying to avoid strict rationalist bounds on the conversation, we’d probably be stuck with romanticism —yet again—for modernism oscillates back and forth between the two. As the main alternative to scientific rationalism drifting around in the sea of modernity, romanticism retains the priority of the word (usually as the ego) and all the consequences of that priority. Rousseau’s ‘‘First I feel and then I think’’ is as Cartesian as the cogito itself, but with an a√ective throb.

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If romanticism and rationalism are just two dialects of monotheism, as I think they are, this makes it clearer why we’re treated to so many dialects over the course of modernism. We speak of nature, and this fact has led, via the master argument, to the view that there must be some sense in which nature is linguistic. The specific suggestions about how nature is linguistic correspond, as it were, to the theory of language prevailing in any given tradition. So when language is the instrument of magical power, nature is correspondingly magic. When language is the compounding of logical atoms, nature is correspondingly the compounding of atoms of another sort. When language is the elaboration of y = f(x), the world is a function of one variable. In short, we hear the old story over and over again, and romanticism is simply one genre. If the word is prior to the act, the world must conform to the word no matter what theory of the word happens to prevail. But I don’t really care, in the first instance, if the world conforms to my word. I want it to conform to my act. When I’m pulling on a weed I really don’t give a shit what Linnaeus had to say about it. I want it to come up, roots and all. And the fact that it’s a weed is embedded not in a cladistic tree, but in my garden. In fact, we might reflect on the way that the cladistic trees themselves are secondary, summaries of interactive engagements among the gardens, soils, rains, and other contingencies of times past. At least those of us who tell evolutionary tales would reflect in that way. In this light, my attraction to paganism, despite my lack of faith, is that the pagans are far more honest to the contingencies of the past than the monotheists are. Hence (unless we’ve reached the end of history), they’re more honest to the contingencies of the present. But for that judgment to mean anything, let alone have any persuasive force, it has to be examined in the context of the presently dominant monotheism, rationalist science.≥ In short, we have to imagine what a pagan science would be like, and the dominant conditions such a science would have to meet are those the world has learned to expect from monotheistic science. Clearly, not all the conditions will be met fully, for to ask for that would be to ask for the reproduction of monotheistic science itself. But it’s fair to ask for something approaching the undeniable success of monotheistic science in some regards. Well, first, of course, there will be a lot less talk about laws in a pagan science. As any number of historians have shown, and as any look at the

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early modern period shows as well, the laws that dominate scientific discourse are the Vox dei required for monotheistic rationalism. It certainly does make sense that a single all-powerful ruler and creator is thought of as a lawgiver, and the product of his/her creation subject to the laws he/she gives. But there is no such lawgiver in a pagan world. All the many many deities all over the place are more or less a law unto themselves, as it were. And speaking of those deities, I’m sure you’re all breathlessly eager to hear (from a lapsed pagan, mind you) what they’re like. Clearly, just as the monotheistic god varies from religion to religion, so do the gods of the pagans, though with far greater variety. However, just as there is a generic core of monotheity that can be extracted from the various single godheads, there is a generic polytheity that can be extracted from the varieties of paganism. I won’t pretend that my particular extraction doesn’t reflect my own biases. As there are no gods in any case, it really doesn’t matter. There’s a deity for every di√erence that makes a di√erence. Thus, if Feynman is right, there is only one god of electrons. On the other hand, some gods keep coming into existence and passing away. Thus, at one time there was no god of dodo birds, then there was, and now once again there isn’t. Those who think that gods are eternal are just wrong, except perhaps about the god of very energetic photons. In starting this way we’ve obviously located an immediate major theological issue: what di√erences are godly, and what ungodly. The pagans are interested in powerful di√erences, not doleful impotent ones. But, of course, it’s not always easy to know where the power lies. So, to be safe, we’ll have our pagans be willing to believe that there is a deity for every determinate capacity. This generous willingness to open the pantheon wide quite naturally creates the task of identifying determinate capacities, and this may look like a di≈cult if not impossible task. But the very di≈culty has a decisive advantage at the present stage of inquiry. Paganism has an analogue in one of the most active industries of modern science. The problems involved in locating and counting determinate capacities are, exquisitely and exactly, parallel to those generated by the attempt to find quantitative measures of information. In both cases, the cloaca maxima of potential candidates, gods or bytes, gushes them forth in embarrassing profusion. Counting is thus thwarted by

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tangled plural criteria of identity, all of which have their plausibility. Harsh decisions can be made in the pagan context if you’re willing to commit yourself to a theory of the nature of the gods, and in the informational case if you’re willing to make a decision about what you’re willing to consider to be information. But then, of course, all the problems simply slide over to infect the prior decisions. As Susan Oyama (1985, 3) puts it, ‘‘Information is a di√erence that makes a di√erence, and what it ‘does’ or what it means is thus dependent on what is already in place and what alternatives are being distinguished.’’ Well then, how are all our deities related to one another? To say ‘‘by laws’’ would just reintroduce the monotheism again. In fact, it’s traditional to introduce this move as an argument for monotheism in the form of a foundation of reason (a unique ‘‘arche’’). It always sounds good in a context dominated by monotheistic ideology, and like question-begging silliness otherwise. Here, of course, the silliness is patent. The fact is, the gods are related in myriad complicated or even complex ways, and it’s the job of a polytheistic science to discover, exhibit, and understand the myriad ways of the gods. For example, one of the most interesting things we’ll find as we browse polytheistic science is the way the gods beget gods. I’ve already mentioned the birth (and death) of the god of dodo birds. Such engendering (as it were) is typical of the interactivities of the gods. Just as the most usual form of animal reproduction requires the interactivity of two partners, one of whom has the specific distinct capacity we call ‘‘biological male’’ and the other with the specific distinct capacity we call ‘‘biological female,’’ so the engendering of a given god will require the interactivity of two or more gods with specific distinct capacities. So, the gods Proton and Electron, in the sanctioning presence of various gods of temperature and so forth, will engender the god Hydrogen. In fact, if the presence of various sanctioning gods is reliable enough, we might even tend to forget about them and say that proton and electron engender hydrogen. It’s really very important to keep in mind that the god Law is engendered, in pagan science, only when ‘‘we’’ are part of the interaction. This isn’t any more surprising than the engendering of anything else we’d be inclined to call a human artifact (except, of course, here in the world of pagan science, we, too, are gods). The god Law is the patron of our determinate capacity to forget. In particular, we need incredible

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capacities for remembering likeness and forgetting di√erence in order to engender the god Law. The god Law so engendered is very di√erent from the monotheistic lawgiver. In the case we started with, the existence of the god Law is explained by the interaction of our participatory interaction with the interaction of proton and electron interacting with some other sanctioning gods. It’s absolutely crucial to note that these interactions are nowise explained by the existence of the god Law. At some later time, of course, we might remind each other of the expected outcomes under certain reliable conditions of the interaction of the gods Electron and Proton by referring to the god Law, but reminding isn’t explaining, we must remind the monotheists. It follows that one of the most crucial di√erences between the pagan god Law and the monotheistic law as the word of the one god is that the pagan god isn’t related to ‘‘idealizations’’ in the same way the monotheistic counterpart is. To preserve the divinity of their godhead, monotheistic scientists have to protect it from the vagaries and contingencies of quotidian interaction. So life in the monotheistic world of law is life in the subjunctive mood. We’re told what the god would do were it not for the dirt and noise. For the pagan, Dirt and Noise are gods, too. Their participation in an interactive process has no less dignity and is no less likely to be decisive than the participation of any of the prettier gods. To forget, that is, to ‘‘abstract’’ your way to an idealization, is certainly one of the successful research strategies. Monotheistic science encourages the hypostatization of idealizations and their canonization in the language of law. The problem is with the understanding and use of the idealization. The strategies associated with monotheistic idealization are extremely rigid. In fact, they’re so rigid that penance and absolution have to be made available for those who fall short of the ideal. In the squooshier monotheistic sciences, such as economics, the use of ceteris paribus clauses as boilerplate are ubiquitous and conspicuous. In pagan science, abstractions and simplifications are available as well, but the strategic imperatives are very di√erent. A pagan has to have respect for all the gods, and treating them like dirt isn’t the way to do that—if dirt is thought of in the monotheistic way. So the pagan has to pursue complex strategies allowing all the gods to have their say. Now, if they all talked at the same time, it would be a cacophony. So the pagan has to hush some of the gods, then hush some others, then others still, in an attempt to illuminate the complex nonlinear godly

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interactions. The near impossibility of stilling all but a single voice is one of the main reasons pagan science can’t produce the illusion of certainty nearly as easily as the monotheists do. In the realm of the linear, both monotheistic and pagan science can sustain the illusion of certainty pretty well, but the realm of the linear is far more limited than monotheistic science had hoped for so long. Although this always should have been obvious in all the sciences except physics, it could be ignored for a long time because of the availability of the dream of reduction of all science to physics itself. The gods of ballistic objects are reliable enough to simulate an all-powerful deity under carefully prepared conditions. Of course, from time to time, under unusual circumstances, there may be only one god responsible for some phenomenon. Then we could account for what’s going on by invoking the specific determinate capacity of that god. We might even get fancy and call whatever happened the result of that god’s law. This would mimic monotheistic science. But it would never seem sensible in pagan science to make the search for single-god phenomena the dominant research strategy. There are so few such phenomena, and they’re so uncharacteristic of what generally happens, that the resulting agglomeration of caricatures would be embarrassing to the pagans. A number of people have made an interesting point that has direct relevance to the conception of monotheistic science. For many years, doubts were expressed about the possibility of a scientific cosmology. Among the most serious grounds for this doubt was the ‘‘fact’’ that there was only one cosmos, hence there could be no laws of the cosmos as such, laws needing, as they do, a multitude of instances for their establishment. In just such a way, of course, there can be no laws about the monotheistic deity, only laws by him/her about the world. How physicists overcame this apparent di≈culty is very easy to gloss in terms of a reversion to pagan-like science to achieve a scientific cosmology. The gods of photons, the gods of galaxies, and all the gods in between were brought together to display the nature of their interactions. The fact that they haven’t yet been brought to a harmonious peace may simply indicate the di≈culties of some very deep science. It should be abundantly clear that a pagan science has a very di≈cult time producing a dualistic epistemology or metaphysics. Divinity diluted (as monotheists always insist) is tantamount to divinity denied.

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The ontological separation between deity and world is nigh impossible with all those deities in the world. Consequently, the pressure to make human cognition or language a manifestation of the divine is minimal. For the pagan, human cognition is something in and of the world. Theories are in and of the world as well. Despite the fact that a lot of language is about the world, this is no decisive argument for its occupation of a world of its own as there is for the monotheistic logos. Language, too, is a complex of interactions of immanent gods. How else, after all, could it be part of the making and doing of things? Of course, if you have the monotheistic word as your paradigm of a creative source, I guess it doesn’t bother you that you have no account of the e≈cacy of the disembodied word. But the trope has almost certainly exhausted your patience by now. The belief in a gazillion gods is nearly as absurd as the belief in one. So finally, as a lapsed pagan, I have to talk about secularization—something that is supposed to have happened to monotheism in the transition to modern times. The supposed secularization of monotheistic science turns out to have been no secularization at all. The godhead simply wanders around among inferred existences, subsistences, and persistences, usually summarized as reason and usually certified pure. More specifically, the secularized monotheistic God is whatever it (he, she) has to be to make physics possible on the latest standard models. The priority of the logos is never in doubt. By and large, this means that nature speaks to us with full authority when we hear its (his, her) laws. Expectedly, the attempted secularization of monotheistic science is a colossal failure. As a polytarian, I have to say that, in contrast, the secularization of pagan science is a smashing success. In fact, what it does is show us the embarrassing redundancy of theism in the first place, charming as it may have been. Why bother with gods of electrons when there are electrons with their determinate specific capacities, di√erentiated from the determinate specific capacities of everything else, including positrons and muons? The pagan insight that explanation is at root the account of the dynamic interactions of things with determinate specific capacities stands by itself. It really doesn’t help one bit to assign the interactions to a plenary pantheon. In fact, paganism is a dangerous distraction from serious understanding, just as monotheism is. Hence my lapse.

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There is no doubt that, with all the gods gone, necessity and certainty will be harder to find. Contingency will have to be respected, and that’s one of the hardest things of all for the monotheists to choke down. Pagan and secularized pagan science are de facto far more congenial to biologists than they are to physicists, for obvious and, in their way, sensible reasons. For example, Gould asks whether, if the clock were wound back, evolution would occur in just the way it did before. This is a live question in evolutionary biology, and a good productive one. It can’t be dismissed by a wave of the monotheistic hand. In fact, an informal consensus of the authors in Science’s recent special issue on evolution (25 June 1999; sometimes read between the lines) is that there is no reason to expect that things would turn out just the same were the clock rewound. To think otherwise would be to hold that the multiple interactions over a long temporal sweep that result in the biota we have now were (and are) tight enough to constrain evolution to a single trajectory. They would have to be such that an observer of the ‘‘initial’’ conditions long ago would ideally (in the monotheistic sense) have been able to predict the current biological census and distribution. When put that way it’s hard to find anyone willing to commit to it. This surely does not mean (the pagans remind us) that evolution is beyond scientific understanding. I’ve argued in several places, following Richard Levins, that the pervasive nonlinearity of systems characterized by persistent complex interactions is enough by itself to defeat the dreams of the monotheists. Maybe that’s not surprising given my residual attachment to paganism. But the fact remains that only in those areas of science able to hang on to linearity as a principle, say, of scientific abstraction and approximation has the monotheistic view held any plausibility. This is not to say, of course, that modern pagans haven’t used the tools of linear science to ratchet themselves into an understanding of the nonlinear. It’s the monopoly of ideological power in the understanding of the scope and limits of linear science that’s been broken, not the tool itself. The rationalist traditions cast their lot with the eternal and, of course, found a way to locate our minds, intelligence, or whatever in that realm. Monotheistic science continues that tradition. In that light, we can ponder yet another ‘‘threat’’ of pagan or seculopagan science: it threatens to rob us of our divinity. As long as we can think of ourselves as the unique living beings who can hear nature speak in its laws, we can

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continue to pretend to divinity—have souls, if you like. (We can even begin, at a later stage of sophistication, to think of ourselves as the unique collapsers of wave packets in the divine act of observation.) I think that the humbler and more sensible course is to stop thinking that we can hear nature speak—rather than, for example, hear birds sing, brooks gurgle, radios play, and so forth. We’re in constant interaction with lots of other things around us, and we haven’t the slightest ontological claim to be above those interactions. Like everything else, we have determinate specific capacities that nothing else does, and because self-consciousness is one of the capacities that may be unique, and language another, we get led down the garden path to the gazebo of self-flattering ontological onanism. Because the pagans would have none of that, I remain a polytarian. What that means in the end, for current purposes, is this. I have to balk at the metaphor of nature speaking. It can’t speak. The illusion that it can is a residuum of the view that a god or gods speak through it—to us alone as participants in the divine. So what I have to do at my most serious is pay close attention to my interactive relations with everything else, and as many interactions of one thing and another as my interactive capacities will allow. I listen to scientists—even monotheistic scientists—as I listen to all learners, for they increase my capacities. I do di√er from the monotheistic scientists in that I look for patterns before regularities, and regularities before laws. It should go without saying that I’m not about to tamper with, say, the laws of thermodynamics, but I do insist on thinking of them as articulating very general constraints on the results of natural interactions, however others understand them. Nothing and nobody has succeeded in convincing me that the constraint to a single trajectory is at all common, though I know how you can prepare the world to get that result, locally and temporarily. I can understand why monotheistic science succeeded largely because I can identify the realms within which it did succeed and continues to succeed. Similarly, I think I can identify the realms of its likely continued failure. Part of the latter consists in showing that a lot of science that looks monotheistic actually makes more sense in seculopagan terms. There’s no instantly gratifying shortcut to that task, so it can’t be done here. This all results in a recommendation of the polytarian worldview and the consequent family of viewpoints it suggests. I end with one more consequence of adopting the polytarian stance:

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this essay is a casual and ephemeral intervention in an ongoing conversation. There’s nothing eternal about it, nor could there be.

NOTES

1 A gratifying number of ‘‘paganisms’’ have thrived over the face of the globe. Paganism isn’t a pagan word, after all. Here I have to abstract radically from the fascinating particulars to reach a generic conception su≈cient for my purposes. 2 In addition to St. John, we can remember Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Proclus, Al Ghazali, Ibn Gabirol, Saadya Gaon, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Dan Brooks, and others. 3 This is not to slight Christianity and Islam in the least, but they themselves are presently dominated by rationalist science. What I call rationalist science, because of the direction in which I happen to want the finger to point for present purposes, Donna Haraway calls technoscience, for ultimately more important reasons.

We sow the corn and plant the trees. We fertilise the soil by irrigation. We dam the rivers, to guide them where we will. One may say that we seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.—Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book II

Gardens, Climate Changes, and Cultures An Exploration into the Historical Nature of Environmental Problems

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was hardly the first culture to make noticeable changes in its environment. This excerpt from Cicero’s (1972, 195) work is still one of the first texts in European history in which an attempt is made to conceptualize these changes. The Greek philosophers had lamented the passing of the great forests that were cut down to build their merchant and battle fleets, but this theme never took a central role. In Cicero’s time, the situation was very di√erent, as instead of the Greek mosaic of city-states a true empire was emerging. New agricultural practices spread to a huge area, changing the whole face of the land for good. Grid-like land division, centuriation, was coupled with new forms of local administration spreading to varied environments, such as the Po Valley and Tunisia (Glacken 1990, 146–47). For Cicero this was evidence of the human ability not only to create singular artifacts, but to establish a new order. In short, the Romans not only changed objects to suit their needs, they created the world in which their culture could emerge. Fields, gardens, and meandered rivers were at the core of their culture as much as legions and circuses. ‘‘A second nature in the natural world’’ is not only a quaint phrase, it is an attempt THE ROMAN EMPIRE

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to understand the relationships of culture and nature. To understand the significance of this idea we should remember the intellectual climate of Cicero’s time. Speaking through the mouth of Balbus, Cicero reflects the Stoic view of the world. For the Stoics, Nature was an ordered whole, one that could be compared to the organization of human societies. The gods had laid down the laws and rules that nature obeyed. Thus, nature expressed inner purposes, reflections of the divine intelligence that governed it (Cicero 1972, 155, 172). Cicero argued that there is ample evidence that the natural order was created most of all to suit the needs of humanity (and the gods). The great rivers made cultures like Egypt possible, many animal species seemed to be suited to the care and use of humans, and even the cycle of seasons gave variety to the nourishment nature o√ered and helped sailors to navigate the seas (176–77). As Clarence Glacken (1990, 57) has noted, this line of reasoning spawned analogies between the order of nature and the order of society: the world as a city, for example. For the Stoics, Nature was a mirror of the Roman culture. Our experience with contemporary environmental problems and most of all with the discussion surrounding them easily leads us to value these ideas from a customary perspective. The idea that the world is ordered for the use of humans seems suspect, for doesn’t it involve the age-old human hubris of setting oneself at the top of Creation, of valuing nature simply because of its usefulness? This is, of course, true. The idea that human influence simply improves the world seems ridiculous. We are accustomed to seeing the changes that humankind brings about in nature as inherently either destructive or constructive (e.g., ‘‘restoration’’ of natural systems or removing famine conditions). This duality is at the core of the present environmental discourse, and, as I later suggest, it also is a factor in bringing many issues to political deadlock.≤ But let us arrest this process of valuation for a while and keep our ears open to the faint whispers from the past. Let us whisper together with Cicero and think about some valuable insights in his text. The term ‘‘second nature’’ is at the conceptual core of the quote. The ‘‘first’’ nature was, in Cicero’s view, an orderly whole. Second nature brought about by human practices was also more than just separate artifacts. It was a purposeful order created within a purposeful order. According to Glacken (1990, 60), in this view there is no a priori ∞

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distinction between domesticated and pristine nature—the Roman order was seen as a continuation of the teleology inherent in Nature. However we value Cicero’s idea of humans as stewards of the Creation, one notion behind the image remains important: human practices inevitably e√ect changes in the world. And whether we are talking about Roman gardens and aqueducts or twenty-first-century agribusiness and irrigation, these changes are central to the way that human cultures can realize themselves. Human existence is fundamentally artifactual. The problems associated with this world-building activity are most likely an inseparable part of humanity. Of course, this does not invalidate the criticism of some practices, some institutions, and some problematic outcomes. But it does invalidate any idea of ‘‘Letting Nature Be.’’ However, human practices do not change the world at will and whim. In Cicero’s terminology, changes are possible only within the dynamics of the first nature. One cannot meander the river without the river, and one cannot use the water to fertilize the fields without soil to be tilled and plants to be cultivated. When these changes have been e√ected, second nature will form the new framework for the future. However, first nature remains active within this framework. It is not a tabula rasa blown away by the force of history. Our present cultures are in many ways in a similar situation as Cicero’s Rome. Great changes in the environment are attributed to human practices, and these changes seem to put our cultures in a new position. Ways to conceptualize this are needed, but the insights of the orator are forgotten. The most contested of these changes is the human influence in the process of climate change. The climate debates have focused on the question of whether a (human-induced) qualitative shift has actually happened, or whether the change is a continuation of ageold climatic processes. The whole debate is, of course, directed by the inherent demands of policymaking: to assess the situation, a problem has to be defined, the cause recognized, and guilt attributed. In this definition and recognition various sciences have a pivotal role; scientific communities are being called on to analyze the present problem and demonstrate its primal causes, which will become the objects of policymaking. This is the typical way science-policy mediations work, through clear dichotomies of norm and deviation, problem and cause. In the following, I propose that climate change is one example of en-

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vironmental problems where the traditional role of these dichotomies needs to be questioned. Here, the word guilt is essential. In the assessments of the causes of environmental problems and in finding the culprits, the division of cultural and natural causes is emphasized. If the practices and institutions of (some!) people are to blame, something may be done. If Nature itself is the culprit, policy retreats, as it resides only in the realm of human action and meaning. As in the case of climate change, ‘‘a continuation of age-old climatic processes’’ will not merit the status of a problem. But this retreat of policy does not make sense. The whispers from the past should teach us that regardless of guilt, regardless of how we value changes, changes are taking place. For better or worse (probably worse), Cicero’s second nature, another order, is emerging. We have to ask the question: What is changing with climate change? It is my firm belief that a blunt distinction between natural and cultural (human-induced) states of the climate cannot be a fruitful starting point. For if this is our starting point, we are actually counterposing Culture and Nonculture. This conceptual constellation lacks awareness about the long shared history of culture and nature and, most of all, sensitivity to di√ering cultures and natures around the globe and across the span of history. Human cultures are not built on untouched nature; they are built in the processes that make their very existence possible. Second natures are constantly being created when humans engage in their everyday practices. If the aim is to make practical decisions about complex environmental problems, the distinction between natural and cultural is of no use. I am not proposing a view that would try to invalidate the distinction between culture and nature in itself. Conceptual distinctions are a necessity of life, and in some situations the distinction between culture and nature is of course beneficial.≥ I am saying that it isn’t a good place to start when we try to make valuations about human action and its consequences. Strong distinctions do not help us understand how changes in the world take place and what consequences they might have. In the following pages I examine how the notion of second nature might aid this understanding.

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WHY SECOND NATURE?

Throughout the history of philosophy, the term ‘‘second nature’’ has had many di√erent uses and meanings. In its various guises, the term has dealt with the meeting ground of cultural and natural elements. I examine some of these uses relating to a contemporary example, the climate change debate. This is not merely an academic question of meaning, because the various meanings that are attributed to culture and nature are functioning in our everyday life; they are functioning in that debate as one factor for justifying policy and defining problems. Heating, transportation, tra≈c, food production, and all other necessary activities are being questioned on the basis of perceived changes in the climate. Or, more accurately, their present forms and the ‘‘necessity’’ of those forms are being questioned. The ‘‘naturalness’’ or ‘‘unnaturalness’’ of these practices is used to criticize or justify them and to define the context where the whole issue is addressed. The idea that natural and cultural elements together form the inescapable background of making such distinctions and justifications, the notion of second nature as whispered by Cicero, is lost in the mists of history. Instead of the very real world of Cicero’s gardens and rivers—and coin mints, invasions, and lead poisoning—the debate has drifted into the world of petrified conceptual distinctions that refer to an imaginary realm instead of the very real situation our cultures are in. Conceptual images of the situation have been drawn for the purpose of justifying climate policies. I wish to demonstrate that these images have disregarded the complexity of the situation. As does any other historical situation, climate change has a long common history of culture and nature, and it cannot be meaningfully understood without this history. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of the climate debate helps us to reveal its problems.

ARTIFACTS AS SECOND NATURE

A common way to understand the term ‘‘second nature’’ is to say that it is the realm of human artifacts in opposition to the realm of natural objects. Trees and rivers are of nature, whereas wooden furniture and

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canals are of culture. Long and tiresome debates have been going on throughout the history of philosophy about the problematic role of domesticated animals and cultivated forests, all the way to nuclear reactors and genetically modified organisms (of course, there are important problems related to these issues). The main issue here is the form of agency behind the formation of various objects. Who or what is the cause or the producer of something? Can intellectual purpose and intention be detected? The products of human cultures have been perceived as creations in the true sense of the word, made objects that form the second nature beside the first, ‘‘untouched’’ or ‘‘pristine’’ nature. The role given to the first nature is that of a background, building material, the stage that is set for the main actor who plays out his or her historical role. This is the dominant way to perceive the phenomenon of climate change. Present climatic conditions are seen as a result of the e√ects of human practices on the natural environment. A qualitatively new situation, ‘‘the second nature climate,’’ has been born. In the following, I illustrate this viewpoint as a play in four acts.

‘‘THE STORY OF THE PROMETHEAN CLIMATE’’

Act 1: In Which the Stage Is Built

In the beginning there is the stage of events, a huge lump of metals, minerals, and rock to be called Earth. Already a lot of things are happening, but the actions of the microscopic stage managers will not get due attention on the opening night. Act 2: Enter the Set

The formation processes of Life create a historical novelty: the biogenic atmosphere. As the atmosphere is a piece of the set, no roles are written for it in this story. The old theater tradition of white-masked actors who move the pieces of the set is already lost; the only agents visible to the audience are the human actors in the key roles. As often is done in the history of philosophy, let us name this original atmosphere ‘‘the State of Nature,’’ the starting point for our political considerations. From the perspective of climate change, this means a state of the climate that does not involve human interference.

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Act 3: The Intro

After the initial formation of the atmosphere, the audience can see a long period of development, in which the composition of the atmosphere and the states of climate are in constant flux. This is the mythical history before the entry of the protagonists, and it is filled with music and dance, harmonies and disharmonies. While the music and movements flow, most of the audience is still leafing through the playbill. The natural history of the climate is not deemed relevant for the main storyline, the story of the anthropogenic climate change.∂ There are some spectators who are enchanted by the flow of music and dance and can see that the entire development can be understood meaningfully only as a continuum of relatively stable states. The natural history of the climate is not a cacophony; one can discern more or less regular cycles of development within the seemingly chaotic whirl. Ice ages are a good example. From the viewpoint of humans and other beasts fleeing the creeping ice walls, an ice age is an apocalyptic disaster, but in the longer span of history it is a part of the dynamics of the climate. A sheet of ice one to three miles thick represents stability in a sense, but for some creatures their world is brought to an end. There are also periods of steady warming and cooling and transitory periods of steady mean temperatures, and these, too, are ‘‘perceived’’ di√erently, depending on the situations of the creatures. The idea of relative stability can be addressed in another way. Translated to the language of the climate debate, it means also relatively normal, in the very literal sense of the word. ‘‘Normal’’ is something from which norms can be inferred, on the basis of which actions are valued. What might a relatively normal state of the climate be? As the atmosphere is mainly the result of the formation of life processes, normality can be understood meaningfully only in relation to biological systems. Mere change is not a signal of instability or abnormality; change itself must be understood. The dynamic states of climate can be normal or stable only when the biological systems have adapted to them. For short periods, the dancers and the music move in unison.

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Act 4: Enter Prometheus

The music and the dance pause, the set is silent, and the spotlight focuses on the entering protagonist. He is Prometheus, ‘‘humanity,’’ who changes the State of Nature, thus creating a qualitatively new situation. He rearranges the set and creates a climate that is a human artifact. In the field of climate debate, this ‘‘event’’ is described by saying that humanity has disturbed the natural state of the climate by changing the composition of the atmosphere. This Prometheus not only stole fire from the gods, he is creating vast amounts of emissions by using it. The State of Nature is the norm by which the actions of the protagonist are judged.∑ However, the audience is left baΔed and without closure. The main actors engage in an obscure debate in which they argue about the exact moment when the transition took place. In other words, what is the relevant period of human history? When did first nature transform into second nature? Further debates ensue: Who, actually, was Prometheus? What should be done about his creation? The distinction between the natural and the disturbed state of climate is a common feature of the arguments for the need for climate policy. It does not matter whether the truly banal notion of the natural stability of the climate or a more sophisticated notion of the natural dynamics is proposed: the normative role of nature is a recurring background assumption. But there is one serious problem. From the perspective of climate dynamics, the gaseous emissions from human action do not di√er at all from natural ones. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and even cow flatulence participate in the same dynamic as volcanoes and forest fires caused by lightning. How can these various sources be distinguished from each other? The obvious answer seems to be that only the human sources should be considered, as only they can be objects of political decision making. They can be regulated and limited through policy, but natural sources cannot sit at the negotiation table. This is, of course, important in the sense that guilt is not evenly spread among the human actors, even though clear causal chains cannot be drawn. But from the viewpoint of the climate change phenomenon, guilt is not a straightforward issue. Primary causes for changes cannot be isolated, if change is a defining characteristic of the climate. In the climate debate, a second line of argument has arisen against

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the idea of human-made climate. Because change itself is a natural element of the climate, as the third act of the play clearly demonstrated, the states that include human interference are not artifacts or unnatural as such—no second nature emerges. The opponents of emission limitation often use this argument. Again, ‘‘nature’’ is being used normatively, but very di√erently from before. For some it is the (balanced) State of Nature, for others a realm of inevitable change. What is this mess really about? Concern over the confusion of the climate debate was voiced by Professor Philip Stott in his 1998 editorial for the Journal of Biogeography. After his experiences of the Kyoto Summit, he wrote: ‘‘To hear ecologists talking about ‘halting’ or ‘curbing’ climate change was deeply disturbing, but for them to try to make the world believe that this ‘stability’ might be achieved through manipulating just a few variables out of the millions of interlinked and dynamic factors which govern the world’s climate is frankly sinister. Let us be blunt; it is a lie, a disgrace to the subject, and a scientific nonsense’’ (1). Stott’s editorial is clearly meant to be provocative and consciously elitist,∏ but one should note that he doesn’t seem to oppose climate policy as such. His argument is simply based on the conviction that changes in the climate are inevitable—the editorial actually opens with a quote from Heraclitus—and that this must influence climate policy, otherwise it is bound to fail. In short, he is concerned that the dominant ways of looking at environmental problems simply block better understanding of them.π I agree that the problematic conceptual constellations of climate policy are not just a philosophical conundrum. They are closely tied to policy. What is at stake in the climate debate is the issue of governance, the attempt to get the perceived problem under control. But no phenomenon becomes a problem by itself; it gets this status in a scientific and political process. In the making of an environmental problem, sciences and policy engage in visible dialogues that close up their apparent separation into ‘‘specialist’’ fields. The results of scientific studies are not transported directly into the arena of policy; the customary ways of understanding and handling environmental problems pose expectations on the forms the studies will take (like the emphasis on finding clear causes). In much the same way, the dominant dichotomies used in the sciences a√ect policymaking. To make the problem into a viable object of decision making, these science-policy mediations strive to

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reach a common closure. They are essentially trying to find a common language for defining the dynamics of the problem. The ways this is done dictate the possible strategies of action. If Stott is even partially correct, the function of simplistic accounts of climate change is to make climate change into a viable target for a straightforward policy. According to this definition, human interference has disturbed the natural state of the climate, and for nature to recuperate that interference must be curbed or removed. Thus, the idea of the State of Nature in climate is an archetypal example of how an immensely complex process is being reduced to an abstract division between a supposed norm and deviations from the norm. This abstraction bypasses the fact that the climate is in a state of flux, no matter what is done.∫ The whole phenomenon of climate change has been totalized and abstracted. In some sense, it is possible to see it as a single phenomenon. But there is not one single dynamic for the sources of emissions, and neither is there a common result of the change; one climate, myriad weathers. But if the State of Nature is dismantled, where can we seek norms for action? One way to seek an answer to this question is to examine another meaning for the term second nature.

CULTURE AS SECOND NATURE: CULTURAL NATURES

Whereas the previous meaning of second nature dealt with separate artifacts or situations and their origins, this meaning is linked to a stronger ontological claim. The emergence of culture is not only a historical development, but also an ontological shift that creates two separate realms of existence. The untouched and pristine first nature is seen in opposition to second nature: human culture or civilization in general. In the history of philosophy, this idea has been introduced by various schools of thought. The fundamental idea is that humanity represents a new world-historical stage of development in the history of life on Earth. Human culture is the end result, the pinnacle of evolution; it is the fulfillment of life itself. (Even though the notion of teleological history is not inherent in the theory of evolution, it lives on surprisingly strong in many popular versions.) Humanity is seen as the telos of Creation, whether it is God’s creation or a creation of Evolution or some form of Weltgeist.

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According to this viewpoint, all norms for human action stem from humans themselves, from a historical mission ‘‘given’’ to them, whether it is the stewardship of the Earth or the utilization of natural resources for human progress. Nature as a basis for normative judgments disappears; indeed, the link between culture and nature is completely severed. It is always ‘‘our’’ decision. There are some obvious problems here. Even though this view emphasizes the eventual human responsibility in making decisions about any environmental problem, people disappear, as do the real situations they live in. Instead of heterogeneous human cultures there is the Culture, and instead of diverse natural elements there is a totalized realm of Nature. Abstract philosophical ideas such as this do not figure much in the actual debates about environmental problems. Still, the fading of natural elements to the background is a recurrent feature. Again, climate change is a good example. Even if the previous account of the climate is based on a simplistic opposition between nature as a norm and the human-induced state of climate, it still hints at the idea of climate as a historically changing phenomenon. But it is easy to forget this altogether, when the present states of the climate become institutionalized in the arena of international climate policy. The climate becomes an ahistorical haggling ground for policies, where ‘‘humankind’’ tries to decide among strategies. The millions of actors and factors that Stott referred to are muted. Natural elements have no role in the play where ‘‘we humans’’ plan the future. It remains unclear who ‘‘we’’ are, and the actual situation of the climate does not have any history. As before, it is more a piece of the set than an actor in the play. The fading of nature is a similar problem in viewpoints that resemble some forms of social constructivism. They are based on the notion that nature is always a human creation. When people are talking about nature they are always talking about an image of nature, one interpreted through their own experiences of the world, mediated by their interactions with it and their shared beliefs and discourses. For example, competing metaphors for understanding natural systems have played a key role in the history of biology: competition or cooperation, harmony or constant change? These metaphors have been involved in struggles over important political notions, of which Spencer and Kropotkin are good examples. In other words, we never have direct access

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to the brute reality. The end result of such discussion is easily just an empty comparison among di√erent formulations of nature, with no means to justify any one of them. If environmental problems are seen to be just ideological constructions and interpretations of the world, the role of natural elements is trivial, even nonexistent. In an extreme interpretation, the normatively used image of the natural state of the climate is seen as an ideological construction, one created for and during the climate debate. This construction serves the interests and goals displayed in that debate: acquiring the legitimacy to define the problem, gaining control of climate policy. Such is the case with any other view that has a role in the debate. In his book Against Nature, Steven Vogel (1996, 96) stretched this view to the extreme by claiming that ‘‘the world we live in is the world we have created.’’ Nature is always second; the first nature is the brute reality beyond our grasp. Philosophical deconstruction of our images of nature has been an important achievement that has been helpful for understanding the problematic role of nature in science and politics. Struggles over scientific authority, the right and power to determine the problem at hand, have been a dominant feature in the climate debate. The constructivist line of argument has convincingly demonstrated that whatever scientific view is adopted, one cannot forget the fact that the decisions made regarding climate change will always be human judgments, not inferences from nature itself. To be sure, much of the climate policy is a struggle among diverging interests, not just scientific interpretations of climate change. Yet, even though the results of scientific research cannot give direct access to the core of the problem, reducing the whole phenomenon to an ideological struggle is just as problematic as blind faith in normative nature. Purely objective knowledge of climate change is a problematic notion, but clearly there are human practices that can be linked to perceived changes in the climate. Inferences can be made about their future consequences; their reliability can be questioned, but they cannot be ignored. Due skepticism about scientific proof cannot refute the fact that scientific models about climate change are based on traditions of science that have developed in interaction with natural elements; meteorology, for instance, has long practical roots in history. Katherine Hayles (1995, 56) put it eloquently: ‘‘A science understood to

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flow from historically specific interactions implies that we know the world because we are involved with it and because it impacts upon us.’’ In addition, the changing states of climate, influenced by natural and cultural factors, constantly reshuΔe the deck and force us to rethink the entire problem. Nature may be mute in the sense that it is always mediated by human reflection, but this does not warrant excluding its active role in the way environmental problems unfold. The dilemma of the climate debate goes deeper than the problems posed by theories of science or epistemology. Regardless of the status the natural sciences are given in the debate, the object of their study is neither culture nor nature. Climate debate takes place in a world in which human action has participated in the existing climate dynamics for a long time. Even though emissions of greenhouse gases have indisputably multiplied since the Industrial Revolution, intense deforestation, drying of swamps, and the activities of ancient empires like Rome have created significant emissions. It is, of course, disputable whether these emissions can be compared in any way to the consequences of intensive use of fossil fuels. But the loss of potential carbon sinks has been passed on to successive generations as some areas have su√ered erosion or the reach of human habitation has spread. Neither should we forget the heritage of technological, political, and economic developments—the Industrial Revolution did not appear out of nowhere. We now return to the theme of history.

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN ACTION

Whether the term second nature is understood as the degree of human transformation of first nature or equated with culture as an independent realm of existence, there’s one significant problem. Neither of these views pays attention to the shared history of cultures and nature. Climate change cannot be adequately understood as an artifact or a neutral situation interpreted through di√erent standpoints. Its historical nature must be understood. If the present state of the climate is seen purely as a human artifact, it raises the impossible dilemma of pinpointing the moment of transition from natural to human-made climate. If the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change is resisted

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on the basis of the naturalness of change, the whole history of human action disappears into a void. Instead of sticking with old conceptual distinctions, the present state of the climate should be seen as a product of a process. Just as Cicero realized that the changes wrought by the Romans had become part and parcel of the environments within the empire, it should be seen that the present states of the climate are a part of our environment, whether we like it or not. What should be done about them is another matter altogether. The processual view reveals grave problems in the current climate debate. The problems go beyond the philosophical complexities of the concepts of nature and culture. I try to clarify these problems by examining two main strategies of action that have been proposed as a reaction to climate change: adaptation and limitation. Fierce contest over these strategies has been an important feature of the climate debate. Representatives of environmental movements have mainly supported the limitation of emissions, the object of which is to slow down or curb climate change. They have mostly rejected the idea of adaptation to the coming changes, as it seems to involve a surrender to the problem. The fiercest opponents to any limitations of emissions have often favored the adaptation strategy, saying, for example, that it is more cost-e≈cient than expensive limitation measures.Ω Adaptation has thus far mostly been interpreted as economic adaptation to the e√ects of climate change, centering on future problems of production. Other forms of adaptation have been neglected: social adaptation that makes communities less vulnerable to crises and divides the burden more equally, and improving the possibilities of ecological adaptation of endangered ecosystems. The basic conceptualizations of climate change are at work again: Should we combat the Promethean creation, or adjust our practices in the midst of natural and inevitable changes? Any common agreement seems to be impossible. But it is truly impossible only if we cannot step out of the boundaries of the present debate and the present forms of climate policy. To understand the dilemma of the two strategies, let us reenact the play about the history of the climate, but this time with a new script. Now the play shows a stage on which protagonists and various pieces of the set are equally active, reacting to each other’s moves.

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‘‘THE CONSTANT TURMOIL’’

Act 1: The Dancing Protagonists

In this play, being human is not a prerequisite for being a protagonist. The mythical history of the climate merges with the entrance of humankind. There is no need for a curtain, as natural elements and humans alike can be actors. Each and every ecosystem has its main protagonists, reacting/adapting to the dance on the stage. For a long time, human practices engage as participants in these dances. This is the music of discords and harmonies that sets the tone for the following acts. Act 2: Recurring Discords

Throughout this long historical dance sudden changes take place, regardless of the actions of the protagonists. Periods of discord and harmony vary, and as always, some actors will have to step o√ the stage. Ecosystems break down and transform, and organisms die o√ or migrate. Human communities either survive the challenge or disappear, leaving strange ruins for posterity. The dancers try to catch up with the changes, protagonists, and pieces of the set alike. Act 3: Looking for Harmonic Flows

This act focuses on the actions of the protagonists, as they attempt to adapt to the changes in the flow of music and dance. As always in the history of the world, adaptation to changes remains a necessity, whether the human protagonists participated in the changes or not. As we recall from the previous play, ‘‘normality’’ of the climate can be understood only in relation to how biological systems have adapted to it. Human protagonists are no di√erent from other organisms, in the sense that they also meet the pressures to adapt. However, their methods of adaptation di√er significantly from other protagonists’. Still, both human cultures and other biological systems strive for adaptation: if the climate changes, one has to change agricultural and building practices to suit the new environment, die, or migrate to pastures that remain (or turn) green.

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Act 4: Crescendo, or, The Dark Satanic Mills

At some point in the play, the actions of the human protagonists change radically. The steps and turns of their dance influence the overall whirl much more than before. A marked di√erence can be seen in the whirl on the stage. Such changes have happened before, but this time human protagonists are visibly actors in bringing them about, not only seeking to adapt. Adaptation to the changes may still be as hard as in the mythical changes of Act 2. It is up to the spectators, the human protagonists, and the (retrospective) playwrights whether this period is seen as a genuine turning point in world history. But one thing is clear: this turmoil cannot be understood if it is cut o√ from its history. Act 5: Future Horizons

While the turmoil of changes and haphazard adaptation takes place, the human protagonists get into a protracted disagreement about the future. They claim to have recognized their own actions or the actions of their colleagues, which have a√ected the changes around them, and focus their attention on them. Meanwhile, the faceless whirling on the stage goes on. It will go on regardless of what the protagonists do, as the e√ects wrought by human actors cannot be neatly di√erentiated from the others. The whole set is alive. This is a di≈cult moment in the climate debate. Even if the present direction of climate change could be reversed at least partially, some changes will take place. The long history of human action, ‘‘the carbon memory’’ of the climate, will not disappear, even if the majority of the present gaseous emissions were to be cut. The resulting new stages of the climate will still require adaptation, even if something is done about the emissions. So: Should the process of climate change be stalled, and even reversed, or should the human protagonists prepare for the inevitable changes? The mere presence of human e√ects on the climate and perceived changes do not give clear answers to this question. The inevitable flux of the climate that Philip Stott pointed out cannot be ignored, although his conclusions can be challenged. Even though thus far the strategies of limitation and adaptation have been seen as alternatives that rule each other out, this is not necessarily the case. Limitation may be a

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safeguard against some of the worst changes, but only if somewhat bolder policies can be put into action. This in turn could make the hard task of adaptation a bit easier. Michael Glantz wrote some two decades ago that adaptation and limitation strategies are both eventually useful, as they help societies reach other important environmental goals and prepare for other crises. In his recent book he restated this valuable insight (Glantz 1996). In any case, it must be understood that the present state of climate has been passed on by a long history, just as the future possibilities depend on the present state. The State of Nature of the climate is an empty abstraction with no point of reference in the world today. I do not mean that people should not be concerned about the e√ects of climate change on various human communities, arctic ecosystems, coral reefs, and so on. We can be sure that nobody can even start to predict all of the changes that the future has in store, so complex are the processes in question. It is possible that the present developments will result in the emergence of processes such as the thawing of permafrost that will escalate climate change and warming very rapidly. On the other hand, rapid cooling of local climates may be possible due to changes in sea currents. Nobody in Scandinavia would appreciate the e√ects of the disappearance of the Gulf Stream, with the exception of some arctic species. As mutually diverging as these scenarios are, they do not dictate an either/or decision about the two alternative strategies. The significance of the new play is that mere awareness of the phenomenon of climate change does not dictate policy. The play suggests that political actions that aim to react to climate change should not be based on simplistic conceptual distinctions unrelated to the history of the climate. They should be based on the reality of today, which is the ground from which future possibilities emerge. The future is always based on the history of cultural and natural actions that precede us. These actions have been objectified in the present as states of the climate, ecosystems, artifacts such as technological infrastructures, political and economic institutions—and ways to look at the world. Nature as a norm cannot help here, because it can be meaningfully defined only as forever changing. The change itself can be valued, provided the valuation can be related to the relationships between the climate and social and biological systems. It is not reasonable to see the present state of the climate merely as a human artifact. In the long

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dance on the stage of history, human cultures have for centuries, even millennia, caused greenhouse gas emissions or eradicated potential carbon sinks and thus participated in climate dynamics, however minute that participation has been. This is true even if the emissions have escalated in the past couple of centuries. Participation is the key word here. Human and natural actors have formed a common historical process in which they cannot be neatly di√erentiated. Social and biological adaptation processes mean that the word ‘‘historical’’ must be taken seriously. It means that the present stage can never be understood without the previous stages and could not exist without these. This history must not be forgotten, even if it makes it very hard to form a unified picture of this particular environmental problem.

SECOND NATURE AS NATURE-CULTURE HISTORICALITY

Let us exercise this renewed historical awareness by returning to Cicero’s Roman landscape. Cicero saw his contemporaries changing the flow of rivers and building aqueducts to satisfy the need for irrigation. You do not have need for irrigation without farming, and you do not have farming without countless mouths to feed. Thus, the environmental changes of the Roman agricultural practices cannot be understood outside the context in which the Roman Empire was emerging. In the tradition of environmental history, many writers have been trying to capture such contexts of various cultures and explain their history on the basis of their relation to the environment. They often share the unvoiced basic assumptions I mentioned in the introduction: there is a natural environment, which the ascendant culture increasingly changes, resulting in environmental destruction or degradation. This in turn is responsible for the demise of the culture in question. The conclusion is often that human cultures in their essence destroy nature. From Cicero’s viewpoint, the situation is much more complex and alive. The Roman agricultural practices not only utilized natural resources, but the whole agriculture shaped the world into an environment that could support its practices. This is the essential feature of any long-lasting human practice. There is simply no practice that can survive within the dynamics of natural elements without altering them to some degree.

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Agriculture in Cicero’s Rome was closely tied to the City, namely Rome, the only real megalopolis of its age. The environmental e√ects of Roman cities have been often described. Mere minting of coins and using lead-coated pipes resulted in significant pollution that can even now be detected in arctic glaciers, Scandinavian lake sediments, and the bones of the ancient Romans. For instance, evidence from the glaciers of Greenland shows that lead emissions from Roman industries equaled those of our early industrial age (Hong 1994). The extravagant gladiator shows were partly responsible for the disappearance of large predators from northern Africa. The other side of the Roman coin was the villas, the small farms that were allocated evenly according to a geometric pattern. In addition to the various ‘‘small Romes’’ that were built around the Empire, the villas were the main tools of Roman colonization. For the Romans, colonization was a dual process: the far reaches of the Empire were production areas that fed its centers; at the same time, the villas helped to spread one formal model of society to many di√erent environments. They e√ectively realized the Stoic dream of a hierarchic order of second nature within first nature. With the violent invasions of the legions, the Roman ideals were spread out into the world. The history of Roman colonization is closely linked to the history of social domination. Aristocrats leased their remote holdings to settlers (coloni), e√ectively chaining them to the soil. Joseph Vogt (1993, 21–23) has noted that the advent of the colonial lords and the demise of free peasantry actually impeded the production of food. Just before Cicero’s time, the focus of the Roman food economy seems to have switched from wheat growing in the Italian peninsula to the fringes of the Empire, especially Egypt, Iberia, and northern Africa. Cicero’s second nature was crafted to suit the needs of olive trees and vineyards. The emerging chasm of power between the center and the periphery was accompanied by di√erences in practices and the resulting environmental e√ects. I propose that this constellation of power might o√er us a loose analogy with which we can perhaps understand the present climate dilemma a bit better. The spreading of intensive agricultural practices to a large area and diverse environments proved to have a wide variety of outcomes, marks of which we can still see today. In some areas, the villas would participate in creating novel landscapes. The wide open sky and the golden

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wheat fields, olive orchards, and vineyards—for the Roman farmer family this was the nexus of their relationship with nature, their lifeworld, a veritable image of their afterworld. Nobody traveling around the Mediterranean can miss the echoes of this world, as they are still around, as much as the ruins and the philosophies of Cicero. This applies even to the environments people have come to regard as natural. Then again, there are the marks of erosion and environmental degradation in the grain silos of the Empire. Some of those are equally deemed natural, like the huge North African deserts. As human activity has such deep roots in the history of the world, a clear distinction between cultural and natural elements is simply not possible. I believe that this applies as much to the Roman landscape as it does to our present climate situation. This does not mean that we cannot make value judgments about human action and its relation to nature; these judgments have been made for millennia without the help of modern philosophy. The judgments just have to be grounded on this historical soil. I try to shed light on this by referring to an (intentionally) banal question that was asked of me once: If the whole human race went extinct, wouldn’t nature take over and retake areas claimed by culture? Wouldn’t the state of the climate recuperate eventually? If we take the idea about the common history of culture and nature seriously, the answer is clearly no. The present hybrid states of nature and culture are the memory of this world; they convey environmentally graven images of long-gone human practices and long-gone natural systems. Whatever will happen in the future, this memory will inevitably influence it by opening up some paths of development and closing down others. A return to the natural state of climate is an absolute impossibility.∞≠ History is to some extent always linked to irreversibility. This is not a new idea. Let us continue our walk down Memory Lane and listen to the whispers of another thinker, Karl Marx. According to Marx, every stage of societies, every historical situation, should be seen as the historical inheritance of previous stages of historical development. The inheritance forms the framework of possibilities for any informed political action; in Marx’s case, for revolutionary struggles. Marx was undeniably married to age-old philosophical myths: the stage theory of societal development and the idea of historical progress. For him a turn toward decentralized production and settlement would

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have been anathema. Ideas of progress are constructions as much as the technologies they propagate. What matters is whether people see them as necessary, that is, natural. This brings us to another classical meaning of second nature: reification (Verdinglichung). If a social construction is seen as an undeniable fact of life, as necessary, it becomes thing-like (Ding), a natural object in the eyes and minds of people. But regardless of Marx’s ideological baggage, we should let ourselves hear his whispers with a selective ear. The idea of historical inheritance is still invaluable to us.

TAKING ADAPTATION SERIOUSLY

It’s time for the actors of the climate play to gather backstage and discuss the lessons learned. The climate change debate has given rise to two main strategies: limitation (inhibition, reversal, and control) and adaptation. Even though many people rightly see that climate change is the problem of our age, a change of world-historical proportions, the phenomenon itself does not seem to dictate clear norms for political action. Nature did not make speeches at Kyoto and it will not do so at any subsequent conference. The whole problem is so complex that any attempt to define clear norms will meet insurmountable di≈culties. Instead of clear norms, we have a truly binary situation in which the justifications that are voiced in support of policy are closely linked to the ways that the relationships of culture(s) and nature(s) are understood. Neither of the strategies can be irrefutably verified or denied by an appeal to nature. Any political scenario for the future will be determined by the present states of the climate, human practices that now influence climate dynamics, and the current state of the world’s ecosystems. It is one thing to say that ‘‘we’’ must limit the emissions of greenhouse gases by 80 to 90 percent and another thing to do it. Politically and economically it does not seem possible, at least in the present political constellations of climate policy. Sudden reduction may not even be technically possible, as the inertia of existing practices and technological artifacts inhibits sudden changes. The term ‘‘possible’’ is hardly neutral, however. In political rhetoric, these factors are usually called ‘‘realities.’’ One must not confuse the

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di√erent kinds of realities that abound in the climate debate, as some are just political slogans in disguise. The present forms of climate policy are not the only possible ones. The political possibilities and impossibilities of climatic realpolitik have been and are being criticized, especially when the nation-state-led negotiations seem to have reached an impasse. Swift political changes have happened before, and new forms of politics have emerged. There is no reason to think this could not happen again. Some practices may be changed rapidly, if there is su≈cient political will to e√ect the change. In addition to will, the change requires new political actors to gain enough political power to bring their case to the table. The plight of climate change shifts from the halls of the climate negotiations closer to the everyday problem of division of power. Accepting the adaptation strategy does not necessarily mean surrendering to the problem; the strategy should just be redefined in relation to the political nature of the climate dilemma. For some people, the appeal to adaptation raises understandable concern. In the midst of anticipated changes, what will be the chances of adaptation for a Bangladeshi peasant whose fields are in danger of flooding? What about the residents of Nauru, the island that may yet share the fate of the mythical Atlantis? Then there are the issues of some coral reefs and arctic ecosystems. These are all legitimate concerns, but they signify only that the whole issue of adaptation must be redefined. It has been rightly noted that strong equality issues are linked to the strategy of limitation. This holds true also for adaptation, as the political, economic, and social resources for adaptation di√er vastly between di√erent groups of people. If we see adaptation as a question of forms of production, for example, agriculture, we should also ask who possess the resources and possibilities to change their practices in the face of sudden changes. In situations where land ownership is unequally distributed, this may prove extremely hard, and thus land virtually becomes a climate issue. Mobility is another important factor. Adaptation to dramatic changes, such as the possible disappearance of the Gulf Stream, will most likely require migration in addition to changing forms of production and habitation. Social and ecological adaptation must be brought to the forefront of climate policy. What is at stake here is the vulnerability of societies in the face of unexpected changes. What can be done to decrease vulnerability?

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An example from Central America suggests that a lot can be done. After the October 1998 Hurricane Mitch, the second-largest city in Honduras, San Pedro Sula, su√ered much less damage than the capital due to precautionary measures that were adopted after a hurricane disaster in 1974 (Haila 1999b). Changing building practices to avoid excessive concentrations of buildings, creating vegetation zones as barriers against floods, and other similar measures will become increasingly important. Depending on the political situation, this may require the emergence of new political agents to break the entrenched practices.∞∞ Regardless of any actions, changes will inevitably take place. In the face of this we would be remiss in our moral responsibilities if we forgot the importance of adaptation, even though in the present political climate it may create strange bedfellows. (Which actually may prove to be the best argument for adaptation! New alliances can help create fractures in the regimes that are blocking much-needed policy changes.) For the environmental movements, this means a change not only in thought and rhetoric, but also in self-image. True enough, the image of activists blockading conference centers, surrounding them with sandbag barriers, and chaining themselves to coal power plants is very heroic, and it has been a good tool for political mobilization. It may be harder to invoke such heroic images and convincing slogans in defense of adaptation. Politically, the adaptation issue is much more complex and di≈cult than limitation. The situation of the Bangladeshi peasants cannot be solved by a Kyoto convention; it is related to the division of land, the right of selfdetermination—in short, to the issues of equality and solidarity. Without empowerment of the people in the vulnerable areas, any future adaptation may very well prove impossible. This does not mean just ‘‘cheering up’’ and taking on the burden of politics, as the possibilities of doing that may be limited. This is again a question of creating new resources. A new form of political or social organization may also be a valuable resource. In fact, a shift in climate policy is required for both the limitation and the adaptation strategies, as the needs for decreasing vulnerability are as unevenly spread as are the needs/responsibilities for emission limitation. But I propose that the limitation strategy is much easier to limit (no pun intended) to the halls of governmental negotiations and emission haggling. Within the limitation debate there have been attempts to break apart the constellation of political actors. The discussion on

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North-South inequality is a good example of this. But I propose that a fundamental problem is attached to the ‘‘language of Carbon.’’ A global policy of limitation is simply not possible without abstracting the emissions and dividing them into somewhat arbitrary units. In these units, diverse agents are necessarily lumped together. Only those actors that are large enough to measure in the emission calculations have visibility. Political significance, even the chance of gaining political agency at all, is determined by the nature of climate policy. New forms of adaptation could make visible those who are now invisible. Stubborn refusal of the adaptation strategies does not acknowledge the everyday situation of the powerless multitude who are forced to live under the threat of climatic changes. The customary rhetoric of ‘‘our common Earth’’ and ‘‘our common responsibility’’ to stop the Promethean climate change is in that sense politically blind—even though at the same time those images may address the various problems associated with the limitation strategy. The historical burden of guilt is different for di√erent groups of people. But those who will su√er most do not often have a vote, or even a voice. The present focus of the climate policy on just the emissions neatly sidesteps the issues of equality and division of power. At least for now they have petrified into an opposition between the North and the South, in which only large actors are visible, not those who will be most a√ected by the changes. In governmental negotiations it is easy to forget that the North and the South as political terms do not denote geographic locations. ‘‘The people of the South’’ may be found all over the globe, not just in southern countries: as illegal immigrants, residents of reservations, in the economic and political peripheries of the North. The same applies to the South, where the aΔuent districts of countless megacities are full of northerners. If we continue to speak just the language of the Carbon, it is very hard to recognize, let alone reach these very real lifeworlds under threat.

CAN THE NATURE-CULTURE DISTINCTION EVER BE DRAWN?

The conceptual distinction between culture and nature not only involves philosophical problems, but it also veils the complexity of many environmental problems. With this distinction the historical nature of those problems is obscured, as either nature or culture is ignored as an

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actor. As has been noted, this tendency is especially strong in studies of environmental history. Often, the basic assumption of the inherent destructiveness of human action is at work. Some historical examples, such as the disappearance of large mammals from North America, have become almost models of explanation. It seems that the appeal of such thinking is held up by the strong nature-culture dualism. Dualistic constellations discourage making connections between the poles and support simplistic linear explanations. The cause for some phenomena is sought ‘‘purely’’ from one end of the dichotomy. This makes it hard to notice the actual interplay between human and natural elements. The environment tends to become either a passive background for human action or an impersonal overbearing Force of Nature. The demise of the Norse colonies in Greenland around a.d. 1475– 1500 is a good example of the latter perspective. The story of Greenland is often used to illuminate the irresistible powers of Nature. Steven Milloy wrote in his USA Today article ‘‘Don’t Worry: Climate Changes Naturally,’’ ‘‘The Vikings farmed Greenland about a thousand years ago. Then the climate cooled. Today, Greenland is a frozen wasteland’’ (7 July 2001, EUSAToday.com). What he neglects to mention is the success of the Thule Inuit cultures before and after the demise of the Norse colonies, and that the colonies managed to survive and prosper for two whole centuries after the beginning of cooling. By taking an alternative view of the story we get a very di√erent lesson that emphasizes the practical relationships of human communities to their environment and the role of adaptation. In his article ‘‘Managing for Extinction in Norse Greenland,’’ Thomas H. McGovern (1994, 141) suggests that the main reason for the destruction of the colonies was not the cooling of climate, but the social rigidity of the colonizers that prevented them from adopting new sources of livelihood. According to McGovern, the Norse colonies in Greenland had always struggled at the limits of animal stock-raising techniques, but stock was still their prime source of food, as they couldn’t create a functioning grain economy due to the lack of arable land (134–35). Fishing and hunting were also important sources of livelihood, but mostly for the smallholders whose possibilities for raising animal stock were limited (137).∞≤ After the beginning of the Little Ice Age (a.d. 1250–1850), stock raising became increasingly di≈cult, but ironically the colonial society committed to it even more, as this kept up the

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superiority of the central settlements (144). In short, the reason for the demise of the colonies was not the changing climate, but ‘‘the management for extinction.’’ The colonists were not able to make use of many natural resources, because they would not adopt the alien Inuit technologies available (evidence of centuries of cultural contact is clear), and they lacked the social mobility to adapt to the change in fish stocks due to changing sea currents. The social rigidity resulted in paralysis in the face of grave environmental changes. The Forces of Nature aren’t just objective conditions with predetermined outcomes. They are realized only in the interplay of many kinds of actors. The established view of the nature-culture dichotomy also makes it downright impossible to recognize human activities that enrich the environment, for instance, agricultural practices that sustain diverse animal and plant populations. There will not be sustainable technologies in any sense of the word, as every ounce of resources extracted amounts to destruction. This is not fair to the Roman farmer tilling his olive orchard, sharing meals with friends, and harvesting his rich wheat crop. The birds feeding on the rich insect life in the garden would not agree either. The view fits better the plundering legions and the intensive farming on the fringes of the Empire, but it is not a working generalization. We should take more seriously the idea of the common dynamic of natural and cultural elements. Every gardener knows that maintaining the fertility of the soil requires a lot of work. The garden does not reside in an artificial realm, it is a meeting point of cultural and natural elements. The skills, the tools, even the seed and the soil are objectifications of a long history of agricultural practices. The seasonal change, the quality of the soil, and many other actors may provide relatively stable conditions for gardening for a while, but there are always exceptional years. Eventually, some conditions will change permanently: the soil may become poorer, and it may be impossible to find a single cause for it. This creates a need for change. The present climate change has brought us to a similar situation. A historically inherited tumbleweed of natural and cultural elements poses problems for many present practices. Any path of development will have to cope with changes, even though to some extent we may influence the space of future alternatives by swift action now. The stage is set, but it is still unclear which of the actors will be allowed to continue in the next act.

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NOTES

Even though it seems that Cicero was largely ignorant of the detrimental environmental impacts of the Roman Empire, or ignored them due to his generalized viewpoint. His emphasis is on the ‘‘world-building’’ activities of humans and the assumed suitability of the natural world for them. 2 Of course, it would be a mistake to attribute political errors only to ‘‘bad ideas’’ or ‘‘values.’’ 3 For example, in situations where the dynamics of the problem are simple enough to merit the division between human action and nature disturbed by it. A lake polluted by mercury would be a good example. Another is the destruction of an ecosystem, virtually uninhabited by humans, that won’t recover, such as a rainforest. 4 Often, a lot of the human history is deemed irrelevant for the storyline. 5 The ‘‘natural’’ state of the climate is a dominant source of arguments in the climate debate, even though the underlying concern is about the future of humanity—or usually of some groups of humans or of the economy. 6 ‘‘I increasingly felt like Heraclitus himself, observing the folly of the Ephesians from his hermit-home high in the mountains’’ (Stott 1998, 1). 7 Stott made a much stronger rebuttal of the Kyoto convention in his commentary in the London Times on 19 July 2001. Even though he still based his argument on the complexity of climate phenomena, he now called the convention an error on scientific and economic grounds. Any attempt to limit emissions is in his mind a waste of money and resources that could be used for more valuable projects. He argues that the Kyoto convention is unable to meet the goals it is set up to accomplish—as if hordes of environmentalists had not made this argument many times before. One can see Stott moving from constructive criticism of climate policy to shallow political rhetoric: ‘‘Sadly, for Europe, Kyoto has become gesture politics; for many greens it is simply another chance to shame the evil American Empire.’’ Philip Stott, ‘‘Let’s Clear the Air over Kyoto: It’s Simply Daft Economics and Dubious Science,’’ comment, The Times (London), 19 July 2001. 8 Of course, there are those who steadfastly deny any human influence on the climate. 9 As the current state of the climate negotiations shows, the most favored strategy has been inaction. 10 Again, this is particularly true of complex phenomena like the cli1

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mate. Climate cannot recover in this way, but a mercury-poisoned lake may. ‘‘Natural state’’ or any such approximation is a good enough term on a restricted scale. 11 Adaptation will be as important to ecosystems threatened by the changes. In many areas, the ecosystems are so fragmented that adaptation or migration may be impossible. As well as the dilemma of the endangered communities this is a complex political question; most of all, it reflects very well the idea of the shared history of culture and nature. Establishing routes of migration and ‘‘reconstructing’’ damaged ecosystems would require as powerful human intervention as did the former fragmentation and loss of biodiversity. The resulting adaptation to new climatic conditions would be a prime example of the meaning of second nature proposed in this essay. ‘‘Saving nature’’ cannot mean leaving it alone. 12 According to McGovern (1994), archaeological evidence suggests that the forms of social domination in the colonies diverted much of the hunted caribou and seal meat to the centers of the Norse elite for consumption and trade. Thus, the smallholders would face the adaptation problems first.

Participative Thinking ‘‘Seeing the Face’’ and ‘‘Hearing the Voice’’ of Nature

John Shotter

within which the explorations conducted in essays in this volume should take place, Yrjö Haila posed two general questions: First, what does it mean for us humans to learn from nature? And second, in what ways is nature present in human cultural existence, and what does this teach us? In this essay, I explore these questions in both a negative and a positive way. In other words, I explore both what it is that prevents us from learning what nature might have to teach us, and also, in line with Haila’s overall goal, what is involved in entering into a conversation with nature so that we can, so to speak, come to hear its voice and to see its face, thus to make sense of what it has to teach us. In line with Chuck Dyke’s reference to the claim made by Goethe’s Faust—which, incidentally, also appears in the quotation I cite from Wittgenstein (1980) below—that it was not the word but the act, the deed, from which our understanding of things began, I also explore what it is to understand the ‘‘inner life,’’ the ‘‘spirit’’ of Others, from our participating in a joint life with them. This joint life is such that, in Dyke’s words, ‘‘it lives with us and we with it: in, around, and through each other in a helter-skelter of interactivities of varying profit to us all.’’ As I see it, it is our immediate, spontaneous, living responses to the others and othernesses in our surrounding circumstances that have been completely discounted and ignored as unimportant in our current, standard forms of rationality. Turning away from active forms of dynamic, participatory understanding—what I call relationally responsive forms of understanding—has led us to focus all our attention on attaining merely a passive, uninvolved, referential-representational kind of understanding. And in seeking such a passive, representational understandIN ESTABLISHING THE OVERALL LANDSCAPE

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ing, rather than seeking to do justice to the othernesses around us and to let them teach us about themselves in their own terms, we have sought mastery over them, and merely to represent them accurately to ourselves in our rather than in their terms. Instead, I explore a view of communication, of language, as an extension of our spontaneously expressive-responsive bodily activity, a view that orients us away from language as consisting primarily in terms of words and word forms—forms that can be iterated identically over and over again—and more toward language as an elaboration and refinement of our expressive gestures, both mimetic and indicative. Wittgenstein (1953, no. 568) captures this aspect of our expressions in his remark, ‘‘Meaning is a physiognomy.’’ For, as we will find, it is only in our ongoing, dynamic, responsive, living relations to the expressions of the others and othernesses around us that a sense of their inner lives can become present to us in our human world. To make such a change as this, though, is to treat our surroundings, the earth, rather than as a dead mechanism, as an intelligent, living being. It is, as Carolyn Merchant (1980) points out, to return to views similar to those of certain ancient Greek philosophers or, as Levy-Bruhl (1926) suggests, to the animistic or participatory attitudes of so-called primitive peoples. In this respect, it is Merleau-Ponty (1962, ix) who best expresses the attitude I adopt: ‘‘To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematism is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.’’ In thinking of nature speaking to us as, to an extent, all living things ‘‘speak’’ to us, I do not, however, go so far as to claim that the earth is in fact a nurturing mother, or that our surroundings are in fact inhabited by spirits and ghosts. But I do claim that the same strands of sixteenthand seventeenth-century thought that turned us away from thinking of our earth as alive, and from thinking of life as something uniquely special and as yet not well understood, have also led us to ignore important events to do with our own bodies and their responsive reactions to events occurring around us. As professional academic experts, trained (ideally!) to live in worlds of orderly and systematic theory, we have been trained to ignore the dirty, messy, unique world of particular concrete events and living bodies, the worlds of ordinary everyday life. It is this,

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now strange(!) world of bodily expressions, of gestural meanings, and of our spontaneously responsive bodily relations with our surroundings that has become invisible to us and to which, once again, we must learn to attend.

ON MAKING OURSELVES DEAF TO NATURE’S RESPONSES

How did we come to be so inattentive to our surroundings? Because, I think, we are heirs to a philosophical tradition with recent roots in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. As Kant (1970) described it in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, if we are to follow what is accounted as ‘‘the true path of a science’’ (17), then we must accept the belief that ‘‘reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, [thus] it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings. . . . Reason . . . must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything the teacher has to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated’’ (20). In other words, as Charles Taylor (1995) notes, our currently agreed way of doing science, indeed, all our modes of intellectual inquiry in the Western world, are deeply and extensively shaped by the inclinations and attitudes implicit in what he calls ‘‘the epistemology project.’’ Its e√ects shape ‘‘some of the most important moral and spiritual ideas of our civilization . . . [such that] to challenge them is sooner or later to run up against the force of this tradition, which stands with them in a complex relation of mutual support. Overcoming or criticizing these ideas involves coming to grips with epistemology’’ (8). What is this tradition? There are many strands to this tacit background to our intellectual lives, influencing what we account between us as properly constituted knowledge. One is that we must conduct all our scientific inquiries as self-conscious, rational subjects set over against a world of objects. Another is our willfulness, our urge toward mastery, the tendency to treat our own actions as primary and to ignore what just happens to us, events that we ourselves are subject to that come to us from our surroundings—our responses to nature. We think of such responses as being merely subjective and assign this sphere of human experience to

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the arts, to literature, to poetry or painting, or perhaps to the human sciences, to psychology, sociology, and linguistics. But this leaves unexamined all our own prejudices and biases, urges and compulsions, fixations and illusions, what we take for granted as unexceptional. Indeed, we can see just these attitudes represented in the passage from Kant quoted earlier. But it was Descartes who set the whole scene for the version of rational inquiry that motivated Kant’s remarks. How? In his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1637, Descartes (1968) set out a characterization of our ‘‘external world,’’ and a method for thinking about its nature, that has shaped our thought about ourselves, our surroundings, and the relations between the two ever since. By the use of his methods, as he put it, ‘‘there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it’’ (41). Indeed, such a method of reasoning, in which we must ‘‘borrow all the best from geometric analysis and algebra’’ (42), could, he suggested, lead us to the discovery of God’s established laws, ‘‘thereby mak[ing] ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature’’ (78). Many such Cartesian influences are still at work in our sciences. And as a ‘‘form-shaping ideology’’ (Bakhtin 1984, 83), these assumptions still, it seems to me, selectively determine both our aims and the phenomena to which we attend in many of our academic disciplines. Thus —perhaps surprisingly, given its success in many other of our spheres of inquiry and endeavor—for our purposes here, of entering into an essentially communicative relation to nature, thus to ‘‘see its face’’ and ‘‘hear its voice,’’ I want to reject this whole approach. For, in conducting ourselves in a one-way, mechanical, input-output, cause-and-e√ect manner, we eliminate from rational consideration the two-way, dialogically structured, spontaneously responsive activities required for such communicative relations to be possible. They become, so to speak, rationally invisible to us. As I have already noted, in leading us to ignore our immediate, spontaneous, living responses to the othernesses in our surrounding circumstances, this approach prevents us from letting them teach us about themselves in their own terms. Refusing to allow ourselves to be led by nature in any way, we restrict ourselves to acting only in terms of our own wants, desires, or reasons. We ignore an important source of knowledge: our spontaneous responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. In other words, the

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form-shaping ideology implicitly at work in such a one-way style of interaction with our surroundings is, as Bakhtin (1984) terms it, one of a monological kind. In transforming the world into a representation arrived at as a result of deductive reasoning, we ‘‘inevitably transform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction’’ (83). We make ourselves ‘‘deaf to the other’s response’’ (293).

ON BEING BODILY RESPONSIVE TO OUR SURROUNDINGS

I want to explore how our disciplinary lives might change if we were to adopt a very di√erent form-shaping ideology in certain of our inquiries, especially in those involving our living relations to our natural surroundings. What if, rather than as Descartes’s self-centered and selfcontrolled, subjective minds, standing (if that is the right word to apply to such disembodied entities) over against a voiceless, objective world, we begin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger, ongoing, predominantly living whole? Then, as merely participant parts within such a whole, rather than seeking solely to be masters and possessors of it, we might also find ourselves subjected as respondents to its requirements as much as, if not more than, we can subject it to ours. If that were so, while still perhaps seeking mastery of some of its aspects—seeking to understand how we might use them as a means to our own ends—we would also need to seek another, quite di√erent kind of understanding. We would need to understand its expressions, respond to its calls, and so on. For, as it is an other or otherness to which we must, unavoidably, respond, we would need to develop forms of response in which we can collaborate or participate with it in achieving our goals. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this shift, from focusing our attention on representations of our surroundings, to focusing on our immediate, spontaneous, bodily responses to them. It is in this latter context that Wittgenstein’s remark—that meaning is a physiognomy—should be understood. He means that there is an aspect of our utterances, of our words, that makes them like gestures, like facial expressions, like smiles or frowns, like exclamations of delight or outbursts of dismay, which touch or move the others around us in an immediate way. So, although in one sense, something is said in the

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repetition of a word-form used, in our unique saying of it, in our responsive bodying of it out into the world around us, we are spontaneously expressing something of our unique relation to those surroundings. The same can be said of all the events around us that move us, that touch or strike us. They, too, can be expressive in the same way! This means that we should take seriously our living, spontaneous responsiveness to the expressions of others and the othernesses around us, as a central aspect of us as living in a communicative relation with our surroundings, for at least these two reasons: they provide us with orientation and, even more important, with an access to novelty, that is, the possibility of uniquely new beginnings. I treat both of these in turn.

Orientation

The quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explanations; we seek surefire ways to intervene in ongoing activities causally, that is, in a one-way, mechanical cause-and-e√ect fashion, to influence their outcome in predictable ways. The desire to understand, however— as a matter of understanding how, practically to respond to the expressive, physiognomic aspects of our surroundings—is much harder to describe. It is not a matter of something happening to us intellectually, to do with learning a fact, some information, or a skill. Wittgenstein (1953) tries to explicate it in practical terms. For him, in his kind of philosophy, ‘‘a philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’ ’’ (no. 123). In other words, the kind of understanding he seeks shows, manifests, or displays itself in our everyday practical activities. On being shown, for instance, how to follow a cooking recipe, we cook a good meal; on being shown how to execute a piece of carpentry, we make a useful piece of furniture; after a music lesson, we play a piece of music well; on having read a book, we go on to write an insightful book chapter; and so on. In all such instances as these, as Wittgenstein puts it, we are able to justify our understanding to the others around us by in fact being able to ‘‘go on’’ with our activities in an intelligent, and intelligible, way (see, e.g., no. 154). Rather than any precise factual information, what we have gained in such an orientational understanding is a sense of where and how we are ‘‘placed’’ in relation to the others around us within the landscape of possibilities in which we are all acting.

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In being obsessed in our intellectual lives only with objectivity, with being only outside observers of repetitive forms or patterns, we have ignored unique, once-o√, novel events that have a fleeting existence only in our living relations with our surroundings, the transitory events in which we gain such orientational understandings. Not only have we dismissed their occurrence, thinking of such events as inessential variations in hidden, underlying, ideal forms. But we have also ignored the ‘‘inner sense’’ we can gain from their dynamic structure, the shaped and vectored sense of the openings they o√er us for our practical movements in relation to them. Yet, if we were to ignore the orientational understandings we gain in relation to events in our practical lives— while driving, say, or even while walking along a crowded street—we would soon end in a mess. Intellectually, we have persisted in acting as if we are mere spectators of a world ‘‘over there,’’ on which we act only in one-way manipulative activities, rather than as participants in a world around us ‘‘here,’’ to which we must spontaneously and responsively relate if we are to be answerable to its calls upon us.

Novelty

Fleeting though the world’s calls may be, we cannot not be responsive to them. And just as in our practical—or orientational—understanding, questions posed to us are expressed in our answers to them, so are our relationally responsive understandings of other events occurring around us. They, too, are manifested in the responses we give to them. But to the extent that such events are uniquely related to the local, particular, and timely circumstances of their occurrence (Toulmin 2001), they are in some way expressive of them. And in our responsive reactions to them, we have a chance of understanding that fact. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1980, 31) notes, ‘‘The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language—I want to say—is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [Goethe].’’ By the word ‘‘primitive’’ here, he does not mean something way back in history or something simple, but something present to us now, and, as we shall see, something in fact very complex. ‘‘What is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?’’ he asks. ‘‘Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought’’ (1981, no. 541). In other words, Wittgenstein

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not only sees our ability to use and understand words as emerging from our natural inclination to be influenced by the gestures, the pantomimes, and indications of others, but also finds in our responses to them the beginnings of possible new ways of acting and thinking. Thus, rather than seeking value-neutral, theoretical knowledge of the structure of our shared surroundings as a passive object of thought, which we must then ‘‘interpret’’ as to what its meaning is for us in practical action, we face a di√erent task. Our task is, I suggest, to try to make the ‘‘being’’ of our surroundings, as an active, living agent in our lives, visibly present to us. If we can do that, then, just as we can keep returning to a major character in a novel who lives on within us long after we have finished reading the book and who, like a good friend, responds to our bewilderment and disquiet with o√ers of guidance and orientation, so we might be able to find the living being of our surroundings helpful to us in the same way. We will be able to hear what its voice calls on us to do, to see the expressions on its face to which we might feel responsive—the expressions of order and command, of invitation and encouragement, of reassurance and support, as well as of pained disapproval or celebratory a≈rmation, of bewilderment or disorientation, informing us of both our current relations to our circumstances (our situation) as well as of the value of our responses to them (the anticipated meaning of our actions). We can pursue all this with the overall aim of ultimately coming to know our way around inside its workings, to apply them to current problems before us in our consulting activities. In other words, just as we breathe a sigh of relief on hearing English spoken on returning from foreign parts—for we know our way around and feel a certain ease of movement in our own country denied us abroad—so we can seek a similar sense of being at home in the surroundings in question.

‘‘REAL PRESENCES’’ IN A DIALOGICALLY STRUCTURED, PARTICIPATORY WORLD

Central to the exploration into participatory approaches to inquiry that I want to conduct here, then, is a very special phenomenon that occurs only when we enter into mutually responsive, dialogically structured, living, embodied relations with the others and othernesses around us

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in our surroundings—when we cease to set ourselves, unresponsively, over against them and allow ourselves to enter into an interinvolvement with them. In the intricate orchestration of the interplay occurring between our own outgoing, responsive expressions toward those others (or othernesses) and their equally responsive incoming expressions toward us, a very special kind of felt understanding of this special phenomenon becomes available to us. The phenomenon is the creation within the responsive interplay of all the events and activities at work in the situation at any one moment of distinctive, dynamic forms—dynamic forms in which all of those involved in them are, so to speak, participant parts. We can find a model for such felt forms in, say, the 3-d spiral that we can see stretching out in depth before us as we scan over one of the 2-d random-dot stereograms that were popular a few years ago. We may move our two eyes over the page before us as we please, but the dots on the page are arranged in such a way that, if we can let our eyes work like a camera with automatic focus, as we look in one direction we can find a convergent focus at this distance, in another direction at that distance, in another at another distance, and so on, so that as we continue to scan over the page, we gain in the course of our looking the felt sense of a spiral form before us—a felt sense that is identical for everyone. But our embodied sense of it as a 3-d form does not emerge in an instant. Only in the unfolding temporal course of our visual involvement with the special patterning of the dots on the 2-d page does it emerge. And it is only there in our orchestrated interaction with the whole distribution of the dots on the page; it cannot be found hidden in just a selected few.∞ It is as if we must feel over what is before us with our eyes, place by place, just as we must in feeling something with our fingers. Rather than simply looking at it, it would be more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, for it is a guiding agent in my looking. As Merleau-Ponty (1973, 133) puts it, ‘‘The look . . . envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of preestablished harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory—I do not look at a chaos, but at things—so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command.’’ Indeed, if we are to see the spiral—and this is not easy to do—we must let it, the spiral to be, control our looking. And when we

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do see it, we locate it neither on the page nor in our heads, but in fact out in the space between us and the page, out in the world. For that is where, dynamically, the di√erent 2-d views from my two eyes cohere into a 3-d unity. But clearly, such forms, apart from their moment-bymoment emergence in the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, have no substantial existence in themselves. Yet, nonetheless, in being out there as distinctive othernesses in their own right, so that only if we address them appropriately, in a way answerable to their nature, do they answer to our inquiries, do such forms have the character of a ‘‘real presence’’ (Steiner 1989). But although they are invisible and exist only in a felt form, they are, nonetheless, somethings that are independent of our wishes and opinions, of our beliefs and desires; indeed, we cannot interpret them as we please. Thus, in this sense, they are clearly real. Although we often fail to acknowledge the fact, it is such somethings, such dynamic forms, that constitute the background landscape, so to speak, to all our exchanges with the other people around us, including our academic disciples. Understanding their nature a√ords us a sense, not only of who the others around us are, but also of where they are coming from and of how we are placed in relation to them. It is a kind of understanding we express by saying that we are ‘‘on a footing’’ with them, or that we understand how to ‘‘go on’’ with them. In short, more than merely a sense of another’s nature in itself, we come to a sense of their expressions in relation to a larger landscape of possibilities, in relation, in fact, to the ‘‘world’’ within which our relationship with them has its being. Someone who struggled with the di≈culties of giving expression to such dynamic forms was William James. In his famous ‘‘The Stream of Thought’’ chapter (James 1981), he discussed their nature in a way similar to the discussion above and pointed out a number of mistakes we tend to make—if our thoughts have in fact such a character—in trying to describe them. We fail, he suggested, to register ‘‘the transitive parts’’ of the stream and succumb to an ‘‘undue emphasizing of [its] substantive parts [i.e., its resting places]’’ (237); that is, we focus on static or stable forms in the flow and ignore its relationally responsive movement. Indeed, in so doing, we tend to confuse ‘‘the thoughts themselves . . . and the things of which they are aware. . . . [But, while] the things are discrete and discontinuous . . . their comings and goings and

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contrasts no more break the flow of thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie’’ (233; emphasis added). In other words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the stream of thought as the truly important parts, but they are, regrettably, ‘‘in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all’’ (246). James’s comments here about our vague feelings of tendency are of great importance. And, except that the momentary dynamic forms I want to focus on are not hidden in a stream of thought inside people’s heads, but are out in the larger flow of interactivity between them and their surroundings, I want to follow his promptings. Once we make this move, though, we should note that, vague though the feelings of tendency may be that emerge in our interactions with our surroundings, to the extent that all can adopt a similar way of responding to them, all—as in seeing the same 3-d spiral in a random-dot stereogram—can orient toward the same real presence. We can draw on Kuhn (1970) to reinforce this point. He discusses the relations between (1) Galileo’s seeing a ball rolling down a slope and up to the same height on the opposite slope, as related to the swing of a pendulum; (2) Huygens’s solving the problem of a pendulum’s center of oscillation by imagining it as being composed of point-pendula, like Galileo’s balls rolling down a slope and up the other side; and (3) Bernoulli’s use of these ‘‘ways of seeing’’ aspects of the physical world to solve the problem of ‘‘the speed of eΔux’’ of a jet of water from a tank as a function of the descent of the center of gravity of the water in tank and jet. He gives his reason for the example thus: [It] should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship [as] thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws. . . . [This] sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are leaned together. (190–91)

In other words, it comes, as we shall see, from the fact that, as Kuhn notes, we enter into a dialogically structured form of participatory, rela-

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tionally responsive understanding with certain crucial, initial concrete exemplars.

SOME METHODS FOR PARTICIPATORY FORMS OF INQUIRY

Currently, in accord with the unidentified and unremitting Cartesianism implicit in our current forms of inquiry, at least the following four major themes have been dominant in our attempts to understand ourselves and our surroundings. We have supposed (1) that the situations that confront us have the form of problems to be solved by the selfconscious application of our own powers of individual thought; (2) that to understand a problem correctly, we must possess a correct picture, a theory, an accurate representation of it, in the sense that every element in reality, and the relations between them, are matched by elements in the representation; (3) that all such theories or representations are constituted as a single order of connectedness, such that a single source of influence can be said to be at work in producing the ‘‘problematic’’ phenomena—a system of rules, laws, or principles, for instance; and (4) that such representations must be arrived at by public argument and debate—concerned with the conceptual coherence of the proposed theory and the empirical evidence in its support—with the aim both of achieving universal agreement and of eliminating any errors that there may be within it. If we are to arrive at some new, participatory forms of inquiry, we need to consider changes in relation to each of these four themes. I will consider them in reverse order, turning to the last first.

From Argument to Dialogue

If we are interested in adopting a more participatory approach in our inquiries, as arguers and debaters, concerned only to criticize the systematic theories of others and to replace them with our own, we arrive on the scene too late, and then look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude: too late because we take the ‘‘basic elements’’ in terms of which we must work and conduct our arguments to be already fixed, already determined for us by an elite group of academically approved predecessors; in the wrong direction because we look backward toward supposed, already existing actualities, rather than forward toward possi-

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bilities; and with the wrong attitude because we seek a static picture, a theoretical representation of a phenomenon, rather than a living sense of it as an active agency in our lives. To put it another way, this kind of critical concern with theories is both beside the point and after the fact. It is beside the point as our aim is to understand the (as yet nonexistent) activities involved in approaching nature di√erently, and that cannot be done simply by proving a theory true. It is also after the fact, for in orienting us toward regularities, toward already existing forms, it diverts our attention away from those fleeting moments in which we have the chance of noting new reactions in ourselves, previously unnoticed responses that might provide the new beginnings we seek. This is not to dismiss the importance of the scholarly work that has been done so far in the academies. Indeed, all the attempts to represent nature as crucially exhibiting this or that order or organization have exerted a tremendous influence, not only on what we think of as being its character today, but also on the openings we can still see for its possible further structuring. But none of them has been wholly successful. Kuhn’s (1970) work, as mentioned, being just such a case in point. Yet, as he himself notes, ‘‘By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, [a] paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable’’ (24). And, as I indicated earlier, this has been of great importance. However, while such work has brought to our attention detailed features of our surroundings that we would never have noticed otherwise, in another role, that of influencing social and environmental policies for implementation by central, state governments, this kind of theorydriven, systematic science has been disastrous (Berlin 1962; Bernstein 1983; Scott 1998). Why? Because in line with theme 3, when such theory-driven work is applied in the world outside the research community, it is not passed on in terms of its ‘‘paradigm’’ within the research community, but only in terms of a set of principles, that is, a linguistic account of a single order of connectedness. Instead of the ‘‘real presence’’ of a historically rich, shared landscape of research possibilities, what is passed on is a set, to use a phrase of Scott’s, of ‘‘necessarily simple abstractions’’ (262). No wonder, as Sir Isaiah Berlin remarks, that while many of our ‘‘great liberating ideas’’ initially open up a surge of new opportunities, they ‘‘inevitably turn into su√ocating strait-

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jackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by new, emancipating, and at the same time, enslaving, conceptions’’ (1962, 159).

From an Explicit, Single Order of Connectedness and Sublime Essences to ‘‘Real Presences’’

Currently in our academic inquiries, we feel under a compulsion to seek a systematic or logical framework, an accurate cognitive view, in terms of which to conduct our reasoning as to what, in particular practical circumstances, we should do. Thus, at the moment, it seems perfectly rational to us to turn away from the practical contexts in question, to convene meetings in conference or committee rooms, and to hold ‘‘decision-making meetings.’’ And in such meetings, as I noted earlier, to conduct debates as to which system of principles, which theoretical structures, we should attempt to implement. A number of Wittgenstein’s remarks are apposite here. One is: ‘‘Giving grounds, justifying the evidence, comes to an end;—but the end is not in certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game’’ (1969, no. 204). In other words, he is trying to remind us here, as Kuhn is in his talk of paradigms, that theoretical structures alone cannot shape our actions; indeed, it is only in the context of shared practices that a theory can be applied without misunderstanding. Such shared practices, what Kuhn (1970) later came to call a ‘‘disciplinary matrix,’’ while leading us to respond spontaneously to events around us in certain standardized ways, also carry with them certain irresistible urges, cravings, inclinations, and compulsions to respond to events also in self-misleading ways. Central among such cravings is our ‘‘craving for generality,’’ or ‘‘the contemptuous attitude [we have] towards the particular case’’ (Wittgenstein 1965, 17, 18). Bewitched or charmed by the methods of science, ‘‘we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in grasping one comprehensive essence’’ (Wittgenstein 1981, no. 444). The tendency to generalize the case seems to have a strict justification in logic: here one seems completely justified in inferring, ‘‘ ‘If one proposition is a picture, then any proposition must be a picture, for they must all be of the same nature.’ For we

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are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence’’ (no. 444). We must, we feel—as professionals trained in a discipline—seek regularities, patterns, or orderliness if we are properly to understand a phenomenon. Rorty (1989, 198) notes something similar in talking of our compulsive need, as he puts it, to ‘‘eternalize’’ or ‘‘divinize’’ the ideology of the day in a quest to find a basis for our actions somewhere ‘‘beyond history and institutions.’’ In other words, what Wittgenstein and Rorty are noting here is the powerful influence that the linguistic generation of a ‘‘real presence’’ can exert on us in our exchanges with each other. But when words are used in this way, in a purely speculative or theoretical fashion, without being (mimetically) responsive to the contours of a practical context of use or (indicatively) pointing to any of its features, then, we might say, following Wittgenstein (1953, no. 38), that language has gone ‘‘on holiday.’’

From Theoretical ‘‘Real Presences’’ to Real ‘‘Real Presences’’

Although we still may feel that, nonetheless, all the talk and writing of theoreticians must represent something that is real, we need to remember that, whatever it is, it is connected to our natural surroundings only discontinuously, in terms of a number of points. Or, to put it another way, a theory, in being tested in a series of discrete experiments, gives rise to a knowledge framework that, as Quine (1953, 42) put it, is ‘‘a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.’’ The possibility of people being ‘‘present’’ both to each other and to their surroundings, and of being in touch with all the unique ‘‘contradictory’’ complexities of each, is eliminated in this discontinuous, out-of-touch approach to the acquisition of knowledge. We need a way of being in a more continuous contact with the others and othernesses around us; we can gain the kind of understanding we need only in dialogically structured circumstances.≤ If we are ever to mount the required form of participatory inquiry, instead of a single order of connectedness, supposedly proved to be true by a small group of experts to the exclusion of everyone else, a dialogically structured community is needed. Indeed, just as Kuhn (1970) claims for a shared paradigm, which is taken by a scientific community,

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for a while at least, as giving it correct answers to what its fundamental research objects are, so we might say about a shared, dialogically structured, living ‘‘truth’’ within such a community: it, too, may determine for a whole community what, simply, its reality ‘‘is.’’ In this connection, Bakhtin (1984, 81) notes, ‘‘It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential [sobytiina] and is born at that point of contact among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only one of the possible ways. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence.’’ Further, such a shared and living truth, in being full of event potential, does not, like value-neutral, theoretical knowledge, require interpretation if we are to implement it in practical action. In giving us a living sense of the actualities of our lives, it shows us their partial, still uncomplete nature, and thus their openness to being further specified by us. Indeed, such a ‘‘truth,’’ as a real presence, as an agent in our actions, acts as a powerful other embodied within us, and calls us into action, issues ‘‘action-guiding advisories’’ along the way, and then judges our subsequent actions accordingly by the facial expressions it directs toward us after their completion. But if we are ever to mount the required dialogical form of inquiry, how can we do it? For, as Bernstein (1983, 226) notes, all attempts to implement ‘‘the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form such communities [has been] disastrous . . . [for] the coming into being of community already presupposes an experienced sense of community.’’ James C. Scott (1998, 351–52) adds a rider to such comments to explain why such centrally imposed plans are so often disastrous. ‘‘It is,’’ he suggests, ‘‘a characteristic of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that order. . . . [A] nonconforming practice is an indispensable condition for formal order.’’ Indeed, it is precisely the ‘‘specific variability’’≥ in a human order that allows us still to sustain it in the face of quite unpredictable circumstances. So how can we begin to help dialogical communities develop, if we cannot do it through deliberate planning and the implementation of principles? What way or ways are available that will not prove disastrous?

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The Role of Exemplary Conversations in Constituting Shared Practices

Although Kuhn’s limited focus on ideally scientific contexts can be criticized (see Fuller 2000), what he says about the role played by concrete examples in our learning of scientific practices is, I think, important. He notes, to repeat, that learning to perceive ‘‘similarity relationships’’ is ‘‘embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws,’’ and that this ‘‘sort of learning . . . comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are leaned together’’ (1970, 190). Wittgenstein (1969, no. 139) makes a similar remark: ‘‘Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes, and the practice has to speak for itself.’’ In other words, a shared practice arises in a set of shared circumstances in which a group of people exhibit a set of shared responses to a set of shared events. It is the function of a set of shared examples or exemplars to evoke such a set of shared responses. The examples give orientation in the learning, as Wittgenstein (1953, no. 199) puts it, of a ‘‘technique’’—where, ‘‘to understand a language means to be master of a technique.’’ Such examples are not illustrative of the practice in question, but constitutive of it, in the sense that they spontaneously call from us the new responses required for us to begin new language games, new ways we may make sense together of whatever it is that our forms of shared expression are responsive to. Is there a classical example here to which we can refer as a signpost, pointing out to us the direction in which we must go? Yes, there is: Goethe’s study of plant forms. As is well-known, Goethe claimed—not as a matter of actual fact, but as a way of orienting oneself toward entities in one’s surroundings with the aim of acquiring a sense of their life—that all the organs of plants (from cotyledons to stem leaves, stem leaves to sepals, sepals to petals, petals to stamens, etc.) are leaves transformed. To acquire this sense, to be able, imaginatively, to move backward and forward, through the unbroken, developmental flow of plant forms with ease, we must, Goethe claimed, understand the overall movement of a plant’s growth through a process of ‘‘exact sensorial imagination.’’ Goethe outlined the nature of this process thus: ‘‘If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not

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actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole. At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, yet nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself ’’ (quoted in Ho√man 1998, 133). Such a process is, he says, ‘‘a delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory.’’ To which he adds the comment: ‘‘But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age’’ (quoted in Brady 1998, 98). This is where, finally, we must come to a reconsideration of our first theme: our traditional orientation to an encountered other or otherness as a problem to be solved by being explained. As Goethe makes plain, rather than problems requiring explanation, thus to add yet more knowledge to what we already are, the shift or move we require is to turn such encounters into opportunities to acquire a sense of the unfinishedness of our surroundings and of the openings they o√er us to become more than we already are. Thus, as he puts it, our task is this: ‘‘Whatever great, beautiful, or significant experiences have come our way must not be recalled again from without and recaptured, as it were; they must rather become part of the tissue of our inner life from the outset, creating a new and better self within us, forever as active agents in our Bildung [self-development]’’ (quoted in Brady 1998, 109).

CONCLUSIONS

In the classical tradition, we begin our inquiries by orienting toward any newness, strangeness, or disquiet we encounter as a problem to be solved. We then approach it in terms of a specific sequence of steps. We first treat it as an entity that can be analyzed into a set of already wellknown elements. We then search for an order or pattern among them; hypothesize a causal agency responsible for that order (we may call it, say, ‘‘the Synergy of Nature’’); and then go on to find further evidence of its existence. We then begin to develop further theories as to the nature of such a Synergy and attempt in terms of such theories, indirectly, to manipulate the Synergy’s operations to produce what we see as out-

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comes advantageous to us. But we call such theories solutions to our problem only if they enable us to achieve mastery over the agency hypothesized within them. Alternatively, however, in seeking a participatory, orientational understanding, the sequence of steps we would follow would be quite di√erent. We would begin by treating any otherness we encounter as radically unknown to us—we would approach it, not like Kant’s ‘‘appointed judge,’’ but with care, respect, and anxiety. We would then enter into dialogically structured, reciprocally responsive relations with it. To do so, we must (partially at least) be answerable to its calls, just as it (partially at least) would be answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay between us and it, another it, a real presence would appear between us, produced neither solely by us nor by the othernesses, an ‘it’ within which both they and we have our being. This it is not my ‘it,’ but our ‘it.’ Thus, I do not gaze at it as I might at an object for use; I do not see it as having a place within an ordered perspective. My looking wanders around within it, in accord with the calls I receive at each point of fixation to move my looking next to its neighbors—and where, just as the two 2-d monocular views from our two eyes are merged into the unity of a binocular view with depth to it, so all of these points of fixation merge into the unity of a world. It directs my looking as much as I do myself. Rather than simply seeing it, I see with its help. Thus, just as a person’s facial expression, which with its smile gestures us to approach or with its scowl repels us, has a similar directive or instructive physiognomy, so we can develop a sensibility of, or sensitivity to, many other its that can emerge in our responsive engagements with our surroundings. And I can do this because ‘‘my body is not only an object amongst all other objects, . . . but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colors, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them. . . . [The body] is that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently ‘be at home in’ that world, ‘understand’ it and find significance in it’’ (James 1981, 236–37). And as we continue our commerce with the othernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of our familiarity with the inner shape or character of the real presences created between us. And as we dwell on or within its nature, we can gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-

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achieved aspects—the prospects it o√ers us for ‘‘going on’’ with it. We come to feel at home with it, to know our way around within it, in the way we find our way around inside houses familiar to us. Thus, what we gain here, rather than a solution, rather than further information, is a shaped and vectored sense of how to ‘‘go on’’ in relation to the otherness concerned and be answerable to the mute judgments of the living world around us—a sense that cannot be measured by any mechanical instruments, that is available to us only in our living, moving, responsive engagements with our surroundings. I have explored just some of the possible features of a participatory way of thinking—as distinct from the disengaged or detached forms of thought and discourse we currently employ in the academic and intellectual spheres of our lives—which gives us a chance that the face and the voice of our natural surroundings will become present to us. But I say only a chance, as such a full responsiveness is not easy to achieve. Only if we are prepared to return, like little children, to our primordial commerce with the world, to a pre-Cartesian way of being in the world in which we approach it not as self-conscious, self-contained, individual thinkers and deliberate actors, but as living, responsive, participant parts of a larger whole. Aware of the Cartesian dangers we have been exploring here, Merleau-Ponty (1973) attempted to describe a new task for philosophy. Noting that modern philosophy ‘‘prejudges what it will find,’’ he suggested that to overcome this tendency, philosophy ‘‘once again . . . must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over,’ that o√er us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them’’ (130). But to make such a change as this—which is, as Wittgenstein (1980, 17) remarks, ‘‘a di≈culty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect’’—is not at all easy. For, as the whole tenor of this essay suggests, it is not an intellectual change that is required, but a bodily one— a very di√erent kind of project for those of us used to ‘‘the life of the mind.’’ I have tried to answer Haila’s questions and to suggest something of what is needed if we are to fashion the kind of vocabulary required to relate ourselves, dynamically, to the dynamic phenomena around us. But if we are to walk the walk of this new and changed way of

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talking, major changes in the whole institutional life of academe are required. Only if we can learn to see the face and to hear the voice of our own current, local, intellectual institutions will we each be able to see the particular and unique openings they o√er us. To act globally, we must each act in our own precisely local ways, as the voice and the face of nature allow.

NOTES

See Shotter (1996), where this phenomenon is discussed at length. About science, Merleau-Ponty (1964, 159) remarks: ‘‘Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to e√ect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always has been that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general—as though it meant nothing to us yet was predestined for our use.’’ 3 I take this term from Voloshinov (1986), who uses it to outline how a supposedly normative, linguistic form can be uttered in di√erent ways in di√erent circumstances to take on di√erent meanings: ‘‘Thus the constituent factor for the linguistic form . . . is not at all its self-identity as signal but its specific variability; and the constituent factor for understanding the linguistic form is not recognition of ‘the same thing,’ but understanding in the proper sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not ‘orientation’ in some inert state’’ (69). It is its novelty, not its repetition, that is significative of a speaker’s unique meaning. 1 2

Rethinking Intentionality A Bourdieuian Perspective

Iordanis Marcoulatos

perceived as a characteristic of mental reality (Brentano 1973, 88; Husserl 1962, 108; Searle 1983, 1), or even as a projection from the observer’s standpoint, that is, as an epistemically convenient fiction (Dennett 1987, 25). What has been largely overlooked by mainstream philosophical discourse on the subject are the forms of intentionality that may transcend the isolation of the mental. Intentionality has not been integrated in the neurophysiological reality of a human being in a way that would transform this reality into an existential perspective, that is, in a way that would allow for the emergence of the phenomenological givenness of a human presence as a field of realization of significance. In principal philosophical currents— analytic or continental, critical or phenomenological—intentionality has been construed as the link that bridges the distance between subject and object, and this seems to presuppose the subsistence of this distance even amid the flow of practice, where it is often imposed by the observer of the interaction between the subject and the world. In addition to the standard conception of the relation between the mind and the world, what is also assumed from this perspective is the nature of each of the relating parts. On the one hand, we have the active pole (which is capable of intentionality) reaching outward, in the direction of the object, and, on the other, the passive, expressionless (material) pole, which awaits some intentional import to be bestowed upon it by the acts of a consciousness.∞ Forcefully put, intentionality becomes the philosophical codification of the process of relating as one-sided, that is, as if it were the case only at its one end, with the other being inherently unable to reciprocate. As a result, the prereflective—yet dialectic—coherence between the subject (intersubjectivity) and the world is lost INTENTIONALITY IS TYPICALLY

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from sight as the ground on which overtly intentional instances of the relation stand; what remains is intentionality as a characteristic of distinct fragments of the relation, always originating at its subjective end. In this context, pursuing an analysis of Bourdieu’s theory of intentionality may appear puzzling, if not outright misguided. Bourdieu does not engage in the study of intentionality as an essential characteristic of the mental, either logically or biologically speaking, since, as usually practiced, such study lies beyond a sociologically sensitive context of analysis. Moreover, his style of argumentation evades the distinction between the interior of a consciousness and the exterior of a surrounding world, which is typically presupposed and, in e√ect, hypostatized in theories of intentionality. This approach to intentionality maintains a dualistic overtone even in a monist frame of analysis. The mind is perceived as the source and vessel of meaning—as the meaning-endowing epicenter of the world and the initiator of cultural forms—and the body as the neurophysiological mechanism that brings it about. In fact, many monists (from the behaviorists to the eliminativists) understand the claim that material reality is the only reality there is, as placing in jeopardy the very existence of meaning, unless it is defined in extensional or functional terms. Any other (presumed) level of actualization of meaning is perceived as a deep-rooted illusion—a heuristically appealing, yet ultimately misleading, imposition on the fabric of the world. Abandoning one side of dualism yet preserving the other, as it were (as pure matter or nature), one is endorsing something of the overall spirit of dualism; one must conceive one’s surrounding world as purely material or natural, to require the invention of a distinct dimension of being so as to contain within one’s worldview the (phenomenologically) evident meaningfulness of practices. Moreover, from a reductionist or eliminativist perspective, the issue of the ontology/genealogy of meaning is posed exclusively in reference to the mental. On the other hand, the corporeal is treated as part of a domain of physical processes—pure of any sort of import, which is always perceived as imposed. As a reaction to eliminativism, other monists in the analytic tradition, such as Davidson and Searle, have employed di√erent formulas for preserving some level of autonomy of the mental despite its emergent (i.e., ultimately physical) status; however, they also hypostatize it as the exclusive locus of genuine intentionality. If rationalism, as a general theoretical atti-

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tude, detaches reason from the world by inventing an ideal level of reality, and maintaining that this ideal dimension somehow rules over the contingencies of the real (and hence that reality as we know it makes more sense if perceived from this perspective), the above may be rendered as vestiges of rationalism in the heart of a philosophical culture opting to overcome it. Eliminativist or strong physicalist theories of the mind also deny the worldliness of reason; they also separate reason from the world, which, being purely physical, cannot contain reason, especially when reason is conceived not merely as a cognitive or adaptive faculty but as the objective cohesion of a sociocultural context. At the other end of the theoretical spectrum, reason becomes (by mentalists, structuralists, and formalists alike) a (quasi-)textual construct instead of being perceived as a constitutionally practical and mostly practiced aspect of a lifeworld. In its usual sense, intentionality refers to the quality or fact of being intentional (i.e., intending or intended); we should di√erentiate this sense of intentionality from the technical one, the quality or fact of being about something (the quality or fact of referring to something), which is more general. For example, a fear, an insecurity, or a moment of embarrassment is typically unintentional, yet it is usually about something. We might say that intentionality in the conventional sense entails intentionality in the technical sense, but not vice versa.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE DISCUSSION

In this work, I draw on Bourdieu’s account of the lived reality of a social agent to suggest that intentionality (in the philosophical sense), notwithstanding its traditional elaborations, is a dynamic conceptual nucleus, which contains intriguing, often conflicting, yet largely unexplored possibilities. Beyond its received understanding, it indicates an awareness of the plasticity of the distance between subject and object, that is, the possibility of perceiving the distance as emerging cohesion. Aboutness encapsulates the referential nature of consciousness and, more important, of existence, the directionality of life and, in particular, of human, culturally structured life. It is a concept with a relational and dynamic constitutional intent, which has been elaborated only as an indication of the subsistence of the distance between subject and object,

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where in fact it indicates the advent of its transcendence. The distance it suggests is constantly shifting, and hence the nature of the relationship it indicates is shifting as well. From the received perspective on intentionality, consciousness does not appear to extend toward the world; rather, it assumes the role of a detached observer. Yet, intentionality suggests the outwardness of consciousness as a movement (epistemic as well as practical) toward the object; it suggests a tendency to integrate certain aspects of a surrounding reality as active and productive dimensions of one’s constitution. In particular, from this standpoint, intentionality can be perceived as a process of existential approximation—as an adaptive structural convergence—between subject and object, not as an indirect consolidation of the distance of consciousness from the rest of a (socionatural) surrounding world. It may be presented as a process of gradual internalization of the structures—the logics—of the reality at hand, and hence as a flexible schema of internalized obligations to accommodate them. As Bourdieu (2000, 144–45) argues regarding the habitus, intentionality should not be perceived episodically, but as a physiognomic background. It does exist in flowing time, which, however, is not an aggregation of instances but the manner they run into each other, that is, the structure of the di√erential imports and values of these transitions; it is the flow as determined by the relative standing of its instances. The very nature of consciousness, and of human existence in general, as it may be construed on the basis of Bourdieu’s treatment of intentionality, is that of an outward dynamism striving to meet the object; it is that of an extension of the subject toward a structural appropriation of the object, amid a process of reciprocal formation with the object. It stands in stark contrast to the standard conception of the observer, ascribing from a distance meaning and value to elements of a neutral substratum.≤ From an analytical angle grounded on the concept of the lifeworld (which, in Bourdieu’s work, is microsocialized and thoroughly politicized), meaning and values make up the objective fabric of the world, and intentionality is inevitably actualized in the shapes of this fabric. In this sense, we can argue that the intentional impetus of a living presence has specific (i.e., culturally attenuated) forms and functions. On the contrary, when it is perceived as an indication of the consciousness’s distance from the world, it can be conceptualized as aboutness in general; it has been

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positioned at the margins of the world, defining the nature of consciousness as (virtually) other-worldly. The ontological seclusion of the mental, which is implied in the standard conceptualization of intentionality, is closely connected with a prioritization of the human, as the generative locus of the most genuine form of mental life, and its complementary objectification of the natural. Intentionality, as the mark of the mental, constitutes a pivotal conceptual device for substantiating an anthropocentric, thoroughly rationalist conception of the world, within which the creation of a surrounding socionatural order is perceived, primarily, as a task for a (logocentric) hegemony of humanity over the rest of existence. In contrast, from an existential phenomenological as well as developmental (time-conscious) perspective, intentionality becomes a reaching out, a progressive approximation between subject and object, instead of being merely a conceptual consolidation of the distance between them. It becomes a process of fluid structural internalization of a surrounding reality. If we indeed perceive intentionality as a comprehensive existential gesture of a living presence toward its physiognomic surroundings—as a comprehensive attempt to incorporate their practiced logics—we end up perceiving biosocially specific human presences as dynamic extensions of their world. Conversely, if intentionality functions as the conceptual formula that highlights the distance between subject and object, it ends up substantiating a radical ontic discrepancy between humanity (as the generative center of reason) and the rest of nature/culture. The rigid di√erentiation between the source of this referential propensity and its surroundings as arrangements of passive receptors, in essence, is nothing but the split between an essentialized logos—detached from everyday practices—and a mute and passive, thoroughly (and often reflexively) objectified, reality.≥ What I try to show is that in Bourdieu’s work, which constitutes an essential aspect of the groundwork for the currently developing interest in body theory, there is an alternative understanding of intentionality: intentionality lies beyond the mental and correlatively beyond the subjective, either within the subject (which structurally absorbs the object, becoming, to an extent, objectified) or beyond it, in other elements of the surrounding world. In fact, his philosophical anthropology and his social cosmology are structured around this expanded conception of

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intentionality; they are based on a keen awareness of the aspects of any meaningful relation, which, although practically articulate, are not (and need not be) articulated. Extending beyond the mental (certainly beyond the linguistic), intentionality characterizes the physiognomic impression conveyed by the whole person; the same orientedness—the same constellation of structurings—that animates one’s thoughts and utterances, and permeates one’s decisions, tastes, and inclinations as if they were converging toward a common future, also enables the coherence of one’s presence, that is, the idiosyncratic texture of one’s facial expressions, mannerisms, posture, projected personal energy, tone of voice, and so on. Express significance is just one aspect of realization of the expressive potential of a human presence. For instance, an orator does not conquer his audience only by means of what he says; rather, he captivates them, having himself been taken over by the ambiguous—in Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 189; 1973, 244) sense— objectivity of his practice. Partaking of his practice (i.e., availing himself, through incorporation, of the instruments of his practice), he has become an aspect of the flexible coherence of a surrounding world, which is not simply a coherence of rules, beliefs, and expectations, but also of existential manners.∂ For Bourdieu, as countless instances of his work testify, an agent is immanently and pervasively directional and dialectic, and in this sense intentional, not only as a consciousness, but first and foremost as a manner of being;∑ it is within this intentional framework that more conspicuous instances of intentionality are necessarily inscribed. Bourdieu’s social phenomenology of the lived reality of an agent is focused on this level of intentionality mainly through the concept of the habitus. An agent is a certain habitus, prior to being a system of opinions and a relatively distant (remote as well as detached) center of awareness: he or she is an inherence in a constellation of possibilities that outline the course of a historical circumstance. Our intentionality is what enables us to situate ourselves within the objective directedness of our immediate history. In this sense, it is a comprehensive characteristic of our manner of being, rather than a logical feature of specific aspects of our mental life. An agent’s personal or communal political preferences are formed and reformed within the wider context of his or her social development. The process of emergence of the person, as a system of deliberate ideological positions, is merely one aspect of a wider process

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of sociopolitical maturation, which takes place primarily at the somatic/ intersomatic level, in the field of interactions between the biosocial organism (the individual corporeal presence) and its concrete and interactive (socionatural) surroundings.∏ From this standpoint, thought and linguistic expression become the tangible crystallizations of the overall expressive potential of a human presence. Conversely, if we perceive the living actuality of a human being from a physicalist (or reductionist) perspective, we are bound to grasp the mental as a kind of supervenient oddity and pose questions of the type, How can there be meaning in a world of natural processes? regarding the constitution of the subject, as well as that of our surrounding world. Such questions constitute an inversion of the proper order of analysis of social phenomena as social phenomena. A surrounding world, which in the human case is always a cultural and historical world, is not endowed with meaning primarily by the generative acts of a consciousness; meaning precedes subjective imposition, as formal and informal objectifications, which enjoy a relatively independent existence and shape individual consciousnesses. In Bourdieu’s work, the patterns of significance that constitute the fabric of the social world are, to an extent, self-evolving—in contrast to being always dependent on subjective or intersubjective acts of imposition. Such patterns, ideal or objectified, are the primary materializations of significance, which social agents de facto appropriate (being appropriated by them) in order to acquire a voice. They constitute the irreducibly preexisting setting that generates the (situated) subject as an explicitly and implicitly signifying presence. In short, in Bourdieu’s work, significance is not a superimposition but a dimension of the structure of the surrounding world, and, in the form of cultural patterns, it enables the emergence of persons as intentional structures. Correlatively, intentionality is not merely a characteristic of distinct aspects of our existential givenness, but its most elementary modality. At this point, it is important to underscore that Bourdieu treats different levels of intentionality as complementary rather than oppositional. Taking notice of the corporeal dimension of directionality is intended to provide overtly intentional instances of behavior with a socially objective framework: di√erent levels of intentionality are always discussed as parts of a continuum, that is, as aspects of the flow of behavior (Bourdieu 1994, 51). For example, one’s embodied social priv-

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ilege consists not only in one’s ability to think and argue convincingly, but also in one’s spontaneous facility for carrying oneself in a commanding manner in specific social milieus. Let us take a closer look at that continuum: one’s ability to persuade lies not merely in formulating one’s ideas in a reasonable fashion, but also in a style of enactment— that is, in unknowingly employing the pantomime of persuasion effective in a specific social setting; correlatively, one’s manner of handling oneself consists in an uninterrupted stream of nonverbal as well as verbal behavior. Instead of positing intentionality as a conceptual issue, Bourdieu allows it to emerge as a dimension of his social ontology through a careful examination of certain (always ambiguous regarding their subjective or objective character) aspects of social reality, which are perceived not as texts to be deciphered, but as phenomena, that is, as relational structures realizing and manifesting meaning. By means of a comprehensive delineation of their reality as lived, they are brought to light as objectified sense; that is, they take shape as phenomena.π Significantly, in Bourdieu’s work, intentional structures are not only mental but also corporeal, not only epistemic but also political. By way of this concretized and politicized phenomenology, the event of intentionality is reconstructed from the bottom up rather than postulated. Intentionality is transformed from a general concept to an operative and concrete configuration of forces. Let us now selectively explore this tacit pattern of theoretical moves.

TRACING INTENTIONALITY IN BOURDIEU’S TEXT

Bourdieu’s perspective on intentionality is focused on the specific forms it takes and the functions it serves, not so much on its general character. Consequently, he is not preoccupied with a clear demarcation of the concept but rather with detailing the functions of the phenomenon represented. Intentionality is not merely aboutness; it is concern, urgency, privilege, advantage, potential, inhibition, self-exclusion. It manifests a sociocultural identity, always tentative, yet practically binding and e√ectual. Yet, the question may persist, what is the di√erence between the conventional conception of intentionality as a characteristic of specific intentional acts, such as wishes, desires, and intentions,

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and the level of intentionality I am attempting to trace in Bourdieu’s work? The latter form of intentionality is not merely a feature of distinct intentional acts or states, but an encompassing existential style—the aura of a way of existing—that frames the emergence of overtly intentional aspects of behavior. Intentionality denotes the general manner of being of a certain class of entities; existential style also refers to the general manner of givenness of a class of (social) entities, only in this case, the generality in question is a socioculturally specific and politically functional one. In this sense, existential modes such as inhibition, submissiveness, and determination are not realized merely as specific acts, but may pervade and define the general way an individual or collective existence is realized in relation to other (socially tangible) existential identities. It is not only that ideologies emerge and take shape in a nonlinear, evolutionary manner, but that they do so primarily in the body: intentionality is, in its own right, a politicized phenomenon, even at the (representationally ‘‘blind’’) corporeal level. Corporeal forms of intentional life are direct manifestations of mostly unformulated, yet practically endorsed or tolerated, political stances. By way of politicizing this basic existential modality, Bourdieu initiates an alternative way of systematizing its study. Intentionality, as a general manner of givenness, gradually acquires a physiognomy as the details of its reality are filled in and their social consequences become apparent. Instead of being construed as a fragment of an abstract geography of mental life, it is situated in the real world as a sociopolitical function (e.g., Bourdieu 2000, 156). In the way that social realities in general are not ideal entities but are real processes and tendencies, intentionality is not an ethereal quality of mental contents but an aspect of a socioculturally tangible agent, and, to the extent that one’s lived actuality inheres in the structures of one’s surroundings (to the extent that the structures of one’s life, which are themselves forms of actualization of the objective coherence of a cultural world, have been ingrained, either by distinct acts of production or by cohabitation and osmosis, into the shapes of one’s surroundings), it is a dimension of those surroundings as well. A clarification of the di√erent senses in which cultural objects can be perceived to manifest intentional qualities lies beyond the scope of this work.∫ Nonetheless, let me mention that beyond perceiving such objects as characterized by derived intention-

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ality, we can trace the gradual emergence of an autonomous intentional physiognomy of certain (objective) elements of a social universe. We can reconstruct cases of such objects as emitting significance and having developed a presence or character—virtually, a voice—of their own, largely emancipated from the volitional authority of subjects (or intersubjectivities), although it always exists publicly, that is, in reference to a community of aptly sensitized agents. The concept of derived intentionality carries with it the implication of a subjective or intersubjective intention—that is, intentional imposition of intentional import; the sort of objective intentionality I am outlining here, although dependent on the presence of a responsive intersubjectivity, avoids the intentionalistic implication by means of understanding the dialectical physiognomy of an intersubjectivity in socially objective terms. In this section, I selectively focus on aspects of Bourdieu’s work that may be construed as references to intentionality, not just as a characteristic of mental states but as the oriented dynamism of a whole person: situated, practiced, operative, and political.Ω Let us explore how this conception of intentionality is developed in Bourdieu’s manner of arguing. Bourdieu’s (1984, 468; 2000, 141) references to bodily knowledge suggest a corporeal kind of intentionality. Bodily knowledge has to be about something; in some nonintellectual sense, it should refer to something. Yet, in this case, referring is purely relating; there is no assumption of distance between the knowledge in question and what it is about. Reference is relating and, when the specific relating posture is reciprocated, it is belonging. Framing the issue in terms of truth and falsity, we could argue that, at the level of practical know-how, being true is being reciprocated, whereas being false is being (experienced as) incompatible and hence being unable to relate. Bourdieu’s (2000, 141) conception of the body as learning and memory (which would also have to be of something) moves in the same direction. The body becomes a field of inscription of cultural patterns and regularities. Learning and memory are not just imprints or contents, but are active (and, to an extent, activated) potential, that is, reason in practice. They are practical in two senses: in the sense that they exist in practice, that is, as the practiced manners of the body, and in the sense that they are practically (i.e., socially/politically) e≈cacious. Closely connected with the epistemic renditions of the directional reality of the body are the political ones, mainly referring to the mecha-

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nism of social reproduction and manifested in the informal logic of everyday interactions, which indicate social hierarchies even through their most inconspicuous details: ‘‘There would be no game without players’ (visceral, corporeal) commitment to the game, without the [visceral, corporeal] interest taken in the game as such which is the source of the di√erent, even opposite, [formulated] interests of the various players, the wills and ambitions which drive them and which, being produced by the game, depend on the position they occupy within it,’’ which constitutes a viscerally political stance (Bourdieu, 2000, 153). In this passage, the reality of the body is rendered as (practiced) interest and commitment; social agents are unthinkingly endorsing the worthiness of the stakes of certain practices, and hence they are viscerally invested in them beyond the level of conscious calculations. They adopt a certain stance, a physiognomic directedness, which has the elementary structure of interest and commitment. As I understand him, Bourdieu is not arguing that interest and commitment are two forms of corporeal intentionality among others, but rather that the sociopolitically situated shapes of corporeal intentionality function inherently as engagement or commitment, as the inertia of an interested existence striving toward its structural perpetuation. In his account of the lived reality of the body, the universal is construed as inherently perspectival and (ultimately) political. Let us take a closer look at the connection between the political and the epistemic functions of corporeal intentionality. At the practical level, memory (being a sedimented repertory of possible reactions) functions as unthought endorsement of a structure of possibilities, that is, of the demands they present us with. What has been inscribed or deposited— what is practically understood—constitutes the situated and politically operative actuality of a form of life. As Bourdieu (2000, 154) puts it in reference to Sartre’s waiter, ‘‘His body, which contains a history, espouses his job, in other words a history, a tradition, which he has never seen except incarnated in bodies.’’ The socioculturally situated body is here construed as containing or espousing a tradition: it espouses a way of life, being itself an embodiment of the particular way of life. Thus, it constitutes the locus of eradication of the distance between its subjective manner of being and the objective structure of a way of life. One’s directional manner (one’s habitus) is an essential aspect of a form of life, as well as a de facto corroboration of that form: it constitutes a

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synoptic quasi act of endorsement of a manner of living, and hence the adoption of a tacitly (yet undeniably) political stance. To sum up, from Bourdieu’s perspective, the corporeal is seen as epistemic—as a field of inscription, which is a practiced (active and productive) inscription— and the epistemic as politically e√ectual. Direct references to the concept of intentionality are rare in Bourdieu’s work. In the following passage form the Pascalian Meditations (an unapologetically philosophical text) he elaborates on the connection between intentionality (conceivably in the sense of aboutness)∞≠ and the habitus: In so far as it is the product of the incorporation of a nomos, of the principle of vision and division constitutive of a social order or a field, habitus generates practices immediately adjusted to that order, which are therefore perceived, by their author and also by others, as ‘right,’ straight, adroit, adequate, without being in any way the product of obedience to an order in the sense of an imperative, to a norm or to legal rules. This practical, non-thetic intentionality, which has nothing in common with a cogitatio (or a noesis) consciously oriented towards a cogitatum (a noema), is rooted in a posture, a way of bearing of the body (a hexis), a durable way of being of the durably modified body which is engendered and perpetuated, while constantly changing (within limits), in a twofold relationship, structured and structuring, to the environment. (2000, 143–44)

In this passage, Bourdieu is directly arguing that the functional reality of the habitus is characterized by a practical, nonthetic intentionality, which (in contrast to the standard conception of intentionality) is realized in the form of existential manners rather than as a property of mental contents. Nonthetic means not proposed: not placed before a consciousness as an intention, a desire, a conjecture. He points out that this level of intentionality is rooted in a posture; that is, it characterizes or is part of a posture. If a posture is a specific expressive physiognomy realized in bodily manners, and a pivotal aspect of a habitus, he is essentially arguing that this level of intentionality is rooted in a habitus. Intentionality is the state of being directed, and the habitus is nothing but a specific directional manner. The dispositions that constitute a habitus emerge (and become discernible) as a habitus in the quasi act of their physiognomic outwardness. In this sense, a habitus is constituted as such insofar as it is intentional; it is the manner of realization of the directionality of a living presence.

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He continues with a direct identification of the habitus as a form of orientedness and outlines its basic levels of functioning: ‘‘Habitus constructs the world by a certain way of orienting itself towards it, [by a certain way] of bringing to bear on it an attention which, like that of a jumper preparing to jump, is an active, constructive bodily tension towards the imminent forthcoming’’ (2000, 144). This formulation indicates the epistemic dimension of the corporeal and the practical dimension of the epistemic. Attention is inherently a sort of tension; that is, it contains a practical (in e√ect, confrontational) dimension; it is urgency as well as anticipation in view of the demands objectively posed by a task at hand. Tension is an active positioning toward (a moving toward) a situation and the ensuing apprehension regarding the imminent confrontation, that is, regarding the possibilities it may hold and the aptitude required for achieving a pending structural balance. The habitus does not just observe or cognize the world; it constructs the world, being itself an extension of the world. It is shaping the world from the inside, or, as Bourdieu notes elsewhere, gives meaning to the world, a meaning that it has taken from the world. From this perspective, world making or even meaning attribution is not primarily an intellectual process but a practical one, either intellectually or practically realized; hence it is never arbitrary.

INTENTIONALITY AND THE HABITUS

If nonthetic (corporeal) intentionality, as concrete openness to the world, constitutes the actuality of the habitus, we may direct our attention to the habitus to enhance our understanding of the forms and functions of intentionality in Bourdieu’s work: ‘‘The principle of practical comprehension is not a knowing consciousness (a transcendental consciousness, as Husserl presents it, or even an existential Dasein, for Heidegger) but the practical sense of a habitus inhabited by the world it inhabits, pre-occupied by the world in which it actively intervenes, in an immediate relationship of involvement, tension and attention, which constructs the world and gives it its meaning’’ (2000, 142). This passage, along with numerous others, constitutes a virtual revision of the standard understanding of intentionality. Beyond the purely representational sense in which mental contents are said to be about states of

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a√airs or other mental contents,∞∞ the habitus may also be seen as being about or referring to certain surrounding conditions. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘‘The principle of practical comprehension’’ is ‘‘the practical sense of a habitus.’’ In other words, the habitus is a form of (practical) knowledge. To possess a habitus responsive to the range of possibilities (i.e., possible calls to action) making up the lived actuality of a set of objective conditions—due to its genetic connection with these or homologous conditions—is to have a sense of the structural dynamics of the possibilities in question, that is to say, of how they should be handled for a desired equilibrium to be facilitated. This sense lies beyond an epistemic grasp of the situation: it is primarily a form of practical responsiveness, an existential involvement that amounts to a sociopolitically operative stance. At this level of materialization of intentionality, referring to a reality means adopting a certain posture toward this reality and, to the extent that this posture is the appropriate one, being compatible with this reality, due to a structural (i.e., genetic) connection with it. The world acquires its meaning not only (or even primarily) by means of conscious imposition, but through the way it is lived, and has been lived evolutionarily, that is, through a process of productive participation in the contiguous lives of persons and things. We acquire a flexible schema of visceral political preferences through the way we live (in) the world, rather than living the world according to an expressly construed system of ideological principles. The habitus is typically construed as a system of dispositions (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, 82). Yet, if this system did not amount to a physiognomic existential openness—that is, if it did not constitute a presence— it could be rendered in nonintentional terms,∞≤ and this is emphatically not what Bourdieu does. The habitus is not just dispositions but ‘‘the site of durable solidarities,’’ ‘‘loyalties,’’ and ‘‘visceral attachment of a socialized body to the social body’’; moreover, it is ‘‘the basis of an implicit collusion’’ or ‘‘immediate agreement’’ ‘‘among all the agents who are products of similar conditions and conditionings’’ (2000, 145).∞≥ Thus construed, the reality of the habitus appears socially specific, politically functional, and unambiguously intentional. The dispositions composing a habitus have a place (and a function) in social life; they constitute a quasi act of self-placement, which is a pivotal aspect of the process of objective social ordering. They outline a perspective, which is not merely epistemic but is also practical (i.e., cul-

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tural, social, political), a position taking with real-life functions and implications. Whereas disposition can be construed as a purely biological process, solidarity, loyalty, and even collusion are terms that presuppose a network of social relations and, in their common (i.e., anthropocentric) understanding, a (cultural) value system that infiltrates and binds a course of action without necessarily being stated. The habitus is a physiognomic openness, which takes shape through its interaction with a physiognomic world; it is openness not toward specific objects but rather toward the organizational structures—the practiced logic—of certain surrounding conditions, a comprehensive existential aptitude for a systematic range of possibilities. The mutuality between the directional structure of a habitus and a homologously structured environment can be explained by illustrating the genetic connection between reciprocating existential configurations.∞∂ Intentionality is not merely directedness but the shifting structure of a (socially specific) process of adaptation; it is responsiveness and, optimally, e≈ciency.∞∑ Let me momentarily focus on the normative function of the habitus. Bourdieu (2000, 144) construes the functional actuality of the habitus as a force endowed with a law: a spontaneity, impersonal yet ordered, or an unthought propensity toward certain patterns of action, which (nonetheless) exhibits a normative rationality. Another rendition of the actuality of the habitus is as vision (sight and foresight) and division (the quasi act of practical implementation of classificatory principles; ibid. 139). From Bourdieu’s perspective, the perceptual aspect of social interaction contains an intuitively evaluative component; vision constitutes a projection of lines of social division. One’s perceptual manner— which, naturally, permeates one’s general bearing—functions as a practical judgment, compelling the intentional physiognomies interacting with it to ‘‘meet its demands’’ or ‘‘satisfy its taste.’’ Correlatively, the flexibility and responsiveness (i.e., the practical sense) that define a habitus enable a somatic compliance on the subject’s part; the habitus constitutes a propensity to unknowingly validate anticipated existential evaluations, which are ‘‘issued’’ and function, for the most part, beyond the awareness of the evaluators. In short, in Bourdieu’s work, intentionality is a social and political function, not a postulate. By perceptual manner (or, elsewhere, existential manner), I attempt to render the convergence of the cognitive and the behavioral in the lived actuality of a social agent; in particular, I am referring to one’s

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proto-conceptual schemata for situating things in social (i.e., hierarchical) categories, and to elements of one’s composure (e.g., facial expressions) that materialize specific acts of perception at the behavioral level. The quasi-mental categories that function as unthought stereotypes contaminate one’s synoptic bodily gesture toward a person, a situation, or a social environment. This level of cognitive functioning is, from its very inception, internal as well as external, especially in ways that evade subjective awareness; indignation or aloofness, approval or appreciation is materialized through one’s behavioral repertoire in parallel to being adopted by one’s mind or being sensed as rather indistinct moods—and sometimes in defiance of what the mind intends to hold back or conceal. The same point can be made regarding the process of development of such attitudes throughout a lifetime; from their initial stages, they emerge not only as mental schemata but also as manners of behavior. Parallel to internalizing a system of classifications (e.g., a configuration of tendencies to disregard or appreciate specific social others) adding up to nothing short of a worldview, one also absorbs an evaluative demeanor: ways of standing, staring, in general, existentially enacting a social identity in interaction—this enactment being pervasively dialectic. The two levels develop in a process of reciprocal corroboration—instead of being linked in a linear fashion—and jointly constitute the actuality of a habitus.

A NOTE ON BOURDIEU AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Let me conclude with a brief note on the relation between Bourdieu’s analytical orientation and phenomenology proper,∞∏ as he outlines it in the Pascalian Meditations: Phenomenological description, though indispensable in order to break with the scholastic vision of the ordinary vision of the world, and while it comes close to the real, is liable to stand in the way of a full understanding of practical understanding and of practice itself, because it is totally ahistorical and antigenetic. One therefore has to return to the analysis of presence in the world, but historicizing it, in other words, raising the question of the social construction of the structures or schemes which the agent implements in order to construct the world∞π (and which are excluded as much by a Kantian type of transcendental anthropology as by an eidetic

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analysis in the style of Husserl and Schutz, and, after them, ethnomethodology, or even the otherwise very enlightening analysis by MerleauPonty). (2000, 146–47; emphasis added)

Phenomenology transcends (to an extent) theoreticist renditions of everyday experience, by means of paying close attention to its lived qualities; yet, it formalizes certain elements of this experience, and neglects their (social) process of generation and their historical character. This tendency toward ahistorical formalization is not as pervasive in the phenomenological camp as Bourdieu appears to assume; there are elements of genetic and historical thinking not only in Merleau-Ponty, but also in Husserl and Heidegger.∞∫ Yet, even when phenomenological analysis adopts a genetic stance—that is, when it attempts to reconstruct the (social) process of constitution of the structures of consciousness—it remains largely ahistorical and, as a result, quasi-transcendentalist; one could argue that the process of constitution is approached stratigraphically, as if to recover the layers of a universal structure (e.g., H. Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, 345–46). Moreover, the phenomenological perspective is persistently focused on the mental life of the subject, and this leads to an incomplete conception of the lived reality of the person as a whole— Merleau-Ponty being the most unambiguous exception to this trend. Directly put, the unremitting emphasis placed by orthodox phenomenology on retrieving the elementary structures of consciousness—that is, on reconstructing the inner life of the theorizing subject—strongly resonates with Cartesian dualism and hence perpetuates it as a general philosophical attitude (Husserl 1988, 1–6). On the other hand, Bourdieu targets aspects of human lived reality typically neglected in phenomenology (mainly the expressive actuality of the body), yet he does so with a phenomenological analytical sensitivity; placing them at the center of his anthropological perspective, he attempts to recover their basic manners of givenness, the ways they are (socially) experienced, both as lived and as encountered, and does so from a historically sensitive standpoint. As he notes, one has to return to the analysis of presence in the world, yet from a historical, and hence social and political, perspective.∞Ω Phenomenology is engaged in describing the experience of the world as taken for granted, without providing a systematic account of the sociopolitical process of emergence and the sociopolitical functions of this self-evidence. For Bourdieu, on the other hand, the world is not self-

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evident in general, but rather as my world, as a specific range of options that may appear obvious, conceivable, or unthinkable to me—to people of my cultural, socioeconomic, or educational background—and consequently as the setting of my social action or inaction, which corroborates or violates a set of objective conditions.≤≠ Here are some issues neglected by phenomenology, which, according to Bourdieu, should be addressed from a sociological perspective:≤∞ How did a certain vision of the world (which, at the practical level, is nothing but a certain way of the world) come to emerge as self-evident? Bourdieu attempts to answer this question by analyzing the specific social conditions that give rise to the practical or explicit assumptions composing a given range of self-evidences—not by reconstructing the universal structures of the mind. He attempts to explain this self-evidence by bringing to light the nature of the (social) process of production of social agents. Furthermore, what are the social and political functions of this self-evidence? As already mentioned in passing, this self-evidence serves quasi-political functions transcending those of an epistemic certainty; in e√ect, it functions as a mechanism of social inclusion or exclusion, unreflectively realizing a specific social identity.≤≤ Yet, it is not merely internalized constraint but also enablement. The readiness to conceive yourself as an actual dimension of a range of possibilities is a requirement for sensible strategizing; you need to take certain things for granted (most important, your possibility of success) to realistically entertain a certain course of action, let alone plan it e√ectively. The self-evidence of an order of conditions of existence is an inconspicuous (and therefore e√ective) form of empowerment or deterrence, situating individuals in the trajectory of certain social paths while rendering others unthinkable.≤≥ At this point, I would like to note in passing that political ideologies may be perceived as practiced—adaptive and, at times, internally conflictual—forms of self-evidence, before they acquire the luster of systematic formulation and institutional sanctioning and, possibly, after they lose it; after our ideological formulations change content and direction, lived political stances may continue to survive at a visceral, practically fostered, level. This is the primary field of emergence and evolution of concrete ideological stances, which is given priority by some of the essays in this volume (e.g., essays by Peltonen and Laine), over that of their potential systematic elaboration. To take my analysis one step further, I suggest that becoming atten-

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tive to forms of nonrepresentational intentionality can be practically inspiring in its own right; it constitutes a palpable enhancement of the analytical scope of political theory and may hint at political mobilization: in e√ect, it may delineate for us the emancipatory dynamics of a range of lived reality. Specific forms of reality are perceived, from this angle, as existential perspectives with a right to be taken notice of—to be heard—and to be given a chance to mature. Tracing forms of nonrepresentational intentionality in the lived reality of subjects, as well as in the interactive physiognomies of natural/cultural objects (one’s objective surroundings being perceived as manifesting indigenous maturational tendencies), sheds light on the emancipatory intimations and possibilities (though never certainties, as Haila and Dyke point out in the introduction) silently a√orded by the self-realizing dynamics of reality itself. There is, in fact, a direct connection between our epistemocentric and rationalist conception of the subject, and the general orientation of our practiced environmental ethics: when our view of the world is anthropocentric and our concept of humanity is logocentric (in the rationalist sense), then our wider conception of a surrounding environment cannot be su≈ciently respectful of its self-contained value and functions. Conversely, we are after a form of phenomenology (a wide-ranging methodological framework for an extended family of social sciences), which would be directly linked to a decisive reconsideration of our ethics of involvement in (rather than interference with) concrete socionatural settings. In a nutshell, when you bridge the gap between subject and object—in essence, when you abandon the schism between reason and reality: when the logic of reality does not reside any more within the virtually other-worldly essence of the subject, but rather stems (primarily) from an intersubjectivity’s practiced surrounding coherences— then you also have to take a drastic step from ‘‘a mode of conquering the world to a mode of coexistence with the world,’’ as Haila and Dyke put it in the introduction, regarding your guiding practical posture toward your (or others’, for that matter) surroundings. There is a direct connection between our epistemology and our general political orientation, often dictating concrete political choices a√ecting our natural/cultural milieus. Bourdieu inseminates sociology and social anthropology with phenomenological insight, despite the fact that (pace orthodox phenomenology) he seriously curtails the autonomy of subjective mental life. He

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enhances the sociological perspective with a comprehensive attention to the quality of lived experience, taking the intellectualized and personalized phenomenological rendition of this experience beyond its received formalizations. He places it back into the real world, which is a social—politically active—world. Moreover, he recognizes that a human being is not primarily mental processes (causally enabled by a neurophysiological apparatus) but is also a bodily presence, involved, dialectic, and intentional, beyond mental articulation. The ahistorical formality of the structures of the mind is replaced by a historically, socially, and politically situated embodied presence. Bourdieu’s virtual outline of intentionality, which I tried to reconstruct in this work, epitomizes his philosophical anthropology; intentionality, transformed from an abstract quality of the mental to a situated, embodied, and operative property, becomes one of the junctures where philosophy and social theory converge in mutual complementation—Bourdieu’s own work being a model of this sort of cross-fertilization. Philosophy should never neglect the social nature of human experience, which is its permanent subject; correlatively, social theory has to retain and enhance its sense of the analytical complexity of the structures of experience through which sociality is actualized.

NOTES

I am grateful to professors Chuck Dyke, Kyriakos Kontopoulos, Yrjö Haila, and Stefanie Theodorou and to the members of a graduate seminar group at the University of Tampere, for their precious comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 This schema is particularly problematic in reference to the interaction between subjective and objective elements of a cultural universe, due to their comprehensively reasoned and dialectic nature. The search for initial points of imposition of cultural significance over a natural substratum, or for distinct—purely natural or purely cultural—levels of constitution of cultural realities, flies in the face of the intrinsic ambiguity of such realities. On this issue, see the essays in this volume by Chuck Dyke and Ville Lähde, respectively. 2 This conception of the relation between the subject and his or her surrounding reality is pervasive in analytic accounts of social ontology (see Searle 1995, 13–4).

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3 Chuck Dyke o√ers us an insightful and fascinating genealogy of such deep-seated cultural preconceptions (along with sobering allusions to their practical ramifications) in the opening pages of his essay in this volume; see also the introduction by Haila and Dyke. 4 He is one form of realization of this practice in a dialectical exchange with his audience, which is another such form. Typically, the practice of giving reasons and being convinced by them exploits the reciprocal propensity of the involved parties to appreciate what is being o√ered within the discursive and performative outlines of a particular context. 5 ‘‘Practical belief is not a ‘state of mind,’ still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (‘beliefs’), but rather a state of the body. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense’’ (Bourdieu 1990, 68). ‘‘One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘sit up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand,’ and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement’’ (69). ‘‘Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’’ (69–70). 6 On this way of approaching the process of emergence and evolution of personal political stances, as well as political movements in general, see the contributions to this volume by Lasse Peltonen and Markus Laine, which amply demonstrate its poignancy. 7 On phenomenon as something that allows its constitutional logic to shine through its presence, see Heidegger’s interesting comments in Being and Time (1953/1996, 30–32). 8 For an extensive analysis, see Marcoulatos (2003b). 9 Isolating specific instances of Bourdieu’s work that testify to this is rather futile, in the sense that an expanded conception of intentionality is ubiquitous in his work, and hence indispensable for its proper understanding. It is a key way of overcoming the antinomy between subjectivity and objectivity. 10 As already noted, we should bear in mind the distinction between the nontechnical and the technical sense of intentionality, which respectively refer to the quality or fact of being intentional (i.e., intending or intended), and

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to the quality or fact of being about something (the quality or fact of referring to something). In reference to the following passage, I want to point out that even if what Bourdieu has in mind here is intentionality in the conventional sense, his claim would also hold for certain cases of intentionality in the philosophical sense, because intentional in the conventional sense is, by definition, intentional in the technical sense. He broadens the everyday meaning of intentionality to include a rather impersonal, socially objective layer of intentionality; yet this layer would also be intentional in the technical sense. 11 This aspect of aboutness can also be construed as care, concern, or anticipation, although this angle on it is frequently overlooked. 12 As Searle (1998, 109) construes the Background. For a critical appraisal of Searle’s elaboration of the concept of the Background in nonintentional terms, see Marcoulatos (2003a). 13 The complete quote is as follows: ‘‘It [i.e., the habitus] is the site of durable solidarities, loyalties that cannot be coerced because they are grounded in incorporated laws and bonds, those of the esprit de corps (of which family loyalty is a particular form), the visceral attachment of a socialized body to the social body that has made it and with which it is bound up. As such, habitus is the basis of an implicit collusion among all the agents who are products of similar conditions and conditionings, and also of a practical experience of the transcendence of the group, of its ways of being and doing, each agent finding in the conduct of all his peers the ratification and legitimation (‘the done thing’) of his own conduct, which, in return, ratifies and, if need be, rectifies, the conduct of others’’ (Bourdieu 2000, 145). 14 ‘‘With a Heideggerian play on words, one might say that we are disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is . . . exposed and endangered in the world . . . and therefore obliged to take the world seriously . . . that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of which they are the incorporated form’’ (Bourdieu 2000, 140–41). 15 By means of the way he practices his general theory of the social, Bourdieu e√ectively suggests that the universal is constitutionally situated and aspectual, and hence political. For instance, habitus (as a concept) has not been crafted to function in a platonic fashion (as an immutable prototype enabling us to distinguish between di√erent kinds of things), but rather as a provisional research device, which, as all tools, is not to be reduced to an abstraction beyond its actual functions. It remains a provisional (i.e., historically/pragmatically privileged) arrangement, which, al-

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though e√ective in its present form, is adjustable to the needs it serves— needs that shape it, but are also (to an extent) shaped by it. 16 This is an issue of great theoretical interest, which should be pursued as an independent project. 17 It is within the wider context of such a thoroughly politicized, genetic/historical (therefore dynamic) phenomenological approach that I would place the contributions by Peltonen and Laine in this volume. 18 See Husserl (1970, 187–88, 271–72, 369; 1988, 44–45, 66–67), Heidegger (1953/1996, 338–62), Merleau-Ponty (1962, 425–26, 430–33). On Bourdieu’s critical assessment of the phenomenological hypostatization of temporality and historicity, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 137–38). 19 This possibility (contrary to Bourdieu’s claim to the opposite) has already been pursued in Merleau-Ponty’s work, albeit in a rather rudimentary form; see Marcoulatos (2001, 14–19). 20 As already mentioned, in Bourdieu’s work the political dimension of the analysis is fundamental, in contrast not only to a Husserlian (and, ultimately, Kantian) line of analysis, but also to the work of Schutz and the ethnomethodologists, where the self-evidence of the everyday world is usually accounted for in an ahistorical (and hence apolitical) manner, and the structures of consciousness remain (in e√ect) a transcendental given (e.g., H. Garfinkel 1967, 36–37, 57–58; Schutz 1970, 163–66). 21 On the same issue, see also Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 73–74). 22 On the ways the perspective of this volume undercuts the enlightenment ideology of agency and (in principle, unconditional) freedom, see Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke’s analysis in this volume’s introduction. 23 The practicality invoked in other socially minded lines of phenomenological analysis amounts to a general prudence that seems to emerge in a political vacuum (e.g., H. Garfinkel 1967, 263–75).

Fluids on the Move An Analogical Account of Environmental Mobilization

Lasse Peltonen LIQUIDS FLOW IN PATTERNS ‘‘between chaos and rock.’’ They can both evaporate in gaseous forms, when water becomes vapor and steam, and turn into solid matter, as water freezes into snow and ice. Unlike blocks of ice, liquids are mobile, and unlike vapor, they move in discernible and patterned forms such as currents and waves. Metaphors of fluidity readily o√er themselves to describe complex phenomena. Therefore, it is not surprising that metaphors of fluidity are widely used in research literature of social movements: protests come in waves that flood public spaces, and there is fluctuation in movement activity and di√usion of collective action. In the case of social movements, the romantic appeal of things on the move, as opposed to the rigidity of the established social order, also seems to play a role. Like liquids, complex phenomena are di≈cult to handle. Despite new imagery, researchers of social movements have found it di≈cult to deal with the dynamics of these movements. The distinction between agentcentered and structural explanations leaves unanswered questions concerning the movement within social movements: How exactly do movements move? Which mechanisms account for the di√erent movement patterns, such as protest cycles and waves? I argue that depicting social movements in terms of complex dynamics of fluid movements is a way around the structure-agency divide. Neither structuralist nor individualist explanations of collective action allow for the true interplay between agent and structure, or between di√erent structural scales. With this problem in mind, Melucci (1992) noted that the dualistic tradition of sociology inherited from the nineteenth century is nowhere more incongruous with the phenomena studied than in the field of social movement research. Moving beyond such dualism, a process view to

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movements seeks to understand them not as preformed entities but as ‘‘bodies-in-formation of radical relationality,’’ a term used by Dillon (2000) for the evasive objects of both complexity and poststructuralist thought. To put it briefly, basing an explanation on either agency or structure denies the very possibility of the emergence of social movements as genuinely novel structures. Movements are, in fact, fascinating precisely because they are more complex than the mere expression of any predetermined essence of either structure or actor. Here, fluidity provides an illustration of emergence, which helps us see movements as more than the sum of their constitutive elements. Pointing at ways around persistent dichotomies and linear causality, complexity theory seems paradoxically both fluid and robust at the same time. In the following, it serves as a heuristic framework to specify the notion of fluidity, that is, emergent patterns displaying ‘‘order out of chaos’’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). If we want to know more about how social movements emerge and how they work, merely calling them fluid will not take us very far. Unlike casual metaphors, specific analogue models are more helpful, as they focus on constituting mechanisms and processes, thus narrowing down both metaphorical ambiguity and its variety. Analogue models involve mechanisms or, to use Kontopoulos’s (1993) term, logics that introduce patterns and organization, thus accounting for the emergence and structuration of phenomena. Di√ering from the pursuit of prediction through general laws, analogue models are helpful where rigid linear accounts fail and where explanation is needed for processes involving both patterns and contingent features (see the discussion on analogue models in Haila and Dyke’s introduction to this volume). I have chosen to elaborate on a specific analogue model from the field of fluid mechanics, known as the Bénard cell (or Bénard instability), as a way of providing ideas on how movement and emergence of new structures take place. Using the Bénard cell analogy is a way to specify the metaphor of fluidity. After presenting the Bénard cell, I briefly introduce two perspectives for understanding complexity, namely, evolutionary explanation (Dyke 1988) and the epistemic strategy of heterarchies (Kontopoulos 1993). These approaches serve as a starting point for examining the dynamics involved in the emergence of social movements. Third, I use the Bénard cell analogy as a perspective on the involvement—or entrainment—and mobilization of individuals in a social movement, based

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on interviews with local Green movement activists. In terms of social movements, the analogy is aimed at the mobilization of movements, that is, accounting for the shift from simple movement to patterned social movement. I suggest that the emergence of a movement is an instance of self-organization. This approach points to an analogy with natural processes—but it also raises questions about the specificity of the social in social movement. I touch on this aspect under the heading of ‘‘discursive membranes.’’ I conclude by discussing other aspects of social movements, namely, conjunctures and critical events that highlight the aspects of discontinuity and contingency in movement dynamics.

LEARNING FROM MOLECULES

The so-called Bénard instability is a phenomenon known to students of fluid mechanics. It is a dissipative system, characterized by the flow and transformation of energy, and it provides an interesting case of nonlinear thermodynamics. Prigogine and Stengers (1986, 212–18) call it a ‘‘spectacular phenomenon’’ due to the way it demonstrates self-organization. Bénard instability arises from convection in a thermodynamic system, where a thin layer of oil is heated from below between two horizontal plates, creating a temperature di√erence between the bottom and the top plate. With the heat rising, the molecules start to move without any specific pattern. However, at some point during the heating (a ‘‘threshold temperature’’), a pattern emerges as the oil molecules group into rolling hexagonal cells (the so-called Bénard cells). The functionality of this phenomenon lies in the e≈ciency of such a pattern to mediate and release the heat from the bottom to the top. The Bénard cells keep rolling as long as the temperature remains within certain limits; with excessive heat, the system starts to display chaotic behavior. As a preliminary sketch of social protest, the Bénard cell analogy suggests that there is energy and restlessness in the ‘‘grassroots.’’ The heat that gives the movement its energy arises from situational grievances enacted by the individual ‘‘molecules’’ in forms of ‘‘hot cognition’’ (Gamson 1992, 31–32).∞ As the temperature di√erence reaches a certain point where enough is enough, the molecular citizens organize to voice their demands in a more e≈cient and e√ective way. As the tem-

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perature di√erence or tension between the grassroots and the establishment diminishes, protest dissolves. In the case of heightened tension, the system might become chaotic, that is, displaying revolutionary or anarchist behavior. To use the Bénard cell analogy is not to say that human beings are just like molecules in liquids. Rather, the analogy aims at understanding relational and emergent properties by contrasting liquid movement with social movement. Thus, we want to focus on the emergence of pattern and organization rather than the essence of the individual molecular particles involved. After all, water molecules are not wet. There are several noteworthy characteristics of the Bénard cell that are relevant for the purposes of my argument. First, nonlinearity. The contrast between the sudden shift in molecular movement and the gradual change in boundary conditions should be noted. Despite the gradual rise in temperature, the cellular patterns emerge instantaneously, in a nonlinear fashion. Millions of molecules just ‘‘pick up’’ the pattern and start rolling. In some sense, the rise in temperature can be seen as the cause of molecular movement. As soon as this is said, however, it becomes evident how limited this causal explanation is in the face of the nonlinear emergence. Linear causality fails to account for abrupt changes at a threshold temperature. Furthermore, there is no way to predict the direction in which the cells will start to roll. This aspect of nonlinear and contingent organization points to the direction of attempts in social movement research to understand shifts between latent and active stages of movement activity. As Sheller (2001, 12) notes, this is a crucial point of focus: ‘‘Much of what constitutes ‘social movement’ is precisely about a switch from a stable structuration of interaction to a more uncertain and fluid moment of transformation: it is this complex (and at times ungoverned) shift which we name ‘mobilization.’ ’’ To say the least, the idea of nonlinear emergence tells us to expect the unexpected from movement mobilization. Second, self-organization. It is impossible to explain the phenomenon by pointing at a primus motor of the movement. Prigogine and Stengers (1986, 215) point out how the birth of new forms of organization can be understood as a process in which a microscopic current, fluctuation, does not fade away, but is amplified and takes over the whole system. The resulting change, such as the patterned movement in the Bénard

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cells, cannot simply be attributed to an outside cause. The notion of self-organization can be placed in the explanatory vacuum that lies somewhere between cause and e√ect. It is a way of understanding the mutual selection between the two, that is, what happens ‘‘for a cause to e√ect its e√ect, and for an e√ect to be caused by a cause’’ (Baecker 2001, 60). Consequently, self-organization does not mean that movements are self-contained actors acting regardless of other actors and their environments. On the contrary, it points to the both/and character of living systems, such as movements, as both independent from and dependent on their environment, discarding the dualism of either/or.≤ The notion of self-organization helps to explain spontaneous organization without hierarchical power relations, a feature observed in social networks and movements. Third, entanglement of agent and structure. The ‘‘structure,’’ that is, the pattern of movement of the cells, is made of trajectories of individual oil molecules. The structure and the agent are, in a very concrete sense, inseparable. The individual molecules participate in the pattern through their movement, not as particles per se. The pattern is relatively stable and structured in the eye of the beholder, but we must see how it is made of movement. This suggests that there are no ready-made social movement actors that join ready-made movements, but these two are mutually constitutive, and the agency of the actors lies not in their essence, but in how they connect and how they move. As a sociological parallel, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, understood as a trajectory and a structured structuring structure, provides a helpful hinge between agency and structure (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; see also Crossley 2001, 202–3). In relation to the individual habitus, social movement is both moving and moved: participants both carry and are carried by the movement. Individual participants are coupled to the movement through the temporally determined structure of their habitus, in a conjuncture between the trajectories of habitus and social movement. Consequently, the temporal dimension of self-organization is crucial in understanding the constitution of a movement. The question is: What are the necessary and su≈cient conditions for sustaining patterned movements over time? Asking this question helps us avoid the reification of movements as given entities, or what Melucci (1992) calls the ‘‘metaphysics of the actor.’’

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EVOLUTIONARY STRUCTURATION

In any attempt to understand nonlinear processes of structuration beyond the reach of causal explanations, we face the obvious methodological question: How should one make sense of such complex processes? Here I resort to what Dyke (1988) calls evolutionary explanation. In this mode, explanation is an e√ort not to pinpoint causes of local events, but to give a robust account of how things have become what they are. Dyke (35–36) contrasts evolutionary explanation with bookkeeping as two ways of accounting for complex, emergent phenomena. Whereas bookkeeping accounts for phenomena by an inventory of their basic constituents, evolutionary explanation seeks to account for the processes through which the phenomenon has become what it is. Where bookkeeping is static and synchronic, evolutionary explanation recognizes the key importance of temporality and developmental paths.≥ Further, Dyke (1988, 13) suggests the heuristics of possibility spaces as a tool for understanding such trajectories. The basic idea here is that trajectories of evolutionary entities are both subject to and creators of the space in which they move. Therefore, mapping these multidimensional spaces is a way to make sense of the trajectories of evolving entities. Following the analogy of possibility spaces, social movements are to be understood as emergent movements-in-their-environments. Thus, evolutionary explanation provides a decidedly relational perspective, navigating between agent-based explanations based on methodological individualism and rational action theory and structuralist accounts positing forceful macrostructures and objective conditions. It also refutes rationalistic accounts, such as the political process and resource mobilization approaches, which neglect contextuality and treat action as narrow and one-dimensional in its goal orientation (Crossley 2001). To further elaborate complex contextuality, I use the notion of heterarchy in combination with evolutionary explanation. The idea of heterarchy is an elaboration of hierarchy theory by Kontopoulos (1993),∂ who suggests that explanation of complex phenomena should not be hierarchical (structuralism) or compositionist (methodological individualism) but heterarchical. The notion of heterarchy entails an open-ended view of the emergence of structure with multiple structurational dimensions, both bottom-up and top-down. Unlike the compositionist view, heterarchy allows for the whole to be more than the sum of its

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parts, and unlike hierarchical top-down control, the heterarchical perspective needs only to recognize the possibility—and not the necessity— of subsumptive projects. Heterarchies are ‘‘partially nested’’ or ‘‘tangled composite’’ structures, which ‘‘involve a theory of levels defined in terms of pragmatic criteria of scale and complexity, partial inclusion, and semiautonomy—partial determination from below, partial determination from above, partial focal-level determination, residual global indeterminacy’’ (55). Kontopoulos contrasts the notion of heterarchy with what is normally referred to as structuration theory in social sciences.∑ He insists that a theory of structuration should primarily specify the numerous logics of structuration operating in social space and time and, secondarily, explain upward structuration in detail, that is, provide a ‘‘level-structure sca√olding for the location, partial ordering, complex heterarchical networking, and dynamic transactivation of particular structured structuring structures’’ (1993, 327). Apart from multiple determining forces, Kontopoulos refers to an interesting category of residual global indeterminacy, which can be seen as contingencies inherent in any system. This feature is particularly interesting in terms of structure and agency as it means that structure cannot be understood in static terms—no matter how solid empirically studied structures might seem. If we see the Bénard cell–like emerging patterns as quasi-local systems giving rise to structuring and embedded in higher-level structures, they can also be seen as the sources of minute transformations that go unnoticed when the larger wholes are studied at an aggregate level. As the lower-level systems (such as individual movement activists) explore their possibility spaces, they give rise to emergent phenomena. The higher-level phenomena then constrain and enable these lower-level systems—when individuals are ‘‘caught’’ in social movements, for instance. In addition to the enabling and constraining dimensions of structure, Kontopoulos (1993, 235–36) also mentions a third one: higher-level structures avail themselves of and engulf lowerlevel structures. As structured structures avail structuring structures, the social movements can work in ‘‘mysterious ways.’’ For instance, Sheller (2001, 13–14) refers to seepage, that is, how fluid movement escapes the structures that seek to channel it. This also implies that complex changes do not directly result from the agents’ will to change the world (see Urry 2000, 196).

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TRAJECTORIES OF ENTRAINMENT

Crossley (1999) describes the British mental health users’ movement in ways that seem compatible with the Bénard cell analogy. The movement started as an embryonic cell with a handful of individuals who had acquired what Crossley calls ‘‘resistance habitus’’ in their earlier lives. Following a government proposal to close a progressive hospital, they managed to recruit patients and sta√ into the movement. Finally, the ‘‘take-o√ ’’ of the movement was facilitated by sustained media attention, which attracted a large number of new members. Drawing on Bourdieu and Foucault, Crossley notes that one of the conditions for the emergence of such a movement was the existence of a mental health field. Having institutionalized insanity and transformed it into a curable condition, the field brought patients together and constituted them as a group with a new habitus. Hence, the history of the emergence of such a movement has genealogical rather than linear forms. The use of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of practices as habitus within fields enables Crossley to reconstruct the unfolding of practices in relation to their environments, providing a dynamic account of the emergence of the mental health users’ movement. With a similar aim, I use interviews of local key members of the Finnish Green Party from Tampere to obtain an inside view of ‘‘getting involved’’ in a social movement.∏ These interviews and their narrative content correspond to the molecular level of the Bénard cell analogue model. The individual accounts of local activists serve to trace trajectories that provide clues as to how the movement starts to flow: how people become involved and how a social movement emerges from such involvement. As such, they reveal heterogeneous continuity and rupture involved in the genealogy of a movement.π Following such trajectories is a useful way to understand the dynamics involved in the movement and to gain clues of the actors’ perceived and appropriated possibility spaces (or opportunity structures) in the movement environment. After all, if we want to understand what social movement waves are like, why not ask the social movement surfers who ride these waves? This is certainly an advantage that human beings have over oil molecules: unlike the molecules, human beings can tell us how they feel about rolling in the movements of their respective fluid cells. Taking into account Melucci’s (1995) warning

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against easy equations between activist biographies and the broader meaning of social movements, the biographical interviews are used here more modestly, to show how individuals make sense of the movements they are drawn into. The interviewees were asked how they became involved in environmental issues and the Green movement. Our first interviewee, Pauli Välimäki, had moved to Tampere from a smaller Finnish town to study journalism at the university in the 1970s. He had been active in leftist politics and had worked at Hämeen Yhteistyö, the local journal of the skdl Party.∫ However, Pauli’s involvement in the emerging Green movement pulled him away from the skdl. The Komposti journal was one of the results [of the emergent Green movement] and I read it here at the university. Quite soon after that, I went to interview [the editor] Pekka Haavisto and all those ideas . . . sort of made me want to know these people, as it felt as if they corresponded to my own views of the world. Before that, I had been active in the skdl but that soon started to feel strange for me. Then I was looking for a new framework from the alternative movement’s way of thinking, which felt somehow fresh and free of dogma and all that, ethically high quality. . . . And also very radical, questioning all the things that those old ideologies didn’t question, let’s say like car driving and things related to lifestyles, like eating meat. So it was new in an exciting way, and things that you couldn’t see the connection between before were problematized, and it was demonstrated how everything is connected to everything.

According to Pauli’s description, ‘‘everyone’’ around at the time in Tampere was involved with alternative lifestyles. People were living in communes, eating vegetarian food, and participating in a variety of organizations that were actively dealing with a variety of issues, including peace, human rights, alternative social policy, and the environment. Of course, this kind of activity was a wider phenomenon in Finland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, giving rise to a Green counterculture that was focusing on new quality of life questions (E. Konttinen 1998, 1999). All kinds of alternative things were going on, we were editing a newspaper called HaamulehtiΩ . . . so it wasn’t just environmental activism, but different alternative activities. Living together in communes, eating vegetarian food, buying food straight from the farms . . . all these things were tied together, the same bunch of people were doing all kinds of things. . . . We were

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interested in all kinds of alternative phenomena, not just environmentalism and protecting old buildings. (Pauli Välimäki, interview, 6 Aug. 2000)

Pauli’s involvement in the Green movement seems to have derived from a specific set of attractions present at a specific period in time. It would be a mistake to explain it in causal terms. It is neither a case of a stimulus-response chain, nor of rational choice as the logical consequence of some cost-benefit calculation. Nor can we find an extraneous ‘‘structural’’ force that makes him Green. Instead, involvement is clearly relational, and it takes the form of entrainment, where Pauli’s involvement in the movement is not as clear-cut as the vocabulary of ‘‘choice’’ and ‘‘decision’’ implies. The idea of entrainment suggests a path where one thing leads to another, while rejecting any single driving force behind the sequence of events. Satu Hassi had been involved in leftist student politics in Helsinki prior to moving to Tampere. Somewhat older than Pauli, she had been actively involved in the radical student movement associated with the leftist skdl Party before the emergence of the Green movement: Around the end of the 1970s, of course, this revolutionary gang started to . . . well, gradually the fiercest excitement started to fade away. And sometime at the beginning of the 1980s, I remember participating in the traditional May Day parade, as I had done a great number of times. There in the square, [a Communist Party mp] was giving a fiery speech, preaching . . . as loud as hell, that in the Soviet Union, the last unemployment agency had already been abolished in the 1920s. . . . And somehow it sounded so idiotic. And then the well-dressed crowd started singing how ‘‘hunger is always with us.’’ That’s when I got this feeling of what am I doing in this crowd? And then, partly because of a [personal] crisis at the beginning of the ’80s, or maybe in the late ’70s, I got involved with those people who founded the Women’s Union, the Tampere Women’s Union. . . . Partly through these feminist connections and partly through the leftist people, some environmentalist people entered my circle of acquaintances. I was also involved in these new movement activities, such as the women’s peace movement. In 1983, I took part in that . . . peace walk from New York to Washington. Then in 1984, a friend called and told me that an electoral coalition of ‘‘alternative’’ people was being formed for the municipal elections, asking if I would join the feminist list. After some hesitation I agreed. (Satu Hassi, interview, 8 Sept. 2000)

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Note the language that both Pauli and Satu use to describe their move from the left to the Greens. To Satu, the propaganda-style speech starts to somehow sound idiotic, which gives her the feeling of being misplaced. Pauli felt that the Green ideas were fresh and corresponded to his view of the world. His former membership in the skdl started to feel alien. It would be far-fetched indeed to call their involvement in the Green movement a matter of rational choice. Questioning Mancur Olson’s (1965) account of collective action, the idea of rational choice is abandoned here in two important ways: first, by the clear primacy of gut feeling over rational calculation and, second, by the fact that in its contemporary form, the movement did not exist as a formal organization with clear goals; that is, its form was not instrumental. Thus, the act of joining is not a clear-cut decision, but more akin to drifting toward interesting people, places, and ideas. Instead of perfectly informed choice, the phenomenon here implies resonance: identifying with something, being drawn to something interesting and pushed away from something alien. In a sense, the move is a result of an energy flow from leftist politics toward the Green movement, away from alienation, toward attraction.∞≠ Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is a way of understanding such stories of entrainment and resonance. Habitus can be understood as a system of relatively durable dispositions, as internalized social structure accumulated through previous experience, which governs one’s attitudes, preferences, and tastes. Habitus is something of an embodied structuring structure, which is both the source and result of action. It includes the insight that structure is not external to, but internalized by the individual actor, as a set of dispositions that are acquired in earlier life (Bourdieu 1977, 1990, 1994). These dispositions are the basis of the great majority of human action and entail a certain path-dependence that accounts for the (relatively stable) social order. As such, the notion of habitus allows for a nonlinear explanation of human action in terms of entrainment where the subject operates, based on its former status. Therefore, habitus accounts for orientation of human action toward certain ends without resorting to intention—or any other single internal driving force—for explaining this orientation.∞∞ Bourdieu’s notion has the e√ect of secularizing the individual. Instead of relying on rationalization such as goals ( fins), human action is rooted in ‘‘acquired disposition,’’ that is, in all the walks of life one has traveled. As such,

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habitus can be understood as Bourdieu’s attempt to grasp the mode of social self-organization at the individual level. The secularizing logic lies in stripping the individual of metaphysical features such as idealized rationality and intentionality and, in contrast, seeing human action as a product of its own developmental paths. Thus, what threw Pauli and Satu into the new emerging movement was a mix of situational or structural conditions and internalized embodied inclinations. Despite their alienation from the leftist skdl Party, previous involvement by Satu and Pauli in political action accounts for what could be called a ‘‘politically active habitus,’’ which made it easier for them to join the Green movement. Crossley (1999, 2003) uses the notion of ‘‘resistance habitus’’ in a similar manner, accounting for the involvement of movement activists who had previous experience in other social and political movements. Because resistance habitus is not equally distributed among social movement actors, some actors are more in tune with opportunities and enablements or, to use Gibson’s (1979) term, ‘‘a√ordances’’ that surface as events and changes in the action environment take place, thus leading to participation and mobilization.

DISCURSIVE MEMBRANES

Suggesting that analogue models from thermodynamics and fluid mechanics are helpful in making sense of social movements points to questions of the status of ‘‘social’’ in social movements. What is the specificity of movement in the case of humans, as opposed to oil molecules in Bénard cells? The question can also be asked in the light of di√erent forms of collective behavior: Is there any di√erence between the fluidity of, say, panic, a hostile outburst, and a goal-oriented social movement (see Smelser 1962 for a classic taxonomy)? If not, where then should we look for the dynamic di√erences between collective behavior and social movement? The role of human cognition and especially language as means of communication are crucial mechanisms of self-organization. Thus, the place of the social in social movement is found in language-mediated communication. Drawing on but departing from Luhmann’s approach to social systems,∞≤ Leydesdor√ (2001, 305) suggests that language is the

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key operating system of society: ‘‘Language enables us, among other things, to recode, that is, to translate and thus to reconsider interactively the functionality of what has grown naturally and/or what was culturally constructed previously, for example, in the service of our individual selforganization and/or that of society. (Note that from this perspective, society includes also the historically prevailing definitions of ‘nature’).’’ The role of language is also crucial for the self-organization of social movements, as the comments by the Green activists demonstrate. The emerging communication of ‘‘greening’’ may be understood as a fluctuation that became an important attractor in the social space and gave rise to movement identity. In the context of social systems characterized by communication, Leydesdor√ (1997, 26) refers to identity in relation to self-organization, which he defines as ‘‘the ability of a system to select among communicated meanings with reference to the system’s identity. While a reflexive meaning can be provisionally stabilized, a further selection among various possible meanings potentially globalizes the system. Thus, the identity of a self-organizing system can be considered as a distributed and changing regime of representations.’’ Indeed, the interviews point to an emergent new code, or a new Green paradigm that was taking shape in the early 1980s.∞≥ The code included an amalgam of elements such as alternative lifestyles, a new valuation of quality of life issues and subjectivity, and forms of critique of modernity. Likewise, starting in the mid-1970s, students’ aversion from the dogmatic rationality of Marxist movements became increasingly widespread (E. Konttinen 1998, 1999). Moments of entanglement in movements such as the ones described by Pauli and Satu can thus be seen as moments of mutual selection between attractors in social space that take the form of meaningful codes akin to paradigms (see Leydesdor√ 1993, 2001). These can be understood in a broad sense as a set of related practices and meaningful discourse. Such codes may acquire enough momentum to evolve by themselves, still carried by individuals but increasingly independent of any single individual. Therefore, the crucial moment is the one wherein individuals lose their monopoly over a discourse, which instead gains power vis-à-vis its individual carriers. In a sense, there is a reversal of control as the discursive code emerges and begins to carry its carriers. This, of course, does not mean that the individual participants in the

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Green movement’s ‘‘regime of representations’’ necessarily acquire a one-dimensional Green identity. Consequently, the notion of resonance refers here to the interaction between individual sense making and an emergent code that strikes a chord. As Pauli puts it, there is an attraction to a network, a ‘‘correspondence’’ between worldviews and a sense of ‘‘all kinds of things going on.’’ Mediated by linguistically conveyed meaning, this mechanism of entrainment provides a special case of the Bénard cell model, one particular to the interrelations between linguistic classifications and human beings, which Hacking (2000, 103–9) has called ‘‘interactive kinds.’’ Thus, the entrainment of self-referential beings is not a blindfold process, and one should bear in mind that it adds an extra dimension of complexity to the thermodynamic model of fluids. In social systems, language operates as a mechanism of variation and selection. Language is also relevant in terms of perception of the movement environment and self-perception. A source of complexity relevant for political and other opportunity structures derives from the fact that opportunities cannot be opportunities unless they are really within the reach of those seeking them. To be real, opportunities have to be perceived as such and appropriated. Such perception is mediated by language. Unlike biological and evolutionary boundary conditions, the political opportunity structures that human actors face are subject to discursive struggles (Koopmans and Duyvendak 1995, 245). Cognitive frames for social movements themselves are part and parcel of the movements, forging their goals and identities and acting as common denominators among movement activists. Gamson (1992, 1995), for instance, sees such appropriation in discursive terms, as framing collective action in ways that underline the integrity of the collective identity and agency in relation to injustices that instigate and legitimize such action. In any case, the discursive dimension is intertwined in the making of and unfolding of events (see also Jenson 1995; V. Taylor and Whittier 1995). Thus, we can hypothesize about a movement striving, in its emergent phase, toward operational closure, that is, toward a phase where it can enter into an evolutionary mode of development through self-organization. When we see language as an essential mechanism in the selforganization of a social movement, it is possible to look for linguistic

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mechanisms that provide for operational closure, allowing for the coevolution of a social network and a code of conduct. For instance, considering Gamson’s (1992, 1995) observations on social movements’ cognitive frames such as agency and identity, one could perceive discursive frameworks as the construction of a ‘‘discursive membrane.’’ These membranes are used to di√erentiate the network and the code it carries from its operating environment and therefore allow for operational autonomy. Like biological cell membranes, these discursive membranes have a double function, as they both isolate cells and connect them to others. As in the case of any organization, the permeability of the membrane is a delicate matter, as it should keep the organization intact and operational, without endangering its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Another aspect evident here is the narrative dimension in telling stories and life histories in relation to movements. Thus, the interviews used here may be reflected in relation to the Bénard cell analogy, but they also portray a narrative aspect that escapes such straightforward analogy. The stories told are not only factual accounts of what happened, but also ways of rationalization, sense making, or possibly even therapy in the midst of fluid events. The narrative mode provides the possibility of reverting the time axis by telling and retelling the past as a way of orienting to the future. In relation to trajectories and entrainment, storytelling may thus be seen as an additional degree of freedom, which allows a specific kind of self-organization (see Leydesdor√ 1997). Because such narratives provide organization in the form of temporary and recursive fixes in the flow of events, they provide a perspective of the temporality of agency, seeking to connect past with future (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Thus, narrativity adds a new dimension to the dynamics of movement formation. Still, as noted earlier, agency is not the only agent in social change. Trajectories and narratives are always subject to shifts in conjunctions, punctuation, and transient events.

CONJUNCTURES AND CRITICAL EVENTS

Kontopoulos (1993, 222–32) sees conjunctures as a form of ‘‘quasi-local’’ structure, a level structure that is genuinely novel and not reducible to lower-level structures such as individual choices. In terms of the emer-

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gence of social movements, conjunctures are found, for instance, where a Green mp-to-be feels at home in a new discourse. In the face of a new situation, the enrollment in the movement just seems to click. The individual trajectory converges with other, similar paths in the same movement, a process that takes place in concrete, place-bound space, as well as in social space and communication networks. The events through which individuals join or become entrained in social movements can be explained only in evolutionary terms, that is, taking time and space seriously and looking closely at the paths that brought them there. Behind the probabilistic statistical picture of certain independent variables characterizing individual political behavior (such as voting Green), there are the multiple patterns of dispositions of the habitus, the relative regularity of which is the only guarantee of the validity of the statistical link. However, there are also exceptions, or ‘‘deviant cases’’ (see Mahoney 2000, 508), which just disappear in statistics and are not the prime target of Bourdieu’s mapping of social fields. The discrepancy between what is expected or regular and what actually happens relies on the multiplicity of contingent fluctuations or ‘‘butterfly e√ects’’ that are inherent in any complex system. The account that Satu gives of what she calls the ‘‘coincidence’’ of her being elected to the local council in 1984 portrays a good dose of such contingencies: In many ways, I was getting frustrated working in engineering . . . at Tampella [large local machinery manufacturing company], which was just terrible . . . and I felt that I was dying there. So I fled to the Tampere University of Technology where I got a temporary job. . . . I had thought that I would find more intelligent discussion there about our responsibility for the fate of our world. I was really pondering the pollution of the environment, the arms race . . . how everything was going down the drain. . . . But I noticed that the workplace community had no means of discussing our responsibility for the world. Environmental issues, for instance, were somehow totally out. . . . So, on the one hand I was frustrated with the job at the University of Technology, and on the other, I had these crises in my private life. Both of these things influenced the fact that I started to write poetry and then, to my great surprise, I won the poetry category of the Pirkanmaa [regional] writing contest in 1983. . . . And the wsoy [publishing company] decided to publish my poems just after I had promised to run in the municipal elections. I was interviewed

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in at least three big women’s magazines just before our electoral list was released. And that guaranteed my being elected. (Satu Hassi, interview, 8 Sept. 2000)

Instead of external causal factors, the examples in Pauli’s and Satu’s accounts point to internal fluctuations—or microcurrents, as Prigogine and Stengers (1986, 215) describe the emergence of patterns in Bénard instability—that take the form of, for instance, hesitation, ‘‘Should I stay or should I go?’’ It is just such fluctuation that these reflective individuals react to in quitting a job, getting a divorce, or joining a social movement. Conjunctures can thus be characterized as outcomes of internal fluctuations at the focal level of the heterarchy. At the individual level, this implies that habitus is not a fixed entity, but entails indeterminacy. Such fluctuations are, of course, made in sequences of interaction with one’s environment and other people, that is, recurring interference or perturbation. Combining the insight of habitus and the dynamics of complex systems, we can understand how individuals operate in their former modes in a way that allows for the possibility of small fluctuations to be amplified, resulting in profound changes and further entrainment. The noise of seemingly minor contingencies can produce a butterfly e√ect, with considerable repercussions. Hence, the telephone call Satu received in 1984 to join the Green Alternative Tampere electoral list can be characterized as noise. It interfered with her life but resonated with some fluctuations that were influenced by earlier noise, so that she decided to join. Note how such contingent conjunctures proved to be very important for the two interviewees, because in a sense, the next twenty years of their lives follow a path-dependent sequence as members of the Green movement, which was later registered (1987) as a political party. Satu Hassi became the Green Party chairperson in 1997 and was appointed minister of the environment in 1999.∞∂ Real places and spaces are highly relevant for such conjunctures or bifurcations to take place. As Gieryn (2000) argues, places have a causal force of their own, enabling or constraining interaction and engagement. The properties of places have an independent e√ect on human action and, conversely, such social phenomena as class, culture, politics, and social movements are all emplaced. Among other acts, places arrange patterns of social interaction and constitute social net-

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works spawning collective action. This could account for the fact that university towns—where young, mostly middle-class people converge into a ‘‘critical mass’’ at meaningful intersections of their lives—make for typical sites of contention. Places are also relevant as sites of significant events. In the trajectories of our interviewees, the demolition of an old industrial building in the city center in 1976 passed without significant public protest at the time but did not go unnoticed: ∞∑

But at that time [1970s] in Tampere it was part of the Zeitgeist that old buildings were being demolished. And when I came here to study, they were just demolishing the old Verkatehdas [yarn factory] and I was just in time to still see it and of course I started wondering why such buildings were being demolished here. (Pauli Välimäki, interview, 6 Aug. 2000) The demolishing of the old Verkatehdas . . . I thought it was so uncivilized . . . in addition to being drawn into these groups who then went on to organize the alternative electoral coalition in 1984, it had exceeded the limits of my patience. Had the old factory not been demolished, I probably would not have bothered to join. (Satu Hassi, interview, 8 Sept. 2000)

The demolishing of an old factory in the city center in 1976 appears as an incident that constituted a meaningful disturbance for the Greenactivists-to-be. Even if the 1970s witnessed few overt protest movements locally, the event was significant as it was widely discussed and regarded as a mistake in city planning. In the experience of the interviewees, the demolishing of the factory could be characterized as a seed of frustration that later produced local environmental protest events. Interestingly, the two quotes also point an accusing finger at local politicians’ actions, which appear as incomprehensible or ‘‘uncivilized.’’∞∏ Such social frustration can be seen as important for later mobilization in the 1980s and crucial for the emergence of the Greens as a political force both locally and nationally. I ended up in the Greens because of the [1981] o≈ce block conflict, that’s where I got to know those people . . . well, I knew some of them before, of course, but this was the first real . . . campaign. [The old o≈ce block conflict] was really about the formation of the Greens here . . . people from Helsinki participated as well. Soininvaara and Ville Komsi helped to organize the event, which lasted for months after the squatting

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of the building . . . that’s where all the contacts were made and I also got to know these people. And when the elections came, it was just somehow natural and convenient that the same bunch of people participated in them as well. . . . The people from Helsinki probably knew each other from Koijärvi. And then there was this environmental camp in Inkoo, where some people from Tampere participated and everybody somehow felt that they were part of the same ideological framework. Through the Inkoo camp, more radical forms of action came along, like direct action, and it was also a challenge directed at the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, and to traditional nature conservation. (Pauli Välimäki, interview, 6 Aug. 2000)

The local protest was inspired and fueled by a conflict at Lake Koijärvi, a wetland with a rich community of breeding birds, in 1979, and was in fact part of a wave of local conflicts across Finland that took place between the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Koijärvi conflict was not the first event in this wave, but it certainly was the most visible, and it became an important symbolic event and reference point for the Finnish Green movement (E. Konttinen 1999). Such events can be understood in Das’s (1996) and Bourdieu’s (1988) terms as ‘‘critical events.’’ Das describes critical events as events that cut through the social fabric, from the public to the intimate; Bourdieu discusses them in relation to social fields, as events that create a crisis in a particular field, which then spreads through other fields in the social space. The Koijärvi conflict cannot be compared in scale with cases used by Bourdieu and Das (i.e., the events of May 1968 in Paris and, among others, the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947). However, on the scale of Finnish postwar politics, the conflict was a moment when environmental concern entered the political field in an unprecedented way, recruiting widespread support and marking the birth of Green politics in Finland. In addition, it synchronized a multitude of local conflicts into a wave of contentious action, through both personal networks and shared ideology. It also gave rise to the so-called Koijärvi generation of Finnish environmentalists (E. Konttinen 1999). A necessary condition for the Koijärvi conflict to become critical was the intense media attention it attracted. Publicity functioned as an amplifier (see Crossley 1999) for the movement, attracting new members and spreading models of action beyond local networks.

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In 1979, I had just been to France on a bird-watching trip. . . . I got back and the tv news told how Lake Koijärvi was being drained∞π . . . and it felt just terrible. The third best bird lake [in Finland] is drying up, the water is being drained and nobody is doing anything about it. . . . And then I saw that some guy called Ville Komsi and some others have rushed there [to stop it,] which I thought was really wonderful. So I took my little brother’s car and a camera to get there to write a story about Koijärvi for the [newsletter of the regional nature conservation association]. And I stayed there. Over the three and a half months that followed, I spent over fifty days there. . . . And what Koijärvi meant to me, since I never got into university to study anything . . . Koijärvi was my university, where I saw Ville Komsi and the others, and how to run a popular movement like that, a project . . . and how to spin the media and so on. . . . That’s where I learned to do publicity. How to make a press release, how to keep calling journalists all the time. (Harri Helin, interview, 24 Aug. 2000)

As Harri demonstrates, sites of collective action are also sources of inspiration and learning new skills as part of collective action. Critical events are thus appropriated by actors and become incorporated in their habitus, as practical knowledge or competence, building a sense of identity and agency. Intertwined with life histories, such events may become truly transformative. To sum up, the dynamics of social movement can be studied as comprising trajectories of systems operating as heterarchies at di√erent, intermeshed levels of structures, always building on their previous states. The processes at the individual level link with the social, building embryonic cells capable of self-organization and recruitment of new actors. In accounts explaining the dynamics of emergence, the interviewees reveal a temporal topology of pathways and events. This topology, with its time-variant enablements and constraints, is appropriated through a felt sense,∞∫ that is, iteration based on like and dislike, attraction and aversion, which then guides individual trajectories, mostly without explicit and deliberate choices.∞Ω In their narratives of involvement, the interviewees focus on meaningful events that remain in the activists’ memories, although without resulting in any visible mobilization, and others that trigger contentious action in the form of protest waves. It seems that the former type of events helps explain the occurrence of the latter, by pointing to the

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sequence of events prior to what would otherwise appear to happen all of a sudden. Thus, the ‘‘frustrating events’’ account for the tension that ultimately leads to bursts of protest. The tension that builds up in sequences of events and nonevents amounts to potential for action. Here opportunity structures for action could be reformulated in dialectical terms, as the tension and release of movement potential. In the framework of heterarchical structuration, critical events can thus be understood as events that instigate upscale changes, regardless of any objective measurement of event size. The notion of critical events can also be seen as operating on di√erent scales. Taking into account the places of the events relative to features in media and communication networks, it is possible to consider some events as critical at the local and individual level. Whereas the Koijärvi conflict clearly assumed nationwide importance, local events such as the demolishing of old buildings and more explicit protest events can be interpreted as critical, as they involved individuals and were retained in memory as reference points for later activities. As we can see in the interviews, frustrating events are not necessarily political in the sense of attracting publicity or widespread public debate, not to mention the possibility of lack of interest within the formal, institutional political system. If we instead choose to look at the undergrowth of institutional political arenas, such frustrating events could well be called not only subpolitical (see Beck 1997) but also subcritical. This refers to their genealogies in lower-scale fluctuations as embryonic events that contain the seeds of public contestation with potentially widespread e√ects.

CONCLUSION

Building on the notion of heterarchies and the dynamics of emergence, as captured by the Bénard cell analogy, I have suggested that social movement could be studied as natural movement. I have maintained that something can be learned from the complex patterns of molecular movement in fluids. What kind of explanation is this? It certainly does not seem coherent with much of social science. Admittedly, reference to fluid mechanics may sound mechanistic, maybe even deterministic. Therefore, I have pointed out that (multiple) determination and determinism are not the same thing. The fact that processes are determined

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by something—and invariably, in any interesting case, by a multitude of things—does not mean that they are deterministic, that is, predictable or manipulable. The nonlinear nature of complex processes is just as relevant in the sphere of social complexity. Interactive and selforganizing systems such as human beings and social movements are determined in very specific ways, following the sensibilities of their habitus. Instead of pregiven entities, individuals and movements may be understood as creations of their own history, transactions, and complex genealogy. I have also touched on the other meaning of cause, implying goaloriented action, typically seen as a key feature of any social and political movement. I have pointed out that processes that give rise to movements should not be turned into linear and simplified equations in the form of, say, political reductionism, where a movement is defined as nothing but its political cause. Movements cannot therefore be reduced to their goals or manifest causes. They constitute emergent evolutionary systems that act along their accumulated dispositions and sensibilities in multidimensional environments or possibility spaces. They mobilize in unpredictable threshold conditions. They feed on discursive and material a√ordances that they find in their operating environments. In this sense, movements may be seen as emergent life forms that are carried by their participants. It is true, of course, that movements do develop coherent identities and clearly defined goals. My aim has been to point out that good causes and movement identities may also be seen in evolutionary terms, that is, as emergent codes of communication that arise in transactions and allow for reflexivity and novel forms of self-organization. I have discussed the causes that movements pursue in terms of the notion of discursive membranes, pointing to the stabilization of the self-organizing patterns. Thus, organization of a movement is not only about organizing individuals into groups or networks, but is a process of self-organizing identification where actors-in-movement become entrained through specific pathways into networks where shared identities emerge. The idea of fluidity and the Bénard cell analogue model, along with a look at activist accounts, have been useful in questioning the double meaning of cause in social movement. Analogies pointing at emergence and evolutionary explanation through level structures seem more helpful in understanding how indeterminate external causes combine with

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internal, circular ones (see Baecker 2001). The broader issue of understanding social change is at stake here. The iterative nature of complex processes has been neglected in sociology, and the multiplicity of iterations in social processes has simply been swept under the carpet of structure. This has strengthened dualism and led to a heavy reliance on agency as the sole explanation of change (Urry 2000). The explanatory trade-o√ between agency and structure is also related to the distinction between independent and dependent variables in causal explanation. However, there is a case to be made against any fixed use of independent and dependent variables in social science explanation. To this e√ect, Alexander (1987, 315) has noted that elements in social science explanation should instead be ‘‘conceived as parameters and variables in an interactive system comprising di√erent levels of di√erent size.’’ Alexander goes on to state that such an e√ort requires a conceptual scheme that the social sciences do not yet possess. Alexander’s observation seems to open the way to consider analogical, evolutionary, and complexity models as such a conceptual scheme. The dynamics of social movement may be seen in fresh ways through analogue models of movement, and there are many other lessons for social processes and patterns in a broader sense. A final warning is due here. The evolutionary mode of explanation does have consequences for pregiven entities such as taken-for-granted conceptions of agency and disciplinary borders. Questioning the significance and indeed the nature of human agency as we know it, the view of complex systems theory runs counter to the mainstream social science views, which have traditionally upheld a certain ‘‘heroic’’ mode of human agency. The explanatory models used in this essay, founded on trajectories such as the notion of path dependency or Bourdieu’s model where ‘‘things just go that way,’’ seem to violate a politically correct understanding of agency. All too often, agency is treated as an answer instead of a puzzle in itself. Indeed, if agency is related to empowerment and therefore important to us, why treat it as a taboo instead of making our understanding of it as robust as possible? A way forward might be to study the relation between di√erent modes of agency and self-organization. In any case, it makes little sense to detach agency from its e√ects and indulge in abstract or metaphysical discussions on the issue. Arguing against the hierarchical use of a priori independent and dependent variables is ultimately an argument against any disciplinary

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boundaries, including those between natural and social sciences. Therefore, we may ask the following question: If culture can be seen as a legitimate framework for studying social movements, why can’t nature be just as good a candidate? After all, both concepts share an allencompassing and ambiguous character. Social science seems to hold the view that nature does not explain anything social as such, as it is merely the sphere of determinism. Culture, however, is not necessarily much better in this respect: the Durkheimian tradition in sociology and the closure of culture in the anthropological tradition have reified culture as a transcendental category, amounting to essentialism reminiscent of the natural (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 1993). Clearly, we need to be more specific here. What is certainly more interesting is how culture works and how individuals or social movements do ‘‘cultural work’’—how issues are framed, how discourses change (Johnston and Klandermans 1995), or how music is used in social movements (Eyerman and Jamison 1998). Similarly, one may ask how nature works. After abandoning the idea of natural determinism, the uses of models based on natural analogies and metaphors depend on how closely we care to look at these processes and how willing we are to learn from, say, molecules in the Bénard cells.

NOTES

I wish to thank a number of people who have helped with this piece in both Tampere and Amsterdam, including Sean Chabot, Chuck Dyke, Yrjö Haila, Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdor√, Susan Oyama, and John Shotter. I also want to thank fellow students and friends in both the ‘‘Umbrella group’’ in Tampere and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research for inspiration and support. Special thanks to Hannes Ikäheimo for e-mail exchanges on an earlier version, Minna Mäntylä for the transcripts of the interviews, and Jonna Kangasoja for final comments. 1 Discussing the importance of the ‘‘injustice framework’’ for collective action, Gamson (1992, 32) makes a remark on the emotional dimension of the framework: ‘‘Di√erent emotions can be stimulated by perceived inequities—cynicism, bemused irony, resignation. But injustice focuses on the righteous anger that puts fire in the belly and iron in the soul. Injustice, as I argued earlier, is a hot cognition, not merely an abstract intellectual judgment about what is equitable.’’

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2 This feature of living systems is demonstrated in Maturana and Varela (1988) through the notion of autopoiesis, referring to self-organization in biological systems, as the ability to function as both producer and product. As to the extension of this principle in the field of social systems, one should be cautious, however. Leydesdor√ (1993) argues that the idea of selforganization cannot be taken for granted in social systems and should therefore be used as a hypothesis. 3 Evolutionary explanation resembles Foucault’s genealogy as both are opposed to historical accounts of preformed entities. Genealogy is an exercise in placing archaeological findings in heterogeneous and punctuated continuities, without referring to a definite origin but rather to ‘‘numberless beginnings’’ (Foucault 1984; see also Dean 1998). Similarly, evolutionary explanation maintains that ‘‘god is dead’’; that is, we can base our explanations only on a secular history that has taken a multiplicity of forms ever since the Big Bang and continues to do so in heterogeneous and contingent ways (Dyke 1988). 4 Hierarchy theory is a variant of complex systems theorizing. It claims that systems may fruitfully be seen as composed of level structures where higher levels constrain lower levels, which constitute higher ones (Simon 1973). 5 Kontopoulos (1993, 327) sees Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory as deficient especially as it lacks a solid account of upward structuration and emergence, relying instead on ‘‘magical incantations.’’ 6 The three interviewees were Pauli Välimäki, a journalist and Green city council member in Tampere; Satu Hassi, one of the first Green city council members and, at the time of the interview (2000), minister of the environment; and Harri Helin, a city council member since 2001 and a long-time general secretary of the regional branch of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation. The interviews were conducted in August 2000 (Laine and Peltonen 2003). The excerpts have been translated from Finnish. 7 For a view on the uses of biographical interviews in social movement research, see Della Porta (1992). Here it is crucial to grasp that movements cannot be understood through personal accounts only. What seems pertinent is the plurality of actors and the double meaning of ‘‘subject’’ as oscillating between the control of certain moves and being overwhelmed by events and movements. 8 The literal translation of the abbreviation skdl is ‘‘Finnish People’s Democratic League.’’ The coalition included the communists. The skdl was the precursor to the present-day Vasemmistoliitto, ‘‘League of the Left.’’ 9 Meaning ‘‘phantom paper,’’ this alternative publication had as its deliberate target the biggest local newspaper with a rhyming name, Aamulehti.

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10 It is not uncommon that people involved in collective action state that ‘‘I didn’t choose the cause, the cause chose me.’’ When interviewed for a bbc documentary, Brian Davies, the International Foundation for Animal Welfare campaigner for seal protection, recalling his first visit to Newfoundland where seals where clubbed to death, stated, ‘‘I didn’t pick the seals, they picked me.’’ There must be more to such statements than repetition of a cliché or covering purely strategic reasoning with a more acceptable veil. 11 According to Bourdieu, his theory of action amounts to saying that rather than intention, most human action is based on acquired dispositions that allow action to be interpreted as oriented toward an end, without the claim that it was based on a conscious aim at that end. In a nontrivial sense, ‘‘things just happen like that’’ (Bourdieu 1994, 183–84). Bourdieu uses the idea of ‘‘investments’’ as a further explanation of how present practices are rooted in previous paths, both in an economic and psychological way (151– 53). Investments may be understood as interests with a durée in time. 12 Leydesdor√ (2001, 19) draws on Luhmann’s (1995) self-organization paradigm in sociology, according to which society should no longer be considered as composed of human beings, but rather of (systems of ) communications. Whereas Luhmann proposed that ‘‘meaning’’ be considered the operator of social systems, Leydesdor√ positions language—with the dual layers of meaning and information—in this role. 13 See Leydesdor√ (1993) on Kuhnian paradigms as a model for emergent self-organization. 14 For a brief summary of the history of the Finnish Green movement, see A. Konttinen (2000). 15 According to Gieryn (2000, 473–79), places have the e√ect of emplacing di√erence and hierarchy, domination over man and nature, bringing people together in engagement or, conversely, estrangement. Places can also restrict collective action. Gieryn’s points resemble a ‘‘linguistic turn’’ in spatial terms, that is, granting new entities some form of independent, causal powers, instead of seeing them just as secondary ‘‘decorations.’’ 16 The issue of the relation between aesthetics and politics is clearly in play here. Some would argue that bad taste equals bad politics, but it is su≈cient here to point out how the di√erent instances of habitus, embodied in both political elites and protest movements, can be used to understand such friction. For an attempt to explain patterns in local governance through the habitus embodied in governing coalitions, see Painter (1997) and Laine and Peltonen (2000). See also Markus Laine’s contribution in this volume.

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17 Prominent local farmers were draining the lake to protect their fields from flooding. The environmental activists built a dam to block the drainage and padlocked themselves to the bulldozer to stop it. Later, the activists were arrested and sentenced to pay fines in court. After appeals, the Finnish government agreed on a compromise solution of ‘‘partial protection’’ and paid to provide pumps to the farmers to keep their fields dry. As a result, the value of Koijärvi as a bird lake deteriorated. Interestingly, it was a previously unsuccessful attempt to drain the lake at the beginning of the century that originally made the lake into a valuable wetland habitat for birds. 18 I want to thank John Shotter for pointing out this notion. 19 Here Bourdieu’s theory of action, referring to the actors’ ‘‘sense of the game,’’ to trajectories and events, replaces structural determinism with heterarchical determination. Methodologically, this implies that even if much of these topologies is visible in biographical accounts, analysis is needed to combine other level structures, as all the constraints and enablements are evidently not within the reach of the narratives of social movement actors.

Fight Over the Face of Tampere A Sneaking Transformation of a Local Political Field

Markus Laine THE GROWTH OF CITIES is based on a whole range of economic and social processes, which are woven together into complex historical transformations. Cityscapes are molded by economic necessities and cultural preferences. Cities, being end results of processes that nobody deliberately planned to begin with (Dyke 1988), e≈ciently break down the boundary between culture and nature. Purely artificial elements in the city such as old buildings acquire strong symbolic meaning as standing for the nature of the city; indeed, old buildings represent ‘‘second nature’’ in a deep sense (see Lähde, this volume). In this essay I look into the city of Tampere, the biggest inland city in the Nordic countries, which originated as a local trading post and marketplace. Tampere is sometimes called the Manchester of Finland, in homage to the red brick factories on both sides of the Tammerkoski rapids, which give a peculiar character to the city. Tampere is situated on a narrow isthmus between two lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, which are connected by the rapids. The king of Sweden, Gustaf III, was persuaded that the rapids were good assets for economic purposes. He signed the founding charter of the city in 1779 and gave tax privileges, which safeguarded the industrial development of the city. The industrialization was made possible predominantly by foreign money, and it took o√ when Finland was a grand duchy of tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. Factories needed workers, and Tampere grew rapidly: the city has been the most important industrial center in Finland since the first half of the nineteenth century, with a whole range of textile, paper, timber, and metal industries. Over 40 percent of Finland’s industrial workforce were employed in Tampere in the late nineteenth century. Tampere also boasted two of the biggest factories in the Nordic coun-

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tries. As is typical in an industrial city, labor parties, namely the Social Democrats and the Communists (skdl),∞ were influential in local politics during the second half of the twentieth century. Local politics is a growing field of research, although there are just a few studies in which the cultural dimension of local politics has been taken seriously. In studies of the political economy of a given locality, decision making is commonly understood to be a voluntary process in which political groups form coalitions based solely on rational calculation. However, Joe Painter (1997, 134–43) argues that local political coalitions are not simply formed on the basis of rational choice. Instead, local modes of governance are formed in a dynamic process to which actors bring their resources, values, and cultural dispositions. Meredith Ramsay (1996) showed in her analyses of two small American towns that historically embedded customs and strategies of resource use had more influence on the decision-making process than rational calculation. In addition, local case studies in political ecology and social movements have shown that local governance should be analyzed in the context of changing historical processes, rather than as a result of voluntary decisions (Peet and Watts 1996; Rocheleau et al. 1996). I analyze the process through which the local political regime was challenged in connection with an environmental dispute concerning the future of an old industrial area in Tampere city center. In this process, a particular place within the city center became a vehicle for articulating di√erences in political projects. Simultaneously, place can be understood as a medium through which political identities or habituses became visible (Escobar 2001). To analyze the cultural dimension of this political transition in Tampere and to understand the dynamics of this change, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Bourdieu’s relational sociology is a fruitful tool for understanding social complexity (Dyke 1999) because for him, society or ‘‘social space’’ is not a simple space with only a single logic. It is made up of overlapping and interlocking fields of social action of which politics is one. Bourdieu (1991, 235–39; see also Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 104) defines a field as a dynamic space in which struggles over legitimate visions of the world take place. He also suggests that setting the limits of any given field is a subject of constant contest. Each of these fields, whether academic, economic, political, artistic, religious, or journalistic (Chouliaraki and Fairclough

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1999, 103), has its own cultural logic. This logic mobilizes various forms of capital or combinations of capital, which both determine and are determined by the structure of the field. Bourdieu identifies four fundamental categories of capital: economic, social (networks of mutual recognition), cultural or informational (any kind of legitimate knowledge), and symbolic (reputation, prestige; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 119). Every actor or player within a field abides by the rules of the game, but the borders and the content of the field are open for discussion and redefinition (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 98–99). A crucial question here is what is at stake within the field. Is it money, political power, recognition, prestige, knowledge, or a combination of these? What are the means within the field to achieve this goal? What is considered to be important in the field? What kind of capital or combination of capitals guarantees a dominant position in the field? According to Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), these are empirical questions. In his studies on the working of the state, Bourdieu establishes the notions of the field, di√erent forms of capital, and the habitus of political actors as dynamic concepts requiring detailed empirical analyses (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 98–99). As Western democracies are representative political systems, it is necessary for a ruling coalition to have a social network and gain popularity with the public. Bourdieu uses the terms social and symbolic capital when he refers to this broader social support. Social capital consists of resources and durable, more or less institutionalized networks of relationships based on mutual recognition by actors (Bourdieu 1986). On the other hand, symbolic capital is based on achieved prestige, social honor, reputation, and fame (see Bourdieu 1991, 128, 230; J. Thompson 1991, 72) and can be used to attain or maintain social capital or political power. In politics, achieved prestige, that is, symbolic positions, needs to be generated and maintained. There are two ways to achieve this: first, by presenting an argument that is considered a legitimate vision of an event; second, by acting in a style that is appreciated by the citizens, for instance, e√ectively, empathically, or dialogically. Bourdieu uses the term field of opinion, by which he refers to a site where di√erent kinds of views are contested. To separate other fields from the field of opinion, I use the term public space to refer to sites of public interaction in which political groups, politicians, and other locally active people interact and

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try to impose their ‘‘commonsense’’ or legitimate vision of the world (see Bourdieu 1991, 235–39). The key word here is public: the space has to be attainable by any person who wants to. All fields of social action have their public aspect, but some fields are particularly important for public space, such as the journalistic field. To be e√ective, a political project should be relevant within a social network that consists of one’s own party and other important interest groups. Furthermore, actors in the political field need a project, which has to have relevance in social space with the voters, who ultimately decide which group is going to stay in power. Thus, for a group to be successful, its political projects have to be relevant for the ‘‘frequency’’ that will find ‘‘tuned’’ ears that appreciate such a message (see Dyke 1999). When I use the term political project, I do not simply mean intentional activity. I claim that a political project is based partly on unconscious assumptions. Hence, it is tied, at least in the case of Tampere, to the habitus of a political group or coalition. When people set goals, political or otherwise, they rely on their own views and knowledge, that is, dispositions constructed from their own historical experience, which ‘‘incline agents to act and react in certain ways’’ (J. Thompson 1991, 12).

THE STABILIZATION OF LOCAL POLITICS IN TAMPERE

To understand the formation of the local political scene, it is necessary to look into the postwar history of Tampere and examine the historical reasons for the stabilization of the power structure before we can analyze the environmental dispute mentioned earlier. After the Second World War, the Tampere city council was made up of three parties of equal strength: the Social Democratic Party, the skdl, and the conservative National Coalition Party. Of the three parties, the skdl often had the largest number of representatives in the council in the decades following the war. This strengthened the need for the Social Democrats and the Conservatives to acknowledge a common interest. Seeds for the cooperation of these two parties were already sown in 1940, when they formed a local association of Brothers in Arms (Aseveljet in Finnish). The aim of this association was to give financial support to veterans of the Winter War, fought between Finland and the

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Soviet Union in 1939–1940, and to encourage national independence through the reconstruction of the country. By the 1950s, the ruling coalition of Tampere came to be known both locally and nationally as ‘‘the Brothers in Arms Axis.’’≤ In local postwar politics, the enemy was the Communist Party, seen as a threat to Finnish independence and democracy. The following extract from a discussion in 1944 between Erkki Napoleon Lindfors, who later became mayor of Tampere, and Lauri Santamäki, another leading figure of the Brothers in Arms, illustrates the postwar political atmosphere in Tampere: ‘‘We Social Democrats and Conservatives, who have experienced these di≈cult years together [know that] our fight is not over. It has just changed from a war of weapons into a war of politics’’ (quoted in Seppälä 1983, 115).≥ The local political field in Tampere was part of a larger, heterarchic entity:∂ international, national, regional, and local structuring pressures a√ected and were a√ected by each other. The two most significant factors dividing the field of politics in Tampere immediately after the Second World War were the parties’ attitude to Finnish independence and their relationship with the capitalist economy. The members of the Brothers in Arms Axis identified themselves as defenders of Finnish independence. From the Axis point of view, the Communists seemed to form an internal threat to independence, autonomy, and sovereignty. The fate of many Eastern European countries gave this view some credibility. In addition, Communists naturally claimed that means of production should be taken over by the workers, whereas the Brothers in Arms were convinced that flourishing private industries guaranteed the growth of the city’s prosperity. In the postwar decades, the political atmosphere was characterized by optimism about growth. The postwar economic boom generated enough capital for reconstruction, welfare services, and urban development projects. Once communist influence had been excluded from the decision-making process, the ruling coalition was able to focus on welfare projects and the maintenance of political power. Materials such as new concrete and bright steel were considered better than old red brick factories and worn-out wooden houses. The speech of mayor-to-be Erkki Napoleon Lindfors in 1951 illustrates the Zeitgeist: ‘‘In the near future, we are going to start the construction of a central o≈ce block, . . . the construction of a hospital for the chronically ill, a workers’ institute,

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day-care centres, vocational school training workshops, 250 flats annually, a new sports centre, a new bridge and sewage treatment plant, renovation of water pipeline pumps, the construction of a new main water pipeline and renovation of its predecessor, an electrical power plant, the expansion of the public transport system, and the construction of a new police station’’ (quoted in Seppälä 1983, 126–27). This ‘‘politics of construction’’ gave a heroic aura to the Brothers in Arms. They were the men who transformed a grim wooden wartime town into a modern industrial ‘‘e≈cient’’ city, one with indoor plumbing and modern housing. They built new and bigger roads, hospitals, and homes for old people, swimming pools, and theaters. This refurbishment created more symbolic capital, that is, prestige, for the ruling coalition. They were men who would abide by their political aims and keep their promises. Local people saw how the city changed, how ‘‘the old made way for the new’’ before their very eyes.∑ This massive renovation was the most visible part of the political project of the Brothers in Arms, who, on suitable occasions, also continued to articulate the rest of their agenda, such as welfare based on economic e≈ciency. The Communists did not oppose the Axis development strategy per se, just the way it was organized through the reconciliation between capital and labor. The Axis bridged the interests of workers and industrialists by emphasizing welfare and economic e≈ciency. In those days, development itself was not a political issue. From the 1950s onward, both the Social Democratic Party and the National Coalition Party possessed a large amount of social and symbolic capital. The ruling coalition network ranged from labor unions to corporate directors, from construction businesses to banks, and from newspapers to voters. The Axis connection with actors in the economic field, such as banks, provided financial resources, that is, the economic capital necessary for welfare services and city development. This relationship allowed Mayor Lindfors to put his motto ‘‘Money in the bank is dead money, we need to invest in steel and concrete’’ into action. The Brothers in Arms’ political project remained popular with the public for decades following the Second World War. In the course of a few decades, the Brothers in Arms changed the whole administrative machinery behind the decision-making process. The allocation of administrative positions was based on agreements between the two parties. In this way, the Brothers in Arms Axis controlled the city’s admin-

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istrative workforce. In Bourdieu’s (1991, 194) terms, they possessed political capital, loyal civil servants, which are vital for gaining a lasting position of dominance in the field of politics. As the division of the political field took place alongside other local fields of social action, the polarization of local political groups became quite clear to everyone. Each of the three major parties had its own newspaper, trust fund, and sport club. In addition, the Social Democrats and the Communists fought in the trade unions to gain dominance among factory workers (Rasila 1992, 317). Due to the intensity of this political struggle, all other fields of social action became synchronized to the political field. The scenario was evident, and gradually the disputes between the Brothers in Arms Axis and the skdl started to follow a predetermined pattern. To put it simply, the Brothers in Arms Axis had the initiative and plenty of eyes and ears in Tampere that were tuned in to their development projects, a situation that lasted until the 1970s. In e√ect, the Brothers made the decisions and the Communists routinely opposed them.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES ENTER THE POLITICAL FIELD

The environment became a significant factor in local politics in Tampere as a consequence of a number of separate disputes between the 1960s and the 1980s. The rapid changes in the physical appearance of Tampere were discussed for the first time. In interviews, local actors named fifteen disputes, which varied from road construction to hazardous waste, water pollution, old buildings, and city planning.∏ Some cases were considered more important than others, such as a plan to construct a new motorway along a ridge popular as a recreational area, a plan to demolish an art nouveau–style o≈ce block building in the city center, and the demolition of a broadcloth factory by the Tammerkoski rapids. Such cases continued until the early 1980s (see Peltonen, this volume) and raised public concern and triggered the growth of a critical environmental awareness. During these disputes, an association was founded that focused on city culture and architectural heritage, and the political orientation of the Nature Conservation Association was strengthened (Laine and Peltonen 2003; Laine et al. 1998). From the beginning, symbolic dimensions of the environment domi-

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nated public discussion and triggered disputes. Real pollution was handled quietly as a technical problem. To give an example, Lake Näsijärvi, the source of Tampere’s drinking water, was polluted by a local pulp factory. By the early 1970s, the capacity of the purification system was stretched to its limits, and the quality of tap water declined, especially in spring and early summer. Furthermore, the lake was important for recreational purposes. However, this problem hardly provoked any public discussion, although it was ecologically severe. It was ‘‘solved’’ by constructing a new water intake from another, cleaner lake further away from the city. There was hardly any environmental activity in the 1960s. Activism increased slowly and cautiously, and in the early stages environmentalists resorted to negotiations held in private with the city of Tampere. The authorities received suggestions and demands directly from the environmental movement, but with almost no publicity. Only at the beginning of the 1980s did environmental disputes surface into the public space. A good example of this was the fight over the fate of an art nouveau–style o≈ce block in the city center, which was occupied in 1981 by local environmental activists. Another important case was the construction of a coal power plant in a city suburb, opposed by local inhabitants. The plant was finally built, but the fuel was changed from coal to natural gas. All the local newspapers, regardless of their political orientation, reported and debated the o≈ce block’s occupation and the power plant dispute. This phenomenon in Tampere was in tune with national trends. Such cases brought out frustration that had been building up over several years. All of these disputes were in some way related to growth. Tra≈c was increasing, and therefore a new motorway was necessary. More e≈cient use of city space was considered important, so the old o≈ce block was to be demolished. The clothing factory needed money to construct a larger facility outside the city center, so the old factory had to be demolished. A new power plant was necessary as the city was growing. All these disputes a√ected the very core of the Axis political project: that economic growth geared by the Brothers was beneficial for everyone. Only the Communists had opposed this idea for ideological reasons during the previous decades. The Axis was so used to the old situation that it automatically branded all its opponents communists, even during disputes in the 1980s, although the participants in those move-

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ments were mainly of a di√erent political persuasion. This can be explained by the inertia of the habitus (see below). Originally, opposition arose to protect the local environment and important features of local life, but also to voice general protest against the vision of those in power regarding the future of Tampere. The radical transformations in the Tampere cityscape during the 1970s produced frustrating events, which laid the foundation for future protests. The early 1980s were a formative period for the mobilization of a new type of Green movement in Tampere (see Peltonen, this volume). The occupation of the city o≈ce block and the power plant dispute had initiated the gathering together of diverse, but similarly orientated people and groups, and they formed a new electoral list of candidates for the municipal elections in 1984. The list, called ‘‘Green Alternative Tampere,’’ included not only environmental activists but also a range of di√erent people calling for alternative lifestyles. They included the Peace Movement, an Alternative to Nuclear Power, Amnesty International, the Association for Alternative Social Policy, the Association of Nature Conservation, Tampere Environmental Group, the Socially Oriented Christian Students’ Organization, and the Tampere Women’s Union. In addition, this coalition contributed to the formation of the Finnish Green Party. They constituted a new face in the local political field in Tampere.

CHALLENGING THE FACE OF THE RULING COALITION

The biggest fight had yet to be fought over the appearance of Tampere. It started on 13 June 1989, when the main local newspaper, Aamulehti, printed the front-page headline ‘‘Tampella Rushes Planning Permission for a City Center Site.’’π The property was an old industrial site that covers 26 hectares in the city center by the Tammerkoski rapids. The Tampella Corporation, which owned the area, wanted to move out from the city center and to construct a modern factory elsewhere, possibly in the southern part of Tampere. The corporation desperately needed money for the new factory and planned to sell the old factory site to get assets. There was a problem, however: in the city plan, the site was allocated to industry. Hence, the corporation demanded a new plan, with a generous allocation for housing development.

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This demand triggered a dispute that focused on the future use of the central part of Tampere. Behind it was a ‘‘Tamhattan plan,’’∫ commissioned by the Tampella Corporation and financed by local construction companies who wanted a share of the forthcoming project. Timo Penttilä, a Finnish architect, had already been commissioned in February 1988. His first plan, for more than 600,000 square meters, consisted of four forty-storey skyscrapers and one gigantic circular building. The Planning Department of the City of Tampere rejected Penttilä’s plan, but he made several others based on the same idea; Penttilä’s plan gained symbolic weight in later stages of the dispute (see Figure 1). In June 1989, the owners of Tampella became frustrated by the slow progress of the negotiations with the city o≈cials and went public. Roughly two months after the headline was printed in Aamulehti, the city council had a meeting concerning the approval of an agreement between Tampella and the City of Tampere. In the agreement, the permitted building volume for the site was 420,000 square meters. This reversed the order of decision making: usually, plans are approved first and then the permitted building volume is decided on. According to Finnish law, private agreements should not influence public decision making. Given the high public interest in the case, the key audience of the debate in the meeting of the city council on 22 August 1989 was the voting public, not the council members. The aim of the Greens and their allies in the dispute was to de-legitimize the agreement. The ruling coalition, on the other hand, tried to defend it. After a heated debate, the supporters of the agreement won by fifty-six votes against eight. However, in the wake of the conflict, the local political field of Tampere had significantly changed from that of the early 1970s. First, the Greens had representatives on the city council, and the fight over the appearance—both of the city and its administrators—had become an inseparable part of the institutional political field. Second, the old enemy of the Axis, the skdl, became divided due to an internal dispute. As a result, a new party called the Democratic Alternative was formed, which mainly aligned with the Greens. The atmosphere around environmental issues was more tense than twenty years previously, when environmental matters were mainly discussed within a traditional conservationist framework. Now the dispute was public. Furthermore, due to the presence of new groups on the city council, an environmental

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A scale model of Timo Penttilä’s ‘‘Tamhattan plan.’’ The forty-storey towers and the circular building to the left of it are the dominating elements of the plan, but all the structures in the front are new; existing city blocks are in the background. (Reprinted courtesy of Antti Haapio.)

1

conflict came out for the first time in a city council meeting and challenged the ruling coalition in its own field. The Green CoalitionΩ opposed the Tampella agreement at the city council meeting by arguing that the speed demanded of local decision making violated the democratic process and that there were other considerations, such as the quality of the city environment, to be taken into account, rather than just economics. Moreover, the plan was illegal: building rights should be the final result of the planning process and not its starting point. The Green Coalition claimed that broadly based public discussion and alternative planning visions should precede any city council decision. The Green Coalition parties wondered how it was possible that they did not know about the agreement before June, although negotiations had already been under way for a couple of years. The Tampere city council, the highest decision-making body, had been excluded from the process along with the local inhabitants.

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The importance of the agreement, the Axis argued, lay in its e√ect on local development, growth, and employment. All city dwellers in Tampere would benefit from the agreement. The modernist construction ethos was still strong; the mayor in o≈ce during the Tampella dispute, Vesa Kauppinen, stated that old buildings had to be replaced by new buildings and that there was no way to stop development. He claimed that in any case, the agreement would not harm old historical buildings by the rapids. The Axis members stated that the city planning department contained the best expertise in this matter, and the department had announced that it was possible to accommodate 420,000 square meters of new buildings in the area. As for the criticism concerning the lack of democracy in city planning, the Brothers in Arms Axis replied that the agreement followed customary public relations practice. This is clearly articulated in the statement by Mayor Kauppinen during the city council meeting on 22 August 1989: ‘‘In my opinion, we have found the right balance between the need for publicity and the need to withhold some information for the good of the negotiations.’’∞≠ This statement drew its legitimacy from the long tradition of private negotiations between the Brothers in Arms Axis and private companies. The critique of the ‘‘established’’ method of decision making and the demand for public discussion were novelties in the 1980s. In other words, the Green Coalition used another interpretation of municipal democracy. According to the Brothers in Arms, the public took part in the decision-making process by voting, whereas the Green Coalition advocated broader public participation in planning. The old enemy, skdl, supported the Brothers in Arms Axis by claiming that although the agreement was not perfect, it was the best possible one under the circumstances. The Green Coalition, along with other opposition forces such as the ‘‘Tampella movement,’’ formed by several politicians and private citizens opposing the agreement, launched campaigns to stimulate public discussion. As a consequence, a lively and heated public debate arose in both the local and national media. To stimulate discussion, they enrolled a large network of experts from di√erent social fields to support their claims. The coalition opposing the agreement included professors of city planning, a professor of construction techniques, a councilor from the Ministry of Environment, a professor of law, the National Association of Architects, the National Board of Antiquities, and people

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from the Planning Department of the City of Helsinki. The city planning department of Tampere seemed to be the only expert organization that supported the Brothers in Arms Axis and the agreement. The main local newspaper, Aamulehti, published a plea opposing the Tampella agreement just before the meeting of the city council. The plea was signed by 262 important cultural figures. Moreover, on the morning of the meeting, the editorial of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s most important daily, asked, ‘‘Who is calling the shots in Tampere?’’ Practically all the important actors except the Axis seemed to oppose the agreement. In addition, according to a survey by Aamulehti, the majority of local inhabitants in Tampere were against the agreement. It seemed that public opinion had definitively turned against the Axis. The environment as a general theme was a Trojan horse. It contained diverse questions about the legitimacy of political power. First, during the dispute, the Green Coalition had challenged the limits of the political field in various ways. The borders of the institutional political field, the playground of the Axis, were challenged by using the public space, especially local media, to generate public political debate (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 104). Consequently, the Green Coalition, and not the ruling coalition that made the agreement, set the agenda for political discussion in the city council meeting on 22 August. The second challenge was procedural: the tradition of closed decision making was challenged by the Green Coalition, who presented an alternative participatory model for city planning. The third challenge was substantial: the Green Coalition claimed that there were other important values for the cityscape besides financial ones. For them, cultural history and the beauty of old buildings were important factors, which should be taken into account in decision making. The old modernist vision of the Brothers in Arms Axis considered old buildings simply ine≈cient economically, but new middle-class generations regarded cultural values inherent in buildings as important, and they also thought that the environmental concern was a legitimate one. The Tampella area was, for many inhabitants, one of the most valued features of the appearance of Tampere. The Green Coalition and the environmental movement harnessed an unexpected source to support their project. They used architect Penttilä’s plan, the only visual image of the future of the Tampella area, to show how appalling the area would look after rebuilding (see Figure 1).

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The symbolic capital that the ruling coalition had gathered during earlier years of city development started to act against them. Their modernist view started to seem old-fashioned, gray, and unpleasant, even an indication of bad taste.

DISCURSIVE PRACTICES AND RUPTURES IN THE LOCAL POLITICAL FIELD

Over time, the political project of the Brothers in Arms Axis had become a rather stable ritualized discourse that announced itself in a canonical form of speech or action every time a crisis or a political struggle emerged. In this context, choosing and transforming appropriate language and figures of speech are cognitive actions, because they are connected to an internalized understanding of the task of the Brothers in Arms Axis. These include fighting the enemy (whoever it might be), acting in unison, and creating a modern city with welfare services. The fight over the face of Tampere and its cityscape was di≈cult symbolically for the ruling coalition. A lot of formerly unquestioned fame and prestige (symbolic capital) came from far-reaching demolition and construction activities, which gave an extensive facelift to Tampere between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s. This selfevident visual ‘‘progress’’ was questioned in public political discussion for the first time in the disputes from the 1980s onward. The Tampella agreement was a particularly important stage in this process. As the voice of reason, language may seem momentarily to rise above the rest of the meaningful nonlinguistic interchanges in the political field, but this is an illusion. To have control over linguistic images in terms of which issue is to be discussed is one form of power. For example, when the Greens or others introduce new language that provides new images into the debate about Tampella, they have at the same time captured some of that power. On the other hand, the language of debate very often becomes ritualized, even canonized, so that the terms of debate become virtually the rules of debate. In a status quo, the contents as well as the borders of the field are not contested. This is one of the mechanisms by which power becomes entrenched and protected. Still, a history, even a strong industrial one, is open to interpretations, to politicization. As Chuck Dyke (1999) has shown, in his analysis of

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Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts and social complexity, economy is not the only aspect that is important for social dynamics. Or, it is important because other possibility spaces are closed out from decision making and political deliberation. When politicians or political groups try to impose their common sense or legitimate vision of the world (see Bourdieu 1991, 235–39), they o√er a representation of the world, which might a√ect (perhaps especially so) the very structure of some social field in the future, regardless of its accuracy. The structure of the field has its e√ect on discourse, which also has an e√ect on the structure of a given field. From the point of view of the dynamics of the political field, for example, the linguistic elements of the interaction are just as sociological as any of the other component interactions over a given period. The use of a certain anticipatory discourse gave some predictability to the political project of the Axis. This was necessary to maintain durable cooperation, but it also helped to regenerate the group’s political identity in changing situations. Predictability means that although the inner emphasis in a discourse may change over time, the whole discourse as such cannot be changed at once. A radical change of the discourse would lead to collapse of a political group, because the habitus of a political group gets its conditions of current and future existence from the past (see Bourdieu 1990). The project of the Brothers in Arms Axis came into being through di√erent kinds of discursive practices (see Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 57–58), which were based on inclusion or exclusion of other groups and arguments. These practices involved consultative methods both between the two dominant parties and within their own networks. This became visible in the way the Brothers in Arms made announcements to the press, held speeches, and chaired meetings in the city council, when speaking for representative democracy but refusing to consult with the opposition or active citizens. They typically claimed that all inhabitants had benefited from their mode of governance, but they ignored comments by other parties. On the one hand, discursive practices regenerated and strengthened the political identity of the group, and on the other hand, these practices made the political project of the Axis persuasive for other actors, namely, the important interest groups and the constituent voters. Discursive practices are means or tools to manage the political project mentioned above. In the broadest

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sense, we can calculate the material manifestations, new buildings and roads built by the Axis, as part of such practices. These were challenged by the discursive practices of the Green Coalition during the Tampella dispute. They utilized public space by organizing public discussions, rock festivals, petitions, and leaflets and creating heavy media coverage to promote their ideas. The idea of civic deliberation was in fact part of their political identity. The very birth of the coalition was based on discussions between groups with diverse views. The demand for public discussion was based on this rationale: If we do not know what our group thinks without asking it, how can we know what the public thinks without discussion? If we compare the Axis and the Green Coalition, we can see that the former were focusing on e√ective management based on private negotiations and restricted public participation, whereas the latter were trying to create a new public space to enhance broad discussion and participation. The Axis members were masters in setting the pace of the discussion by restricting it to certain occasions. The time for public discussion was usually narrowed down to a minimum. The Tampella agreement was not an exception in a basic strategy. Even though skdl was on the Axis side, the demarcation line was still there. Now the Green Coalition was on the other side. However, the strategy of keeping negotiations behind closed doors acted against the interests of those in power. The time span between the news that Tampella wanted building rights for its central property and announcement of the city council decision was very short. With only a minimum of information available, all the other actors were ready to believe in a worst-case scenario, that is, that the skyscraper plan might actually come about. People saw in Penttilä’s plan the idea of e√ective city planning taken to its logical conclusions. Suddenly, the governing coalition’s linear decision-making style was seen as undemocratic and suspect. The Brothers in Arms discourse could not cope with the environmental challenge because the environmental discourse, a translation of informational capital into linguistic form, questioned city development based solely on economic e≈ciency, the very core of its discourse. Control over the local political field in Tampere was established by a homogeneous political identity, by using commonly acknowledged symbolic capital, and by leaning on discursive practices that corresponded to these aims. In Figure 2, this setting is shown as a triangle of power.

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The triangle of power of the ruling coalition of Tampere.

To earn symbolic and social capital, it is important to have a political project that can be clearly articulated. Until the end of the 1980s, the Brothers in Arms’ project was formed in a familiar pattern; it emphasized economic growth, welfare, and city development. By using their political and social capital (mainly their connections to actors in the economic field) to create an impression that they were acting for the common good, they gathered symbolic capital. Habitus, which is behind political identity, plays an important role. It helps to form the style of political actors, allowing them to select the kind of acts consistent with their political identity. Internalized awareness of the situation was necessary to maintain interaction among discursive practices, di√erent kinds of capital, and political identity. If the political project did not resonate with the preferences of those groups that guaranteed its legitimacy, it would collapse due to lack of support. This is especially true in the political field, where power is a reflection of one’s social and symbolic capital. It is crucial that the triangle of power resonates at a frequency that is recognized and acknowledged in social space. A political project can be enabled only if it is tuned in to the tastes of the public, that is, the voters. If the ‘‘resonance space’’ of symbolic capital is no greater than the political field, the result is a lack of political legitimacy. The Brothers in Arms’ triangle of power was still running during the Tampella dispute, although not as smoothly as before. The connections within the group and with business were in order, but their contact with

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the public was weakening. However, this was not considered important by the ruling coalition, as they honestly assumed that their goals still represented the common good.

SYMBOLIC FRACTIONS AND THE LOCAL FIELD OF POWER

The old Tampella factory area in the center of Tampere came to symbolize the environmental attitudes of di√erent parties. The old modernism of the Brothers in Arms Axis faced the new environmental awareness of the Green Coalition. The irony of the case was that an industrial mind-set favored demolishing the old industrial site, whereas the postindustrial mind-set supported its protection. For a while, the area was the symbolic face of politics in Tampere. At the same time, the plans for the area represented the future of the city and the actual political projects of di√erent parties. The dispute revealed the political faces of the parties themselves. A vision for the area also created an image of each party’s project. In an ecological sense, the old factory area had no valuable features that should have been protected, but symbolically it had many such features. In the local political field and public space, protection of the natural environment and the cityscape, ‘‘second nature,’’ became synonymous. Although di√erent local associations pursued di√erent purposes, roughly the same group of people were interested in nature protection and the preservation of historical buildings. Presenting the Tampella dispute as an environmental issue was not di≈cult, as this had already been the common understanding in the first place, in the context of the history of local conflicts concerning the cityscape. Cultural goodwill and environmental awareness shared the same enemy: a one-dimensional, economically determined use of the cityscape. The environment was an umbrella under which a wide range of other concerns, from feminism to participatory democracy, was brought into the field of politics. This created symbolic capital for the Green Coalition. They constructed an alternative political project from the one that the Axis proclaimed. The Axis ideology and their particular interest, presented as a universal one (see Bourdieu 1991, 167), was to ensure their governing ability by protecting the interests of their network. The political project of the Green Coalition acted against the very structure

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of decision-making mechanisms of the ruling coalition. Public discussions, continuous media speculation, and demands for participatory action and planning meant that decisions were not as firmly under the control of the ruling coalition network as before. The opposition’s vision was culturally and environmentally tuned; that is, culture and the environment, and not economics, should be at the core of decision making. According to the Green Coalition’s viewpoint, city planning based solely on economic factors would have unpleasant and aesthetically disastrous e√ects. During the dispute, symbolically important fissures appeared in the ruling coalition’s front. First of all, the visual image of the Tamhattan plan acted against the agreement. Even though it was rejected, it was seen as a logical but undesirable continuation of the dominant city planning vision, formerly seen as progressive but now simply seen as bad taste. Second, in relation to this plan, the old Tampella site, later seen as an important part of Finland’s industrial and architectural heritage,∞∞ started to look like an essential part of the local ‘‘mindscape.’’ To illustrate this, a Green city council member claimed that Tampella and Finlayson are to Tampere what the cathedral is to Cologne. This general appreciation of place and context gave certain symbolic weight to the claims of the Green Coalition. In fact, a new political setting and an alternative to the old regime were underlying this dispute. To understand this, we have to turn back to Bourdieu and Waquant (1992, 104–5; see also Bourdieu 1998, 14– 18) and ask how the local political field was situated in relation to the field of power. If we look back at the postwar history of Tampere, it is easy to see that until the 1970s, the local field of power was situated somewhere between the political and the economic field. In those days, the ruling coalition possessed all the important capital needed for domination of the local political field. Bourdieu and Wacquant (130) note that dispositions, that is, the habituses of (political) groups, are often more durable than the conditions that produced them. In 1989, the world around the ruling coalition had changed, even though they continued to act on the basis of their old habitus that valued the old forms of capital. When society changes, the relationship between the field of power and other fields also change, as well as the relationship between types of capital and cultural dispositions, that is, habitus that values these forms of capital.

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The symbolic capital of Brothers in Arms, which was tied to local high-ranking positions, economic arguments, and e√ective but nondialogical political style, did not have the same legitimacy in the Tampella case as in previous decades. The Greens and other opposition members were questioning them one by one. When the Green movement grew stronger in the 1980s, it used the local media to promote its ideas, while the journalistic field itself was becoming more independent of the local political field. These two trajectories strengthened each other, which led to a process of transformation in the configuration of local social fields in relation to the local field of power. The local media became a more important reference point for all the actors in the political field, and for certain actors in the economic field. This is because the journalistic field, formerly tightly bound to political parties, gradually became more independent after the late 1980s and suddenly began to channel more unpredictable and nonpartisan public opinion. Not surprisingly, the Green Coalition and the environmental movement were better at playing the new political game, which demanded active public discussion. The ruling coalition was more used to utilizing nonpublic relations. The Green Coalition used cultural capital, namely, environmental and social knowledge, for questioning the legitimacy of local political power, which gave a new perspective to the local political field. We can see Tampere as a place where international and local events became intertwined and formed a specific whole, a new entity that simultaneously has some general features. The project of the Brothers in Arms Axis was created by the war experience. Its project was to legitimate societal goals by presenting them as the fulfillment of a universal task of ‘‘benefiting all the inhabitants of Tampere.’’ On the other hand, as a product of another era, the Green Coalition did not believe they had automatic access to the common good, so they tried to find ways to channel public opinion. The universal ‘‘common good of all inhabitants of Tampere’’ was not convincing anymore, especially when the grounds for that statement were made only to the political field, which became abstracted and without links to the social space. As I have outlined, the di√erentiation of the local fields of social action became visible during the Tampella dispute.

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NOTES

1 The literal translation is ‘‘Finnish People’s Democratic League.’’ The coalition included the Communists. skdl was the predecessor to the present-day Vasemmistoliitto, ‘‘League of the Left.’’ 2 Their political enemies, the skdl and left-wing Social Democrats who were in opposition to cooperation between their own party and the Conservatives, gave them the nickname, which was soon adopted into common use. 3 Translation from a book in Finnish by Raimo Seppälä (1983), Tampereen Napoleon (The Napoleon of Tampere), which focuses on the political career of Erkki Napoleon Lindfors. 4 ‘‘Heterarchies are typically characterised by two kinds of phenomena: structures and processes on one scale stabilise structures and processes on another; and structures and processes on one scale regulate processes on another’’ (Dyke and Dyke 2002, 82). 5 Quotation from a campaign film in the 1960s commissioned by the City of Tampere. In the film, pictures of demolished old wooden housings were shown as a symbol of a better ‘‘concrete’’ future. 6 In total, thirty-five interviews, conducted by Markus Laine and Lasse Peltonen in 1996–2000. 7 In Finland, the municipality has a monopoly on city planning. Before construction can begin, a plan must be made and approved of by the municipality, in which the number of square meters, the height, and some visual aspects of the buildings are defined. 8 The term ‘‘Tamhattan’’ was invented by the opponents of the project, presumably inspired by Timo Penttilä’s scheme of forty-storey skyscrapers. The term connected conveniently Tampere (the city), Tampella (the company), and Manhattan. The concept was later widely used both in local and national media. 9 Formed by the Greens and the Democratic Alternative. I use the name ‘‘Green Coalition’’ from here on. 10 Quotation from a photocopy of the speech, on file in the archive of Markus Laine and Lasse Peltonen. 11 The industrial scenery of Tampere was depicted on the last Finnish 20 mark banknote prior to the conversion to the euro in March 2002.

Stand/ardization and Entrainment in Forest Management

Ari Jokinen

of ecosocial systems depends on the exploitation of ecological resources; this is self-evident. It is equally self-evident that di√erent types of ecosystems vary greatly in what demands they set for human exploitation. Agriculture is the paradigm of intensive exploitation. Hence, it is quite natural that agriculture has provided models for the management of other types of ecological resources. My focus in this essay is on forestry in Finland. Export-driven, economically significant timber acquisition and forest management began in Finland in the second half of the nineteenth century. Originally, the models applied in forest management came from abroad, but they were relatively quickly modified to better correspond to the domestic social, economic, and ecological conditions. My particular focus is on the forest stand as a conceptual and material artifact that has facilitated the onward march of modern forestry throughout the Finnish countryside.

THE EXISTENCE AND REPRODUCTION

THE MULTIPLE FACES OF A FOREST STAND

A stand of trees is an ecological entity. In a natural forest, the succession of stands is a cyclic dance from growth to death, and again to new growth. Such cyclic change is continuous in forest ecosystems, but the frequency of cycles varies considerably from locality to locality. Fire regimes and other disturbances drive this variation, and the appearance of the stand at a particular moment is dependent on the intensity and

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frequency of disturbances, the distribution and abundance of various species that colonize newly created open land in the surroundings of the disturbed sites, and other factors. Furthermore, reproductive cycles occur on small scales inside stands, as single trees die and are replaced with new ones and the composition of herbaceous vegetation on the ground changes. Immediately following a disturbance on the stand scale, the stand is dominated by saplings of deciduous trees. A more or less regular process of succession follows toward the final stage, old growth. As specific disturbances are unpredictable, stand boundaries are not stable, and the configuration of forest landscape changes with the passing of time. Soil conditions stabilize this variation. In every respect, change is the only constant feature, and the dynamics of stands is simultaneously dominated by stochasticity and regularity. A stand of trees is an economic entity. A stand is the smallest unit in operationalizing forest management. Stands help to reduce the complexity of the forest: natural variation is diminished by stand-based management. Stands, which are made even-aged and homogenized in their sizes and shapes, are used to introduce modern forestry into new regions and to extract the greatest possible economic benefit from the forest. Every even-aged stand is ‘‘lifted o√ ’’ from the surrounding landscape, as it were. Stands are delineated as artificial compartments by management procedures; they are subjected to a given rotation cycle according to forest characteristics and economic goals. A steady flow of timber, called sustained yield, is the long-term objective. Quantification is essential to achieve sustained-yield forestry. The result is a forest landscape, which is dominated by harvesting cycles instead of disturbances such as wildfires. Increasingly, a stand of trees is also an entity in conservation. Traditional conservation was focused on single species and valuable sites. With the recent emphasis on biodiversity, the object has become more di√use: thoroughgoing protection of the productivity of ecological systems. However, somewhat paradoxically, this sets even stronger requirements on inventory and classification than economy-driven forest management: spots and qualities of biodiversity and its di√erent spatiotemporal dimensions have to be taken into account both within stands and across the grid of stands.

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I explore the role of the stand as an artifact, which combines e√orts to strengthen human control over the forest. The grid of managed stands enables a synoptic view; it increases legibility of the forest and thus the possibilities for its centralized monitoring, classifying, and controlling (Scott 1998). My focus is on private forestry. I present a historical overview of the arrival of the forest stand as a basic unit of forestry from Germany into Finland, the social conflicts this gave rise to, and its adoption by forestry science. I then investigate the role of the stand in practical management as it takes place in the interaction of forest owners with their forest and with forestry professionals working in governmental administration, forest companies, and advisory organizations. The tuning together of a whole range of temporal scales, reflecting the reproductive cycles of forest ecosystems, is critical in this process. This section draws on my empirical work, as specified later. Following that section, I review more recent stages in the career of the stand: its appropriation by nationwide data management systems, which aim at a comprehensive control of Finnish forests. In the last section I discuss possibilities for resistance.

STAND / ARDIZATION OF FINNISH FORESTS

Origins

The story of the forest stand, in a simplified version, begins in Germany in the late eighteenth century. German forestry developed as a part of the ‘‘cameral sciences,’’ which aimed at improving fiscal administration and resource management of the state. The basis of the German model was economic rationalization of forestry by quantifying the forest and regulating management practices according to systematic guidelines (Lowood 1991). The starting point was to maximize the mass and volume of timber. German forest mathematicians adopted new concepts, such as standard tree, size class, sample plot, and age class. These were used to construct a normal forest, a quantified idealization of a perfect forest made up of compartments (stands) that were even-aged and identical in their size and rotation period. Sustained yield was reached by felling annually the compartment with the oldest trees (Tasanen 2004, 208). One of the German writers on forest management, Heinrich

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Cotta, presented in 1804 a method to extrapolate calculations of wood mass and growth rates from an individual tree to a stand and finally to the forest as a whole. The forest balance sheet could be derived from trees, stands, and forests, and linked to the monetary budget by determining the value of the yield. The straight linkage between forest resources and the state economy made inventory and prediction important to regulate the system in which the standing forest was viewed as capital and yield as interest. The German model can be summarized by listing three guidelines that aimed at maximizing the timber yield (Lowood 1991). First, minimum diversity was needed to reduce the complexity of the forest system. It meant minimizing nature’s diversity and reconstructing the forest with the help of selective measurements to quantify its yield or growth. Second, the balance sheet of forest use o√ered quantitative information for annual accounting. The balance sheet provided a bu√er against over- and underutilization of forest resources on the short term. Third, the principle of sustained yield was adopted to support long-term forestry planning. The next step was taken when two German forest scientists, Pressler and Judeich, began to operationalize the concepts of normal forest and maximum soil rent. They claimed that the forest can be used more e≈ciently if its components, stands, are managed as e≈ciently as possible. This marked the beginning of a strong development of the stand. They understood the forest as an arithmetic sum of its stands, and each stand was to be delineated and managed by following site characters and biological requirements of tree species (Lihtonen 1959, 26, 287–90). In this system, stands become distinguishable because they are individually managed as even-aged units and reproduced by final felling (clearcutting or seed-tree method) after a well-defined rotation period.

The Stand Arrives in Finland

The o≈cial story of the arrival of the forest stand in Finland tells about an inevitable onward march, albeit with some di≈culties. Traditionally, forest use in Finland was based on selection method (continuous cover management), that is, the removal of single trunks at a time. Final felling was not used; instead, the forest reproduced itself gradually and continuously. The main e√ort among forest scientists and foresters

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from the 1840s onward was to eliminate selection method and establish rotation-based principles into Finnish forestry. The principles were adopted from Germany; for instance, the first textbook (Gyldén 1853) was based on the theories of German pioneers. In the early stages, however, a major problem was that selection method was profitable for forest owners. Selection felling of logs for industrial use o√ered a flexible and economically reasonable way to utilize the forest, easily adaptable to fluctuations in the need for money and the state of the market (Michelsen 1995; Tasanen 2004). Naturally, timber of various size and quality was also needed in household use. Administrative bodies were first formed for state forests and then, several decades later, in the early twentieth century, for private forestry. It was clear from the beginning that the transition to rotation-based forestry was going to be a long process. However, after Finnish Independence in 1917, national-level forestry seems to have developed along almost linear tracks. The process of state formation influenced greatly the course of forestry. It was essential to achieve social stability in the use of forests, the most valuable natural resource in the country. A cohesive process of strengthening forestry formed a kind of national religion (Kuisma 1993, 568) and made possible a massive mobilization of Finnish softwood resources into western European markets around the turn of the twentieth century. The forest industry obtained raw material from forest-owning peasants, who in turn received earnings from timber sales and additional income from forest works. Land reforms were included in the compromise, because the question of forest ownership was a sore issue at the time. The landless population was given holdings from Crown forests, and timber firms were banned from buying forested land.∞ A factor that supported rotation-based thinking was the growth of paper and pulp industries in the 1920s, which increased the market demand for small-size timber, even though it first triggered the selection felling of young trees. There was a countercurrent, however, to this streamlined and Whiggish story: the resistance of private forest owners against rotation-based forestry. The resistance was continuous during the first half of the twentieth century, despite the e√orts of the enlarged profession to get them to adopt rotation-based thinking instead of selection method. Forest scientists were, definitely, aware of this resistance. Forestry experts claimed that the selection method devastates the forest by jeopar-

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dizing regeneration or making its rational development impossible, which they thought was against the Forest Act reformed in 1928, to which they repeatedly resorted. Such interpretation was often based only on their professional supremacy, because the selection method allowed many variations, from small-scale peasant traditions to industrial practices. Furthermore, the Forest Act did not include precise definitions as to which particular measures were forbidden as causing forest devastation. A direct means of punishment, short of taking a recalcitrant forest owner to court, was that all cutting in his forest was banned for ten years; in some years, the banned forests covered more than 5 percent of the total area of private forests (Hellström 1993). Many forest owners, however, responded by continuing selection felling, after having learned how to revise the management practices slightly, only to avoid interventions by forestry authorities (Vuokila 1980, 20). Bans and court trials as well as the outspoken resistance by forest owners continued until the 1980s. Furthermore, to introduce and establish the new forestry idea, forestry experts marked the standing trees allowed to be cut. A specified label on the stem represented law and order. Forestry experts marked trees for decades, and during this period the marking axe was incarnated as a symbol of power and expertise. I personally remember my respect for this tool when, as a young forestry trainee two decades ago, I was allowed to use it. In those days, if a forestry expert of the District Forestry Board, nowadays Forestry Centre, lost his marking axe, he was subjected to a police interrogation (Kuurne 1997, 28). A common phrase in Finland, ‘‘The axe is the best cure for the forest,’’ means cutting trees down according to silvicultural principles; another apparent connotation is marking them, factually meaning the same. Thus, the marking axe and the stand are artifacts functionally close to each other, the former now abandoned after it had fixed the latter. The development of the marking practice during the twentieth century illustrates the advance and adoption of rotation-based forestry. First, foresters were those who were authorized to mark trees, then forest technicians and foremen, and after them forest workers. Nowadays, the trained machine drivers, a liable group because more than 90 percent of timber harvesting has been mechanized, select the trees without labels. By following this routine based on standards they redefine the stands and reestablish their boundaries.



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Providing that the forest area and its productivity allows it, it is the duty of the society to develop its timber production, i.e. the forests of its territory, to meet constantly at least the volume of national use, or, which would be a better target, to increase the yield as much as possible. What all this strictly speaking means is that our forests are developed toward normality, considering the real possibilities of our forestry. Correspondingly, what is significant for the state as a whole, is naturally of high importance for the private farm.

The intensification of timber production with the help of substantial subsidy programs from the early 1960s made even-aged stands more distinguishable in the landscape. Forestry started to follow agricultural principles, using clear-cutting, soil preparation, artificial regeneration, fertilization, and pesticides (Ollonqvist 1998). This ‘‘logical chain of decision making’’ in forestry operations made natural regeneration seem to be ‘‘a game against nature,’’ because the latter was dependent on natural year-to-year variation in such critical factors as seed production and weather conditions (Leikola 1986, 181). Draining peatlands for timber production and constructing forest roads were extensive projects, both reaching relatively the most massive scale in the world. Mechanization of timber harvesting promoted the stand-based structure of forests, too. An explicit aim of the professionals was to purify the private forests of traditional ways of timber use. The boundary between forest and field was flexible in the traditional small-scale farming that was still common in Finland in the 1960s. Subsistence was based on multiple, mutually complementary sources of income as well as on self-subsistence. Forest was simultaneously a pasture, a reserve of a huge variety of timbers, a potential space for clearing more fields, and so on. Farmers harvested timber by horses and farm tractors and often used selection thinning. The close interaction among forest, livestock, and field made it di≈cult for forestry experts and policymakers to develop rotation-based forestry into industrial scales suitable for mechanization. Viljo Holopainen (1967, 97), the director general of the Finnish Forest Research Institute, drew the following analogy between agriculture and silviculture in a pamphlet popularizing intensive forestry: ‘‘Because the implementation of national forestry programs requires a change from natural to man-made forests, the future of Finnish land use policy should be seen as a division between two modes of cultiva-

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tion, cultivation of crop plants in the field and cultivation of trees in the forest.’’ After the Second World War, a new generation of forestry scientists took the lead. Forests have been as a backbone of modernization and the creation of prosperity in Finnish society, a development that some scholars characterize as the rise of a ‘‘forest-sector society’’ in Finland. Scientification of forestry has taken place, and new legislation is full of details to maintain and increase timber production capacity and biodiversity values of stands. The long-term conflict between the selection method and rotation-based forestry has di√used into the network of stands as a consequence of several decades of intensive and focused projects of forestry extension. As a side e√ect, the aversion against selection method has led to the impoverishment of the agenda of silvicultural research and development (Leikola 1986, 157–63). However, many forest owners still feel positive about selection method, and among forest researchers a handful of marginalized dissenters promulgate the method over fully mechanized rotation-based forestry. Consequently, a hidden tension is detectable between traditional practices and modern silviculture.

TIME SCALES, RHYTHMS, AND NATURALIZATION

In management guidelines given out by forestry authorities, the basic idea of modern silviculture is typically defined as follows: If the goal is to obtain a high and continuous timber yield, a forest allotment should comprise nearly equal areas of all age classes, from seedling stands to mature stands. When forest management aims at economic results, it is necessary to use rational working methods and to arrange stand sizes accordingly. A maximal total yield can usually be achieved from an allotment if stands are regenerated as soon as possible and if sound management guidelines are obeyed. (Forestry Centre Tapio 1994, guidelines for private forestry)

The long rotation time of forest from the creation of new sapling stands to profitable timber harvesting is in potential conflict with the goal of steady flow of income to forest owners. As the citation from the management guidelines for private forestry shows, the authorities rec-

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ommend that forest owners manage not only single stands separately but also the stand composition of their whole forest allotments. In other words, management in rotation-based forestry is primarily management of time, in several temporal scales simultaneously. The age of trees, maturity, and rotation period are essential characters of the stand, and the management of young and middle-aged stands is important, too, not only final felling. Stands classified as underproductive or overmature are to be immediately regenerated. A special adjustment period is needed before a regular cutting cycle can be established in areas where such stands are common. Temporal synchronization of stands in a given area is possible only provided di√erent development classes of stands exist in optimal proportions; that is, the formal requirements of ‘‘normal forest’’ must be fulfilled. The underlying goal is comprehensive control over the growth of trees: silviculture as agriculture of forest trees. However, there is a critical di√erence: the temporal scale of agricultural operations is one year; by contrast, the temporal scale of growing trees is from several decades to more than a century. On private lands, punctuality in management and timber selling has to be reached through the advice and motivation of individual forest owners. This is certainly problematic, especially when most industrial timber has to be procured from private forests, as is the case in Finland, and all the more so due to the recent diversification of forest owners after heavy social changes. Forest owners’ goals in forestry are dispersed, and forestry experts must continually create new means to catch and advise them.≤ We found this di≈culty in many forms in the argumentation of forestry experts, based on our thorough interviews with fifteen of them working as planners, timber buyers, and advisors in private forestry (Jokinen and Holma 2001). For instance, they explicitly classified forest owners according to their activity and readiness to follow o≈cial management principles. The forest stand enables a modern way of governance. Forestry experts follow flexibility and communication in forestry advice and o√er several silvicultural alternatives to forest owners. The appearance of the stand proved to be one of the most important means for forestry experts. When they communicate with forest owners in the forest, which they regarded as the most e≈cient method of advice, the stand o√ers an authentic proof of necessary management measures. What they can see together categorizes the stand, and in this sense the stand is an active

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participant in the process: it tells by its appearance its own silvicultural stage and the next step needed. The stand is a strong argument in itself: it demonstrates the situation, the ‘‘facts,’’ and forestry experts are facilitators. Forest owners can see the state of the stand with their own eyes, and no one can deny the facts. Furthermore, the condition of the stand can always be compared with the adjacent stands and also with the stands in the neighboring parcel—the relatively better silvicultural and well-managed view they o√er, the more apparent is the need of doing something to complete the project. The three principles of rationalized forestry—minimum diversity, the balance sheet, and sustained yield—are still at the core of forest regulation in practical forestry (Jokinen and Holma 2001). They are realized through standards, often in an imperceptible way, because forestry experts have to allow some deviations when needed to get the standards to work (see Bowker and Star 1999). Because stands mediate the process, it is vitally important that they are clearly defined and unbroken and the network of them is workable. One of the interviewees working as a forestry management planner emphasized flexibility in forestry practices, but not in this issue: Especially those forest owners who cut by themselves avoid hard work in regeneration, and therefore they use only small regeneration areas, placing them on patches that have already become restocked by natural regeneration. It is probable that we, if the target size of stands is as large as 1.5 hectares . . . , when walking through a spruce stand, cannot find that kind of small groups of birch that typically shelter the best naturally regenerated young growth . . . because we have hectares more than enough as our planning target.

Another, working in timber procurement, pointed out that the target size of the stand, 1.5 hectares again, should be accepted by forest owners for their own good because it maximizes the economic harvesting result for them; smaller stands are possible, if they accept financial sacrifices. By adhering to a certain size of stands and using economic motivation, forestry experts naturalize forestry standards and make them seem unavoidable. The standard size of stands makes the mechanized harvesting chain profitable; the work of forest owners themselves, using their farm tractors and chain saws, becomes superfluous. For forest owners, an ordinary size of stand o√ers a proper scale in

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many senses. This became clear during my observations and interviews with eight elderly forest owners, neighbors of one another and diligent managers of their own forest. I walked separately with each of them in his forest parcel (Jokinen 2002). Although they were members of traditional rural culture and thus contemporaries of the period of selection method, they were ordinary forest owners who did not overtly protest against the prevailing forestry system. The stand organizes the resources of the forest and homogenizes them into groups. For instance, the stand is a suitable unit for forest owners to manage by themselves during a period of some weeks or so. The fairly slow tempo of forest growth in Finland may be adequate within the life span of forest owners, because the final felling can usually be carried out when the forest is sixty to a hundred years old, and during the growing period it is possible to make two to four thinnings, albeit with poorer economic return. Furthermore, the stand with distinct boundaries ‘‘attracts’’ to complete the management activities within the grid of other stands. The attraction reflects diligence, thriftiness, and the desire for a well-done and completed work. (However, this does not mean that the interviewees had followed the silvicultural advice of forestry experts as such. In fact, they had mixed modern and traditional management routines and avoided the full intensity of thinning and clear-cutting.) The stand is also a ready-made package of timber, ready to be exchanged for a nice sum of money. The price of timber from a final felling is often su≈cient for buying a new tractor or a car. In these ways, the stand regulates the decision making of forest owners. The spatial and temporal scales of the stand are compatible with the behavior of forest owners, as one of the interviewees put it: ‘‘Here I still have some cleaning and thinning left to do, to complete also this. . . . We did pretty much this work [cleaning the forest and gathering firewood] with my wife. We worked a month in the forest. It was . . . maybe 2 hectares we did there, forward of that swamp. And here we did yet some kind of supplementary work, because this place had been forgotten since the previous felling. It made me angry, because there was so much timber on the ground and the forest was too dense.’’ When they spoke about past and present objects and events in their parcel, they pointed at certain distinguishable sites along the route we walked. Further, when they wanted to show me something they did not find at the moment, they spontaneously localized the site, using as cues

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particular signs and details they saw when walking. Typically, the forest owners had some specific experiences, acquired while working in the forest, connected with these specific sites, or there were large trees collectively known by most forest owners in the area. Every forest owner was thoroughly familiar with his forest parcel, its history and potentials; for them the forest was primarily a material place of situated experiences. All this indicates that it is not the grid of stands but particular sites and the forest owners’ experiences in these sites that are important to them when they create an image of the forest and which they use to find their way through the forest. Although everything they had done in the forest had happened within a certain stand, the stand was only an embodiment of their management routines, not any pattern of representation to control the forest at a distance with the help of maps and standards as forestry experts perceive it. In this sense, the stand was naturalized for the forest owners: it was an invisible frame of their experiences and important places. The forest owners were not distressed by the boundaries of stands in the same way as they were by the boundaries of parcels. The latter need special care to keep them open, but the stand automatically produces its boundaries along with forest growth and management. Correspondingly, the stand is naturalized for forestry experts, but in another way. For them, the stand is a tool that has become invisible because of its high importance and constant use, like an axe for a carpenter. In its physical appearance the stand has several characters that make it a proper tool for forestry experts in their everyday work (Jokinen and Holma 2001): it is, first, a rhetorical resource in communicative transactions with forest owners; second, a means of checking and controlling silvicultural routines of forest owners; third, a source of awareness of their own professional targets to achieve forestry standards; and fourth, a means of introducing, reproducing, and maintaining those standards. These characteristics create essential feedback loops in forest regulation, but not without experienced experts. Field experience became important from the beginning of scientific forestry in Germany: ocular methods were preferred over geometrical deduction by Cotta in 1804. Foresters had to understand the forest as a multiple of trees to be able to use sampling methods; a standard tree produced a mental picture of the whole forest (Lowood 1991).

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The stand belongs to the professional tradition of the experts. They must internalize the forest as a configuration of stands from the very beginning of their education, and after their education is completed, they are fully interlocked with this landscape dismembered into separate stands. During the interviews, they spoke all the time about stands in a neutral way, as if they were natural patterns and without artificial boundaries. Only in particular situations, when they presented forest management plans or emphasized the importance of the proper size of stands for mechanized harvesting, did they use the term stand in the sense of an artificial stand compartment (kuvio in Finnish) that can be shaped.≥ Despite the great di√erences in views between forest owners and forestry experts, the stand has been naturalized for both of these groups and is therefore able to function as a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989). Boundary objects can combine actors from distinct social worlds by satisfying the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are plastic because they have di√erent meanings in di√erent social worlds; at the same time, they are robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. The stand as a boundary object combines heterogeneity and cooperation: it serves as a communication channel between the two social worlds by balancing different categories, rhythms, and meanings. A source of a stronger dynamics is that the stand lives in ‘‘the now,’’ but the now of a particular stand connects several temporal horizons (Figure 1). The stand integrates linear time regimes of forest regulation with situational nonlinearities of forest growth and social spheres. This mutual entrainment of the perspectives of forest owners and forestry experts is strengthened by their similarity, which historically originated through mutual adjustment. During forestry advice, they simultaneously perceive the stand and its potentials in the forest, discuss them, and have joint experiences. In the forest I noted that many forest owners had adopted the perspective of the professionals toward evaluating cutting possibilities and the silvicultural state of stands by looking at the top shoots of conifers. During the period of selection method, the traditional way was to scan the forest and seek tall trees with a large diameter. So, the forest owners followed their old habit of fixing attention on single trees, but now each tree indicated not only its own quality but also that of the even-aged stand as a whole. Such modi-

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Three temporal horizons combined by routinized practices (vertical lines) in private forestry.

1

fication and transformation of habits and traditions, proceeding more or less gradually, belongs to the process of naturalization.

THE STAND SCALED UP: INFORMATION NETWORKS

At the ground level, the forest stand is organized so as to follow a regular two-cycle rhythm between management and rest. The stand functions as a boundary object between human actors—forest owners and professionals—while its growth is regularly assessed and pruned. On the other hand, stands are increasingly connected in large planning units on the regional scale and, ultimately, on the national scale. On this larger scale, forest growth is a flow that penetrates complex layers of institutions, human groups, interests, and technical bodies. This huge system can be called boundary infrastructure (Bowker and Star 1999, 313–14), and stands and forestry standards are cohesive nodes of it. They stabilize the system and help di√erent actors share the infrastructure. Forest growth is not outside of the boundary infrastructure, it is intertwined in it. Forest growth represents internally driven, dynamic change. It produces deviations from rigid classifications and standards, which have to be readjusted to correspond to the state of the forest. On larger, regional and national scales, classifications and standards are

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increasingly imposed using new technology. Aerial photos, satellite imagery, and electronic technologies are used to gather and analyze information from stands. Forestry experts use mobile data recorders in the field to add stand characteristics into a data bank. Computer-based models of forest growth set the rhythm of forest management. The models simulate the growth of individual tree species and optimize timber production. These multilayer and comprehensive technologies control the standing crop, biodiversity values, and damage by insects and fungi; the locus of control is increasingly distanced from the forest. Information is a buzzword often used to describe a complex like this, even though its many threads may be only distinct embodiments of the contemporary consumption society. In any case, every aspect suggests that if scaled up, the forestry system is increasingly dependent on information. Stands are totally connected with large information networks, and a single stand may belong to several of them. I give two examples, both of them related to forest companies and timber markets. To reduce the interest costs of storage, forest companies have largely given up depots of timber. Instead, the stand with growing trees is used as the storage. Most timber sales are standing sales; after a transaction, the buyer has two years to harvest the stand in question. During this period the stand is an online store of timber, like a fish box used for storing the catch alive to keep it fresh until use. Or even more: once ecological and industrial processes are merged, the trees are growing straight into the pulp boiler—the stand is the basic structural unit in a conveyor belt that starts from growth tissues in trees and ends in the industrial cauldron where pulp is made and then transported further on to the world market. The new practice is supported by a dense network of forest roads, mechanized harvesting, and the Global Positioning System (gps). Sawmills are nowadays increasingly interested in the characters and details of stands to get cut-to-size timber for their regular customers. Consequently, information links to stands are increasing in number and temporal length. A computer application called Stem Bank is used for this. Computers on harvesters save detailed data on the properties of the stems harvested from stands. By using the Stem Bank application operating with these databases, forestry experts can simulate the future development of comparable stands and pick the ones that seem to produce particular kinds of timber assortments for specific needs of

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customers (Malinen 2003). This is a more accurate method to predict stand characteristics and log distribution than those used before. Because of the enhanced predictability, the method fixes the stand firmly into the markets. It o√ers information that may attract timber dealers for many years before harvesting is possible, wherever in the world they are. The Stem Bank is acting as a market facilitator, not between endusers and timber mills, but between end-users and standing stands. These cases give only a hint of the totality of information networks in which the stands are embedded. The basis of them is gis (Geographic Information System) combined with forest management planning. This combination is e≈ciently used in Finland, because state-subsidized forest management planning covers all the forests in each planning area regardless of the wishes of individual forest owners. With the support of nationwide forest inventories, stand-based forest management planning o√ers su≈cient information not only for statistical but also for direct and individual surveillance of stands and forest owners, thus making specified advice possible. In a forest management plan, every numbered stand on the map is connected with data of the site, tree characteristics, and proposals for management. The nationwide information networks have also been used to address environmental concerns. For instance, specific goals of species protection and biodiversity conservation are easily implemented into them. To the extent that forests are regarded as carbon sinks, as growing trees fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the information networks are used to integrate forest stands into climate policy. The control of forest stands from a distance with the help of electronic technologies has some conspicuous implications. As stands alternate between management and rest they cumulatively produce information and o√er contact points for many concurrent information networks. Stands begin to move across the information networks and surprises may happen: a stand ‘‘escapes’’ out of control by entrainment of an unexpected information network; it achieves independence as ‘‘an actor.’’ A source of surprise may be a patterned disorder caused by the increased complexity and a recursive iteration of standardized practices. But it may be human manipulation, because electronic technologies produce not only binary logic, digitalized, but also new operational and malleable configurations for further development. Suitable stands for di√erent purposes can be actively sought and combined

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extremely e≈ciently by new computer technologies. Then, too, the forest owners in question are in focus, automatically and obliviously. This is a new source of conflicts, though until now implicit and highly unproblematized. The previous colonization of Finnish forests was by rotation-based forestry and the ideal of ever-increasing yield; the present-day form of colonization is the transfer of stands into electronic data banks. Data banks gathered by di√erent actors may fix the ‘‘electronic stand’’ to any context, such as timber production of special assortments, nationwide environmental monitoring, bu√er zones in land use planning, ecotourism, the EU list of nature conservation, forest improvement projects financed by the state, or conflicts over old-growth forests. More generally, the forest and the stand are becoming publicly virtualized. On the Internet can be found many kinds of timber markets, as well as photos of valuable or destroyed stands distributed by environmentalists who are fighting for better nature conservation in forestry. Electronic media of remote surveillance and multiscale mapping, such as gis and gps, are not only value-neutral observation or instrumental means of representation, but they are tied to material and ideological needs and interests and have social, ethical, and political implications (Pickles 1995). Power is capillarized through stands and standards; one form of this is a latent technological development that is realized through them. New electronic images are depictions of the forest that can be shaped and manipulated; new patterns can be produced irrespective of what the information is about. For instance, the combination of remote sensing, other electronic technology, and the fully covering forest management planning makes externalized communication among forestry actors possible, but who is worried about or even aware of how largely or deeply the forest owners and other citizens are included?

CAN WE LIBERATE THE FOREST FROM THE STAND / ARD?

Superficially, it might seem that Finnish forests are completely under human control: a thoroughly naturalized system of stand/ards makes up a boundary infrastructure which binds the forests inseparably together with major human actors and stakeholders such as forest owners, forestry professionals, representatives of the industry, national-

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level planners, and people in charge of forest policy. Conservation, in the shape of biodiversity preservation, adds a new element to this infrastructure, ultimately increasing its strength. This impression, however, invites further questions: Are there ‘‘monsters’’ around, actors or objects that refuse to be naturalized within this infrastructure (for the concept, see Bowker and Star 1999, 302–5)? In fact, there are: recalcitrant forest owners; animals and plants that do not respect the stand boundaries (empirical data on the habitat distribution patterns of birds and ground arthropods are in Haila et al. 1996 and Niemelä et al. 1992, 1996, respectively); and spontaneity of forest growth which creates mixed stands in the most purified monoculture designs. Furthermore, my interviews with ordinary forest owners showed that they have great respect for the spontaneity of the forest. In fact, the forest owners relate to their own forests along rhizomes of meaning that weave together significant sites and do not respect stand boundaries. These monsters inhabit borderlands outside of the categories of stands and rotation-based forestry. Perhaps, at this stage, it is better not to try to give a single answer to the question I posed in this section’s heading. As Bowker and Star (1999, 317) point out, boundary infrastructures are necessary in any case in such a complex society as the one in which we live. At issue is not being for or against infrastructures such as the stand/ardization of forests; at issue is to look at how they are constructed and maintained and to evaluate them both as a critic and as a (re)designer. However, let me point out that forestry experts, fixed as they are to a rigid concept of forest stand/ard, have forgotten the lesson about gardens that Cicero already understood (see Lähde, this volume): we humans have to create a ‘‘second nature’’ that allows the garden to flourish. The plants grow all by themselves. Compared with gardening, forestry may seem easy in the long term: because of its high potential for reproduction, the boreal forest can hardly be totally destroyed. Given enough time, forest nature will correct human mistakes. However, the real dilemma is whether we modern humans are able to respect the potential that the forest a√ords us, considering the temporal scale and social circumstances under which we live. Reflective spontaneity is needed in forestry—respect for the spontaneous reflexivity of the forest. The least we can do is to be sensitive to monsters, not to adjust, civilize, or strike them back, but to learn from them and conceive novel ideas.

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NOTES

1 A complication, however: supporters of the traditional agrarian society had political hegemony, and they originally opposed the rising power of the forest industry and forestry professionals. They regarded scientific and technological forestry as a threat to traditional Finnish values and agricultural stability (Kuisma 1993; Michelsen 1995). The alliance between forestbased industrialism and agrarian-based nationalism was possible because industrial growth raised hopes of agrarian development. The alliance was also generated by the traditional frontier spirit (Kuisma 1993). 2 The number of private forest holdings is some 440,000, and they are owned by some 450,000 forest owners, but if family members, parties to an estate, and other co-owners are included, there are some 930,000 private forest owners in Finland. The number is high in relation to the total population of 5 million. The proportion of women, pensioners, and town dwellers is increasing considerably. The average size of woodlots is some 26 hectares and the time of possession thirty-one years. There are annually some 10,000 changes in forest ownership; usually the property is assigned by inheritance or a formal deal between relatives. Recently, fragmentation of land ownership has produced 10,000 new woodlots per decade. 3 A similar exception is the extract following the previous subhead: it is the only piece in the seventy-two-page forest management guidelines for private forestry that explicitly articulates the stand as an artificial component of large timber production machinery. Both cases suggest that language plays an important role in the naturalization of the human-made stand. ‘‘Stand’’ in English is a neutral word, because it covers both natural and artificial senses of the concept. Its common equivalent in Finnish (metsikkö) is neutral for the same reason, also in those very usual cases when the word specifies the dominant tree species (e.g., kuusikko, meaning ‘‘a spruce stand’’) or the age of trees in question (e.g., taimikko, meaning ‘‘a seedling stand’’).

Calculating the Futures Stability and Change in a Local Energy Production System

Taru Peltola

the change of energy from a more intensive to a less intensive form, drives the world. This is equally true of the human world as of the rest of nature. A major trend in the history of human societies has been the acquisition of more e≈cient sources of energy. A new source of energy never comes alone, however. An immediate consequence is that sink problems accentuate: the energy used by the human community dissipates somewhere. As pointed out in the introduction by Haila and Dyke, there is nothing specifically human about sinks. Quite the contrary, every process in nature requires a sink, too. I am not primarily interested in energy sinks in this essay, however. I focus on the social organization of a particular energy production system. Systematic utilization of modern sources of energy requires social and economic supporting networks. Hence, another consequence of adopting a new source of energy is the creation of a novel social field of power. Thomas Hughes (1983) presented a classic analysis of this aspect of industrial-scale energy production systems. The case I explore is much smaller in scale. I analyze the development of a district heating system in the administrative and commercial center of a Finnish rural municipality, Alavus, located in central Finland. The case brings to the foreground several elements that are characteristic of energy production more generally: synchronization of several types of activities, controversies over criteria to use in assessing the system, and political tensions arising from the symbolic meanings attached to the system. The particular aspect I analyze is a political controversy concerning fuel choice.∞ The district heating system in Alavus was built during the 1980s. It was based on a widely used heavy fuel oil technology. HowENERGY, OR MORE PRECISELY,

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ever, soon after the heating system was completed in the early 1990s, the fuel choice was disputed. A group of local politicians, mainly representatives of forest owners and farmers, demanded that the perfectly functioning heating system be replaced with a new one in which domestic fuels (wood and peat) could be utilized. The initiative was the beginning of a dispute over the future of the heating system between the wood fuel advocates and the management of the heating system. In the conflict, the focus was not on the technical details of the system; rather, the choice of fuel became a socioeconomic question. The supporters of domestic fuels called into question the conventional principles of engineering and business management by arguing that the fuel choice should be reconsidered within the broader setting of the local economy and livelihood. Therefore, the debate following the initiative was primarily about standards, norms, and techniques that were used when evaluating the heating activities or technological choices. These form the category of ‘‘proper,’’ with which Mary Douglas (1992, 134) has analyzed the cultural patterns of decision making. Douglas is especially interested in how the category of proper gets its content in particular situations. She reminds us that normative principles change as a result of normative debates in which the stability and legitimacy of social and institutional arrangements are questioned. In Alavus, the disputing parties defined ‘‘proper heating’’ in contrasting ways. During the first ten years of heating, the fuel oil system gained a legitimate position as a reliable energy production unit from the perspective of everyday heating management. On the other hand, it had become a part of municipal services and local economy through a constant flow of information and money. The system developed capacities that could be recognized by both the wood fuel advocates and the heating management. In my analysis of the debate, I use the concept of contrast space (A. Garfinkel 1981) to trace the conflicting frameworks within which the local decision makers evaluated heating technologies. Garfinkel (28) uses the concept of contrast space to clarify how explanation always takes place within a specific space of alternatives that determines what kind of explanation makes sense. I use the concept to specify the relevant alternatives in the choices about heating that were made in Alavus: the meaningfulness of the fuel choices was based on contrasting perspectives on the future of the heating system. ‘‘Proper’’ in heating was

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neither a fixed category nor taken for granted, but was justified by contradictory arguments by the opposing parties. In this essay I first summarize the construction of the district heating system in Alavus and name the routines that facilitated the stabilization of the system by the early 1990s. When the system was challenged, alternative calculations of profitability played a central role in the arguments the main actors used to support the fuel choices. Then, I analyze the connections between the abstract calculations and material and social practices in heating and specify the historically formed setting for the particular ways of thinking. I return to the redefinition of the norms and standards in district heating and, finally, I deal with the question of flexibility and reliability in local energy production and delivery systems.

CONSTRUCTION OF THE DISTRICT HEATING SYSTEM IN ALAVUS

Technically, a district heating system consists of power plants and a network of pipelines that delivers heated water from the plants to warm up a large number of buildings in the surroundings. The system o√ers many advantages in urban areas. The process of energy conversion results in less pollution and savings in fuel costs because burning is more complete in a large boiler than in numerous small ones. However, the construction of a heating network is expensive. This is why district heating usually is publicly funded. In Finland, district heating became common in the 1970s, when the state allocated investment subsidies for municipalities. The building of district heating systems was seen as a means to save energy after the oil crises. Therefore, the new technology was adopted even in small towns. The development of the district heating system in Alavus was quite typical. The local heating company, founded in the late 1970s, was municipally owned. The building of the system began in 1980 and expanded rapidly during the decade. In the beginning, the heating network covered a few of the larger buildings, mainly public premises such as the hospital and schools. By 1986 the length of the heating network had tripled from the first stage. The investments were mainly financed by loans secured by the city. Table 1 illustrates the physical expansion of the heating network and the increasing economic activities. It also shows a common structure of investments in heating, in

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Table 1. Statistics of the Growth of the District Heating System in Alavus.

Year

Network km

Clients

Debt (million FIM)

Invoicing (million FIM)

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991

3.6 5.4 6.7 7.8 8.6 9.7 10.4 11.1 11.3 11.8 11.9 11.9

23 47 59 64 74 79 84 87 88 94 96 96

n/a n/a 4.5 4.6 5.4 8.2 7.8 n/a n/a n/a 11.6 12.0

n/a n/a n/a 2.8 3.3 4.3 3.3 3.7 4.0 4.2 5.0 5.0

Source: Alavuden Lämpö Oy (the heating company), annual reports 1982–1997.

which the incomes lagged behind the investment costs: the amount of debt increased parallel to the expanding network, but invoicing barely doubled during the first decade. In the beginning of the 1990s, the growth of the system stopped. The system consisted of four boilers (three fixed units of 6 megawatts [mw], 2 mw, and 4 mw and one movable unit of 4 mw) and nearly 12 kilometers of pipelines. The heating company had ninety-six clients and delivered heat to 1,400 inhabitants. Heavy fuel oil was chosen as the fuel in Alavus, in line with most other Finnish municipalities building district heating in the 1970s and 1980s. The state-owned oil company Neste played a significant role in the choice. It o√ered a predesigned system including boilers, networks, and fuel from a single supplier. The technology marketed by Neste made oil an easy and reliable choice for municipalities, which had little expertise in energy production. Moreover, there were few options available at the time when district heating began to spread in Finland. Boilers for solid fuels were only beginning to be developed, and there were many uncertainties related to their use. Coal was and still is used in a few of the larger power plants but was not seriously considered for use in the smaller units. The price of oil began to drop in the early 1980s,

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and as a consequence, oil became commonly used as fuel in heating: in 1995, there were almost 300 district heating units using fuel oil in Finland (Wessberg 1999).≤ However, the discussion of alternative fuels had touched Alavus: when the decision to build the district heating system was made, the city wished that the fuel could be changed within the first five years. Local politicians planned to follow one of the neighboring towns, Virrat, which was pioneering wood fuels.

STABILIZATION AND ROUTINIZATION OF DISTRICT HEATING

Besides the technical structure, heating required various daily routines. The functioning district heating system was maintained by parallel circulations of material substance and money. The heating company in Alavus bought fuel from the Neste oil company. Hot water was circulated in pipelines and delivered to clients who paid for it. With the money the heating company was able to buy more fuel and run the routines. The sta√ of the heating company maintaining this circulation consisted of three full-time employees, a manager, a secretary, and a maintenance man, and one part-time employee for backup. Routinization of activities is important for the stability of a technological system. Routines enable the successful operation of an organization because it is wise to stabilize, normalize, or standardize what functions in particular circumstances (Nelson and Winter 1982). Therefore, routines are an important storage of operational knowledge, and as such they tend to maintain the system. In Alavus, the routinization of activities was a guarantee of the continuous availability of heat, and thus the reliability of the system. From the perspective of daily management of heating, the goal to change the fuel started to appear risky without an alternative production and delivery network. Therefore, the company management abandoned the plan: it was not wise to change a functioning system one has learned to cope with. The stability of the system was not only a local achievement. The delivery of fuel oil was reliable due to established market relations, stable actors, and rules of operation. The maturity and stability of the technology was an asset for Neste, which could successfully expand its business and strengthen its position in the energy market.

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However, when the local heating activities in Alavus developed into routines, they also became di√erentiated despite the small size of the heating company. Two distinct but equally necessary routines seemed to be important. First, technical routines aimed at securing the uninterrupted operation of the technical devices. The equipment had to be regularly maintained to keep it in good order. Oil tanks were filled a few times a year. Although the heating system was automated and did not require continuous presence of the sta√, the operation of the system had to be monitored. If something abnormal occurred, the sta√ was informed and could take the necessary actions. Another important field of activity consisted of the economic and accounting routines necessary to secure the economy of the company. These included invoicing of the clients and discharging the payments. The sta√ had to monitor cash flows and ensure that the company was able to pay fuel bills. Moreover, the owner and other interest groups were informed through annual reports and financial accounts. Through these, economic information also flowed outside the company. Thus, the heating activities were not confined to the heating company because the system was not a closed techno-economic unit. It was administered by a board of directors, mainly composed of local politicians representing the city as the owner of the company. Important decisions such as investments funded by loans were made by the city council in the public arena; less important choices, such as daily routines and repairs, were made within the company.

THE FUEL CHOICE CHALLENGED

A group of local politicians and members of city administration proposed in 1993 that the heating company in Alavus should be closed down and heating should be rearranged so that it was possible to use wood and peat as fuel. They released an initiative of a contract with the fuel company Vapo.≥ The contract included selling the existing oildriven plants to Vapo, which would, in turn, build a new solid fuel heating plant. The city would remain the owner of the pipelines and continue to deliver energy to the clients. The initiative invoked resistance from the heating company and marked the beginning of a public dispute. The manager of the company

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argued that there was no need for change because everything was functioning well (Viiskunta [the local newspaper] 4 February 1993). Also, the annual reports of the company a≈rmed that there had been no need to repair the boilers in the early 1990s. In the debate, two camps with mutually contradictory views on the future of the heating system were formed. Both parties used economic calculations to estimate the benefits and costs of the proposal, but each distributed the benefits and costs di√erently. Evidently, the role of the calculations was not to provide the decision makers with necessary information, but to make the viewpoint of each party visible and help to extend or claim their authority over the issue. The advocates for domestic fuels used economic calculations to support their initiative. When the contract proposal with Vapo was released, the mayor of the city presented investment calculations in the local newspaper. According to the calculations, the building of a solid fuel heating plant would not be economically profitable and the city would have to pay subsidies to support the investment. The mayor, however, justified the subsidies by pointing out their stimulating e√ects on the local economy. She claimed that the rearrangements in heating would create new jobs and improve the reliability of the system in crisis situations (Viiskunta 21 January 1993, 25 January 1993). The proponents of the initiative considered burning oil wasteful from a regional economic viewpoint. If wood fuel was used, landowners, chippers, and transportation would have to be organized into production chains, and the money spent on fuel would benefit the local economy instead of flowing abroad. To evaluate the benefits for the local economy, the city and Vapo estimated the number of new jobs that would be created in farming and forestry sectors, which were experiencing serious economic hardships. They emphasized the unfavorable economic situation and high unemployment rate to underline their case and to make the boost to the local economy seem attractive (Protocol of the municipal executive board, 19 January 1993, in the city archive). Moreover, they addressed benefits for forestry and forest owners in the form of increased forest growth.∂ To defend his views, the manager of the heating company ordered another investment calculation from a consultant and undermined the claims of the mayor by arguing that ‘‘the calculations the city has made are false’’ (Viiskunta 4 February 1993). He addressed the question of

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proper ways of economic calculation and considered the estimations of the local economic e√ects vague. For the manager, the building of a solid fuel heating plant was purely an economic investment that had to be evaluated in business economic terms only: the project would be profitable if profits exceeded costs and the investment paid back investors in an acceptable time span. The manager evaluated the feasibility of the proposal on the basis of the life cycle of the equipment and correct timing of investment: it makes sense to invest in a new boiler only if it is especially beneficial (e.g., technical improvements result in major savings) or inevitable at the moment (e.g., the boiler has become old). From the perspective of daily routines of the heating company, no investments were required at the moment. From the municipal viewpoint, the business economic notion of profitability was not, however, an adequate criteria for judging heating activities. By introducing complementary calculations, the representatives of the city tried to widen the scope of costs and benefits while the manager stuck to the conventional business management approach. The competing calculations indicate that there was uncertainty concerning the system boundaries. This enabled the debate on what activities should be taken into account when heating is evaluated. The focus on calculations also emphasized the social and economic nature of the fuel choice. With the calculations, the socioeconomic context of heating could be redefined and the group of interested actors widened: the heating system included not only the heating company and the technical structure but also the municipal sector, forestry, agriculture, and transportation. Moreover, heating was not considered a purely local activity but related to many national issues and practices, such as forest policy and regional development. In addition to system boundaries, the criteria for normal economic performance in heating was negotiated. Although the city council of Alavus accepted the contract with Vapo, the board of the heating company refused to sign it. The recalcitrant board defended itself by claiming that the contract would result in unprofitable business actions (Viiskunta 14 April 1993). Enraged over the situation, the chair of the city council referred to the balance sheets of the company and stated that the company was already in serious economic trouble. According to him, ‘‘The annual turnover of the company is 4 million marks and its

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debt is 11 million marks. This means that the company owes three times as much as the turnover. A company is usually regarded to be in a crisis when the debt exceeds the turnover’’ (Viiskunta 19 April 1993). He claimed that the company would soon be bankrupt and therefore implied that the contract would be reasonable also from the business economic viewpoint. Why weren’t the balance sheets alarming to the manager of the heating company? Although the company could only barely take care of its big loans, there was no threat of a cash crisis. The figures describing the economy of the company could have been interpreted as normal in district heating due to the characteristic structure of investments. However, the advocates of wood fuel utilized the information from the balance sheets to play down the manager’s claim about the reliability of the system. This reveals the ambiguous nature of calculations and economic information. Economic calculations are like crystal balls: calculations, too, make the future visible. However, similar to messages from crystal balls, calculations can be interpreted in di√erent ways. The di√erent interpretations of the same balance sheets illustrate the uncertainty about what is normal economic performance. The abstract business theoretical knowledge was confronted with local everyday experience, but their relationship was not straightforward. The wood fuel advocates used the theoretical ideas only when they strengthened their own arguments; otherwise, they ignored the claims of the manager about the correct timing of the investment. The flexible use of calculations made the supporters of wood fuel successful: the city council confirmed the decision to accept the contract with Vapo. The conflict was not, however, easily settled. The board of the heating company had to be changed twice before the contract with Vapo was signed. The manager was fired. The discussion included two transitions that had a crucial e√ect on the outcome of the debate. First, the economic e≈ciency of district heating became separated from technical e≈ciency: the indebtedness of the company became a more significant criterion for assessing the operation of the system than technical reliability. Second, economic indicators were used to argue for both business economic and regional economic views, but the figures were used and interpreted in contrasting ways by the opposing parties. When the arguments developed, the contrast spaces within which the

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parties assessed the economic viability of the heating system diverged from each other. A basic contrast was between private business profits and public benefits, but the parties diverged on two additional issues. One set of arguments circled around the ownership of the company. It was municipally owned but the participants in the conflict had di√erent views on whether it should be managed according to business economic principles or not. The participants also disagreed on whether the product, heat itself, is a private or a public good. These contrasting ways of framing district heating were utilized by both parties to support their specific arguments. Although the manager of the heating company argued that the company should be managed according to business economic principles, he also claimed that all the citizens should have an equal right to cheap energy—a right that would be jeopardized by the new investment. The advocates of wood fuel, in turn, had to use business economic e≈ciency as an argument for their case, although they principally held that heating is part of public services provided by the municipality. The boundary between what was considered in business economic terms and what was not became unclear in the debate.

DISTRICT HEATING AS A MATERIAL AND SOCIAL PRACTICE

The meaningfulness of particular contrast spaces and alternative ways of interpretation is related to practical matters. A. Garfinkel (1981, 32– 33) remarks that the presuppositions of an explanation are bounded by actual situations, and the nature of phenomena and the explanation is not valid outside this boundary. For instance, we can explain the greenness of plants by their chlorophyll content, but this explanation is not valid for other kinds of green objects. In Alavus, addressing the viability of the investment made sense only in relation to the specific definition of the district heating system. While the manager of the company defined the system as an economic unit comprising material equipment, his opponents considered this system a part of municipal services. The alternative definitions of the object of decision making were not arbitrarily chosen but closely tied to particular material and social practices. In fact, the di√erent definitions of the heating system as an object of decision making were constitutive of these practices.

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Main stages in the developmental trajectory of the district heating system in Alavus.

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In Figure 1, I illustrate the developmental trajectory of the district heating system in Alavus and the connections between ways of thinking and the development of material structures and institutional arrangements of the heating system at di√erent stages. 1. Originally, the heating system was established in Alavus to produce heat more e≈ciently. The decision was facilitated by several developments, such as improvements in district heating technology and the two oil crises of the 1970s, which made the old central heating systems seem ine≈cient and wasteful. 2. The heating company was established, and the building of the physical structure of the system began with the help of the Neste oil company. Later, the necessary activities and duties to manage the system took shape within this institutional and material framework. 3. By the early 1990s, the physical structure of the district heating system was completed. The routines and practices of heating evolved along with the stabilization of social and economic relations between the actors and accumulating experience of the sta√. 4. The routines di√erentiated into two particular fields of expertise within the company: technical maintenance and economic management.

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A third field of expertise was formed in the municipal arena when administrative bodies were informed of the operation of the heating company, for instance, by annual reports and through the working of the executive board. Consequently, the performance of the heating company was increasingly evaluated as a part of municipal activities. Along with the building of the system and the establishment of the routines and practices, ways of assessing the performance of the system were stabilized. The role of energy management was understood within three alternative frameworks: what is technically feasible; what is profitable in terms of business; and what is proper for the municipality. The latter two were based on economic information about heating activities as distinct from technical skills. 5. The strengthening of the municipal perspective brought new interests into play. The need to reform district heating arose because the existing practice did not satisfy the targets in the local economy. Also, the economic recession set new goals and requirements for the local economy. The municipal interests in heating were supported by representatives of the forestry sector. In fact, the chair of the city council was also the chair of the local forest management association. The technical expertise of the heating company was replaced by a reliance on Vapo as an expert on the use of domestic fuels. A dispute arose. 6. As a consequence, the physical structure was changed. In 1994, a new heating plant using peat and wood fuel started to produce heat.

CONCLUSIONS: WHAT IS ‘‘PROPER’’ IN DISTRICT HEATING

When the advocates of wood fuel challenged the normative basis of heating in Alavus, the e≈ciency of heating became a political question. In district heating, as in other infrastructure services, there are goals besides the goal of making a profit. Although privatization or adoption of principles of business management is often seen as a solution to improve the e≈ciency of infrastructure services, problems can arise if the quality of the good, reliability of the service, or environmental aspects have been considered subordinate to business economic targets (e.g., Brendan Martin 1996 o√ers examples of failures of the private sector to fulfill all the goals of water management). In Alavus, the demands to change fuel were explicitly based on claims that proper ways of heating should not be judged solely by monetary measures. As long as the manager of the heating company

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regarded costs and profits as the adequate measure of the viability of the fuel choice, use of wood fuel did not seem to be wise. However, when the municipal actors introduced the framework of prosperity and welfare of the citizens, changes in production technology began to seem necessary. Ironically, the debate focused on numbers and economic calculations, even though the supporters of wood fuel tried to point out that heating is connected to issues that are not easily transformed into a numerical form. Although economic calculations can be seen as a means to establish norms in business activities, for instance, to control the e≈ciency of production (Miller 1994; Miller and O’Leary 1994), the mechanism is not automatic. Despite the focus on economic calculations in Alavus, the changes in production technology cannot be interpreted as a reaction to a static problem, such as maximizing the profits or improving e≈ciency, because the normal and agreed-upon ways of conceptualizing energy production were questioned. The story of the district heating system in Alavus demonstrates the dynamic interplay between actions and the future conditions of action. The ground for bringing up the fuel choice in the early 1990s was prepared during the history of building the system. First, as district heating was institutionally located between private and public sectors, purely business economic principles could be challenged. Second, heating gradually became the concern of a broader group of people with various backgrounds and goals. As a consequence, expertise in heating was no longer internal to the heating company but moved to the public arena. In the very beginning, the city had to rely on the technical expertise of the oil company Neste and the engineer-manager of the heating company. However, when the system matured during the ten-year history of its building, knowledge of heating was not only stored in the routines within the company, but it infiltrated the practices of the city as well. In other words, the heating system was built in such a way that it belonged to di√erent worlds at the same time. Susan Leigh Star (1991) has called this kind of situation a zone of mixed order. The heating system thus was not a singular network of technical artifacts, human actors, and institutions; its constitutive elements were members in different networks at the same time. This kind of partial membership creates uncertainties in technological systems. In Alavus, uncertainty

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about system boundaries and the criteria of reliability enabled the testing of the legitimacy of the social, institutional, and material arrangements constituting the heating system. On the other hand, the existence of the zone of mixed order enabled new actors to enter the field. The authority of engineers was eroded because the system was not closed enough to be controlled by its managers only; municipal actors could utilize the leaking information for their own purposes. Due to the leakages, the representatives of the municipality could enter into a ‘‘thick’’ relation with the company. Such thick relations cross organizational or industry boundaries and therefore enable reinterpretation of knowledge and information (Allen 2000, 28). The expansion of authority and expertise was not based on the transmission of knowledge from the company to the municipal arena; it was based on a translation of the decision-making situation in a way that supported the specific goals of the advocates of wood fuel.

AFTERWORD: DEGREES OF FREEDOM AND RELIABILITY IN A HEATING SYSTEM

Uncertainty is present in every technological system, small or large. Despite the e√orts to build a reliable or ‘‘proper’’ system, and no matter how stable and normal the system seems to be at one moment in time, there is always room for uncertainty. To investigate this issue, I first draw a parallel to a network breakdown that occurred in Lapland in January 1999 during an exceptionally cold spell. The main Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (28 January 1999), reported the incident as follows: ‘‘A rescue operation was prepared in Inari to evacuate hundreds of people from their cold homes because the delivery of electricity was interrupted on Tuesday evening. Almost one thousand households were left without any source of power, because the main power line was broken due to a low temperature reaching almost –50 degrees centigrade. The line was repaired by Wednesday morning, but the temperature had fallen below ten degrees in many houses.’’ Inari is one of northernmost municipalities in Finland. About 90 percent of the housing stock in Inari depend completely on the electric power supply and have no fireplaces or other backup for heating.∑ The episode illustrates what can follow. Blind trust in the unproblematic

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availability of electricity has defined choices in the use and distribution of energy in Lapland. In the decades following World War II, cheap electricity was available in Lapland from the Soviet Union as compensation for the regulation of Lake Inari for hydropower production on the Soviet side of the border. In the 1970s and 1980s, the state supported the building of new houses in Lapland to improve the living conditions of local people in the north. The authorities only recommended but did not principally require building fireplaces in the new houses. Construction companies o√ered electricity as a convenient and inexpensive mode of energy in sparsely populated Lapland. However, the dependency on electricity suddenly became a problem when heat was most urgently needed. The weaknesses of technological systems are often acknowledged only after a crisis; no one thinks about them when the system functions normally. In Inari and Alavus, the normal way of functioning was not self-evident, but in both cases it required reconsideration. In Lapland, the extreme weather indicated the vulnerability of the power distribution system. However, the reliability of the system was based not only on the technical structure (although it was a material element that was actually broken) but also on the social and institutional organization of the system. The arrangements were a result of economic, political, and technical choices. The di≈culty in anticipating the uncertainties is that it is often hard to specify who has made the choices or when they have been made. Both in Inari and Alavus, the development of the system was not in the hands of any single ‘‘system builder,’’ often assumed in technology studies. Instead, the knowledge and expertise as well as the decisionmaking powers were distributed across the network of di√erent actors taking part in the life of the system and the life span of the system. The significance of the dispute in Alavus is that the previous choices were made visible. Although from the perspective of everyday business management, the system was functioning well, the introduction of the new contrast space brought the choices into a public space in which they were scrutinized. The discussion about appropriate technology also raises the question of flexibility in technological systems. Once a system has been built, the technology applied is a constraint for people who are connected to it and dependent on its reliability. Routines, practices, and stable relations

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maintain established technologies and have the ability to close o√ other technological options: the choices that have been made seem to be inevitable and unavoidable. In Alavus, only by taking the energy production system out of its everyday context and placing it into the context of municipal economy could novel and alternative interpretations of the future of the energy production system be made. In this sense, the political struggle in Alavus seems to be an achievement: the advocates for domestic fuels questioned what was previously taken for granted. By disturbing the existing order of things and pointing out that there are choices to be made in energy production, freedom of action could be increased in Alavus. A word of warning has to be added to this conclusion, however. The central role of Vapo has turned out to be an obstacle in expanding the use of renewable wood fuel. Vapo is using mainly peat in the heating plant, and the price of wood fuel has remained too low for an e≈cient production chain for wood fuel to develop. Indeed, in the late 1990s, Alavus was reminded of the vulnerability of the system: a pollution tax was introduced for peat, and as wood fuel was in short supply, the price of energy rose. (In fact, the energy price has been the highest among district heating systems.) What once looked like a pathbreaking step toward the use of renewable energy has actually become an obstacle; while utilization of wood energy has strongly increased in Finland, Alavus has not succeeded in increasing its share of renewables. The current dissatisfaction among some actors in Alavus implies that ‘‘proper’’ heating might still require new definitions, and the material, institutional, and social arrangements of heating—stabilized for a while—may need to be retested.

NOTES

1 The dispute was public in two arenas: municipal decision-making bodies and the pages of the local newspaper, Viiskunta. My analysis is based on empirical material consisting of newspaper articles; municipal documents, including economic calculations; and interviews with key participants in the discussion. 2 This development path has led to a dependency on the international oil markets and fluctuation of oil prices in the Finnish energy sector. Until the

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1950s, heating was self-su≈cient and based mainly on firewood. When central heating systems were introduced, the use of oil spread even into rural areas with abundant wood supplies. However, demands to change the fuel have appeared lately, and many municipalities have actually abandoned oil. Natural gas replaced oil wherever it became available after the mid-1980s. The interest in wood energy also increased in the 1990s. In fact, the case of Alavus is part of the second wave of wood energy after the first pioneers in the wake of the oil crises. 3 Vapo is a state-owned fuel company, founded after World War II for production and delivery of firewood. In 1969, Vapo started to extract and deliver peat (Massa et al. 1987). Thereafter, it has mainly concentrated on peat production, owning large peatland areas all over the country. The peat markets in Finland are highly concentrated: the two largest companies (one of which is Vapo) extract 85 percent of the peat used in energy production (Tanskanen and Palviainen 1997). The use of peat is a peculiarity of Finnish energy production, and in district heating systems peat and wood are often combined. 4 Finnish forest policy is based on an assumption that thinning of young forest stands improves forest growth. Because biomass from thinning can be utilized as a source of energy, the use of wood fuels is often justified by this argument, and use of wood energy is promoted by forestry organizations. 5 Verbal information from Inarin sähkölaitos, the local power company (23 August 2001).

In this actual world there is . . . not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstractions of Man and Nature. We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out. Except that if we mentally draw back . . . we are spared the effort of looking, in any active way, at the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once our product and our activity.—Raymond Williams, ‘‘Ideas of Nature’’

Exploring Themes about Social Agency through Interpretation of Diagrams of Nature and Society

Peter Taylor THEMES

When environmental researchers and commentators speak about how nature speaks to them, they often use diagrams depicting ideas about the relationship between natural and social processes. By interpreting some of these diagrams I explore simple propositions or themes that inform the study of social and environmental dynamics, including themes about the position researchers take as social agents in relation to such dynamics. I endorse themes that stimulate thinking, open up questions for further inquiry, and lead us to generate new theories. I am critical of reading simple propositions as representations of some general or specific aspects of the world. I want to problematize themes that ask

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us to think of environmental or social situations in terms of dynamics among simple variables in some well-bounded system. I place such themes in tension with others with three qualities: they link subjects across conventional boundaries; they discount their own appearance of generality by drawing attention to considerations that have been placed in the background or beyond their scope; or they point to further work needed to analyze particular, complex situations. Whereas some themes focus our attention within the boundary of the researchers’ ‘‘dialogue’’ with the situations studied, we can also interpret such dialogue with reference to the interactions among social agents involved in establishing and acting on knowledge. I am especially interested in interpretive themes that depict social agency as distributed across di√erent kinds of agents and scales of social interactions. Tensions in the previous paragraph apply to my cases. The diagrams are snapshots from particular points of time; a fuller analysis would require detailed reference to the text and context from which they have been extracted. Looking at other work by the researchers may warrant revision of the themes I identify. Furthermore, if readers try to use the themes to influence the work of others or to modify their own direction, they would have to supplement the themes with an examination of the particular contexts in which they are engaging. In short, the essay as a whole exemplifies a theme about the process of generating theory (in tension with the representational fidelity or generality of the product of such processes), namely: 1. Themes may stimulate our thinking about the ways researchers study social and environmental dynamics, but they invite deeper analysis of and engagement in particular cases and subsequent work.

A Simple Contrast

Cultural anthropologists Schwarz and Thompson (1990, 4–6) use diagrams to illustrate four worldviews concerning nature and the e√ect society can have on it (Figure 1). This classification and the cultural (‘‘grid-group’’) theory that underlies it have been widely invoked in analyses of responses to environmental issues (e.g., Harrison and Burgess 1994; Rayner 1990; M. Thompson 1984). But to introduce the themes of this essay, I want only to draw attention to the basic character of the diagrammatic representation of society-nature relations.

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Nature capricious

Nature perverse / tolerant

Nature benign

Nature ephemeral

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Four views of nature. (From Schwarz and Thompson 1990.)

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These diagrams share certain features: the society-nature system has a point of balance, represented by the position of the balls in the diagrams. Although this is not shown, it is implied that di√erent forces stimulate the society to exploit its resources and push the system out of its basic condition of balance—the ball would be moved sideways in the diagram. If the forces diminish, the system may return to its point of balance—as the displaced ball would do under the force of gravity. The diagrams di√er on the return to the point of balance. Moving clockwise from the bottom left in Figure 1, the return happens either (a) readily and reliably; (b) slowly, perhaps so slowly that the system appears to have no preferred state; (c) contingently, provided the system has not been disturbed beyond some threshold; or (d) rarely, because almost any disturbance pushes the system over the threshold. These di√erences notwithstanding, the common formulation of societynature relations depicted in these diagrams is of society disturbing a system whose basic dynamics are set by biological and physical conditions, not by society: 2. Nature is something external to society, and the nature of this nature determines the range of acceptable human ‘‘disturbances.’’

A contrast between this formulation and another view of societynature relations is represented in a diagram by resource economist Raúl García-Barrios (personal communication, April 1994; Figure 2). García-Barrios wants to highlight that in many places, the environment or natural resources, for example, topsoils, rainforests, bodies of water,

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Environmental degradation prevented by social forces (1) versus society as a disruption of nature’s balance (2). (After Raul García-Barrios, personal communication, April 1994)

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have already been deeply transformed by people. A local threshold has been reached and surpassed, but this socially conditioned environment (ball 1) is prevented from ‘‘rolling down the hill’’ into a situation of degradation by various social conservative forces (e.g., when agricultural terraces are maintained by well-disciplined labor; see the next section). If this social-natural system degrades, the reason is not that a natural balance has been disturbed by social forces beyond nature’s basin of resilience (ball 2). Instead, one has to inquire into how the social conservative forces have been eroded (see P. Taylor and GarcíaBarrios 1997). Even in the case of extreme temperature and rainfall or drought (i.e., situations where it might seem that nature has become less benign or tolerant), the timing and form of environmental degradation must depend on the character of the socially conditioned environment. This contrasting formulation motivates the following situation: 3. Natural and social are inseparable in social and environmental dynamics.

Interpretation of Ideas about Nature

García-Barrios’s diagram is simple. It points only to the existence of processes that are simultaneously social and natural; it leaves undeveloped how one engages with particular cases and how to analyze the

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‘‘forces’’ pictured in Figure 2’s arrow. Nevertheless, the simple contrast motivates an important question: What are people doing when they represent nature and society as separate, albeit interacting, realms? One possible answer might be that people are concerned with the resilience (or vulnerability) of nature as a realm-in-itself. To assess this natural resilience they look for places without signs of past or present human activities. However, few such places remain on this planet. Another possible answer is that ideas about resilience derive from comparing what happens after an environmental accident (e.g., an oil spill), with or without e√orts at amelioration. If amelioration usually produces no better results, then it might seem that nature can look after itself. Such a comparison, however, depends on social decisions about what aspects of nature are to be restored, for whom, and for what purposes. Thus, it does not seem that either rare pristine situations or cleanup e√orts can serve as a basis for generalizations about the resilience of nature-as-nature. When people talk of nature separate from society, something else must be generating their claims. The English Welsh cultural analyst Raymond Williams argued that people derive their ideas about an untouched ‘‘nature’’ and their ideals about ‘‘natural’’ principles, not from remote and atypical sites of nature free from human influence, but from the social order they are defending or promoting. Idealizations about nature spare people the e√ort of examining ‘‘the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once [their] product and [their] activity’’ (1980, 83). Representations of nature and society have literal referents but, following Williams, they can also be interpreted as privileging certain social arrangements, actions, and agents over others. In other words: 4a. Representations of nature and society can be interpreted as representing more than what they explicitly refer to. 4b. Preferred social arrangements and social agency are represented— explicitly and implicitly—in the ways nature and society are represented.

In the four cases to follow (which are drawn from a larger set I collated with Chris London), I make extensive use of the tensions between well-bounded systems and inseparability (theme 2 vs. 3) and between natural or social scientific representations and their interpretability in relation to social agency (themes 4a and 4b). In the first of

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the four cases, I identify several aspects of social-natural dynamics that most diagrams suppress. This prepares the ground for my interpretation of more conventional diagrams in the three subsequent sections.

INTERSECTING PROCESSES

Political ecology (Peet and Watts 1996; P. Taylor and García-Barrios 1995) analyzes the complexity of social and environmental dynamics in terms of intersecting and conflicting economic, social, and ecological processes operating at di√erent scales. These processes range from the local institutions of production and their associated agroecologies, and the social di√erentiation in a given community and its social psychology of norms and reciprocal expectations, through to national and international political economic changes. Political ecology’s rich descriptions have several features; they tend to connect local struggles and changes related to land, labor, and other resources to disputes over roles and responsibilities; draw on the historical background of the current processes; highlight the dynamics related to inequality; and attend to critical developments in the larger political economies. Let me illustrate these features through a synopsis of research undertaken in the mid1980s by Raúl García-Barrios and his brother, Luis García-Barrios, an ecologist, in which they traced severe soil erosion in a mountainous agricultural region of Oaxaca, Mexico, to the undermining of traditional political authority after the Mexican Revolution (García-Barrios and García-Barrios 1990). The twentieth century is not the first time soil erosion has occurred in Oaxaca. After the Spanish conquest, the indigenous population collapsed from disease and communities moved down from the highlands and abandoned terraced lands, which then eroded. The Indians adopted labor-saving practices from the Spanish, such as cultivating wheat and using ploughs. As the population recovered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collective institutions evolved that reestablished and maintained terraces and stabilized the soil dynamics. Because such landscape transformation introduced the potential for severe slope instability, it needed continuous and proper maintenance. The collective institutions revolved around the mobilization of peasant labor for key activities, first by the Church under a repartimiento system and then,

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after independence from Spain, by the rich Indians, caciques. These activities, in addition to maintaining terraces, included sowing corn in cajete work teams and maintaining a diversity of maize varieties and cultivation techniques. In a form of moral economy, the caciques benefited from what was produced but were expected to look after the peasants in hard times. Given that the peasants felt security in proportion to the wealth and prestige of their cacique, and given the prestige attached directly to each person’s role in the collective labor, the labor tended to be very e≈cient. In addition, peasants were kept indebted to caciques and could not readily break their unequal relationship. The caciques, moreover, insulated this relationship from change by resisting potential labor-saving technologies and ties to outside markets. The Mexican Revolution, however, ruptured the reciprocal and exploitive relationships by taking away the power of the caciques. Many peasants migrated to industrial areas, returning periodically with cash or sending it back, so that rural transactions and prestige became monetarized. Monetarization and loss of labor meant that the collective institutions collapsed and terraces began to erode. National food-pricing policies favored urban consumers, so corn was grown only for subsistence needs. New labor-saving activities, such as goat herding, which contributes in its own way to erosion, were taken up without new local institutions to regulate them. Figure 3, a diagram I prepared to help me narrate this story, highlights several important features related to themes 2 through 4 and motivates some additional themes. Let me begin with inseparability (theme 3). Processes of di√erent kinds and scales, involving heterogeneous elements, are interlinked in the production of any outcome and in their own ongoing transformation. Each is implicated in the others, even when they are excluded (as was the case during the nineteenth century when caciques kept maize production insulated from external markets). The expression intersecting processes conveys this inseparability or mutual implication of processes of di√erent kinds and scales (P. Taylor and García-Barrios 1995). No one kind of thing, no single strand on its own, can su≈ce to explain the currently eroded hillsides. In this sense, political ecology contrasts with competing explanations that center on a single dynamic or process: for example, climate change in erosive landscapes; population growth (or, in the Oaxacan case, population decline) as the motor of

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Intersecting processes leading to soil erosion in San Andrés, Oaxaca. (From P. Taylor 2005.) The dotted lines indicate connections across the di√erent strands of the schema.

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social, technical, or environmental change; increasing capitalist exploitation of natural resources; or modernization of production methods. Four aspects of the inseparability theme can be introduced here: 3a. In intersecting social-natural processes, di√erentiation among unequal agents is implicated.

Sustainable maize production depended on the reciprocal ties of cacique and peasants, and the inequality between these agents resulted from a long process of social and economic di√erentiation. Similarly, the demise of this agroecology involved the unequal power of the state over local caciques, of urban industrialists over rural interests, and of workers who remitted cash to their communities over those who continued agricultural labor. 3b. Heterogeneous elements and scales are involved.

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The situation involved processes operating at di√erent spatial and temporal scales, involving elements as diverse as the local climate and geomorphology, social norms, work relations, and national political economic policy. 3c. Historical contingency is significant.

The role of the Mexican Revolution in the collapse of nineteenth-century agroecology is contingent. Its significance rests not on the event of the Revolution itself, but on the di√erent processes, each having a history, with which the Revolution intersected. 3d. Structuredness is not reducible to micro- or macrodeterminations.

Regularities, such as the terraces and the reciprocal obligations, persist long enough for agents to recognize or abide by them. That is, structuredness is discernable in the intersecting processes. Yet there is no reduction to macro- or structural determination in the above account. Nor is the focus on local, individual-individual transactions or on complex patterns produced by multiple simple transactions. Let me assess various implications of interpretability and social agency (themes 4a and 4b) in relation to this case. First, notice that the social agency represented explicitly in the account of the García-Barrioses was not centered in one class or place. Instead, in intersecting processes: 3e. Social agency is distributed across di√erent kinds of agents and scales.

In the nineteenth century, caciques exploited peasants, but in a relationship of reciprocal norms and obligations. The national political economy was implicated, by its exclusion, in the actions of the caciques to maintain labor-intensive and self-su≈cient production. Although the Mexican Revolution initiated the breakdown of local institutions, the ensuing process involved political and economic change not only from above, but also from below and between: semiproletarian peasants brought their money back to the rural community and reshaped its transactions, institutions, and social psychology. Other kinds of social agency, however, are represented implicitly (theme 4a). My diagram of the García-Barrioses’ account can be read as an engagement with current scholarly discourses in a way that presumes and promotes distributed social agency. The elements included

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in the diagram are heterogeneous, but I tease out di√erent strands. The strands, however, are cross-linked; they are not torn apart. In this sense, my account has an intermediate complexity—neither highly reduced, nor overwhelmingly detailed. By acknowledging this level of complexity, the account steps away from debates centered around simple oppositions, for example, ecology-geomorphology versus economy-society, or ecological rationality versus economic rationality. Similarly, by placing an explanatory focus on the ongoing, intersecting processes, the account discounts grand discontinuities and transitions, for example, peasant to capitalist agriculture, or feudalism to industrialism to Fordism to flexible specialization. Distributed social agency, intermediate complexity, and the other aspects of intersecting processes accounts (theme 3a–e) have implications not only for how environmental degradation is conceptualized but also for how one responds to it in practice (theme 4b). Intersecting processes accounts do not support government or social movement policies based on simple themes, such as economic modernization by market liberalization, sustainable development through promotion of traditional agricultural practices, or mass mobilization to overthrow capitalism. Instead: 5. Intermediate complexity accounts favor the idea of multiple, smaller engagements linked together within the intersecting processes.

This shift in how policy is conceived suggests a corresponding shift in scholarly practice. On the level of research organization, intersecting processes accounts highlight the need for transdisciplinary work grounded in particular sites (theme 5). The accounts do not underwrite the customary, so-called interdisciplinary projects directed by natural scientists or the economic analyses based on the kinds of statistical data available in published censuses. In all these di√erent ways, representing is inseparably bound up with engaging (theme 4b) in a way that further extends the idea of distributed social agency (theme 3e; P. Taylor 2005). Finally, note that the intermediate complexity of Figure 3 preserves a role for some kind of social scientific generalization. The synopsis and diagram abstract away an enormous amount of detail, a move that suggests that this particular might be relevant to other cases. The account does not provide a general explanatory schema, but at least it could serve as a template to guide further studies (theme 1). Such a

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template would be elaborated in new research projects once researchers began to address the particularities of the situation they are studying. In other words, the particularities of each case would not warrant starting from scratch when attempting to understand and engage in socioenvironmental change. The intermediate complexity of my account also means—and here I am applying some reflexivity to my own representational work—that I have deflected attention away from the need to examine the particular institutional and personal resources, agendas, and alliances that people like me would have to cultivate to gain support for the desired transdisciplinary research or policy interventions. This last observation, that representations, including diagrams like Figure 3, can help steer attention away from the complex politics involved in understanding and influencing socioenvironmental change, is an example of theme 4b that will assume greater significance as I analyze more conventional society-nature diagrams.

SOCIETY-NATURE DIAGRAMS

The aspects of social-natural processes discussed in the previous section are not commonly spoken about or depicted in diagrams. In this section, I explore the significance of this through three more cases, drawn from ecology, cultural analysis of views about nature, and social interpretations of science.

Ecosystems as Circuits in H. T. Odum’s Early System Ecology

In the mid-1950s the ecologist H. T. Odum (1956) reported on the measurements from his first study of energy transformations up different trophic levels in the Silver Springs in central Florida. He included a diagram that conveyed the relative scale of biomass stocks and production rates (both converted to energy equivalents) and the subdivision of gross production into respiration, consumption, and so on (Figure 4). The form of this diagram was new in ecology, but Odum claimed that energy flow diagramming was an obvious step for someone with his training in flows of chemicals and energy through the biosphere (P. Taylor 2005). Yet Odum’s early diagrams had a proportionality and clear orientation that was lacking in previous diagrams to which he referred

Energy flow diagram for an ecosystem. (From Odum 1956.)

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(Clarke 1946, 333; Hutchinson 1948). The flow downward, from the upper left to the heat sink at the bottom of Figure 4, adds the force of gravity to a theme that runs throughout Odum’s work: 6. Ecological and biogeochemical cycles are ‘‘driven by radiant energy’’ (Odum 1951, 407).

Energy flow diagrams summarized measurements economically but suggested little about how to theorize the ecological processes. Odum’s (1960) theoretical productivity increased in the late 1950s, when he converted energy flow diagrams into actual electrical circuits. Figure 5 depicts an electrical circuit in a diagram that corresponds very closely to Figure 4. The boxes corresponding to the trophic compartments are similarly placed and scaled. In the actual electrical circuit, resistors (represented by the zig-zag lines with arrows in Figure 5) could be adjusted until the current flow along the connecting wires, measured on the ammeters, became proportional to the measurements of energy flowing between the compartments in the actual ecosystem. The circuit was a physical device that Odum could readily manipulate to deliver on the theory only promised by earlier diagrams. Analogizing was facilitated by pictorial conventions for reducing objects to the two dimensions of the printed page. Consider the convention of framing. Diagrams for scientific publication must be inserted on a flat and rectangular printed page in some relation to the text. When separate pages or plates were common for illustrations, several elements were often arranged on a single page and enclosed within a frame (Blum 1993). Odum’s flow diagram omits the frame, but his circuit diagram restores and extends the convention to demarcate an inside from an outside. The internal components are separated from external factors. Electrical energy flows across the frame/boundary, but the e√ects of external factors are relatively simply mediated compared with the coherent internal relations. Partitioning of inside and outside and simple exchanges across the boundary give weight to the following idea: 7a. Nature can be divided into coherent, well-bounded systems.

The frame suggests that 7b. An outside analyst can observe and analyze the dynamics of the system as a whole (see theme 4b).

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Electrical analog circuit for the steady state ecosystem in Fig. 4. (From Odum 1960.)

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It would be di≈cult to find a position that provided such an overview of an actual ecological situation. Yet, the nature of the printed page ensures that, even if no explicit frame is depicted, partitioning of inside and outside will be an issue. Although diagrams can be drawn as if they continued o√ the page, some computerized scan-and-zoom display is needed to minimize the need to make decisions about what to include and exclude. The very act of making ecosystem diagrams on printed pages privileges, therefore, the coherent system view of nature (theme 7a). Furthermore, the components of the electrical circuit are physically localized and can be arranged as in a flat diagram. In Odum’s analogy, the outside observer of the system can manipulate the electrical circuit. In the case of the actual ecosystem, Odum imagined equivalent interventions. The separateness of components, well represented in a circuit

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diagram, is characteristic, if not of natural systems, of engineered ones (themes 7b and 4b). Although the two diagrams depict in a similar way the relative size of trophic compartments, in the circuit there is no material analogue to the biomass; therefore, the boxes in the diagram are superfluous in the actual functioning circuit. The pictorial boxes add more weight, however, to the diagram as a link bridging the ecosystem and the electrical circuit. The direct analogizing led Odum to introduce storage condensers into his electrical trophic compartments, giving biomass an equivalent in the charge stored in each condenser. Reciprocally, he sought an ecological equivalent for the voltage drop between compartments and suggested the term ‘‘ecoforce,’’ measured by the voltmeter in Figure 5. The idea of ecoforce led Odum (1960, 4) to propose that ecologists should recognize that ‘‘accumulated food by its concentration practically forces food through the consumers.’’ In other words, we can refine theme 6 into this: 6a. Ecological and other systems are manifestations of universal principles of energy transformation.

And we can add this: 7c. The logic of belonging to a system governed by principles of energy transformation overrides the particularities of any of the components.

Equivalently, the systems analyst can claim a superintending role with respect to specialists focusing on the particular components and incapable of grasping the whole picture (theme 4b). On inseparability of the natural and social (theme 3), Odum is more in tune with Schwarz and Thompson (Figure 1) than García-Barrios (Figure 2). Admittedly, Odum explored analogies between ecological and energetic circuits because he was looking, as his subsequent work revealed, for universal principles that would apply to ‘‘systems of man and nature.’’ Yet, despite this superficial appearance of inseparability, Odum’s work did not consider ways that social processes shape what we call nature, but emphasized how social systems would fail if they departed from the best models nature provided, that is, mature tropical rainforests and reef ecosystems. In other words, although nature tends to be stable (a in Figure 1), we need to manage human interactions with those systems if we are to keep them from collapse (c in Figure 1; theme 2).

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The two diagrams on their own are not a su≈cient basis for my interpretations (themes 1 and 4a). From texts, interviews, and other sources I bring more knowledge about H. T. Odum to my viewing of these two diagrams (P. Taylor 2005). For example, when I linked Odum’s framing and two-dimensional depiction to a managerial or engineering perspective on ecology, I drew on my reading of Environment, Power and Society (Odum 1971) and on the analogous diagrams he drew of mangroves and the war-ravaged economy of Vietnam after a visit in the early 1970s. Yet the diagrams were not mere illustrations of work that Odum would have done anyway. If I propose a variant of theme 5 (that also builds on themes 3b and 3e)— 5a. Science can be interpreted in terms of the many, diverse resources researchers use for pursuing their work.

then diagrams provide some of those resources for Odum (and also for Bruno Latour; see below). Approaching Odum’s work through his diagrams allows us to see how someone’s representing is tied up with his visions of intervening—his view of social agency (theme 4b). To summarize my interpretation: 8. Odum’s systems ecology corresponds to a technocratic view of social agency.

By this I mean a number of things, all of which stand in contrast to the previous case of soil erosion: 8a. Order can be achieved (because systems are coherent, stable, and manageable; themes 7a and 7b, contra themes 3e and 5). 8b. There is a natural means of reducing complexity, namely, energetic analysis of systems of all kinds (themes 6 and 7, contra themes 3b–d). 8c. Natural implies universal (theme 7c), that is, applies to everyone equally (contra theme 3a). 8d. Scientists can pursue systems analysis disinterestedly (theme 7b and 7c). 8e. So that it is in everyone’s best interest to submit to or participate in the prescribed social order or remedies (contra theme 3a). 8f. And the exponent holds a special place in the proposed order (as for all schemes couched in terms of universal interests; theme 4b).

With respect to this last subtheme, Odum sets himself up to lead the rest of us by virtue of revealing the common logic of the various systems

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(themes 6 and 7; see P. Taylor 2005 for more specific ways Odum’s later diagrams build in a special place for himself ). Technocratic views of social action are further discussed in the next case.

Moral, Technocratic, and Conservative Views in Schwarz and Thompson

Earlier I used diagrams from Schwarz and Thompson (1990) to characterize a common view of nature external to and setting constraints on society, which, in turn, disturbs natural balance (theme 2). Their text draws explicit parallels between the four views of nature and four views about social action, but it is also possible to interpret some of the implicit, nonliteral messages of their ontology (theme 4a). (The interpretations to follow draw less on the wider textual and social context than do my interpretations of Odum’s diagrams. This limits the interpretations on the level of representing Schwarz and Thompson’s work, but they are o√ered in a di√erent spirit, namely, of opening up questions and stimulating possible lines of inquiry.) Schwarz and Thompson’s diagrams focus our attention on di√erent views about the environment or natural resource system, not on different kinds of disturbing forces, at least some of which would have social origins. Given this lack of social specificity, society becomes something unitary (contra theme 3b), which obscures any di√erential responsibility for the disturbances of nature (contra theme 3a). My first interpretation of the diagrams is, therefore, a refinement of theme 8: 8%. An undi√erentiated view of social agency privileges two views of politics: the moralistic and the technocratic.

These views are quite common in environmental discourse. In technocratic formulations, objective, scientific, and (typically) quantitative analyses identify policies that society as a whole needs for restoring order or ensuring its sustainability or survival—policies to which individuals, citizens, and countries should submit for their own best interests. In contrast, moralistic formulations reject coercion and instead rely on appeals to individuals to change their values and actions so as to maintain valued social or natural qualities of life. Yet, in many senses, appeals for technocratic planning and moral change are allied. To command people’s attention, exponents invoke the severity of the crisis and the threat to the social or natural order. They appeal to common, un-

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di√erentiated interests as a corrective to inadequate governance that stems either, in the technocratic view, from scientifically ignorant leaders or, in the moral view, from corrupt, self-serving, or naïve ones (P. Taylor and Garcia-Barrios 1997). Social agency is implicated in the moral and technocratic views in two more subtle ways. By emphasizing people’s common interests in remedial environmental e√orts, these views steer attention away from the di≈cult politics that result from di√erentiated social groups and nations having di√erent interests in causing, and di√erent interests in alleviating, environmental problems. Dominant social groups are spared scrutiny; their agency is thus privileged. More subtly, special places are reserved in the proposed social transformations for their exponents (theme 8f ): the technocrat would be the analyst or policy advisor; the moralist, the guide, educator, or leader. My second interpretation of Schwarz and Thompson’s diagrams is that a more conservative view of social action is built into the diagrams. First, note the discrepancy between the two allied kinds of social action or politics in my first interpretation and Schwarz and Thompson’s scheme of four views of nature, each of which parallels a worldview about ‘‘politics, technology and social choice.’’ They propose: 9. The four views of nature correlate with four cultural types, defined by their distinctive rationalities—ways of seeing and knowing—and preferred ways of organizing.

In Figure 1, type a are ‘‘individualists’’ who have faith that unconstrained market-mediated interactions ensure the adaptive social change necessary to overcome any problems; their corresponding view of ‘‘nature’’ is benign, returning readily and reliably to balance. Type b are ‘‘fatalists,’’ who identify themselves as socially marginal and feel unable to influence events; ‘‘nature’’ is capricious. Type c, ‘‘hierarchists,’’ seek a procedural rationality for responding to problems before they grow into threats to the existing social order, which, for the good of everyone, preserves di√erences among social groups. ‘‘Nature’’ is usually tolerant, but beyond limits becomes perverse. Type d, ‘‘egalitarians,’’ focus on solidarity and critical thought in resisting the ever-present tendencies to establish status di√erences and inequalities, which are the cause of social vulnerability and crisis; ‘‘nature’’ is ephemeral. Schwarz and Thompson apply a number of subthemes that contrast

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with those from the soil erosion case (especially with theme 3d, which questions micro- and macrodetermination of society): 9a. People organize institutions that reinforce their preferred rationalities. 9b. People apply four kinds of rationality to any and all aspects of the world, including nature and society alike. 9c. Politics consists of interactions among four kinds of institution/rationality/culture. 9d. Each of these types has, or should have, a place in politics.

At first sight, the two views I identified could be interpreted as two of Schwarz and Thompson’s four di√erent cultural types: moralist = egalitarian; technocrat = hierarchist. Moreover, society under Schwarz and Thompson could be viewed as di√erentiated (theme 3a), at least insofar as all four of their cultural types would recognize social inequalities. (This recognition comes in di√erent forms: the hierarchist and individualist do not think the inequalities should be overcome; the fatalist does not think they can be overcome; and only the egalitarian definitely seeks to overthrow inequalities and prevent them arising.) Notice, however, that, whether the four types of people accept or criticize the unequal social status quo, none analyzes the particular dynamics producing that status quo; each type already knows how to see the world. In this sense, the only change that Schwarz and Thompson’s account endorses is an increased recognition of di√erences among people’s views about the world—a pluralism of benefit to us all. This is the sense in which their scheme builds in a conservative view of social action. Moreover, as was the case for moral-technocratic views, Schwarz and Thompson’s scheme preserves a special place for themselves (theme 8g). Their place is as ‘‘over-viewers,’’ people who can ask the di√erent cultural types to be civil to each other, but who are not obliged to announce their own cultural type or expose their privilege or allegiance in an unequal social world. In summary, Schwarz and Thompson’s account of nature reflects—and through it they promote—both moral/technocratic and conservative views of social action (theme 4b).

Consistency between the Two Sides of Bruno Latour?

The diagrams in the previous two cases resulted from attempts to simplify Williams’s ‘‘complex[ity] of social and natural relationships’’ accord-

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ing to the theories of a natural scientist (Odum) and social scientists (Schwarz and Thompson). My last case, like the soil erosion diagram, addresses the relationship between complexity and simplicity more selfconsciously. It revolves around a diagram by Bruno Latour from We Have Never Been Modern (1993; hereafter whnbm ), his polemical text in the social studies of science and technology (sts), and employs comparisons with his earlier work, Science in Action (1987; hereafter sia ). whnbm is widely cited for its propositions about the need to theorize nature and society in equivalent, ‘‘symmetrical’’ ways (Figure 6). whnbm does not analyze any situation in detail but proceeds according to the theme: 10. Theoretical purchase can be gained by using previous theorists’ own terms to identify and then resolve inconsistencies in their work.

The well-known strong program in sociology of science (Bloor 1991) is the reference point for Latour’s discussion of ‘‘symmetry.’’ He argues that the strong program has been asymmetrically applied to Society and Nature: 11a. Society is not a stable thing that can explain beliefs about Nature; both are constructed from ‘‘quasi-objects.’’ 11b. The apparent separateness of Nature and Society is an artifact of deeply conventional but not obligatory ‘‘purification’’ of hybrids of natural and cultural objects. 11c. The production of these hybrids is a process in which nonliving, nonhuman, and human are all active agents or ‘‘actants.’’

From themes 11a–c follows Latour’s generalized principle of symmetry, which resolves the inconsistent asymmetry in the strong program: 11d. Not only do Nature and Society both have to be explained, but they have to be explained jointly without privileging one form of actants over others.

Applying theme 10, let me observe interesting consistencies and inconsistencies in Latour’s theoretical move. Notice, for a start, that to bring Nature and Society onto the same level in a supersymmetrical framework is, in practice, not to give agency to nonhuman actants as much as it is to diminish the psychology of human agents. A piece of equipment, for example, can facilitate or resist the e√orts of other actants, but it has no cognition, imagination, intentionality, and so on. Consistency requires likewise of humans. But such a view of human

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Subject/Society Pole

Nature Pole

asymmetrical explanations Truth is explained by Nature

Falsehood is explained by Society

first principle of symmetry Nature explains neither truth or falsehood

Truth and falsehood are both explained by Society

Nature and society are to be explained

generalized principle of symmetry

The explanation starts from quasi-objects

The principle of symmetry. (Fig. 4.1 from Latour 1993, 95.)

6

agency does not seem to match with sia , in which scientists are described as taking a variety of actions and using a diversity of resources in establishing what counts as scientific knowledge; they mobilize readouts from equipment, experimental protocols, citations, reputations of colleagues, publicity, and so on. In this way, scientists become nodes in networks of heterogeneous resources (theme 5a). Humans acting in and contributing to such heterogeneous networks would seem to have more mind and psychology than nonhuman actants. Before trying to reconcile the two accounts I need to explore another angle on Latour’s supersymmetrizing move. To refer to hybrids of nature and culture presupposes things that were separate before being hybridized, but Latour views the separateness of Nature and Society as a construction (theme 11b). This circularity can be broken through sia ’s own network formulation, that is, by reframing the quasi-objects that are hybridized as stabilizations—perhaps transient—within ongoing intersecting processes in which heterogeneous resources are linked to-

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gether. In this picture, even when something is conventionally referred to as natural or as social, its significance as a resource lies in how it is linked with many other diverse elements (P. Taylor 2005). This inseparability of the natural and social (theme 3) is obscured if intersecting processes are partitioned into natural and social parts. However, a diagram of the same form as the Oaxacan soil erosion would emphasize the intersecting processes or heterogeneous network side of Latour’s thought. The interconnected strands that develop over time as knowledge gets established could be underlying unmediated reality; agents’ creative process; language, tools, and work organization; and wider sources and audiences (see http://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter taylor/ IPHetCon.pdf ). We can now make a di√erent and more careful contrast with the strong program than the one Latour draws in Figure 6. As indicated in Table 1, the strong program consists of four principles (Bloor 1991). In Figure 6’s ‘‘first principle of symmetry,’’ whnbm merges the first three into ‘‘Truth and falsehood are both explained by Society.’’ Yet the strong program’s principles 1 and 2—causal explanation and impartiality (with respect to explaining beliefs in true or false ideas)—have distinct analogues on the heterogeneous network side of Latour’s constructionism. In contrast, the third principle, symmetry, does not have a direct analogue. Only at the most schematic level is it plausible that all beliefs are supported by the same kinds of resources linked in the same ways into intersecting processes. Moreover, any interpreter of science who wants to gain insight into how to modify any particular item of knowledge or belief would need to tease out the particular, diverse resources and their linkages (theme 5a). The resources and linkages include those that the interpreters are contributing themselves, and this translates into an analogue of the fourth principle of reflexivity. Why does Latour not identify the analogues given in Table 1 and dispense with symmetry altogether? My answer depends on noting a consistency (theme 10) that is not explicit (theme 4a) in Latour’s supersymmetrizing move (theme 11). If human agents are driven only by the need to accumulate resources in reaction to other people accumulating resources, which is a dominant image in sia , then their psychology is strong, but thin; they are single-minded. No further insight into how to modify knowledge would be gained by analyzing the particular structure of the intersecting processes that support that knowledge (my third

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Table 1. The Four Principles of the Strong Program and Analogues (defined by the author) in the Construction of Heterogeneous Networks Strong program

Construction of heterogeneous networks

1. causal Social factors determine beliefs.

1. causal Science in action builds on networks of heterogeneous resources.

2. impartial With respect to truth-falsity. Beliefs in both true and false ideas require explanation.

2. catholic With respect to modifiability. All facts, ideas, arrangements, actions merit explanation.

3. symmetrical Beliefs in true or false ideas are explained the same way.

3. particular Competing beliefs require particular accounts of the construction of heterogeneous networks (the same structure of explanation or same kinds of resources should not be expected).

4. reflexive Regarding one’s own textual moves.

4. reflexive Regarding the practical facilitation of one’s own work (constructed as a heterogeneous network).

analogue). This, in turn, means that when whnbm pursues the schematic side of heterogeneous networks, Latour is able to discount the need for reflexive engagement in particular situations (my fourth analogue). This side of Latour is thus insulated from concerns about participation and engagement that motivate some sts researchers (Brian Martin and Richards 1994). In short, interpreting Latour’s preferred view of social agency (theme 4b) allows us to reconcile the sia , heterogeneous networks Latour and the whnbm supersymmetrizing Latour. Two correlates in Latour’s position in sts make sense if scientific agents act with a minimal psychology, almost without mental representations: 12a. Inborn dispositions, cognitive constraints, individual creativity, and so on cannot determine belief.

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This preempts those who would invoke the internal cognitive mind against sts analyses that allowed social context or forces to determine their beliefs or actions: 12b. No place is left for interests or other external influences to reside inside the scientist’s head.

As is clear from my discussion of social agency in the soil erosion case, I am interested in reflexive engagement in particular situations (P. Taylor 2005). Nevertheless, I recognize that: 13a. Latour’s position is in sync with the anti-Marxist currents of post1970s social science that led many theorists in sociology of science to shun interests explanations. 13b. Latour’s idea of single-minded, resource-accumulating scientific agents has been made more plausible by the political economic changes in Western countries since the early 1980s that have revalorized unconstrained markets and entrepreneurial individualism.

TENSIONS AND EXTENSIONS

It is not surprising to me that in all the sts discussion of Latour’s ideas, few have written about the consistencies and inconsistencies I discuss above. Within the society of sts researchers, Latour’s supersymmetrizing move and its correlates (theme 12) are reinforced not only by themes 13a and 13b, but also by themes about expository and theoretical style in sts (see http://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter taylor/01bNote.pdf ). In particular, I recognize that simple themes are easier to communicate to a general audience than particular reconstructions of the complexity in environmental situations or in the social position(ing) of researchers. Simple themes often seem to provide a basis for e√ective social mobilization, whether at the level of global environmental politics or, more modestly, at the level of teaching students and influencing colleagues. However, simpler, more memorable, and adaptable accounts are only apparently simple, as I showed by exposing, for example, the assumption of minimal psychology in Latour’s supersymmetrizing move (theme 12). As an extension of theme 5, it seems that: 5b. The impact and importance of simple themes depends on the ways they are linked to other resources by scientists and other agents who

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are negotiating how to contribute to changing knowledge, society, and ecology.

There is clearly a tension between developing complex accounts and using simple themes, but this can be addressed in a number of ways that elaborate on theme 1: 1a. Themes can be motivated through writing and teaching that are readily communicated yet, at the same time, point to or open up the complexity temporarily backgrounded in the attempt to communicate to others (P. Taylor 2005).

A particular version of this theme that informs this essay is the following: 1b. New light can be shed on analyses that invoke nature as something separate from society or that invoke some well-bounded systems if we ask how their implications would change if they incorporated some or all of the features of intersecting social-natural processes (e.g., themes 3, 4, and 5; P. Taylor 2005).

(For example, the simple, widely held idea that population growth leads to environmental degradation is disturbed by the soil erosion case in this essay.) Another, less direct way to address the complex-simple tension is to note: 1c. Interpreters of the themes involved in the research of others can expose more of the complexity of the researchers’ social positioning if their initial interpretations elicit responses from the researchers (or their supporters) that dispute the interpretation (in general or in particular cases).

These variants of theme 1, which respond to the tension between developing complex accounts and using simple themes, lead me to identify another tension. I have suggested that Odum, Schwarz and Thompson, and Latour position themselves as outside analysts observing and analyzing the dynamics of the system as a whole (theme 7b). Analogously, I am positioning myself as someone who has a larger view of the larger conceptual system in which others have only a partial view. I do so even though I favor themes that depict social agency as distributed across di√erent kinds of agents and scales of social interactions and point to further work needed to analyze particular, complex situa-

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tions. I am not going to attempt to resolve this tension here (but see P. Taylor 2005). I conclude this essay by ‘‘simply’’ acknowledging that using themes to stimulate readers’ thinking (theme 1) is a limited means of making sense of social and environmental dynamics unless, as Williams exhorts us, we also engage self-consciously with ‘‘the whole complex of social and natural relationships which is at once our product and our activity.’’

NOTE

The origins of this essay lie in an unfinished project with Chris London. His comments and those of Michael Guggenheim, Yrjö Haila, and an anonymous reviewer have been valuable in revising this essay.

[Miguel] pointed out the stonework he had done on the floor and lower parts of the wall which were all made from flat stones found in the Sierra. I asked him if he had done this all by himself and he said ‘‘Yes, and look, this is nature’’ (‘‘Si, y mira, esto es la naturaleza’’), and he pointed firmly at the stone carved wall, and he repeated this action by pointing first in the direction of the Sierra [national park] before pointing at the wall again. Then, he stressed his point by saying: ‘‘This [the Sierra] is not nature, it is artificial; this [the wall] is nature’’ (‘‘Eso no es la naturaleza, es artificial; esto es la naturaleza’’).—Katrin Lund, ‘‘What Would We Do without Biodiversity?’’

Who Speaks for Nature?

John O’Neill THE NATURE OF DELIBERATION

Who speaks for nature? With what legitimacy can they speak? Both questions are of significance for the theory and practice of deliberative democracy and indeed for democratic theory and practice more generally. In this essay I discuss some of the problems deliberative democracy has in taking nature into account in public decision making. However, before doing so I need to make a few initial comments about the assumptions presupposed by the opening questions. Both questions assume that nature cannot speak for itself. Neither, it should be added, does nature understand our speech. We are not partners in a dialogue. Clearly, there are qualifications one might make to those claims. Certainly, animals engage in activity that requires interpretation. Their activities are not mere movement. Communication can and

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does take place between persons and animals through gestures and voice. Moreover, there are various ways one can talk metaphorically about the language of nature, the book of nature, and communication with nature. Some of these are explored elsewhere in this book; see, for example, the discussions in Oyama, Dyke, and Shotter. However, although a number of clarifications and qualifications can be added, and I add some more in my discussion of the idea of taking deliberation into nature, it remains the case that in any literal sense, the nonhuman natural world does not speak to us. Neither does nature listen. It is, as Passmore (1980) notes, indi√erent, not in the positive sense of actively not caring, but in the sense of lacking the capacity to care for us or for what we say. That nonhuman beings, like many human beings, are not partners in public dialogue is not to say that they should not count. Nonhuman beings do have interests that need to be taken into account in public decisions. However, in any such public deliberation, the interests of the nonhuman world are voiced by human agents. Hence the questions with which I started: Who speaks for nature? With what legitimacy can they speak? Those questions are particularly acute for deliberative models of democracy. The theory and practice of deliberative democracy have been particularly developed in the environmental arena (Dryzek 1992, 2000 chap. 6; Eckersley 1999; G. Smith 2003). The deliberative theorist o√ers a model of democracy as a forum in which judgments and preferences are formed and altered through reasoned dialogue among citizens, in contrast to the economic picture of democracy as a surrogate market procedure for aggregating and e√ectively meeting the given preferences of individuals. In practice, it is often taken to be expressed in the development of a variety of new formal deliberative institutions such as citizens’ juries and consensus conferences, which are often presented as experiments in deliberative democracy. In the environmental sphere, deliberative democracy is often presented as a response to the representational failings of economic approaches to environmental decision making, which leave the poor underrepresented, because willingness to pay is income-dependent, and the interests of nonhumans and future generations are at best indirectly and precariously represented through the preferences of current consumers. However, while such deliberative institutions are claimed to resolve some of the problems of inadequate representation involved in surrogate market

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methods, they have their own problems of representation. Willingness and capacity to speak and to be heard is unevenly distributed across class, gender, and ethnicity. The direct voices of nonhuman nature and future generations are necessarily absent. These require others to speak on their behalf. Hence again the significance of our opening questions about representation, about who speaks for nature and with what legitimacy they can claim to so speak. These questions are not abstract problems of theory. Disputes concerning the legitimacy of claims to represent or speak for nature are at the heart of the actual politics of nature. Consider the politics of nature conservation. Nature conservation bodies and institutions often claim to represent nature’s interests. They find their claims contested by those who live in areas designated as natural parks and who have a distinct working relationship with the natural world. These often include groups whose voice is already marginal in public deliberation about environmental goods. Consider, for example, the passage that opens this essay, from a local living by the natural park of Sierra Nevada and Alpujurra, a park that had been granted biosphere status by unesco and natural park status by the government of Andalusia. Moreover, di√erent groups who claim to speak on behalf of nature also dispute each other. Nature conservation bodies and animal rights activists speak on behalf of nature in di√erent and sometimes conflicting voices. Professional conservation agencies can find themselves in conflict with direct action movements, each claiming to represent the interests of nature.

DELIBERATION IN THE PRESENCE OF NATURE: FROM DON ALEJANDRO TO JOHN MUIR

How is nature to be represented in public deliberation? Consider as a starting point a story by Borges, ‘‘The Congress.’’ The story begins with the problem of representation: Don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would represent all men of all nations. . . . Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types—a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without go-

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ing farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity’s great forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or—more obviously—all beautiful women? Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers—including those of New Zealand? (1979, 20–22)

The story ends with an echo of a Borges story on the development of cartography, which attains its highest point when the perfect map is identical to the area it maps: ‘‘The College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point’’ (1981, 131). Similarly, the only adequate Congress of the World is discovered to be the world itself: ‘‘It has taken me four years to understand what I am about to say’’ don Alejandro began. ‘‘My friends, the undertaking we have set ourselves is so vast that it embraces—I now see—the whole world. Our Congress cannot be a group of charlatans deafening each other in the sheds of an out-of-the-way ranch. The Congress of the World began with the first moment of the world and it will go on when we are dust. There’s no place on earth where it does not exist.’’ (1979, 32)

The characters go back out into the city ‘‘drunk with victory,’’ to take part in the life of the Congress in which all people and all things are represented perfectly by themselves. It would be nice to think that don Alejandro had the last word on the subject, and in the design of institutions for representation the solution should be that we should simply go for a walk outside. In the case of the representation of nature, it might look as if something like an Alejandro solution is both possible and desirable. Consider the success of John Muir’s strategy of taking Theodore Roosevelt for a four-day trip in 1903 into some of the Yosemite landscapes he aimed to preserve (Fox 1981). There is a sense in which one might say that the strategy consisted in allowing nature to be represented by itself. However, Alejandro solutions to the problem of representing nature fail. In the first place, Alejandro solutions are clearly not an adequate response to the problems of representation in general. For all the delightfulness of his solution, Alejandro clearly misses the point of representative institutions just as Borges’s cartographers miss the point of

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maps. Maps are better when not identical to their original. The Congress of the World is not best represented by the world itself. No representation captures everything about those represented. Every representation is unrepresentative over some dimensions. It could not be otherwise. But that this is the case is not always a problem. It doesn’t matter that my ordinance survey map doesn’t mark every stone. It doesn’t matter that men with red beards do not have a spokesperson in the UK. I do complain when my walking maps are indi√erent to scale. It does matter that large groups of the population lack any adequate representation in political life, for example, low-paid and retired workers. Similarly, any representation of nature for itself, even if it were possible, would necessarily be selective. Consider another Borges story, The Aleph, in which the main protagonist is given access to one of what are called Aleph points, a ‘‘point in space containing all other points’’ (Borges 1967, 119), points at which the whole of life is present. There are no such points. Muir took Roosevelt to particular, selected places that were to represent others. Miguel’s carved wall represents a different part of nature under a di√erent description from the Andalusian park to which he gestures. The presence of one and the absence of the other in public deliberation matters to its legitimacy. Consider again the Yosemite landscapes to which Muir takes Roosevelt. They walked not just in the presence of nature but also in the absence of humans. The Ahwahneechee Indians were driven from their lands in Yosemite by Major Savage’s military expedition of 1851. They live outside the park boundaries to this day. Their absence made its own mark on the ecology of the park. The grass parklands through which Muir and Roosevelt walked were in part the result of the pastoral practices of the indigenous people, who had used fire to promote pastures for game and black oak for acorn production. After the indigenous tribes were evicted from their lands, ‘‘Indian style’’ burning techniques were discontinued and fire suppression controls introduced. The consequence was the decline in meadowlands under increasing areas of bush. When Totuya, the granddaughter of Chief Tenaya and sole survivor of the Ahwahneechee Indians who had been evicted from the valley, returned in 1929, she remarked on the landscape she found, ‘‘Too dirty; too much bushy’’ (quoted in Olwig 1995). It was not just the landscape that had changed. In the giant sequoia groves, the growth of litter on the forest floor, dead branches, and competitive vegetation

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inhibited the growth of new sequoia and threatened more destructive fires. Following the 1963 Leopold report, Wildlife Management in the National Parks, both cutting and burning were used to ‘‘restore’’ Yosemite to its ‘‘primitive’’ state (Runte 1987). Which part of the world is represented for public deliberation, the state park or the stone fireplace, is a human a√air. So also is the description with which it is represented, as a ‘‘wilderness’’ or as a ‘‘depopulated cultural landscape.’’ Which descriptions ought to count? The question is not one of a philosophical nature in the sense that Twirl suggests, that of correctly fixing on Platonic forms. The reason being ‘‘a man with a red beard who sits in armchairs’’ would normally be an irrelevant characteristic has nothing to do with appearing in a theory of forms. The problem of representation is political, not metaphysical. The question requires answers that appeal to normative criteria. There are descriptions in which representation might be objectionable in virtue of the attitudes they embody; consider, for example, the category of ‘‘Norwegian womanhood’’ in the passage from Borges. There are descriptions in which representation ought to be demanded, say, of class or gender. The question of the nature of the description with which the nonhuman world should be represented remains central to the politics of nature. Nature cannot speak for itself nor represent itself. It has no voice. Nature’s interests are spoken through human utterances. Even its silence requires human voice. Consider its articulation by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1965). The presence of nonhuman nature in deliberation about environmental choices requires human representation. This is not to say that nonhuman members of the natural world do not or should not count in deliberation. There is no reason to assume that those who are morally considerable should be limited to those who can deliberate. Very young children cannot deliberate; neither can sentient animals. Both ethically matter. However, they require representation by others in public deliberation.

THE SOURCES OF REPRESENTATIVE LEGITIMACY

What are the criteria for saying who or what should be represented and whether representation is adequate and legitimate? Questions of legiti-

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mate representation have their own history in political theory (Birch 1972; Pitkin 1967). There are three central answers to the question of the sources of the legitimacy of the representation.

Authorization and Democratic Accountability

The claim that authorization is central to representation is given its starkest formulation in Hobbes (1968, chap. 16), who makes it the whole of representation. However, in a number of democratic theories of representation, authorization is tied to the accountability of the representative to the represented, embodied in democratic election (Pitkin 1967, 42–43; Plamenatz 1938), a feature absent in Hobbes’s account. Thus, in one liberal model of representation, the interests of individuals are represented through the act of authorization embodied in the vote. More radically, in socialist and egalitarian politics, authorization is often associated with the representation of class interests through recallable delegates. Authorization is itself agnostic on the question of who does the representing: the representative, when authorized, can be entirely di√erent in characteristics from the person represented. A lawyer can represent children without being a child. In certain contexts, you may prefer that X speaks for you because of features you do not share; for example, in an industrial tribunal, X is more articulate than you, as he or she is a shop steward.

Presence

A feature of much feminist and socialist theory is that in the context of political representation, a pure authorization model is rejected. Who does the representing matters. Exemplary is the following statement by women claiming a place in the Estates General in 1789: ‘‘Just as a nobleman cannot represent a plebeian and the latter cannot represent a nobleman, so a man, no matter how honest he may be, cannot represent a woman. Between the representatives and the represented there must be an absolute identity of interests’’ (quoted in Phillips 1997, 175). The same thought underlay the principle in the socialist movement that the emancipation of the working class must be their own work, and correspondingly that their interests could not be represented by any other class. The thought that particular groups demand representation

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by those who share a common identity has become central to what Phillips (1995, 1997) calls ‘‘the politics of presence’’ (see Gould 1996; Kymlicka 1996). It underpins, for example, the demand for quota systems in modern electoral systems. There are at least three distinct sets of considerations that might be appealed to to defend the need for presence. One concerns recognition. What is wrong with one group being represented by another, of women by men, of the working class by another class, and so on, is the lack of respect and dignity for the group that it entails. The demand for representation is in part the demand of a group for recognition and respect as agents capable of representing themselves. A second consideration is about quality of judgments made in the absence of the presence of all relevant voices. The exercise of sound judgment requires the presence of others so that one can escape the partiality of particular interests and perspectives. Thus, as Arendt (1968a, 220–22) puts it, ‘‘[Judgment] needs the presence of others in whose place it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all. As logic, to be sound, depends on the presence of the self, so judgement, to be valid, depends on the presence of others.’’ The third consideration concerns interests. Politics is not just about deliberation; it is also about power and negotiation between di√erent interests. A shared identity might be held to matter in representation on the grounds that similar experiences are a condition of proper knowledge of the interests and aspirations of some group. A shared identity may be a necessary condition of adequate representation in some context, but it is not clearly su≈cient. There may still be a requirement for authorization or accountability. That someone shares an identity with me under some description does not entail that he or she can legitimately represent me in the absence of my authorization.

Epistemic Values

A third source of appeal to legitimacy of representation is the knowledge, expertise, or judgment that is taken to allow an individual to speak or act on behalf of some group. This argument is often developed in ways that are in tension with a representation legitimated through shared identity. Consider, for example, the view that there are certain

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individuals who, through knowledge, have a better grasp of the objective interests or good of some group than others in that group and that this knowledge legitimizes their representative status. Versions of that appeal are to be found in theorists as di√erent as Burke (1774/1899, 95–96), Mill (1974, 82), and Lenin (1963, chap. 2). However, although some versions of the epistemic argument are inconsistent with presence, knowledge and presence need not always be in tension. As we have just noted, one reason for presence is that a shared identity is required for knowledge of the interests of those being represented.

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY AND THE SOURCES OF LEGITIMACY

A deliberative theory of democracy is compatible with a number of distinct answers to the question of what constitutes the source of legitimate representation. In its minimal sense, deliberative democracy refers to the view that democracy should be understood as a forum in which judgments and preferences are transformed through reasoned dialogue against the picture of democracy as a procedure for aggregating and e√ectively meeting the given preferences of individuals. In that minimal sense, deliberative democracy is compatible with competing answers to the question of the sources of legitimacy. For example, Edmund Burke’s (1774/1899, 95–96) famous address to the electors of Bristol combines a deliberative account of parliamentary institutions with a narrow account of the range of those who can speak and exercise their judgments within those institutions. Recent accounts of deliberative institutions are taken to be also ‘‘inclusionary’’ of a wider range of voices. The addition of inclusionary to the concept of deliberative processes links the arguments about representation to some of the themes in the politics of presence, that is, that deliberative institutions should give equal access to all relevant voices by directly including representatives of di√erent relevant identities. Two of the arguments for presence are of note here. The first is that engagement in deliberation defines a particular form of citizenship, and hence that the presence of di√erent groups is a condition of full recognition of their status as citizens, alongside other political rights. The second is that presence is a condition for the exercise of political judgment and deliberation itself. One classic state-

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ment of the view is that of Arendt, already noted.∞ The view that wider inclusion is required for proper deliberation in which the widest range of di√erent relevant views are heard has been echoed in more recent arguments for deliberative democracy. Judgments about common interests are properly formed only through confronting a range of arguments and views (Sustein 1997). Whether or not these arguments are adequate—and I will return to them below—there are clear problems in extending this approach to nonhuman nature and future generations.

GIVING VOICE TO THE VOICELESS

The central problem for any representation of nonhumans and future generations is the absence of two central forms of legitimation: authorization and presence. For nonhumans and future generations there is no possibility of those conditions being met. Clearly, representation can neither be authorized by nonhumans or future generations nor rendered accountable to them. Hence, Hobbes (1968, chap. 16), for whom authorization is all of representation, argues that because ‘‘inanimate’’ or ‘‘nonrational beings’’ cannot authorize others to act for them, they are outside the domain of representation. The politics of presence that underlies much of recent literature in deliberative democracy also appears ill suited to include future generations and nonhumans. Neither nonhumans nor future generations can be directly present in decision making. That neither authorization nor presence is possible is in one sense unproblematic: it could not be otherwise. The problem lies in the claims to legitimacy of those current humans who claim to speak on behalf of future generations and nonhumans in the absence of sources of legitimation. What can be said for deliberative models of democracy in the face of those problems of legitimacy? One response is the appeal to the publicness condition on deliberation that has been central to much deliberative democracy: reasons must be able to survive being made public. The publicness condition is taken to force participants to o√er reasons that can withstand public justification and hence to appeal to general rather than particular private interests. The point is one that has roots in Kant (1793/1991, appendix II), for whom every moral principle must meet ‘‘the formal attribute of publicness’’: ‘‘All actions a√ecting the rights of

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other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public.’’ The test rules out those arguments from principles that appeal to self-interests where this conflicts with just concern with the interests of others, because the persuasiveness of such arguments could not survive publicity.≤ Hence, reasons for action that appeal to wider constituencies of interest—including those of nonhumans and future generations—are more likely to survive in public deliberation than they are in private, market-based methods for expressing preferences. Goodin (1996, 844) develops this further and suggests that through such deliberation, wider interests are internalized: we view democracy ‘‘as a process in which we all come to internalize the interests of each other and indeed of the larger world around us.’’ Through the internalization of interests of nature, those interests can be virtually represented: ‘‘Much though nature’s interests may deserve to be enfranchised in their own right, that is simply impracticable. People, and people alone, can exercise the vote. The best we can hope for is that nature’s interests will come to be internalized by a su≈cient number of people with su≈cient leverage in the political system for nature’s interests to secure the protection they deserve’’ (844). This concept of individuals representing the standpoint of all others might itself be taken to involve a second Kantian move of the kind to which Arendt appeals. Her account of ‘‘representative thinking,’’ like that of Goodin, appeals to the idea of deliberation as a process in which the outlooks and interests of others are internalized; also like Goodin (2000), she takes this to involve not just public deliberation, but, to use his phrase, ‘‘democratic deliberation within’’: Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from di√erent standpoints, by making present to mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. . . . The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests. Hence, if I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in the world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else. (Arendt 1968b, 241–42)

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There are, however, clear di≈culties in an appeal to an Arendtian and Kantian account of representative thinking in this context. The Kantian argument concerns the reliance of judgments on a wider community of judgment. The power of judgment is social in that it relies on the comparison of judgments with others in order to ‘‘escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones, an illusion that would have prejudicial influence on the judgement’’ (Kant 1987, 293–94). The escape from prejudice is identified with the escape from passive reason, the failure to think for oneself, and hence is a condition of enlightenment. Therefore, because comparison with the judgments of others is required to avoid prejudice, the maxim ‘‘Think for yourself ’’ and the maxim ‘‘Think from the standpoint of everyone else’’ are related (294–95; see also Kant 1933, A820– 21/B848–49). This thought is important, but it won’t extend to nonhuman beings. They lack the capacity for judgment and hence do not belong to that community to which judgment must test its soundness. The idea of internalizing interests, in Goodin’s sense, has then to be independent of this Kantian line of thought. Instead, the argument needs to be that, through the public use of reason, one escapes not just the narrowness of partial judgment but also the narrowness of private interests. Enlarged interests can survive public deliberation and develop a wider perception of what and whose interests count. However, this raises a second problem. Although representative thought can take place even, as Arendt suggests, in solitude, politics is not just about thought, but also includes speech, and representative speech is public and as such answers to demands of legitimation and justification. On what grounds can we hold that you are able to speak for others? The issue remains as to what, in the absence of authorization, accountability or shared identity can legitimate any particular individual or group making public claims to speak on behalf of the interests of others. Goodin may be right here that the internalization of interests is the best one can hope for in terms of representing nature or future generations, but the idea of internalizing interests does not resolve the problems of legitimacy of public representation of those without voice.

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SPEAKING FOR NATURE

What response can be made to a challenge of the legitimacy of a claim to speak for others? In the absence of authorization, accountability, and presence, the remaining source of legitimacy to claim to speak in such cases is epistemic. Those who claim to speak on behalf of those without voice do so by appeal to their having knowledge of the objective interests of those groups, often combined with special care for them. Thus, natural scientists, biologists, and ecologists are often heard making special claims ‘‘to speak on behalf of nature’’ where their claim to do so is founded on their knowledge and interests. Environmental lobby groups make similar claims. However, as I noted at the outset, such claims are also commonly disputed. Two kinds of dispute are of particular significance here. First, there are new versions of a traditional normative debate in political theory about the proper descriptions in which the representation should take place: Is it as individuals or as members of particular groups or as bearers of particular identities? The animal liberation and welfare movements are individualist: it is individual sentient beings that have moral considerability, and it is as such that they should be represented in our decisions. Those involved in the environmental movement and nature conservation are concerned primarily with the conservation of biodiversity, species, and habitats, and it is as members of particular species or as bearers of particular roles within an ecological system that nonhuman nature is to be represented (Callicott 1989, 1998; Jamieson 1998; Rawles 1997; Sago√ 1984). The dispute is normative. The debate is not primarily about particular knowledge claims as such, but rather about which knowledge claims are normatively relevant to the representation of nature—those concerning the welfare of individuals or those concerning the functioning of ecosystems and habitats? The conflict itself is in practice a real and important one. Although it is often the case that what is good for habitats will also be good for individuals, there are a series of practical issues where the two come apart, for example, the culling by conservation authorities of feral animals or nonnative animals to preserve some particular habitat, or the release by animal rights activists of caged animals into nonnative habitats. The spokespersons for nature speak in di√erent voices. A second set of disputes arises with direct challenges to the epistemic

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legitimacy claimed by putative scientific spokespersons for nature. These are of particular significance when representatives of nature have too much voice rather than too little, for example, when they conflict with communities speaking with an already marginalized voice who are policed in and excluded from nature reserves justified by natural scientists. Consider again the remarks of Miguel quoted at the outset of this essay. They are typical of a number of disputes between the representatives of nature and the communities they aim to police in nature’s name. The disputes are particularly evident in the export of nature reserves to the third world. They are at their most acute where nature is evoked to justify the exclusion of people from their homes. Consider the fate of some of the Masai in Africa who have been excluded from national parks across Kenya and Tanzania.≥ Attempts to evict indigenous populations from the Kalahari reveal the influence of the same wilderness model: ‘‘Under Botswana land use plans, all national parks have to be free of human and domestic animals.’’∂ The history of exclusion is illustrated in the conflicts surrounding the Batwa in Uganda. They were ‘‘o≈cially’’ excluded from forest reserves during the British colonial period of the 1930s, although in practice they continued to use the forests as a means of livelihood. Since the establishment of national parks in 1991, their exclusion was made e√ective, which has led to continuing conflicts (Gri≈ths and Colchester 2000). Similar stories are to be found in Asia, where the alliance of local elites and international conservation bodies has led to similar pressures to evict indigenous populations from their traditional lands. In India, the development of wildlife parks has led to a series of conflicts with indigenous populations; there has been a series of much discussed evictions and resettlements of local populations in the creation of parks and sanctuaries. Consider, for example, the resettlements of Maldheris in the Gir National Park (Choudhary 2000), the proposed and actual exclusions of local populations in the Melghat Tiger Reserve and Koyna Sanctuary in Maharashtra, and the conflicts around the Nagarhole National Park, where there have been attempts by the Karnataka Forest Department to remove six thousand tribal people from their forests on the grounds that they compete with tigers for game (Gri≈ths and Colchester 2000; Guha 1997; Jayal 2001). The moves are supported by international conservation bodies. Hence the remark of one of the experts for the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Nagarhole case: ‘‘Re-

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locating tribal or traditional people who live in these protected area is the single most important step towards conservation’’ (quoted in Guha 1997, 17). Even where they are not excluded, those whose relation to a place is as a place on which their livelihood depends can come into conflict with the representatives of nature. Consider the comment from a person in the Makala-Barun National Park and Conservation Area in Nepal, reported by Ben Campbell (1998): ‘‘This park is no good. They don’t let you cut wood, they don’t allow you to make spaces for paddy seed-beds, they don’t permit doing khoriya [a form of slash-and-burn agriculture].’’ Conflicts exist between international conservation bodies speaking on behalf of the interests of nature seeking to protect ‘‘natural landscapes’’ and the socially marginalized groups whose lives and livelihoods depend on working within them. Places matter to such groups in ways that conflict with the goods defended by the representatives of nature. Such groups have particular local knowledge of place, which gives them a distinct voice in its future di√erent from that of the scientific expert who claims to speak on behalf of nature. The well-discussed arguments in political epistemology about whose knowledge claims count in environmental decision making are in part arguments about the legitimacy of representation founded purely on epistemic authority: Who can claim to speak on behalf of others, where the only claims for legitimacy are knowledge claims and where authorization, accountability, or presence is impossible? To raise those questions is not to o√er any solutions. Indeed, I suspect there are no solutions as such. However, it does point to a need to shift from one traditional justification of deliberative democracy. Recent accounts of reasoned deliberation, especially those that have their roots in Habermas, define successful deliberation in terms of the convergence of judgments under ideal counterfactual conditions in which all have equal voice and ‘‘no force except that of the better argument is exercised’’ (Habermas 1975, 108). However, it may be that there is no possibility for convergence even in ideal conditions. I say this not because of the common argument that for normative questions there are no truths of the kind found in science on which one could expect convergence through reasoned debate (B. Williams 1985, chap. 8). I remain unconvinced by this argument (O’Neill 2001). Rather, it is because there can exist conflicts between di√erent goods themselves,

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which give reasons for skepticism about the possibility of convergence even under ideal conditions. Values are plural and can conflict in ways in which no resolution is possible. Di√erent human goods fostered in distinct practices by di√erent groups may themselves be in conflict: thus, for example, the ways in which good husbandry of the land within a marginal farming community can come into conflict with the aims of conserving biodiversity. Such conflicts may be unresolvable. Conservation does not have some lexicographic priority in such cases over the value of community or the internal goods of husbandry. Nor are there simple trade-o√s between commensurate values. There are real human goods that demand realization but that conflict. Even under ideal conditions, hard and sometimes irresolvable choices between values that contingently conflict cannot be eliminated from ethical and political life (O’Neill 1997a, 1997b). Moreover, under the nonideal conditions of actual deliberation in political and social life, the existence of consensus can be a sign of personal or structural power that is exercised to keep various voices and conflicts out of the realm of public discussion, rather than an indication of the exercise of the power of reasoned public conversation.∑ The virtue of deliberative democracy may lie not in claims that it resolves conflicts but in its tendency to reveal them. The publicness condition forces participants, in at least some conditions, to justify their claims. Public deliberation in this respect di√ers from expressions of private preference in market behavior, which does not require justification. But publicness here is a virtue because it opens up space for contesting claims, not, as is often suggested in deliberative theories of democracy, because it is a condition for consensus. For that reason, there is as much a need for dissensus conferences as consensus conferences, for places where hidden conflicts are made explicit and silenced voices are heard.

NOTES

Earlier versions of this essay were read to a workshop in Tampere, Finland, that formed part of the project ‘‘How Does Nature Speak?’’; to the seminar Deliberation and Nature in the series ‘‘Deliberative and Inclusionary Processes in Environmental Policy Making’’ funded by the Economic and So-

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cial Research Council, UK; and to seminars at Dundee University and Helsinki University. My thanks for the many helpful conversations made on those occasions. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, UK, in writing this essay. Parts of this essay appeared previously in J. O’Neill, ‘‘Representing People, Representing Nature, Representing the World,’’ Environmental Planning C: Government and Policy 19 (2001), pp. 483–500, Pion Ltd, London. 1 Arendt (1968b, 241) clearly can be counted as a deliberative theorist for whom ‘‘debate constitutes the essence of political life.’’ However, the version of deliberative politics she o√ers is di√erent from that which comes from Rawls and Habermas. What unites all three is a common Kantian heritage. 2 For developments of this point, see Elster (1998) and Rawls (1996, 66–71). The rejoinder sometimes made is that deliberation in this sense forces participants to mask private interests as public interests and in that sense to make the process less rather than more transparent. 3 See Monbiot (1994, chaps. 4 and 5). Consider, for example, the Masai su√ering from malnutrition and disease on scrubland bordering the Mkomazi Game Reserve, from which they were forcibly evicted in 1988 (The Observer, 6 April 1997, 12). 4 ‘‘Bushmen Fight to Stay on in Last Botswana Haven,’’ The Times, 5 August 1996, 11. 5 It is worth noting that the arguments just outlined are not incompatible with Habermas’s own theoretical position as such. The last highlight the place of deliberative institutions in conditions of conflicts of power and interest in the actual world. The first raises conflicts in what Habermas would count as ethical and evaluative domains rather than the domain of morality.

APPENDIX

Primer On Thinking Dynamically about the Human Ecological Condition

Chuck Dyke A SYSTEM

Rather than define ‘‘system,’’ current practice throughout the sciences urges us to think of a family of systematically connected things such as the central nervous system, the world economic system, dos, the ignition system in your car, the American prison system, and the historically paradigmatic solar system and thermodynamic system. Using the word ‘‘system’’ for such a wide range of things is justified so long as we respect the obligation to specify what is connected and the nature of the connections. Beyond that we always have to consider the boundaries separating a system from the other systems it interacts with, or is embedded in, or, in general, can be distinguished from. For thermodynamic systems, the standard obligations are the demand for boundary conditions (isolated, closed, or open system) and the definition of intensive variables such as temperature and pressure. The right to call dos a system is embedded in the source code. (I share with many others the view that Windows is only marginally a system.) We talk of ecosystems, social systems, and ecosocial systems. The first two usages are long standard and at least partially justified. We accept the responsibility of justifying the third. This volume begins our attempt to do so. Notice that the coinage ‘‘ecosocial system’’ explicitly addresses the question of boundaries. In this case, the clear implication is that the traditional hard boundary between ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’ is being challenged. Usages related to system are ‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘network.’’ We will be at pains to explain the first and don’t have much in

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this volume to say of the second, though we are keenly aware of the potential advantages of doing so; Barabási (2002) is an excellent starting point for discussing networks.

Dynamical Systems

Strictly speaking, a dynamical system is a mathematical object, like a pie chart or a ballistics trajectory. By extension, phenomena that can successfully be modeled by these mathematical objects are called dynamical systems. Justifying the extension is very seldom trivial. Models are like maps, though pie charts are only rarely maps of pies. Models of dynamical systems, on the other hand, are, in the first instance, mappings. They embody transformation rules that take a point in a mathematical space and map it to another point in that space. The successive transformations map out a trajectory in the space. To maintain that something is a dynamical system is to take on the task of characterizing such a trajectory: defining the mathematical space and articulating the transformation rules.

The State Space

A state space is a representation of the salient ways in which states of a system can change. For a simple pendulum, for example, the two things that can change are the position of the pendulum bob and its velocity (or, often more usefully, momentum). So the state space for the pendulum (called, as a mathematical object, a simple harmonic oscillator) has two dimensions, p and v. P and v can be represented in a Cartesian space, or, more usefully, in polar coordinates; these are two di√erent styles of ‘‘pv plot.’’ As the pendulum is imagined to swing back and forth, a representation of its movement is a trajectory through points on the pv plot, every point on that plot representing a unique combination of a particular position and a particular velocity. The simple harmonic oscillator can be defined by the characteristic pattern that appears in its state space representation as its trajectory is mapped out (Figure 1). The hope of people who study dynamical systems is that many things will be specifiable and usefully understood in terms of the pattern of their state space trajectories. Theoretically, any phenomenon for which you can specify a set of

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The transformation of the oscillatory movement of a pendulum into a representation in a Cartesian phase space.

1

possible changes can have a state space representation. But there’s a di√erence between doodles and informatively patterned trajectories. This is why you have to be ready to specify what’s changing and the ‘‘logic’’ of the transformations that are taking place to produce the patterned trajectory. This demand is no di√erent in kind from the more traditional demand that one be able to specify the equations that a phenomenon ‘‘obeys.’’ Indeed, in the paradigm cases, like the simple harmonic oscillator, the two demands are identical. The ways states can change saliently are called dimensions; the simple harmonic oscillator is thus a two-dimensional representation. There are no theoretical limits to how many dimensions a state space can have, but in practice, if a state space representation is going to be illuminating there are lots of limits on the number of dimensions (quantum mechanics excepted).

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Asymptotic Stability: The Attractor

The simple harmonic oscillator is the standard model of a frictionless pendulum. They’re devilishly hard to find in the real world, but pedagogically useful nonetheless. A frictionless pendulum settles down to a steady to-ing and fro-ing if nothing disturbs it. The pattern it settles down into is called its asymptotic state, and the state is stable if little perturbations settle down fairly quickly to restore the asymptotic state. There are basically three common asymptotic states, and they’re called attractors because it seems as if the trajectories in systems in which they come about are drawn to them. The Point Attractor The most familiar attractor is the point attractor. For example, a normal pendulum, subject to friction, will gradually settle down to hanging motionless at the vertical. The address of this attractor in the state space set up in the usual Cartesian space will be (0,0): no momentum; lowest position. The attractor is stable, for a little push will produce a little swing that will damp out very quickly. So it’s right to think of the point attractor as an equilibrium point in this case. Economists will immediately think of Pareto optima: points reached by rational traders from an initial distribution of assets. Pareto systems are almost as uncommon in the real world as simple harmonic oscillators, but correspondingly their analytical simplicity makes them just as pedagogically useful. The state space of a Paretian trading system, a system for which an equilibrium at an optimum can be expected, is twodimensional, with each of the dimensions representing a single commodity. Each point in the space thus specifies a particular commodity bundle containing specific amounts of the two commodities. The boundary conditions and transformation rules are embodied in the definition of ‘‘rational trader.’’ For example, ‘‘more is better than less’’ and ‘‘marginal utility decreases with increase in quantity.’’ This is enough to define a vector space; that is, it specifies the transformation from one state of the system (the initial distribution) to a final state (the Pareto optimum). The optimum can be shown to be stable. At the optimum neither trader can become better o√ without the other becoming worse o√, and the other trader, being rational, won’t agree to such a trade. Once the state space has to be expanded to accommodate more than

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two traders, or more than two commodities, the existence and/or stability of the point attractor can’t be guaranteed. This has been known for a long time (Kenneth Arrow’s 1951 Social Choice and Individual Values is the classic work, but the literature is extensive by now). The two-person–two-commodity case is not the general case any more than the simple harmonic oscillator is the general case of a pendulum. The Limit Cycle In fact, Arrow showed that in the general case, the attractor might well be not a point but a cycle. Even under the strict definition of rationality, trading systems can reach not a single point, but an orbit, around which they cycle—theoretically forever. Like a pendulum, the trading system can become an oscillator. A dynamical system is an oscillator if the trajectory traced out by its attractor has the characteristic pattern of returning reliably to some previous state from which it embarks on yet another journey that again returns it to that previous state, and so on (theoretically) ad infinitum. A single cycle is called a period, and oscillators (or limit cycles) are said to be periodic. It’s important that periodic behavior need not mean that an orbit hits the initial state every time around but may hit it every two times around, or three, or more. So there are period 1 cycles (a hit every time around), period 2 cycles (a hit every two times around), and so on. Of course, this means that a way has to be found to specify ‘‘one time around’’ that’s di√erent from ‘‘next hit on the initial point.’’ The standard way of doing this is to imagine taking a cross-section of the orbit, say, dropping a fluorescent screen through it at right angles. (Naturally, right angles are going to get tricky for orbits in many-dimensional spaces. We’ll have to leave a lot of this to the mathematicians. Threedimensional spaces are general enough for visualization to be reliable for our purposes.) So, every time around, the trajectory will make a flash on the fluorescent screen. The question of periodicity is answered by noticing how many flashes occur before there’s a flash at the initial point. Initial flash, then three flashes elsewhere, then a flash at the initial point means period 4, and so on. (The record of flashes is called a Poincaré section; Figure 2.) Waves of all sorts are oscillators, and the study of oscillators is tied closely to the mathematical analysis of waves. This is picked up below. Quasi-periodicity The world is full of oscillators: photons are oscillators, galaxies are oscillators, and biological and ecological systems are teeming with oscillators. But most of them fail to live up to their obliga-

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The Poincaré section as a geometrical method of studying quasi-periodic oscillation.

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tion ever to get back exactly to their initial state. Yet there are many such that are well behaved enough so that we can analyze their behavior fruitfully. Quasi-oscillators are well behaved. They live on bagels. That is, the state space representation of a quasi-oscillator is a torus, a threedimensional topological shape that resembles a bagel. A quasi-oscillator starts its trajectory somewhere on the surface of a torus and winds its way around, never returning exactly to a point it has visited before, but filling the surface of the torus (in the very long run) as full as you please with visited points (Figure 3). Just as limit cycles are useful because we always know where to find a current state of the system (it’s always on the cycle), so quasi-periodic orbits are useful because we know they’ll always be on the torus. From this we know that reliable transformation rules are in play. This is especially important for the analysis of all sorts of natural and social systems, such as the ones considered in this volume. In a sense, nothing ever gets back exactly to a state it was in before, yet we and natural processes have our (more or less) reliable rhythms nonetheless. Quasi-periodic orbits are never considered to be a separate kind of attractor apart from the point, the cycle, and the chaotic attractor about to be discussed. This is largely because it is assumed that quasi-periodic systems will eventually settle down into one of the three canonical attractors. Chaotic Attractors The most complex of the attractors found in dynamical systems are chaotic attractors (sometimes called strange attractors). Indeed, some people would like to define complexity in terms of the presence of such attractors. Chaotic attractors occur when a system

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The beginning stages of a space-filling trajectory on a torus.

‘‘settles down’’ to a trajectory that isn’t a cycle and isn’t on the surface of a torus, but nonetheless has a precise mathematical characterization. The ‘‘surface’’ it lives on is topologically definable, and its behavior on that surface can be analyzed in terms of rigorous transformation rules and statistics. As in the quasi-oscillator, the trajectory traced out never visits a point it hit before, yet a Poincaré section will exhibit a recognizable pattern. For our purposes, the important thing about chaotic attractors (beyond the fact that they can be recognized and rigorously defined) is that systems whose attractor is chaotic are ‘‘sensitive to initial conditions.’’ That is, one of their defining characteristics is that knowing an initial state, even with incredible precision, doesn’t help you for very long to predict what state the system will be in at some future time. The information about the initial state disappears exponentially fast. Nonetheless, just as you could know that every future state of a periodic system would be on the limit cycle, and every future state of a quasiperiodic system would be on the torus, you can know that every future state of a genuinely chaotic system will be on the precisely patterned chaotic attractor (Figure 4). It’s this kind of global reliability in the face of local ignorance that makes chaotic systems worth considering as tools for modeling real-world processes.

Nonlinearity

From a mathematical point of view, linearity is defined in terms of additivity: a system of equations is linear when, if x is a solution and y is a solution, then x + y is a solution. In fact, there’s probably no other adequate definition of linearity not equivalent to, or a special case of,

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A simplified picture of the Lorentz attractor. The elliptical ‘‘wings’’ represent two alternative states of the system (i.e., basins of attraction); the trajectory shifts irregularly from one to the other.

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this one. As we’ll see, nonlinearity is one of the chief generators of complexity. No system that operates on its previous states to yield successive states can reliably be expected to be linear, although many nonlinear systems can have more or less extensive linear ‘‘regimes.’’ Variations on this theme are played out throughout this volume. Classical Enlightenment science made its greatest advances by dealing with linear systems or finding adequate linear approximations to nonlinear systems. It’s when such approximations are no longer adequate that the ‘‘sciences of complexity’’ come into their own. Nonlinear systems, as a rule, have no analytical solutions, so numerical solutions generated by computers have to be found instead. Poincaré knew at the end of the nineteenth century that the solar system was nonlinear—a many-body system not adequately approximated for all purposes by linear two-body systems. Nothing much could be done about that until the age of powerful computers.

Basins of Attraction

The basin of attraction of an attractor of any of these types is that set of points in the state space from which the trajectory of the system will move to that attractor. In the easy case of the pendulum subject to friction, every place on its swing that we started o√ would lead eventually to its hanging still, the point attractor. So every possible state of the system is in the basin of that point attractor. In contrast, a Paretian

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A bifurcation diagram and potential landscape of thermal convection such as the Bénard cell (see Haila and Dyke, this volume, Fig. 1). Originally, the movement of fluid molecules is homogeneously chaotic; that is, the potential landscape has only one ‘‘well.’’ With increasing temperature gradient, the well first flattens and then divides into two parts separated by a basin boundary; these two wells correspond to clockwise versus counterclockwise rotation of the fluid cells.

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system has a highly specific endpoint combination of commodity bundles associated with each specific family of starting combinations of commodity bundles. Initial distribution determines final distribution. The basin of attraction of a Pareto optimum (a point attractor) is a straight line between the optimum and the initial point. In e√ect, the straight line passes through all the points the traders would visit if they traded tiny little bit by tiny little bit, always at the same price. The price is given, as always, by the slope of the line. The latter case shows that the state space of a system can have more than one attractor in it. There may be more than one way the system can stably end up, depending on where it starts. (Psychologists using these techniques are constantly faced with this situation, for example.) If there is more than one attractor, then there has to be a boundary between their basins of attraction. Such boundaries are called, in an awesome act of baptismal creativity, basin boundaries (Figure 5).

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These boundaries are only rarely lines that can easily be traced. More often, and always in the case of chaotic attractors, basin boundaries are fractal. This means that starting points to one basin and starting points to another are densely scattered among one another in such a way that as (mathematically) close to a starting point for one basin of attraction as you wish, you can find a starting point for another basin of attraction. In a typical American city, for example, try to draw a line around the set of people who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. You’ll be fairly successful in some areas, but in other areas demography will utterly defeat you; the Republicans and Democrats may be too densely mixed. The defeat is infinitely more decisive in the state spaces of complex systems. Until you get close enough to the attractor, you may simply be unable to decide which basin a point is in. This is a brute fact of this sort of research and the reason no advances in it were made until fast computer simulations became possible.

Transients

Attractors are defined in terms of asymptotic stability. That’s why it’s possible to be confident that any future state of a given system will be found on the attractor. Transient behavior is the behavior of a system before it has settled down and reached its attractor. It’s in the basin of attraction, but not yet at the attractor. I have real doubts about whether very many real-world systems ever reach asymptotic stability. In fact, there are many reasons we shouldn’t expect them to do so. The concept of an attractor is the idealization that organizes the study of dynamical systems. Because no scientific field or subfield can get along without its characteristic simplifications and idealizations, we have no call to apologize here. Instead, we have to think about what the idealization of attractors entails for empirical research. This question is currently alive in every field of investigation beginning to use dynamical systems thinking as an important tool. We simply acknowledge the di≈culties. However, one suggestion is this. As we discuss entrainment, it will be clear that at this stage one of our most important guiding ideas is that very many phenomena can usefully be modeled as systems of coupled oscillators, or, more often, quasi-oscillators. When studying systems of coupled oscillators (say, the York or Henon systems), the hypothesis suggests itself that apparently

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chaotic attractors are themselves late stages of transients to periodic behavior. This would be hard to ‘‘prove’’ because of the di≈culties introduced by round-o√ errors in sensitive systems. Be that as it may, the suggestion arises that probable final states can be recognized by the pattern of earlier states. The mathematician would say that we might be able to identify important features of asymptotic behavior from its ‘‘preimages.’’ The claim then would be that this is a common phenomenon, as cells and organisms are themselves constrained to recognize periodic signals on the basis of (late) transients. When speed is of the essence, cleanly idealized signaling has a prohibitive cost.

Entrainment

Periodic and quasi-periodic systems are, as mentioned, wave-like and are modeled by the mathematics of waves. A number of essays in this volume depend heavily on identifying entrainments. So we have to be especially clear about them. The two most important features of periodic systems are phase and frequency. Phase is defined in terms of two or more distinguishable characteristic states that alternate: for example, crest and trough for the ripples on a pond. Frequency is defined in terms of how many times a given state occurs in a given time: for example, how many crests pass by a certain point in a minute. Two oscillators can be either in phase or out of phase with one another and can have either the same frequency or di√erent frequencies. When they are stably in phase with one another they are said to be ‘‘phase-locked’’; when their frequencies are stably identical they are said to be ‘‘frequency-locked.’’ The word ‘‘entrainment’’ is used for both sorts of locking, partly because for many systems, phase and frequency locking will occur together. It is also used when the process of achieving the phase or frequency locking is being emphasized. So we can imagine two pendulum clocks. The two pendula could be swinging at the same rates from tick to tock. Each completes one whole swing in exactly the same time as the other. They would be frequencylocked. Yet one could be at tick when the other was at tock (left end of swing, right end of swing). Or one could be at tick when the other was at the middle of its swing. Or, in fact, their relative positions could be far less easily characterizable. They wouldn’t be phase-locked.

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On the other hand, they could both be at tick at the same time and tock at the same time. Then they would be phase-locked. In contrast, it could be that whenever one was at tick, the other was at tock. Then we’d say that they were locked 180 degrees out of phase. Finally, two oscillators might continually come into phase with one another, but not on every cycle for one or both of them. For instance, one might be at the same phase as the other every three cycles, whereas for the other it occurs every four cycles. (Musicians who understand hemiola and other counterrhythmic patterns will see this immediately. I play three to the bar and you play four to the bar, yet we always get to the end of the bar together.) These sorts of situations will be extremely important when we talk about self-organization. The Process of Entrainment We need to know how oscillators that aren’t entrained come to get entrained to one another. We also need to think about how two things exhibiting no rhythmic correlations get synchronized—on the same wave length in some way. For only when we know the how and why of synchronized patterns do we reach a truly useful understanding of them. We know that there will be di√erent hows and whys for di√erent sorts of phenomena, but there are some general considerations worth going into. Many entrainments can be attributed to ‘‘pulls’’ and ‘‘pushes’’ of various kinds. First, think of a little girl and her father side by side on a swing set, both swinging. They really get into it, and the little girl would really love to swing as high as her father. He’s a lot heavier than she, though, and that helps him go higher. It also a√ects her ability to maintain a stable smooth swing. Every time he gets to the top either of his swing forward or his swing back it jerks the swing set and upsets her rhythm. It turns out that she can improve her swing by adjusting her phase so that his jerks propel her in the right direction: a jerk forward when she’s on the forward swing, a jerk back when she’s on the back swing. More interesting, if she just lets nature (and her father) take its course, she’ll eventually get jerked into phase with him anyway. His pushes and pulls are transmitted through the swing set to alter her frequency and phase. The classic story is that of the clock shop, where every morning a number of pendulum clocks are wound up for the day. To begin with there’s a cacophony of tickings and tockings, but over the course of the day, the clocks will become entrained. In this case, sound waves and

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attendant vibrations are the pushes and pulls that do the job. Once convinced that this sort of thing actually happens (and it does), we could move on to think of how the pushes and pulls of the sound waves create vector fields that, in e√ect, embody the transformation rules of the clocks that are coupled, after all, in a very simple dynamical system. The trick then is to be able to identify and establish the pushes and pulls in play when you begin to use these tools to study social or ecosocial systems. Some of the essays in this volume attempt to do just that. Strogatz (2003) is essential reading on this theme.

Self-Organization

When pendulum clocks entrain, there is no clockmeister who entrains them: they do it by themselves. So entrainments are one kind of selforganizing process. The process or, rather, system of processes involved in biological development is another kind. From some points of view, biological evolution and ecological succession are others. There is a very active group of psychologists who maintain that the development of human personality is yet another. This volume suggests still others. Here we will try to orient and develop intuitions about self-organization. A class focusing on environmental issues meets in a room arranged as a sort of big seminar room. There is a ring of chairs around three walls and a ring of tables in the middle. Thirty students are sitting in the outside ring and ten in the middle. The students are asked to do the following. They are familiar with ‘‘the wave,’’ once popular at football games. The wave is formed by people raising their hands above their heads, then lowering them. They do this in succession, starting at one point in the ring and going around and starting again. The students are asked to create such waves with these conditions: the wave in the outside ring will go clockwise, the wave in the inside ring counterclockwise. A student at the end of the outside ring is designated the starter, and a student at the end of the inside ring as a starter. They are asked to synchronize their waves, phase-lock them, in the sense that both waves must arrive back at the starter simultaneously. You can see that there are two possibilities: they could lock frequency, whereupon the outside wave would reach the outside starter once for every three times the inner wave reached the inside starter; or they

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could adjust their frequencies in such a way that the waves would be phase-locked every time they went around. The second was asked of them. They succeeded amazingly quickly, without any further instruction or help from the instructor (except a little badgering and mild ridicule). The result was a self-organized global pattern. Analyzing its process of, in this case, entrainment tells us a lot. Each ring by itself is easy. Each student simply tunes in to the one before him or her in line, and uses that student’s arm raising as a signal. No student need be at all cognizant of anything but that previous student. The signals are all local; the pattern is global. The synchronization is more complex. In the particular case, the students in the inside ring quickly figured out that they had to tune in not to the previous person in their ring, but to a person in the other ring: every third person in the outer ring was the signaler for a person in the inner ring. Furthermore, they realized that their arm raising had to be at a slower frequency than arm raising in the outer ring if the wave was to be smooth. The students in the outer ring didn’t have to pay any attention to the inner ring at all and, of course, were better o√ if they didn’t. They were then asked to do the same thing, not with arm raising but with deep breaths. (Anyone who hyperventilates flunks.) It was a breeze. Finally, they were asked to synchronize their heartbeats; that, in context, was just a joke. But it wasn’t only a joke, because it emphasized the necessity of being tuned to signal. Heartbeat signals weren’t available. Controlling heart rate is another problem, solved only by those well trained in biofeedback techniques, but under the circumstances this was beside the point. Finally, to get to something meatier for social research: the self-organization of classroom dynamics. The students chose their own seats early in the semester. By the end of the first week, everybody had their own seat and has maintained it ever since. Being in the outside ring or being on the inside ring has sociopedagogical meaning, though this doesn’t imply the division between two pedagogically homogeneous groups. When it dawned on the people in the inside group that the moment had arrived for a bit of leadership and strategy setting, they accomplished it in (literally) less than 10 seconds. Meanwhile, the starter at the beginning of the outside ring had long since established himself as a leader and locked in the start signal immediately. Although this is a highly par-

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ticular and radically truncated example, the self-organization of classroom dynamics is a powerful educational tool. The most common reason for failure of such dynamics is the attempt by a teacher to micromanage the classroom ambience in some preconceived pattern: a bad mistake. Cellular Automata Local signal and response produces global structure. The students proved that to themselves. One of the best devices developed for studying this sort of phenomenon is the cellular automaton. It may be most familiar as the Game of Life, but it can be generalized. There are many versions in both one and two dimensions. They are important enough to touch on here because they are beginning to be used to model ecological processes, such as optimum tree spacing to limit the spread of forest fires. Imagine a grid of squares. Except at the edge, every square has eight contiguous neighbors. We’ll say, for simplicity, that squares can be either black or white, and we’ll be making up rules for when they change from one to the other (or stay the same). The rules come in sets: rules about what a square does if it’s white and what it does when it’s black. According to the rules, what a square will do depends on the signals it gets from its eight neighbors. For example, one rule might be ‘‘If you’re white, and four or more of your neighbors are black, change to black.’’ Several more rules will have to be added to that one. It isn’t easy to find sets of rules that produce interesting results—the emergence of patterns—but dozens have been found. Once you have an interesting set of rules, you start with an initial array of black and white squares and have them follow the rules. Notice that you could do it by hand. Cellular automata are not theoretically tied to the computer, but in practice only the computer versions will be of any use. So you start the process and watch what happens. Typically, waves of various sorts will self-organize. Sometimes static but interesting configurations will result. Sometimes nothing of interest will show up. The point here is that cellular automata are currently the paradigm of local signals producing global patterns, at least for simulation and study purposes. No square’s communication capacities extend beyond its eight neighbors, yet signals are propagated and correlated globally over time. There is no cellmeister choreographing the emergence of pattern. The hypothesis is that many social and ecosocial phenomena are like that. Even this briefest of discussions of self-organization should help readers of this volume. But it has to be said that people working with the

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growing theory of networks will be frustrated at just this point. They have a major contribution to make and will see immediately where they might fit. The work that went into the present volume hasn’t yet caught up with the advances they have made, but it fits well with them.

THERMODYNAMIC SYSTEMS

The conditions for self-organization can’t be appreciated fully unless the thermodynamic aspects of their possibility are considered. There are many ways to express the important implications of thermodynamics. What follows is one that gets to an understanding of selforganization quickest. The laws of thermodynamics state the general conditions under which all processes take place. The first law is the familiar principle of the conservation of energy: the amount of energy remains constant, even as some kinds of energy are converted to others. The books balance. Einstein expanded the range of the books with his principle that matter and energy are interconvertible according to the relation energy = mass times the square of C, the speed of light in a vacuum. We won’t need to worry about that. The second law is the law of entropy, stated in many ways, but for our purposes as the principle that all processes tend toward equilibrium as fast as they can. Co√ee gets cold; martinis warm up. They both move toward an equalization of their temperature with the surroundings. It takes work, a suitable infusion of energy, to maintain something at a temperature di√erent from its surroundings. Human body temperature is a fairly constant 98.6 degrees F. The ambient temperature in Finland is very seldom that high. The Finns must be availing themselves of energy sources to maintain their di√erence in temperature from the world around them. Furthermore, they must maintain body boundaries so that they don’t lose what energy they have to the ambience. Finally, they must maintain the conditions for the internal highly organized processes necessary to prevent the equalization of their temperature with that of their surroundings, the processes of life. Equilibrium is defined in terms of the absence of di√erences, and at a stable equilibrium little di√erences that might arise disappear quickly. Structure can provisionally be defined as the (more or less) stable main-

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tenance of di√erences, for example, a radical change in the probability of measuring a temperature of 98.6 degrees F as you move across the dermal boundary of a healthy human being. Structure alters the way a local part of the universe is approaching equilibrium. Such structure must be stabilized far from equilibrium. The understanding of such structure, in thermodynamic terms, was advanced in the middle of the twentieth century by Ilya Prigogine, preeminent among others. Structure is a sort of triumph over the tendency to go to equilibrium, using this very tendency to advantage.

Stable Thermodynamic Structure

The best examples of structure stabilized for a time far from equilibrium are familiar and straightforward, for instance, the vortex that forms as water drains out of the sink or the bathtub. The thermodynamically preferred state of the water is ‘‘all as low down in the gravitational field as it can get.’’ It gets there as fast as it can given the constraints of the plumbing. Given the usual constraints, the fastest way is to form a vortex, a flowing spinning top. Although the vortex is pretty stable, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its sensitivities as well. Most people know that the vortex always spins in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and always in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere. The di√erence in relative orientation of the gravity vector and the vector of the earth’s rotation are enough to produce a strikingly decisive result. Similarly, low-pressure atmospheric systems always spin counterclockwise, and high-pressure systems always spin clockwise. Hurricanes and nor’easters moving up the coast of the United States throw the rain and snow at us from the direction of the sea. There are many, many things that are stable only as long as they spin. Gyroscopes are the paradigm. When they stop spinning, they fall over. That is, oscillators are only oscillators as long as they oscillate, and when they stop oscillating, they’re not oscillators any more. It doesn’t sound very profound, put like that, but our lives depend on it all the time. It may even be that something similar is true of social systems. For example, there’s a hypothesis, approached very gingerly by a number of theorists, that the United States is stable only insofar as its politics oscillate between the poles of jingoism and the bleeding heart.

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One very instructive oscillating system is the system of Bénard cells that emerge in slowly heated fluids of the right sort under the right conditions. There’s an excellent account of them in the essay by Lasse Peltonen in this volume. The fact that there are so many oscillators and quasi-oscillators around, coupled together in myriad ways, accounts for our continued emphasis on them all throughout this volume. Finally, the sorts of stability to be found far from equilibrium di√er from those at equilibrium in a way that’s decisive for the possibility of the emergence of order and structure. In nonequilibrium systems, fluctuations don’t always disappear. On the contrary, under the right conditions, fluctuations are ‘‘captured’’ and amplified—to produce, say, new patterns of periodic behavior. The easiest case to think about is the emergence of positive feedback cycles at rock concerts. The scream of feedback noise coming out of the speakers is a self-organized emergent structure, created by the capturing and (literally) amplification of some little noise. The system drives itself over a threshold, or, from the mathematical perspective, to a bifurcation point at which the conditions of stability change to favor the scream.

Biological Structure

Ecosocial systems are, of course, strongly and centrally biological. Issues of biological structure dominate the study of developmental and evolutionary processes. So we need to prepare some of that ground. We’ll still need to think in terms of thermodynamically preferred states. A major theme will be that biological structures emerge and grow not by laborious building-block processes, but by relaxing into (thermodynamically prepared) place. In general, the components of ecosocial systems interact with one another by creating thermodynamically preferred places for one another. Things live in, on, and o√ one another. Some of the interactions are genuinely active; a lot more are pretty passive. The easiest example of the preparation of thermodynamically preferred place is the role of enzymes in molecular assembly and disassembly. Our bodies are constantly engaged in processes that would be thermodynamically di≈cult if not impossible were it not for the enzymes that change the shape of the thermodynamic space to render them the favored path to equilibrium. Enzymes change the shape of the

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chemical plumbing. So proteins, for example, are not muscled into their bioactive configurations, but relax into them under the constraints created by the enzymes. At some level of generality, there’s no di√erence between a protein relaxing into its final structure and a big thunderstorm relaxing into a tornado. Tornadoes don’t use enzymes; they depend on particular conditions of temperature, pressure, and moisture to set up the plumbing for their vortical structure. They also need fairly flat ground to move over. Bumpy terrain messes up the thermodynamic conditions for their stability.

Symmetry

Associated strongly with the emergence of structure are symmetries and symmetry breakings. For all the depth of these concepts in all the sciences, the concepts are graphic and simple to understand. Things are symmetrical with respect to possible ‘‘transformations.’’ Something is bilaterally symmetrical if you can change one side for the other without anyone being able to tell that you did so. So humans aren’t really bilaterally symmetrical but mirror-image bilaterally symmetrical—or sort of. Circles, on the other hand, are very, very symmetrical. The result of any rotation is indistinguishable from any other. Mathematicians have developed a very powerful theory of groups, where groups are defined in terms of shared symmetries. We needn’t follow that line of thought for the purpose of the essays in this volume (with the possible exception of Dyke’s), but many of the moves forward from our beginnings will require a serious look at symmetry groups. One of the most important symmetry groups is that defined by the principle of the conservation of energy. It tells us that we aren’t going to be able to tell any state of a conservative system from any other just by measuring total energy. On the other side, the symmetry is going to be an indispensable source of equals signs for our equations. My favorite sad tale of symmetry is that of the poor cockroach who falls into a bowl of cream of wheat. Heavy enough to get buried, the roach isn’t heavy enough to retain her sense of up and down when immersed. Every direction seems the same as any other direction. The roach can’t tell which way to go to get out. (Any extra light coming in the top to break the symmetry would be morally cruel, as the roach’s cate-

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gorical imperative is to move away from the light.) The roach will probably have to wait for the cruel release of ingestion. A more useful example for humans is the following. We have a pair of honest dice, except that they have no spots on them. No matter how many times we roll them, we can’t tell which sides are up. So we put a dot on the exact center of each face and roll again. We still can’t tell which side is up; the symmetry hasn’t been broken. On the other hand, we can be sure that because the dice are fair, every result of a throw is as probable as any other. Then we mark the dice as they’re usually marked. We can now tell some results from others—snake eyes from boxcars, for example. Every result is still as probable as any other, but the problem of rolling 7 is di√erent from rolling, say, 3, because we distinguish results in terms of what the two dice add up to. It’s now worth reaching for our wallets. We’ve broken a symmetry and can play a game. The results are structured in terms of the totals. There are two very common symmetries in liberal democratic political theory: Mill’s principle that everyone is to count for one and not more than one, and the principle that justice is blind. The first says that symmetry-breaking advantages must not be structured into a voting system. The second says that symmetry should not be broken before the law. Interestingly, we know that these two symmetries can often compete with one another for precedence. In particular, in U.S. history, Madison in The Federalist Papers argues that some matters of justice are too important to leave to the ‘‘will of the majority.’’ The almost immediate result of this was the insistence of Virginia that they wouldn’t ratify the new constitution unless the Bill of Rights was added to it. These first ten amendments spell out a system of ‘‘equal right’’—areas in which justice must be blind—that is beyond the reach of majority rule. From the Virginians’ point of view, the underlying asymmetry from which they wanted protection was the latent theocracy in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These issues are perennial in the United States and manifest themselves now in the debate about same-sex marriage. Asymmetries of ethos are a structural feature of American society.

Another Word on Strategy

As usual, questions about modeling and explaining arise in the use of the resources of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The analogy be-

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tween a protein and a tornado is fun. Is it any more than that? Well, to put it one way, the thermodynamic models link weather, climate, metabolism, trophic levels, international energy policy, and genetics into a coherent picture. Thermodynamic considerations are ubiquitous in ecosocial systems. Lotka and Lorentz can be brought together. The real questions for many people will be about the level of analysis. Looking at ecosocial systems in these terms won’t yield the configuration of questions and answers that many people are used to. However, this, by itself, shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not as if traditional lines of thought have yielded all the answers or convinced us that they will. Others may worry that these lines of thought are misanthropic, decentering humans and their intellects from accounts of their relationship with the ambient world. But how can it ever be misanthropic to understand the human place in the world, even as it’s a ‘‘thermodynamically prepared’’ place? Furthermore, the de-centering may constitute a gesture of humility toward a world that we’ve brutalized far too much and far too often.

BOURDIEU

The continual presence of Pierre Bourdieu’s thought in this volume is an artifact of our education. He taught us a lot. Arguably, we could have learned the equivalent elsewhere; we didn’t. So we include a brief summary of what we use and how we use it. A deeper account of Bourdieu’s relationship to other intellectual trends is contained in the essay by Iordanis Marcoulatos in this volume. In addition, a number of items in the references can help fill the gaps.

Structured Structuring Structures

Bourdieu was in critical dialogue with a tradition that included Althusser, Merleau-Ponty, and, as a particular target of criticism, Sartre. One major focus of his work was a critique of static structuralism; another was his attempt to overcome the false dichotomy of mechanism and teleology. Those of us working in evolutionary and/or ecological theory could well sympathize with these foci. The core of Bourdieu’s advance is summed up in the following:

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The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘‘regulated’’ and ‘‘regular’’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu 1977, 72)

We have thought that this, and the supporting and motivation material that went with it, both articulated and could be articulated by the dynamical thinking sketched in this primer; hence Bourdieu’s formulations served as an important sca√olding for us. We think it was a good fit; Bourdieu thought so, too. The language of structured structuring structures, clumsy as it is, has the advantage of aiming directly at the interplay of social stability and social change. Ecosocial systems are multidimensional and can be stable or changing at a variety of scales and disparate rates. Some organized track has to be kept of the (nonlinear) interactions between these dimensions and their results. Bourdieu’s rubrics have helped us along these lines. Although the detailed law-bound predictions so dear to the positivists (and so few, in fact) aren’t available very often for the systems we study, it’s still often possible to develop intelligent justified expectations about the future of them.

Habitus

The structures Bourdieu is most concerned with are neither imposed nor ‘‘reasoned out.’’ One of the most important places to see this is in his discussion of the Kabyle house (Bourdieu 1977). Some of the most important habits, constraints, and enablements constitutive of Kabyle culture are embodied in the house and its distribution of spatiotemporal occupation. The place of men and the place of women are arranged in a way that is far more powerful than a set of imposed rules, as would-be Westernizers always find. The habitus of a people has a history, of course, but according to Bourdieu, it isn’t the history of rules

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imposed or decisions made—except, again, under something like colonial reform. The history is one of self-organization. The Kabyle house relaxes into its meaning-embodying form. In a real sense, the Kabyle and their house become symbiotic, each providing conditions of existence for the other—as what they are.

Entrainment

People become entrained to a way of life, and through that way of life to each other just as surely as clocks become phase- and frequency-locked. As with the clocks, local interaction produces global structure. Our image of such entrainment was my students’ wave. Bourdieu’s (1977, 72) image is collective orchestration ‘‘without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.’’ Some of the essays in this volume exploit this analytical tool extensively.

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

CHUCK DYKE

is a professor of philosophy at Temple University,

Philadelphia. is a professor of environmental policy at the University of Tampere, Finland.

YRJÖ HAILA

completed his Ph.D. on the political ecology of natural resource use at the University of Tampere; he is working as a senior advisor at the Pirkanmaa Regional Environment Centre, specializing in conservation management.

ARI JOKINEN

VILLE LÄHDE works on his Ph.D. on Rousseau’s views of nature in philosophy at the University of Tampere.

completed his Ph.D. on the politicization of the environment in the City of Tampere (jointly with Lasse Peltonen); he is currently working as a senior researcher in environmental policy at the University of Tampere.

MARKUS LAINE

completed his Ph.D. on Pierre Bourdieu at the Department of Philosophy at Temple University.

IORDANIS MARCOULATOS

JOHN O’NEILL

is a professor of philosophy at Lancaster University.

is a professor emerita of psychology at John Jay College and at the cuny Graduate Center, New York City.

SUSAN OYAMA

TARU PELTOLA completed her Ph.D. on the politicization of local energy decisions at the University of Tampere. LASSE PELTONEN completed his Ph.D. on the politicization of the environment in the City of Tampere (jointly with Markus Laine); he is currently working as a researcher at the Center for Urban Planning, Helsinki Technical University.

is a professor emeritus of interpersonal relations, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire.

JOHN SHOTTER

is a professor in the Program in Critical and Creative Thinking, Graduate College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

PETER TAYLOR

INDEX

Aboutness, 130, 134. See also Intentionality Action: collective, 167; conditions of, 230 Actor. See Social agency Adaptation, 91–95, 98–103, 211. See also Climate Adjustment period, 207 Administration: bodies, 202; fiscal, 200 A√ordance, 22, 31, 161; positive, 45 Agency. See Social agency Agriculture, 37, 198; Roman, 95 Alavus, 218–23, 225, 227–30, 232–33 Alexander, Je√rey C., 172 Analogue model. See Model Analogy, 14, 22–23, 40, 70, 150, 152– 53, 155, 164, 205, 298; electrical analog circuit, 248 f. 11.5 Anthropology: Bourdieu’s philosophical, 131, 146; social, 145 Arendt, Hannah, 268, 271–72 Aristotle, 26, 30–33, 40 Artifact, 37, 82, 85, 87, 94, 198–200, 203, 205, 211, 299 Atmosphere. See Climate Attraction, 159–60, 209, 214; attractor, 18, 162, 282–84, 286–88; basins of, 5, 286–88, 301; basins of point attractor, 286; chaotic attractor, 18, 284–85, 288–89; Lorentz attractor, 286 f. P4; periodic attractor, 18; point attractor, 282, 286; strange attractor, 284 Auden, W. H., 17, 43 Australia, 35 Authority, 206 Authorization, 267–68, 270, 272–73, 275

Autopoiesis, 174 n. 2 Awareness, of professional targets, 210 Background, 148 n. 12 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 109–10, 121 Balance, 30, 201, 237 Balance sheet, 208 Basins of attraction, 5, 286–88, 301 Behavior, 31; asymptotic, 289; collective, 161; of forest owners, 209; nonverbal, 134; transient, 288; verbal, 134 Behaviorism, 128 Bénard cell, 7, 9, 16, 151–54, 156–57, 161, 163–64, 170–71, 173, 296; instability, 151–52, 166. See also Analogy Berlin, Isaiah, 118 Bernstein, Richard J., 118, 121 Bifurcation, 33–34, 166, 296; diagram, 287 f. P5 Biodiversity, 29, 199, 206, 214, 216 Biography, 176 n. 19 Biology: biological base, 51; biological evolution, 291 Biopower, 39 Bios, 32 Biosphere, 28 Body, 135; bodily change, 125; bodily hexis, 147 n. 5; bodily responsiveness, 110; expressive actuality of, 143; gestural meanings, 108; as interest and commitment, 137; as learning and memory, 136; lived reality of, 137; mind and, 128; socioculturally situated, 137; theory, 131 Bookkeeping, 155 Borderland, 216 Borges, Jorge Luis, 263–65

324

INDEX

Boundaries, 37, 50, 56, 172, 177, 199, 205, 209, 216, 279, 287–88, 295; basin, 288; boundary conditions, 24, 26, 153, 163, 279, 282; boundary infrastructure, 212, 215; boundary object, 212; disciplinary, 172–73; of forest stand, 210, 216; global boundary conditions, 28; of parcel, 210; plastic boundary object, 211 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19, 32, 34, 128–43, 145–46, 154, 157, 160–61, 165, 168, 172, 178–80, 183, 189, 191, 194–95, 299–301 Brady, Roland H., 123 Braudel, Fernand, 23 Brentano, Franz, 127 Burke, Edmund, 269 Butterfly e√ect, 165–66 Calculation, 201; rational, 178. See also Economy Capacity, 19; carrying, 27–28; determinate, 70, 74, 76; production, 206 Capital, 178–79; cultural, 179, 196; economic, 179; informational, 179, 192; political, 183, 193; social, 179, 182, 193; symbolic, 179, 182, 190, 192–93, 196 Capitalism, 28, 47 Carson, Rachel, 266 Cartwright, Nancy, 48 n. 9 Categorization, of forest stand, 207 Causality, linear, 153 Cause, 29, 54; and e√ect, 154 Cellular automata, 293 Centralization, 200 Change, 199; dynamic, 212; gradual, 153; from natural to man-made forests, 205; social, 172, 207, 300 Chernobyl, 42 Choice, rational, 160, 178 Chomsky, Noam, 51

Chouliaraki, Lilie, 178, 191 Cicero, 36, 78–82, 91, 95–96 Circular causality, 7 Cities, 27, 48 n. 8; city planning, 188– 89, 192, 195 Classification, 199–200, 204, 212; of forest owners, 207 Climate, 7, 9–11, 16, 19, 35, 84, 88, 100, 299; anthropogenic change in, 84; change in, 78, 81–83, 86– 94, 98–99, 101–3; debate over, 86, 89–90; dynamics, 85; dynamic states of, 84; flux of, 93; humanmade, 86, 90; policy, 86, 89, 98, 214; Promethean, 83; state of, 89 Closure conditions, 15 Code, 162; of communication, 171 Collective variable, 9 Colonization: form of, 215; of Finnish forests, 215 Common good, 196 Communication, 1, 23–24, 44–45, 107, 109, 112–14, 161, 207, 211; communicative relations, 109; Habermasian, 29; interactive kinds of, 163 Competition, 15 Complexity, 3, 19, 21, 26, 43–44, 63, 71–72, 82, 91, 94–95, 151, 156, 163, 170–71, 178, 199, 201, 213–14, 236, 244–45, 259–60, 284, 286; biosocial and ecosocial, 27; complex society, 216; ecosocial, 19, 21, 27– 28; models of, 172; social, 171 Conditions: ecological, 198; initial, 17 Conflict, 186, 204, 206, 219, 273–76; environmental, 186–87; over oldgrowth forests, 215; potential, 206; sources of, 215; symbolic, 13 Conjunctures, 16, 152, 164, 166 Conrad, Joseph, 17 Consciousness, 130–33; distance from the world of, 130

INDEX

Conservation, 199, 273–76; of biodiversity, 214; EU lists of nature, 215; traditional, 199 Constraints, 26, 31 Constructivism, social, 88–89 Constructivist interactionism, 55 Contemporary consumption society, 213 Context, 59, 64, 215; complex contextuality, 155; practical, 120 Contingency, 17, 243 Continual construction and transformation, 56–57 Control, 52, 200, 207, 210; distanced, 213; human, 200, 215; of forests, 200, 214 Control parameter, 5, 9, 16, 25 f. 1.5, 35 Convection, 7; thermal, 8 f. 1.1, 8 f. 1.2, 287 f. P5 Cooperation, 211 Countercurrent, 202 Critical events, 152, 164, 168, 170 Crossley, Nick, 157, 161 Culture, 78, 173; cultural work, 173; Roman, 79 Cycles, 22, 24, 84, 198–99, 212, 283– 84, 290, 296; limit, 283–85; reproductive, 21, 33, 199–200; rotation period, 199–201 Das, Veena, 168 Davidson, Donald, 128 Dawkins, Richard, 53 De-centering, 299 Deduction, geometrical, 210 Deliberative democracy, 29, 261–63, 269–70, 275–76 Democracy, 188 Dennett, Daniel, 127 Descartes, René, 68, 109 Determination, 156, 170; global indeterminancy, 156; indetermination, 156

325

Determinism, 170, 173; structural, 176 n. 19 Development, 52; rational, 203 Developmental systems theory, 31, 33, 50, 54–56, 59 Diagrams: conventions, 247; interpretation of, 235–60; of natural and social processes, 235–60 Dialogue, 24, 109, 113, 117, 120–21, 124 Dichotomy, 34, 81, 98, 128; cartesian dualism, 143; developmental dualism, 33, 52; dominant, 86; of mechanism and teleology, 299; mind and body, 32; nature-culture, 81, 101–3, 177; nature-nurture, 50–51, 54, 59–60; structure-agency, 150– 51, 154, 156, 172 Di√usion, 150 Dillon, Michael, 151 Directionality, 138; directional manner, 137. See also Intentionality Disciplinary borders. See Boundaries Disciplines, 51, 59–60 Discourse, 173; discursive membranes, 161, 164, 171; discursive practices, 190–93; discursive struggles, 163 Dispositions, 140, 195 Disturbance, 167, 199; frequency of, 199; human, 237; unpredictable, 199 Doctrinal dispute, 204 Douglas, Mary, 219 Doxa, 147 n. 5 Dualism. See Dichotomy Dyke, Chuck, 2–3, 19, 21, 49, 52, 60– 61, 106, 145, 155, 177–78, 180, 190 Dynamics, 16, 211; complex, 150; cultural, 17; dynamic forms, 115; of forest stands, 199; nonlinear, 13, 21, 43; population, 15; vegetation, 204. See also System; Thinking

326

INDEX

Ecocatastrophe, 41–42 Ecology, 5, 56, 58–59; ecological succession, 291; human, 5; population, 42 Economics, 198; orthodox, 44 Economy, 199; economic calculations, 220, 224–26, 230; economic indicators, 226; economic information, 223–24, 226, 229; economic motivation, 208; financial sacrifices, 208; local, 23, 219, 224, 229; models of, 23; monetary, 201; national, 204; return, 209 Ecopoetics, 38 Ecosystem, 5, 94, 98, 198, 200, 279; forest, 198 Eliminativism, 128–29 Emancipation, 45, 47 Emergence, 151, 153, 155, 157, 169–71; of pattern, 293; of structure, 297 Enablements, 26, 31 Energy, 7, 16, 22; flow, 22, 245–47; local production, 218–27, 229–30, 232–34 Engagement, 238, 244–45, 257–58 Enlightenment, 20, 26, 286 Entrainment, 9, 16, 24, 27, 30, 34, 37, 151, 157, 159–60, 163–64, 198, 211, 214, 288–92, 301; process of, 290– 91; trajectories of, 157 Entropy, 294 Environment, 12, 50, 55, 59, 62, 64, 194; environmental problems, 78; in local politics, 183–85; operating, 164 Environmentalism, 2, 13, 159, 168; environmental concern, 168, 214; environmental protest, 167. See also Movement Environmental transformation, 237– 38, 240 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus, 39 Epistemology, 108; political orientation and, 145

Equality. See Climate Equilibrium, 294–96 Escobar, Arturo, 178 Essentialism, 54 Eternalization, 120 Ethnomethodology, 143 Ethos, 33 Evolution, 12; cultural, 12 Experience, 146, 210, 211 Expertise, 203, 205, 207–11, 213, 216, 228–29, 231–32, 268 Explanation, 151, 155–56, 160, 165, 171–72 Exploitation, 198 Expressions. See Communication Exxon Valdez, 41 Face, 177, 185 Facilitator, 208, 214 Fairclough, Norman, 178, 191 Faust, 67, 106 Feedback loop, 210 Feelings of tendency, 116 Felt sense, 169 Feminism, 21, 159, 194 Feynman, Richard, 70 Field, 168, 178–79; economic, 196; journalistic, 180, 196; local fields of social action, 183; local political, 177; mental health, 157; of opinion, 179; political, 180–81, 183, 186, 190, 192–96; of power, 194–95; social, 188, 191; of social action, 183 Finland, 48 n. 8 Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, 168, 183. See also Environmentalism First nature, 3, 36, 45, 85, 87, 89–90, 96 Flexibility, 205, 207–8, 220, 232 Flow: of forest growth, 212; of income, 206; of timber, 199

INDEX

Fluctuations, 12, 16, 18, 150, 153, 162, 165–66, 202, 296; internal, 166 Fluidity, 150, 171, 287 f. P5; fluid mechanics, 152, 161, 170; fluids, 150–51 Foot-and-mouth disease, 42 Forestry, 37, 198–217; extension, 206; planning, 208; principles of, 204; private, 200, 206–7; rational, 204; rationalized, 208; regulation, 208; rotation-based, 202–6, 215–16; selection, 201–4, 206, 211; virtualized, 215 Forest stand, 198–200 Form of life, 137 Foucault, Michel, 21, 38–39, 157 Fractal, 37, 288 Fragmentation, of land ownership, 217 n. 2 Frame: cognitive, 163–64; of experiences, 210 France, 23 Frequency, 289–92, 301. See also Oscillation Fuller, S., 122 Fundamentalism, 2 Future generations, 263, 270–72 Galileo, 2 Gamson, William A., 163–64 García-Barrios, Raúl, 237–38, 240 Garfinkel, Alan, 15, 219, 227 Garfinkel, Harold, 143 Gause, Georgyi F., 15 Gellner, Ernst, 39 Genealogy, 157 Generality, 119 Genes, 15, 53, 56, 64; genetic program, 54; homunculoid, 61 Ghost in the machine, 53 Gibson, James J., 31, 161 Giddens, Anthony, 174 n. 5 Gieryn, Thomas F., 166

327

Girard, René, 43 Glantz, Michael, 94 Goethe, 106, 122–23 Goodin, Robert E., 271–72 Governance, 86, 178, 207 Governmentality, 39 Greenland, 102 Growing period, 209 Growth rate, 201 Guilt, 80–81, 85, 101 Habit, 211; transformation of, 212 Habitus, 130, 132, 137–42, 154, 160– 61, 165–66, 169, 171, 178, 180, 191, 193, 195, 300–301; as directional manner, 138; as existential involvement, 140; as form of knowledge, 140; intentional, 140; normative function of, 141; as physiognomic openness, 141; as practical responsiveness, 140; resistance, 157, 161 Hacking, Ian, 163 Hadley circulation, 7, 8 f. 1.2 Haila, Yrjö, 53, 59, 61, 64, 106, 145 Haken, Hermann, 7 Haraway, Donna, 68 Harmony, 30–31; harmonic flows, 92; rhythmic, 34 Haˇsek, Jaroslav, 17 Hassi, Satu, 159, 166–67 Hayek, Friedrich A., 44 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26 Heidegger, Martin, 139, 143, 149 n. 18 Helsinki, 159 Heredity, 56 Hess, Benno, 33 Heterarchy, 19, 151, 155–56, 166, 169–70, 181 Heterogeneity, 58, 88, 211 Heterogenous components, 241–42, 255–57 Heuristics, 30

328

INDEX

History, 12, 82, 90, 95, 211; environmental, 95, 102; historical inheritance, 97 Ho√man, Nigel, 123 Holism, 59 Homogeneity, 199, 209 Hot cognition, 152, 173 n. 1 Hughes, Thomas, 218 Husserl, Edmund, 127, 139, 143 Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, 48 n. 12 Hysteresis, 25 f. 1.5 Iago, 43 Ice age, 84, 102 Icke, Vincent, 45 Idealization, 200 Identity, 162, 169, 272; common, 211; existential, 135; green, 163; political, 192–93; sociocultural, 134 Ideology, 135, 215; political, 144 Implications, 215 Imposition, 133 Independence, 24 Indicator, of forest productivity, 204 Information, 31, 49, 53–54, 62, 111, 212–15 Infrastructure, 216 Institutions, 37, 212; political and economic, 94 Intentionality, 27, 32, 127–30, 132–33, 135–36, 138–39, 141, 146, 147 n. 10, 148 n. 10, 160; Bourdieu’s theory of, 128; as comprehensive existential gesture, 131; conventional conception of, 134–35; corporeal, 136– 37; derived, 136; di√erent levels of, 133; genuine, 128; nonethic, 138– 39; nonrepresentational, 145; as physiognomic background, 130; as sociopolitical function, 135, 141 Interaction, 1, 3, 21, 26, 44–45, 49, 56, 76, 205; complex, 75; dialogically structured, 24; informal logic

of everyday, 137. See also Communication Interests, 212, 215, 271–73; internalization of, 272; of nature, 275 Interference, 45 Interpenetration, 55, 60 Interpretation, 121 Interregulation, 26 Intersecting processes, 240–41, 242 f. 11.3, 244, 255, 259 Intersubjectivity, 136, 145 Irreversibility, 97 Jacobs, Jane, 23 James, William, 33, 115 Jokinen, Ari, 3, 23, 27, 37 Justice, 29, 298; injustice framework, 173 n. 1 Kafka, Franz, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 108, 142, 270–72 Kelso, J.A. Scott, 3, 7 King Lear, 4, 44 Knowledge, 268–69, 273, 275; bodily, 136; homeopathic, 42–43; local, 275; practical, 136; scientific, 41; value-neutral theoretical, 121 Koijärvi Lake, 168–70 Komsi, Ville, 167, 169 Kontopoulos, Kyriakos M., 19, 151, 155–56, 164 Kuhn, Thomas S., 116, 118, 120, 175 n. 13 Kyoto Summit, 86, 100 Labor, 235, 240–41, 243 Lähde, Ville, 3, 4, 27, 34, 36, 177 Laine, Markus, 3, 9, 12–13, 23, 27, 37, 144, 183 Language, 53, 68–69, 74, 76, 107, 112, 120, 122, 161–63, 190, 300; game, 119, 122; linguistic mechanisms, 163–64; linguistic turn, 175 n. 15

INDEX

Latour, Bruno, 12, 64, 68, 254–58 Laws, 69–71, 73–76, 294, 298 Legibility, of forest, 200 Legitimacy, 261–62, 265–66, 269, 272–73, 275; epistemic, 273–74 Legitimation, 270 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 44 Leigh Star, Susan, 230 Levins, Richard, 75 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 107 Lewontin, Richard C., 55 Leydesdor√, Loet, 161–62, 164 Liberation, of forest, 215 Life histories, 164 Life span, 209 Lifeworld, 130 Limitation, 91, 93–94, 98–101. See also Climate Linearity, 11 f. 1.3, 20, 24, 37, 73, 75, 171, 202, 205, 211, 285–86 Logics, 151; chain of decision making, 205 Lorenz, Konrad, 51 Los Angeles, 28 Luhmann, Niklas, 161 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 37, 40 Malthus, Thomas, 28–29 Management: data, 200; environmental, 38; forest, 23, 198, 200; principles, 207. See also Forestry Manner, 141 Marcoulatos, Iordanis, 3, 24, 27, 32, 34, 299 Marginalization, 206 Market, 202, 213–14, 276; timber, 215 Martin, Brendan, 229 Marx, Karl, 97–98 Masai, 274 Mathematics, 15, 30, 280, 283, 285, 289, 297 Maturana, Humberto R., 174 n. 2 Mayans, 31

329

Melucci, Alberto, 150, 154, 157 Memory, 137 Mental, 131; contents, 139; as supervenient oddity, 133 Merchant, Carolyn, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 107, 114, 125, 132, 143 Metabolism, 22 Methodology, 117, 119; exemplary conversations, 122; methodological individualism, 155 Mobility, 99; social, 103. See also Climate Mobilization, 151–53, 167, 169, 171, 202; environmental, 150; resource, 155 Moby Dick, 17 Model, 15, 18, 20, 47 n. 3, 198, 280; analogue, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 23, 27, 29–30, 33, 35, 40, 43, 151, 157, 161, 171–72; computer-based, 213; epidemiological, 42; of forestry, 200, 204; genetic, 15; single trajectory, 20; standard, 282 Modern, 199, 206; humans, 216; management routines, 209 Modernism, 68–69, 194 Modernization, 12 Monism, 128 Monitoring, 215 Monologue, 24, 110, 121 Monsters, 216 Morowitz, Harold, 28 Movement, 157; chaotic, 287 f. P5; environmental, 100, 189, 196, 273; Finnish green, 168; green, 2, 152, 158–61, 163, 166; Green Alternative Tampere, 166; Marxist, 162; mental health users’, 157; molecular, 153; protest, 167; relationally responsive, 115; social, 24, 27, 150– 51, 153–57, 161–65, 170, 172–73; social and political, 171 Muir, John, 28, 264–65

330

INDEX

Narrative, 164, 176 Naturalization, 206, 210–12 Nature, 4, 6, 69; conservation, 263, 273; cultural, 87; diversity of, 201; first, 3, 36, 45, 85, 87, 89–90, 96; forest, 204, 216; game against, 205; historical, 78; natural selection, 52; normative role of, 85; patterns, 211; presence of, 44–47, 263, 265; pristine, 83; regeneration, 208; second, 3, 36, 45, 78–79, 81–83, 85–87, 89, 95–96, 98, 177, 194, 216; speech, 1, 2, 47, 49, 57, 60, 63, 66–68, 74– 76, 107; variation, 205 Neste, 221–22, 228, 230 New York, 159 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 67 Nonlinearity, 3, 5, 11 f. 1.3, 21, 72, 75, 153, 171, 285, 286; nonlinear organization, 153; situational, 211 Normal forest, 200–201, 204–5, 207 Normality, 92 Normative debates, 219. See also Public dispute North America, 10 North-south division. See Climate Novelty, 5–7, 9, 11–13, 16, 83 Oaxaca, 242 f. 11.3 Observer, 130 Odum, Howard T., 245–50 Oil crises, 220 Olson, Mancur, 160 O’Neill, John, 3, 29, 39 Ontology, 87; of meaning, 128; social, 134 Optimization, 31 Organism, 21–22, 33, 55; extended, 22, 47; physiology of, 33 Oscillation, 30, 295–96; damped oscillator, 14; frictionless pendulum, 282; oscillator, 14, 16, 29, 33, 283, 289–90, 296; pendulum,

14, 16, 280, 282–83, 286, 289–91; quasi-oscillator, 284–85, 288, 296; simple harmonic oscillator, 14, 280–83 Othello, 43 Otherness, 109, 111, 113, 120, 123–24 Oyama, Susan, 3, 18–19, 31, 33, 44, 53, 55, 61, 64, 71 Painter, Joe, 178 Paradigm, 118–19, 198, 281; green, 162 Pareto optima, 282, 287 Parity of reasoning, 55, 57 Parmenides, 76 Participation, 95; participant, 112; participant parts, 110, 125; participatory attitudes, 107; participatory forms of inquiry, 117, 120 Particularity, 236, 258–59 Parties: Finnish green, 157; Green, 167, 186, 190, 196; Green Alternative Tampere, 185; Green coalition, 187–89, 192, 194–96; SKDL, 158, 161, 180 Path: dependence, 160, 172; developmental, 155, 161; pathway, 169 Pattern, 293; global, 292–93; regularities vs., 76 Patterned disorder, 214 Peet, Richard, 178 Peltola, Taru, 3, 23, 27 Peltonen, Lasse, 3, 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 23– 24, 27, 144, 183, 185, 296 Pendulum, 14, 16, 280, 282–83, 286, 289–91 Perspective, 211 Phase, 289–90, 292, 301. See also Oscillation Phenomenology, 142–43, 145; existential, 131; politicized, 134; social, 132 Phillips, Anne, 268 Philosophy, 146; modern, 125

INDEX

Physicalism, 129, 133 Physiognomy, 107, 110–11, 124 Physiology, organismal, 23 Place, 166, 178 Plato, 30 Plotnitsky, Arkady, 61 Poincaré section, 283, 284 f. P2 Polanyi, Michael, 40 Policy: forest, 204, 216; land use, 205; making of, 20. See also Climate Polis, 34 Political ecology, 240 Political opportunity structure, 163 Politics, 170; of construction, 182; decision making, 85, 219, 232; green, 168; local, 178, 180–86, 188–96; political arenas, 170; political controversy, 218, 223; political mobilization, 100; political project, 180; political struggle, 233; political system, 170; subpolitical, 170 Pollution, 5 Population growth, 29 Positivism, 20 Postclassism, 61 Posture, 132, 138, 140 Potential, 19, 211; for reproduction, 216; of forest parcel, 210 Power, 38, 101, 204, 215; triangle of, 193 f. 8.2 Practice, 227 Practices, 220, 227–30, 232; meaningfulness of, 128 Praxis, 68 Predation, 15 Predictability, 9, 58–59, 201, 214 Preformationism, 19 Preimages, 43 Presence, 265, 267–70, 273, 275; embodied, 146; expressive potential of human, 133; real, 113, 115, 118–21 Preservation, of biodiversity, 216 Prigogine, Ilya, 44, 152–53, 166

331

Process, 19, 54; complex, 155; ecological and industrial, 213; nonlinear, 155; political, 155 Productivity, 54, 199, 204–5, 207; timber, 213 Professionals, 211–12; forestry, 204–5 Proof, 20 ‘‘Proper,’’ 219 Psychology, 50 Public dispute, 218, 223 Purified monoculture design, 216 Quantification, 199 Quasi-periodicity, 283–84. See also Oscillation Quine, Willard Van Orman, 120 Ramsay, Meredith, 178 Rasila, Viljo, 183 Rationalism, 2, 67–69, 128, 155; monotheistic, 70 Rationality, analytic, 39 Rationalization, of forestry, 200 Realpolitik, 99 Reason, 129; reality and, 145; in practice, 136 Recursive iteration, 214 Reductionism, 128, 133; political, 171 Regimes, 198, 211 Regularity, 199, 207, 210 Reification, 98 Relatively stable states, 84. See also Climate Reliability, 220, 222, 224, 226, 229, 231–32; global, 285 Representation, 262–73, 280–82; instrumental means of, 215; legitimacy of, 275; legitimate, 266–67; of nature, 263–65, 274; pattern of, 210; of quasi-oscillator, 284; state space, 281–82 Reproduction, 198, 201; social, 137 Resilience, 239

332

INDEX

Resistance, 200, 202–3 Resonance, 160, 163 Resources, 56; developmental, 55; ecological, 198; forest, 201; natural, 202; rhetorical, 210 Responsibility, 63–64 Rhizomes of meaning, 216 Rhythm, 206, 212–13, 284, 290; of our existence, 47 Rocheleau, Dianne, 178 Roman Empire, 78, 90–91, 95–96 Romanticism, 1–2, 68–69 Rorty, Richard, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68 Routines, 210, 222–23, 228–30, 232; routinization, 222 Rules, 132; set of, 293 Ruptures, 190 Sacks, Harvey, 143 Salinization, 29 Sartre, Jean Paul, 137 Scales, 156, 170, 199; crossing, 28; national, 212; regional, 212; from single to multiple, 56; spatial, 24, 36, 209; temporal, 12, 21, 37, 207, 209, 216; time, 206; tuning of temporal, 200; up, 212–13. See also Time Schutz, Alfred, 143, 149 n. 20 Schwarz, Michael, 236–37, 251–53 Science, 38, 40; cameral, 200; cognitive, 53; of complexity, 3, 24, 286; computer, 53; environmental, 41; forestry, 200, 204, 210; linear, 9, 75; natural, 20; social, 17, 20, 156, 172–73 Science and technology studies, 257–58 Scientification, of forestry, 206 Scott, James C., 118, 121 Searle, John, 127–28 Seasonality, 10 Second nature, 3, 36, 45, 78–79, 81–

83, 85–87, 89, 95–96, 98, 177, 194, 216 Self, 63 Self-evidence of everyday world, 149 n. 20 Self-organization, 16, 64, 152–54, 161–64, 169, 171–72, 290–94, 296, 301 Seppälä, Raimo, 181–82 Serres, Michel, 14 Services: infrastructure, 229; municipal, 219, 227; public, 227 Shakespeare, William, 17, 43–44, 46 Shared practices, 122 Sheller, Mimi, 153, 156 Shotter, John, 3, 24, 44, 61 Side e√ect, 206 Signals, local, 292–93 Silviculture. See Forestry Similarity, 211 Simple harmonic oscillator, 14, 280–83 Simulation, 213 Sinks, 5, 6, 218; carbon, 90 Smith, Adam, 43 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 59, 61 Social agency, 24, 26, 62, 83, 99, 154, 156, 164, 169, 172, 212, 214–16, 239, 243, 256–58; conservative, 252–53; distributed, 236, 243–44, 259; moral, 251–52; political agency, 101; technocratic, 250–51 Social phenomena, 133 Socioecology, 29 Sociology, 145, 150, 172; of science, 254, 256–57 Soininvaara, Osmo, 167 Solidarity. See Climate Source, 6 Space, 33; contrast, 219, 226–27, 232; phase, 4; possibility, 4–5, 9, 12–14, 18–19, 34, 41, 43, 155–57, 171, 191; potential, 205; public, 9, 179, 189, 192, 194; social, 178, 180, 193, 211;

INDEX

spatial extensions, 16, 21; spatiotemporal dimensions of biodiversity, 199; state, 13, 18, 280, 282, 286–88 Spontaneity, 209; of forest growth, 216; reflective, 216 Spontaneous organization, 16, 64, 152–54, 161–64, 169, 171–72, 290–94, 296, 301 Spontaneous responsiveness, 107–11, 113, 119, 122, 125 Stability, 199, 222, 294; asymptotic, 282, 288; dynamic, 21–22; relative, 84; social, 202, 300 Stabilization, 180, 222 Standardization, 198, 200, 208, 210, 212, 216. See also Forestry State: future, 285; initial, 283, 285 Steiner, George, 115 Stengers, Isabelle, 44, 152–53, 166 Stochasticity, 199 Storytelling, 164, 176 Strategy, 298–99 Structuralism, 19, 150, 155; static, 299 Structuration, 151, 174 n. 5; evolutionary, 155 Structured structuring structure, 32, 154, 156, 160, 299, 300 Structures, 19, 169, 172; biological, 296–97; global, 293, 301; heterarchical structuration, 170; intentional, 134; level, 171; opportunity, 157, 170; political opportunity, 163; structuredness, 243 Subject, 60, 131, 133; autonomous, 60; human subjectivity, 61; object and, 125, 145; object’s distance from, 127, 129, 131; progressive approximation between object and, 131 Subsistence, 22–23, 39, 42; human, 27–28, 39, 41 Succession: of forest, 198; regular process of, 199 Su≈cient reasons, 18–19

333

Supremacy, professional, 203 Surveillance, 214; remote, 215 Symbol, 24; of power and expertise, 203; symbolic weight, 186 Symmetry, 254–56, 297–98; asymmetries of ethos, 298; asymmetry, 298; breaking, 6–7, 9, 16, 297–98; groups, 297 Synchronization, 16, 23, 30, 292 Synergetics, 7 System, 57–58, 62, 153, 156, 279; biological and ecological, 283; chaotic, 285; complex, 5, 19, 165–66, 288; developmental, 50, 55, 59; dynamical, 280, 283, 288, 291; ecological, 11 f. 1.3, 199; ecosocial, 9, 20, 198, 279, 296, 299–300; forestry, 209, 213; of human interaction, 17; linear, 286; living, 174 n. 2; natural and social, 284; naturalized, 215; nonlinear, 5, 26, 286; periodic, 289; political, 170; quasi-periodic, 284–85, 289; social, 163, 279; social or ecosocial, 291; social-natural, 238; -talk, 49, 57–59, 62, 64; thermodynamic, 279, 294– 96; weather-climate, 16; wellbounded, 236, 247, 259 Tamhattan plan, 186, 195 Tampere, 12, 37, 157–59, 177–78, 180– 81, 183–87, 189, 190, 194–96 Taylor, Charles, 108 Taylor, Peter, 3, 41, 53 Technology: comprehensive, 213; electronic, 213–14; forestry, 217 n. 1; latent development of, 215; studies, 232 Teleology, 80, 87 Theory: complex systems, 172; developmental systems, 31, 33, 50, 54– 56, 59; evolutionary, 52; generation of, 236; hierarchy, 174 n. 4; liberal democratic political, 298; rational

334

INDEX

Theory (continued) action, 155; site type, 204; social, 146; structuration, 156; theoretical extension and unification, 57 Thermodynamics, 6, 161, 294, 296, 299; conditions, 297; laws of, 294; non-equilibrium, 298; nonlinear, 152; stable thermodynamic structure, 295–96 Thick relation, 231 Thinking: binary, 29; detached forms of thought, 125; dynamical, 279– 301; intellectual change, 125; participative, 106 Thompson, John B., 179 Thompson, Michael, 236–37, 251–53 Time, 33, 154; management, 23, 37; mean transient time, 33; passing of, 199; period, 209; return time, 37; tempo, 209; temporal extensions, 21; temporal horizons, 16, 35, 211; temporality, 155, 164, 169; temporal length, 213; temporal synchronization, 207 Totalization, 21, 87, 88 Toulmin, Stephen, 112 Trade, 28 Tradition, 37, 201, 203, 205–6, 211, 275, 299; management routines, 209; professional, 211; rationalist, 75; rural culture, 209; theatre, 83; transformation of, 212 Trajectory, 154–55, 157, 164–65, 167, 169, 172, 280–85, 286 f. P4; developmental, 25 f. 1.4, 228 f. 10.1; single, 20; torus, 285 f. P3 Transaction, 23, 27, 210, 213. See also Economy Transformation, 177 Transients, 19, 41, 288–89; globalscale, 28 Transition, 85, 90, 202; transitive parts, 115

Tuning, 292 Turchin, Peter, 15 Turner, J. Scott, 22 Uncertainty, 225–26, 230–32 Understanding, 190; forms of, 106; orientational, 111–12, 124; participatory, 106; referentialrepresentational, 106; relationally responsive, 106, 116–17 United States, 19 Universal, as political, 148 n. 15 Välimäki, Pauli, 158–59, 167 Values, 189, 276; epistemic, 268; traditional Finnish, 217 n. 1; valueneutral observation, 215 Vapo, 223–26, 229, 233 Varela, Francisco J., 174 n. 2 Variation, 198; natural, 199 Voice, 275–76; giving, 270 Vulnerability, 99 Wacquant, Loic, 179, 195 Washington, 159 Watts, Michael, 178 Waves, 46 f. 1.6, 168; protest, 169; social movement, 157 Weather. See Climate Weber, Max, 48 n. 8 Welfare promise, 12, 37 Williams, Raymond, 41, 239 Winfree, Arthur T., 16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 106, 111, 119– 20, 122, 125 Worldview, 142 Yield, 201; ever-increasing, 215; quantified, 201; sustained, 199–201, 204, 208; of timber, 206; total, 206. See also Forestry Zone of mixed order, 230–31

YRJÖ HAILA

is a professor of environmental policy

in the Department of Regional Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland.

CHUCK DYKE

is a professor of philosophy

at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data How nature speaks : the dynamics of the human ecological condition / edited by Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke. p. cm. — (New ecologies for the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3725-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3696-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Human ecology. 2. Nature—E√ect of human beings on. I. Haila, Yrjö. II. Dyke, Chuck, 1938– III. Series. gf49.h69 2006 304.2—dc22

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