Nature, Poststructuralism, and Politics

Summary of a chapter from Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics

What counts as nature is never a closed question. The concepts through which we know nature are produced where actions, concepts, and matter are mixed. The act of fixing the concept of nature has social and ecological effects. The argument that environmental issues are simply a dispute between competing interests does not take into account that the concept of nature is not self-evident, and not independent of power and politics. Foucault’s analysis of madness, sexuality, the body and so on showed that knowledge is produced as an effect of power, and power operates through knowledge. Post-structuralism on the other hand, is a radicalization of structuralism, such as that of Saussere, which suggest that there are sign-systems beneath cultural practices, allowing a degree of stability of such concepts. Structuralism asserts that an utterance has meaning because we can understand the cognitive significance of the rules of the relations between words. Deconstructionism (Derrida) can be understood as an approach to reading that calls into question the closure of meaning of the text. This can be seen as an extension of Heidegger’s notion of ‘sein’ (with a line through it), or being as it is revealed as it is taken away or effaced. Thus, Derrida argues that the meaning of the signifier in relation to signified is mutable, an effect of différance. Différance refers to play of deferrals (referring meaning to another time) and differentiations within meanings. All words are defined in terms of other words, and meaning is always deferred to another time. The positive aspect of this defferal is that we open ourselves up to new possibilities. The example of the exclusion of Native Americans from the forests of BC through a reiterated citation or recalling of meaning, the hauntology of those excluded meanings of forest, provides an example of the usefulness of post-structuralist analysis of socionature. The indigenous assertion of new meanings of the forests that filled in some of the gaps of Sloan’s “forest” allowed the Tla-o-qui-aht to make claim to that land, based on notions of property, and the notion of indigeneity. Poststructuralism emphasizes a world in flux, where we continue the project of making sense of the world, but also focus on how meanings become fixed at certain points.