Seeing Double: Thinking about Natures and States
This chapter is about how we think about states, natures, and the relationships between them. Despite this book’s assertion that an understanding of the relations between states and natures is vital for any interpretation of contemporary political life or ecological existence, it is important to recognize the growing sense of antipathy towards theories of the state within work on nature. This antipathy is based on two broad critiques of state theory—one epistemological and the other ontological. At an epistemological level, challenges to work on the state can perhaps best be understood in relation to the consistent tendency of certain strands of political theory to use the definite article when referring to ‘the’ state. Reference to ‘the’ state, however innocently deployed, implicitly suggests a clearly designated, singular entity of government. But it is precisely this view of states as sovereign, territorially autonomous containers of political life that has led to a concerted wave of theoretical criticism. The reification of a definitive vision of the state has tended to create a very narrow view of the state within certain strands of contemporary political theory. It is in this context that Rose and Miller (1992) argue that the state is nothing more than a ‘mythical abstraction’ (see Chapter 1), or an attempt to simplify the complex networks and practices through which governmental power is realized into narrowly conceived, centralized visions of authority. Consequently, to many writing within what could broadly be defined as a Foucauldian school (Hobbes 1996: 82) of political theory, notions of the state are anathema to the careful and systematic study of the governmental technologies, modes of calculation, and institutional procedures through which socio-political power is realized. At an ontological level, it is argued that even if vestiges of the mythical abstractions (or ‘fantastic topologies’) associated with state theory persist, the power of states to shape the political, economic, and social worlds has been seriously undermined. Much of the purported reduction in the state’s sovereign power has been associated with the rise of globalization and the associated socio-ecological relations and transactions that now routinely traverse national territories.