To talk about technology when exploring the relationship between states and nature may seem paradoxical. The paradoxical nature of this assignment is twofold. First, many argue that to speak of the technological is to speak of the anti-political—here technology is understood not as something of the state, but as an external arena that can simultaneously be used by the government to verify its policies, or, if unchecked, undermine the governing capacities of politicians (Barry 2001: ch. 1). Others claim that technology is the antithesis of nature—if nature is the un-produced eternal substratum of existence, technology is a socio-cultural artefact, a fragment of produced nature and a mechanism for ecological transformation (Luke 1996). Despite this apparent conundrum, this chapter argues that technology provides a crucial basis upon which many of the interplays between the state and nature continue to be expressed. Within his recent book on the links between states, government, and technologies—Political Machines—Andrew Barry (2001: 9) suggests that we need to think of technologies in two related but distinct ways. He argues that our first recourse when considering technologies is often to technological devices—or those labour-saving and labour-enhancing gadgets, tools, instruments, and gizmos that make new socio-economic practices possible and speed-up existing exercises (see also Harvey 2002). Secondly, Barry discerns a broader understanding of technology, which incorporates a wider set of procedures, rules, and calculations in and through which a technological device is animated and put to use. In this chapter we explore the technological devices and supporting technological infrastructures through which the contemporary politics of state– nature relations are being played out. We interpret the role of technology within state–nature relations in two main ways. First, we explore the ways in which various technologies have been synthesized with and within the state apparatuses in order to enhance governments’ capacities to manage nature. The role of technology in facilitating the governance of nature can be conceived of at a number of levels. It can, for example, be related to a Marxist reading of technologies as tools/machines deployed in the physical transformation of the natural world (Harvey 2002: 534).
How Should the State Interact Constitutionally with Corporations which have significant power and influence over its population? Lessons from the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788-1795
