ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the historical development of what we term the“enviro-state.” The term describes a set of discursive, organizational, and material relationalities between science and governance that have developed since the scientific revolution.We use the term “state-environment relationalities” to capture the complexity of the connections. In so doing, we open up analytical space beyond the narrow confines of the language of “the relationship” between “the state” and “the environment.”The latter language obscures complex relationalities, giving the impression that the state is a macro actor that stands in a relationship with something external to it called “the environment.”The enviro-state is generated in practices of environing, meaning surrounding and penetrating.These practices stem from the networking of science and government around boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) such as land,water, lithium, and other “natural resources,” and result in deep entanglements between what is considered as nature, infrastructure, and governance. Regimes of governance that include both state agents and technoscientists give modern states the specific character of being technoscientific. It is important to note that regimes of “governance” are not confined to official government.To the extent that official government permits “private” (what is private is constituted by law) agents to govern, those private agents can form part of a regime of governance (see Bakker 2007 for the conceptualization of governance in terms of who gets to make decisions and how). Similarly, to the extent that non-governmental organizations participate in political decisions, they too are part of the regime of governance. Of course, agency (understood here as decision-making power) within regimes of governance will vary both temporally and spatially. Taking our cue from Richard White (1995), who described the Columbia River as an
“organic machine,” we conceptualize the enviro-state in a similar manner. But the enviro/technoscientific state is not simply a hybrid of nature and culture and a cyborg-like formation. It is an engine in motion. It is in process. It is not that it merely is a particular type of entity, but that it is generative, a driving force, a constant movement “forward” in the sense of “economic development,” human population growth, and resource exploitation.Thus, we describe the enviro-state as an “organic engine.” In order to develop an ontology of the envirostate as something assembled from discourse, practices, and materialities, we maintain that it is
best conceived as a “thing.”To conceive of the enviro-state as a “thing” is not to conceive of it as an “object” out there. Despite the tendency to equate the word “object” with “thing,” the two are far from equivalent (Latour 2005, Ingold 2010). For instance, one can go to a thing, but not to an object. That is because the oldest meaning of a thing is a gathering, particularly a political assembly where decisions are made.We adopt the term because it evokes the envirostate as a regime of governance, but equally because it evokes it as an assemblage.We only add that it is a material assemblage comprised of both humans and non-humans. We build our argument on analytic resources derived from Foucaultian governmentality
studies (Burchell et al. 1991, Rose and Miller 1992, Foucault 2004, Dean 1999) and Actor NetworkTheory – ANT (Callon 1986, Law 1992, Latour 1996, Law and Hassard 1999). How we do so will become clear in our theoretical discussion of state-environment relationality and through our empirical cases. For now, we wish to simply point out how our theoretical argument diverges from the dominant forms of these literatures. First, governmentality studies developed in opposition to state theory and as a result has neglected developing an ontology of the state (see Carroll 2009).While we agree that the state is an effect of myriad micro level actions, what Foucault termed “micro-physics,”we hold that the ontology of the state is fundamentally material. Hence the conceptualization of the state as a thing. Indeed, we think it is somewhat ironic that a theory that pays attention to the material at the micro level ends up with a rather nebulous image of what the state is. Second, we do not flatten the analysis into “discourse,” sometimes rendered as “discursive practices.” Despite the invocation of “practice” and “technologies,” both tend to be subsumed into discourse. Governmentalities appear at base to be, precisely,mentalities.They are “rationalities of government” (Barry et al. 1996).We maintain a strong analytic distinction between discourse, practice, and materiality (practice being the nexus of the discursive and the material). With respect to ANT, we do not adopt a “generalized symmetry” that homogenizes, through
the concept of “actants,” human and non-human actors.While ANT has done much to demonstrate that humans are not the only entities that can act, we maintain that it is not necessary to collapse all actors into the single category of “actant” to recognize this.We retain the term“agent” to characterize those actors whose action involves choice, design, purpose, goals, etc.This particular formulation of agency views it as a special kind of action. It is unique to living human beings. A storm has no design behind it, it has no goals and involves no choices.To say both humans and non-humans have agency obscures this critical difference.We believe it is important to maintain the distinction in terms of the politics of technoscience. ANT is often criticized for lacking a critical edge, and for neglecting less powerful humans (Haraway 1992).While we do not have a normative political agenda in this chapter,maintaining the conventional understanding of agency allows for political critique in terms of accountability in the sense of accounting for which humans get to meaningfully exercise agency and which do not. Still,we also maintain that storms can act, and that they can materially resist human goals. Andrew Pickering (1999) has acknowledged this, yet he continues to ascribe the agency captured by our concept of “agents” to non-humans which clearly do not have goals or make decisions.We reserve the term “force” for action characteristic of phenomena like storms.We further distinguish a third actor, collectively understood as material culture. Material culture does not have agency in the sense of a capacity to make choices or have goals.However, it does embody designs and goals.Hence material culture has agency once removed from its human creators. For this reason, we reserve the term “actant” for material culture.That term signifies a degree of material agency. Thus we have three distinct actors: humans, who are also agents; actants, which embody
design and thereby agency once removed; and forces (more precisely, if somewhat cumbersomely, “non-designed materialities”), which have no design or purpose of any kind, but
nonetheless can act with powerful effect. The particular arrangements of agents, actants, and forces allow each empirically specific capacities to act.We do not see the action of each of our actors as mutually exclusive, in the modernist sense. For instance, the flow of water in a valley or a salt flat only becomes a “flood” in relation to human presence. A flood is a “problem,” and problems only exist in relation to human designs. It is nonetheless importantly caused by the action of forces such as storms. We also depart from classical ANT in stressing the concept of “material relationality” over
linguistic metaphors such as “translation” and “semiotics” to deal with particular, empirical arrangements of agents, actants, and forces.We are aware that ANT is described as a material relational theory, but in a particular context ANT took a linguistic turn.The concept of “material semiotics” was deployed to bring in non-humans without relying, as Collins and Yearley (1992) argued was required, on natural scientists’ accounts of non-humans (in doing so one would return to a fully humanist analysis). In addition to the ways that our theoretical tools diverge from many contemporary uses of ANT,we employ a now neglected term, the concept of “punctualization.” Though crafted within earlier versions of ANT (Law 1992), this concept has largely fallen by the wayside (Latour 2007), which is somewhat odd, since Law gave it so much importance (see below). It refers to the process whereby something is black-boxed, the process through which heterogeneous actor-networks are rendered as free-standing singularities, often as actors.The concept is fundamental to our critique of the notion of the state as a single macro actor, and our alternative ontology of it as an actor-network.To quote Law:
This, then, is the core of the actor-network approach: a concern with how actors and organizations mobilize, juxtapose, and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed; how they are sometimes able to prevent those bits and pieces from following their own inclinations and making off; and how they manage, as a result, to conceal for a time the process of translation [we would say articulation] itself and so turn a network from a heterogeneous set of bits and pieces each with its own inclinations, into something that passes as a punctualized actor.
