TC Boyle’s “Politics of Nature”

Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield

doi:10.3390/h10010025

Abstract

This paper offers a Latourian reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done. It shows that the novel satirizes contemporary ecological debates and stages the cultural wars of our current ecological culture. It also demonstrates, however, that the novel does not merely point out the impasse of our current ecologies: its fiction intuitively diagnoses the contemporary “crisis of purity” in modern environmental politics and points us towards the kind of entangled ecologies sketched by Latour and other recent thinkers. Like Latour’s reinvention of a more hybrid and entangled “politics of nature,” Boyle’s novel allows us to reimagine a complex and contaminated new ecology, away from the purifications of our contemporary “NaturPolitiks”.

Highlights

In modern environmental politics and points us towards the kind of entangled ecologies sketched by Latour and other recent thinkers
Boyle is neither a “Latourian” nor an explicit theoretician of the crisis of modern natural politics, he diagnoses, unerringly, the contemporary “crisis of purity” in modern environmental politics. He points us towards a more entangled alternative and his fiction sketches the kind of hybrid and contaminated ecologies Latour and other recent thinkers have offered as alternatives to the dead end of modern dualism
Boyle’s exuberant narrative offers us a conundrum familiar to our times: given an environment that has been disaffected by centuries-old human cultures and economies, how do you best manage and care for it? What kind of ecological approach will be the most ethically responsible as well as respectful of its “equilibrium”? In the novel, these particular queries take the form of a protracted fight between two camps: that of the scientists and their exclusive concern with population biology and that of animal activists who harbor an entirely different but no less limited notion of “life”

Summary

Introduction

Boyle is neither a “Latourian” nor an explicit theoretician of the crisis of modern natural politics, he diagnoses, unerringly, the contemporary “crisis of purity” in modern environmental politics He points us towards a more entangled alternative and his fiction sketches the kind of hybrid and contaminated ecologies Latour and other recent thinkers have offered as alternatives to the dead end of modern dualism. His fiction is exactly the kind of resource Latour has in mind when he claims that “Novels, plays and films from classical tragedy to comics provide a vast playground to rehearse accounts of what makes us act”2 Novels such as Boyle’s allow us to think through the impasse of today’s ecological thought and to reimagine the hybrid solutions needed to face our entangled natures-cultures

Boyle’s Aporetic Nature Wars

Boyle’s Contaminated Ecology: “Wrecking the Separation Zone”

Relational Ecologies