Seeing a chronic fucking moron online concern trolling about the possibility of family abolition based on a dogmatic conception of nature has stimulated me to write down a couple of thoughts regarding culture and nature, the malleable and unmodifiable.

There's an old understanding of the world that divides it into two levels: "nature" is an indisputable given, a hard real thing before us, and "culture" is a set of malleable institutions built on top of it. This is a methodological distinction, it determines how people do social science research. It produces histories that take geography, hydrology, the existence of food sources, etc. as a set of "initial conditions," a stage, while humans are actors whose relations play out on that stage. It produces ethnographies where a normative vision of human reproduction—including heterosexual desire by default and the connection between parents and children—is assumed, while the specific ways a social group understands and regulates those facts through kinship systems remains to investigation. Some flaws in this are fairly obvious: things like rivers and animal populations are subject to transformation due to internal causes and human involvement, and those transformations then affect humans. Neither is it obvious that human reproduction necessarily regulates itself within these constraints; ultimately any human group is as capable as a human individual of not reproducing at all. Those who consider some things "natural" and beyond dispute can't even avoid disputing among themselves which things those are (one is reminded here of Locke's rejection of innate ideas.)

A first wave of reaction to this conception has consisted in trying to reintegrate the two levels in one way or another. Notable are the anthropologists Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, whose work each describes very different configurations of nature and culture in the worlds of various peoples, and Bruno Latour's flat-is-justice sociology that rejects the methodologically preordained division of entities into different types. These are accompanied by a lot of "new materialisms" work, largely faddish and self-congratulatory, that insists on the "plasticity" and vitality of matter organic or inorganic, its capacity to effect and be affected. A recent second reaction I've noticed is in books like Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling (2018) and Frédéric Neyrat's The Unconstructable Earth (2016, trans. 2018) (I only read the latter for the first time yesterday). Without reverting to the previous paradigm, both of these books try to curb a perceived excess in the first group and the "new materialisms," which according to them (a) are not particularly novel, (b) have a secret alliance with capital's project of remaking the whole world in its image, and (c) sabotage their attempt to escape cultural idealism by reducing the natural pole (resistant to modification and interconnection) into the cultural one (vulnerable to it).

I think this attention to the world's resistance to modification is spot-on, but we have to be careful to avoid lapsing back into a reified idea of the distinction between soft and hard. Neyrat's formulation is very good; he insists that "wildness" is findable everywhere, but that this isn't per se enough, because it makes it seem like we are absolved of involvement with it: "what matters here is saying and showing how the state of the wild can be rediscovered" (161). But his calling it an unconstructable "part," as though it exists separately from a part that is constructable, could easily be misread. I think we are perfectly capable of getting past the whole dichotomy, rather than engaging in fucking ontological gerrymandering until the end of the kalpa when Kirby swallows the universe up again. Because that's what it is: a foredoomed attempt to pin down a universal line between what can and can't be changed, which misses the point of how "changing things" even works. This is the orthodox Neo-Tiantai line: everything is at the same time completely vulnerable to revision and completely resistant, beyond all negotiation. Nothing can ever be destroyed or exorcised, and to assume we can is a good way to get our asses bitten by the return of the repressed. However, our actions are always redefining everything in the world, not at a second layer like "culture" on top of "nature," but in their very essence, so this preservation is simultaneously a cancellation. An unabashedly contradictory view like this might seem impracticable, but in fact it squarely refocuses us on practical. The exclusive distinction between what can and can't be changed is not to be made abstractly, but in individual pragmatic distinctions ("Is this thing alterable, for my present purposes? How can this be broken down and repurposed without trying to annihilate it?") which know they are only provisional.

Q: What does this actually mean?
A: With respect to ecology: if we can achieve any worthwhile human life on a changing earth, it's not thanks to abstract engineering power of our will but by our ingenuity in according with Heaven. And regarding family abolition: it's not some foolish attempt to wipe away a fundamental category of human existence. Kin roles in a stable system are codified allocations of labor and relationships, and what we do will be generalizing each of those so that it is no longer possible to name roles like "mothers" who care for children, "wives" who emotionally and sexually support "husbands", or "parents" who are solely responsible for generation. A tiresome retort is that this entails dogmatic communitarianism, but it doesn't. I'm not immune to the desire for dyadic heterosexual coupling or the desire to become a solitary mountain hermit, desires as ineradicable as any others and which we will have to integrate.