At university, I once made the claim that the defining feature of alcohol was – when consumed – nothing but its potential to cause a “black-out”. In response, I was told that alcohol is understood differently in different cultures, thus (as implied) having nothing as a defining feature. The common sense Lacanian claim, as it may be understood, is – to paraphrase the podcaster and filmmaker Helen Rollins – that the only thing we all (every culture) shares is that which we do not: lack (incompleteness, fundamental emptiness, etc.). Thus, it was a criticism worth considering (in some sense), as it is possible to question how this specificity of alcohol is somehow equal to lack (in its universality). Having considered this (perhaps), my claim is that there is no contradiction here. Such a claim will be familiar to readers of the great Lacanian Slavoj Zizek, as tied in with the notion of (again to paraphrase) the contingent expression of a deeper necessity, which resolves the “contradiction” between particularity and universality in paradoxical terms. In other words, perhaps more familiar to readers of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) alcohol is an object and, like all objects, it withdraws (in this sense “becoming noumena/noumenal”, in the Kantian terms). The specific way in which alcohol withdraws can perhaps be debated (it is in some sense, “neither here nor there”), but that which is universal is the very act of withdrawal itself. When studying/approaching an object, the first question for the environmental historian ought always to be: what is the specific way in which this object withdraws?

What has this to do with nature? As Timothy Morton points out, nature itself is perhaps the key object “haunting” us today (although perhaps they (Morton) wouldn’t put it in these terms). It is quite clear that in the wider discipline of history questions about the human-centredness (anthropocentrism) of the discipline have been called into question. This is arguably the “crisis” of history today (today, even some of the most influential postcolonial historians, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, have turned their attention to this topic – with good reason from the perspective of empires). Nonetheless, it is arguable here that environmental historians are already “one step ahead”, as – during the cultural turn – we were (again arguably) the only (sub)discipline to fully realise the agency of the non-human. Thus, perhaps the key question for not only environmental historians – but historians in general – is: what is the specific way in which nature withdraws? And, perhaps more importantly, what is it/has it withdrawn into? The claim I would like to make here is that nature is withdrawing into science. Over the past few years, we were told repeatedly to “trust the science” (especially, of course, during the pandemic). It has come to the point that most people now agree with Bruno Latour (as I understand it), that there is such a consensus (among scientists/the general public) about the climate crisis/climate change (that it is happening) that the few “dissident” voices who claim that it is not happening are best (in some sense) ignored – in the sense of not accepting the terms of their debate of being about “the science”. Here, I am in full agreement, but why? At this point, there are two possible catastrophes on the horizon. The first is if the scientific predictions (if one excuses a crude generalisation) are completely correct, and we see around us in the following decades a kind of nightmare of extreme weather patterns, degradation, mass immigration (climate-influenced), etc. The other possible catastrophe is if somehow this does not happen: the carbon emissions do not fall dramatically, but the world goes on in some sense “as normal” (this has already had to have been realised, in some sense, by the most extreme predictors who foretold that human life would almost (if not fully) entirely have disappeared by now). Either way, what is required is indeed a trusting of the science, but an even more radical trust – one which does not rely on empirical confirmation. In this sense, nature withdraws (and is arguably “born-again”) into science in the sense of formulas, graphs, and so on. (here, clearly I am in agreement with the likes of Morton and Zizek that we need to think an “ecology without nature”).

A key question here may be what this means for the human (subject). Is the human tied up in nature? (like, as the Nobel Prize winning physicist Roger Penrose argues that morality is tied up in consciousness). My argument here is perhaps not – in other words, we do not need a “transhuman” position. The model that is needed here is that of exaptation as outlined, for one, by Ian Tattersall in his How We Came to be Human. Here, he argues that even language – which, for the Lacanian, structures our reality – likely came about due to this process: biologically, the vocal tracts and that kind of thing which made language possible may have been intended (evolutionarily speaking) for a different purpose altogether. In other words, we were in a sense human even before we were human – before we invented that which makes us human (language). In this sense, even if there is a new invention today (perhaps not on the level of language, but why not?), there is no reason to say that this brings us to a transhuman position. As Tattersall points out (here he agrees with David’s Graeber and Wengrow in their recent bestseller) even perhaps human’s greatest invention – language – came about through some process of play. Today, maybe this is what is needed – to paraphrase J.G. Ballard (as Graham Harman likes to quote) – we already live in a big fiction, what we need is an invention of reality. Such a reality would, by the logic of play, require a certain (polite) degree of bluff and chance to come about. Nonetheless, since the human is also an object, the question remains open about what the human withdraws into. This is where OOO may be on the cutting-edge of something – what is the “proper place” of the subject-object relation in the world of (mostly) object-object relations?

Here, I may have some disagreements with Harman (although I am really not sure). I accept that the philosophical landscape we occupy today is a (post?) Kantian one (which is the same thread as the historical landscape we occupy today – with the Kantian historian Leopold von Ranke being the key figure (if one believes Ranke was some kind of brutal empiricist, I question how they reconcile this with his quotes about history being ultimately “felt”/intuited). It seems to me that Harman has argued that all objects are potential noumena – are potentially Kantian things in-themselves (and Harman uses the plural). My semi-tentative question here would be – yes, I agree, but what about the noumenal realm? If a kind of new object is created (in the sense of, as Harman uses, Lynn Margulis’ model of symbiosis) when an ordinary/sensual object collides with the subject (in a complex sense – my sense is that this is not the only way of telling this story), what is “left behind” in this collision? We can say that a new object (potentially subject) is created, but – following Lacan – such an object will also be divided amongst itself and hence produce a kind of surplus (in the sense of, as the social contract theorists knew, the contract is between the people and itself and the sovereign emerges as a surplus – here we may be “back” to the purely formal “x”). It is my claim (and here I may already agree with Harman) that this “x” is not simply a negative, but has its own (positive, I think) discourse – something like a (ridiculous term) positive of the negative. Nonetheless, it is precisely this positive that keeps us away (in some sense) from the thing in-itself – not negativity as such (in other words, we repress the positive, treating it as a negative, in order to have a place in polite society – here I may admittedly be talking about Lacan’s object petit a but I am not convinced that this aligns with Harman’s criticism of Zizek that the object in OOO is not object petit a, which may indeed leave me in the “anthropocentric” view (of Harman). The question may be whether this object “finds” itself, in a sense. Here, I think things are complex – my claim (tentatively) would be that such an object can perhaps “stare at itself” but not find itself, perhaps putting us back in the gap between the noumenal and phenomenal realms where Zizek locates the subject. There is (perhaps) some sort of failure, and I follow both Zizek and Harman in looking for (and looking to “follow”) where things seem to fail. My other question for/when it comes to Harman is: I have heard him say a few times that the an object can change fundamentally five or six times (for example, this is outlined in his book Immaterialism with reference to the Dutch East India Company. For our purposes, the “five or six” may not be so relevant here as simply more than once or maybe twice at a push). My question is – what gives him the grounds to make such a claim? If an object is created in symbiosis – the coming together of two – then surely we can only say that an object changes fundamentally once. Here, we may be looking at something like Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model in which there is one universe but a series of big bangs (where things/objects (why not) from the previous aeon (that which exists between big bangs) appear (in some mediated sense) in the current aeon). My question is – since one big bang surely also changes (retroactively, of course) all the other big bangs, and hence we cannot have any sort of direct access to (say) the universe three big bangs ago (admittedly this may be unfair to Penrose to use his cosmological model as an example of Harman’s one – but nonetheless I think using it demonstrates things well). Could we say, for example, that an object which I am looking at was “from” three big bangs ago?