Review: Toward a Critical Theory of Nature

Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics #

By Carl Cassegård Bloomsbury Academic, 2021 (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society series)

Cassegård, Carl. 2021. Toward a Critical Theory of Nature: Capital, Ecology, and Dialectics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3501-5950-1 (hardback), 978-1-3501-7627-0 (ebook).

The Frankfurt School has long stood accused of having nothing useful to say about the ecological crisis: too negative, too culturalist, too busy with the dialectic of enlightenment to help anyone stop a pipeline. Cassegård, a sociologist at Gothenburg, sets out to prove the accusation wrong, and his instrument is a deliberately systematic reconstruction. A critical theory of nature, in his formulation, is "a critique of the reified social forms that regulate our interaction with nature." Form is what capitalist society imposes: value, the market-relevant aspects of a forest, the division between society and nature itself. Matter is what the forms can never fully capture and what eventually undermines them. The book wagers that Adorno's most forbidding ideas (non-identity, natural history, the primacy of the object, constellations, permanent catastrophe) become concretely useful once read through this form-matter relation and pointed at global warming. While Cassegård largely wins that wager, and wins his polemics against Foster, Moore, and the new materialists on points, I will argue that "matter" ends up carrying so many jobs that nature's critique of capitalism risks becoming unfalsifiable; a critical theory that cannot in principle be embarrassed by the world has quietly traded its materialism for idealism.

Two vignettes worth the price of admission #

Cassegård opens with a pair of set pieces that do more to justify his approach than any methodological declaration could. The first is Bloch's 1929 essay "The Anxiety of the Engineer," with its image of the Americanized metropolis "rooted in midair," defending itself hourly against the elements like a city under enemy invasion. The second, and the best pages in the book, is Hegel on measure in the Science of Logic. Every quality is defined by a quantum, yet nothing in the concept tells us where the quantitative limit lies, so we are always justified in thinking that a little more won't hurt: one more tree cut, one more grain removed, one more CO2 molecule released. Hegel's point, which Cassegård applies to climate with real force, is that the catastrophic Umschlag surprises us not because of our ignorance but because of our knowledge. Our concepts are correct, and that is exactly why the shock will find us. And the shift, when it comes, works backward: the question "when will the catastrophe begin?" becomes "when did it start?", and we discover we were inside the catastrophe all along, perhaps since the first steam engines. As a philosophical anatomy of climate complacency, of why decades of near-certain knowledge have produced almost no systemic change, this reading is the most illuminating thing I have encountered in the course's materials.

The reconstruction that follows is genuinely constructive. Chapter 2 distinguishes three materialisms in the Marxist tradition: causal (Engels and scientific Marxism, where matter is the determining base), practical (Lukács and Gramsci, where praxis mediated by totality does the work), and critical, Cassegård's own, modeled on Capital, where matter is the system's outside, the real world on which the false totality depends and which its categories can never do justice. Two moves deserve particular note. First, his handling of reification: against Jane Bennett's charge that demystifying critique treats only humans as wrongly thingified, he argues that reification means treating anything, human or not, as reducible to the aspects dominant institutions define as relevant. A forest subjected to the market is second nature, "not by being artificial but by being reified." This single reformulation dissolves the ontological society/nature dualism his opponents keep attributing to the tradition. Second, his defense of "left apocalypticism": the apocalypse is not a future event to be brandished or avoided in mobilization debates; the apocalypse is already here, combined and uneven, and accepting ongoing disaster as a premise for action is not defeatism.

Winning the polemics #

Chapters 7 through 9 take on the field: Foster's eco-Marxism, Moore's world-ecology, and the new materialisms of Bennett and Morton. These chapters are the book's most rigorous, and their fairness makes their verdicts more damaging. The Foster chapter is exemplary. Cassegård grants everything grantable (the metabolic rift, the rehabilitation of Marx as ecological thinker), then isolates the one claim that matters: Foster's Epicurean dialectics of nature is supposed to secure a "unity of method" between natural and social science, and it cannot. Foster oscillates between a praxis-centered dialectics indistinguishable from the Western Marxism he attacks and a universal atomistic dialectics that never gets specified. The chapter's implicit lesson generalizes: the loudest methodological quarrels in eco-Marxism (dialectics of nature versus critical theory, monism versus dualism) dissolve when you ask precisely what work the contested concept does. Against Moore, similarly, he argues that announcing a "non-Cartesian" monism does not stop dualism from persisting in one's actual categories. These chapters map the entire contemporary eco-Marxist debate more clearly than anything else I know at this length, which alone makes the book valuable for a doctoral seminar.

What "matter" is asked to carry #

The book's central weakness is the flip side of its central concept; the two are, as it were, flip sides of the same coin. Matter, defined negatively as what escapes and disrupts form, must cover an enormous range: the hail on the windows, hurricanes and pandemics, Hegel's grains of sand, Benjamin's urban shocks, Adorno's vertigo and shudder, Jameson's history that hurts. The methodological claim holds that shocks are "the language of objects," the negative way consciousness registers the discrepancy between system and reality. But a concept that identifies nature's critique of capitalism with whatever hurts or surprises us faces an awkward question: what would not count? A financial crisis, a war, a moral panic: each hurts, each surprises, each disrupts expectations. If every disruption testifies to the primacy of the object, the theory can absorb any event whatsoever as confirmation, and a critical theory that cannot in principle be embarrassed by the world has quietly traded its materialism for the idealism it set out to criticize. Cassegård knows the neighboring problem (he insists catastrophes must not be trusted to change the system on their own), but he never confronts the epistemological one: how to distinguish matter's resistance from the system's internal noise.

The practical payoff also runs thinner than the buildup promises. Chapter 10 argues, persuasively, that negative dialectics is compatible with praxis and utopian imagination: the subject is born from experiences of non-identity, the sense that "something's missing," and constellations suit a thinking that "asks while walking," in the Zapatista phrase he borrows. But compatibility is a low bar, and when the chapter descends toward strategy it offers mainly the injunction to "hold on to the experience of non-identity" while conceding that action to change the system "often appears almost impossible." What makes this frustrating is that Cassegård is, by profession, a sociologist of environmental movements; his own co-authored empirical work on climate activism appears once, in passing, to note that movements have been institutionalized into green consumerism. The book that could have tested critical materialism against actual movement experience (when does shock mobilize and when does it paralyze? which struggles have made non-identity politically productive?) defers precisely where its author is best equipped. The result is a theory of praxis argued entirely at the level of theory.

A smaller irony deserves mention. Adorno resisted systematization on principle: models, not method; essays, not architectonics. Cassegård's book proceeds by triads, criteria, and definitional housekeeping, turning constellations, natural history, and non-identity into a well-organized toolkit. The toolkit makes the book teachable, and building it is a legitimate scholarly choice. But readers should notice that the form of the reconstruction quietly contradicts the content being reconstructed, and Cassegård, so alert to form-matter contradictions elsewhere, never turns that lens on his own procedure.

Verdict #

In my estimation this book is the best available demonstration that the Frankfurt School tradition has something distinctive and current to say about ecological catastrophe, and its opening Hegelian anatomy of climate surprise, its de-anthropocentrized concept of reification, and its patient dismantling of Foster's unity-of-method claim are lasting contributions. It is also a book whose key concept is stretched past the point of discipline and whose practical conclusions run well behind its diagnostic power. Read it as a map of the eco-Marxist field and a rigorous case for critique amid permanent catastrophe. Do not expect it to tell you what to do on the far side of the shock, and be prepared to press, harder than the author does, on the question of what could ever count as evidence against it.