Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 117that material world.After Harvey’s intervention, the next major attempt to‘de-naturalise’ representations of the non-human world prior to the currentperiod was, arguably, that of Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Box 3.2).Box 3.1 IDEOLOGIES OF NATUREThe term ‘ideology’ has multiple meanings. Broadly speaking, it isused pejoratively by left-wing intellectuals, notably Marxists. Thiswasn’t always so. The term dates from late-eighteenth-centuryFrance where it meant simply the study of ideas and, morespecifically, ideas that were free of religious or metaphysical bias.However, because of the influence of Marx and his co-authorFriedrich Engels, the term ‘ideology’ took on a more particular andnegative meaning. Some Marxists saw ideologies as distortedsystems of ideas (leading to ‘false consciousness’ among thosewho believed these ideas) that are promulgated by powerful socialgroups in order to deceive the mass of society as to their ‘trueinterests’. In Harvey’s critique of neo-Malthusianism there is asuggestion that this understanding of ideology is in play. After all,he implies that his Marxist interpretation of the population–resources relationship is somehow ‘better’ (more accurate?) thanthe neo-Malthusian one. However, he qualifies the ‘false consciousness’idea by declaring that one can never step outsideideology in order to inspect nature ‘as it really is’. This suggests abroader conception of ideology defined as any set of ideasdesigned to facilitate certain social interests by depicting theworld in a selective way. This broader conception arguablyanimates the 1984 work of Harvey’s student Neil Smith. Smith’sUneven Development (1984) makes formal reference to ‘ideologiesof nature’. For him, these are ‘common-sense’ beliefs about naturewhose partiality and bias is dissimulated precisely because theyseem to have no social contamination – because they seem to beabout nature in itself not society. In recent years, left-wing analystsof all stripes have used the term ‘ideology’ in an ever looser, lessprecise way. At the same time, the term now pops up in all manner