Nature - autonomous learning

224 after naturereality is given prominence.Accordingly, we can say that an ontological schismruns through contemporary geography that few have been inclined tochallenge.The geographers whose work I discuss in this chapter seek to overcomethis schism. Among the several reasons for this, three stand out. First, it isarguable that the world is seamless. Dualistic ontologies imagine a worldsplit in two: a world of separate spheres that ‘interact’ and ‘collide’ or wherethe character of one is ‘constructed’ and ‘determined’ by the other. But thisrisks severing the ties that, in reality, make the two plutative ‘spheres’indissociable. Second, it is arguable that the ontological differences withinthe ‘social’ and ‘natural’ worlds are as large as those said to firmly distinguishthem from one another. For instance, we might ask why are a rock and agorilla thought to have more in common than a gorilla and a human being,when the latter two are both primates? Third, it is arguable that thesociety–nature dualism blinds us to the need for a new vocabulary todescribe the world we inhabit.This would not be a vocabulary of ‘pureforms’ but one that captures the hybrid, chimeric, mixed-up world inwhich we are embedded.For these reasons (and others to be explained), a strong minority ofgeographers eschew the nature–society dualism that most of us regardas so normal to be common sense.These geographers beat a ‘third way’between this and related dualisms (like subject–object, urban–rural, andpeople–environment).They do not, for instance, talk about a socially constructednature because they resist the idea that ‘society’ is a self-sufficientdomain that can ‘construct’ something external to it. Likewise, they donot talk about the ‘non-human world’ or ‘human biology’ because thisimplies they are discrete domains with equally discrete properties or elsesurfaces upon which society inscribes its wishes.The geographers whosework I discuss in this chapter are thus best described as relational thinkers.Relational thinkers argue that phenomena do not have properties in themselvesbut only by virtue of their relationships with other phenomena.Theserelations are thus internal not external, because the notion of externalrelations suggests that phenomena are constituted prior to the relationshipsinto which they enter.This probably sounds as abstract as some of the ontological and epistemologicaldebates recounted in the previous chapter. But its implicationsare highly concrete. As we’ll discover in this chapter, a cohort of ‘after-’or ‘post-natural’ geographers wish to alert us to a world existing under