Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 225our noses but one which we fail (quite literally) to see if we divide it intonatural and social things (or some combination of the two). Thesegeographers are not all of a piece – for instance, they include so-called‘actor-network theorists’ and certain Marxists, two groups who disagreeon many things. But some broad commonalities none the less underpintheir research. Intellectually, the project of these geographers is to reveala more-than-social, less-than-natural world to us and so challenge whatthey see as the impoverished vocabulary we use to analyse it. Morally,their project is to move us away from the ethical codes that ground theirclaims in natural imperatives or socially contingent assessments of what wecall nature. Some readers will find the material discussed in this chapterdisconcerting because it refuses the mindset of the work reviewed in theprevious two chapters. As before, my aim to ask why some geographerswant us to see nature in the ways explored in this chapter.What is theiraim in arguing that we are ‘after nature’ in so far as nature, in their view,does not exist either as a social construction or as a realm irreducible tosocial representations and forces?Before proceeding I should enter two points of clarification. First, manyof the geographers whose work I discuss below take issue with the frameworkof analysis used in this book.This framework leads me to treat theideas of these geographers as just that: ideas about the world vying withothers for our attention.As we will see, some of these geographers disputethe notion that we re-present a world ‘out there’ in knowledge. This isbecause they reject the subject–object dualism that apparently animatesmy framework – a dualism that posits a world of things-in-themselveson the one side, and our knowledge of those things in speech, writing andimagery on the other. Second, it is important to avoid a fundamentalerror that is all too easy to make when presenting the work of ‘after-’ or‘post-natural’ geographers. This is the error of supposing that wherethe society–nature dualism was appropriate until recently it is now obsoletebecause ‘technoscience’ has breached the ontological divide betweensociety and nature.Against this ‘epochal’ error, the geographers whose workI discuss below maintain that we have always lived in a mixed-up, hybridand ‘impure’ world where it is difficult to disentangle things from theirrelationships.Technoscientific developments like transgenic pigs, smartrobots and microchip implants are, in these geographers’ estimation, justthe latest examples of a long history of society–nature interfusions.The chapter begins with an example of how, generally speaking, a