Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 229geographers adhering to these positions limit their reach to environmentalsystems and bracket out the human influence for analytical convenience.Yet ideas about chaos and complexity could, in principle, form a unifyingontology for geography as a whole – rather as systems theory was intendedto bridge the human–physical divide in the 1960s and 1970s. Likewise, theideas discussed below could bridge that divide – but only if enoughgeographers on both sides of geography buy into them. Needless to say, thepotted summaries of the four main strands of relational, ‘post-natural’thinking I identify do not do justice to any of them.Non-representational theory/performativityNon-representational theory is most closely associated with the work ofthe British human geographer Nigel Thrift. The word ‘theory’ is ratherinappropriate here. Thrift has laid out a set of general principles andarguments about representation and alternatives to it rather than a specifictheory about how society and nature intertwine. To understand Thrift’scomplaints about representation it is useful to re-read the prefatorycomments I made in the section ‘Re-presenting nature’ of Chapter 3.ThereI observed that, according to analysts of representations of human and nonhuman‘nature’, there are two elements to consider whatever the specificrepresentation in question (visual, written or verbal). First, there is an actof ‘speaking for’ – where the representer acts as a representative of thatwhich is represented. Second, there is a simultaneous and less obvious actof ‘speaking of’ – where the representer actively ‘frames’ the representedwhile claiming to re-present it ‘as it really is’. Both elements of representationwere exposed in Braun’s study of Clayoquot Sound.The pointthat Braun and other critics of representations of nature make, you willrecall, is that representations ‘construct’ the realities they purport merely todepict.Thrift (1996; 2003) makes a number of criticisms of the preoccupationof many human geographers with representations of nature (and otherthings too). First, he argues that this preoccupation wrongly implies thatpeople relate to the material world primarily in visual (or ocular) terms,leading to pictorial, written and spoken representations of it.Thrift remindsus that we engage with the material world (including our own bodies)using all our senses: we are practical beings not just intellectual ones. Muchof our understanding of, and action upon, this world is thus, in Thrift’s view,