Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 239Thrift, she reminds us that people are embodied and corporeal: we are what weare because of our ties (e.g. through the intake and excretion of food) withcountless non-human others.What follows from this, in her view, is thatit is necessary for any ethics to take account of many or all of the actants inany given ‘more than human’ network.We have no choice but to recognisethat each of us is connected to local and global ‘imbroglios’ in which all thecomponent ‘parts’ play a role. It thus makes little sense,Whatmore argues,for us to argue that ethics emerges from or applies to one or other setof entities. Likewise, we go awry ethically if we think that our morals about‘nature’ are dictated to us (by external facts) or by us (in virtue of our selfsufficientbeliefs, values and assumptions). In sum,Whatmore advocates anethics that is ‘generous’ in making no assumptions as to who or what mightdeserve ethical considerability in any given situation.This cosmopolitanethics is intended to equip us with subtle moral skills that refuse theeither/or choice of a socially contrived ethics or a naturally dictated one.It’s an ethics attuned to mixity, impurity and the realities of a ‘companionedworld’ (for more on Whatmore’s arguments see Antipode 2005; for anaccessible book written in the same vein as Hybrid Geographies see Hinchliffe2006).WHAT MOTIVATES POST-NATURAL THINKING?It would be all too easy to infer two things about the post-natural thinkingdiscussed in this chapter.The first, which I queried earlier, is the idea thatthis thinking is preferable to either social constructionism or natural realismbecause it reflects the new hybrid ‘realities’ of phenomena like people withxenotransplanted organs. The second is the idea that because relationalthinking is currently considered de rigueur and cutting edge by manygeographers it must be ‘better’ than its putative predecessors.Against boththese inferences it should now be abundantly clear that I think it betterto ask of post-natural thinking: what motivates its advocates to maketheir claims and what are they seeking to achieve by moving beyond thesociety–nature dualism?This question directs our attention towards the interests and ambitionsof geographers like Thrift, Zimmerer and Whatmore. It directs our gaze awayfrom the seamless socio-natural realities these geographers purportto represent to us.This is not, of course, to say that these geographers donot think of themselves as in the truth-telling business.As academics, they