Hybrid Geographies

Natures Cultures Spaces

Sarah Whatmore

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446240267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

` Hybrid Geographies is one of the most original and important contributions to our field in the last 30 years. At once immensley provocative and productive, it is written with uncommon clarity and grace, and promises to breathe new life not only into geographical inquiry but into critical practice across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences - and beyond. An extraordinary achievement? - Professor Derek Gregory, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Hybrid Geographies critically examines the `opposition? between nature and culture, the material and the social, as represented in scientific, environmental and popular discourses. Demonstrating that the world is not an exclusively human achievement, Hybrid Geographies reconsiders the relation between human and non-human, the social and the material, showing how they are intimately and variously linked.

General arguments - informed by work in critical geography, feminist theory, environmental ethics, and science studies - are illustrated throughout with detailed case-study material. This exemplifies the two core themes of the book: a consideration of hybridity (the human/non-human relation) and of the `fault-lines? in the spatial organization of society and nature.

Hybrid Geographies is essential reading for students in the social sciences with an interest in nature, space and social theory.

1

Introducing Hybrid Geographies

What happens if we begin from the premise not that we know reality because we are separate from it (traditional objectivity), but that we can know the world because we are connected with it?’ (Katherine N. Hayles, 1995: 48)

dis-placing nature – the refrain of the ‘outside’

Barely a day passes without another story of the hyperbolic inventiveness of the life sciences to complicate the distinctions between human and non-human; social and material; subjects and objects to which we are accustomed. Variously labelled as ‘life politics’ (Giddens, 1991) or ‘bio-sociality’ (Rabinow, 1992a), such worldly apprehensions have struggled to make their mark against academic divisions of labour and the viscous terms in which the ‘question of nature’ has been posed in the social sciences and humanities (see Macnaghten and Urry, 1999). As their forays into the domain of natural sciences have swelled, so a plethora of ‘things’ has been trespassing into the company of the social unsettling the conduct of its study. Such things exceed both the proliferation of environmental sub-disciplines¹ and the tired theoretical resources of ‘(social) constructionism’ and ‘(natural) realism’ that have greeted them (see Soper, 1995; Demeritt, 1998). They present an unhappy choice. On the one hand, ‘post-modern’ modes of enquiry in which Nature, having nothing to say for itself, is the always already crafted product of human interpretation, and analysis becomes fixed on the representational practices that make it meaningful (Robertson et al., 1996). On the other, knowledge projects committed in various ways to maintaining a ‘crucial distinction . . . between material processes and relations . . . and our understandings of . . . those processes’ (Dickens, 1996: 83) in order to sustain the possibility of (and their own pretensions to) exemption from the representational moment.

There is undoubtedly a generous measure of caricature in this embattled depiction of the treatment of Nature/nature in social theory that serves primarily to reaffirm intellectual prejudices and identities, and which is writ large in the so-called science wars (see Gross and Levitt, 1994). Only the most vulgar of ‘constructionist’ accounts suggest that the world is – to borrow Sheets-Johnstone’s evocative phrase – ‘the product of an immaculate linguistic conception’ (1992: 46). Equally, only the crudest of ‘realist’ accounts refuse to recognize the contingency of knowledge claims about ‘real world’ entities and processes. Moreover, accounts that get lumped into these categories are inevitably more diverse than their detractors acknowledge (see, respectively, Benton, 1996; Conley, 1997). But for all their loudly declared hostility, these theoretical encampments are similarly premised on an a priori separation of nature and society. As Bruno Latour has put it:

Critical explanation always began from the poles and headed toward the middle, which was first the separation point and then the conjunction point for opposing resources. . . . In this way the middle was simultaneously maintained and abolished, recognised and denied, specified and silenced. . . . How? . . . By conceiving every hybrid as a mixture of two pure forms. (1993: 77–8)

Perhaps because geographers have inhabited this ‘nature–society’ settlement more self-consciously than other disciplines, these (re)turns to the question of nature have a particular resonance. As every undergraduate knows, Geography stakes its identity on attending to ‘the interface between social and natural worlds’. In practice, the separateness of these worlds has been intensified by a disciplinary division of labour between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geography, each of which tends to pay more allegiance to the divergent research cultures of the social and natural sciences respectively than to the other.² There is a sense, too, in which the life seems to have been sucked out of the worlds that Geography has come to inhabit, at least in its efforts to become a spatial science and in some more ‘critical’ spatial theorizing (see Fitzsimmons, 1989).³ In their urge towards the disembodied authority of panoptic knowledge practices, such maps have ‘ceased to be places of sensible activity and journeying’ (de Certeau, 1988: 129). More significantly, the spatialities in which the ontological separation of nature and society inheres are woven through all manner of scientific, policy, media and everyday practices that enact nature as ‘a physical place to which you can go’ (Haraway, 1992: 66). As Tim Ingold has observed: ‘Something . . . must be wrong somewhere, if the only way to understand our own creative involvement in the world is by first taking ourselves out of it’ (1995a: 58).

Human geography is by no means alone in finding itself at an important juncture in its efforts to escape the dialectical vortex of nature–society relations and the environmental refrain of the ‘outside’ (see Wolfe, 1998).⁴ The ‘hybrid geographies’ that I embark on here exercise other modes of travelling through the heterogeneous entanglements of social life that refuse the choice between word and world by fleshing out a different conception of fabric-ation, ‘not as mere retro-projection of human labour onto an object that is nothing in itself but a sturdier, much more reflexive co-production richly invested within a collective practice’ (Latour, 1999a: 274).

Of course hybridity is already freighted in various ways, for example as the ‘margin . . . where cultural differences contingently and conflictually touch’ in post-colonial studies (Bhabha, 1994: 206), and in agronomy as the bodying forth of human in(ter)ventions in the flesh of plants (Simmonds, 1979), both of which are interrogated during the course of the book. But its energies are enrolled here primarily as a device to negotiate the temptations of the ‘one plus one’ logic or ‘mixture of two pure forms’ that Latour warns against above, in journeying between natures and societies; objects and subjects; humans and non-humans and into their excesses.

‘Hybrid geographies’ allies the business of thinking space (Crang and Thift, 2000) to that of thinking through the body (Kirkby, 1997), in other words to apprehend and practise geography as a craft. This enterprise gestures towards Michel Serres’ insistence that ‘there is a sense in space before the sense that signifies’ (1991: 13) in two ways: by attending simultaneously to the inter-corporeal conduct of human knowing and doing and to the affects of a multitude of other ‘message-bearers’ that make their presence felt in the fabric of social life. To map the lively commotion of these worldly associations is to travel in them, negotiating ‘modes of access and ways of orienting ourselves to the concrete world we inhabit’ (Bingham and Thrift, 2000: 292). What happens as a consequence of such mappings into knowledge? A preliminary response to the question staged at the outset would be – an upheaval in the binary terms in which the question of nature has been posed and a re-cognition of the intimate, sensible and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to each other in the fabric-ations of everyday life (Clark, 1997). As the book goes on to explore, this upheaval implicates geographical imaginations and practices both in the purifying impulse to fragment living fabrics of association and designate the proper places of ‘nature’ and ‘society’, and in the promise of its refusal. This is a promise of countenancing the world as an always already inhabited achievement of heterogeneous social encounters where, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘all of the actors are not human and all of the humans are not “us” however defined’ (1992: 67).

diagramming – more than human worlds

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 380)

The heterogeneous conception of social life that I want to flesh out here takes up the ‘common emphases on positionality and interaction’ that Hayles (1995) discerns among disparate theoretical efforts to rupture the terms in which the question of nature has been posed. I take these emphases to imply an epistemological insistence on the situatedness of knowledge and a ‘modest’ ontological stance towards the performativity of social ordering.⁵ At its most skeletal, ‘hybrid geographies’ takes a radical tack on social agency manoeuvring between two theoretical commitments. The first is to the de-centring of social agency, apprehending it as a ‘precarious achievement’ spun between social actors rather than a manifestation of unitary intent (Law, 1994: 101). The second is to its de-coupling from the subject/object binary such that the material and the social intertwine and interact in all manner of promiscuous combinations (Thrift, 1996: 24).

My aim in this book is to elaborate these stances not in the abstract but by working them through closely-textured journeys that follow various socio-material imbroglios as they are caught up in, and convene, the spatial practices of science, law and everyday life. It is organized as a series of paired essays that can be read in at least three ways: as cross-cutting conversations that interrogate the theoretical currents set in motion in this introductory chapter; as thematic sections that explore the spatio-temporal vernaculars of wild(er)ness, governance and consumption; or as individual essays that follow the interferences of ‘things’, from elephants and soybeans to deeds and patents, in the geographies of social life. This iterative style of argument works towards multiple mappings of the ethical import of taking hybridity seriously in/as geographical practice in terms of ‘the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities and responsibilities of intra-acting within the world’ (Barad, 1999: 8). In the same spirit, these introductory orientations are not restricted to this chapter but continue to crop up as prefaces to each section, situating the particular essays they introduce.

My elaboration of these themes engages with four main bodies of work that converge through conversations between geography and science and technology studies,⁶ but are also becoming aligned in more ambitious and various ways that Nigel Thrift has dubbed ‘non-representational theory’ (1999, 2000a, 2000b).⁷ The first is science and technology studies (STS) where the vocabularies of hybridity have been most keenly honed through devices like the ‘hybrid collectif’ (Callon and Law, 1995), the ‘quasi-object’ (Serres and Latour, 1995) and the ‘cyborg’ (Haraway, 1985). ‘Hybrid geographies’ diagrams between the technical and corporeal emphases of two STS communities, those charily associated with the acronym ANT (Actant–Network Theory) (see Law and Hassard, 1999) and those of feminist science studies (see Haraway, 1997). My interrogations of these different efforts to accommodate ‘non-humans’ in the fabric of the social work to evince three consequences of such a redistribution of social agency. These involve shifts from intentional to affective modalities of association; from being to becoming in the temporal rhythms of human/non-human difference; and from geometries to topologies as the spatial register of distributed agency.⁸ Above all, I want to hold on to the sense in this work in which ‘the world kicks back’ (Barad, 1998), or as Latour puts it, ‘things’ can object to their social enrolments (2000). At the same time, though, I want to exceed the scientific onus of these concerns and to mobilize the political implications of this ‘redistribution’ through other knowledge practices, notably those of law and governance, and everyday life.

The second engagement that situates this project is with bio-philosophy, which is never far from the various manoeuvres of science studies, particularly ANT (see Ansell-Pearson, 1999; Lorraine, 1999). Here, my argument is drawn into concerns with the morphogenic impulses of replication and differentiation, multiplicity and singularity through which the flux of worldly becomings takes, holds and changes shape. This rich vein of work folds debates on the philosophy of organism in the early twentieth century (such as Weisman, 1892; Bergson, 1983/1907; White-head, 1929) into those at its close, interrogating the precarious register of ‘life’ as a means of thinking past the human. Notable here are Deleuze and Guattari’s vital topology (1988/1980), Bateson’s ecology of mind (2000/1972) and Serres’ material semiotics (1985).⁹ ‘Hybrid geographies’ pursues this work’s commitment to what Keith Ansell-Pearson calls the ‘inherently ethical task of opening up the human experience to a field of alterity’ (1999: 2).

The third theoretical conversation exercised in this book is with aspects of the diffuse literature on corporeality that have been particularly, though by no means exclusively, elaborated in feminist work (see Welton, 1999). Here, my argument engages with (various) theories of bodily practice. These serve both to reassert the corporeal affordances in which cognition inheres and, just as importantly, to challenge the cognitive privilege by extending the affective register of senses, feelings and habits engaged in ‘thinking through the body’ (see, for example, Radley, 1995; Weiss, 1999).¹⁰ Haunting these debates is Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh (la chair) and its emphasis on the reversibility of energies between bodies and worlds such that ‘the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in things’ (1968: 134).¹¹ Taking the ethical import of this intercorporeal stance at its word, I interrogate these arguments by fleshing out the place of animal body-subjects in the geographies of wildlife conservation.

Last, but not least, ‘hybrid geographies’ engages work that is concerned with the knowledge practices of everyday life or what Shotter refers to as a ‘third kind of knowledge’ (1993). Here the notion of thinking through the body is invested in a particular direction, admitting the know-hows, tacit skills and bodily apprehensions through which everyday life goes on into the repertoire of knowledges that social/scientists need to take seriously (see de Certeau et al. 1998; Schatzki et al. 2000). These everyday knowledge practices have been argued to be performative rather than cognitive, such that ‘talk’ itself is better understood as action rather than as communication (see Shusterman, 2000; Thrift, 2000a). Allied to this argument is the suggestion that the spatialities of everyday life constitute a mode of dwelling, as against building, in the world (see Ingold, 1995a; Thrift, 1999). These arguments have a particular resonance for my determination to escape the scientific ‘power-houses’ of knowledge production and interrogate the ways in which nature–culture hybrids are apprehended through activities like consumption, and their interferences resisted and accommodated in the intimate fabric of social life (see Hansen, 2000a). These arguments are explored in the last section of the book in relation to the dissonance between consumer and producer knowledge practices in the event of food scares.

Thus freighted, the hybrid invites new ways of travelling that are beginning to make their mark in Geography (see, for example, Bingham, 1996; Murdoch, 1997a; Hinchliffe, 1999) and elsewhere (see, for example, Mol and Law, 1994; Strathern, 1996; Hetherington, 1997c). In place of the geometric habits that reiterate the world as a single grid-like surface open to the inscription of theoretical claims or uni-versal designs, hybrid mappings are necessarily topological, emphasizing the multiplicity of spacetimes generated in/by the movements and rhythms of heterogeneous association. The spatial vernacular of such geographies is fluid, not flat, unsettling the coordinates of distance and proximity; local and global; inside and outside. This is not to ignore the potent affects of territorializations of various kinds, just the reverse. It is a prerequisite for attending more closely to the labours of division that (re-)iterate their performance and the host of socio-material practices – such as property, sovereignty and identity – in which they inhere.

This book is not a lot of things. It does not espouse a particular philosophy, although its engagements and commitments position it philosophically. It is neither a complete ‘thesis’ nor an assembly of ‘empirical’ fragments, but rather an effort to germinate connections and openings that complicate this settlement. It is not a ‘geography of nature’ – though natures and geographies are always in play. Doubtless this list will grow as the book travels. Geography is at its most affective when, to use Homi Bhabha’s evocative phrase, the ‘unhomely’ stirs (1997: 445). In some sense, I owe my career as a Geographer to just such a fleeting fusion of the spacetimes of empire, discipline and self which occurred as I crossed the threshold between students and staff in the Geography Department at University College London.¹² That momentary slippage between worlds has shaped the kinds of geographical journeys I have sought to make ever since. But it has taken me more than a decade to venture a mode of geographical practice that holds on to this affect. It takes much of its inspiration from Game and Metcalfe’s wonderful book Passionate sociology (1996) and its salutary immersion in life, compassionate involvement with the world and with others, and sensual and full-bodied approach to knowledge. Fleshing out a practice that shares these commitments but endeavours to enlarge the company of ‘others’ that they bring to notice has been a collaborative and heavily indebted activity, as is acknowledged in the preface. Not least in this company are the various ‘companion-guides’ (Bingham and Thrift, 2000) from Roman ‘leopards’ to Roundup Ready^TM that I have enrolled in these journeys, as they have enrolled me in theirs. But it is also a question of style. Writing is an important part of any geo...