Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
mountain climbing or driving a car: in each we encounter the world not fi rst and
foremost as a set of visual images, but as a set of physical affects, by which our
bodies register the feel of soil, the grade of a climb, or the torque on a steering wheel.
In short, nonhuman entities are not merely vessels that humans fi ll with meaning;
through their 'performances' they add something of their own to the story.
Neo-Vitalism, Cosmopolitics and Ethics
Recently, Hayden Lorimer (2005, pp. 84-85) has pushed this one step further. The
problem with representationalism, Lorimer suggests, is 'that it framed, fi xed and
rendered inert all that
ought
to be most lively' (emphasis added). Here we fi nd an
increasingly common theme in many writings on nature by new materialist scholars:
the
vitality
or
liveliness
of nonhuman nature. This vitalism is implicit in Hinchliffe's
water voles, which made a mess of conservationists' systems of classifi cation. But we
can fi nd it stated explicitly in the work of numerous contemporary geographers, to
the point where this position is rapidly becoming as orthodox as were earlier
approaches that assumed nature to be an inert realm of timeless essences. Rose and
Wylie (2006, p. 476), for instance, tell us that life is characterised by a 'burgeoning,
proliferating, even wondrous topology'. Likewise, Matthew Kearnes (2006, p. 67),
drawing upon Gilles Deleuze, suggests that 'the singularity of matter is alive with the
creative potential of endless evolutions and innovations'. Nature, it seems, has a
sense of humor, as do the socio-technical networks out of which new entities are
continuously born (Davies, 2007). The earth is 'volatile' (Clark, 2007). Everywhere
life is 'feral' (Clark, 2003), 'being summoned' (Thrift, 2004), or simply being 'added
to' (Bingham, 2006). Even technological objects are now seen as 'ontologically
unstable', putting in question our dreams of mastery (Kearnes, 2006; Thrift, 2006).
It merits comment that these vitalist tendencies in human geography mirror, and
to some extent draw upon, the growing infl uence of complexity theory, non-linear
dynamics and notions of self-organisation within the physical sciences, including
physical geography. In many fi elds, notions of equilibrium are decidedly out of
fashion, for, as physical geographer Barbara Kennedy (1994, p. 703) argues: 'If there
is
any non-transient part of our planet's surface in something we might term 'equi-
librium' it is surely a real oddity and what, if anything, would it tell us about the rest
of the globe?'. Whether equilibrium theories are entirely outmoded, or, indeed,
whether complexity theory can be said to be entirely opposed to them, is not entirely
clear. What
is
emphasised today is that any sort of equilibrium is best understood as
an achieved state, rather than an eternal essence, or, in the language of complexity
theory, an
emergent order
that is the property of the whole, rather than something
that can be reduced to, or predicted by, the component parts of a system. In other
words, emergence cannot be predicted in advance, but can only be known in its
effects. As a number of commentators have noted, drawing upon writers such as
Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Keith Ansell Pearson and Brian
Massumi, this places a premium on the 'inventiveness' of the earth.
It is not entirely clear how far this emphasis on 'emergence' can or should be
pushed. Physical scientists, for instance, have tended to be less concerned with
pointing to novelty for its own sake, and have placed equal emphasis on processes
that
sustain
certain material forms, or the ways that apparently chaotic phenomena
at one scale resolve into forms of meta-stability at another, or the signifi cance of
specifi c thresholds (singularities) for shifts from one steady state to another. Nor is
