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it clear whether vitalism should be read literally - as giving us a true description of
the world - or taken as a cautionary tale against modern(ist) dreams of mastery.
Drawing upon the arguments of Canguilhem (1994), for instance, Fraser et al.
(2005, p. 2) suggest that 'Vitalism remains vital partly because of its epistemological
role within the history of the life sciences. . . . [It] functions in part as an ongoing
form of resistance to reductionism and to the temptation of premature satisfaction,
closure, denial or ignorance' (see also Greco, 2005). Even philosopher Henri Bergson,
whose work from the fi rst decades of the 20th century has inspired many of today's
new vitalists, emphasized the
ethical
force of the position. If nothing else, he
explained, 'the “vital principle”...is at least a sort of label affi xed to our igno-
rance'. Because it gives us a world fi lled with contingency, and calls attention to
that which is permanently suspended between being and non-being, it perhaps best
names a discipline of thought (Greco, 2005;
see also Stengers, 1997), that in turn
informs an ethical relation to life and a political orientation.
What this helpfully illuminates are the close connections between how one
answers a set of ontological questions about the 'nature' of the material world, and
what one holds as a set of ethical and political commitments. There is no hard and
fast rule that a particular ontology leads necessarily to a particular politics, but
neither can any ontology be said to be neutral. If we imagine that nature names an
immutable realm, for instance, and see humans to be part of it, we have ample justi-
fi cation in support of existing social relations, since these can be passed off as
'natural'. Likewise, if we imagine nature to name a realm entirely external to humans,
it may be possible, as some have suggested, to treat it merely as so many objects of
utility, or, as others have suggested, to imagine that it has 'inherent value'.
If this is true, then it follows that the accounts of nature given by new materialists
are no more innocent than any other accounts; they too can underwrite a particular
orientation to the world. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the non-essentialist
materialisms of these writers leads to a politics of nature that must invariably be a
kind of active experimentation, since 'we do not know in advance which way a line
is going to turn' (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002, p. 134; see also Braun, 2006b). From
this perspective, the discipline of geography - as earth-writing - does not stand
outside this experimentation, but participates in it. They may also teach us that
dreams of mastery, or reductionist accounts of such things as nanotechnology,
which presume that we can build things 'atom by atom' without any surprises, are
the height of hubris, and harbour the possibility of catastrophe. For, as Kearnes
(2006, p. 59) puts it, 'in the application of force and control we can also see the
radical possibility for creativity and escape'.
It is precisely this radical uncertainty that has informed the ethical and political
positions of post-dualist geographers such as Sarah Whatmore, Steve Hinchliffe and
Nick Bingham. For each of them humans exist in the midst of things. Thus, as
Bingham explains, being is always already being-with-one-another, not in terms of
a pluralism that imagines a world of diverse yet discrete things, but in terms of a
'community of singularities' in which different forms of life are constituted through
what circulates between them. If we add to this the vitalist intuition that the world
is not a fi xed and eternal order, but is instead continuously 'added to' through the
performances of people and things, then the most pressing task we face today may
be to develop institutional spaces and procedures that allow us to work through,
in an agonistic manner, how this composition of common worlds should proceed
(see Stengers, 2000; Latour, 2004; Latour and Weibel, 2005). Who or what must
