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we take into account in our biotechnological innovations? What does it mean to
'add' something like GM crops to a world where human and nonhuman lives
coexist, and where nonhumans also have the capacity to affect wider collectivities?
Whose lives should fl ourish, and whose should be abandoned or excluded from our
collectives? Given what post-dualist and non-essentialist ontologies suggest about
the interwoven nature of human and nonhuman lives, how might we slow down
the process of assembly, in order to properly weigh the propositions that continu-
ously confront the collectives in which we dwell with new and often strange matters
of concern?
These concerns have increasingly come to the forefront in the work of environ-
mental geographers, and perhaps suggest a common ground shared by human and
physical geographers alike. This does not mean that all contemporary geographers
pose ethical and political questions in these exact terms. The environmental justice
movement, for instance, has tended to place attention on questions of social inequal-
ity within these assemblages of people and matter, taking up Neil Smith's (1996)
appeal for a 'political theory' of nature that attends to its social production (see Di
Chiro, 1995). Others, infl uenced by the cultural turn, have suggested the need for
a 'deconstructive responsibility' that never loses sight of the violence inherent in any
closure around being, ethics and politics, even as it acknowledges the necessity of
making provisional claims about all three (see Braun, 2002). Still others have asked
why it is that we draw limits around whom or what is allowed 'representation' in
our political arenas. If animals are part of our 'communities of singularities', if their
forms of life are constituted in relations to ours, why should they not be taken into
account when we design new biotechnologies, burn fossil fuels or clear forests?
Once dualism is abandoned, it seems, nature becomes political, and politics fi nds
itself fi lled to the brim with nature, which it never really had left behind. It is this
attention to the making of common worlds - what Isabelle Stengers (2000; 2003)
rightly calls cosmopolitics - that is the task left to us. In this task, vitalism may
offer a valuable ethical and practical orientation, one that recognizes the ontological
instability of matter, and thus takes precaution as its central principle. For if we
live in a world in which 'intersection, transfer, emergence and paradox are central
to life' (Thrift, 2004, p. 83), then we face a situation that is equally terrifying and
hopeful, in which 'anything is possible - the worst disasters or the most fl exible
evolutions' (Guattari, 2000, p. 66).
NOTES
1. It is important to recognise that the term 'hybridity' is not a term that fi ts well in the
lexicon of the new materialists since it presupposes the existence of the two separate
domains. It is better seen as a 'middle term' that names an impasse in dualist thought.
The new materialists discussed in this section
begin
with the middle term and drop the
two poles.
2. The following sections draw in part on arguments developed in Braun 2007, 2008.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, G. (2004)
The Open: Man and Animal
. Translation by Kevin Attell. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
