Abstract
It is a thrill to have Inhuman Nature taken so seriously. These three generous engagements remind me how unfinished this project is – for all its hard-backed detainment. They are also, in differing ways, reminders of the extent to which my own approach only felt like a risk worth taking because of the palpable achievements of other ways of working the nature-human interface. The book took a long time to write and many other versions got abandoned, reluctantly, along the way. Lesley Head’s point about this not being ‘the time to downplay human agency’ deftly captures the dilemmas I faced as earlier drafts – concentrating more on human impact on environments – gradually succumbed to the rising demands of the inhuman.
My swerve into inhuman domains was intended more as a means of contextualizing the currently fraught human metabolism with nature than as a detraction from it (though such a manoeuvre is bound to have some fallout). To borrow a line from Derrida that Deborah Dixon and John Paul Jones III used to good effect on another occasion (Dixon and Jones, 2005: 243), there is a need ‘to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest attention possible to context’. My contextualizing of the human within the inhuman was, in part, a response to pressing threats to human and other life: climatic tipping points, seismic or volcanic upheavals, and so on (to which we must add, as Erik Swyngedouw aptly notes, the more grinding and quotidian exposure to the pressures of a dynamic planet – Haiti before the earthquake). But thinking human existence through geological time also seemed to call for a patience, a receptivity, a forbearance that resists immediate political traction. I am aware of an unresolved tension between these imperatives – with their divergent temporalities and intensities – running through Inhuman Nature.
As Deborah and John Paul detected, there is a deal of taking geography to task in the book (if largely implicit). Their observation offers a productive counterpoint to Lesley’s reflection, in reference to my planet-scaled gesturing, that ‘(w)ith their disciplinary connection to the physical and natural sciences, geographers arguably need this lesson less than other social scientists’. This was my expectation too, when I arrived in geography a dozen years ago – after doing time in neighbouring disciplines. Human geography, I soon discovered, had joined sociology and cultural studies in an embrace of heterogeneous objects, actors, entities, flows, assemblages and networks: a democratization of the ingredients of sociomaterial life which seemed set on expanding the scope of social thought and political practice. But after a while it dawned on me that this inclusivity was less encyclopaedic than it first appeared. Notably, it did not seem to leave much room for earth or cosmic processes. I began to wonder if the current multiplication of ‘matters of concern’ might have rather different implications for geography than it did for disciplines with no prior commitment to the ‘geo’ and its morphings.
The irony of human geography’s recent enthrallment with just about everything but the earth is that it overlaps with a rising attention to things geological in other fields. A recent US symposium announced a ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary culture – with regard to escalating interest in ‘deep time, … tectonic plate movements, erosion and displacement of landforms, dramatic earth reshaping events, geo-bio interactions’ (Friends of the Pleistocene, 2011). The location of this turn? Architecture, art, philosophy, science and technology studies – apparently. Meanwhile, a special edition of the UK-based interdisciplinary journal Collapse devoted to ‘geophilosophy’ elicited contributions from ecologists, artists, philosophers, architects and literary theorists (Mackay, 2010). Closer to home, when asked to make recommendations about the audience for Inhuman Nature, my reviewer duly listed ‘sociology, social theory, environmental studies and risk management’.
Ceding the ‘geo’ to other disciplines might be construed as an act of generosity by geographers, but I suspect that is not our motive. My own wish to see geography participating fully in ‘geologic turns’ is undoubtedly facilitated by my lack of encumbrance of disciplinary history: it helps not to feel any great anxiety over whiffs of environmental determinism. At the same time, as Deborah and John Paul remind us, this is also a history and a present rich in opportunity. Who could not be intrigued by a version of geomorphology whose animations stretch from intimate encounters with fine-grained locality all the way to speculation over the dynamic forces shaping other planetary bodies! (See Baker and Twidale, 1991.)
How then might we circle back from these multiply-scaled incitements to the pressing ethico-political demands of the current conjuncture? In this regard I have much sympathy with Erik’s misgivings about attempts to philosophically ground politics. I agree that neither a sense of enchantment nor a foregrounding of human vulnerability offer much in the way of guidelines for what we might call a ‘geologic politics’. Here, I should clarify my own take on the relationship between ontology, ethics and politics. Inhuman Nature is ‘ontological’ in the way that it voices my commitment to an autonomous and largely recalcitrant set of physical forces that have locally bundled themselves into the planet we call earth. It is also ethical. However, it was never my intention to imply that ‘because the world is like this we ought to be caring and fair to each other’ (tempting though that is). What I wanted to say was that many people inhabiting the planet already seem to have a sense of the way that earthly forces lay us low from time to time, and there are already a great many interesting responses to this predicament out there – which we theorists might make more of. ‘Ungrounding’, in this way, offers no more of a platform for politics than does a stable Earth, but it can be an occasion for starting to work up political projects. However many continental luminaries I pilfered from to make this point, what I wanted to underscore was the sheer ordinariness of these responses.
It is understandable that Erik asks why there is not much in the way of political architecture built around these insights in the book. This is an important question, one which I am still working on. The answer so far has something to do with my suspicion that going from ontological claims to political assertions is a much more problematic shift than it might at first appear (I have been learning a bit from my colleague Clive Barnett on this front). A lot of recent work in geography seems to move swiftly from claims about what the world is ‘really’ like – ‘relational’, ‘networked’, ‘processual’, ‘vital’, ‘affective’ – to affirmations of various political possibilities. It is this manoeuvre, I believe, that can leave certain aspects of reality out in the cold: stubbornly inanimate matter, episodes of inertia, breaks in becoming, for instance. As I see it, all of these facets of existence – dynamic and inert, vital and mineral, generative and destructive – might under certain conditions spark political action, but none has a privileged affiliation with any particular political leaning, or with politics in general.
Recently I have become aware of some more modest appraisals of the relationship between politics and ontology than those which animated earlier styles of relational materialist thought. With regard to thinking politically about matter, for example, Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore (2010: xxix–xxx) ask: ‘Is more to be gained from a closer attention to the specificity of the matter at hand, as opposed to a generic analogy to “life”?’ Thinking retrospectively along such lines, what I guess I was doing in the book was beginning to attend to the specificity of events involving some of the larger, long-term, earth processes – as triggers for collective or sociable activity.
What I am trying to do post-book is to think more systematically about the differentiated opportunities for political mobilization that are associated with the geological stratification (and destratifications) of our planet. I want to focus on the varying degrees to which earth formations are open to reordering, and consider how and when encounters with or movements across strata might present themselves as occasions for public involvement. This is already starting to feel like a more collaborative endeavour than the labours of Inhuman Nature. One of the biggest challenges in all this may be how best to engage with grand-scale geological forces, while at the same time talking modestly and contextually about the processes by which people work up political responses to more-or-less ordinary earthly provocations. If human geographers are to be more vocal in the geologic turn, I am now thinking (with some promptings from my commentators), it may be less a matter of claiming a disciplinary franchise on earth processes than it is about mining some insights of our colleagues on the mundane/mondain conditions under which ‘geopolitics’ worthy of the name might sometimes happen.