cultural geography ii

Progress report

Cultural geography II: Culturesof nature (and technology)

Scott KirschThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

AbstractRecent cultural geographic research, located at a variety of settings (laboratory, clinic, battlefield, containerport), has emphasized culture’s productive dimensions through studies of the linked construction of nature,culture, and technologies. In this second of three reports, I examine a range of scholarship that asks in dif-ferent ways what it means to be formative in the production of nature, and I discuss the implications of recentefforts to rethink culture as a form of productivity. Some of this formative cultural work is scientific andintellectual, and geographers have sought to understand the practices of scientists, medical researchers,folklorists, and others engaged in the work of producing new objects of nature, culture, and the human body.Their work suggests that science and other modern forms of expertise perform a peculiar kind of culturalwork in the production of nature, carving out and occupying positions of privileged, albeit still contested,ontological actors. I also note recent efforts to reconceptualize broad categories of space, surface, and ‘land’around similarly generative cultures of knowledge and innovation, reflecting related ontological concerns forengaging with culture, ‘culturing’, and cultivation as productive processes. I argue that questions oftechnology remain inseparably tied to constructions of nature, and that technology still has much to disclosein terms of its cultural geographies.

Keywordscultural geography, culture, Gramsci, nature, technology, topology

I Introduction

My first progress report, engaging with recent

research on valuation and waste, emphasized

the transformative material qualities of cultural

work, including the development of systems of

signification and value, as expressed in cultural

geographic scholarship animated by different

but overlapping materialist sensibilities (Kirsch,

2013). Objects of waste and re-use, in particu-

lar, have offered geographers an enhanced view

of materiality as relation and process, a world in

which ‘things’ exist in transitory and unstable

states as bundles of relations and embodiments

of processes that are inseparably physical,

social, and symbolic. But the implications of

relational and materialist approaches for cul-

tural geography are by no means limited to the

wasting, revalorization, and re-uses of matter,

processes that have themselves become integral

to the production of new objects, new knowl-

edges, and new frontiers for primitive accumu-

lation. Here, I expand the discussion of

culture’s productive dimensions through a

review of current work exploring what can be

described as the linked production of nature and

Corresponding author:Department of Geography, University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA.Email: [email protected]

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culture, much of which has been concerned to

trace the shifting, artifactual boundaries

between humanity and its environs. This

research has been located at a variety of social

and geographical settings, from laboratories,

clinics, and field and survey sites to battlefields,

container ports, virtual ‘lands’, and cinematic

landscapes, where new natures have in different

ways been produced. In highlighting these sites,

I stress that productive models of culture and

‘culturing’ are also usefully understood as cul-

tures of technology, as the framings, observa-

tions, and uses of nature appear together with

(and mediated by) technologies and human

design at nearly every turn, underscoring the

still ‘human’ focus of the research agenda, even

for those investigations written under the signs

of post-humanism and the non-human.

Why the ‘return of nature’, as Castree (2012)

recently put it, and why now? If nature has

returned – another go-round for ‘perhaps the

most complex word in the language’ (Williams,

1983: 219) – then its homecoming across the

discipline and related fields has, not surpris-

ingly, been marked by contradictions. While

Clark’s (2011) Inhuman Nature, to which Cas-

tree was responding, portrays the vulnerability

of the human species within a volatile, indiffer-

ent but nonetheless bountiful natural world, the

power of which humanity continues to hubristi-

cally underestimate, others have taken up a

renewed emphasis on nature’s social production

in an effort to revitalize Smith’s (1984) once

provocative concept in an age wherein ‘the

impossibility of distinguishing ‘‘nature’’ and

‘‘society’’ would appear to have been con-

firmed’ (Ekers and Loftus, 2013: 234). These

perspectives on nature may not be mutually

exclusive but they certainly reflect different

vantage points, and different emphases.1 For

Ekers and Loftus, the production of nature the-

sis is to be renewed by reading it back through

key Gramscian categories, which are presented

in part as a question of method (see also Loftus,

2012), that is, as a turn to Gramsci’s historicism

as a basis for extending research to the poten-

tially wide-ranging sites of nature’s production

and reproduction. While their argument is

directed primarily at conversations in political

ecology (see also Ekers et al., 2009), the move

is also an intriguing one for cultural geographers

in its framing of a research program around the

close study of different kinds of productive

practices: ‘Gramsci forces us to highlight the

different types of concrete labour (artistic, intel-

lectual, scientific, manufacturing) that are for-

mative in the production of nature’ (Ekers and

Loftus, 2013: 235).2 What does it mean to be

formative in the production of nature, and what

are the implications for the rethinking of culture

as a form of productivity? In this review I sug-

gest that generative models of culture, though

rarely conceived in Gramscian terms, have

emerged as an important convergence of cul-

tural and cultural-historical geographical scho-

larship, particularly around cultures of nature

and technology, the objects of which have been

conceived as both malleable and dynamic, and

as powerful mediators in their own right. But

understanding these requires that we investigate

how different kinds of work are formative in the

production of nature at particular historical and

geographical conjunctures, along with the var-

ied terrains on which hegemony may be

achieved through productions of nature and

space (Ekers and Loftus, 2013; see also Wain-

wright, 2005).

Among the different kinds of concrete labor

that have been formative in nature’s production,

cultural-historical geographers have gravitated

in particular to the scientific and intellectual,

but nonetheless corporeal work of producing

(or co-producing) nature and naturalized con-

structions of race, engaging in a range of predo-

minantly archival research projects in the

history and geography of recent science. This

work is featured in the next section, which

explores how geographers have understood the

practices of scientists, medical researchers,

folklorists, and others engaged in the work of

692 Progress in Human Geography 38(5)



producing new objects of nature, culture, health,

and the human body. The research suggests that

science and other modern forms of expertise

perform a peculiar kind of cultural work in the

production of nature, carving out and occupying

positions of privileged ontological actors. Yet,

while the stamp of the expert may provide spe-

cial authority over matters of nature, it is by no

means exclusive. In the following section, I note

recent efforts to reconceptualize broad topologi-

cal categories of space, surface, and ‘land’

around similarly generative cultures of knowl-

edge and innovation, reflecting different but

related ontological concerns for engaging pro-

ductive ‘cultures of nature and technology’ in

their geographical manifestations.

II Cultural cold wars

A number of recent studies of laboratory, clini-

cal, and survey work, situated in a variety of

spaces and environments ‘rigged up’ as

‘enhanced epistemological spaces’ (Kirsch,

2011; Knorr-Cetina, 1992), have also taken seri-

ously the implications of scientific practices

(including those of the human and social

sciences) as elite ontological work, which is

organized not only around the production of

knowledge about nature but is also productive

of nature in the world; they are, in a variety of

ways, formative of the objects they contend to

represent. The workers on these ontological

assembly lines are, for some researchers, not

limited to sentient scientists and technicians.

Greenhough (2012a; see also 2012b), for exam-

ple, looking at the ‘mingling’ of species at the

Common Cold Unit (CCU) in Salisbury, UK,

depicts a world wherein the idiosyncratic

properties of cold viruses themselves played

key roles in shaping laboratory spaces and

inter-species relations. Drawing on the co-

evolutionary perspectives of Donna Haraway

and Nigel Clark, the sets of relations engen-

dered between humans and viruses are the chief

concern of Greenhough’s study, as scientists

sought to better understand, through an unusual

clinical research model, how viruses cause

colds. At the CCU, some 20,000 volunteers

were recruited between 1946 and 1990 on the

promise of ten days’ free holiday and travel

expenses (at a cost, nonetheless, of bodily host-

ing the laboratory’s pet cold virus, entailed by

enrollment in the research program). The work

required a host of spatial strategies among proj-

ect scientists for dealing with a ‘fussy’ artificial

virus that often struggled to compete with more

robust ‘wild’ strains entering the CCU in volun-

teers’ bodies, such as an initial quarantine

period for volunteers. In exploring how scien-

tists learned to grow viruses in the culture of liv-

ing tissues, Greenhough also recovers the use of

culture as a verb from laboratory work – that is,

culturing, the growing of living forms – to

express more generally the work of ‘culturing

relations’ (2012a: 294) as a kind of productive

process. Hence, for Greenhough (p. 294), it was

not only cutting-edge strains of virus but also

human-virus relations that required culturing

at the CCU, as researchers ‘created a unique

local environment where human volunteers and

cold viruses learned to accommodate each

other’.

As a response to the question (after Clark,

2011) of how species might live together better,

the CCU thus makes for illustrative case setting,

for viruses, Greenhough reminds us, are sources

of immunity as well as illness; they have helped

to shape the human species; they are internal to

us. Human associations with the cold virus, tak-

ing ‘form’ in the ‘seeping, dribbling and spray-

ing of bodily fluids’, in this sense offer

Greenhough (2012a: 291) lessons of embodied

communication in a porous, mutually consti-

tuted biological universe, a world wherein cul-

ture and culturing describe particular forms of

productivity in inter-species relations.

Another site for the reconfiguration of

human-nature-technology relations is consid-

ered in Bauch’s (2011) study of the Battle Creek

(Michigan) Sanitarium during the 1890s, not

Kirsch 693



coincidentally the ‘back story’ for the rise of the

Kellogg’s cereal corporation. Bauch’s research

utilizes an ‘object-oriented’ perspective to high-

light the relations between human bodies and

the worlds they inhabit, taking on the compul-

sion with digestion that was at the center of

treatment regimes at Battle Creek to explore the

‘profound indefiniteness of the body’s border’

(p. 212). For thousands visiting the Sanitarium,

the instigation of a bland fruit-and-grain-based

diet, under the direction of Dr. John Kellogg,

was the entry point for the production of health

along modern, scientific, and increasingly com-

moditized lines. Bauch shows how the proper

functioning of patients’ digestive systems was

made to turn on geographically extensive, bio-

technological processes of production and cir-

culation, including the operation of rolling

machines for making cereal flakes (‘pre-digest-

ing’ grains outside the stomach), regimented

defecation schedules and frequent colonics, thus

rendering the digestive system as a spatialized

and technicized hybrid object. Taking seriously

the materiality of ideas, Bauch traces the partic-

ular ‘geography of digestion’ developed at Bat-

tle Creek to emerging concepts of the modern

stomach, focused on sanitation, efficiency, and

calculation, arising with the new quantitative

nutritional science and extrapolations from

germ theory. For Kellogg, the digestive system

was, after the skin, ‘the part of the body that

touched the world most’, but, to prevent autoin-

toxication, that interaction was to be closely

regulated (p. 214). Consequently:

constant circulation of material in and out of the

body – the body’s economy, so to speak – was

Kellogg’s way of guaranteeing that food con-

sumption maximized the necessary, beneficial

aspects of nutrient absorption, but minimized the

time bodies were actually in contact with food,

something from the dirty, bacteria ridden, outside

world. (Bauch, 2011: 214)

The modernization of digestion, Bauch illus-

trates, thus depended on an extensive infra-

structure for production, experimentation,

and analysis, recasting the relations among

bodies, food and environments at a moment

when agricultural production in the USA was

becoming increasingly mechanized and

industrialized.

While both Bauch and Greenhough, in the

context of elucidating these particular, highly

structured environments for the production of

nature, culture, health, and illness, attempt to

displace human agency in distinctive ways,

these aims may be undermined in a sense by the

depth of their own historical, species-oriented

scholarship – that is, by the stories of ‘world-

making’ people that they tell, even if the human

species-being is now seen as co-producer. And a

co-production. What is also common to both

studies is a sense of the relevance of such sites

to questions of what it means to be human in a

complexly mediated social and natural exis-

tence, and a sense that we can indeed speak to

such big questions through excavation of these

recent but largely forgotten research programs

and practices. Others, meanwhile, have fol-

lowed the work of scientists and other experts

into more explicitly human and cultural terrain.

Farish (2013) investigates a very different

model for relating humans to the natural envi-

ronment in a study of the Arctic Aeromedical

Laboratory (AAL) in 1950s Alaska, where US

Armed Forces were engaged in a quasi-

scientific ‘cold war’ of their own in the effort

to reimagine Alaska as both laboratory and field

site for learning about human capacities in hos-

tile, Arctic environments. There, premised on a

blunt ‘conflation of racial and environmental

difference’, military scientists and medical

researchers enrolled Alaskan natives in experi-

ments geared toward understanding how their

bodies functioned in the Arctic cold, a project

which reflected the elevated strategic position

of the Arctic in the burgeoning geopolitical Cold

War (Farish, 2013: 7; see also Catungal et al.,

2012; Farish, 2010). Inuit bodies, though belong-

ing to what was seen by project scientists as a




degenerate indigenous culture, were believed to

contain clues (such as the capacity to produce

body heat) that might aid US military efforts in

cold regions more generally. Hence, Inuit were

studied both in their ‘natural habitats’ and also

recruited for experiments in the AAL’s ‘cold

chamber’ in Fairbanks (among other tests) –

trials that were measured against white experi-

mental control groups – as AAL researchers

engaged in what Farish describes as a stunning

production of naturalized racial difference, even

as their findings showed little evidence of actual

difference besides subjects’ abilities to endure

extreme temperatures based on acquired skills

and well-adapted diet and clothing. The issue, for

Farish, is not just the flawed science, then, but to

understand more specifically how AAL pro-

grams had been productive of the Arctic that they

claimed to represent:

The vision of the Arctic produced at the labora-

tory . . . was premised on removing the bodies of

both military researchers and indigenous subjects

from the frame: one group situated behind a veneer

of dispassionate science, the other subsumed into a

nature under attack. (Farish, 2013: 29)

MacDonald’s (2011) study – in which Cold

War geostrategic dynamics recast the signifi-

cance of northern places and regions once

considered marginal, detailing the work of

government-sponsored research projects directed

at understanding, perhaps even recovering, the

people inhabiting them – is in some ways

strikingly similar. In following the work of

geographers, archaeologists, and folklorists in

Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a space transformed

during the 1950s into a testing range for Britain’s

newly purchased guided missile system, we see

that the co-constitution of science and region

here expressed as a ‘generative creation of social

life’, as MacDonald (2011: 331) puts it, was car-

ried out ‘under the guise of its rescue or recov-

ery’. Approaching the study as a comparative

history of fieldwork, MacDonald surveys the

work of these three conservative sciences of

culture, each grappling nostalgically with the

demise of traditional Gaelic culture in the Uists

that was expected to result inevitably from the

encounter with ‘rockets and rock & roll’ in island

settings that were seen as last bastions of tradi-

tional culture.3 Each discipline, while effectively

translating national imperatives for cultural

engagement into funded field research programs,

also shared an ‘urgent need to stem a cultural loss

through the processes and technologies of

recording’ (p. 312), among a host of related field

research practices. MacDonald draws on James

Clifford’s notion (and withering critique) of the

‘salvage paradigm’ in anthropology and ethnol-

ogy, in which the desire to rescue the authentic

from destructive historical changes reflects a

sense of loss but also, in the task of recording,

‘specifies a redemptive action’ (p. 313), casting

academic researchers in heroic roles as special-

ists capable of resurrecting a fractured whole-

ness, or at least preserving it for posterity. But

while anthropologists have emphasized how ‘sal-

vage’ researchers, in these acts of rescue, end up

destroying the objects of their study, sometimes

literally, MacDonald, like Farish, emphasizes the

generative dimensions of scientific practices, and

of fieldworkers who ‘bring into being the differ-

ent versions of social life that they purport to

describe’ (p. 313). The results of the work,

not surprisingly, were full of paradoxes, from fra-

gile models of culture and tradition archived in

boxes – and in the landscape itself – to the find-

ings of Glasgow University’s Crofting Survey,

carried out by a team of geographers, which

documented a form of small-scale tenant farming

which ‘was itself a modern creation, the outcome

of earlier economically rationalist transforma-

tions that had obliterated premodern ways of life’

in the outer isles (pp. 317–318), but was now

recorded as a baseline for measuring islanders’

encounter with modernity. MacDonald identifies

across the projects a tendency to defer analytical

judgment, to record and preserve the objects of

culture ‘in fact if not in form’ (p. 315), studies

which, in the case of the Crofting Survey, would

Kirsch 695



scarcely arrive in the published literature. The

question ‘how to rescue Gaelic culture?’ for

MacDonald is thus a distinctively modern one,

informing who we are by lamenting what we

have lost. Examining how these social scientists

engaged in ‘Britain’s cultural Cold War’ ought

also to hit close to home for many contemporary

geographers, for it compels us to reflect on the

nature of our own ‘salvage work’ in different

contexts.

III Surfaces, ‘lands’, and naturesof no nature

Whether it is a symptom of the return of Nature

or just another moment in nature’s long cultural

career, key elements of nature and physical

space have been ambitiously reconceived lately

and appropriated in efforts to reconstruct spatial

imaginaries around the Earth’s fundamental

surface elements – lands, continents, mountains,

oceans, islands, atmospheres. This rethinking of

basic geographical categories is imaginatively

reflected in a recent theme issue of Environment

and Planning A (Forsyth et al., 2013a) on the

question ‘What are surfaces?’, in which the edi-

tors counter deep-seated rhetorical biases valu-

ing depth over surfaces, reflected in calls to

‘scratch beneath the surface’ and see ‘beyond

surface appearances’ to consider instead:

what surfaces actually are. What kind of ontologi-

cal status are surfaces afforded? How do surfaces

function as edges and interfaces delimiting the

interiors and exteriors of spaces and materials,

or as zones of exchange between two substances,

bodies or areas? How do we sense or apprehend

surfaces?’ (Forsyth et al., 2013b: 1013)

Pushing the surface to the ‘center’ of spatial

ontology, the editors consciously recall Geogra-

phy’s enduring identities with the humanistic,

chorological, and landscape studies traditions

as a science of the Earth’s surface, but contend

that how surfaces matter has lately been

seriously underrated by geographers. What are

the implications of a new ontology of surfaces?

It is a rather broad category to think with, it

must be said, the ‘planar phenomenon associ-

ated with edges and limits of things, whether

solid, liquid or other material’ (Forsyth et al.,

2013b: 1013), but an undeniably elegant one.

Perhaps most concretely, as spaces of exchange

and interface surfaces are highlighted as genera-

tive – if not necessarily stable – locations:

Surfaces and interfaces can be productive, enli-

vening, and enchanting spaces, where diverse

materialities meet to produce physical and aes-

thetic mixtures, fluidities, turbulence, and move-

ment; whether we are talking about the meeting

of paint and canvas, sea water and air, rubber and

tarmac, ink and paper, or concrete and soil. (For-

syth et al., 2013b: 1017)

The papers in the volume highlight the work that

goes into shaping, producing, and apprehending

surfaces, including, among others: two papers

tracing different entanglements of science and

art, presence and absence, and violence and play,

in the work of wartime camoufleurs (Forsyth,

2013; Robinson, 2013); another, urging readers

to think geographically through the placenta,

exploring bodily surfaces which, like the diges-

tive tracts of Battle Creek described above, do

not begin and end with the skin (Colls and

Fannin, 2013); and Martin’s (2013) vivid

study, to which I return below, of the intermo-

dal shipping container as a technology of stan-

dardization designed to facilitate the smooth

integration of land and sea. Collectively, while

closely attending to the connections among

knowledge, materials, and visuality, the papers

also work to demystify surface aesthetics (For-

syth et al., 2013b), perhaps getting ‘beneath the

surface’ a bit after all.

Forsyth’s paper closely reflects this approach,

examining the work of camoufleurs, drawn into

the military project from an array of backgrounds,

in combining zoological knowledge, cubist art,

and military optics into effective technologies




of camouflage, ‘mangled’ together (after Picker-

ing) as a ‘surface of intermingling elements’ in

efforts to conceal British ships at sea in the First

World War, and then to ‘help the British military

disappear into the sand’ in the Desert War during

the Second World War under conditions of

German-controlled airspace (Forsyth, 2013:

1043, 1046). New camouflaging technologies,

Forsyth argues, required the construction of new

viewer-subjects with skills linking aerial photo-

graphy, surface observation, and warfare, and her

paper explores some of the violent implications of

the world viewed-from-above through the design

of deceptive surfaces below. The challenge of

erasing revealing patterns of military presence

in the desert, against a landscape of shifting sands

(a surface which exposed stable objects), pro-

vides the key example, the impetus for the war-

time innovation of new camouflaging

techniques which focused on the active refashion-

ing of landscape. Recognizing that ‘the desert was

an environment ripe for the staging of deception’

(p. 1047), camoufleurs turned to decoys and trick-

ery, and in doing so raised ‘the possibility of an

aggressive, ambushing use of camouflage as part

of the plan of battle . . . In this new offensive role

the camoufleurs sought to save some lives by

destroying others’. Hence, in the transformation

of camouflage into an ‘unsettling offensive tech-

nology’, the interface of surfaces reflects both

productive and destructive elements, revealing

for Forsyth (pp. 1049–1050) how ‘humans and

nonhumans, science, art and militarism, geogra-

phy of the desert and development of aggressive

camouflage become knotted together in a process

of mutual transformation’.

Object-oriented approaches have also been

utilized as a means for investigating surface

integration. For Martin (2013: 1029), in turning

to one of the world’s most impactful objects, the

intermodal shipping container, this implies

close attention to materiality of the boxes them-

selves, including key design developments such

as universal corner fittings, invented ‘so that

various means of lifting containers can also be

standardized across road, rail, and sea’, along

with the legal and political agreements which

make the integration of trading surfaces possi-

ble. Compatibility must be produced. The

object-oriented approach is particularly effec-

tive in conceptualizing surface integration as a

logistical achievement, though Martin (p.

1023) is careful to distinguish (unfortunate that

it is necessary!) that ‘the standardized shipping

container did not produce contemporary capital-

ism, it is an intrinsic mechanism of it’. Martin’s

tracing of the invention story of the intermodal

shipping container indeed offers a fine study not

just of a box, or of a single entrepreneur, but also

of capital’s creative power in posing its crises as

obstacles to be overcome, and problems to be

solved, in the integration of shipping, trucking,

and rail technologies and transport surfaces. But

Martin’s paper also suggests that we cannot

understand the production of compatibility, and

annihilation of differences that make surface

integration possible, without also understanding

the work that material objects and technologies

do in holding together complex arrangements

of power and distributed competencies, often

realizing complex relationships in relatively sim-

ple physical forms.

‘The insubstantial pageant: Producing an

untoward land’ is Thrift’s (2012) variously sug-

gestive and frustrating contribution to related

questions about culturing, cultivation, and

cultural work, based on the 2011 Cultural Geo-

graphies lecture in Seattle. Thrift’s concern is

the emerging capitalist economy – in particular

its ‘leading edges’ – which are characterized by

new forms of production that are both cultural

and industrial, manifest spatially in a massive

‘expressive infrastructure’ for doing the com-

municative work to ‘continually prepare the

ground by setting up new encounters’ (Thrift,

2012: 150). Thrift describes spaces which ‘need

to be constructed in such a way that everyone

can keep an eye on everyone else, and so pick

up cues, signals, insights, and experiences and

identify the moments when a creative rush takes

Kirsch 697



place’. For Thrift, after Massumi, these changes

foretell the construction of a new ‘super-

charged’ naturalism of ideas and affects reflect-

ing a new, insubstantial factor of production

that resembles ‘land’ as:

one of the classical factors of production, the

source of wealth in all early societies because of

the rents that arose from it as the payment for land

use and the received income of a land owner . . .Land can be continually re-used because of the

rise of arts of cultivation. (Thrift, 2012: 154)

Hence it is in a classical understanding of land’s

continual re-use as a source of surplus, and from

the perspective of technology – the rising arts of

cultivation which must find new ways to extract

surplus – that the land metaphor has currency,

for Thrift; in fact, the untoward land should

not be identified in any way with ‘debased’

contemporary understandings of environment

(bizarrely, though, the romantic movement to

re-enchant science in Germany during the late

19th and early 20th centuries is claimed as an

intellectual precursor4). Thrift’s ‘land’ is urban

but otherwise has no fixed address or ‘territory

of its own. It is rather a proto-territory in which

space is continually being temporally captured

for specific purposes’ (pp. 154–155). It is a

space seemingly untethered to the Earth’s sur-

face (a fantasy of freedom from the Earth’s sur-

face), marking for Thrift (p. 143) ‘the formation

of a continuously migratory land . . . land that

can run and run, and in doing so act as a new

source of value as it is tenanted and tilled’. What

matters ultimately, what is produced from this

‘re-interpretation of what counts as land’, Thrift

argues, is the unfettered production of ‘inven-

tion power’ and ‘world making’, paving the

way, ultimately, for a new round of accelerated

productivity and capitalist profitability that will

derive from this ‘second industrial revolution’,

a revolution in making not just people but ‘envir-

onments’ more productive.

Thrift’s case is not always compelling. It

does turn interestingly, however, on an analysis

of changes in the commodity form in which

the commodity, nestling ever deeper into the

psycho-social fabric, ‘becomes a kind of

tenancy’ (p. 143), characterized by limited time

signatures and non-absolute spatiotemporal

arrangements such as the rental contract, lease,

and subscription. The commodity form, he

argues, is increasingly a means of producing

additional value (‘ground rent’) which requires

‘buy-in’. Thrift paints an evocative picture of

the commodity’s changing tendencies, yet his

conceptualization of the spatial and (proto-)

environmental corollaries of these develop-

ments through an ‘environmental stance’ that

excludes conventional categories of nature and

environments, except perhaps as sources for

electricity and pop-up spaces, is both proble-

matic and conceptually limiting, and sometimes

even seems to indicate the existence of a parallel

universe. Indeed, how can the rental agreement,

the lease – or, to add another prominent rental

deal, indentured servitude – possibly be consid-

ered a break from past arrangements in the long

history of capitalism? Only, it seems, if we are

to exclude our material spaces and bodies from

the domains of capital’s leading edges, and

accept the replacement of the fixed environment

(in which most of us are still compelled to live)

by insubstantial proto-environments as a fait

accompli. In this sense, Thrift’s world resem-

bles the ‘consensual hallucination’ of cyber-

space imagined in original cyberpunk novelist

William Gibson’s (1983) Neuromancer, a cul-

tural trope of space and connectivity which has,

like the network topology more favored among

academics, in many ways been realized. But

while, for Gibson, this world of new rules and

capabilities, virtual relations, and budding arti-

ficial intelligences had to be understood, at least

in part, through the portal of the fractured mate-

rial world in which it emerged, including the

ultimate tension, for the protagonist Case, of

imprisonment in the ‘meat’ of one’s body, the

makers of Thrift’s ‘zones of continual emer-

gence’ appear to encounter no such constraints.




Instead, Thrift appropriates for his terraformed

world a holistic language of nature, land, envi-

ronment, and atmosphere, albeit a nature of no

nature,5 adding a whiff of nature’s moral legiti-

macy, or perhaps attempting to revive it, in a

celebration of innovation, accelerated produc-

tivity, and capital’s creative capacities.6

While sci-fi provides a fitting parallel to some

of Thrift’s observations, for Secor (2013), in a

closely argued essay exploring visions of the

topological city in the films The Adjustment

Bureau, Midnight in Paris, and Inception, cine-

matic fictions are used as a springboard for

rethinking the city as it is imagined in our most

popular cultural form, featuring doors opening

onto non-contiguous spaces, fantastic time-

space convergences, and landscapes of the psy-

che. Secor (2013) asks:

What are we to make of these cinematic urban

experiences? Do they speak about what we want

but fail to get from our stubbornly fixed cities, our

cities that don’t seem to consent to the power of

our desires, cities that don’t bend to our minds,

cities that splay their iconic sites out over unre-

lenting distances, cities that refuse to yield up to

our fantasies or to allow us passage into their stor-

ied worlds and bygone eras? Or are these films not

only fantastic but also symptomatic of how we do,

in fact, experience the urban when folded both

spatially and temporally? (Secor, 2013: 431)

Secor keeps these questions alive throughout;

they are difficult ones to resolve. While The

Adjustment Bureau reads as a ‘fantasy of topo-

logical power’, Midnight in Paris, Woody

Allen’s (2011) story of different literary epochs

intertwined in the spaces of the city, shows us

instead the ‘incommensurability of our fanta-

sies, the gap between irreconcilable views’ that

constitute the ‘real city’ (p. 439). Ultimately, for

Secor, in what may be a singularly lucid expli-

cation of Lacanian topology, it is the relations

between subjects and the spaces of everyday

life, accentuating the human interiorizing of

exteriors and exteriorizing of human interiors,

that are so powerfully depicted in these films,

and in the conceptualization of surfaces that are

not easily divided into categories of real or

imagined.

IV Conclusion

If technology, as Marx argued, still ‘discloses’

our ‘mode of dealing with Nature’, then, in a cli-

mate in which views of nature vacillate from

that of nature as a social product to precisely

that which is beyond human production or

control, what do our many different ‘natures’

and constructions of ‘the natural’ disclose – do

they, like technology for Marx, open to ques-

tions on the formation of our social relations?

In recent cultural geographic research, Marx’s

analytical pronouncement has in some ways

been reversed: nature, as a social, material, and

imaginative product, as a set of biophysical

forces, even in revived classical notions of ‘the

natural’, now discloses our modes of dealing

with technology. In its constructed and unrecon-

structed forms, nature has become a lens onto

our technologies, our ways of knowing, and,

to tread onto that slippery term, our ‘cultures’,

a category which I have deployed broadly to

include the making and communication of

meaning in the world and about the world,7 and

the products of that work, along with the return

of generative notions of culture, culturing, and

cultivation as particular forms of productivity,

born in the laboratory and the fields, that I have

emphasized in this review.

In seeking to explore scientific and intellec-

tual work that is formative in our complex and

contested constructions of the natural (and

socionatural) world, the ‘ontologically privi-

leged’ work of scientists and experts has been

highlighted alongside the imperfect grasp on

the world, so effectively revealed in closely

contextualized, historical studies, under which

each labored. But this work can also be equated

with a range of different actors and institutions

– for example, in law, medicine, education,

Kirsch 699



governance, and activism – which all contrib-

ute, in distinctive ways, in the ‘wars of posi-

tion’ that drive nature’s cultural politics. The

construction of new, topological spatial ima-

ginaries around surfaces, objects, and ‘lands’

reflects more explicit efforts to ‘think space

differently’ through broad elemental, some-

times speculative, categories. Here too, how-

ever, the formative nature of specific kinds of

work in the production and integration of sur-

faces is emphasized, shedding light on genera-

tive cultures of nature and innovation as forms

of destruction as well as production. Or, to fol-

low Gramsci’s invective (after Ekers and Lof-

tus, 2013), we can ask how relations of power

are realized through the construction and inte-

gration (or disintegration) of surfaces, as

through specific social and cultural formations

of nature and space. Questions of technology,

recent studies suggest, are never far removed

from the matters of nature and culture, in fact

and in form, and technology, of all ‘things’,

still has much to disclose in terms of its cultural

geographies.

Notes

1. Hence, for Braun (forthcoming), a related contrast is

also instructive, between ‘Inhuman Nature – which

starts from an excessive and exuberant nature figured

as the generous yet volatile ‘‘ground’’ on which human

life unfolds – and Loftus’s Everyday Environmental-

ism [2012]– which begins with the question of our

concrete activity (labor) as that which shapes our

encounters with the non-human – expose the limits

and weaknesses of the other. Where the former strug-

gles to grasp the socially differentiated experience of

the non-human world in politically meaningful ways,

the latter struggles to understand the non-human world

as existing beyond, beneath or before our world-

making efforts.’

2. The move toward close study of contextualized

social and cultural practices in the production of

nature is not, however, one taken up by many

authors in the collection Gramsci: Space, Nature,

Politics (Ekers et al., 2013), whose contributions, for

the most part, are philosophical and conceptual in

scope rather than contextualized accounts of strug-

gles over nature or the production of nature (but see

Gidwani and Paudel, 2013; Karriem, 2013).

3. The significance of insular morphologies, revolving

around notions of isolation, and their appropriation in

constructions of space, inter-species relations, and

scientific knowledges, are also examined by DeLough-

rey (2013) in the context of US nuclear colonialism in

Micronesia, part of a special issue in Cultural

Geographies on the ‘islanding of cultural geographies’

(Baldacchino and Clark, 2013).

4. On the reactionary modernist ideologies of re-

enchantment in German romantic science, engineering,

and political thought which evolved from such views,

however, see Herf (1984).

5. I adapt this phrase from Traweek’s (1988: 162) classic

ethnography of high-energy physicists in Japan and

California, of whom, she observed, many lived in ‘an

extreme culture of objectivity: a culture of no culture,

which longs passionately for a world without loose

ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or

other sources of disorder – for a world outside human

space and time’.

6. If Thrift (2012) is right about changes (or key emerging

trends) in the commodity form, then, at a moment when

futures of air, water, brownfields, and greenspaces,

even the expected savings from different kinds of light

bulbs (Thoyre, 2013), are all being commoditized in

unprecedented ways, Thrift’s distancing from physical

environments, ‘nature’, and territorializing practices is

surely a missed opportunity to find connections

between the changing commodity form and all manner

of cultural and environmental practices, from, for

example, the emerging ‘expressive infrastructures’ of

value within state regulatory agencies (see Robertson

and Wainwright, 2013) to the rise of the hired garden

in geographies of distinctly raced and classed ‘alterna-

tive food practices’ in urban life (see Naylor, 2012).

7. These cultural processes of meaning-making about

nature, of course, also have deeply material implica-

tions in the production of spaces and landscapes, as illu-

strated in Wilson’s (1991) brilliant The Culture of

Nature, the title of which I have appropriated here.

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