Progress report

Cultural geography II: Cultures

of nature (and technology)

Progress in Human Geography

2014, Vol. 38(5) 691702
The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132513516913
phg.sagepub.com

Scott Kirsch
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Abstract
Recent cultural geographic research, located at a variety of settings (laboratory, clinic, battlefield, container
port), has emphasized cultures 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 different ways what it means to be formative in the production of nature, and I discuss the implications of recent
efforts to rethink culture as a form of productivity. Some of this formative cultural work is scientific and
intellectual, 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 cultural
work 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 for
engaging with culture, culturing, and cultivation as productive processes. I argue that questions of
technology remain inseparably tied to constructions of nature, and that technology still has much to disclose
in terms of its cultural geographies.
Keywords
cultural 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 particular, 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 cultural 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 knowledges, and new frontiers for primitive accumulation. Here, I expand the discussion of
cultures 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: kirsch@email.unc.edu

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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 cultures of technology, as the framings, observations, 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 surprisingly, been marked by contradictions. While
Clarks (2011) Inhuman Nature, to which Castree was responding, portrays the vulnerability
of the human species within a volatile, indifferent but nonetheless bountiful natural world, the
power of which humanity continues to hubristically underestimate, others have taken up a
renewed emphasis on natures social production
in an effort to revitalize Smiths (1984) once
provocative concept in an age wherein the
impossibility of distinguishing nature and
society would appear to have been confirmed (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 thesis 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 Gramscis historicism

as a basis for extending research to the potentially wide-ranging sites of natures 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, intellectual, scientific, manufacturing) that are formative 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 suggest that generative models of culture, though
rarely conceived in Gramscian terms, have
emerged as an important convergence of cultural and cultural-historical geographical scholarship, 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 varied terrains on which hegemony may be
achieved through productions of nature and
space (Ekers and Loftus, 2013; see also Wainwright, 2005).
Among the different kinds of concrete labor
that have been formative in natures 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 constructions of race, engaging in a range of predominantly 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

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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 special authority over matters of nature, it is by no
means exclusive. In the following section, I note
recent efforts to reconceptualize broad topological categories of space, surface, and land
around similarly generative cultures of knowledge and innovation, reflecting different but
related ontological concerns for engaging productive cultures of nature and technology in
their geographical manifestations.

II Cultural cold wars

A number of recent studies of laboratory, clinical, 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 seriously 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 example, 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 coevolutionary perspectives of Donna Haraway
and Nigel Clark, the sets of relations engendered between humans and viruses are the chief
concern of Greenhoughs 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 hosting the laboratorys pet cold virus, entailed by
enrollment in the research program). The work
required a host of spatial strategies among project scientists for dealing with a fussy artificial
virus that often struggled to compete with more
robust wild strains entering the CCU in volunteers bodies, such as an initial quarantine
period for volunteers. In exploring how scientists learned to grow viruses in the culture of living 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, taking form in the seeping, dribbling and spraying of bodily fluids, in this sense offer
Greenhough (2012a: 291) lessons of embodied
communication in a porous, mutually constituted biological universe, a world wherein culture and culturing describe particular forms of
productivity in inter-species relations.
Another site for the reconfiguration of
human-nature-technology relations is considered in Bauchs (2011) study of the Battle Creek
(Michigan) Sanitarium during the 1890s, not

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coincidentally the back story for the rise of the

Kelloggs cereal corporation. Bauchs research
utilizes an object-oriented perspective to highlight the relations between human bodies and
the worlds they inhabit, taking on the compulsion with digestion that was at the center of
treatment regimes at Battle Creek to explore the
profound indefiniteness of the bodys 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 commoditized lines. Bauch shows how the proper
functioning of patients digestive systems was
made to turn on geographically extensive, biotechnological processes of production and circulation, including the operation of rolling
machines for making cereal flakes (pre-digesting 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 particular geography of digestion developed at Battle 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 autointoxication, that interaction was to be closely
regulated (p. 214). Consequently:
constant circulation of material in and out of the
body the bodys economy, so to speak was
Kelloggs way of guaranteeing that food consumption 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 illustrates, 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 worldmaking 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 existence, 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 followed 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 environment in a study of the Arctic Aeromedical
Laboratory (AAL) in 1950s Alaska, where US
Armed Forces were engaged in a quasiscientific cold war of their own in the effort
to reimagine Alaska as both laboratory and field
site for learning about human capacities in hostile, Arctic environments. There, premised on a
blunt conflation of racial and environmental
difference, military scientists and medical
researchers enrolled Alaskan natives in experiments 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 belonging to what was seen by project scientists as a

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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 AALs cold
chamber in Fairbanks (among other tests)
trials that were measured against white experimental 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 programs had been productive of the Arctic that they
claimed to represent:
The vision of the Arctic produced at the laboratory . . . 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)

MacDonalds (2011) study in which Cold

War geostrategic dynamics recast the significance 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
Scotlands Outer Hebrides, a space transformed
during the 1950s into a testing range for Britains
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 carried out under the guise of its rescue or recovery. 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 traditional 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
Cliffords notion (and withering critique) of the
salvage paradigm in anthropology and ethnology, 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 specialists capable of resurrecting a fractured wholeness, or at least preserving it for posterity. But
while anthropologists have emphasized how salvage 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 different versions of social life that they purport to
describe (p. 313). The results of the work,
not surprisingly, were full of paradoxes, from fragile models of culture and tradition archived in
boxes and in the landscape itself to the findings of Glasgow Universitys 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 transformations that had obliterated premodern ways of life
in the outer isles (pp. 317318), 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

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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 Britains 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 natures

of no nature
Whether it is a symptom of the return of Nature
or just another moment in natures 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 Earths 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 editors counter deep-seated rhetorical biases valuing 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 ontological 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 Geographys enduring identities with the humanistic,
chorological, and landscape studies traditions
as a science of the Earths 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 associated 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 generative if not necessarily stable locations:
Surfaces and interfaces can be productive, enlivening, and enchanting spaces, where diverse
materialities meet to produce physical and aesthetic mixtures, fluidities, turbulence, and movement; 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. (Forsyth 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 digestive tracts of Battle Creek described above, do
not begin and end with the skin (Colls and
Fannin, 2013); and Martins (2013) vivid
study, to which I return below, of the intermodal shipping container as a technology of standardization 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 (Forsyth et al., 2013b), perhaps getting beneath the
surface a bit after all.
Forsyths 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

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of camouflage, mangled together (after Pickering) 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 photography, 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), provides the key example, the impetus for the wartime innovation of new camouflaging
techniques which focused on the active refashioning of landscape. Recognizing that the desert was
an environment ripe for the staging of deception
(p. 1047), camoufleurs turned to decoys and trickery, 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 technology, the interface of surfaces reflects both
productive and destructive elements, revealing
for Forsyth (pp. 10491050) how humans and
nonhumans, science, art and militarism, geography 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 worlds most impactful objects, the
intermodal shipping container, this implies
close attention to materiality of the boxes themselves, 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 possible. Compatibility must be produced. The
object-oriented approach is particularly effective 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 capitalism, it is an intrinsic mechanism of it. Martins
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 capitals 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
Martins 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 simple physical forms.
The insubstantial pageant: Producing an
untoward land is Thrifts (2012) variously suggestive and frustrating contribution to related
questions about culturing, cultivation, and
cultural work, based on the 2011 Cultural Geographies lecture in Seattle. Thrifts 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 communicative 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

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place. For Thrift, after Massumi, these changes

foretell the construction of a new supercharged naturalism of ideas and affects reflecting 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 lands

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). Thrifts 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. 154155). It is a
space seemingly untethered to the Earths surface (a fantasy of freedom from the Earths surface), 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 invention 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 environments more productive.
Thrifts 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 commoditys changing tendencies, yet his
conceptualization of the spatial and (proto-)
environmental corollaries of these developments through an environmental stance that
excludes conventional categories of nature and
environments, except perhaps as sources for
electricity and pop-up spaces, is both problematic 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 considered 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 capitals 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, Thrifts world resembles the consensual hallucination of cyberspace imagined in original cyberpunk novelist
William Gibsons (1983) Neuromancer, a cultural 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 artificial intelligences had to be understood, at least
in part, through the portal of the fractured material world in which it emerged, including the
ultimate tension, for the protagonist Case, of
imprisonment in the meat of ones body, the
makers of Thrifts zones of continual emergence appear to encounter no such constraints.

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Instead, Thrift appropriates for his terraformed

world a holistic language of nature, land, environment, and atmosphere, albeit a nature of no
nature,5 adding a whiff of natures moral legitimacy, or perhaps attempting to revive it, in a
celebration of innovation, accelerated productivity, and capitals creative capacities.6
While sci-fi provides a fitting parallel to some
of Thrifts 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, cinematic 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 timespace convergences, and landscapes of the psyche. 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 dont seem to consent to the power of
our desires, cities that dont bend to our minds,
cities that splay their iconic sites out over unrelenting distances, cities that refuse to yield up to
our fantasies or to allow us passage into their storied 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 topological power, Midnight in Paris, Woody
Allens (2011) story of different literary epochs
intertwined in the spaces of the city, shows us
instead the incommensurability of our fantasies, the gap between irreconcilable views that
constitute the real city (p. 439). Ultimately, for
Secor, in what may be a singularly lucid explication 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 climate 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 questions on the formation of our social relations?
In recent cultural geographic research, Marxs
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 unreconstructed 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 intellectual work that is formative in our complex and
contested constructions of the natural (and
socionatural) world, the ontologically privileged 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,

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governance, and activism which all contribute, in distinctive ways, in the wars of position that drive natures cultural politics. The
construction of new, topological spatial imaginaries around surfaces, objects, and lands
reflects more explicit efforts to think space
differently through broad elemental, sometimes speculative, categories. Here too, however, the formative nature of specific kinds of
work in the production and integration of surfaces is emphasized, shedding light on generative cultures of nature and innovation as forms
of destruction as well as production. Or, to follow Gramscis invective (after Ekers and Loftus, 2013), we can ask how relations of power
are realized through the construction and integration (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.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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 Loftuss Everyday Environmentalism [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 struggles 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 worldmaking 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

7.

scope rather than contextualized accounts of struggles over nature or the production of nature (but see
Gidwani and Paudel, 2013; Karriem, 2013).
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 DeLoughrey (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).
On the reactionary modernist ideologies of reenchantment in German romantic science, engineering,
and political thought which evolved from such views,
however, see Herf (1984).
I adapt this phrase from Traweeks (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.
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, Thrifts 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 alternative food practices in urban life (see Naylor, 2012).
These cultural processes of meaning-making about
nature, of course, also have deeply material implications in the production of spaces and landscapes, as illustrated in Wilsons (1991) brilliant The Culture of
Nature, the title of which I have appropriated here.

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