Cultural Geography

the mediating moment that glues all the others

together. Somewhat differently, short of environ-

mental discourses emerging sui generis, both

Bridge and Escobar imply that they are func-

tional to capital. This argument takes us back,

ironically, to those rather simplistic motifs of

determinism and determination that I considered

near the start of this chapter. For it is otherwise

difficult to explain where environmental dis-

courses come from and to what end they exist.

Moreover, by implying that discourse (culture) is

founded upon production (economy), Bridge and

Escobar paradoxically take as a given the kind of

distinction they’re at pains to show is a product

of discourse itself. But more serious than this

‘performative contradiction’ is another. For as

with pretty much all of the work I’ve reviewed so

far, Swyngedouw, Harvey, Bridge and Escobar

want, at some level, to speak for nature – to

ascertain its materiality – even as they show how

inapproachable that materiality might be. Politi-

cally, Swyngedouw and Harvey want to contest

the ‘creative destruction’ of environment in the

interests of a ‘greener’ Marxism. Likewise,

Bridge wants to contest the practical agenda

written into mining discourse, while Escobar

touts those new social movements which are

seeking to resist the appropriation of nature by

capitalist interests. In each case, a paradoxical

attempt to know nature quanature (albeit an

always already ‘impure’ nature) runs up against

the impossibility of exiting the practical (labour)

or representational (discourse) moment.

MATERIALIZATION

This problem brings me to the final cluster of

Marxian work on the culture–nature question.

It’s arguably the most ingenious cluster of all and

one where traditional Marxist concepts have a

rather vestigial presence. Here the matter of

nature is brought so deeply within the realm of

culture that there’s simply no epistemic or onto-

logical space left to conceive of grasping the

former’s physicality at all. That is, nature’s ‘truths’

are, quite literally, disclosed in and through webs

of words that, iteratively, inform social and eco-

nomic practices. Nature may indeed have a con-

sequential materiality – whether its genes, rocks

or weather – but the argument is that we can

never know it, only specific, constructed versions

it. To use a very cumbersome phrase: the materi-

ality of nature is ‘materialized’ for us discur-

sively. There is no conceivable ‘outside’ to

linguistic practices. Indeed, the very distinction

between inside and outside, representation and

reality, language and object is itself an emergent

effect. A truly relational approach to nature and

culture would thus concede that there is only a

world of material entities and connections that

are necessarily understood by way of discursive

practices (see Doel, 2000). The things we call

‘natural’ assuredly exist, and we engage with

them practically, but we can know them only

within a linguistic universe that duplicitously

assures us there’s an ultimate referent upon

which we can hang our signifiers.

This ‘hyper-constructionist’ or ‘deep discur-

sivity’ argument, which may seem highly

‘un-Marxist’, can be traced to at least two sources:

the Frankfurt School (and specifically Adorno

and Horkheimer), which I mentioned in passing

earlier, and more recent attempts to marry Marx

with Heidegger and Derrida. These more recent

attempts, as I’ll show momentarily, address a key

weakness in Adorno and Horkheimer’s approach

but also take us to the abyss of another cognitive

dilemma. The Frankfurt School was famously

critical of the ‘productivist’ cast of Marx’s polit-

ical economy and, partly inspired by Lukacs’

example, developed a wider critique of capitalist

modernity. Horkheimer and Adorno’s notori-

ously difficult Dialectic of Enlightenment(1972)

and Adorno’s later work on ‘non-identity’

together delivered a shattering indictment of the

modern condition. Arguing that Enlightenment

had turned back upon itself, they diagnosed a

dismal world where a regnant instrumental

reason – at once a state of mind and a practical

activity – dominated both people and nature.

With the economy one of several ‘spheres’

governed by this monological ‘culture’ of reason,

there was, for Adorno and Horkheimer, no way

to exit from the iron cage. Since, for them, all

other ways of knowing had been squeezed to the

margins, they could only turn to nature as a

quasi-mythical, redemptive realm that was

utterly unapproachable. Smith (1984: Chapter 1)

argues that this entails a residual dualism in

Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. This is not

incorrect. However, I think it’s more accurate to

say that their inability to avoid direct appeals to

nature issues in a paradox. As Stephen Vogel

puts it, ‘it is not clear how ... an appeal to ...

immediacy underlying thesubject’s acts of medi-

ation to which those acts might be said to con-

tribute ... could possibly be justified’ (1986: 79).

So if Adorno and Horkheimer were unable

to avoid a residual, yet impossible, naturalism/

realism, are there any alternatives? Writing in the

wake of Judith Butler’s (1993) adaptation of

Derrida and Heidegger to the question of the

body, Bruce Braun (2000) has recently sought to

rework Marxian ideas so as to avoid any hint of

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