that the materiality of nature/s in the making can
be grasped with some degree of accuracy (by
either people ‘on the ground’ or academic Marx-
ists analysing them) – and that implies a distinc-
tion between the knower (a ‘cultural’, ‘economic’
and ‘social’ being) and the known (‘nature’),
even as they’re practically related and united. In
other words, the question seems to revert to a
dualism of the very kind that, as I’ve shown,
several Marxists studying culture, nature and eco-
nomy have sought to overcome. What is required,
it seems, is an even morerelational approach than
the motifs of coupling, conjunction and embed-
ding offer us. In recent years, two versions of this
more relational approach stand out.
The first is a process-based approach that
insists on the absolutely seamless intertwining
of, and perpetual exchange between, the econo-
mic, cultural, natural and all other moments of
socio-ecological life. Drawing upon Bertell
Ollman’s (1993) interpretation of Marx, Smith’s
Uneven Developmentand the ‘amodern’ argu-
ments of Bruno Latour (1993), it’s an approach
advocated by Erik Swyngedouw (1999) in his
inquiries into the waterscapes of Spain and
Ecuador. The watchword of Swyngedouw’s anti-
analyical imagination is ‘metabolism’: the cease-
less ‘glocal’ interleaving of people, things,
materials and artifacts under the aegis of capital.
Capitalism is thus not above or outside the
rhythms of daily life. Rather, economy, culture,
nature and much more all get churned up in the
driverless juggernaut that is capitalism, such that
ontological ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ are difficult
to fathom. This holistic view of ‘socio-nature’ is
advocated at a more philosophical level by
David Harvey (1996; Chapter 2) and dovetails
with his views on the peculiarity of capitalist
value (mentioned above). For Harvey, socio-
environmental life is an indissoluble material
process of multiple ‘moments’ and material ‘per-
manences’, and the study of them is part of this
process, meaning that all knowledge of them is
necessarily situated and provisional.
Where Swyngedouw and Harvey arguably
accent the practical, physical aspects of socio-
natural change, other authors have looked more
to the power of discourse. Here the question as to
how one might come to know the materiality of
the nature that is so intimately inscribed in the
materiality of culture and economy is subject to
a linguistic coup de grâce. For the argument is
this: that since the matter of nature can only be
known by beings who are ineluctably cultural it
is pointless to inquire about materiality as such.
In other words, the material ‘power’ of linguistic
conventions is so intractable that knowing nature
becomes an issue internalto culture (including,presumably, the ‘culture’ of the academic analyst
too). The relationality of nature and culture here
becomes asymmetrical, though their materiality
remains nominally equal. There are ‘weak’ and
‘strong’ versions of this argument. Gavin Bridge
(1997) accents this cultural-linguistic construc-
tionism in his research into the contemporary
mining industry. He focuses on the industry’s
‘environmental narratives’ to show how cultur-
ally specific and carefully choreographed repre-
sentations of nature circulate through the media
and society. His point is not that metals like gold
and copper don’t exist. Rather, he is at pains to
show how ‘representation’ can become ‘reality’
because it is inherently performative. Discourse
is not, contraSmith (1984), mere ‘ideology’ for
Bridge. Rather, it functions for mining compa-
nies as a tool that allows them to tell a very
specific story about the economically driven
excavation of pits, quarries and hillsides: it is
productive, proactive, material.
A stronger version of this discursive construc-
tionism has been advocated by anthropologist
Arturo Escobar (1996; 1999). More indebted to
poststructuralism than Bridge, Escobar’s synoptic
account of contemporary economy–environment
relations links different phases of capitalism with
distinctive ‘discursive regimes’. In its current
‘ecological phase’, global capitalism, so Escobar
argues, redescribes natural entities in such a way
that they become available for a new, ‘greener’
round of exploitation than heretofore. No longer
simply a ‘resource’ to be exploited, nature has
become something to be ‘banked’, collected and
partitioned in the brave new world of ‘sustain-
able development’, biomedicine and genetic
modification (Katz, 1998). More than Bridge,
Escobar’s point is that the power of language
goes ‘all the way down’: there is simply no
wayto access nature’s materiality outside the
materiality of signification. In a capitalist world,
therefore, discourse becomes as much of a
‘productive force’ as any harvester’s plough,
manufacturer’s machine or scientist’s pipette. It
is a grid that both enables and disables those
things we come to call ‘economic’ activities
and ‘natural’ entities (see also Darier, 1999). It
is, in short, both world disclosing and world
constituting.
Persuasive as they might seem, the processual
and constructivist approaches to nature and
culture within Marxism are not wholly consis-
tent. To begin with, while the processual view
seems to dissolve all distinctions (which now
become ‘moments’) by envisioning a world of
‘distributed materiality’, there’s no doubt that for
Swyngedouw and Harvey it is ‘economic’ forces
that are prime. That is, human labour becomesGEOGRAPHIES OF NATURE IN THE MAKING 1773029-ch08.qxd 03-10-02 10:47 AM Page 177