Spacing Lives and Lively Spaces: Partial Remarks on Sarah Whatmore's Hybrid Geographies

摘要

It is a pleasure to comment on this excellent book, which ingeniously and attractively moves on debates about how to take seriously the spatialities of nature-culture hybrids, and which both illustrates and extends very current thinking about a "relational human geography" fully aware of how any object named as an analytical category (in one register) must always be understood as a precarious relational accomplishment (in another). The stabilities of nature and culture—and of so many other objects and categories beloved of natural science, social science, even cultural studies—are here exposed as illusory; and the timings-spacings of the processes always already involved in their making are brought to the fore for critical (and, as Whatmore adds, ethical) scrutiny (see also Whatmore 1997, 1999). In passing, there might be more to say about the dangers of adopting too relational a perspective—too much of a focus on the "making" rather than on the "made"; on what has been created, sustained and made effective is still under construction rather than on what; on "becoming" rather than on "being"; on "threading-verbs" rather than "noun-chunks" (Laurier and Philo 1999:1067)—but I will leave this line of critique to others (and see parts of David Demeritt's contribution to this symposium).