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> On Sep 2, 2009, at 11:47 PM, Dysboulides wrote:
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>> Uh, neither James nor I mentioned the world perceived by the senses.
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>> And just what world do you denote by the word "nature?"
> Shane Mage
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Here's Haraway, tho James will likely find this tedious:
Of course, what science, culture, or nature – and their “studies” might mean – is far less self-evident.
Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetuses gestating in the amniotic efffluvia of terminal industrialism,4 one of those impossible things characterized by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature’s discursive constitution as “other” in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never “have.” We must find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession. Perhaps to give confidence in its essential reality, immense resources have been expended to stabilize and materialize nature, to police its/her boundaries. Such expenditures have had disappointing results.
Efforts to travel into “nature” become tourist excursions that remind the voyager of the price of such displacements-one pays to see fun-house reflections of oneself. Efforts to preserve “nature” in parks remain fatally troubled by the ineradicable mark of the founding explusion of those who used to live there, not as innocents in a garden, but as people for whom the categories of nature and culture were not the salient ones. Expensive projects to collect “nature’s” diversity and bank it seem to produce debased coin, impoverished seed, and dusty relics. As the banks hypertrophy, the nature that feeds the storehouses “disappears.” The World Bank’s record on environmental destruction is exemplary in this regard. Finally, the projects for representing and enforcing human “nature” are famous for their imperializing essences, most recently reincarnated in the Human Genome Project.
So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the “other” who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man.