Geography, materialism, and the neo-vitalist turn

Abstract

In her article ‘Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds,’ Susan M. Ruddick adds to a growing body of geographical literature that adopts a neo-vitalist approach to the understanding of nature and the human subject. In this brief article we suggest that whilst Ruddick’s argument raises many interesting points it is nonetheless hampered by a limited engagement with the historiography of scientific metaphors and the wider ethical and political tensions engendered by a contemporary recourse to vitalist ontologies.

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

“…Such a programmatic would entail reinvigorating more-than-human geography's inaugural concerns of attending to spaces of embodiment, motion and relation and how they are constituted through traffic at the feverish borders between human and animal, flesh and information, body and machine (Whatmore, 1999). Fourth, it demands taking seriously emerging trends of infrastructuring non-human life and the political economies surrounding vitality, an endeavour crucial for addressing calls for providing correctives to some of the new materialist accounts of agency that dispense with a critical politics and economy in their recuperation of elusive material ecologies (Braun, 2015;Gandy and Jasper, 2017;Klinke, 2019;Lemke, 2015). A wider infrastructural ontology can in fact furnish ground for another kind of politics where nonhuman life might be allowed to subvert capitalist capture.…”

Vitalist temptations: Life, earth and the nature of war

“…This brings me finally to the question of vitalism's own place within the history of political thought and practice, a point raised by Gandy and Jasper (2017). And whilst we may agree that there are limits to the conceptual work that a Foucaultian biopolitics can do to aid our understanding of anthropocentric late liberalism (Povinelli, 2016), such biopolitics is able to help us understand the gaze that Ratzel's vitalism and other historical vitalisms perform onto the nature/society nexus.…”

Vitalism Now – A Problematic

“…There is now explicit talk of a 'vitalist turn', one that would supersede the 'discursive' while encompassing the 'affective' and the 'ontological' (turns) (e.g. Gandy and Jasper, 2017;Susen, 2015;Mitchell, 2013) -the latest in a series of turns to claim the theoretical cutting edge in disciplines ranging from geography to sociology, to art and literary criticism.…”