Journeying into interobjectivity: how worlds can be multiple and real

Abstract

The culture-nature division is fundamental to the division of academic labour between the social and natural sciences. In the face of climate change and other broad environmental threats, natural and social scientists are becoming critical of this division of labour. This paper considers Contested Natures (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and heterotopia in the social sciences and social-ecological systems in the natural sciences as attempts to undo this division. These attempts, I argue, reproduce the ontological division fundamental to the problem they aim to overcome. Using a curious coincidence on a trip to the field, I explore a language that avoids the subject/object distinction characteristic of this ontological divide. By closely considering the point on my journey where my travelling companions — a GPS navigator and a small Japanese sedan — encountered their limits, I find a metaphysical starting point for a multiplicity of natures that are more than mentally-held cultural constructions of nature, or linkages between diverse social systems and an ecological realm. The argument suggests that multiple worlds emerge from the disentangling operations of interobjectively extended bodies and that the apparent unity between multiple worlds is itself a product of such interobjectivity.

Keywords:

• culture/nature division
• interobjectivity
• maps
• nature
• ontology
• space
• travel