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The Nature of Produced

Nature: Materiality and
Knowledge Construction in
Marxism
ARTICLE in ANTIPODE MAY 2006
Impact Factor: 1.89 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.1995.tb00260.x

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Antipode 271, 1995, pp. 1248.

ISSN 0066 4812

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED

NATURE: MATERIALITY AND
KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN
MARXISM
Noel Castreet
though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she [sic] will still find
her way back
Horace, Epistles
the themes of race, sexuality, gender, nation, family, and class have
been written into the body of nature in western . . . sciences since the

eighteenth century
Haraway, Primate Visions

Writing in this journal, Michael Redclift (1987a: 223) argued that Marxist
approaches to the production of nature remain a largely unexplored
dimension of theoretical concern within human geography. Eight years
on, it seems to me that, in certain crucial respects, Redclifts statement
still holds. To be sure, there has been a valuable consolidation and application of the theoretical gains made up until the late 1980s regarding the
production of nature thesis (Fitzsimmons, 1986; Marsden et al., 1988;
Redclift, 1987a; Watts, 1989,1991).Since then, however, theoretical debate
has moved on within (and outside) the wider world of Marxist scholarship. For that reason, in this paper I want to review, and to offer some
general theoretical considerations about, the production of nature thesis
within Marxist geography so as to bring debate up to date, and to point
to some possible future directions for Marxist thinking about produced
nature.
t Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 122
Canada
0 1995 Editorial Board of A~iti[~ode.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1 JF UK.

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 13

I will argue that Marxist geography needs to undertake a partial "reinvention" of its conceptualization of nature, that is, a rethinking of what
is captured and entailed by that loaded term.' It is a rethinking which is
essential to making Marxism both a more powerful and relevant social
theory and a more insistently self-reflexive social theory. In other words,
I want to rethink nature so as to address Haraway's (1991: 187) pointed
question,
how to have simultaneously an account of the radical historical
contingency (and partiality) for all knowledge claims, . . . a
critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies'' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to
a faithful account of the "real-world," one that can be partially
shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom,
adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering
and limited happiness.

I undertake this rethinking by convening two conversations. The first

is between Marxist geography and "green" thought. Environmentalism
has become one of the most powerful social and political movements of
the late 20th-century Western world, attesting to a genuine and widespread concern about the increasingly deleterious impacts of humanity
upon the natural world. Indeed, that green thought is so popular at a time
when Marxism is proclaimed to be in terminal crisis may be no coincidence: some commentators suggest that this state of affairs speaks to the
fabled antipathy between "reds" and "greens," as Marxism's supposedly
Promethean inflections have tended to make it no friend of ecoactivists.
However, one of the most fertile areas of contemporary Marxist theorizing
has been precisely at the interface of red and green thought. Seeking to
overcome the red/green schism, a body of scholarship is now emerging
that attempts to take seriously what I call the materiality of nature. By that
term, I mean both the ontological reality of those entities we term "natural," and the active role those entities play in making history and geography. In the first part of the paper I review existing theorizations of the
"production of nature" within Marxist geography to suggest how, despite
their other virtues, they underplay this material side of the production
process. I then try to show how the contemporary "greening" of Marxist
thought is one Marxist geographers need to take seriously (as, indeed,
several now are), and one to which they may be particularly well
equipped to contribute (see also Pepper, 1993).*
The second conversation, unlike the first, has barely got underway
within human geography: it is a discussion between Marxism and socalled "cultural studies of science" (for a review see Rouse, 1992).3The
production of nature argument has focused on offering an explanatory

14 NOEL CASTREE

account of the reality of nature's production under capitalism. It has not,

however, done so in a naive way, that is, by supposing that its theoretical
categories simply mimic an external, albeit produced, nature in the manner of positivism, rationalism, empiricism and other non-dialectical theories. Rather, it has eschewed such naivetk by arguing that theoretical
knowledge is actively produced. Marxist theorizations of nature thus
seem to promise a truthful, explanatory account of the world, and yet to
moderate the authority of that account by situating it as one historically
contingent human practice within an historically specific society and
nature. This tempered explanatory project is laudatory: it retains a commitment to understanding how the world really works, and seeks to
determine what nature really is, without falling into the mire of a fullblown epistemological constructionism where theory becomes a hermetic
linguistic enterprise (cf. Strohmayer and Hannah, 1992). Indeed, it is this
commitment to a qualified form of epistemological realism that allows
"green" reconstructions of Marxism to take seriously the materiality of
nature. However, it does not, I argue, allow them to take seriously enough
the way that their own theoretical inquiries always, at every level, actively
fashion or "fix" knowledge about those entities designated "natural" and
the consequences thereof. In other words, Marxist discussions of produced nature ultimately leave open a space - the space of capitalist
society and nature - wherein their knowledge claims can be validated in
some objective, ontological sense. The cultural studies of science, by
contrast, insist that theory is a social, linguistic activity which, at every
level, to an important degree manufactures its knowledge of the world.
What is so provocative about the cultural studies of science is that they
stress, and more importantly show, that epistemological constructionism
is an unavoidable and consequential aspect of any and all attempts to
make sense of the world. By constructionism I do not mean that theoretical knowledge interprets or makes objects just as it pleases. The point,
rather, is more nuanced and is double-headed. First, the "vertical" distinction between knowledge and the world on the basis of which the
world is apprehended is not at all a self-evident given, but is a product
of language. It is, in other words, a cultural problematic, one both necessary and immensely enabling, and yet potentially disabling and dangerous if deployed unselfconsciously. Second, the categories and practices
theorists use to make sense of an outer world so posited make a difference
to how we understand that world and how we behave toward it and each
other because those categories and practices are part of wider "horizontal'' discursive and cultural economies of meaning. This, then, is both a
more subtle and a more limited sense of "constructionism" than that
proffered by some neo-Kantian, post-modern notions that claim that
thought somehow constitutes a material reality taken to be beyond the
immediate horizon of theory (Sismondo, 1993).

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 15

Such constructionism, in the sense I mean it here, is unavoidable,

because we always come to understand natural entities posited as
ontologically real and outside us through and in terms of categories,
concepts and language. And it is consequential, because knowledge of
worldly, natural objects is always political. By this I mean not that such
knowledge is biased as opposed to knowledge which is supposedly
true. Rather, as Haraway (1991) argues, we necessarily approach the
world from situated perspectives, situated by - though not reducible to
- our own interests and capacities, and by our own particular historicogeographical location in the world. In other words, nature is rarely, if
ever, an innocent category. It is, rather, cerned (Smith, 19881, that is,
fixed in specific ways from particular perspectives and with particular
implications for how we might behave toward it and each other. This
fixing, I will argue, is necessary to the explanatory-diagnostic ambitions
of a theory like Marxism. The ever-present danger, however, is that
discourses producing knowledge in the interests of social explanation
might mistake their own situated interpretations or cernings of nature
for the reality of nature tout court. In so doing they risk conflating their
particular - but still valuable - knowledges with truth. Cultural studies
of science help us dis-cern nature in theoretical discourse, and challenge
us to become aware of and take responsibility for the way theory fixes
what counts as nature.
The arguments in the first and second sections of the paper turn on a
heuristic borrowing of a distinction made by the historian of science
Canguilhem, and subsequently reworked by Foucault, between theories and concepts (see Gutting, 1989). Concepts, for Canguilhem, are
the cultural categories, the taxonomic template through which the basic
elements of the world are ordered. Theories, taking concepts as givens,
seek to explain them. Hence Marxism seeks to explain natures production. The problem, of course, is that in supporting Marxisms explanatory
account of nature in the first part of the paper, and critiquing its concept
of nature in the second, my argument appears paradoxical how can one
be ontologically realist about produced nature and yet epistemologically skeptical? However, the fact that cultural studies of science prosecute their cases within the domain of Science - traditionally taken as the
true home of objective knowledge about the material world -has enabled
them to offer some particularly acute insights on the relations between
realism (however subtle or qualified) and social constructionism. I develop these insights to suggest that Marxism can and must take seriously
the fact that whenever it talks about nature it is talking about what it
must necessarily and strategically posit as simultaneously an ontological
reality and a epistemologically cerned entity or concept (cf. Hazelrigg,
1993). In this way I bring the insights of the first and second parts of the
paper together to suggest a possible agenda for future Marxist investiga-

16 NOEL CASTREE

tions of nature. As Sayer (1993) argues, the extremes of realism or relativism/conventionalism do not constitute viable options, and we need to
come to some - indeed some tense - accommodation between the two if
we are to understand how theory, and our understanding of the world
more generally, operates.
Before proceeding, I must make one disclaimer. Throughout the paper
(as is often the case with reviews of this sort) I use the terms Marxism
and cultural studies of science in the singular. In so doing I do not intend
to suggest that either are homogeneous entities, and in using the terms I
am self-consciously abstracting from what are in fact two complex and
heterogenous bodies of scholarship.

Marxism, Marxist Geography and the Production of Nature

Marxist conceptions of nature: the first two waves.

Marx did not himself provide a systematic account of nature. This task
was left to Alfred Schmidt, whose account of The Concept of Nature in Marx
embodied two moments. First, Schmidt showed that Marxs explanatorydiagnostic account of capitalist nature had two main components: on the
one side, an exposition of the representation of nature within bourgeois
society, what N. Smith (1984: 3) called the ideology of nature, and on
the other side, Marxs critique of this ideology so as to disclose natures
true nature under the capitalist mode of production. Second, Schmidt
considered how Marx used this critique to foreshadow a post-capitalist
future, an anticipatory-utopian vision of a less instrumental relation between human beings, and between human beings and nature.
Translated into English in 1971, Schmidts disclosure of the ideology of
nature marked an important intervention at a time of great environmental
concern in the West. As Smith (1984) later noted, Schmidt identifiPd the
counter-revolutionary implications of the great discursive divide between
society and nature that is such a commonplace in Western societies.
Schmidt realized that for Marx the various meanings of nature within
bourgeois thought made it resolutely external to society, and, at the same
time and in contradiction, universal - human beings, as biological entities,
are seen as natural too. Smith (1984) has demonstrated the political
implications of construing nature as both/either external and/or universal. On the one hand, the epistemological assumption that nature is
pristinely separate from society - which for Smith is embedded at the
heart of natural science - is doubly ideological. First, it hypostatizes
non-human objects and renders them immutable, intractable barriers
against which humanity is more or less powerless. Second, it thus simultaneously denies any social relation to nature, hence ruling out the politics

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 17

and possibility of altering it to meet human needs. On the other hand,

the assumption that nature is universal makes social relations as intractable and immutable as natural processes themselves. The work of
Malthus, of course, shows the two assumptions operating simultaneously,
as the sexes are subject to natural passions, while the land can only
yield food at an arithmetic rate. Together they underpin what Benton
(1991a: 241) has called epistemic conservatisms, that is, traditions of
thought which, like Malthus, resist emancipatory projects on broadly
cognitive grounds. And it was precisely the embodiment of these assumptions in much of the neo-Malthusian discussion of population
crisis in the early 1970s that compelled Harvey (1974), in his seminal
essay on Population, resources and the ideology of science, to disclose
their ideological nature and suggest how nature and society might be
differently construed.
It seems to me that the critique of ideologies of nature is still broadly
compelling (see Emel and Roberts, 1989; Peet, 1985; Roberts and Emel,
1992).4The most pressing question, though, is what reading of nature
Marx proposed in place of this ideology. Schmidts answer was that Mam
insisted on the relations between society and nature, thus avoiding the
schism between them without collapsing the latter into the former as in
the monistic doctrine of universal nature. As Smith (1984: 18) correctly
observes, nature separate from society has no meaning. . . . The relation
with nature is an historical product, and even to posit nature as external
to society . . . is literally absurd since the very act of positing nature
requires entering a certain relation with nature. More specifically
Schmidt saw in Marx a dialectic between the two: nature is mediated
through society and society through nature (Smith, 1984: 19), a complex
metabolic process that Marx centers on the labor process, the site at which
society systematically engages with and transforms the natural world.
Schmidt then went on to discuss the specificity of the labor process under
capitalism, namely how the metabolic interaction of society and nature is
mediated by use-values, exchange-values, and the process of commodification. This insistence on the relations between society and nature
is crucial (as I will argue shortly when examining Smiths work), but it is
in Marxs anticipatory-utopian vision that Schmidt saw a fundamental
flaw. For where Marx apparently envisaged a harmonious balance of
nature and society, Schmidt detected a subtext of a will to power: that is,
an affection for technology in the service of human well-being which
could unintentionally turn into the domination of nature, and ironically
(after Adorno and Horkheimer) into the domination of humans themselves.
Schmidts argument, while timely, has since been charged with two
major limitations. First, Smith (1984: 23-24) has provocatively argued that
incredible as it sounds, Schmidt ends up providing us with one of the

18 NOEL CASTREE

most elaborate accounts of the bourgeois concept of nature. In Schmidt too

there is an external conception of nature . . . and a universal conception. . . . Amid the truths and half-truths about Marx, Smith sees
Schmidts thesis about the domination of nature (nature as a separate
realm to be dominated) and human nature (humans encompassed by
inexorable technological processes) connoting, in its very language, the
immutability and inevitability that are the hallmark of the external and
universal conceptions. In short, in his attempt to re-emphasize the realm
of nature in Marxs oeuvre, Schmidt, ironically, underplayed the role of
social relations in constituting nature and society5 In the second place,
Schmidts account of the Marxist conception of nature is extremely abstract, and even his comments on use-values and exchange-values do not
approach the kind of concrete analytics that Marx sought in CapitaL6
In light of these limitations, a second phase of Marxist scholarship on
nature emerged, within the discipline of geography. This stream of work
began with theoretical discussions by Harvey (1974),Burgess (1978,19851,
Sayer (1979, 1983), Smith and OKeefe (1980, 1985), Pepper (1984), and
Smith (1984), and issued in a number of specific theoretical statements
and empirical studies within particular sub-fields, notably concerning the
agricultural geography of the developed (Bowler and Ilbery, 1987; FitzSimmons, 1986; Marsden, 1988; Marsden et al., 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Page
and Walker, 1991) and less developed worlds (Bell and Roberts, 1986;
Redclift, 1984, 198%; Watts, 1983a, 1983b, 19891, the geography of environmental and land use regulation (Walker and Storper, 1978; Walker,
Storper and Gersch, 1979; Walker and Heiman, 19811, and the geography
of hazards (Hewitt, 1983, 1986). This work was distinguished by two
features. First, an elaboration of Schmidts insight about the relations
between society and nature so as to emphasize - contra bourgeois conceptions of nature - the social side of the relation. Second, an attempt to
offer a more substantive explanatory-diagnostic framework in which
- to
understand this process of social production. Let me expand.
Harveys (1974) landmark critique of neo-Malthusianism marked the
beginning of an increasing emphasis on the social aspect of the societynature dialectic that Marx sought to capture. Reacting to the epistemic
conservatism of the limits to growth debate, Harvey turned the tables on
his antagonists when he redefined three key terms in that debate (subsistence, resources, scarcity) and viewed the population problem through
the optic of social relations. He thus rejected the argument that, Overpopulation arises because of the scarcity of resources available for meeting the subsistence needs of the mass of the population, to insist instead
that, There are too many people in the world because the particular ends
we have in view (together with the form of social organization which we
have) and the materials available in nature, that we have the will and the
way to use, are not sufficient to provide us with those things to which

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 19

we are accustomed. (Harvey, 1974: 274). The kind of paradigm shift he

sought to inaugurate (with Burgess, OKeefe, Pepper, Sayer and Smith)
was best exemplified by subsequent revisionist geographical work on
hazards, which insisted that particular social groups were placed in positions of vulnerability to physical hazards, not that certain environments
were just intrinsically hazardous. However, while important, this work,
like Harveys, at the time offered little in the way of a substantive theoretical account of those social relations and the relation with nature they
implied. Moreover, and more importantly, it marked the beginning, but
did not make the leap, to thinking of nature as produced.
This is why N. Smiths Uneven Development was such an important
statement, pushing debate forward with his thesis about the production of
nature under capitalism. As Smith (1984: xiii-xiv) readily conceded, this
thesis
sounds . . . quixotic and . . . jars our traditional acceptance of
what had hitherto seemed self-evident . . . it defies the conventional, even sacrosanct separation of nature and society, and it
does so with such abandon and without shame.
Nonetheless, it is of the utmost importance. First, it gets beyond the
external and universal conceptions of nature and it registers the redundancy of conceiving of nature as a pristine entity, untouched by human
hand - conventionally known as first nature. Second, it rightly points
to the internal relations between society and nature. One cannot make
sense of the latter without reference to the former: they cannot and should
not be reified as separate entities. Third, it alerts us to the way that
capitalism commodifies whole landscapes, constructs and reconstructs
them in particular (profit motivated) ways - to how it determines particular constellations of natural products in particular places. This is
exemplified well by recent work on the production of agrarian regions
(Fitzsimmons, 1986: Marsden et al., 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Watts, 1989,19911,
but most forcefully, perhaps, in Cronons Natures Metropolis (1991) (see
the special edition of Antipode, 1994h7 Fourth, it powerfully historicizes
human relations with nature and thus opens up the politics and possibility of the transformation of both nature and society.
Neither these authors, nor Smith, are suggesting that capitalism produces nature in the sense of, to take an extreme example, determining
how trees grow. We know that sunshine, water and chlorophyll have a
great deal to do with that. This is where some confusion about Smiths
thesis may arise. The portmanteau term production seems to imply that
capitalism determines every aspect of the natural world as it transforms it:
right down to each particle of natural stuff. However, this is not what
Smith argues. What the thesis of the production of nature does capture is

20 NOEL CASTREE

the way in which first nature is replaced by an entirely different historical-geography of natural products. The imperatives of capitalism
bring all manner of natural environments and concrete labor processes
upon them together in an abstract framework of market exchange. Under
capitalism humans relate to nature in a specific way, through commodification of natural products, and in so doing actively appropriate,
transform, and creatively destroy it. The natural regions of say, the
midwestern United States, cannot be understood simply as pre-existent
natural grasslands, as the traditional notion of first nature would imply.
Instead - and this is the point - they must be seen as constructed natural
environments evolving out of decades of intensive, profit-driven conversion into what they presently are.8
On the basis of this general thesis about the production of nature, Smith
went on to present one of the most sophisticated (if still incomplete)
Marxist theoretical maps elucidating that production process, moving
with increasing historico-geographical specificity from production in
general, to production for exchange, to, finally, capitalist production
with its specific (class) social relations and specific (profit-driven) relation
to nature. This important work of elaborating a substantive theory of
capitalism (also, of course, represented by the work of Harvey, Scott,
Storper, Walker and others) has found its most mature empirical expression regarding the production of nature in Watts (1983a, 1983b, 1985,
1989) work. In his studies of Nigeria, in particular, we find rich sociohistorical accounts of how particular natural environments are produced
under the imperatives of international commodity markets, and how
problems of peasant production, as these environments are transformed,
are not natural agricultural crises (i.e., the limits imposed by a fixed,
separate first nature), but arise from the relations between local social
formation, international political economy, and profit driven ecological
transformation.
Nonetheless, in his eagerness to stress this novel idea of producing
nature Smith - and many others - risk losing sight of the materiality of
nature (cf. Fitzsimmons, 1989a, 1989b).By materiality I mean both the real,
ontological existence and causal efficacy and agency within history, of
those entities and processes we call natural. In seeking to overturn the
ideologies of external and universal nature, there is the risk of reverting
to a monism centered on the labor process - the production of nature which tends to exaggerate the transformative powers of capitalism. Consider, for example, the following, albeit self-consciously polemical, statement from Page and Walker (1991: 283, italics added) on the creation of
agro-industrial regions: Midwestern industries developed themselves
through an evolution of productive capabilities that owed nothing to nature
and everything to regional social arrangements, human capabilities, technological advances, and divisions of labor yielding powerful external

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 21

economies. So concerned have some Marxists been with showing how

capital produces natural environments in its own image, that they have
frequently not theorized the role and importance of those produced natural environments themselves.
This is a tendency, and I am not suggesting that the materiality of
produced nature is absolutely effaced in all Marxist geographical accounts. To the extent, however, that this tendency does exist it clearly
amounts to an intellectual misconception. It is also political misconception because it risks suggesting that we can transform nature willy nilly
in the struggle for a future socialist society, if only we could dismantle
capitalism. But in the words of environmental historian Worster (1988: 61,
nature itself is an agent and presence in history. Or, as Redclift (1987a:
228-229, italics added) rightly argues in a different context, Nature
involves ecological systems which, whatever their relationship to human
activity, pose threats (or present opportunities) to the survival of human
society. In short, we can, indeed must, recognize the fact that capitalism
produces nature, but we must simultaneously recognize the materiality and consequentiality - of the particular natures capitalism produces. Let
me now turn to recent attempts to do just that, and show where their
importance lies.

Greening Marxism: the third wave.

My review of the aphasias of Marxism concerning the materiality of
nature might be considered typical - at least by many greens - of Mamisms anthropocentric, even Promethean inflections. Seen as obsessed
with capitalist production and class relations, Marxism appears to many
ecoactivists as inherently incapable of adequately making sense of nature
within contemporary societies. Conversely, several Marxists look upon
much green thinking with suspicion, accusing it of being everything from
woolly minded (e.g., deep ecology: see Luke, 1988) to a special interest
ideology (e.g. middle class NIMBY groups contesting local resource use).
While there are truths and half-truths in this green view of Marxism and
these Marxist views of green thought, each, ultimately, is a caricature
(Raskin and Bernow, 1991).*Specifically, there is much in Mam that takes
the materiality of nature seriously, as I will suggest, but this does not
entail Marxism reverting to essentialist conceptions of nature (e.g., as
external or universal) with all that that implies.
In this vein, a number of authors outside human geography have
recently sought to re-discover natures materiality in Marx by way of a
theoretical reconstruction of his work (Benton, 1989, 1990, 1991a, 1991b,
1992a, 1992b; Faber and OConnor, 1989; Grundmann, 1991,1992; OConnor, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c; OConnor and Orton, 1991; Ryle, 1988; Soper,
1991). This project has also begun to get underway within human geog-

22 NOEL CASTREE

raphy in squarely Marxist (Johnston, 1989; Pepper, 1993), but more usually Marxisant or post-Marxist studies (Basset, 1988; Bell and Roberts,
1991; Black, 1989; Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). What the
more resolutely Marxist accounts presently lack, is the kind of substantive
theoretical framework wherein historical materialist accounts are able to
register and incorporate natures materiality. I want now, all too briefly
and dogmatically, to present such a framework as articulated by Ted
Benton. I do so because his attempt to green M a n is especially lucid,
and although I hardly think his account incontestable, it does usefully
highlight the benefits to both Marxism and greens of a rapprochement.
Bentons aim is a rigorous exploration of the limits and resources of
Marxism itself (1989: 51). Simplified, Bentons argument can be divided
into two parts. First, he seeks to explore the nature of and the reasons for
the fabled Marxian antipathy to the limits of natural systems. Bentons
central thesis is that there is a crucial hiatus between Marxs . . . materialist premises in philosophy and the theory of history on the one hand,
and some of the basic concepts o f . . . (his) economic theory on the other
(1989: 55). He argues that the former - presented in the 1859 Preface,
the German Ideology, and the Critique of the Gotha Program - is resolutely
naturalistic. By naturalism Benton means the materiality of the natures
which humanity relies upon and produces. But Benton also claims that
Marxs naturalism ironically disappears in his late economic writings,
notably Capital, which is incapable of adequately conceptualizing the
ecological conditions and limits of human need-meeting interactions with
nature (1989: 63). For Benton this eco-blindness is a tendency within
Marxs thought, not the whole story. He locates this blindness in the
optimistic intellectual and political climate of Marxs time, and in Marxs
over-reaction to Malthuss epistemic conservatism, deeming Marxs
stance to be utopian emancipatory - the opposite of epistemic conservatism - insofar as it overlooks the biological limits to human social
possibilities (1989: 57). In this I think Benton is right. Unlike Schmidt,
who ultimately reduces Marxs position to a domination of nature
thesis, Benton is more alive to tensions and ambivalences within it. Similarly, I have chosen to view the second wave of Marxist discussions of
nature less as totally effacing material nature (as some greens might have
us believe) than as under-emphasizing it.
This brings me to the second part of Bentons argument: his reconstruction of Marxs economic theory so as to more fully articulate its ecological
premises. In order to do this Benton utilizes resources of Realist philosophy which assert or recognize the purpose-independent reality of the
structures, forces or mechanisms which limit human aspirations (1989:
58). Bentons aim is both to reclaim the reality of the ontology of
(produced) nature, and the reality of Marxs theory viz. the question of
nature. In particular, Benton focuses on two levels of Marxs economic
theory: his abstract concept of the labor process as a trans-historical aspect

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 23

of all societies, and his account of the labor process under capitalism
specifically (cf. N. Smiths "production in general" and "capitalist production").
In the former case he shows that Mam was almost exclusively concerned with "transformative" labor processes (1989: 661, that is those
which manipulate and rework natural products to human ends. This,
Benton argues, seriously underplays the relative dependence of all labor
processes upon their contextual conditions, and the particular dependence of what Benton calls "eco-regulatory" labor processes (e.g., agricultural ones) which engage in a "metabolism" with produced nature in the
most immediate of senses. Benton (1989: 65-76) thus proposes an expanded and more discriminating typology of the labor process. In the
latter case Benton, like N. Smith, stresses that one of Marx's key insights
was to theorize capitalist production as a profoundly transformative
process, systematically structured by the search for profit: natural objects
are but means to pecuniary ends, and are produced and destroyed accordingly. However, what is interesting here is that Benton (1989: 73) sees
Marx as fetishizing this instrumental labor process in a very particular
way (cf. Schmidt, 1971).Capital indeed produces nature, but Marx (and
Smith after him) is too dazzled by capital's creative destruction of the
natural world: like capitalism itself Marx takes natural conditions as
"given" and malleable, and does not bother to theorize them. Yet,
more than a century later, it is now widely recognized that the
nature and scale of human interactions with nature have produced unforeseen and/or unintended consequences . . . Such
conditions can no longer, in other words, be taken as 'given'. . .
but must enter into the theoretical structure of the economic
theories of our times. (Benton, 1991a: 264)
In other words, capitalist production is just as dependent upon and
imbricated within nature as any other mode of production, even though
it is a nature of capital's own making. This general claim can be decomposed into what I would identify as the two major senses in which the
materiality of produced nature decisively influences capitalist production.
The first influence revolves around the consequences of intentionally produced nature. Benton proposes two modifications to Marx's conception
of the capitalist labor process, which speak to the role of these consequences. First, that it register the enabling and constraining role of the
natural conditions underpinning capitalist production. Second, that it register their pertinence to the ongoing sustainability of that production. To
this I would add, thirdly, that it register their pertinence in limiting
industrial change, rather as Harvey has argued that produced space
hinders and yet compels the annihilation of space by time. The second
major sense in which nature's materiality decisively influences capitalist

24 NOEL CASTREE

production revolves around the unintended consequences of produced

nature. Bentons third suggested modification of Marxs conception of the
labor process speaks to this influence. He (1991a: 266, italics added)
argues, I think quite rightly, that we recognize what he calls the naturally
mediated unintended consequences of production (e.g. the destruction of the
ozone layer) may impede future production. This claim is given a more
forceful theoretical formulation by OConnor (1989a).He argues that there
is an inherent and deep-seated contradiction within capitalism between
forces and relations of production and their produced natural conditions
of production, one which is realized in ecological crises of a potentially
global nature and which (he rather optimistically suggests) offer a possible second path to socialism alongside the more traditional Marxist claim
concerning overproduction crises.
So far so good. Except that Bentons position may seem to reintroduce
the conception of external nature which Marxists have been so concerned
to dismiss! However, this would be a misreading. On Bentons account,
nature and society are inextricably related: capitalism produces specific
natural environments but these environments are, in turn, both enabling
and constraining. The point here is that they enable and constrain only
in specific relation to the social relations they are imbricated within. We are
dealing here, then, with specific structures of natural/social articulation
(1989: 77, italics added). Although Benton does not use the term, his
sense of articulation is intended to be thoroughly dialectical. In fact, we
might suggest that Bentons vision of nature as specifically produced and
consequential only in relation to those specific production processes offers
a more genuinely dialectical conception of society-nature relations than
that found in Smith and others with their tendency towards a social
productionist over-emphasis. This reconceptualization of the society/
nature relation yields two advantages. First, it
avoids both the Scylla of epistemic conservatism and thE
Charybdis of social constructionist utopianism. Each form of
social and economic life is understood in terms of its own
specific contextual conditions and limits. These conditions and
limits have real causal importance in enabling a range of social
practices . . . which could otherwise not occur, and also in
setting. . . limits to their sustainability. (Benton, 1989: 78, italics
added)
Second,
since natural limits are themselves theorized . . . as a function
of the articulated combination of specific social practices and
specific complexes of natural conditions . . . what constitutes

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 25

a general natural limit for one such form of nature/society

articulation may not constitute a limit for another. (Benton,
1989: 79)
What we have here is a conceptual edifice, albeit a very general one,
through which Marxist theory can take nature seriously as a material
entity and actor in history, without hypostatizing it as a fixed, unchangeable, universal given separate from society. In other words, it allows us
to think of nature as simultaneously produced and real and active in the
history and geography of capitalist societies.
By way of an illustration of this approach let me consider - again all
too briefly - ecological crises under a capitalist regime (see OConnor,
1989a, 1989b, 1989~;and Faber and OConnor, 1989, for a more detailed
consideration). In so doing, I want not only to highlight the relevance to
Marxist geography of taking natures materiality seriously, but also the
relevance to green thought of Marxisms explanatory-diagnostic account
of how and why nature is produced and degraded. As Pepper (1993)
rightly argues, too much green thought lacks a basis on which to explain
the environmental degradation it decries. Any realistic solution to ecological crises cannot rely on half-baked, or mystical appeals to natures
inherent worth, but must consider the way humans actually and systematically produce and destroy nature. As Benton, OConnor and others are
now arguing, appropriately corrected Marxian political economy offers
one powerful explanation of ecological crises under specifically capitalist
regimes, without lapsing into either a productionist over-emphasis or
natural limits arguments. It does so in two ways. In the first place, it
theorizes the capitalist relation to the nature it produces as a tripartite
process. As capitalist production it is dominated by a value-maximizing
logic which is blind to natural conditions and elements except insofar
as they facilitate that value-maximization (as noted above). As productive
labor process it is dominated by a means-ends schema of instrumental
action which is relatively indifferent to given, non-manipulable natural
conditions. Finally, because capitalist production accounts only for what
it can value in property-monetary terms, it is indifferent to the cumulative
effects of its operations where, in the absence of state regulation, the
burden of those effects are (at least in the short term) borne by society
not the individual firm. Some of these points are now a commonplace of
Marxist geographical theory (see Blowers, 1984; Walker, 1982; Walker and
Storper, 1978). However, in and of themselves they are necessary but
insufficient to explain why capitalism has a specific liability to generate
ecological crises. This is where, in the second place, a consideration of the
materiality of produced nature in relation to capitalist production is vital:
we need to supplement Marxs account . . . with a . . . conceptualization
of the specific configuration of material contexts, conditions and systematic

26 NOEL CASTREE

environmental interconnections the persistence of which is necessary for

the sustainability of the (production) process (Benton, 1991a: 266). Environmental crises do not arise out of the abuse of first nature, but out
of the structured, dialectical articulation of capitalist social relations and the
particular nature(s) they produce and rely on.
Seeing environmental crises in this way alters Marxist geographical
perspectives on the production of nature in two ways (and again, let me
stress that some Marxist geographers do deal with the following points).
The first alteration is of an explanatory-diagnostic sort. As OConnor
(1989a)rightly argues, it is the insistently material consequences of structured environmental degradation that form the crucible within which
many industries, governments, classes, and social movements fight to
reproduce, ameliorate or even overturn the capitalist order. Thus, as Bell
and Roberts (1986) suggest, much more attention has to be given to
understanding the proximate (produced) natural processes at work in environmental degradation, in addition to the distal social-structural causes
which Marxist analysis has traditionally been concerned with. This point
leads to the second alteration, which is of a normative-political sort. For
various classes and groups, environmental crises are the most immediate
manifestation of the social structural contradictions of capitalism, and
environmental conditions seemingly the most amenable arena for making
change. As such, and in conditions where the capacity of individuals to
affect social-structural reform (or revolution) is severely limited, Marxist
geographers perhaps need to pay more attention to environmental management and engineering and their potentially ameliorative effects. It is
blithe to decry such policies as reformist when the prospects of large scale
social-relational change are absent (Blaikie, 1986).But conversely, I believe
that the power of Marxist theory is still (and I demur post-modern
criticisms) its explanatory ability to illuminate how the particular, in this
case specific environmental problems in specific places, can be understood in relation to general, (partially) unifying processes by virtue of
capitalisms globalizing dynamics (Altvater, 1993; Harvey, 1993). At the
same time, its anticipatory-utopian promise - yet, it has to be said, to be
fully articulated - is its insistence that environmental justice is part and
parcel of social justice (for a recent ambitious attempt to sustain this dual
claim see Pepper, 1993). At a time when all manner of environmental
movements are operating within their own limited, discursive worlds,
fighting for local changes and environmental reforms, it seems to me that
Marxisms contribution can be to take the reality of those local environmental problems seriously while still building a larger project which
situates those problems and joins their antagonists into a more global
view of and struggle over natures (and societys) creative destruction (cf.
Peet and Watts, 1993: 248-249).
The actual and difficult work of giving flesh and bones to these general

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 27

propositions remains to be done. Although much detailed, empirically

sensitive work on the political-economy of natures production means
that we know much more about the social side of the society-nature
dialectic than we did even a decade ago, a number of tasks remain for
Marxist theories of nature. One is the need to specify particular socialnatural articulations within and between modes of production (Redclift,
1988). A second, and related task, is to integrate such specific accounts
within a more general framework through integrating concepts focusing
on levels of abstraction (Cox and Mair, 1989), the geography of scale
(Smith, 1993), and upon combined and uneven development within a
world economic order (OConnor, 1989).A third task is to pursue a more
concerted focus upon the state as a key actor within natures production
and destruction (Johnston, 1989).On the nature side of the society-nature dialectic, as I have suggested, a more thorough comprehension of the
materiality of physical processes is central to understanding produced
natures role within capitalist societies. These are all very tall orders I
realize, and yet all central, I think, to Marxism making its own distinctive
contribution to debates on nature. But it may not be too sanguine to
suggest that they are tasks Marxist geographers may be particularly well
equipped to undertake. Despite the human-physical schism that pervades
the discipline, the arguments I have presented above require the kind of
synthetic vision that was once geographys raison detre. It is a vision that
some are now calling for once more (e.g Cooke, 1992), and Marxist
geographers, it seems to me, should be at the forefront of this endeavor
(cf. Emel and Peet, 1989).

The Production of Knowledge: Dis-cerning Nature

I have argued two things. First, that Marxism offers a potentially powerful account of how nature is produced under capitalism. Second, that a
project to take natures materiality more seriously would render that
account more realistic, powerful and relevant to our green times. But
this is only part of the rethinking of nature I have in mind. Let me now
turn, then, to a second sense in which Marxism might rethink its understanding of nature. That rethinking revolves around a strategy of what,
following l? Smith (1988), I am going to call theoretical-conceptual discernment. It is a strategy, I will argue, which is articulated forcefully in
cultural studies of scientific knowledge.
Smiths argument concerns Western critical theorizations of subjectivity,
but his arguments also apply to Marxist geographical investigations of
nature. The verb to cern means to encircle or to enclose, and for Smith
indicates the way in which conventional theorizations of subjectivity
limit the definition of the human agent in order to be able to call him/her

28 NOEL CASTREE

the subject in the singular (Smith, 1988: xxx, italics added). Theoretical
cerning operates in two ways. First, it rests on the claim that subjects just
are what theory sees them to be (e.g., class subjects, or gendered subjects,
etc.). Theory merely reports what actually exists, positing, without problematizing, a direct veridical relation between the subject and the theory
which re-presents it. Second, this ontological legitimation of theorys
subject rests on a denial of the way theory actively cerns the subject, that
is, the fact that at some level and to some degree it constructs or fixes the
subject in this way rather than that. This dual conjuncture, Smith continues, is precisely what has allowed so much modern theory to claim
authority for its world-views, and which is simultaneously at the root of
its ills. On the one hand, the claim to epistemological realism (however
subtle or qualified) - to having captured the way things are - legitimates
ones own view of the world. On the other hand, this is precisely where
danger lies: the danger of intellectual and political authoritarianism. By
denying the role of theorists in constructing the world through partial
and particular theoretical lenses, and claiming instead to have captured
reality just as it is, modern theorists have sought de-legitimate other
views as less truthful, and therefore less important. In Aronowitzs terms
(1988: vii), the power of modern theory consists in its conflation of
knowledge and t r ~ t h . ~
But let me stress that Smiths project does not end here, simply with a
critique of cerning. Smiths own contribution is to argue that subjects are
always dis-cerned, that is called into multiple and often contradictory
subject-positions. While such a stance may seem to license an abandonment of any substantive claims about the subject, since the subject appears
now so overdetermined and fractured as to escape the closures of
strong theories like Marxism, Smiths central point, as I understand it,
is that dis-cernment only makes sense as the necessary twin of cernment.
In other words, the condition of possibility of dis-cerning the subject is
that theory routinely and necessary cerns the subject, fixes it precisely by
virtue of its particular cognitive lenses. To dis-cern the subject, therefore,
is not to abandon a substantive acount of the subject, but to become
self-conscious about theoretical cernment and to explore and take responsibility
for its consequences.
What has this to do with Marxist theorizations of nature? One of the
dangers attending Marxist geographical theorizations of nature, and of
the recent attempts to take natures materiality seriously, is precisely
unreflexive cerning (not cerning per se). In particular, they risk cerning
nature by virtue of the will to knowledge inherent in Marxisms explanatory-diagnostic ambitions, but do so, ironically, after dis-cerning nature
within the bourgeois discourse they oppose. This is best illustrated by
examining the double standards of the Marxist critique of the ideology
of nature, represented most clearly in N. Smiths (1984) account. This

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 29

critique rests on a double play. This play is to show that within or

behind one reality purported to define and exhaust what nature is ideology - there is in fact another, which Marxist theory discloses. This
double reality problematic, as Smith (1988: 11)calls it, is a central figure
of Marxs thought and has been one of the characteristic means by which
it has prosecuted its critical claims. Bourgeois ideology operates through
a mis-representation, or an ideological cerning, of that which is, i.e., social
production within an exploitative class relation. In other words, the reality of capitalist nature appears as something other than it really is. This
other, surface reality is equally material as the real real, but not in
Marxs eyes the fundamental truth of the capitalist mode of production.
Thus, as Mitchell (1988: 18) puts it, To the mechanism of misrepresentation by which power operates, Marx opposed a representation of the way
things intrinsically are, in their transparent and rational reality. Yet, as
Mitchell continues, The problem with such an explanation was that, in
revealing power to work through mis-representation, it left re-presentu tion
itself unquestioned (italics added). In other words, while Marxists object
to bourgeois conceptions of nature because their re-presentations mis-represent or falsely cern the real nature of capitalist nature, they do not
problematize their own re-presentations with the same critical vigor. In
so doing they unreflexively cern nature and thus risk mistaking what is a
theoretical maneuver (although, as I will argue, it cannot be considered
to be just that) for the reality of capitalist nature tout court.
I am not suggesting that Marxist accounts of nature are ignorant of the
active role knowledge construction plays in theorizing the world (although the recent work of Benton and others displays remarkably little
concern with the question, a consequence, perhaps, of their concern to get
on with the more immediate business of establishing the basic theoretical
principles of a new, emerging research program). There is no need to
dredge up the tired old caricature of Marxism as a positivist theory
modeled on the Kantian dualisms of nineteenth century natural science,
although it is disturbing how prevalent the image of Marxism as an
objectivist, almost naive, science of society currently is. While there are
indeed positivist and rationalist Marxisms, the traditions of historical
materialism are too rich to be reduced to one predicated on a putatively
passive view of knowledge acquisition which simply mirrors nature
(Walker, 1989; Wenger, 1988). On the contrary, Marxs well-known ruminations on epistemology attest to a concern with knowledge as an irreducibly human practice and product, one extended and enriched by
Western Marxists from Lukacs to Adorno to Althusser. In other words,
Marxism has, in its various forms, long contested traditional epistemological realisms (positivism, rationalism, empiricism, etc.) by offering a
theory of knowledge production grounded in the dialectical relation between the theorist and society and nature (Walker, 1989). It is a concern,

30 NOEL CASTREE

moreover, quite evident in geographical materialist readings of produced

nature. Harvey (1974), for example, offers a sustained meditation on
logical positivisms denial of its role as an ideological instrument of
knowledge production, and suggests how dialectical materialist knowledge is actively imbricated within a social world. Sayer (1979),too, argues
at length over the practical bases of the epistemological lenses through
which nature and society are seen, as does Watts (1983~).Likewise,
N. Smith (1980; 1984) is explicit that his argument concerning natures
production through capitalist social labor extends to his own work which
is produced as a particular form of theoretical labor. Marxist knowledge
and theory, therefore, are never outside history: they cannot, apparently,
be validated on some putatively objective and external plane free from
social influences. Marxism is not, it seems, modern in quite the sense
that I? Smith suggests. Rather, it seems to embody a moment of selfreflexivity concerning its claims to truth and reason intrinsic to its materialist concern with human pra~tice.~
There is no gainsaying this materialist focus on knowledge as practice,
as one (dialectical)moment within a wider, and complex division of labor.
Nonetheless, I? Smiths arguments apply to Marxist geographical theorizations of nature by virtue of the limits in the latters application of this
activist view of knowledge. I mean this in three senses. First, it is a
characteristic maneuver of such theorizations to criticize other peoples
knowledge constructions, namely bourgeois ideologies of nature. Second,
although quite explicit that historical materialist knowledge is an effort
of intellectual labor, such theorizations rarely go into any detail about the
actual meaning and consequences of their particular theoretical labors
and claims about reality (e.g., what might it mean to say that nature is
this rather than that: see below). As Wenger (1988: 143) puts it, Marxist
theorization about theorization has tended to proceed in a very gingerly
fashion when its object has been the question of Marxism (itself) . .: and
in certain currents of Marxist thought, the question has been treated as
immediately obvious, or as a matter of dogma. Third, this reticence
seems to be linked to an anxiety that pushing the constructivist view too
far would detract from Marxisms basic task as an explanatory social
theory concerned with real world events and relations. Indeed, to many
Marxists that anxiety no doubt seems valid in light of the most ambitious
attempt to codify Marxs epistemological observations, Althussers theory of theoretical practice, an ultimately idealist and relativist conception
in which knowledge and its object seem fatally sundered as Marxist
theory becomes one ideology among others (Geras, 1977; Smith, 1980;
cf. Sprinker, 1992). A space, then, outside of knowledge simpliciter is characteristically left within Marxist geographical accounts, a space within
which the veracity of materialist knowledge claims can be substantiated:
that is, the space of capitalist society and nature. As Haraway (1991: 185)

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 31

phrases it in more general terms, We would like to think our appeals to

real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an
act of faith like any other cults, no matter how much space we generously
give to all the rich and always historically specific mediations through
which we and everybody else must know the world. In other words,
despite their activist view of knowledge production, several Marxist geographers seem to effectively reinscribe a realist assumption (i.e., distinguishing thought and the real, or in this case thought and produced
nature, a nature which that thought represents) into their work that
implies that, when all is said and done, some knowledges get at reality
as it really is.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with such an assumption. On the
contrary, with several others (Sayer, 1993; Walker, 1989).I agree that it is
necessary for Marxisms explanatory-diagnostic ambitions (and, as
I? Smith avers, for any explanatory social theory more generally). It is an
assumption we cannot, as it were, not invoke (Barnett, 1993; Derrida,
19851, a point to be developed further in the final section of this paper.
My argument, however, concerns the way that assumption is invoked in
Marxist theorizations of nature. If Marxist accounts of produced nature
are not quite modern in Smiths sense, then, neither do they fully cash
in the promissory note of self-reflexivity that arises from their activist
view of knowledge production. This, I think, is what is problematic. By
way of illustration let us turn to cultural studies of scientific knowledge.
Cultural studies of scientific knowledge offer a powerful vehicle
through which we can dis-cern nature in theoretical discourse. They demonstrate the routinization of natures fixing within knowledge, and the
baleful consequences of doing so in a way that ignores that active and
often unconscious gesture of cernment. The context for and intellectual
origins of the cultural studies of scientific knowledge lie in the work of
Mannheim and Merton, on the sociology of knowledge and the sociology
of scientists respectively. Despite their differences, the conception of social utilized by both authors and their students, according to Woolgar
(1988a: 13), tended to emphasize those influences external to the intellectual activities of the scientist. In other words, they still assumed that a
residual (hard core) kernel of science proceeds untainted by extraneous
non-scientific (i.e. social) factors. It was this assumption that inspired
Bloor (1976) and Barnes (1977) to initiate what became a complex and
expansive project usually known as the sociology of scientific knowledge.I5To simplify drastically, this project sought to widen the domain
of sociological analysis by arguing that scientific knowledge itself could
be explained as the outcome of often complex social interests articulated
within and outside the formal institutions of science. Although productive
of an impressively rich corpus of substantive studies of scientific knowledge production, the sociologists of scientific knowledge have been

32 NOEL CASTREE

charged with two main failures. On the one hand, the concern over social
causation has been seen to tacitly overlook the material consequences of
scientific knowledge itself. On the other hand, in their concern to explain
scientific knowledge production, the sociologists of scientific knowledge
have tended to replicate the same distinctions and assumptions (e.g.,
between thought and the real) central to sciences self-image, and so
remain uncritical of the cognitive bases of their own knowledge claims
about science. In short, the sociology of scientific knowledge is seen as
still ultimately wedded to a more or less objectivist view of the world, in
spite of its constructivist construals of scientific knowledge. This is a
shortcoming which also underpins more recent attempts to develop a
specifically Marxist account of scientific knowledge. In Youngs (1982)
work in particular, and the recent ambitious study by Aronowitz (1988)
which, schematically speaking, both view scientific activity as a transformative labor process, the status of natural entities in relation to the
knowledge-productive scientific labors about them remains conspicuously unclear and unexplored, while little effort is devoted to exploring
the bases and consequences of a Marxist theory that claims (in the manner
of a coup de grace) to be a theory of scientific theory. Like Marxist geographical accounts of theoretical practice, Young and Aronowitz are unwilling to pursue the implications of knowledge as consequentially produced too far, because they assume that doing so necessarily undermines
the basis of their own arguments.
It is in this context that the cultural studies of scientific knowledge gain
their distinctiveness (although it goes without saying that to suggest that
this work is a cohesive whole is as erroneous as suggesting that it can be
pristinely differentiated from the sociology of scientific knowledge). The
cultural studies of scientific knowledge insist that all knowledge, scientific
or otherwise, is at all levels constitutively social, linguistic, and constructed, cutting to the very heart of the qualified realist assumpcions
underpinning Marxist accounts of produced nature. There is, in other
words, no space in which theory can claim immunity from social and
linguistic saturation, no universal or even historically specific outside
which can serve as an unproblematized site for testing our cognitive
claims. Knowledge is social and linguistic through and through, and this
makes a difference to any and all claims about a world taken to be
external to, or even dialectically related with, that knowledge. Cultural
studies of science are diverse, involving several disciplines (e.g. historians
like Haraway, sociologists like Latour, anthropologists like Traweek, philosophers like Rouse), a range of political viewpoints (e.g. feminists like
Fox-Keller, anti-racist feminists like Haraway, post-Marxists like Latour),
and a variety of foci from the macro (e.g. Shapin and Schaffers (1985)
account of the politicization of science and politics scientization) to the
micro (e.g. Traweeks (1988) comparative ethnography of the Stanford

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 33

Accelerator group). I cannot do justice to the complexities of the field here

(see Pickering, 1992; Rouse, 1992). Instead, I will show (selectively) how
cultural studies of science dis-cern nature by offering three fundamental
critiques of the axiom that there is an outer world to which we can have
some kind of truthful access, where truth is taken as knowledge that more
or less accurately captures the ontological reality of that world.
First, they challenge the assumption (however qualified) of natural
entities as being out there by historicizing and localizing the production
of that very assumption. Shapin and Schaffers (1985) Leviathan and the
Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life is perhaps the most
brilliant and sustained example of this argument. In meticulous detail,
the authors show how Boyle actively inaugurated the very distinction
between matters of fact and their representation, between reality and
knowledge, between nature and society. He did so, they argue, by instituting a new method of attesting to the facts of what is natural reality.
Drawing on a paralegal metaphor, Boyle assembled gentlemen in the
laboratory as witnesses to the scene of experimental action, those who
could legitimately testify to the existence of a vacuum through the medium of air-pump technology. The novelty of this technique for establishing truth claims was not just that they broke with the prevalent
Hobbesian belief that knowledge is a divine plenism delivered from God,
but that they enlisted, discursively and practically, a new actor - inert
nature - as reliable testament to truth by performing inside a laboratory
instrument in front of reliable witnesses. The power of Shapins and
Schaffers account is that they show how discussions about God, Nature
and Society, facts and their veracity, etc., did not straightforwardly precede Boyles experiments but were made to go through his specific, local,
leaky and transparent air-pump.
Second, cultural studies of science contest the idea that knowledge
more or less faithfully re-presents those natural entities posited as
external. Questioning this ideology of representation, as Woolgar
(1988a: 100) calls it, cultural studies of science show that this effect of an
external reality is sustained by a denial of the way that scientists always
actively re-present and intervene in nature at heterogenous sites and in
heterogenous ways (Hacking, 1983).For example, in their ethnography of
laboratory life, Latour and Woolgar (1979) point to the contingent nature
of facticity. Facts, they argue, are rendered through inscription devices
(graphs, tables, equations, machines), but, after negotiation about which
inscriptions are most appropriate, an inversion is made and the facts come
to produce the texts: the blip on the printout is no longer a blip but the
reality of a pulsar (Barnes, 1993, p. 302). Similarly, Traweeks (1988)
comparative anthropology of high energy physicists around the Stanford
Accelerator shows how the intervention of the accelerator technology
makes a difference to the scientists conclusions. In other words, the

34 NOEL CASTREE

technology actively mediates and manipulates a putatively external

physical world, its constitution enabling it to disclose some things about
high energy particles but not others. More provocatively still, Latour
(1988) argues that Pasteurs discovery rested on a process of actively
transforming the bacilli which caused anthrax among cattle. Without
freeing the bacilli from other competition in the laboratory, Pasteur could
not have developed his vaccine. Far from being inherent in nature, the
bacilli deployed on farms on the basis of Pasteurs work were recreations
of the bacilli Pasteur fabricated in the laboratory. Hence Latours (1983)
statement Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world: facts are not
discovered but made in the laboratory, and from there they disseminate
out into the world masquerading as the facts of nature itself. As Latour
(1983: 166) puts it, Facts are like trains, they do not circulate outside their
rails. More generally, Latour (1986) has argued that the truth about
nature is always relative to the deployment of immutable mobiles, that
is, inscription devices which state what the facts of nature are (e.g.,
academic papers, technical apparatus), and which are sufficiently mobile
(e.g., academic papers published in the major journals or translated into
several languages) to reach and convince a wide audience that their
representations are truthful. The immutable mobiles help determine what
are taken to be natural facts, not the other way around.
Thirdly, cultural studies of science contest the idea that knowledge of
entities designated as natural can ever be more or less fixed as if those
entities have a singular being or is-ness potentially open to cognitive
appropriation. Indeed, they suggest that the category of nature is so
deeply insinuated into wider economies of meaning that its use is always
problematic. This insight structures Haraways (1989) dazzling work on
primate science. Arguing, after Derrida, that the representation-reality,
subject-object dualisms so central to sciences self-understanding are an
effect of language itself, Haraway focuses not on the veridical rehtion
between signifier and signified, but on the horizontal relation between
signifiers themselves. Rejecting the view that each natural object designates its own concept, she argues that the scientific re-presentation of
primates is caught up in extremely complex linguistic and cultural economies. Primates, as quintessentially natural beasts, are never for
Haraway innocent: when deconstructed, their bodies are, instead, the site
of Western narratives about race, sex, gender, class, nation, civilization,
family, morality, life, and death. In turn, as her investigations of popular
culture demonstrate, those linguistically and culturally overdetermined
scientific claims about nature rebound onto the social, as scientific knowledge gets insinuated in complex ways within everyday life (as advertising, technology etc.) with often subtle, unseen, but nonetheless dire
results for groups coded in the implicitly racist, sexist, and nationalist
terms of scientific knowledge itself and cultural knowledge more gener-

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 35

ally. In other words, claims about nature always say more, or exceed, the
attempts of scientists to foreclose natures being: in Haraways (1991: 3)
words, grammar is politics by other means; words, and the practices
they relate to, can be toxic. Similarly, Fox-Kellers (1993) historical inquiries into molecular biology elucidate how powerful but implicit cultural
narratives of male birthing are central to attempts to legitimate its importance. Science thus becomes not a separate field whose procedures are
closed off from the rest of society but an open endeavor where sciences
boundaries with wider social and linguistic economies become extremely
permeable. Science and theory, in other words, ure culture.
The challenge of cultural studies of science to Marxism, then, is that it
be reflexive to its very core. Where so many philosophical defenses over
such questions as realism and relativism get locked in abstract (and often
sterile) proofs of the logic of their positions (e.g., realists appealing to
the obviousness of real processes like gravity regardless of how we
interpret them), what is refreshing about cultural studies of science is the
attempt to show meticulously, historically, and empirically how knowledge construction occurs and its insistently material and political consequences. All of these arguments, of course, apparently implicate cultural
studies of science in just those dichotomies and explanatory projects that
they criticize in science and in the sociology of scientific knowledge.
However, more subtly, cultural studies of science are reluctant to set the
categories of social explanation outside their purview. As Rouse (1992:10)
argues, cultural studies instead take reflexive questions as an invitation
to consider their own complex epistemic and political relations to the
cultural practices and significations they study. I want now to say more
about the implications of this intensive self-reflexivity in regard to a
future agenda for Marxist accounts of produced nature.

Beyond r/ReaIism and conventionalism

The arguments I have presented may seem at this stage to be - quite
fatally - antithetical. On the one hand, I have argued the need for Marxism to take natures materiality seriously. In so doing, I implicitly assumed that there is a produced nature out there, which is both
ontologically real and active - and did not, in my discussion of produced
nature, problematize Marxist, or my own, cognitive claims about it. On
the other hand, I have taken issue with the qualified realist epistemology
underpinning this discussion of materiality, and insisted that the facts of
produced nature never speak for themselves. This would seem, perhaps,
to leave me caught on the horns of a dilemma: my recommendations for
Marxist discussions of nature would seem to be ontologically realist and
yet, at the same time, epistemologically relativist. However, in this last

36 NOEL CASTREE

section I want to show how the arguments I have presented might be

synthesized to see produced nature as both real and epistemologically
fixed and cerned at one and the same time. I also highlight the advantages
for Marxism of this (both/and) position over the dichotomous (either/or)
option of realism or constructionism, which is so frequently presented to
us in these "postmodern" times (Sayer, 1993).'6
Let me begin by suggesting why, left unquestioned, that dichotomy is
sterile. Theories which, in however subtle or sophisticated a way, invoke
some true reality as the ultimate basis and authority for their knowledge
claims (as I have argued Marxism ultimately does), and theories which,
against this, argue that there is no unmediated access to an "outer" nature
or society because language and knowledge always construct the world
in theoretically given terms (as some postmodernist theories do: e.g.
Strohmayer and Hannah, 1992) both assume the distinction between reality
and re-presentation on which their arguments turn to be self-evident.
They do not, in other words, see it for what it is: an historically specific
discursive production which, far from being self-evident, needs to be
problematized and questioned. As the cultural studies of science show,
and as Heidegger and Derrida have argued in more general terms, the
distinction between thought and the real is a peculiar metaphysic of
modernity (Mitchell, 1988). I thus concur with Barnett's (1993: 350) Derridean insight that "language and reality are not two separate realms
needing to be linked in some way. Reality is in language, with representation. Language is the place where representation and reality meet."
Distinguishing reality and the real is an enabling device because it
permits theory to make claims about a world beyond theoretical re-presentation. It is thus an indispensable condition of possibility for making
social theoretical claims about the world and, as I have argued, therefore
central to enabling Marxist insights about the production of nature. It is
also for this very reason a device that can become an instrument of power
(Mitchell, 1988),because used unreflexively it circumvents and ultimately
denies the kind of active and interested theoretical cerning, the possible
conflation of knowledge with truth, that cultural studies of science illuminate so well. As Barnett (1993: 348, italics added) puts it, "processes of
reference and representation are able to achieve certain effects only by
remaining blind to their conditions of possibility. . . ." This is why those
conditions must be problematized and questioned, not somehow reversed
or dispensed with: we cannot get outside the representational project, we
cannot, then, not cern "nature." But we must pursue that project with the
utmost vigilance and self-awareness in order to trace the strategic need
for and particular effects of our cerning of nature. In regard to Marxist
theorizations of produced nature the critical payoff is that the very assumption that permits those theorizations to investigate and offer powerful insights about the world is also that which must be seen as an

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 37

assumption - not a self-evident ontological given - one potentially open

to theoretical abuse. Hence Barnett's (1993: 351) insistence that "open
questions must endeavor to refashion the obviousness of what is into a
new configuration which enables the problem of its production to be
gleaned as a problem."
This argument may seem to reduce the representational project to language: "Reality is in language with representation." However my point
(and, I take it, Barnett's too), is not to make such an extreme reductionist
claim, but to press home a more sober insistence: that claims about the
world, produced nature, society, etc. are made through a distinction enabled by language. It is the posited or axiomatic basis upon which our
desire to argue that some theories capture the reality of the world better
than others rests. This is why representation is such a serious business
and why, as I suggested in the previous section, cultural studies of science
do not reject representation but take a subversive and questioning stance
toward it.
Once we recognize, and become alive to the potential perils of unreflexively using, this enabling distinction it becomes possible to self-consciously deploy it in the interests of arguing for one view of the world
over another. It becomes possible, and for Marxist geographical theorizations of nature necessary, to deploy the distinction against the view that
theory can never say anything meaningful about the world because we
can never get outside theory's terms. Indeed, a fringe of cultural studies
of science seems to become embroiled in such an extreme position (see
especially Ashmore, 1989; Woolgar, 198813).The implication is that science
constructs "nature" and the world just as it pleases, as if they were a
tabula rasa. Whatever its other insights, this extreme position is deeply
flawed from the perspective of a social theory like Marxism committed
to making claims about a world beyond the immediate location of the
theorist. To use Baber's (1992) apt phrase, it entails getting "lost in the
reflexive funhouse."
Although there is an important sense in which knowledge constructs
objects, and not vice versa, this construction has limits. Science, and theory
more generally, may indeed re-present and intervene, but this double
mediation does not exhaust all the properties or possible interpretations
of those objects deemed to be natural. First, when science re-presents
nature it constitutes concepts of objects not the objects themselves (Sayer,
1993).Second, even when science practically intervenes to physically alter
"natural" entities proper, those entities, once altered, still have inherent
and relational properties that are quite real and consequential. Pasteur 's
bacilli are a case in point, for pasteurization could not, materially, have
occurred without them, within or outside the laboratory. To suggest
otherwise is to argue that "natural" objects have "no liabilities, no causal
powers, no relational properties independently of the shifting symbolic
and moral (-practical) projections of human cultures" (Benton, 1992b:

38 NOEL CASTREE

126). Nature and the world never come to us unmediated, but we must
axiomatically insist that they may exist independently of our intended
epistemological re-presentations and interventions with regard to them.
Additionally, while there is an essential and recursive connection between re-presenting and intervening in science (and, indeed, in language
and knowledge more generally), neither science nor society simply construe natural entities as they please, simply by altering prevailing
re-presentations of and interventions in nature. The reason, as Haraways
study of primate science so powerfully shows, is that particular interventions and re-presentations of nature become institutionalized, stable and
hegemonic in given contexts. But these constructions are not, as the cultural
studies of science show, immaterial or idealistic. On the contrary, they
materially affect those entities they designate as natural, even though the
properties and possible interpretations of those objects are not totally
exhausted by these constructions.
In making both of these arguments against ultra-conventionalism I may
seem to fall back into just the kind of realist arguments I have been
questioning. But note that these arguments are self-consciously articulated
from within the problematic of representation, not taking it for granted,
but using it strategically and necessarily, with all its attendant dangers,
to make claims about produced nature and the world.
Sayer (1993), in a critique of postmodernist thought in geography from
the standpoint of Critical Realism, has recently offered apparently similar
arguments, to suggest why any critical social theory cannot rest with the
incipient epistemological relativism and nominalism of such thought.
Likewise, Walker (1989) has also offered Realist arguments in a defense
of dialectical materialism against the wayward Marxisms of Wright and
Burawoy, and, indeed, Marxists and Marxist geographers more generally
have found Realism a particularly congenial conceptual apparatus (e.g.
Lovering, 1990; Kanth, 1992). I find Sayers and Walkers positions persuasive and fully sympathize with the intent of their arguments. In fact,
I think that Critical Realist philosophy, as presented by Bhaskar (1978;
1979; 1989), offers, when appropriately corrected, a powerful conceptual
lexicon suited to the kind of dual rethinking of Marxist geographical
conceptions of nature I have argued for in this paper. I say appropriately
corrected because I think there are two lacunae in the Critical Realist
vocabulary which limits its otherwise exemplary commitment to selfreflexivity, and which do not attend my critique of epistemological relativism as presented above.
On the one hand, Critical Realism offers a resource apparently well
suited to a thoroughgoing dis-cerning of nature as I have described it,
without sacrificing Marxisms explanatory-diagnostic role. That resource
is the fundamental distinction Realism makes between the intransitive
objects of theoretical inquiry that exist in the world and act independently of the theorist and her/his representational machinery, and the

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 39

"transitive dimension," or conceptual vocabulary which necessarily mediates and influences how the intransitive dimension is understood. This,
as Sayer and Walker both argue, offers a nuanced "third way" between
mindless empiricism and ultra-radical constructivism, for Critical
Realism

. . . entails acceptance of (i) the principle of epistemic relativity,

which states that all beliefs are socially produced so that all
knowledge is transient, and neither truth-values nor criteria of
rationality exist outside historical time. But it entails rejection
of (ii) the doctrine of judgemental relativism, which maintains
that all beliefs are equally valid, in the sense that there can be
no rational grounds for preferring one to another. It thus
stands opposed to epistemic absolutism and epistemic irrationalism alike. (Bhaskar, 1978: 24)
Moreover, the Realist conception of the intransitive dimension as a layered plurality of structures, mechanisms and events offers precisely the
kind of sensibility attuned to not unreflexively cerning "natural" entities
as if they could be definitively explained as this rather than that, and in
this way rather than that. Although some Marxists suggest that Marxism
does not need a Realist vocabulary to make such claims (e.g., Gunn, 1989;
Harvey, 1987), I think Bhaskar and his co-workers offer a much clearer,
more nuanced, and more consistent set of distinctions on these questions
than do most traditional Marxist accounts. Certainly, the currently popular image of Marxism as a ham-fisted Enlightenment meta-theory suggests that Realist attempts to place a new, more sensitive conceptual suit
of clothes upon historical materialist theory is, at the very least, strategically worthwhile.
However - and here I highlight the lacunae - most Realist accounts are
not self-conscious about the fact that the condition of possibility for
talking about the transitive and intransitive dimensions is the very distinction between thought and the real that I have insisted we must
question and be self-conscious about. It is precisely that lack of self-consciousness which permeates Sayer's otherwise persuasive argument, for
he wants, when all is said and done, to posit the intransitive dimension
as if it is a given ontological thing (a feature that might account for the
frequent misunderstanding that Critical Realism is a foundationalist philosophy in the worst sense). While we should applaud the Realist belief
in real social and natural events beyond the immediate horizon of epistemology, Realists, rather like the Marxist geographical theorizations of
nature I have criticized, do not problematize the assumption for that belief
nor do they seem alive to the consequences of its unreflexive invocation.
Rather, they work within it, worrying more about the problems of accessing
the real as if the real is just there. In other words, they bring Marxism to

40 NOEL CASTREE

the cusp of a truly thoroughgoing questioning of the representational

project without abandoning it.
Secondly, for all its admirable concern with the problems of the transitive dimension, Critical Realism rarely goes into any detail about how its
own or other theories transitive apprehension of entities and processes
posited as intransitive are positioned within linguistic and cultural economies, and the consequences thereof. While reflexive in word, in deed
Critical Realism seems to posit entities within the intransitive dimension
as having properties capable of being sutured around this or that representation. Once again, the Realist belief that some representations do
capture the world better than others is both admirable and necessary.
However, Realism seems shy of exploring the consequences of the fact made so clear by cultural studies of science - that even better representations can be guilty of simultaneously pernicious effects. Because, as
Haraway argues, knowledge, theory and science are always implicated in
wider discursive economies, particular theoretical claims about the world,
however powerful and useful, have semantic and practical effects (sexist,
racist, nationalistic, homophobic) that may exceed those claimed or desired. If, as I have argued, the assumption of a vertical relation between
the world and its representation needs to be problematized even as it is
necessarily and strategically invoked, so too do Realists need to problematize the effects of positing a given (Marxist or otherwise) theoretical
representation which deploys concepts inextricably embroiled within a
wider horizontal linguistic culture. Once again, Critical Realism thus
brings Marxism to the cusp of a thoroughgoing questioning of its own
theoretical lenses, yet without fully problematizing the potential danger
and negative effects of deploying those theoretical lenses to make sense
of the world, even as that deployment is necessary to Marxisms explanatory-diagnostic commitment.
A project in which Marxism becomes reflexive through and through in
the ways I have suggested is unquestionably hard work. But, then again,
and as Marxists have long known, no one said producing knowledge
about the world was easy. It is the hard work of being aware of and
disclosing the effects to which the problematic of representation is put to
work within Marxist accounts of nature. It is the hard work of assiduously
exploring the effects of cerning nature in this way rather than that. Hard
work unquestionably, but, surely, well worth the effort.

Conclusion

Let me end with a recommendation. One logical conclusion of my argument is that we really do lack an adequate vocabulary for fully making
sense of what we mean when we talk of entities as natural. We are
presently strung out between theories like Marxism, which seek to mate-

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 41

rially explain natures nature, taking those natural entities as the things
to be explained, and theories which, like cultural studies of science, seek
to explore the concept of nature or what it is to call and manipulate entities
as natural in the first place, its historical emergence, its meanings, its
deployment and its effects. The rather general form of m y o w n argument
is just one indicator of the need to develop a more sophisticated and
self-conscious vocabulary in this regard. Another, more pressing one, is
that nature is simply a category we cannot do without: it continues to
be used within our societies, to be source of concern, contestation, and
power, and for that reason we surely need to dissect the complexity that
Raymond Williams famously identified so long ago.

Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory for acute readings of the issues
addressed here, to David Demeritt and Bruce Willems-Braun for conversations,
and to James McCarthy, Mark OMalley, Neil Smith and Richard Walker for their
very insightful and helpful comments on an earlier draft. Remaining muddles are
of course mine.

Notes
1. Let me make it plain from the start that much of what follows revolves around

2.

3.
4.

5.

a discussion of classical Marxism for two reasons. Firstly, because I think that
most of the major Marxist theorizations of nature, both within and outside
geography, have been rendered through this classical optic. Secondly, because
it is through this optic that one of the most profound Marxist theses about
nature - the production of nature argument - originated. While I use the
general label Marxism throughout the paper, I do not intend to suggest that
each and every variant of Marxist work can be interpreted in the way suggested in this essay.
Let me stress that this simply amounts to one attempt to instigate a red-green
rapprochement. The red-green conversation can be convened in a number of
productive ways, the dazzling range of which Peet and Watts (1993) have
illuminated in their review of development theory and the environment.
Exceptions within human geography are Barnes (19931, Bassett (19941, Demeritt (1994a), and Livingstone (1993).
I say this with two reservations. First, the ideology of nature is only part albeit an important one - of bourgeois conceptions of nature. As an account
of bourgeois conceptions of nature tout court the argument is too generalized
and undiscriminating: for instance, there is a Promethean strand in bourgeois
thought that treats nature as raw material for human manipulation. Second,
I do not for a minute think Marxian critiques of the representation of nature
within Western capitalist societies are the only or even most important ones.
Feminist critiques of nature must be considered indispensable in any critical
evaluation of Western representations of nature, and within geography Rose
(1993) has effectively shown why.
Smith puts this error down to Schmidts Frankfurt School heritage, which sat
some distance from historical materialism and tended to view it through

42 NOEL CASTREE
lenses ground in the pessimistic categories of post-war, post-bourgeois culture.
6. These objections might also reasonably be leveled at another landmark attempt to tease out Marxs theoretical understanding of nature during the early
1970s, limparanos On Materialism (1975).While quite different in philosophical outlook from Schmidt, limparanos attempt to assert the biological priority of nature by stressing Marxs comments about the natural history of the
human species, lapsed into a nature-society dualism which, like Schmidt,
hypostatized the former and underplayed the latter (see Williams, 1980).
7. Natures Metropolis is, in my opinion, the finest exemplification of Smiths
general thesis. Although not Marxist in outlook, Cronons work draws upon
the work of Smith and Harvey, and offers a rich and synoptic account of the
production of nature in the Great West. But it also, significantly, does not fall
into the dangers of underplaying the materiality of nature which, I argue,
Smith does. Cronons environmental history background keeps him alive to
this materiality, and so I think that Natures Metropolis is also an exemplar of
precisely the dual focus I argue for in the first part of this essay: that is, on
nature as produced and active within the historical-geography of capitalist
societies.
8. Note that the thesis of the production of nature, while socially constructionist
in the sense that natural environments are produced via capitalist relations,
is not socially constructionist in the sense I use this term in the second part
of this paper. Smith is largely unconcerned with the way knowledge - including historical materialist knowledge - constructs nature, and his sense of
social construction is intended to register global-systemic human-capitalist
influence on and intervention in quite real ecosystems, not to suggest that
theory per se constructs the natural world in culturally-given, power-laden
practico-linguistic terms.
9. Although Watts is hardly a classical Marxist in outlook. His vision is more
ecumenical, but he does draw upon elements of the orthodox political-economy position, a la Smith and Harvey, to prosecute his case.
10. William Cronon (1994: 170) also fastens on this claim in his response to
geographical critics. I must note that D. Walker objects to my use of this
statement, arguing that it is taken out of context. In my defense let me say
that I am simply taking it to be one pronounced or emblematic instance
supporting my argument, and do not intend to impugn Walkers exemplary
research record concerning questions of nature.
11. Indeed, for those who would (erroneously) directly associate the state communism of the former Eastern Bloc with Marxs work, the environmental
disasters and insensitivity to natural systems characteristic of the former was
simply the practical outworking of the latters theoretical eco-blindness. Captured in Lysenkos infamous statement We cannot wait for favors from
Nature; we must wrest them from her, it issued in environmentally insensitive projects on a vast scale, including the re-routing of major river systems.
12. A much more helpful and realistic way of thinking about Marxist and green
thought is as discursive traditions, that is, complex constellations of related
but distinct theoretical-political positions. For instance, presently there are at
least three major variants of Marxism extant in the Anglophone world (classical Marxism, new structural Marxism, analytical Marxism: Chilcote and
Chilcote, 1992) which, despite their common lineage, are quite distinct. By
thinking in this way one avoids the disingenuous practice of lumping distinct
positions under one generalizing label (e.g. Marxism in the singular with a
capital M) and then attributing one or other meaning to that label.

THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE 43

13. I? Smiths understanding of cerning shares much in common with Heideggers critique of the enframing of the world by late Western societies, the
rendering up of objects before viewing subjects as what he calls standingreserve, that is mere resources for the appropriation of an arrogant humanity.
More generally, Smiths argument belongs to a lineage that stretches from
Heidegger through thinkers like Adorno, Marcuse, Levinas and Derrida, who
all see a will to power within the grasping structures of Western knowledge
and practice.
14. In this Marxist geography has presaged by many years the current and
burgeoning interest in the politics and power of disciplinary and theoretical
geographical knowledge by figures such as Domosh (1991), Driver (1992),
Livingstone (1993) and Rose (1993).
15. Which was indebted also to the more restricted, less sociologically minded,
but provocative statements by Kuhn, and by Feyerabend on sciences internal workings.
16. For other meditations on the relevance of the cultural studies of science to
the realism-relativism question within geography see Demeritt (1994a; 1994b).

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