At the End of Nature: Cyborgs, ‘Humachines’, and Environments in Postmodernity
Open Access
- 1 August 1997
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
- Vol. 29 (8) , 1367-1380
- https://doi.org/10.1068/a291367
Abstract
In this paper I rethink some of the premises in industrial-era social ontologies by rethinking how hybridized agencies, like cyborgs, actor networks, or humachines, decenter anthropocentric modernist conceptions of ‘man and the environment’. By using postmodernist claims that we now operate after ‘the end of Nature’ or ‘the death of Nature’, I build this paper from such conceptual hyperbole to explore how cyborg life-forms or humachinic social formations are reshaping the natural and social environments of contemporary fast capitalism on a global scale. These terms of analysis, in turn, could improve our understandings of the built and yet to be built environments in advanced technological economies and societies.This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit:
- Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of Environments, Bodies, and NatureAlternatives: Global, Local, Political, 1996
- Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and PowerPublished by SAGE Publications ,1996
- Present at the (Dis)integration: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization in the New Wor(l)d OrderAnnals of the American Association of Geographers, 1994
- Worldwatching at the limits of growth∗Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1994
- Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneitySystemic Practice and Action Research, 1992
- Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismPublished by Duke University Press ,1992
- The Foucault EffectPublished by University of Chicago Press ,1991
- The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric VehiclePublished by Springer Nature ,1986