Naturalism and the self-effacement of the non-representational subject

Non-representational and materialist theories have enabled geographers to understand subjectivity as something that is interwoven with intimate and dynamic spaces. While previous work has questioned the political efficacy of integrating subjectivity into the environment, this paper traces a ‘new’ problem to the philosophical naturalism of early non-representational work where the subject was construed as an immanent part of the natural environment. The ambiguity of what this immanence means risks obscuring the functional and grammatical distinction between self and environment that is used in producing and communicating geographical knowledge. From this perspective, the paper argues that the enlivening of cultural geography can also be interpreted as achieving an opposed, morbid effect. The problem is contextualized with examples from early extensions of psychoanalytic theory concerning the alienating consequences of objective self-representations. It is argued that non-representational and materialist geographies may benefit from further clarifications of what theories of integrating subjectivity into the natural world mean in practice.