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Peet and Watts, I would argue that this gestures beyond the regional level to a dis-
cursive spatiality, which refuses to privilege or essentialise any particular scale.
Peet and Watts' portrayal of discourses as part of an environmental imaginary
is illuminating for at least three basic reasons, which resonate with more extensive
claims about discourse and representation within geography. While discussing this
below, I will argue that discourse bears important similarities and differences with
its conceptual cousins ideology and hegemony, some of the erstwhile preferred
notions among critical minds.
In the fi rst place, Peet and Watts explicitly hook up discourse to shifting relations
of social power. Power may here be understood in terms of situated, relational
practices of dominance and resistance around both meaning and matter. Rather
than seeing power as strictly centred ('power is possessed by a particular social
class') or universal ('power is everywhere'), this emphasises the particularities of
who exercises it in conjunction with why and how it operates in specifi c biogeo-
physical environments. As David Harvey explains, there are good reasons to couple
discourse with power, most basically 'because words like 'nature' and 'environment'
convey a commonality and universality of concern that can all too easily be captured
by particularistic politics. 'Environment' is, after all, whatever surrounds or, to be
more precise, whatever exists in the surroundings of some being that is
relevant to
the state of that being at a particular place and time (Harvey, 1996, p. 118). The
social situatedness from which such relevance is defi ned varies considerably, and
this will affect the shape of discourses as modalities of power.
Discourses often come as specifi c packages, as 'formations' of representations,
narratives, storylines, concepts, metaphors, and conventions - constituting, if you
like, a multimedia dialectic, in which a more or less coherent worldview is commu-
nicated in mutually confi rming (or contradictory) guises of maps, images, and texts
(Mels, 2002). Assemblages or chains of references of this kind tend to circumscribe
particular interests and organisations of, for instance, bureaucratic, military, legal
or corporate control. Discourses and their constitutive representations in that sense
codify and substantiate particular social power relations and intervene in the
material reconstitution of the environment, actively producing the 'very reality they
appear to describe' (Said, 1978, p. 94).
Yet, like ideology, the power of discourse need not lie in deliberate maneuvers,
but can also operate in a more subterranean fashion as 'broad taken-for granted
frames of reference, including practical knowledge that results in embodied material
practices of engaging with the world. Discourses contain common sense ways of
knowing, valuing, and doing - for example, knowing what one likes without
knowing how to explain why, or seeing any reason to do so' (Duncan and Duncan,
2004, p. 38). Importantly, the power of discourse is relative and relational. Like
hegemony, discourses tend to be contested and struggled-over in ways that mediate
geographically specifi c interests of class, gender, and ethnicity. Shifts in discursive
power relations can appear when, for instance, local activists appropriate the
discursive techniques of elites, present counter-discourses which map out 'lost' social
relationships, or contest the homogenisation or naturalisation of space, property
relations, plans and policies.
In the second place, and by extension, Peet and Watts' formulation leaves an
opening to deeper philosophical issues about plural knowledge-claims and worlds,
epistemologies and ontologies. It has often been argued that this recognition of
plurality explains why many academics nowadays prefer to speak of discourse
