Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Recent work by the Canadian geographer Bruce Braun may serve to illustrate
the critical purchase of post-structuralist strategies to interrogate discursive prac-
tices. Central to his inquiry on the Clayoquot Sound, a heavily forested area in
British Columbia, is the method of
genealogy,
inspired by Foucault's Nietzschean
approach to history
.
This seeks to detonate the ostensibly obvious nature of things,
the search for origins and timeless essences. It is to splinter notions of unity, to
expose the heterogeneity and discontinuity of what seems to be consistent and
continuous, in order to grapple with 'the historical, cultural, and political conditions
through which objects attain legibility' (Braun, 2002, p. 3). Braun's genealogy pays
careful attention to specifi c confi gurations of power/knowledge, bringing out the
capacity of institutionally sanctioned epistemologies to present certain categories
and narratives as trustworthy and real. Behind the preservation of such discursive
coherence - which is instrumental to the ability to maintain social power - lies a
hidden social history of exclusion, forgetting and silencing.
And so Braun turns to the language of industrial foresters, scientists, environ-
mental groups, experts, and various forms of scientifi c categorisation, nature writing
and photography with the intention of tracing the (subjugated) histories, (buried)
epistemologies and morphologies of different environmental discourses. In Braun's
treatment, each discourse not only adds layers of partial meaning to the environ-
ment, but these meanings are in their turn subjected to further deconstruction.
From a critical analysis of offi cial documents, Braun argues that environmental-
ists and the logging lobby have at fi rst sight constructed radically different discourses
about the same old-growth forest. Where the forest company advances a scientistic
account of the forest as a set of manageable resources, the environmentalists view
the area through a more romantic veil as a pristine, sparsely peopled wilderness.
However, for all their further differences, both of these environmental discourses
make strong claims to transcend their discursive domain and capture reality as-it-
really-is. Both trade on a widely reproduced nature/culture dualism. Their shared
view of the Sound as pure nature entails a near denial of the historical presence of
indigenous peoples, thereby (perhaps unintentionally) harking back on colonial
discourses and practices of displacement. In these discourses, the Nuu-chah-nulth
are doubly excluded from the environment, being either seen as a cultural aberration
within nature or as a traditional anomaly within Canadian modernity.
Braun's approach to environmental discourse owes much of its depth to his sys-
tematic attention to the ways in which past environmental discourses and episte-
mologies reappear historically. As it turns out (and this echoes a general argument
within post-colonial theory) much spadework for the currently dominant expert
discourses on Canadian wilderness was done in the 19th century. These past dis-
courses are kept alive not in the fi rst place by immediate reference, but by their
reproduction in social memory through imagery, storylines, and habits of thought,
which in their turn are inscribed in the landscape itself. On a more theoretical level,
Braun's work is attuned to a post-structuralism in which we cannot in any meaning-
ful sense break through discourse to describe what a particular environment is like.
Instead of allowing some discourse to speak authoritatively in the name of the
environment, this calls for attention to closures in
all
discourses, be they hegemonic
or disruptive, scientifi c or lay (Braun, 2002, p. 262).
I think it is important at this point to measure the distance between the post-
structuralist method of critique presented here (revealing and challenge binaries,
buried within discourses) and a more Marxian critique, which refuses to separate
