GOVERNING SOCIETY WITH REFERENCE TO THE NATURAL - Making Sense of Nature - page 78

'corporatisation of the media' - both the news and entertainment media -
rightly disturbs many commentators for this reason. The worry is that the
diversity of content and high quality standards one gets with most pub-
lic broadcasting are sharply eroded once big private companies call all the
shots. This raises wider questions about how epistemic communities govern
themselves, and are governed by other responsible parties - questions I'll
turn to at the end of this chapter.
EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIES FROM THE INSIDE OUT
I've argued that various epistemic communities are (wittingly or not)
involved in the complex process of subject-formation - to different degrees
and with different effects, depending on the case. If, as I suggested earlier,
many of these communities make sense of 'nature' for us, then it follows
that the concept and its referents are an aspect of governmentality (con-
ceived here in a broad, generic way as a diffuse process of governing beyond
the realms of state and formal politics per se). Working within (or sometimes
challenging) the antonyms mapped in Figure 1.5 , different communities'
particular representations of nature compete for our attention. At the very
least they can affect our thoughts, attitudes, values, feelings and actions -
in the short or long term. But they can also interpellate us as subjects of a
certain kind, and to that extent are involved in the making of the self. That
self might be wholly conventional in some or all areas of daily life, but then
again, it might not be.
Note the corollary of all this: if representations of nature are implicated
in the shaping of subjects and selves, they're necessarily implicated in the
way what we call nature is itself used, altered or protected. The governance
of people and the governance of bodies and ecologies are but two sides of
the same very large, intricately patterned coin. Consider again the car advert
in Chapter 2 ( Plate 2.2) . To the extent that they succeed (and they most cer-
tainly do ), these ads engender habits that permit mass pollution as a 'normal'
practice and the mass extraction of oil from the ground. Huge environmen-
tal changes are attendant upon us being interpellated as consumers in need
of private transportation.
Having so far looked at epistemic communities from the outside in,
from the perspective of 'consumer' and 'audience', let me now briefly
look from the inside out. This matters for two reasons. First, epistemic
communities obviously socialise their own members . Often they engender
specific epistemic identities that members assume when working within
those communities. 10 These identities then become the basis upon which
group members produce and disseminate their representations. Second, this
feeds into the process whereby epistemic communities both create and then
actively maintain epistemic boundaries between themselves, other com-
munities and the wider public realm. This fence building and maintenance
is quite central to how communities and their audiences are defined and