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outside the mainstream may form various 'counter-publics' who either
hope to challenge the mainstream or who exist, impotently, on its mar-
gins. Some of these counter-publics are part of a 'transnational public
sphere' facilitated by the Internet, email, Skype and so on. But even
sympathetic commentators regard these counter-publics as
visible
, but
ultimately
ineffectual
in a practical sense. Unsurprisingly, left-wing aca-
demics like Giroux are part of such international counter-publics and
wish them to be effective. Some, though by no means all, counter-
publics aim to foster a culture of critical debate that approaches Jurgen
Habermas's idealised public sphere (where sustained, non-superficial
dialogue produces a robust, if impermanent, consensus).
Theideaof
post-political
democracy resonates with Giroux's notion
of 'public pedagogy'. It's associated with the European philosophers
Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Chantal Mouffe. In
different ways, they each suggest that modern so-called 'democracies'
operate ever more by
depoliticising
critical questions and issues. Cer-
tain things become 'off-limits', that is to say unthinkable, unsayable
or unimaginable. The flip side of this is that certain other things
become common sense and almost beyond question. For instance, my
Manchester University colleague Erik Swyngedouw argues that 'climate
change' has become accepted as a 'fact' in most modern democra-
cies - to the point where questioning it almost opens one to ridicule
(Swyngedouw, 2010). In a context where capitalism appears equally
beyond question, Swyngedouw argues that the idea of climate change
limits political debate to 'technical solutions' to the impending 'crisis'.
Not only are the claims of 'climate change sceptics' pilloried; equally,
radical arguments for a future economy not based on continuous mass
consumption are barely entertained in the corridors of power or every-
day life. As Zizek put it sardonically, 'say and write whatever you
want, on the condition that [it]
...
does not effectively question the
predominant political consensus' (Zizek, 2002: 544).
Clearly, in all the arguments summarised above, there's a certain
idealisation of a public sphere and a form of democracy that are,
respectively, 'strong' and 'deep'. However, as long ago as 1925, the early
media theorist Walter Lippmann (1925), in his book
The phantom public
,
worried that the ideal may
never
be realisable in practice - short of rev-
olution and the break-up of mass democracies into far smaller polities
and self-governing communities.
The value of epistemic diversity
Returning now to the subject of nature and its affiliated concepts, which
representations do we - and should we - pay heed to? Which of nature's
