Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
'representatives' should be listened to, how much, and how? In what ways
do we receive and consume their representations, critically or uncritically,
as mere 'fiction' or something 'factual'? Which representational genres do
we, as individuals, tend to favour, and which ones do we ignore or decide
are not for us? How aware are we of the 'work' they perform upon us?
Should we take the genre differences between these representations at face
value, so too the varied social functions the genres perform? The answers to
these questions lead us well beyond a concern with censorship laws and the
prohibitions enforced by state-sanctioned regulators - what Luigi Pellizoni
(2001: 60) calls 'power over communication'. Within the realms of what's
deemed socially tolerable, how much epistemic diversity (or 'bandwidth')
do we experience and which representations of nature become, in effect,
ghettoised because they're perceived to be too esoteric, maverick or 'weird'
by the mainstream? The question, which pertains to 'power
in
communica-
tion' (ibid.), alerts us to the quality of what Siva Vaidhyanathan (2006: 305)
calls our
semiotic democracy
. To the extent that references to nature and
its collateral terms play a wide role in all our lives, how can we ensure rep-
resentational plurality and resist representational narrowing? How can we
cultivate a 'mature' attitude towards representations, epistemic workers and
genres - and so become aware of their role in shaping us as subjects?
As Vaidhyanathan argues, in the tradition of thought known as republi-
can democracy, 'freedom' and 'liberty' do not simply consist of the right
to
refuse
certain available options (since the options may be limited, similar
or inferior). In their 'positive' versions, they require that a society organises
itself such that
new
ideas,findings,arguments,etc.are
actively fostered and
distributed
. Such a society thus decides to question its own cognitive, moral
and aesthetic practices as a measure of how well it realises its self-established
political ideals. Such a society may require 'positive discrimination' so that
certain epistemic communities and various representations are not ghet-
toised, ignored or stigmatised before they've been given a chance to be
more widely heard. This then obliges established or influential epistemic
communities to reflect on their own practices, and it obliges the rest of us
to reflect, however briefly, on our own habits of thought, feeling and action.
It implies that the mere 'toleration' of unusual ideas, claims, values and so
on is insufficient, at least in the first instance. For, at its worst, toleration
merely entrenches mainstream beliefs, assumptions and habits, and it shel-
ters them from any robust challenge or the glare of radical alternatives. In
this sense, toleration - and its bedfellow 'freedom of speech' - can become a
cover for business-as-usual, the rejection of alternative modes of being, and
the refusal of a different (better?) future. Fostering epistemic diversity in
claims made about 'nature' (and much else besides) counts for far less than
it should if people lack the opportunity or skills to give those claims proper
consideration. As Henry Giroux has argued repeatedly, creating a 'critically
literate' citizenry has a pay-off only if people have a range of ideas, insights
and value-claims to work with and against.
