GOVERNING SOCIETY WITH REFERENCE TO THE NATURAL - Making Sense of Nature - page 98

SUMMARY
In this and the previous chapter, I've suggested that the question 'what
do we know, believe, feel and do?' is umbilically connected to the ques-
tion 'who or what is seeking to shape our attitudes, values, emotions and
actions?' Building on Chapters 1 and 2, I've argued that diverse epistemic
communities invest the concept of nature with specific meanings, so too its
collateral concepts. These meanings are attached by them to various material
referents whose very definition is internal to discourse, genre and represen-
tational mode, which themselves are relationally defined and mutable in
time and space. My major point has been that references to 'nature' and its
collateral concepts are important means by which the thoughts, sentiments
and activities of hundreds of millions of people are governed. Yet because
nature routinely appears to be non-social and to be an ontological given,
it's very easy indeed to ignore the ways in which references to it are impli-
cated in the process of governing thought and conduct. Equally, it's easy
to forget that nature is made actively knowable to us by others cognitively,
morally and aesthetically. Even when we pay attention to what these others
are doing, it may appear that the last thing any of them are engaged in is a
wider process of subject-formation and the governance of belief, feeling or
practice.
In the previous pages, I've used the word 'govern' in the broadest sense,
just as I did the same for 'politics' in the previous chapter. To be clear: I'm
not suggesting that there's always and necessarily something pernicious or
malevolent about the process of governing our habits of mind or action.
Though some critical social scientists regard 'power', in a pejorative sense,
as a promiscuous, ever-present aspect of modern life that crowds out 'gen-
uine' freedom, I remain deliberately agnostic on this substantive question
here. 20 My (more limited) claim is that, to the extent that representations
of 'nature' and its collateral terms factor in the process of governing, they
can be instruments of social power, but also tools enabling resistance and
opposition, fulfilment and enrichment. Equally, they can be the medium of
new thoughts, feelings and experiences that unsettle received wisdom and
lead to unexpected 'improvements', however defined, in our own or others'
lives.
In the remaining chapters, I want to explore, by way of extended exam-
ples, how the process of governing with reference to 'nature' operates in
practice. I draw no firm conclusions beyond these examples about its prac-
tical 'success' or 'failure' because these terms beg exceedingly complex
questions about how one judges the effects of such a multifaceted process,
let alone measure those effects. Before I proceed I should make two final
points. First, it's important to read the rest of this topic in light of the claims
and concepts presented in this and the previous chapter. I realise that this
is no mean feat because I've thrown a lot of arguments, terms and exam-
ples at readers. I will recapitulate (and elaborate) the major points in the