UNNATURAL CONSTRUCTIONS - Making Sense of Nature - page 139

In this light, the three cases presented in this chapter are not attempts
to deny that what we call 'forests', 'genes' and 'dingoes' possess attributes
irreducible to the way they're represented by various epistemic workers. My
point is simply that these workers may present particular attributes to us as if
these are the main or only ones, as if they are 'objectively', 'really' or 'essen-
tially' definitional. In the process, they make material connections - and
invite us to make our own mental, emotional and practical connections (or,
in the case of dingoes, dis connections) - with the physical things referred to.
As I argued in Chapter 2 , representation is a means by which those doing
the representing aim to create particular linkages (imaginative and/or prac-
tical) between people, and between people and the world of animate and
inanimate phenomena. Representations seek to engender specific modes of
thought, feeling and action - more or less successfully, more or less con-
sciously. They're not immaterial and nor are they passive in relation to the
things they speak of and speak for.
I think, therefore, that (properly understood) 'construction' is a fitting
term to describe representation because representations are both fabricated
and, in turn, may shape the world - they are constructs that can them-
selves construct. But representation is never sui generis , never something
fashioned out of whole cloth: there are ontological limits to the process
of construction. Can these limits be specified objectively? Only if we accept
that 'objectivity' is (despite the word's conventional meaning) simply one
of several epistemic characteristics that we've attributed to certain forms of
knowledge. All of the 'limits' that (what we call) 'nature' sets on the con-
tent and influence of our representations are not absolute, but relative to the
social goals intrinsic to those representations (in their diverse modes and
genres). This is what cultural critic Katherine Hayles (1991) meant when she
coined the useful term 'constrained constructivism'.
For these reasons (and Hayles's contribution notwithstanding), some ana-
lysts have eschewed the language of 'construction' altogether when seeking
to denaturalise that which is presented to us as natural. While they endorse
the attention it gives to our multifarious human purposes, discourses and
practices, they consider it to be too 'muscular', too inattentive to the consti-
tutive role that 'non-social' entities play in making possible even the most
technologically advanced societies. For them, this is not a question of the
relative balance of influence between 'social' and 'natural' phenomena. In
place of this 'two-worlds' ontology (and its associated language of 'cause
and effect', 'in/dependent variables', 'interaction', 'domination' and so on)
the starting point for these analysts is that the world is composed not of
things (which can be neatly compartmentalised into categories like 'social'
and 'natural', 'urban' and 'rural', etc.) but of myriad relations .Theserelations
are more-or-less seamless, more-or-less permanent, more-or-less intricate and
more-or-less stretched out in space and time (see Box 4.1 ).