Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
referenda. The challenge is not to somehow reduce the scale or scope of
'rule' (notwithstanding the aspirations of anarchists). In complex, large-scale,
globally interconnected societies characterised by detailed divisions of man-
ual and mental labour, the challenge instead is to resist the attenuation of
democracy. Democracy is a form of rule that aspires to empower those
who are subject to that rule. It is, self-consciously, self-rule. Freedom and
submission are thus two sides of the same coin.
As I intimated in
Chapter 3,
and as some of the case material consid-
ered in the past two chapters suggests, to fully understand how thinking
and action are governed we necessarily have to consider the subject of
social power
. I've touched rather lightly upon this important subject
so far in this topic. Only a Pollyanna could believe that we live in a
relatively power-free world where everyone enjoys a roughly equal right -
cratic societies are characterised by relationships of power, never mind
those we might consider to be autocratic or despotic (like Robert Mugabe's
Zimbabwe, Bashar al-Asad's Syria, or the former regimes of Saddam Hus-
sein and Muammar Gaddafi). This is why Jurgen Habermas, the celebrated
German critical theorist, famously regards the realisation of 'true' democ-
racy as an 'ideal speech situation' - ideal, because power-free discourse
among diverse members of a democratic society is a possibly unrealisable
aspiration.
The subject of social power has preoccupied social scientists like
Habermas for many decades. It remains a central concern of political scien-
tists, sociologists, political economists, media analysts and cultural studies
scholars (to name but a few). It's a subject that conjoins analytical and nor-
mative reasoning. What is power? Who (or what) has power? What different
forms does it take? Is power always 'bad'? Should we aim to eliminate it?
And how, in certain circumstances, are references to nature and its collateral
terms important instruments of power? I explore answers to these questions
in this chapter, thereby amplifying ideas and key claims presented earlier in
the topic. Needless to say, because these are very weighty questions - a vir-
tual library of topics and essays exists to address the first five, let alone
the sixth - my answers will inevitably strike some readers as hopelessly
partial or overly succinct. Even so, it seems to me important to exam-
ine (however sketchily) the connective imperative between social power
and how 'natural' phenomena are made sense of by influential epistemic
communities.
I will begin, in the next section, with some general observations
about social power. I'll then relate this discussion to representations
of biophysical phenomena with reference to one extended case (about
deforestation in West Africa). However, a case considered towards the
end of the next chapter, whose subject is the major media and genres
through which representations of nature are communicated today, will also
