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and soft power are variously obfuscated, reproduced, revealed, resisted and
changed. Rather than try to adjudicate between these conceptions, we can
regard them as
interventions
that are jostling to shape thought (and practice)
about social power. We don't then look for the 'right' conception because
ideas about social power, like all ideas, knowledge or information, are being
judged according to the effects they seek to engender. From this perspec-
tive, academic analysts of social power are using their epistemic credentials
to produce representations that they hope will be taken seriously by their
peers, students and members of the wider society. We can borrow these rep-
resentations and put them to work insofar as they're consistent with the
general arguments we're trying to advance. We give up any search for the
'essence' of social power and regard claims about its 'true' nature as rhetori-
cal, not only cognitive, as attempts to displace 'rival' conceptions. We need
not be bound by these claims nor swayed by these attempts.
As was evident at the end of
Chapter 4,
where I discussed a pragmatist
approach to discourse, representation and knowledge, I prefer the second to
the first option. Rather than link my earlier claims about epistemic depen-
dence, communicative genres and epistemic communities to one particular
conception of soft power, I prefer to point out that, depending on what
available notion of soft power we cleave to, the link can be (and has been)
made in several ways. I will shortly detail one of these ways, referring again
to empirical cases (an extended case in this chapter and others in the next
chapter), and show how representations of nature can be regarded as media
for attempts to turn 'power to' into 'power over'. As I've done previously
in this topic, I'll consider cases analysed by members of the loose epistemic
community in which I'm situating myself. The case discussed in this chapter
(relating to supposed deforestation), and those to follow, should be read in
the context of my various arguments in
Chapters 2
and
3
about the uneven
effects of epistemic dependence and their implications for the quality of
democracy. Though wedded to rather different conceptions of soft power,
the cases are consistent with the general claims made in these two chapters.
For instance, my generic conception of 'governmentality' (one of Foucault's
terms) can accommodate several possible understandings of how represen-
tations become vectors of social power relationships. These understandings
become resources I can use rather than ideas whose accuracy should be
assessed with reference to a putative ontological 'court of appeal' existing
'out there'.
Let's now consider one way in which social power might be said to
depend upon representations of nature for its efficacy, recognising, in light
of the discussion above, that it's hardly the only way.
DEFORESTATION DISCOURSE
Since the early 1990s, a major component of the discourse of 'environmen-
tal crisis', part of the 'end of nature' narrative I discussed in
Chapter 1
, has
