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(or what) exerts it, what its effects are, or whether it has an 'outside' (a place
where it can be ignored or resisted). It's an open question, whether this
reflects the plural character of social power, academic confusion or some-
thing else. Side-stepping this question, I focussed on one way in which soft
social power has been said to work by way of influential epistemic commu-
nities (in this case botanists and forest managers) who rarely consult with
those subject to knowledge they are authorised to produce and act upon.
I showed, taking one extended example, how representations of what is
taken to be natural (in this case 'climax vegetation') can be pivotal to the
exercise of soft social power. 'Nature' has its uses and the users' tools are
linguistic, epistemic and representational ones as much as physical ones. In
situations, like Kissidougou, where the users have real power over others it is
important to inquire into the quality of their epistemic practices (in
Chapter
8
I will talk about governance issues in some detail).
Of course, readers of this topic aren't subject to the discourse of tropical
deforestation in the same way that farmers in Kissidougou were. In highly
urbanised Western countries, most of us, most of the time, don't confront
regulations and sanctions designed to protect 'nature' that directly curtail
our actions or affect our livelihoods. However, in other ways we
are
sub-
ject to discourses about tree loss, climate change, our own genes and much
more besides. These 'other ways' speak to the power of the mass media -
notably, its non-fictional components (news, current affairs programmes,
documentaries, etc.). As I mentioned in
Chapter 3
, whatever the origins of
any given representation of nature and its collateral terms might be, it must
usually be noticed and re-presented by the mass media in order to have
any wider purchase. As I noted earlier in this chapter, while Foucault's 'dis-
persed' notion of social power is valuable, analytically and politically, the
power to represent reality remains uneven nonetheless. In the next chapter
I want to focus on the mass media since, for most us, it's arguably one of
the
media through which our understanding of self and world is shaped and
reshaped.
Those working in large institutions that supply television, radio and inter-
net content, like Britain's BBC or Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, are
among the most powerful epistemic communities in the world. In part, their
modus operandi is to assemble, interpret and reframe the representations of
others (e.g. scientists, politicians, entertainers and activists). In part, their
role is to produce their own distinctive genres of representation, such as
wildlife documentaries. Without the mass media we'd not only be less well
informed (and less entertained) but, arguably, different people. The quality
of the mass media is a key determinant of the quality of any democracy. As
the next chapter reveals, mass mediated representations of biophysical phe-
nomena are very important ingredients. The following chapter introduces
the final part of
Making sense of nature
, where I look closely at the epistemic
communities whose representations of nature and its collateral referents,
arguably, overshadow most others.
