Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
SENSE OF SENSE MAKING
This topic's been predicated on a seeming paradox: there's no such thing
as nature, I've argued, but 'nature' matters all the same. As one of the
major concepts used in Western discourse, what we call nature continues
to organise thought and action in a plethora of arenas. This is because we've
naturalised the concept to the point that it appears a
necessary
part of our
collective vocabulary. I've sought to help you make sense of what we call
nature by denaturalising it, along with its collateral terms. In so doing, I've
followed in the footsteps of many social scientists and humanities scholars
writing over the past 40 years. Despite these scholars' considerable efforts,
nature's apparent naturalness remains 'common sense' in early twenty-first
century-Western societies - at least outside the academy. This being so, my
principal claims have been as follows and were elaborated in summary form
in
Part I.
First, nature is routinely made sense of for us by a myriad epistemic
workers operating across every conceivable communicative genre using a
range of discourses and a variety of communicative media. Second, I've
suggested that their representations of human and non-human nature -
often couched as claims about 'race', sex, genes, biodiversity, climate change,
heredity and more - are politics by other means. They contain contestable
value judgements and 'perform' in a myriad of intersecting registers -
linguistic, numerical, pictorial, cartographic and so on. Third, I've argued
that these representations are a major part of the complex and incessant
process whereby our opinions, convictions, sentiments, values, prejudices
and actions are governed. They render us epistemically dependent: we're
at once reliant on them as resources for enlightenment, discovery and self-
improvement, and yet also potentially passive recipients of others' creations.
Either way, the immense stream of representations we consume under the
large semantic umbrella of 'nature' and its collateral terms has a subject-
forming role in our lives - often in relation to momentous issues like global
climate change or the character of our genetic code. Power, accommodation
and resistance are at work here, though analysts don't agree on what precise
forms they take. Finally, I've suggested that how others make sense of nature
for the rest of us is central to the dynamics of contemporary democracy. The
formal political apparatus of the modern
demos
must reckon with important
scale issues: the few can only legitimately govern the many if mechanisms
