CONCLUSION: MAKING BETTER SENSE OF SENSE MAKING - Making Sense of Nature - page 283

exist that ensure the will of 'the people' affects incumbent and aspirant gov-
ernments. The wider political health of any democracy, however, depends
on the existence of a vibrant 'semiosphere'. Representations of nature and its
collateral terms, I've argued, are very important here. We can ask questions
about the provenance, variety and intended effects of these representations:
why do we notice some more than others, what value commitments do they
contain, and are we aware of how even seemingly 'innocent' ones seek to
interpellate us as subjects of a certain kind?
These four argument have allowed me to bring otherwise disparate
themes, issues and examples into a single topical space. If you've made
it this far you will, I hope, be able to see why it makes sense to discuss
things like Fraser Island dingoes, the Human Genome Project, tree loss in
Guinea, bestiality in Washington State, Stone butch blues , intellectual property
in seeds, newspaper reporting of climate change, IPCC assessment reports
and citizen science in Pickering at one and the same time. I've provided a
set of tools that will hopefully enable you to interrogate the myriad of ways
in which 'governmentality' (broadly defined) requires diverse and repeated
representations of everything from DNA to melting ice-caps. You (and I)
are together subject to these representations. But we can also use them as
resources to change ourselves and the world for the better. The question
is: how?
There's no magical bullet here that will turn unavoidable epistemic
dependence to our personal advantage or that of our fellow citizens. Writ-
ing at a time when detailed divisions of mental and symbolic labour were in
their infancy, philosopher Immanuel Kant famously opined that
Enlightenment is man's [ sic ] release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage
is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from
another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason
but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.
Sapere aude - 'Have the courage to use your own reason' - that is the motto of
Enlightenment.
(Kant, 1784/1992: 90)
In the centuries prior to Kant, a combination of social inequality and
social stability had been achieved by powerful social actors (e.g. reli-
gious leaders) recycling a limited number of cognitive, moral and aesthetic
messages. Kant hoped that the new knowledges proliferating in eighteenth-
century Europe might empower more than a small elite, if people could only
learn to use it of their own accord. 1 Writing 138 years later, the American
Walter Lippman was far from sanguine. 'The real environment', he wrote in
his book Public opinion
is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.
We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many