REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 48

extraordinary range of meanings and applications, stretching from men-
tal images

...

to legal processes to theatrical performances' (Runciman
and Vieira, 2008: vii). This raises a number of issues, and I'll tackle these
presently. For now, though, the point I want to make is this: all represen-
tations refer . They are commentaries on something that they themselves are
not. They can take the form of descriptions, explanations, appreciations,
recreations, forecasts, assessments, disagreements, depictions, critiques and
so on. They are exercises in communication about the world, and they can
work in all of the registers of understanding, evaluation and affect. They're
the means by which, and the media through which, meanings are attached to
various portions of reality and those portions of reality themselves delimited
(or, perhaps, called into question and recategorised).
Representations can refer to what appears to be 'nature', to its collat-
eral terms and their referents, or to any of the various elements of what
is considered to be 'society', 'economy', 'politics' and 'culture'. This means,
in the latter cases most obviously, that representations can refer explicitly
to other representations and to the things those representations themselves
refer to. And, because they refer - because any given representation is not
simply (or usually) about itself - representations have the potential to affect
the world by changing (or affirming) how we think and feel about it. Ian
Hacking (2004: 279) calls this the 'looping effect' of representation, espe-
cially of those representations whose reach or significance is relatively high
compared with others.
By virtue of their difference and distance from 'outsiders', representation
is the principal vehicle that epistemic communities rely upon to have a
wider influence. Most epistemic communities affect us by means of persua-
sion not force. I'd suggest that we are, much of the time, audiences who
occupy a vast theatre of representation in which different plays are endlessly
performed. This assertion is consistent with my argument about 'epistemic
dependence'. From time to time, we may be invited on to the metaphorical
stage, while some of us (like myself ) may even have the chance to script part
of a scene or alter aspects of the lighting, set and music. But, for the most
part, we're consumers (and users) positioned at the end of chains of repre-
sentation. I say 'chains' (to use a second metaphor) because representation is
about making links - between us, what is represented and those who repre-
sent the world to us. Various representations refer us to things that, in some
way, 'speak' to us in the voices and idioms of the representers. As Bruno
Latour says 'no being, not even humans, speak on their own, but always
through something or someone else ' (Latour, 2004: 68 'emphasis in original').
In some cases this is very obvious. Think of a Hollywood blockbuster
like The day after tomorrow (2004) with its 'end of the world' storyline and
hyper-dramatic action. It is, clearly, a morality tale about the future perils
of unchecked anthropogenic environmental change. Think too of contem-
porary 'nature writing', such as Richard Mabey's (2005) autobiographical
book Nature cure - a moving, lyrical and highly personal account of how