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as a court of appeal for their veracity (see case study 2 in
Chapter 4
for more
on this). So, for all their differences, this is what documentary film-making
has in common with (say) entomology.
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This returns me to the subject of 'nature', which I've slightly backgrounded
in the last few paragraphs. Consider again what the term signifies. In its four
meanings, its propensity to be spatialised and temporalised in our imagina-
tions, and its metonymic conjoining of the specific and the general, nature -
to adapt Karl Marx's famous statement - 'cannot represent itself; it must be
represented!' Why so? The answer is simple. As I've explained, we conceive
nature as an 'other', which cannot 'speak for itself ' because it cannot speak
at
bodies, in part because the mind-body dualism in our culture has us seeing
our biology as something unto itself. In David Delaney's words, for us 'the
body stands for nature
...
[while] the mind stands for the uniquely human
traits of consciousness, subjectivity, knowledge, will, and freedom' (Delaney,
2001: 495). Indeed, we even cleave the mind in two, using the huge cogni-
tive resources it affords us to study - in ways underdetermined by them -
how those self-same resources work (which is, of course, what neuroscientists
do). As Robyn Eckersley notes, according to our way of thinking, natural enti-
ties 'are unable to articulate their claims according to the canons of rational
argument' (Eckersley, 1999: 37).
These entities require ventriloquists of various kinds - environmentalists,
medical doctors, conservationists, anatomists, artists and all the rest. Their
voices may vary greatly, but they perform the same function. As Haraway
put it, somewhat hyperbolically, 'Permanently speechless,
...
never forcing
a recall vote, in each case the object or ground of representation is the real-
ization of the representative's fondest dream' (Haraway, 1992: 311). Thus
rendered mute, what we call 'nature' is free to be represented in all man-
ner of different ways in a variety of arenas, media and genres. Nature's
apparent ubiquity and seeming ontological givenness together make it a
subject of common concern. It comprises a very large semantic (and thus
material-practical) space for commentators of all kinds to speak to the rest
of us about it. The number and variety of these actors has increased over
the past 50 years, since the first modern wave of concern about environ-
mental degradation in the 1960s. 'Precisely because nature is something
that must be represented', writes Bruce Braun, 'the act of representation
becomes that much more important, for it necessarily constructs that which
it speaks for' (Braun, 2002: 260). This act, we should note, includes the
ability to determine and debate what counts as nature in the first place. As
Evernden wisely observes in
The natural alien
, 'the examination of “nature”
must entail not simply the objects we assign to that category, but also the
category itself ' (Evernden, 1992: xi). The same applies to nature's collateral
terms.
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