REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 55

THE NATURE OF 'REPRESENTATION': FOUR ISSUES

As I said earlier, my understanding of 'representation' is very broad indeed.
Here, I take inspiration from Alexander Wilson and Jennifer Price, among
several others. In The culture of nature (Wilson, 1992) and Flight maps:
adventures with nature in modern America (Price, 1999) they each consider
the diverse sites and situations in which what we call nature is communi-
cated to us and encountered - for instance museum dioramas, Kate Evan's
Funny Weather cartoon, National Geographic magazine, US National Public
Radio's 'Living on Earth' series, or the Canadian Broadcasting Corpora-
tion's once popular documentary Thenatureofthings (fronted by scientist
David Suzuki). Wilson's and Price's inclusive sense of representation chimes
with Stuart Hall's edited book, Representation . Hall has argued that all forms
of representation are, in effect, linguistic: 'Spoken language uses sounds,
written language uses words, musical language uses notes on a scale, the
“language of the body” uses physical gesture, the fashion industry uses
items of clothing

...

' (Hall, 1997: 4). His point is that, like language, even
ostensibly non-linguistic media convey meaning by in some sense 'standing
for' - that is to say, representing, evoking or referring to - something else . 18
What's more, in all these other media, one has various people deliberately
contriving and presenting image, sight, sound and even smell towards cer-
tain semantic ends. Many others agree. For instance, in his book on music,
Nicholas Cook (2000: viii) is hardly the first to insist that everything from
jazz to opera can operate 'as an agent of meaning'. We might say the same
about a good deal of performance art or dance, to take some other cases.
To reiterate: I'm not suggesting that representation is, in effect, everything
and everywhere. Here's a mundane example of why. If I kick a football (as
I do many times each week when playing 5-a-side soccer), it does not 'rep-
resent' much, if anything, except, perhaps, my brain's ability to coordinate
eye, foot and manufactured spherical object. Likewise, a red traffic light is
a command (stop!) not a visual representation. It's also the case that a lot
of our communicative activity performs the function of maintaining rela-
tionships (as when I ask my children about their school day when I arrive
home each evening). Yet much of what we think and do proceeds by way
of representation. This is why it, as both verb and noun, has been a major
preoccupation of the arts, humanities and social sciences for several decades
(and usually connected to the use of important analytical concepts like 'ide-
ology', 'hegemony' and 'power-knowledge' - more on which can be found
in Chapter 6) .
So far, so good. But some readers might regard my definition of represen-
tation as being too loose and insufficiently parsimonious. I say this for four
main reasons, and want to offer a response in each case. They are presented
in no particular order.