REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 56

Representation language?

First, some may disagree with Hall's suggestion that representation goes
beyond 'language' in the conventional sense of the term: that is, beyond
spoken or written words and their meanings (discourse). My response to this
is straightforward. It is, I would argue, impossible to 'contain' language and
thus wrong to draw overly sharp distinctions between the different registers
in which we make the world meaningful to ourselves and others. Let's take
vision and the act of seeing. For the vast majority of us who are not blind or
sight-impaired, our eyes are perceptual instruments of the first order. How-
ever, seeing is not a purely physiological process: the human eye may be
structured the same the world over, but what is seen (and how) varies. As
art critic John Berger (1972) famously pointed out, there are historically and
geographically specific 'ways of seeing'. Over the past 30 years, an inter-
disciplinary field studying visuality has proved him right. 'Visuality', writes
geographer Fraser MacDonald (2009: 1), 'refers to the acculturation of sight'.
Because one learns to use one's eyes at the same time as one learns to use
a specific language, we are obliged to acknowledge 'the discursive nature of
vision' (ibid: 5). The words 'image' and 'imagination' alert us to the fact that
seeing is an active mental process not an unmediated receipt of externally
generated visual stimuli. 19 Think about adverts on television and elsewhere:
what we 'see' is both images and words, working in tandem and together
generating meaning, usually after a lot of effort on the part of advertising
professionals. The same applies to maps of various kinds, for instance an
atlas of the world or a city street map. Most cartographic representations are
littered with text or with symbols that users translate into linguistic signifiers,
signifieds and referents.
Accordingly, when Audrey Kobayashi (2009: 1) defines representation as
'the practice of constructing meaning through language', she's only wrong
if we take her to mean that 'language' exists in a hermetically sealed box.
The famous idea that a picture is worth 'a thousand words' is true, not
because we see it non-linguistically, but because images can, at a stroke,
condense myriad and complex meanings that would otherwise have to be
communicated at length on a page or verbally. Similarly, analyses of repre-
sentation focussed principally on writing, such as the topics Writing culture
(Clifford and Marcus, 1986) or Writing worlds (Barnes and Duncan, 1992),
should not be interpreted too literally. 20 It's surely better to think of words
and their meanings as 'leaking out' into ostensibly non-linguistic registers
of understanding and affect. This is, perhaps, what philosopher of mind
Daniel Dennett means when he says that, 'Language infects and inflects our
thought at every level' (Dennett, 1991: 330). For us, it's a signally important
sense-making medium that is ultimately indissociable from all the other
ways in which we make the world make sense. I thus concur with Rom
Harré and his co-authors who, in their book Greenspeak: a study of environ-
mental discourse , contest the idea that 'language exists as a self-contained,

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