Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
On the other side, even representations that bear a very distant relation
to 'realism' deserve to be taken seriously. Think of advertising, which I men-
tioned in passing previously. A lot of advertising is overtly non-mimetic:
special effects, humour, unlikely scenarios and other devices are used to
communicate a message, usually about a single commodity. For instance,
for many years adverts selling
4
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vehicles have used various images of
mountains, valleys and plains that refer to 'nature'. They do so not in an
objective or scientific sense, but as a way of creating highly gendered (and
often ethnicised or racialised) forms of consumer desire (see
Plate 2.2
). Rep-
resentations like these are no less important for being so obviously 'fictional'
and 'made-up'.
Study Task:
Look closely at the image in
Plate 2.2
but, as with the previous
image, don't read the text beneath the title until later. What 'nature' is dis-
played in the image? What qualities does nature possess that the advertised
vehicle is said to get buyers close to? What kind of potential drivers do you
think this advert is appealing to with its particular choice of text and image?
Going back to
Chapter 1
, can you identify elements of 'connotative refer-
ence' in the advert?
Indeed, if we refer back to
Figure 1.5
, we can see how putatively 'unreal-
istic' or 'creative' forms of representation, which we typically associate with
the arts in their various forms, help to sustain the belief that other forms are
intrinsically
realistic. Each form implies the other: they are defined relation-
ally, one being a conceptual shadow of the other and so not separate at all
(despite appearances). I say this in a non-judgemental way: it's not necessar-
ily a 'bad' thing. In fact, putatively 'unrealistic' forms of representation can
present a useful space in which to comment in creative or critical ways on
what passes for fact, truth and common sense - they can unsettle that which
appears to be their very antithesis.
These are also very significant forms of media in and through which
'nature' is made sense of in the modern world (and, indeed, going back many
generations). The signifieds and referents of this word and its myriad collat-
eral terms are most certainly not the preserve of epistemic communities,
whose
raison d'être
is the search for truth and who see themselves engaged
in a resolutely 'non-fictional' enterprise. Our understanding and experience
of nature, 'race', environment, sex and all the rest are shaped profoundly
by video games, television dramas, plays, the visual arts, the plastic arts and
the sonic arts - among many other things. That's why the analysis of these
media has congealed into entire disciplines, like cultural studies. Such is the
semantic latitude of nature and its collateral concepts that they cross every
conceivable representational genre and practice. These concepts thus condi-
tion our thoughts and feelings in virtually all areas of our daily life, even if
we don't always recognise it.
