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and aesthetically. While some of these communities are tight-knit and dis-
crete, others are looser and their boundaries more protean. We pay attention
to, or ignore them, depending on a combination of things. These include
their social visibility, credibility and fit with our learned priorities and
interests. These communities comprise an 'epistemic ecosystem' (or 'semio-
sphere') in which some metaphorical species are more dominant than others
(such as scientists and daily newspapers).
Second, it's been argued that these communities - be they prominent or
less socially visible ones - are routinely engaged in 'representing' nature to
us and, as it were, for us. All representation, it was further argued, entails a
simultaneous 'speaking for' and 'speaking of ' what we call nature: the two
are indissociable in practice. In turn, this means that what apparently differ-
ent forms of representation (e.g. scientific or artistic) have in common is that
they're both constructed and political. They are 'constructed' in the sense
of being purposefully fashioned by epistemic workers of various kinds, and
they are 'political' in the general sense of secreting - or, in some cases, reflex-
ively questioning - the representers' particular goals, values and preferences
(ones that could, in theory, be changed). Yet the dual character of repre-
sentation is not always apparent, which is to say that many people are not
conscious of how it 'really' seeks to work upon them. Finally, it was argued
that representation still matters in the modern world, despite an analytical
focus on it glossing over some other important elements of daily existence.
Let me make one last point about representation, before moving on. In
this chapter, I've discussed representation in both a 'diagnostic' and 'pre-
scriptive' way. On the one hand, I've argued that, despite appearances, all
acts of representation are performative: they call forth that to which they
seem only to refer. They're thus acts of purposeful invention , not simply acts
of disclosure . They actively engender particular forms of cognition, feeling
and connection (more or less successfully, depending). On the other hand,
I've argued that representation is ineluctable: there's no getting away from
it, meaning that having the 'right' understanding of representation is key to
achieving a better understanding of how we communicate about the world.
As the British philosopher Peter Osborne once put it,
Representation is the medium of thought, [yet] all representation is mis-
representation if by representation we mean the literal . . . re-presentation of
[something]
...
in some self-constituted original state. However,
it is pre-
...
cisely the inevitable failure of any such notion of representation
which
makes a representation a representation - something, that is, which is consti-
tuted through a relation between itself and something else, which it claims to
re-present.
(Osborne, 1991: 208)
This 'both/and' understanding may seem contradictory. Much represen-
tation is not what it seems, I've argued, yet representation matters all the
same. However, like Bruno Latour (2004) in Politics of nature ,Ithinkthe
 
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