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argument is consistent. The challenge is not to do away with representa-
tion (the idea and the attendant practices understood in terms of this idea).
Instead, it's to foster representational practices that do not make us passive
or, worse, manipulated in a world where myriad epistemic communities and
workers vie to shape our perceptions, opinions, beliefs and actions.
In the next chapter, which concludes the first part of this topic, I want to
build on these arguments in order to show that representations of nature are
heavily implicated in the process of governing the ways in which ordinary
people think, feel and act. At base, I'll argue that this is a question of person-
hood, freedom and democracy. It has major implications for the character
and quality of our own lives, as well as all those phenomena with which we
share life on Earth.
ENDNOTES
1
What's additionally different is that these spokespersons are not known to us on a per-
sonal level - they are strangers or, if familiar faces and voices, they communicate with
us remotely via long-distance media. Clearly, I risk making ludicrously simplistic and
over-drawn historical comparisons here. However, I do stand by the generalisation
that, these days, our thoughts and actions are far more influenced by a wider variety
of people who operate at a distance from us when compared with our forebears -
forebears who existed in a world where long-distance communication was slow and
where the division of mental and manual labour was far, far less elaborate than it is
today.
2
This both mirrors, and is thoroughly woven into, our material dependence on
commodities made elsewhere by myriad others within a global division of labour.
Following Marx and, a century after him, Jean Baudrillard, we can say that just as
commodities need to be 'defetishised', so too do 'representations' - not least because
commodities are typically saturated with meaning and are themselves representations
(not simply 'things'). It's frequently said that we live in an 'age of consumption' - we
should remember that what is being consumed is not only material goods but a wide
array of meanings 'contained' in individual commodities (e.g. cars, clothes, food).
A great many of these meanings involve literal or connotative references to nature.
3
This is why Clifford's contemporary, the philosopher William James (1956), criticised
the argument of 'The ethics of belief ' in an essay entitled 'The will to believe'. For
James, the real issue was not that we acquire direct experience pertaining to all the
matters that may influence our lives, but that we get ourselves in a position to assess
the
quality
of the various epistemic communities that seek to shape our beliefs. I will
talk about issues of epistemic quality and the governance of epistemic communities
in
Chapter 3
.
4
As Sue Stafford (2001: 219) defines them, 'Knowledge communities are groups of
individuals drawn together over time by the sustained pursuit of knowledge creation,
knowledge use, and knowledge sharing.'
5
Lave and Wenger (1991), who coined the term 'communities of practice' in their
book
Situated learning
, focussed on 'applied knowledge' such as that characteristic of
midwives, urban planners, architects and tailors. However, this inadvertently gives the
false impression that other forms of knowledge are somehow
purely
epistemic and
lack any 'practical' effects or uses at all. I should also note that, despite the reso-
nances with literary critic Stanley Fish's (1980) notion of 'interpretive communities',
my expansive definition of epistemic communities is intended to go beyond Fish's
preoccupation with how any given community interprets the texts authored by its
members. Equally, I note that Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) - someone who pioneered
