Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
labour in both schools and universities. Take my own discipline. Human geographers,
like other social scientists, study a social world already presumed to be saturated with
meaning. This contrasts with physical geographers who are seen (and see themselves)
as having to make sense of a biophysical world that is intrinsically meaningless until
subject to careful analysis. Thus is their role defined and vouchsafed. Thus are they
able to speak for nature as 'geomorphologists' or 'hydrologists' (say) - indeed, nature
'demands' that they speak because without their voice it is but 'noise' or (worse)
silence.
In light of this, we can readily understand why a lot of the professional academic
debate about representing nature has been not about
whether
to represent it - this is
taken as a given - but about
how
it should be done and
who
should be doing it. For
instance, in the laboratory and field sciences, there have long been discussions about
which methods and techniques will best permit nature's truths to be revealed. If rocks
and electrons 'don't talk back' then how should we make them 'talk' to us? Political
theorists and ethicists have, likewise, for decades discussed how best to give everything
from blue whales to human foetuses a place in our moral universe. This discussion
has involved a sub-debate about whether nature has intrinsic rights, entitlements and
values - and, if so, who is best placed to represent them to the rest of us (e.g. do
you need to have studied and swum with dolphins for years to speak for them in the
public arena?). In other words, the debates have largely been about how to configure
the 'epistemic' and 'political' aspects of representation so as to achieve things like
'accuracy' and 'authenticity'. Throughout these debates, there is an assumption, which
in my view needs to be problematised, that some representations and representatives
operate in the realms of 'truth' and 'reality', while others are altogether different in
kind because their stock-in-trade is 'fiction', 'distraction', 'faith' or 'entertainment'.
18
A familiar example that illustrates Hall's argument well is a motorcar. Take a luxury
vehicle, like a Mercedes, parked on a road as you stroll down a sidewalk. You look
at it, and what does it 'say'? It says, or at least tries to, that the driver is rich and
successful (or aspires to be). It is probably intended by its owner to symbolise his or
her social status, and has been bought as much for its sign-value as its use-value.
19
Some may assume that the senses somehow work alone, sending discrete messages
into the brain. For instance, we might think that vision is about 'showing', while sound
and speech is about 'telling' - two potentially discrete things. But this understanding is
surely crude, even naïve. It is the interplay between information received via different
senses that achieves the overall effect of permitting us to understand or be affected by
the world.
20
The theoretical, methodological and empirical literature on 'visuality' and what's been
called the West's 'visual culture' is now simply vast. Though old, Jessica Evans and Stu-
art Hall's (1999) book remains good value as a primer, while Sturken and Cartwright's
(2001
) Practices of looking
is excellent on the different theories. John Hartley's (1992)
The politics of pictures
is an excellent, accessible study of how public and popular culture
has become 'ocularised' in the West via the mass media and advertising. Gillian Rose's
(2007)
Visual methodologies
offers an attractive blend of theory, method and numerous
real world examples. I follow Rose in not separating 'discourse' from ostensibly non-
discursive acts of sense-making, such as seeing. She devotes two chapters of her book
to 'discourse analysis' and is insistent throughout that seeing and looking are inter-
pretive acts that necessarily involve norms, ideas and values that are expressed (or can
be expressed) linguistically.
21
From the late 1980s, many in the social sciences and humanities announced a so-
called 'crisis of representation'. The crisis in question arose from a critique of the idea
that many representations are mimetic, with French post-structuralist philosophers
and historians leading the charge. Note that these critics did not announce the
death
of representation but, instead, its problematisation.
