Nature - autonomous learning

134 de-naturalisationof nature that I consider in this section of the chapter questions thevery distinction between ideas of nature and the phenomena those ideasrefer to. In effect, this research collapses the ‘gap’ between representationand reality and subsumes the latter to the former. It does so by emphasisingthe power of discourse. As anthropologist Peter Wade (2002: 4)puts it,‘There can be no pre-discursive encounter with biology or nature’.The term discourse is one with many meanings in contemporary socialscience. At the most general level, it refers to a connected set of representationsthat ‘regulate the production of meaning within . . . historicallyand socially specific situations’ (Smith 2002: 343). Discourse-analystsin geography and other disciplines envisage societies as comprisingmultiple discourses that are sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary.These discourses encompass cognitive, moral and aestheticknowledge-claims and they specify what can (and, by implication, cannot)be known, said and done in any given situation. Discourses are directlylinked to practice in so far as people act in accordance with the discoursesthey have internalised over time. For instance, consider the discourseof hygiene which is inculcated into all of us from a very early age by parents,schools, adverts for washing powder, the medical profession and so on.Thisdiscourse comprises a set of linked representations (such as: dirt = disease,cleanliness = civilised, odour = unattractive) that, in turn, inform thepractices people perform on their bodies (e.g. regular showers, the wearingof laundered clothes etc.).The idea that we both understand the world and act in it on the basis ofmyriad discourses differs from the notions of ideology, myth and hegemonyin at least two ways. First, discourse analysts (as we’ll see momentarily)question the idea that specific representations of the world serve theinterests of definite groups in society. Instead, they see discourses as, if youlike, impersonal ‘grids’ that condition the thought and action of any andall people who are exposed to these discourses for long enough.Whateverthe specific origin of these discourses, they are seen to take on ‘a life of theirown’ over time and they change only slowly as new or rival discoursesemerge to qualify and challenge them. They do not always directly ‘mapon’ to the intentions or agendas of identifiable social actors. Second,discourse analysts insist that it is impossible to know reality in a non- orextra-discursive way. Indeed, some of these analysts argue that the familiardistinctions between thought and matter, representation and reality, ideasand reality are themselves a product of discourse.