Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 27Box 1.5 DE-NATURALISATION, DE-CONSTRUCTION ANDDE-ESSENTIALISATIONIn this book (especially Chapter 3) I will use a suite of terms that togetherimply a certain scepticism that natural phenomena are, in fact, naturalat all. The most general of these terms is de-naturalisation. In the contextof the chapters to follow, de-naturalisation means two things. First, itmeans recategorising that which seems to be or is claimed to be‘natural’ and showing it to really be social, cultural and economic incharacter (or the result of social, cultural and economic practices).Second, it also means refusing to explain the characteristics of any givenphenomena with reference to its supposedly ‘natural’ qualities (as whenone might explain a person’s intelligence with reference to their genes).De-construction is a more specialist term normally associated with abody of theorising called ‘post-structuralism’. In this book I use it ina way that respects the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of poststructuralisttheorising. Here it refers to any attempt to reveal the‘symptomatic silences’ that lie within any given claim about what natureis, how it works, what it does and how it should be treated. Asymptomatic silence is the ‘absent presence’ of an idea, assumption orbelief that helps to establish the meaning of a knowledge-claim yetwithout appearing to do so. For instance, in Chapter 3 we will see howenvironmentalists represent Clayoquot Sound in Canada as an untamedwilderness in need of protection and conservation. The problem withthis apparently unproblematic claim is that local native peoples aredepicted as being ‘at one’ with this wilderness – a view that reflects aromantic Euro-American belief in the ‘edifying’ power of pristine naturalenvironments. To de-construct environmentalists’ representations ofClayoquot is thus to show that their apparent stability and obviousnessin fact rest upon culturally contingent distinctions between nature andculture, tradition and modernity, and the rural and the urban. Finally,de-essentialisation relates to the second of the three principal meaningsof the term ‘nature’ discussed early in this chapter. A de-essentialisingargument is a specific form of de-naturalisation. It questions the ideathat any given phenomenon has a fixed and ‘essential’ character byvirtue of its naturally given or determined properties.