Nature - autonomous learning

36 strange natureswas never formally named nor proven guilty, the enormous semanticweight of the word ‘rapist’ was enough to bring his career grinding to halt.Regardless of his innocence or culpability, once this word became attachedto his person it had material effects on him, his family and his relations withothers. As Agnew et al. (1996: 8, emphasis added) rightly observe, wordsare not simply ‘a medium for conveying meaning but the producer[s] ofmeaning’.So what can we say about the word ‘nature’, a key term in geography andthe subject of this book? The first thing to say is that, in its three mainmeanings, the word nature ‘encourages us to ignore the context that definesit’ (Cronon 1996: 35).The main meanings of the word ‘nature’ all divertour attention away from the fact that it is a word not reality itself.After all,each of these meanings refer to that which is supposedly given, unalterableor pre-existing. Second, like all words ‘nature’ is a signifier that possesses oneor more signifieds that are, in turn, attached to all sorts of different referents.Asignified is the meaning of a word (or sound or image). A referent is theparticular real-world thing that the signified denotes.signifier (word) → signified/s (meaning/s) → referent/s (real-world phenomena)Third, unlike most concepts, nature is remarkably polysemic. In otherwords, it has multiple signifieds and countless referents – what culturalgeographer Kay Anderson (2001: 71–2) calls ‘a wildly elastic range of designations’.Nature is a portmanteau word or what social scientists call a‘chaotic concept’.The term’s complexity derives precisely from the jumbleof meanings and referents we’ve come to associate with it (Figure 1.4). JohnFigure 1.4 The concept of nature