After devouring Derrick Jensen's
A Language Older than Words I picked a few titles from his bibliography. Findings: Neil Evernden is stunningly smart (this is, of course, based on what knocks
my socks off and into a dusty corner under the bed... where those socks discover all kinds of cool ideas (as I type this, I can hear the chickens pecking away, scratching their claws into the grass, doing their thing... soothing sounds).
Anyway, I'm copying some thoughts from Evernden's
The Social Creation of Nature. To simplify, the book asks: if we're tasked we "saving the planet", how come nothing seems to stick, and the same ole' shit keeps getting peddled under different names (Conservation, Sustainable Development, blah blah)? And his answer, simplified: when we the people of this culture talk about
nature, well... we ain't speakin' the same language. We mean very very different things. And Evernden traces around for about 500 years of socially constructing the idea of what
nature is (and, how humans are both involved in and distinctly different from what-we-call
nature). I've found it to be a lovely read, and whenever I find myself discussing environmental issues, it's always so obvious that (with almost everything else) extremely diverse presuppositions about
exactly what the fuck we're talking about makes discourse difficult. So this book will, I think, help people figure out how to talk about our unexamined assumptions. So here he is discussing nature, symbols and mythology, Roland Barthes:
But we also "speak" of nature through images. It is no accident that nature features prominently in the modern world of advertising, for that industry is largely concerned with effective communication, which inevitably means the effective use of signs. Since advertising requires a powerful means of conveying favorable impressions of the product in question, the possibility of juxtaposing emotionally positive images with those of the product is irresistible. It is not surprising then that nature is used in advertising much as it is in the promotion of a new morality or world-view: as a visible manifestation of normalcy and health.
Nature has become a powerful part of our vocabulary of persuasion. But even that puts it too mildly, for it is often treated as tehe very realm of the absolute. To be associated with nature is to be placed beyond human caprice or preference, beyond choice or debate. When something is "natural" it is "the norm," "the way," "the given." This use of "nature" affords us a means of inferring how people ought to behave—including what objects they ought to associate with, that is, buy. Yet the authority of that usage stems in part from its confusion with the other major use, nature the
material given, nature as everything-but-us. In other words, the understanding of nature as the realm of external stuff, which is studied by science, lends an aura of objectivity and permanence to the understanding of nature as norm. The two mingle and interact so that we frequently lose sight of the distinction.
Indeed, one writer in the "communications" field, who has figured prominently in the emergence of the study now called semiotics, essentially equated nature with myth—not myth in the colloquial sense as superstitious or erroneous belief, or as primitive cosmology, but myth as an accepted story of the way the world is. Roland Barthes treats myth as something of a second-order sign, and a sign, in turn, as the useful outcome of the juxtaposition of a "signifier" and a "signified." If we combine a signifier, a rose, for example, with a signified, such as passion, we have the rose as a meaningful sign, as a "passionified rose." Once established, that sign has, as it were, a life of its own: it "means." Similarly,, on a second level we might take that sign as a new signifier which, in montage with a signified, creates a higher-order sign-system or "myth". And the danger of myth is that it will be taken not as a human creation but as an independent entity existing outside the realm of culture. It will be perceived, in other words, as nature, as a "factual system" when it is actually a "semiological system." And when we are able to remove the impression of human agency from our description of the world and insinuate a natural reality, we will appear to be dealing with indisputable facts.
But Barthes makes a surprising assertion in is discussion of mythology: he speaks of the need to "establish Nature is as historical." This seems contradictory, since we normally contrast the two as distinct and opposing realms. But he is speaking of the social use to which the concept nature is put, and the mixing of the two realms is a phenomenon of considerable importance. Barthes is especially sensitive to the creation of a "nature" myth, since mythmaking seems to him to be the way in which social ideals—and social injustices—become entrenched. They are immune from analysis or criticism once tehy cease to appear as human concepts and instead become perceived as eternal givens. In other words, once something is perceived as lying in the realm of nature rather than in the realm of society or history, it seems beyond criticism. By definition, it has nothing to do with us: we are not its architects. Why criticize a sunrise or a frog? That's just the way a frog or sunrise is, through nobodies fault. In fact, that is the way they were
meant to be—an odd intuition, given that nature is no longer thought to have purposes or intentions. But this is the paradox: we resist the possibility of there being anything "human" in nature, including purpose and meaning, but then we proceed to use nature as a refugium for social ideals.
Back to me: useful, no? As it not unusual for me to stumble into a conversation in which "that's just human nature..." kind of thinking and claims are bandied about, it's nice to have Evernden come through and clean up some of the rough edges... or, more exactly...
he roughs up the smooth edges.
No smooth edges! That's where the bullshit is kept.
Enjoy
