Mediating Nature

290 Pages·2006·2.217 MB·English

by  Nils Lindahl Elliot

MEDIATING NATURE
Mediating Nature provides a history of the present nature of mass mediation.
It examines the ways in which a number of discourses, genres, institutions and
technologies of observation have historically shaped the current ways of imagin-
ing the nature of nature, and the nature of mass mediation. Where much of the
existing research treats mass mediation as a matter of media technologies, texts,
audiences, or institutions, the current book adopts a somewhat different approach
that breaks down the conventional boundaries between these elements: it consid-
ers ‘mass mediation’ as a historical process by means of which the members of
audiences and indeed publics more generally have been taught to be observers of,
if not in, nature. As part of this approach, the book offers an investigation of the
historical interrelation of a number of social genres and their characteristic tech-
niques of observation. These include landscape paintings and gardens, modern
zoos, photography, early cinema, nature essays, disaster and ‘animal attack’ films,
as well as wildlife documentaries on television. An integral aspect of the investiga-
tion involves what Lindahl Elliot describes as a ‘social semeiotic’ methodology
that combines the semeiotic theory of Charles Peirce with a historical sociology of
cultural formations. This enables the book to challenge some of the assumptions
of naturalist, but also of culturalist and postmodern discourses about the nature
of nature, and the nature of mass mediation.
Topical and timely, this fascinating book will be of great interest to students
and researchers in the fields of media, sociology, cultural geography and environ-
mental studies.
Nils Lindahl Elliot is a researcher in cultural and environmental studies. His
research specialism is in the social semeiotics of nature.
INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIOLOGY
Founded by Karl Mannheim
Edited by John Urry
Lancaster University
Recent publications in this series include:
RISK AND TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE
Towards a sociology of virulence
Joost Van Loon
RECONNECTING CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE
Mike Michael
ADVERTISING MYTHS
The strange half lives of images and commodities
Anne M. Cronin
ADORNO ON POPULAR CULTURE
Robert R. Witkin
CONSUMING THE CARIBBEAN
From Arwaks to Zombies
Mimi Sheller
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Claire Valier
BETWEEN SEX AND POWER
Family in the world, 1900–2000
Goran Therborn
STATES OF KNOWLEDGE
The co-production of social science and social order
Shelia Jasanoff
AFTER METHOD
Mess in social science research
John Law
BRANDS
Logos of the global economy
Celia Lury
THE CULTURE OF EXCEPTION
Sociology facing the camp
Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten
VISUAL WORLDS
John Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker
TIME, INNOVATION AND MOBILITIES
Travel in technological cultures
Peter Frank Peters
COMPLEXITY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Multitudes acting at the edge of chaos
Ian Welsh and Graeme Chesters
QUALITATIVE COMPLEXITY
Ecology, cognitive processes and the re-emergence of structures in
post-humanist social theory
John Smith and Chris Jenks
THEORIES OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY, 3RD EDITION
Frank Webster
MEDIATING NATURE
Nils Lindahl Elliot
HAUNTING THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey and Simon Robb
M E D I AT I N G N AT U R E
Nils Lindahl Elliot
First published 2006
byRoutledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
byRoutledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007
© 2006 Nils Lindahl Elliot
Typeset in Galliard by
Prepress Projects Ltd, Perth, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN10: 0–415–39177–6 ISBN13: 978–0–415–39177–1 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–39325–6 ISBN13: 978–0–415–39325–6 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–08724–0 ISBN13: 978–0–203–08724–4 (ebk)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
PART I 13
1 The nature of nature 15
2 The nature of observation 32
PART II 53
3 The nature of mathesis 55
4 The nature of commodification 77
5 The nature of industrialization 105
6 The nature of sublimation 134
7 The nature of incorporation 164
8 The nature of environmentalism 198
Epilogue: climactic change 230
Appendix: the nature of Peirce 241
Notes 255
Bibliography 264
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to begin by thanking John Urry for inviting me to submit a proposal
to the Routledge International Library of Sociology Series, and for providing
comments on a draft of the book. John’s generous support has made it possible
for me to publish this book in its present form. Carmen Alfonso, Ben Highmore
and Hans Lindahl also provided detailed comments on drafts of the book, and
I am very grateful for their input. It goes without saying that any misinterpreta-
tions that remain are entirely my own.
Constance Sutherland and Gerhard Boomgaarden at Routledge provided gen-
erous support and advice for which I am also very grateful. The same is true for
the kind assistance provided by Andrew R. Davidson and the team at Prepress
Projects.
I developed the ideas and the research for this book at the School of Cultural
Studies at the University of the West of England,Bristol.The School provided re-
search leave and constituted a lively place in which to study and teach some of the
subjects found in the following pages. I am particularly grateful to Jane Arthurs,
who has been a generous and supportive head of school. I’m also very grateful to
the students who participated in my undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and
who encouraged me to clarify the ideas presented in the following pages. I used
an early draft of parts of the book in one of my undergraduate courses in 2004/5,
and would like to thank the especially attentive reading and helpful questions
raised by Dorothea Brueckner, Pascale Yasmine and Simon Steadman.
The research leave provided by the School was more than matched by grants
awarded over the last five years by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of
England and Wales (1999–2000) (now the Arts and Humanities Research Coun-
cil); by the British Academy (2000); and by the Economic and Social Research
Council of England and Wales (2002–2004).
I wish finally to acknowledge the patience and the support of my friends and
family, who understood my absences from non-academic everyday life. It is my
hope that the publication of the book will mark the beginning of the end of the
askesis that preceded its completion.
I dedicate this book to F. Stanley Glynn, from whom I first learned about the
imaginary institution of culture.
viii
INTRODUCTION
Mediating Nature offers a history of the present nature of mass mediation. The
ambiguity of the phrase ‘the present nature of mass mediation’ is deliberate: the
history in question is both a history of the present nature of mass mediation, and
a history of the mass mediation of nature. I shall suggest that such a history goes
some way towards explaining the nature of modern environmentalism.
Each of the terms used in this account – ‘nature’, ‘mass mediation’, ‘modern
environmentalism’ and a ‘history of the present’ – calls for critical scrutiny, and in
the following pages I shall consider some of the problems that each raises.
Nature
I should like to begin with the notion of ‘nature’. Some readers may be surprised
thatI use ‘nature’, and not ‘the environment’. Does the word ‘nature’ not suggest
the kind of old opposition between human and non-human nature, between the
city and the country, between nature and culture, that is arguably the philosophi-
cal (and not so philosophical) underpinning of the current environmental crisis?
Surely ‘the environment’ would provide a more up-to-date understanding of ‘na-
ture’, i.e. one that recognizes that the so-called ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ natures
are ineluctably intertwined, parts of a proverbially inseparable whole? If so, why
stay with ‘nature’?
The first answer is that nature has stayed with us. Just in 2004 and 2005, in a
tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people across and beyond the Indian
Ocean, in an earthquake in the Kashmir region that may have killed as many as
100,000 people, in a hurricane that destroyed a modern city in the United States,
but also in the everyday death of life, nature has reminded us that, as TerryEagle-
ton (2000) puts it, it has the last word.
To be sure, it is not only in death that nature continues to live; a dialectic of
culture and nature arguably shapes all aspects of human practice in so far as there
remains a nature that is, in Kate Soper’s terms, ‘independent of human activity
(in the sense that [it is] not a humanly created product)’, but ‘whose forces and
1
INTRODUCTION
causal powers are the necessary condition of every human practice’ (Soper 1995:
132–3).
A second answer is that, whether such a nature continues to shape human life
or not, this is the nature that is preferred by the mass media. Over the last thirty
or so years, the complex accounts of ecosystematic relations that can be found
in ecology textbooks, and the increasingly baroque accounts of ‘hybrid’ natures
found in academic texts such as this one appear to have been ignored by the pro-
ducers of most genres of mass communication. Indeed, the nature represented in
such genres remains, for the most part, the ‘extreme nature’ seen in Steve Irwin’s
Crocodile Hunter or in The Day After Tomorrow, or perhaps the ‘Edenic’ nature seen
in posters spread out on the concourses of many shopping malls as well as in the
wallpapers of untold millions of computer screens.
A third answer is that this nature – the ‘non-human’ nature – also informs
many representations of the modern environmentalist movement, understood in
a broad manner that includes conservationist organizations and environmentalist
activists but also everyday environmentalist sensibilities. For example, a quick
search towards the end of 2005 of the websites of a number of mainstream – and
even ‘not so mainstream’ – environmentalist organizations suggested that the dis-
cursive opposition between human and non-human nature remains very much a
part at least of their public raison d’être. The WWF, whose acronym once stood
– and in the US still stands – for the World Wildlife Fund, changed its name to
the World Wide Fund for Nature. The organization suggested that this change
was meant to reflect its concern with conserving what it described as ‘the envi-
ronment as a whole’. But, aside from maintaining the word ‘nature’ in its name,
the WWF described its ‘ultimate goal’ as being ‘to stop and eventually reverse
environmental degradation and to build a future where people live in harmony with
nature’ (http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/who_we_are/index.cfm, accessed 15
September 2005, emphasis added).
For its part, Friends of the Earth, a non-governmental organization (NGO)
generally identified with a ‘social ecological’ form of environmentalism, described
itself as an organization whose ‘1.5 million members and supporters in 70 coun-
tries campaign on the most urgent environmental and social issues of our day, while
simultaneously catalyzing a shift towards sustainable societies’(http://www.foei.
org/about/index.html, accessed 15 September 2005, emphasis added). Its mission
statement suggested that its first aim was to ‘protect the earth against further de-
terioration and repair damage inflicted upon the environment by human activities
and negligence’ (http://www.foei.org/about/mission_statement.html, accessed 15
September 2005).
Even Reclaim the Streets (RTS), an organization (or as it described itself, a
‘disorganization’) whose campaigns had been based on a refreshingly urban poli-
tics, included an essay in its website titled ‘Ecology and the Social City’ which
suggested that ‘With the environment and social impact of contemporary city life
increasingly evident in pollution, destruction, poverty, stress and crime, a critical
and reconstructive look at the city and its’ [sic] relations with the natural world seems
2