This blog publishes occasional articles about the media, culture and environmental education. It is part of cmcee.net.
Unless explicitly acknowledged otherwise, all form and content in the cmcee.net blog is Copyright © 2008-2012 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
Imagine you’re watching a wildlife documentary on television. The programme describes the coming of winter to the Artic with stunning photography. In one of the most memorable scenes, the programme shows a polar bear with its newborn cubs in a den dug out by the bear in a snowbound hillside. You wonder how the filmmakers managed to film this and several other extraordinary scenes in the documentary. Later, you learn that at least the scene with the bear cubs was a ‘fake’ in so far as it was actually filmed in a zoo.
Does it matter that the scene was not filmed in the wild, or that the programme failed to explain this?
The situation I’ve just described actually took place towards the end of 2011, when a mini-scandal erupted for precisely the reasons I have just outlined: one of the episodes in the BBC’s blue-chip Frozen Planet series showed newborn polar bear cubs in what looked like a den in the wild. In fact, the den was a purpose-built one in a Dutch zoo (purpose-built for filming as well as birthing). Alas, the programme-makers refrained from telling audiences watching the episode about this. When the scene was ‘outed’ as a ‘fake’, a considerable rumpus ensued in the British press, with the matter even reaching the British parliament.
By the time that passions about the episode began to fade, two ideological positions had coalesced: on the one hand, the BBC’s critics, apparently an unholy alliance of genuinely outraged MPs and climate change deniers looking to score hits on the ‘green’ BBC, demanded that in future the programmes should be broadcast with appropriate health warnings. On the other hand, the BBC’s defenders, which included David Attenbourgh (of course) and some rather more surprising figures such as George Monbiot, suggested that the matter was a relatively trivial one (Monbiot), and was in any case adequately acknowledged and explained in this ‘making of’ video (the BBC). It was some in the latter camp that suggested that the matter was part of a dark conspiracy against the BBC, the result of its support for the theory, which is now really to say the reality, of anthropogenic climate change.
I have no idea whether there was a conspiracy or not – it would not be at all strange, but, truth be told, if the knives are out for the BBC thanks to its climate change position, then the right-wingers have perhaps failed to notice Top Gear, or indeed the news that, in the US, the BBC reportedly made optional the last episode of the series, which focussed on the effects of climate change on the polar regions. Climate change deniers have probably also failed to notice that, given the number of aerial shots in this, as in so many other of the BBC’s wildlife series (presumably produced with helicopters or other light aircraft), the series might well be described as an implicit ode to the kind of carbon belching practices which must come to an end if we are to meet the looming 2017 deadline (I make this point more seriously in a separate post, also about the BBC).
Whatever the case, the polemic has gone the way of so many mass-mediated scandals, and has vanished beneath the e-waves almost as quickly as it surfaced. There is, however, a critique which I think no one put forward at the time, and which needs to be made with respect to George Monbiot’s suggestion that, while the BBC should do more to indicate when scenes in its programmes involve animals filmed in captivity, the matter was a completely trivial one. In Monbiot’s words,
‘It’s an issue of mindnumbing triviality, though I do think that the BBC should do more to warn viewers when scenes have been shot in captivity. The director-general, quizzed by the culture, media and sport select committee yesterday, said that when people were polled on the question, their overwhelming response was that they did not want to see captions or hear disclaimers in wildlife programmes.’
‘There is something both revealing and quite touching about this. It suggests that people watch such programmes much as they might listen to poetry: they want to be transported to a world whose veracity is less important than its beauty. Even so, it doesn’t feel quite right, and I think it would be wise for the BBC at least to list the scenes that were not shot on location in the credits at the end of the film’ (emphases added).
* * *
First things first: Contrary to the BBC’s later suggestion that the episode was ‘carefully worded’ to not mislead audiences, there is no doubt that episode five of the Frozen Planet series did engage in the manufacture of a certain untruth. In the scene in question, the programme employed an audiovisual montage that undeniably did make the claim, however implicitly, that the filmmakers had filmed the polar bear cubs in the wild. Against a visual backdrop showing a steeply sloping hill covered in snow, and after having shown a bear earlier in the programme digging a den in preparation for the winter, Attenborough narrated that ‘But on these side slopes, beneath the snow, new lives are beginning’. By the time he reaches the words ‘new lives’, the wide shot of the hillside is replaced with a close-up of a bear and its cubs, ostensibly in a wild ‘den’. There is no reference whatsoever to the fact that the scene is not filmed in the wild, and, on the contrary, the programme goes some length to construct a narrative that suggests both a temporal and a spatial continuity between the various images of the bears.
Is this a triviality, a tempest in a frozen teacup? Monbiot is certainly not uncritical of other aspects of the documentaries which he feels merit a stronger response: for example, what he describes as ‘the complete separation by wildlife programmes of the natural and the human worlds’, a critique which he says he first offered in 2002 (I couldn’t agree more that this is a problem; I myself have been teaching and writing about it since the mid 1990s). This stance, however, suggests that Monbiot, like so many other media critics, has not really thought through the social semiotics, or as I now spell the term, the semeiotics of natural history documentaries.
If the BBC’s continuing adherence to a code that effectively opposes the human and the ‘nonhuman’ world matters to environmental critics, it is because it has the potential to engage in a dualistic pedagogy of nature. Put simply, so long as the documentaries are able to teach, however implicitly, that it’s us and them (where ‘them’ is the ‘nonhuman’ world), then the documentaries may well serve the cause of right-wing perspectives which have long romanticised a nature that is not only completely separate from ‘us’, but there for ‘our’ pleasure, be it the pleasure of hunting, or in this case, the pleasure of virtual consumption via TV series.
My research suggests that much of the power of such a pedagogy rests not only on audiences’ fantasies and desires for an undisturbed Nature, but on an unquestioned feeling that what is being shown is really ‘nature itself’. Indeed, the quest for an ‘untouched’ (sic) nature is mirrored by a form of representation that itself seems to cause no disturbance. It is on this level of representation that ‘fake’ scenes can undermine the very foundations of the BBC Natural History Unit’s rhetoric, to not say its cultural authority. From this perspective, far from being a ‘trivial’ matter, the question of ‘fake’ scenes is actually of extraordinary importance to the BBC, and to fellow wildife filmmaking organisations like the National Geographic.
The argument that the BBC’s own inhouse research reveals that audiences don’t want health warnings actually corroborates this point. I’d question the extent to which audience wishes can be homogenised. Indeed, I’d very much like to see the research that was apparently invoked by John Thompson in defence of the ‘fake’ scenes. It’s no secret that, depending on the questions asked by surveys, one is more likely to get certain kinds of responses. Would you like to see documentaries full of disclaimers and health warnings? Most certainly not. Do you think that the BBC should tell audiences when programmes haven’t been actually filmed in the wild? Most probably yes. Do you think it matters whether wildlife documentaries are true to nature? A guaranteed yes… and so forth. To be sure, one would have to ask if ethical decisions of this sort are really to be determined by the results of audience research?
It would be problematic enough if ‘faked’ scenes were to constitute a very small part of documentary series such as Frozen Planet. But ‘little white lies’ of one sort or another are very common to the wildlife film industry (and it is that – an industry). The history of wildlife filmmaking is literally replete with a variety of ‘tricks of the trade’ that have been used to fool audiences into thinking that the cinematographers captured in the wild, and quite spontaneously, what was actually a carefully contrived scene, be it ‘studio-based’ or the outcome of the use of baits, or more grievously, of full-fledged traps. Even in the excellent Frozen Planet series, how many, if indeed any of the shots of polar bears in the ‘Winter’ episode were actually filmed in the Arctic winter? I hope I’m wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that most if not all were shot ‘day for night’ in the Arctic summer, when the wind was up.
Some thoughts, finally, about the BBC’s protestations that it was, in effect, defending the animals’ interests by not filming them in the wild, and that in any case, it did provide the information about the fake den elsewhere.
Where the former argument is concerned, I wonder if the BBC would be prepared to not only condemn, but guarantee that it does not partake in any activities of the kind that led to the fining of the filmmaker Mike Linley by a court in Western Australia. I refer not only to the smuggling, but more generally to the practice of capturing animals for ‘studio-based’ filming. Do any such practices – or indeed the much celebrated ‘critter cams’ – tally with the BBC’s claims to be very concerned about the well-being of the animals it films? If the Linley saga teaches us anything, it’s that just as zoos are always a handy fallback for producers unable to obtain certain shots, there are few boundaries that at least some wildlife filmmakers aren’t willing to cross in the quest for the ‘ultimate’ shots.
Where the argument that the information was provided ‘elsewhere’ is concerned, the fact that the BBC didn’t provide that information in Episode 5 itself would also confirm that the matter is far from being ‘trivial’. What is at stake is a form of story-telling which is not only that – story-telling – but one whose authors know only too well what at least some audience expectations are. Far from being programmes which simply ‘show what there is to save’, the programmes’ producers must know that they also need to show what sells. This is a major aspect of the whole enterprise – but one that has the potential to contradict the often pious claims made by the National Geographic and indeed the BBC itself to be working for the good of conservation, and the planet more generally.
Copyright © 2012 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
Why do hundreds of millions of people visit zoos each year?
Last weekend I came across an article in the New York Times that served as a reminder of a discourse that continues to have currency within the zoo industry, and apparently beyond. The article, which made repeated references to recent visitor research, suggested that people who go to zoos experience something akin to ‘wilderness memory’. ‘Just as dancers have body memory’, the author argued, ‘we have wilderness memory’. ‘The random gibbering and roaring, cackling and hooting, yowling and grunting strike ancient chords in us, a feral harmony that intrigues and lulls.’
The discourse in question is a soft version of biologism, the doctrine that everything in human affairs is ultimately a matter of a (biological) Nature. I use a capital ‘N’ in this case because the nature in question is a romantic and sublime one – very much the same nature constructed by those who, like Richard Louv, claim that ‘contact with nature’ is necessary ‘for healthy child – and adult – development’.(1)
In my research I’ve been critical of the doctrine of culturalism, which attempts to reduce everything in human affairs to culture(2). I’ve used the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, a realist philosopher, to insist on the importance of indexical links between certain representations and what they represent, or in the case of zoos, between the observer and the observed. But the vice of culturalism pales when compared to the ideology of biologism, and with it the uncritical naturalism that so often prevails when the time comes to explain cultural groups’ relations to nature (or whatever passes for nature), and to wild animals in particular.
Simplifying somewhat, naturalism involves an ascription of identity between a representation, a referent, and a certain conception of what the referent is really like(3). In the case of zoo displays, the ascription of naturalism is made complex by the fact that the animals on display are at one and the same time a synecdochic representation of a species, and ‘themselves’. Even so, the animals are often displayed within enclosures which are unambiguously representational in so far as they attempt to represent one or another habitat, one or another biome.
The author of the article in the Times does acknowledge that zoos are ‘not a natural world by any means’. But much of the rest of the piece is devoted to suggesting, in effect, that the reason why ‘we’ love zoos – a problematic ‘we’ if ever there was one – is that people treat the animals in zoos as unquestioned presentations of the real McCoy. This is tantamount to subscribing to what I describe as a hypernaturalistic understanding of the nature of zoo animals. The ‘hyper’ in ‘hypernaturalism’ refers to situations in which the representation is regarded as being so real that it is no longer treated as a representation – it is the thing itself.
As I began to explain above, in the case of zoo animals there is some justification for doing so – zoo animals are not best conceived as ‘representations’. But the peculiarity of zoo animals lies precisely in the ambiguity of their status as ‘re/presentations’ and as quasi-wild creatures. As I began to explain above, an animal displayed in a zoo can be regarded as being at once a presentation of itself, and a representation of something else: a species, or a ‘scene’ in a rainforest, a desert, a reef, etc. However, the animal ‘itself’ is not unambiguous from the point of view of its ontological status. Certainly a strong case can be made that many species displayed in zoos conserve most of their morphological and behavioural attributes, and this even after having been bred for generations in zoos. It would, in this sense, be absurd to suggest that there is no difference in ‘wildness’ between, say, a tiger and a sheep.
Even so, zoo animals are not truly wild animals if only because they are no longer living in the wild. Zoo animals are, well, zoo animals, whatever the continuities with their wild cousins. To put this point more generally, it would be a mistake to abstract the animals from their living, and breathing contexts – be it that of an original habitat, or a zoo. It is no coincidence that so much zoological research has been devoted to documenting the many transformations that wild animals undergo when placed in captivity. The transformations range from dramatic behavioural changes to subtle structural transformations (on occasion there are, to be sure, some not so subtle morphological transformations too: consider, for example, the collapsed dorsal fins of many captive orcas).
The more general point I am leading up to is that one can only subscribe to a biologistic explanation of why people go to zoos if one quite radically, even if implicitly overlooks the zooness of zoos. At the risk of seeming to state the obvious, whatever other motivations they may have, visitors go to zoos because zoos exist, and because a tradition exists that involves ‘going to the zoo’. In the space and time of leisure, there are a finite set of options that people have when it comes to leisure, and zoos are one such option, one that is familiar in every sense of the word. But familiarity is not itself necessarily a matter of biophilia. My research in two British zoos revealed that while many parents had serious misgivings about the zoos they visited, they continued to use them because zoos provided a relatively safe, and especially an entertaining place for their young children. The hesitation of such parents was often quite susceptible to the zoo strategy of talking up conservation and the ‘naturalistic’ nature of the enclosures; both aspects provided, as one zoo director acknowledged, ‘permission to visit’ an otherwise questionable kind of visitor attraction. Had another equally good or convenient option existed, many would have made use of it.
It may be assumed from my argument that I sympathise with animal rights discourses on zoos. In fact, I am concerned to explain, critically, what is an exceptionally complex leisure practice, and one which biologistic accounts do not do justice to.
I would add that, beyond simplifying the bio-social relations at stake, a romantic conception of a harmonious nature also makes it difficult to consider the myriad acts of cruelty, or attempted cruelty, perpetrated not by the zoos, but by a surprising number of their visitors, both young and older. As zookeepers know all too well, the barriers of enclosures are often designed as much to keep the wilder animals in as they are to keep the mischievous visitors out. Zookeepers might further point out that, ‘in the wild’, that ‘feral harmony’ that the NY Times article referred to is less than, well, harmonious.
Two last comments: uncritical accounts of naturalism also tend to produce a certain tunnel vision vis-a-vis the question of the relative naturalness of zoos as opposed to the kind of representations found on, say, television. The view of many zookeepers is that visitors go to zoos to experience the ‘real’ animals, as opposed to those ‘dwarfed, flattened, and interrupted by commercials’ (as expressed by the Times’ article). In fact, my research revealed that many visitors applied the opposite criterial hierarchy: real nature, or at any rate the real wild animals, were those found on the tele. Far from going to zoos to remedy the limitations of the media, zoos were often spaces where mass-mediated animals could be ‘seen again’, which is to say recognised (and ‘re-cognised’), but frequently on condition that the ‘real’ animals looked the same as those on television, i.e. on condition that they looked as if they were in the wild. The ‘frequently’ is an important caveat here, for often the most vivid encounters were those in which visitors came ‘face to face’ with the larger mammals; more of than not, this happened in enclosures which were not as ‘naturalistic’.
The last point to one side, this order arguably goes some way in explaining why zoos have developed forms of enclosure which frequently do little for the animals on display(4), but give visitors a sense of a continuity with the moving dioramas produced on television. The dilemma for the zoo designers is that this often means that animals have a certain freedom to roam far from visitors – a tendency that tends to be particularly frustrating to younger children, for whom a different order of naturalism often applied.
My last comment refers to the idealisation of the multi-sensual character of zoos. Zoos may certainly be palaces of multi-sensuality, and a case can be made that they have, for this reason, something of a comparative advantage vis-a-vis some other mediums. But any idea that this is itself an inherently positive aspect, and one that is naturally attractive is misleading, to say the least. Zoos have long been attacked for being ‘smelly’ – indeed the epithet of ‘smelly zoo’ has come to symbolise the distaste experienced by many zoo critics with respect to the older, so-called ‘Victorian’ zoos. Any effort to sublimate this dimension of zoos overlooks many everyday experiences of zoos in which smell is, if not an unpleasant aspect, certainly one that generates ambiguous responses. As I explained in an article(5) that focussed on this dimension of zoos, in the course of conducting ethnographic research with family groups at the Paignton and at the Bristol Zoos, it became apparent to me that especially the younger visitors had a very strong, and rather mixed reaction to the smells in the Paignton Zoo’s award-winning Marie Le Febre Ape Centre.
In most cases the reactions involved exclamations such as ‘Phew! It’s smelly Mummy!’ or as one older child put it, ‘They should use some air freshener in here!’ In a few cases there was a stronger response: four of the children refused to go into this, and indeed into any of the more pungently aromatic displays in either of the zoos where I conducted research. The parents of one family reported that one of their children had begun to wretch the first time that they entered the Ape Centre.
So much for a ‘subtle olfactory landscape that stirs us’!
Updated 17 February 2012
Notes
1) Richard Louv (2009) Last Child in the Woods, London: Atlantic Books, p. 2
2) Terry Eagleton (2000), The Idea of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell
3) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge
4) See for example, Vicky Melfi, Andrew Bowkett, Amy Plowman and Kirsten Pullen (2005) ‘Do zoo designers know enough about animals?’ in Plowman and Tonge (eds) Innovation or Replication? Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Zoo Design. Paignton: Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust, pp. 119-128.
5) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) ‘See It, Sense It, Save It: Economies of Multisensuality in Contemporary Zoos’, Senses and Society, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 203-224
Article and Blog Copyright © 2012 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
Last updated 12 April 2011 at 7.00 BST (please scroll down for update)
by Nils Lindahl Elliot
The Guardian article ‘The Unpalatable Truth is that the Anti-Nuclear Lobby has Misled us All’ is vintage George Monbiot. In it Monbiot combines ‘evidence-based’ arguments with an explicit ethical standpoint—an ethical standpoint that combines a ‘duty to attend to the facts’, with a duty to be profoundly sceptical of claims made by anyone with respect to those facts, or alleged facts.
This scepticism is a key dimension of Monbiot’s work, and is part of what has led many to admire his writing over the last years. Here in Britain, scientific ‘illiteracy’ and aggressive propaganda campaigns have often made it very difficult to cut through spin. Despite decades of critiques, and government-led invocations of the need for a greater public understanding of scientific methods, it is still very easy for private and public institutions to make claims which appear to be factual, indeed may actually be factual (in the sense that they refer to ‘facts’), but actually interpret those facts in ways that are utterly convenient. In this context, Monbiot has been one of the few people who has mastered the combination of the critical and writing skills required to cut through the spin, and to do so in relatively short newspaper articles.
‘The Unpalatable Truth…’ is a good example of this skill. But it is also an example of the devious rhetoric—perhaps ‘misleading’ is a better word—that Monbiot himself has attacked. To begin with, Monbiot portrays himself as a ‘believer’ in the knowledge of the leading anti-nuclear activist, Helen Caldicott. By portraying himself as such, Monbiot works to establish at once a kind of shared identity, and a shared naiveté: like you, I also believed in Helen, I also believed in the horrors of nuclear energy. It is only after this ‘prep’ that the critical claw comes out, albeit sheathed in the velvet of a reluctance to accept that such a revered figure (Caldicott) could be wrong: it is with great regret that Monbiot must report that, when asked, Caldicott cannot provide a shred, or so Monbiot claims, of scientific evidence to support her criticism of nuclear energy. Far from being pleased at this discovery, the article suggests that Monbiot is horrified: ‘Caldicott’s response has profoundly shaken me’. Evidently, Monbiot intends for his readers to be shaken too.
* * *
Back to what I said about scientific ‘illiteracy’: this last term is actually a very problematic one in so far as it implies that we all should be scientists. Any such assumption shows the extent to which we live in a world in which the hypothetico-deductive method of reasoning, and with it the kind of logic associated with positive science, is ‘king’. This gendered metaphor is quite deliberate; as many scholars have shown, both the history of science, and much of its contemporary practice are still informed by a masculinity that assigns for men the role of discovering the secrets of an implicitly female nature (if this seems far-fetched, have a look at my post NASA’s Nature). As part of this discourse, debates over the relative merits of scientific arguments and their evidence tend to be portrayed, indeed lived as sparring matches, as contests in which human agents, and all too often more-than-human actants, are conceived as winners or losers, predators and prey in the kind of social Darwinian struggles which sociobiologists have long used to legitimise the various isms: racism, ethnocentrism, and of course, sexism. In my view, part of what has made Monbiot such an effective critic of the establishment is that he excels in this kind of combativeness. Conglomerates such as Shell regularly accuse their critics of being ‘sentimental’ and ‘emotional’ about the environment, but in Monbiot’s case any such accusation seems particularly baseless; in Monbiot, the Goliaths find a David that has been itching to punch back, and punch back hard.
That disposition is evident, however much Monbiot tries to dissimulate it, in his attack on what he describes as his ‘anti-nuclear opponents’. If you read through the rest of the aforementioned Guardian article, you will find that Monbiot soon abandons the language of shock and surprise, and gets down to what he does best: explaining, on the one hand, how Caldicott cannot support her claims; and showing, on the other hand, how all of the reputable research has shown, to the contrary, that nuclear energy is, if not safe, then certainly not the dangerous thing that it has been portrayed as being. Here as in other such ‘contests’, Monbiot wins, or tries to win, by combining three skills which have proved to be extraordinarily effective antidotes to the spin of the different corporations, politicians, and their climate change nay-sayers.
First, he does what virtually none of the public relationists do, which is that he goes to the actual scientific sources, and in so doing makes them available for readers to check them themselves. Second, he actually interrogates those sources, in order to assess their validity. And third, he frames this process in a discourse that is relatively explicit about his own ethics, and the ethics of those who try to use the ‘facts’ for propaganda purposes. In this case, he repeats over and over again that the problem is no longer to choose between coal and renewables, but to switch, as quickly as possible, to any relatively safe mix that stops runaway climate change. To do otherwise is, effectively, to ignore the real issues, and to do so at a time when hundreds of millions of people across the world stand to drown, starve, or be otherwise displaced by the looming environmental catastrophe.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this combination of evidence and ethics. When I spoke earlier of a scientific ‘illiteracy’, I meant to refer not to a general ignorance about science, full stop—the kind of ignorance that entities such as the Royal Society have assiduously trumpeted for reasons that were not always as disinterested as they might appear to be—but to the kind of poor common sense that leads people to assume that science is entirely based on fact—so if a scientist says something is true, then it’s probably true. What is missing in our educational system is not a curriculum that makes scientists out of all of us, but instead, a curriculum that enables people to be critical readers or users of scientific discourse. By this I mean people who, in much the manner of Monbiot, can not only ‘find the facts’, but question the ways in which the facts have been produced, and crucially, interpreted. At the risk of being dismissed as a relativist, a fact is never just a fact; as soon as it is represented as such, it becomes part of a discursive train which always reflects, however implicitly or indirectly, a certain set of values, a certain set of interests. That does not mean that the fact, or alleged fact, is necessarily wrong; it does mean that there is always a value involved, and if that is true, then there is always also an ethics, and a power/knowledge dimension to so-called ‘evidence-based’ forms of communication.
My favourite metaphor for this problem involves photography. A photograph of, say, George Monbiot, might well be a photograph of the ‘real’ George Monbiot. George was there when the picture was taken, and the picture is, in some respects at least, a very faithful representation of aspects of the man himself. But in this account the word ‘aspects’ is key; George Monbiot is not two-dimensional, and he does not normally exist in a state that is framed by a 4×3 aspect ratio, illuminated by one kind of lighting, contextualised in a blurred background, etc. A case can and perhaps must be made that it’s still Monbiot, whatever the frame. But of course, depending on how Monbiot is framed, and how much other knowledge someone has about him, then the kind of picture might well make a huge difference to how Monbiot is perceived, conceived, and interpreted. In his own way, Monbiot has helped many people, myself included, to get a better grasp of how the ‘photographs’ that were being offered by various interested bodies might be skewing a variety of environmental issues.
* * *
My concern is that when it comes to the nuclear debate, Monbiot is, paradoxically, reverting to precisely the kind of discourse employed by the institutions he has usually opposed.
It seems to me that the criteria that he’s applying to determine whether nuclear energy ought to be used are as two-dimensional, which is to say as flat as a photograph taken with the shallowest of depths of field. Monbiot is claiming that nuclear energy is actually fine because it doesn’t really kill/seriously wound people, or at any rate, not as many people as the technology’s critics claim. Part of this argument is certainly a good one, in so far as it highlights what I would describe as the ‘unknown-knowns’ of other sources of energy such as coal, which have far more problems than is generally recognised. But two other aspects of this argument provoke in me the kind of amazement, to not say the horror that Monbiot claims to have experienced when he ‘outed’ Caldicott’s real, or alleged, lack of scientific evidence.
First, a normally hyper-critical Monbiot is quite ready to accept that a lack of evidence to the contrary is tantamount to the truth of the final outcomes of nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl’s. It is truly extraordinary that someone as knowledgeable as Monbiot should have this level of faith in one of the most heavily politicised technologies in the world. This stance seems disingenuous at best, and convenient at worst. Even if we disregard conspiracy theories, or the possibility of statistics that simply lack key data, what are we to do about all those ‘unknown-unknowns’ for which nuclear energy is notorious? The latest news about Fukushima really underscores this dimension of the whole technology: the Japanese government has authorised TEPCO, the private company that runs the plant, to dump over 11.000 tons of water with (presumably) low levels of radioactivity, into the ocean. This is without precedent; we have no way of knowing at this point what the consequences will be, not least because we (the people without a vested interest in the plant) don’t have any fail-safe way of confirming just how radioactive the water was. As if this were not worrisome enough, on April 6 the New York Times published an article about a confidential assessment by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, suggesting that Fukushima ‘is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable’. Yet Monbiot appears to imply that this whole dimension of nuclear energy should really not be a concern in a world with technologies full of other problems.
In a similar vein, and second, Monbiot appears to dismiss over 6,800—6,800!—cases of thyroid cancer in children in the former Soviet Union by suggesting that they are a simply a matter of a ‘failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with Iodine 131’. Here again, the implicit logic and corresponding ethic is deeply worrisome. It is not just that Monbiot seems quite ready to trust the institutions involved in measuring and studying the outcomes of nuclear disasters—perhaps we all must be on some level. It is that he also appears to be prepared to accept the notoriously rationalistic frame of technocrats, for whom such ‘mistakes’ are easily preventable, or easily controlled and corrected when someone ‘slips up’. If the history of nuclear disasters teaches us anything, it is that such assumptions are completely wrong. In a recent article in El País, a member of Spain’s Nuclear Security Council, an engineer with expertise in nuclear energy, argued that, far from being the ‘crappy’ old plant that Monbiot made it out to be, we have to suppose that the plant at Fukushima was actually one with a relatively sound design—what was ‘crappy’ was firstly the parameters for natural forces (earthquakes and tsunamis) which the plant was designed to withstand, and then the manner in which the unfolding crisis was managed. To use the engineer’s metaphor, no one expected to ‘win’ both the European, and the Spanish national lottery at the same time. And yet, far from being an exception in an earthquake-ridden country, these kinds of failures, these supposed ‘lotteries’ are the norm in nuclear and indeed many other technologies. Again, this is true not just in the context of countries with ‘extreme’ geographies such as Japan, but also in the everyday bureaucratic-administrative process required to design, build, and then manage nuclear plants even in ‘stable’ places like Chernobyl. As far as I can tell, cutting corners is not the exception in modern capitalism; it is probably the rule when what are at stake are the profits of unaccountable corporations, or the costs for a government looking to make savings. (For a recent account of this tendency as it applies to both banking and nuclear reactors, see the article by Joseph Stiglitz, Meltdown: not just a metaphor.)
The last problem I have with Monbiot’s approach is the one that concerns me the most. As I understand it, Monbiot is ultimately grounding his defence of nuclear technology in the following logic-ethic: 1) nuclear energy is no more problematic than other forms of energy such as coal; and 2) given the looming disaster caused by runaway climate change, we must make use of any technology that succeeds in preventing the unimaginable disaster that will result from climate change. Put differently, if it is true that nuclear energy is no different from other equally problematic sources of energy, it is even more true that our failure to use nuclear energy will have an even worse outcome: hundreds of millions of people will starve, or drown, or be displaced by rising sea levels, failing crops, etc. etc.
I have shown why we should not take Monbiot’s arguments about the relative safety of nuclear at face value. But I have no doubt that Monbiot is right to be worried about climate change. What worries me is that the edifice of Monbiot’s argument involves a certain consequentialism. Consequentialism is the doctrine, or the ‘moral’, that what really matters about an action is its consequence, its outcome. Call it, if you will, a big word with which to describe the kind of stance associated with ‘just do whatever it takes’, or ‘the end justifies the means’. Monbiot is, in effect, adopting such a stance by suggesting that we must pretty much do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop climate change: we may not like nuclear energy, nuclear energy may not be perfect, but if the outcome of its use is that we prevent runaway climate change, then we must use it.
As I see understand it, this kind of stance raises two of the most troubling issues for anyone who believes that modern environmentalism—and addressing climate change—is not about technological fixes, however desperate the circumstances. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is that consequentialism can be used to justify anything—in its extreme form, it becomes Machiavellianism. If someone with Monbiot’s stature is ready to adopt a consequentialist frame in this context, then how else might consequentialism be invoked, however implicitly, in future? One person I know is already saying that stopping climate change means that we will have to accept dictatorship.
The second problem follows on from the first, and is that Monbiot appears to be ready to embrace the fundamental ethic of capitalism itself. Part of what has made capitalism so powerful, so creative and so destructive, is precisely a readiness on the part of capitalist institutions and their proxies to ‘do whatever it takes’ to accumulate capital.
Does George Monbiot really believe that he can embrace, however inadvertently, an equivalent ethic in the context of nuclear power, and still oppose the rest of the workings of capitalism? The best parallel that I can think of, from an ethical standpoint, was New Labour’s claim that its semi-secret plans to introduce a universal DNA database were not only required to prevent rape, but also, were not really contradictory of the principle that people are, and ought to remain, innocent until proven guilty. New Labour was as wrong about the universal DNA database as Monbiot is about nuclear energy.
Update 12 April 2011. Japan has finally done what it should have done as soon as its Fukushima reactors began exploding: it’s raised the severity level of the nuclear crisis at the plant from 5 to 7 on the INES scale. 7 is the maximum, and puts the classification of the disaster at Fukushima on a par to that of Chernobyl. (For more on these news, see the Guardian’s article Japan Raises Nuclear Alert Level to 7.) The change vindicates something that many of us had suggested in response to what always seemed like both a premature, naive, and indeed irresponsible suggestion on the part of Monbiot: that if Fukushima was as bad as it got, then we ought to ‘love’ nuclear energy. It now seems increasingly clear that Monbiot has fallen for what, from the start, was rather obviously another disinformation campaign by the nuclear energy sector, with the collaboration, however passive, of the Japanese government itself. TEPCO and the officials in charge of managing the crisis must have known from the start the severity of what is now officially a disaster.
Copyright © 2011 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
Note: the following is the fourth in a series of papers titled ‘Questions in Theory, Methodology, and Practice‘.
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
A researcher was swimming in Panama’s Gatun Lake when she felt an enormous blow to the chest. By the researcher’s own account, there was a split second when she didn’t know what had happened. Sheer incomprehension was followed by the realisation that she’d been given a tremendous blow by something, and that something acquired a recognisable form when an American Crocodile (Cocodrilus acutus) surfaced in front of her. The crocodile opened its mouth and arched its tail before sinking beneath the surface. The researcher had the presence of mind to try to stay still and to call for help. Assistance was forthcoming when another academic managed to swim back to shore and bring over a boat. Despite the misfortune of being attacked, the researcher was lucky in that it seems that the crocodile used its snout to give her a warning blow, as opposed to launching a full-scale attack.
I heard the researcher recount this extraordinary event while I was conducting fieldwork for my research about ecotourism on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. It occurred to me that it offered a good (if very unfortunate) way of illustrating a phenomenological approach which I first started to develop in the context of my research about zoos (1). In this paper I would like to use the encounter with the specimen of Cocodrilus acutus to specify this approach, which is indebted to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced as ‘purse’). Peirce is widely regarded as the foremost US philosopher, and one of two ‘founding fathers’ of semiotics, the theory of the interpretation of signs.
Before presenting the approach I should perhaps provide a very brief contextualisation that explains why and how I began to develop this approach. The first point that I should make it that, whilst researching zoos, it became apparent to me that the category of representation was not a particularly useful one when studying the manner in which visitors observed animals in zoos. To speak of representation is to assume that something has already been represented. While mental images may certainly be regarded as forms of representation, the category does not allow the researcher to adequately explain the actual process of ‘viewing’, or otherwise sensing objects that are somehow external to the subject. In my view, the twin categories of attention and observation, considered by Peirce himself and developed more recently by Jonathan Crary (2), offer a more useful avenue for explanation.
To shift from representation to observation (and attention) is not to suggest that representation ceases to be important. On the contrary, the work of Crary offers a good example of the idea, now commonplace in critical cultural theory, that the human gaze, and with it observational practices more generally, are mediated by cultural institutions, technologies, discourses, particular genres of practice, and thereby, representations. As Crary puts it, observation is best understood not as a process of spectatorship, but as an instance of the Latin verb observare: ‘ “to conform one’s action, to comply with,” as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and practices’ (3). Crary suggests that ‘[t]hough obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations’ (4). Such conventions must include representation. However, Crary clarifies that the conventions entail far more than representational practices. They also entail more than one representing subject. If, he suggests, it can be said that there is an observer that is specific to a particular historical period, ‘it is only as an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing subject prior to this continually shifting field’ (5).
Readers familiar with the work of Crary might be surprised that I combine his work with that of Peirce. To this day, Peirce has a reputation for being, if not a positivist, then a pragmatist in the most caricaturesque meaning of the last term: ‘true is what works’. Such characterisations have long dogged Peircian semiotics, and have made it more difficult to explain that aspects of Peirce’s work preceded by almost a century many displacements now associated with post-structuralist theory. It is, in this sense, no coincidence that Crary himself quotes Peirce on the question of attention.
That said, other aspects of Peirce also act to correct what is, in my view, the Achilles heel of much contemporary cultural theory. Many theorists in the humanities and the critical social sciences still bracket the tricky question of what with Peirce we might describe as the indexical dimension of observation, and of representation more generally. Put very simply, especially but not only when it comes to observing dynamical objects in the natural world, the objects may have a very real capacity to bite, sting, or otherwise inflect—perhaps inflict is a better word—their forms on the observer. Umberto Eco rightly noted in his Kant and the Platypus that the dynamical object—Peirce’s term for the ‘thing-in-itself’, as opposed to the represented, or immediate object—is what ‘drives us to produce semiosis. We produce signs because there is something that demands to be said. To use an expression that is efficacious albeit not very philosophical, the Dynamical Object is Something-that-sets-to-kicking-us and says “Talk!” to us—or “Talk about me!” or again, “Take me into consideration!”’ As noted by Eco, ‘Beyond a doubt the only person who made this [pre-linguistic] problem the foundation of his theory—semiotic, cognitive and metaphysical all at the same time—was Peirce’(6).
We can agree with Crary and other critical post-structuralist scholars that, even in the context of observations produced in a tropical forest, it is still crucial to consider the mediating role of discourse, technology, institutions, and of course, representations. It is, however, highly problematic to bracket the indexical force of dynamical objects such as crocodiles or toucans, poison dart frogs or phlebotomine sand flies. This being true, it is necessary to find a way of incorporating Peircian phenomenology and semiotics (I use the variant ‘semeiotics’, to distinguish the approach from Post-Saussurean semiotics) as part of more traditional approaches to cultural theory.
Those familiar with the different underlying philosophies, theories and methodologies will doubtless argue that any effort to do so is the equivalent of trying to mix oil and water. But actually, the combination works very well provided that one is able to maintain the tension that Peirce himself maintained between the semeiotic, and what Eco describes as the ‘pre-linguistic’ (I would say, ‘extra-semeiotic’) aspects of signification.
I will illustrate one way in which this may be done in a moment. First I should explain that failure to maintain this tension almost inevitably leads to one of two conceptual traps. If, as many sociobiologists do, one can only see the extra-semeiotic aspects of the encounters—or if one conceives those aspects in purely biologically determinist ways—then one falls for biologism, the doctrine that everything in human affairs is a matter of nature. But if, by contrast, one completely brackets any role for nature (or the dynamical objects that are typically the referents for the word), then the trap that winks and beckons is that of culturalism—the doctrine that everything in human affairs is a matter of culture(7).
It seems to me that Peirce’s phenomenology, and the accompanying semeiotic theory go some way in addressing both of these problems, both of these fallacies. To explain how this is the case, it may be useful to return to the unfortunate encounter with the specimen of C. acutus.
In the first split second of the attack, it seems, by the researcher’s own account, that there was sheer incomprehension, a sheer feeling of ‘blow’ which, in the terms of Peirce’s phenomenology, might be conceived as a matter of ‘firstness’—simplifying greatly, indetermination. But of course, this firstness was prompted by an actual blow, and would itself have almost instantly have been replaced by what Peirce describes as ‘secondness’: the researcher would have gone from the univocal ‘momentlessness’ and paradoxical ‘timelessness’ of firstness, to a dynamic of action and reaction, which would itself have been, however fleetingly, a matter of a fairly ‘brute’ or ‘raw’ response. If, however, this reaction involved some form of semeiosis, as it would have done almost immediately, then secondness would have itself given way to thirdness, which is Peirce’s term for a three-way mediation of the kind that defines semeiosis. To ask (or think) ‘What has happened? What has struck me?’ is to begin to mediate the encounter by way of signs.
In Peirce’s words, ‘Firstly come “firstnesses,” or positive internal characters of the subject in itself; secondly come “secondnesses,” or brute actions of one subject or substance on another, regardless of law or of any third subject; thirdly comes “thirdnesses,” or the mental or quasi-mental influence of one subject on another relatively to a third’(8). In Peirce’s philosophy, the references to thirds are references to semeiosis. Unlike Ferdinand de Saussure (9), the other ‘founding father’ of semiotic theory who conceived of signs as dyadic or two-way entities (signified and signified), Peirce conceived of signs as triadic entities. Signs and thereby semeiosis involve a three-way relation between an object of representation, a representamen (or the ‘sign itself’), and the interpretant, Peirce’s term for the process of translation that is required to make sense of signs. A sign is only meaningful in so far as it is translated into other signs: a crocodile is a reptile, has a long tail, etc. etc.. This last aspect of signs, which is not to be confused with the concept of the interpreter, is by no means external to signification: signification occurs only in so far as the three-way inter-relation between object, representamen, and interpretant occurs. Peirce was nonetheless at pains to show that signification is not the kind of free-floating process that has been celebrated by many post-modern scholars. Even in the fullness of thirdness or semeiosis, there may persist a certain secondness, and a certain firstness. This may be a ‘physical’ matter, a matter of a degree of real indetermination, or its semeiotic equivalent ‘within’ signs. So it is that one may be ‘struck’ by someone’s words, and that even as a sign is used again and again to express something, each and every use is, in some respect, the very first.
Extrapolating from Peirce’s phenomenology, and from his semeiotic, I distinguish between three different ‘levels’, or perhaps we should say ‘moments’ of observation: immediate, dynamical, and habitual forms of observation (10). An observation, sensu stricto, must always entail a degree of thirdness, or habit (more on this last term, below). But especially in sudden encounters such as the one with the C. acutus, observation will often involve pre-semeiotic aspects. In the first moments, the researcher who encountered the crocodile experienced an immediate form of observation in so far as her thoughts were not guided—perhaps I should say preceded—by semeiosis. If there was semeiosis, then it was semeisosis of the kind associated with what Peirce describes as an ‘immediate interpretant’: the object, in this case the crocodile, regarded as an unrecognised dynamical object, was observed, however briefly, in a rhematic fashion, or as Peirce puts it, by way a kind of sign for which the observer ‘leaves [the] Object, and a fortiori its Intepretant, to be what it may’(11). This is observation considered as a fleeting—indeed almost entirely evanescent—firstness.
As soon as the researcher’s observations began to become observations, in the strict sense of the term, she would have unselfconsciously and seamlessly switched to a dynamical form of observation. This is observation from the point of view of secondness, or what Peirce describes as the ‘dynamic’ interpretant. The dynamic interpretant is the ‘effect on the mind’ actually produced by (and with) the sign (12). We can say that on this level, the researcher begins to observe in a manner which distinctly indicates a subject (and so involves what Peirce described as a dicent sign [13]). She began asking herself, even if only for a split second, ‘What is this? Is this a croc?’ and so forth.
Note that in dynamical observation, a degree of indetermination remains on the level of the interpretant; more generally, this is the kind of observation that might be associated, under rather more controlled conditions, with the formulation of hypotheses. Once the hypothesis gives way to a certainty, to a full recognition or apparent recognition such as ‘Ah, it is a croc, and it is displaying its dominance’ (or some such representation), then we have ‘normal’ or habitual observation, however abnormal the circumstances. Observation reaches, in effect, the ‘fullness’ of thirdness, which is to say, the production of habitual interpretants, i.e. the kinds of signs that are usually used to interpret a recognised, or what is thought to be a recognised phenomenon.
Peirce defined habit as a ‘readiness to act in a certain way under given circumstances and when actuated by a given motive’; and he defined belief as ‘a deliberate, or self-controlled, habit’(14). We may question just how controlled, and deliberate a habit may be, but it was this ‘final’ or ‘real’ logical interpretant which Peirce believed was the ultimate subject of study of pragmatist (or as he later called them, ‘pragmaticist’) forms of enquiry. As he put it in his characteristically convoluted fashion, concepts, propositions or arguments might be logical interpretants, but not the final logic interpretants:
“the habit alone, which though it may be a sign in some other way, is not a sign in the way in which that sign of which it is the logical interpretant is the sign […] The deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit—self-analyzing because formed by the aid of analysis of the exercises that nourished it—is the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant” (15).
* * *
I have provided the briefest of outlines of what is a more complex theory of observation. Hopefully, it will nonetheless give some idea of how I employ aspects of Peirce’s work. Lest there be any misunderstandings, there are three points that I should clarify. The first is my awareness of the importance of observational process: almost as soon as immediate (perhaps I should say ‘i-mediate’) observation occurs, it is no longer that, and the same is true again of dynamical observation: to begin to ask questions is of course to mediate the dynamical object, and so to subsume it within a certain thirdness. It probably is true that most of our observations are already a matter of thirdness, but that must not obscure the possibility that in some circumstances, this is not necessarily the case. More importantly, perhaps, Peirce’s phenomenology, as linked to his semeiotic, allow us to conceive of a certain indetermination, a certain ‘brute force’ even within the semeiotic mediation.
This leads me to the second clarification: whether or not one calls immediate observation a form of mediation (or says that it involves a semeiotic), depends to some extent on one’s conception of the role of semeiosis in the universe. Peirce is often portrayed as a ‘pansemioticist’—he is quoted, again and again, for having suggested that the universe is perfused with signs, and a number of Post-Peircian scholars have taken this to mean that the universe itself is a sign, or a matter of signs. If so, then everything is already semeiotic, albeit not necessarily a matter of semeiotic habit. In my own interpretation of this question, I prefer to think in terms of degrees of ‘semeioticness’, and as part of this approach, of aspects or levels which are emphatically pre-semeiotic. To do otherwise is to fall for representationalism, which I regard as a variety of the nominalism which Peirce himself opposed.
The last point that I should clarify is that I am fully aware that Peirce was no sociologist (alas, he was also emphatically not a ‘psychologist’). This being the case, today we must recontextualise his theory as part of an account that, in Crary’s terms, does recognise the role of discourses, institutions, technologies and habitual forms of representation. In my own research, I have grown more and more interested in tracing the issues that arise when the latter set of dimensions come face to face, as it were, with the nature of firstness and secondness in spaces such as Barro Colorado Island (16).
Notes
1) ‘The New Zoos: Science, Media & Culture’. Research supported by the ESRC. An account of the initial phenomenological approach can be found in Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge.
2) See J. Crary (1990) Techniques of the Observer, London: M.I.T. Press, and Crary (1999) Suspensions of Perception: attention, spectacle and modern culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3) Crary, Techniques of the Observer, op. cit., p. 6
4) Ibid.
5) Ibid.
6) U. Eco (1999) Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 13-14.
7) T. Eagleton (2000) The Idea of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 91.
C.S. Peirce (1931-58) Collected Papers, 8 Vols., C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (eds.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Following the convention widely used by Peircian scholars, I will refer to this work as ‘CP’, and will then cite the volume number and then the numbered paragraph for each citation. In this case, Peirce CP 5.469.
9) F. de Saussure (1983) Course in General Linguistics, translated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth.
10) see Lindahl Elliot, Mediating Nature, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
11) Peirce CP 2:95
12) Peirce CP 8:343
13) Peirce CP 2:95
14) Peirce CP 5.480
15) Peirce CP 5.491
16) For an account of Barro Colorado, see Lindahl Elliot (2010) ‘A memory of nature: Ecotourism on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island’ in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 19:3, pp. 237-259.
Copyright © 2011 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved.
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
Last Sunday I met Keith Way in Hartcliffe, Bristol. Keith is a naturalist who is campaigning to stop the Bristol City Council from selling off two plots of land along the Pigeonhouse Stream (an area also known as ‘Valley Walk’). We met so that Keith could show me around the area, and explain how and why it is under threat.
I couldn’t have asked for a better guide. Keith has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the area’s fauna and flora. Without being a stereotypical ‘twitcher’, he has that eye for movement that allows birdwatchers to stop in mid-sentence to point out an interesting species as it swoops behind them. Beyond the once–common birds that are becoming increasingly rare in some parts of Bristol, Keith could point out ‘exotic’ species that naturalists on TV have gone to some effort to film. A good example: the lovely Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea), which flew up and down the Pigeonhouse Stream while I was there (and managed to elude my best efforts to get a close-up; see if you can spot the bird in this shot).
A brief digression: in my experience, naturalists tend to know a great deal about nature, but few have spent much time getting to know the history and sociology of the conurbations that encroach on the habitats. An unselfconscious reproduction of that old modern opposition of nature and culture can lead naturalists to overlook the social dynamics that lead politicians (and in this case, contractors) to carry out policies that have nefarious consequences for wildlife.
Not so Keith, who grew up in the area and so has first-hand knowledge of the history of Hartcliffe. Keith’s parents were part of the first generation of Bristolians who moved to Hartcliffe. After the Luftwaffe’s bombs flattened many streets in more central parts of Bristol, farmland was acquired by way of a compulsory purchase order, and a modern, purpose-built estate was built from scratch to the south of the city. Soon after, Keith’s family moved to what we now know as the Hartcliffe Estate.
The oldest part of the estate was divided into small buildings with flats on two floors and long gardens that allowed the residents to grow their own vegetables (can you imagine a shared ownership scheme doing anything as practical as that today?). Even now, Hartcliffe has the spaciousness of an urban setting that feels like it’s been properly planned, with a generous allowance for public spaces. One such space borders the Pigeonhouse Stream, which rises in Dundry Hill, crosses along the eastern edge of Hartcliffe, and eventually joins the River Malago as it winds its way towards Bedminster.
Thanks to Keith’s lived knowledge of the area, I learned about the numerous changes that have taken place in its vicinity. I had no idea, for example, that there was once a famous airport in neighbouring Whitchurch. More poignantly, Keith pointed out exactly where the head teacher’s office was in the old Hartcliffe Comprehensive, which was recently razed to make way for one of New Labour’s flagship ‘academies’. In the abandoned football pitch, where Keith and the other lads frequently had to play in an inch or so of water, there is a remarkable wildflower meadow which Keith is also campaigning to protect. Paradoxically, efforts to improve the drainage eventually resulted in perfect conditions for an extraordinary variety of wildflowers, which in turn have attracted rare butterflies and other insects.
During my visit, we spent plenty of time considering the social dynamics that threaten what has become a remarkable biotic corridor between Bristol’s urban spaces and the rural area on its southern fringe. Until a few years ago, the land on either side of the stream benefited from a benign, if somewhat devious neglect. It seems that, in the New Labour era rush to outsource all manner of public services, the Bristol City Council awarded the maintenance of the green spaces around the stream to a contractor who submitted an uneconomically low bid. As a result, there was little maintenance of the grounds around the stream. Grasses, shrubs, brambles and trees grew, the wildlife thrived, and the stream became a veritable wildlife oasis, an urban hotspot for biodiversity. A survey conducted for Bristol Rivers by the ecologist Phil Quinn in 2010 noted that ‘Along the course of the stream banks, especially where there is sufficient light there are riparian plant species –typically pendulous sedge with some hemlock water-dropwort, figwort, wild angelica, wavy bitter-cress and meadowsweet’ and that there are ‘large sections of bank downstream supporting many large semi-mature alders, ash and field maples with an occasional large crack willow. Of particular note are some shrubs which have rarely been encountered elsewhere along the stream: spindle and buckthorn –the latter is a relatively uncommon species in the wider countryside and any record of it is of some note’. The area on the slopes of Dundry Hill, just beyond Hartcliffe, is thriving with rare plant and insect species.
Alas, the Council’s ‘benign neglect’ did not last for very long. Eventually some of the residents complained about the contractor, suggesting that the lack of maintenance was making the area unsafe for walking at night. In a district that now has a reputation for being one of Bristol’s roughest neighbourhoods, and at a time when the country’s political class seems increasingly comfortable with the rise of a surveillance society, the Council evidently felt compelled to act. A new contractor was hired, and the Council ensured that the new company zealously reclaimed the urban ‘jungle’.
The end result is that contractors have used their strimmers and tractors to create a faux-Victorian parkscape which may look safely well-kept, but is likely to be damaging the stream’s biodiversity. Despite Keith’s repeated efforts to find some middle ground—one need only think of Bristol’s own Brandon Hill—his and other naturalists’ calls have gone unheeded. If anything, the contractors appear to have grown more and more determined to raze anything that looks wild. It seems that while ‘urban wildernesses’ are tolerated in the genteel context of Brandon Hill, such wildernesses are not allowed in Hartcliffe. Keith is worried that, before long, the Wagtails and many other species that frequent the area will be gone.
To a hard-nosed pragmatist, this must seem like a stereotypical tale of environmentalism gone mad. Wagtails? Buckthorn? Surely the good residents of Hartcliffe’s concerns are more important. In fact, the stream now faces an additional threat which will end up affecting all those who use the paths to walk their dogs, or simply to enjoy a bit of urban greenery. Two plots along the stream (see this, and this other photograph) have been designated as land that the Council can sell off. The plots are a microcosm of the kind of process that is threatening green spaces across the entire UK. With the Liberal Conservative government leading the way in a veritable jamboree of privatisation, it is suddenly acceptable for national and local authorities to sell off any so-called ‘low value’ green spaces, and apparently to do so at will—this ostensibly to try to plug the gaping holes that are appearing in our towns’ and cities’ finances.
In the case of Hartcliffe, this is not some vague danger in a far-off future. The sell-off has already started along the Pigeonhouse Stream, where the construction of a new development is currently blocking part of the path on the southern end of the wildlife corridor. How long before the rest of the ‘unsafe’ land is also put up for sale?
No doubt difficult decisions will have to be taken by city councillors over the coming days, months, and years. If it is true that there is a tremendous shortage of affordable housing, it is also true that virtually all services are about to be cut as part of the Liberal Conservatives’ avowed disposition to eliminate Britain’s welfare state. In this context, funding for all sorts of vital services has become gold dust, and one can certainly understand that councils across the country are scrambling to raise cash.
The suspicion must nonetheless be that the selling of this kind of land is also the outcome of lobbying on the part of avid developers, who know a good crisis when they see one. The suspicion must also be that the good councillors—or perhaps the people who really run the council, the administrators headed by the Council’s Chief Executive—have chosen to sell off public land which they calculate will not be defended by residents.
If so, they may have made a mistake in the case of the Pigeonhouse Stream. Keith Way, and indeed a growing number of local and Bristol-wide supporters in the city’s Tory, Labour and Green parties have got a petition going which may yet force the Lib Dem Council to reconsider their plans to dispose of this, and of several other green spaces across Bristol.
Copyright © 2011 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
On January 11, I presented some of the results of the inaugural project of the Centre for Media, Culture and Environmental Education (CMCEE), ‘Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Environmental Education and the Challenge of Transmediation’(1). The presentation took place at the Tupper Centre in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), Panama. It focussed on some of the more practical aspects of visitor research that I conducted on Barro Colorado Island. By practical I mean the findings which the managers and guides of STRI’s Visitors Programme might find most useful from the point of view of re-developing its characteristic forms of environmental education on the island. The overall project explored broader sociological and anthropological questions, so this was a chance to consider issues that might be particularly significant to the Visitors Programme(2).
As I have explained in another article in this blog, Barro Colorado is a 1500-ha island that lies in the Gatun Lake. The Gatun is a 425 km2 reservoir which US engineers created by flooding the Chagres River Valley, a process which took place between 1910 and 1913. The reservoir had, and still has, three main purposes: to create a navigable route across the northern half the then nearly completed Panama Canal (the Canal officially opened in 1914); to provide the tens of millions of gallons of water required to transport ships across the canal’s huge locks; and to control the flood waters of the Chagres and other rivers that wrought havoc first on the French, and then on early US efforts to complete the canal.
Barro Colorado lies just to the south and west of the route taken by ships across the Gatun, so each day many ocean-going behemoths slide past the island as they make their way from the Pacific to the Caribbean, and vice versa. The canal is currently being enlarged to allow even larger ships to cross the isthmus. No wonder that the Panama Canal Authority (known in Panama by its Spanish-language acronym, ACP) regards the area as Panama’s foremost industrial zone.
In this context, Barro Colorado is a paradoxical fragment of the seasonal moist tropical forest that once covered the vast area destroyed by the flooding of the Chagres River Valley. Parts of Barro Colorado’s forest have often been described as being relatively undisturbed from the time that the first Spanish conquistadores first crossed the isthmus in the early 16th century. It is partly for this reason that, in 1923, a group of US naturalists succeeded in persuading the governor of what was then the US-controlled Canal Zone—a 10 mile-wide swathe of land along the Panama Canal—to set aside the island as a natural park. One year later, the naturalists established a field station that treated the entire island as a kind of laboratory for biological research.
Over the next century, what began as a small, privately run station, frequented by a handful of US naturalists, went on to become the internationally-renowned research centre that it is today. After WWII, the station came to be administered by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In 1966, the station acquired the status of an overseas bureau of the Smithsonian, and became known by its current name, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. STRI now has its headquarters in Panama City, and its research projects about tropical ecologies span the globe.
My own research project was concerned not so much with the activities of the scientists on Barro Colorado, as with those of the tourists whom STRI’s Visitors Programme welcomes to the island each year. Casual visitors began to be allowed to travel to Barro Colorado almost as soon as the first station was established. It was, however, not until the late 1940s that tourism began to take off on the island. While it did so on a small scale, the presence of a growing number of tourists worried many of the scientists, who felt their experiments might be disturbed by the ‘lay’ visitors who were allowed to roam across the island after WWII. In 1957, Martin Moynihan, the third director of the field station, complained that tourism had transformed Barro Colorado into ‘ . . . a hybrid, half research station and half hotel for miscellaneous tourists . . . who have no serious interest in research, or even biology’ (Moynihan in Christen, 2002: 245). A few years later, Moynihan brought the tourism to an end, and over the next two decades the island once again became the exclusive preserve of scientists and a handful of VIP visitors.
In the 1980s, tourism returned to the island thanks to the beginning of the devolution of the Panama Canal to the Republic of Panama. The devolution started to take place after the Torrijos-Carter Treaties were signed in 1977. The treaties marked the successful completion of negotiations that began after the Martyrs Day protests of January 9, 1964, which saw the deaths of 18 Panamanian civilians and 4 US soldiers in the vicinity of Panama City’s Ancon Hill. Given the nationalist discourse that inspired the uprising, STRI and Barro Colorado itself might have lost their special status in the former Canal Zone. However, Ira Rubinoff, Moynihan’s successor, was able to negotiate an agreement with the Panamanian government which secured STRI’s continued ‘custodianship’ not just of Barro Colorado Island, but of an enlarged 5400-ha nature reserve comprising the island, five surrounding peninsulas, and several islets.
As part of this arrangement, STRI once again allowed tourism on the island, albeit under a new, and far stricter visiting modality. Where tourists could once stay overnight and roam across the length and breadth of the island, tours now took the form of day trips which were closely supervised by guides, were confined to certain trails across areas of secondary growth, and were used to inform visitors about the activities of STRI, and about the ecology of Barro Colorado. Although STRI still prefers to use the concepts of ‘visitor’ and ‘visitor programme’, this form of public outreach effectively transformed Barro Colorado into a pioneer in ‘sustainable tourism’—in this case, what eventually became known as ‘ecotourism’.
In 2007 I began a research project which investigated the manner in which the tourists, by then some 5000 per year, responded to STRI’s Visitors Programme, and to Barro Colorado itself. The research studied the relationship between ecotourism, STRI’s environmental education on the island, and any role that certain media of mass communication might have in helping to shape particular patterns of observation amongst visitors. The investigation focussed on what I describe as the pedagogy of wildlife observation: the processes by which guides teach, and visitors may learn to perceive, conceive, and interpret wildlife. STRI guides attempt to teach about the broader ecology of Barro Colorado, but most visitors who participated in my research travelled to the island at least partly in the hopes of seeing a handful of charismatic mammals such as Barro Colorado’s Howler Monkeys (Alouatta palliata) or Sloths (Bradypus variegatus and Choleopus hoffmanni).
I should perhaps clarify that when I speak of ‘charismatic mammals’, I do not mean to suggest that the mammals are innately attractive to visitors. Rather, they are charismatic in the sociological sense of the term, i.e., they have a following amongst many of the tourists who are often prepared to travel thousands of kilometres for a chance to observe them. Contrary to what some biologists have suggested, this following has little if anything to do with a natural inclination; instead, it is the outcome of social and cultural dispositions that are not only learned, but are themselves the result of an on-going mediation by specific ensembles of social institutions. Depending on the visitor’s background, the institutions in question might include those dedicated to scientific research; to formal and informal environmental education; to the conservation of endangered species and habitats; and to leisure via tourism, and via the media of mass communication.
In a forthcoming book about ecotourism on Barro Colorado, I explain and contextualise the role of some such institutions. During the presentation at the Tupper Centre, the focus was on visitors’ backgrounds and expectations, visitors’ feedback on the organisation of the tours, and possible media-related motivations for the feedback.
STRI’s Visitors Programme obtained high marks from a majority of visitors—for example, over 90% of the 127 visitors who answered a detailed questionnaire gave the tour a rating of 4 or 5 (‘good’ or ‘excellent’ on a scale of 1-5). The same proportion gave the knowledge of their guides an equally high rating. Many of the visitors had travelled in the previous five years to sites such as the US national parks, and famous wildlife reserves across much of the rest of the world. In so far as the findings can be generalised, these and other ratings suggest that the island, and STRI’s Visitors Programme are more than able to hold their own with highly experienced travellers.
Despite these results, nearly half of the visitors expressed disappointment over not having seen ‘more wildlife’. Conversely, less than 10% valued the visit for the opportunity to experience Barro Colorado’s flora, though a similar proportion did value the opportunity to experience what was variously described as a rainforest, a jungle, and more accurately, a tropical forest. Amongst those who felt that the tour had completely fulfilled their expectations, the reason most often given for the fulfillment was the sighting of wildlife.
This is a pattern of response with which the managers and guides of STRI’s Visitors Programme, and many other programmes in tropical forests throughout the world, are quite familiar. While tropical forests do tend to be treated as ‘hot spots’ of biodiversity, the kind of diversity that many, if not most visitors seem to expect is the kind implied by wildlife TV documentaries, glossy wildlife magazines, and increasingly, the internet-based media that accompany such media. I describe the media devoted to the representation of wildlife as the ‘nature media’, and this category includes the media of organisations such as the BBC, the National Geographic Society, and Discovery Communications. As I have explained in other posts, many of the representations produced by such media portray a natural world that is ‘teeming with life’. But especially the TV documentaries tend to offer a rather restricted ‘menu’ of megafauna that are apparently easy to observe, constantly on the move, and visible to the naked eye in dramatic close-ups.
By my own estimates, just one of the organisations in question, Discovery Communications, may be able to reach upwards of three quarters of a billion people across the world. For its part, the National Geographic magazine publishes 34 language editions across the world. Of course, such figures must not be conflated with an equivalent capacity to influence audiences’ perceptions, let alone to neatly determine all audiences’ expectations vis-à-vis tropical forests. In this context as in others, responses to media representations are shaped by a complex concatenation of factors which include individuals’ and social groups’ prior experiences of the represented phenomena, level and subject of education, gender, social class, and cultural background.
To be sure, aspects of any disillusion with the wildlife in neotropical forests are at least as old as the so-called ‘discovery’ of the New World. Antonello Gerbi has noted, for example, that on the very first day that Christopher Columbus made landfall in October 1492, he lamented that he’d found ‘no beast of any sort…save parrots’ (Columbus in Gerbi 1985:15). This impression eventually settled into a formula which might well chime with the impressions of many of Barro Colorado’s contemporary visitors: meagre fauna, exuberant flora (Gerbi 1985:15). Of course, the fauna on Barro Colorado isn’t actually ‘meagre’; as noted by the STRI Visitors Programme introductory slideshow, Barro Colorado has well over one hundred species of mammals (if one includes the chiropteran species), 71 reptile species, 35 amphibian species, and countless species of invertebrates. Alas, this faunal diversity is kept hidden from the tourist gaze by the exuberant flora (which itself includes more than 1300 vascular species), and many species’ cryptic forms and behaviour.
If it is true that the impression of an absent wildlife has a long history, it is nonetheless also true that at least some contemporary visitors’ interpretations do reflect, directly and indirectly, the rise in the modern media of mass communication. The most direct, and striking example that I encountered during my field work involved a visitor who looked upon one of the Gatun Lake’s crocodiles (the itself elusive Crocodylus acutus), and commented that it was remarkable to see the wildebeest being devoured after jumping into the [Mara] river. The visitor had not been to Africa; instead, he was unselfconsciously transposing, or as I put it, transmediating TV documentaries that have shown Crocodylus niloticus in East Africa to the apparently more peaceful setting of Barro Colorado’s Basilisk Bay.
As I employ the term, transmediation involves the mostly tacit transposition of techniques of observation, or of aspects of such techniques, from one context to another (Lindahl Elliot 2006). This general process is arguably an ineluctable aspect of any form or instance of observation. It is, however, generally difficult to study because it tends to be relatively private and unselfconscious. It is also a process that, in modern cultures, appears to be using media representations as an increasingly important ‘source’. I first began to research transmediation in the context of an investigation about contemporary zoos (see for example Lindahl Elliot 2005), which revealed that many tourists routinely make use of nature media to identify, and more generally to interpret wildlife on display in both ‘naturalistic’ and older forms of enclosure.
The research on Barro Colorado confirmed that this was also true on the island, but it did not point to a neat causal link between the extent of nature media use, and any negative evaluations of the visibility of wildlife (or indeed, of the overall tour of the island). Instead, the research suggests that there is a semiotic (or as I spell the term, ‘semeiotic’) association: at least some visitors did tend to interpret some of the wildlife encounters (or their absence) with reference to virtual encounters of the kind made possible by the nature media. This type of association cannot simply be explained by way of counting exercises of the kind that are employed by statistical analyses (for more on this problem, see for example, my Questions of Theory and Methodology: The Rule of Phenomenalism).
It may seem that visitor programmes such as STRI’s can do little to mediate such associations, but my research suggests otherwise. On the one hand, on Barro Colorado I discovered that STRI’s introductory presentations (Powerpoint slideshows) might inadvertently be priming the associations by focussing on the wildlife of the island, and by showing close-up photographs of some of the most charismatic species. Of course, this kind of presentation forms part of a widespread and in some respects useful genre. During my seminar at the Tupper Centre, I nevertheless suggested that the genre itself constitutes a form of transmediation—and one that involves a sharp discontinuity between its own characteristic representations, and the forms of observation that visitors are likely to experience in situ. I further explained how and why the presentations might thereby help to produce disappointment amongst some visitors; such presentations, I showed, were more likely to generate unrealistic expectations amongst some visitors about what might be observed on the trail, and especially, about how it might be observed.
On the other hand, the research showed that, even though many of the visitors were disappointed with the wildlife seen (or not seen) on the trail, many came away with a sense of surprise, and interest in the many other dimensions of Barro Colorado. For example, while a comparatively small proportion of visitors were interested in the flora, at least part of that proportion most likely reflected guides’ efforts to point out a variety of types of vascular plants, their structure, and in some cases, their human uses. Many of the visitors also expressed surprise and interest in the extraordinary variety of research projects being conducted on Barro Colorado. I am convinced that the current programme could build on its existing good practice to develop these aspects even further, and to make them even more interesting to a variety of visitors.
To this end, we discussed some of the practical strategies that might be employed to address the impression of ‘meager fauna, exuberant flora’. Amongst other aspects, we considered ways in which new Powerpoint presentations could be developed, and how field guides might be employed on the trails themselves. A report on the subject describes these recommendations in some detail, and will be available via the cmcee.org website once a peer review group and STRI’s staff have had a chance to peruse it. As I began to suggest earlier, this year I will also be publishing a book that examines some of the deeper social, historical and semeiotic dimensions of the pedagogy of wildlife observation as it has taken place on Barro Colorado Island.
* * *
In this post, I have taken for granted that tourists can, and should travel to see Barro Colorado Island. However, it is now abundantly clear that the sharpening environmental crises caused by the social institutions behind climate change raise urgent questions about the wisdom of encouraging visitors to travel thousands of kilometres to observe wildlife. From this perspective, a practice that requires long distance air travel, and more generally, the kind of consumption that is generally associated with so-called ‘soft’ ecotourism, is clearly problematic. This being true, STRI does well to be encouraging a growing proportion of local Panamanian groups to visit Barro Colorado. STRI is fortunate in this sense that, even though it does charge tourists a fee to visit the island, its overall operation is in no way dependent on that fee. This is not true of many other biological reserves and research stations, which use ecotourism to raise revenues for their parks. In the coming year, I hope to offer a series of seminars that will address this issue, and the problematic I have analysed in this post. Any readers interested in the seminars—or any visitors who wish to share ideas, views or experiences in related visits— are encouraged to contact cmcee.org by writing to info /at/ cmcee.org (please replace the /at/ with an @).
1) The project received support from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. I am grateful for the interest shown in the project by Ira Rubinoff, director emeritus of STRI; Oris Acevedo, Scientific Coordinator on BCI; Belkys Jiménez, Scientific Coordinator’s Assistant; and last but not least, Beth King, STRI Science Interpreter.
2) Academic publications for the project are in the pipeline. A first article on aspects of the history of ecotourism on Barro Colorado has recently appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; see A Memory of Nature: Ecotourism on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island.
References
Christen, C. (2002) ‘At home in the field: Smithsonian tropical science field stations in the U.S. Panama Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama’ in The Americas, 58:4, pp. 537-575.
Gerbi, A. (1985) Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Translated by J. Moyle. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Lindahl Elliot, N. (2005) The New Zoos: Science, Media and Culture. A report for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK.
Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
Copyright © 2011 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved.
The Centre for Media, Culture and Environmental Education (cmcee.org) will be publishing more articles on the question of climate change. It seems that now more than ever, it is necessary to engage in an open-ended investigation and debate about the role that the media may play in the environmental crises generated by climate change. Any such debate presupposes a contextualization of the kinds of challenges that are likely to be faced by societies around the world as a direct or indirect result of climate change. It also requires reflexivity, and self-reflexivity on the part of all those who wish to play a role in developing existing, or any new forms of environmental education. In this context, it is appropriate to start off with a paper by John Urry, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, and the Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research. In the following essay, Professor Urry provides an overview of key problems that we are likely to face: amongst these, high carbon, rising temperature, peak oil, and rapidly growing urban populations. The essay also offers food for thought with respect to what Urry describes as the ‘epochalism’ that now informs much of the sociological literature on climate change. Readers new to the sociological literature will find that the essay’s endnotes suggest a wealth of references to follow up. Readers interested in learning more about Professor Urry’s work may wish to visit this page at Lancaster University’s website.
Nils Lindahl Elliot, Centre for Media, Culture and Environmental Education
Please note: this post offers the introduction to the essay. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking here.
CLIMATE CHANGE, PEAK OIL AND COMMUNITIES
by John Urry
Fred Pearce: ‘The big discovery is that planet Earth does not generally engage in gradual change. It is far cruder and nastier’
Marx and Engels wrote that modern bourgeois society: ‘is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’ (1).
Nicholas Stern: ‘Climate change…is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure’ (2).
Anthony Giddens: ‘Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth’(3).
INTRODUCING EPOCHALISM
In an interesting recent paper Mike Savage examines and critiques ‘epochalism’ in contemporary British sociology (4). Such epochalist thinking presupposes a distinct narrative of the past which is to be contrasted with the new, distinct and epochal present. He maintains that the emphasis upon ‘newness’ is particularly influential amongst British sociologists (Albrow, Featherstone, Giddens, Urry) or those working within Britain (Bauman, Lash, Sennett). Such epochalism can be seen from the 1980s onwards in the overlapping notions of Post-Fordism, disorganized capitalism, individualization, reflexive modernity, globalization and the network society.
I examine how certain commentators, scientists and the occasional social scientist are advocating analyses of various futures including future catastrophes. In particular, many catastrophist analyses draw out how various systems set in place during the twentieth century contain the seeds of their own destruction. These analyses are anti-evolutionary and dystopic. Some authors consider that the twentieth century (at least in the rich North) was a short period in human history; and that there are no guarantees that the increasing prosperity, wealth, movement, knowledge and connectivity of that period (in the rich North) will continue.
Various analysts have been examining how that twentieth century legacy could come to a shuddering halt with the societies of the rich North ‘reversing’ or ‘collapsing’. The general features of this were explored in Joseph Tainter’s classic The Collapse of Complex Societies from the late 1980s(5). This examined how societies become more complex often as a response to short term problems, how that complexity demands ever greater high quality energy, how that increased energy produces diminishing returns, and how there is growing concatenation of problems which can reinforce each other unexpectedly and unpredictably across domains.
Strikingly in the first few years of this century such catastrophist thinking has mushroomed, there is a veritable change of zeitgeist. This new catastrophism is developed inter alia in Our Final Century (6), The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Society (7), The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations, and Ecological Decline (8), Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive(9), The Revenge of Gaia (10), When the Rivers Run Dry (11), The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization(12), The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (13), The Next Catastrophe (14), Field Notes from a Catastrophe (15), With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (16), Winds of Change. Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations (17) Meltdown (18) and World at Risk (19). Related doomsday scenarios are also becoming common amongst novelists (20) and filmmakers (21).
Jared Diamond maintains how environmental problems have in the past brought about the ‘collapse’ of societies(22). Populations grew and stretched natural resources, particularly energy resources, to breaking point, especially when such societies were at the very height of their powers. He suggests that in the twenty first century human-caused climate change, the build-up of toxic chemicals in the environment and energy shortages will produce abrupt, potentially catastrophic decline. Such a catastrophe would consist of increases of global temperatures that make much plant, animal and human life impossible, the running out of oil and gas, the increased lack of resilience of many societies, a global failure of economy and finance, population collapse, increasing resource wars, and huge food shortages. In short these could constitute a perfect storm analogous to the ‘societal collapse’ that happened to the Roman Empire or the Mayan civilization. In these cases internal contradictions working slowly and imperceptibly over time brought down apparently dominant systems based upon the availability and deployment of extensive energy(23).
And more generally there is currently developing increasing interest in the ‘fall’ of civilizations in part under the influence of ‘complex systems’ thinking in which small changes can tip large systems over the edge, over a threshold so that there are ‘runaway’ changes away from systems in equilibrium. As Tainter wrote: ‘however much we like to think of ourselves as something special in world history, in fact industrial societies are subject to the same principles that caused earlier societies to collapse’(24). Elsewhere other commentators are examining the current period of human history as being an anthropocene. This developed from around 1800 and involves soaring carbon dioxide levels, a quantum step upward in erosion, widespread species extinction, ecosystem disturbance, and ocean acidification. The Earth moved in a fundamentally new direction, the anthropocene, and this may also be a finite period in human history that will in due course be replaced by another geomorphological period.
So in the rest of this paper I examine some lineaments of new epochalist thinking. During the long twentieth century resource-dependence came to be forgotten. It seemed that ‘societies’ had been able to spin off and break free from their resources. Social science colluded with the modern world in promoting the notion that there is an endless supply of ‘free lunches’ and there are no finite limits and perverse consequences that flow from using and exploiting the world’s resources (rather analogous to how finance behaved over the last two decades; see below). In the analysis of the post-modern, disorganized capitalist epoch, what Bauman writes of as ‘liquid’ everything, seemed to regard the social as ‘infinite’, without limits and without costs or consequences, with no resources that are finite and whose effects mean that they are well able to ‘bite back(25), especially because of the potential for the concatenation of these multiple processes that is central to examining their catastrophic potential, as Homer-Dixon argues.
To download the rest of the essay as a PDF document, please click here
(1) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Foreign Languages, [1848] 1888), p. 58.
(2) Nicholas Stern, Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (London: House of Commons, 2006), p. 1. Significantly this Review ignores the other major market failure, namely the using up and probable extinction of oil.
(3) Backcover, Anthony Giddens, The Politics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
(4) Mike Savage, ‘Against epochalism: an analysis of conceptions of change in British sociology’, Cultural Sociology, 3: 217-38.
(5) Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
(6) Martin Rees, Our Final Century (London: Arrow Books, 2003; he is President of the Royal Society).
(7) Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Society (New York: Clearview Books, 2005).
(8) Roy Woodbridge, The Next World War. Tribes, Cities, Nations, and Ecological Decline (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005).
(9) Jared Diamond, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
(10) James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
(11) Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry (London: Transworld, 2006).
(12) Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (London: Souvenir, 2006).
(13) James Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
(14) Charles Perrow, The Next Catastrophe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
(15) Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. A Frontline Report on Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
(16) Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence. Why Scientists fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
(17) Eugene Linden, Winds of Change. Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
(18) Stephen Haseler, Meltdown (London: Forumpress, 2008).
(19) Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
(20) Recent examples include Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (London: Faber and Faber, 2007); Marcel Theroux, Far North (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).
(21) See the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.
(22) Jared Diamond, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
(23) See Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (London: Souvenir, 2006), chapter 2.
(24) Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 216. See Thomas Homer-Dixon, ‘Prepare for tomorrow’s breakdown’, Toronto Globe and Mail, May 14th, 2006.
(25) See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
Copyright © 2010 John Urry All Rights Reserved
Note: the following is the third in a series of papers titled Questions in Theory, Methodology, and Practice
Imagine the following rather absurd situation: two friends are bickering over an apple pie that they have just baked. One of the friends, who owns the tree from which the apples were picked, suggests that the superior quality of the pie is all down to the apples. Were it not for the apples, the pie would not have the wonderful taste that it has. His friend, who happens to be a baker, makes the opposite point: the apples, he says, are nothing on their own. Were it not for the recipe, the dough and the careful baking process, you’d have nothing but tart apples.
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
As the bickering progresses, each friend attempts to win the argument by trying to undermine the other’s case. The apple tree owner suggests that, when you think carefully about it, it really must be the natural ingredients that matter most; after all, the pastry too, is made with flour, and so were it not for the wheat, there would be no dough. The baker retorts that were it not for the intervention of people, the wheat field would not exist, and, to be sure, the apple tree probably would not have been planted in the friend’s garden.
* * *
The example is absurd, but so is the debate for which it offers an analogy: the one that has been rumbling on between the advocates of biologism, and the advocates of culturalism. I say ‘advocates’, but in fact, the scholars in question are often not conscious proponents of either ‘ism’, and, to be sure, probably none would like to have their views characterised as that (as an ‘ism’). However, any such protestations do not contradict the fact that, over the last centuries, there has been an ongoing dispute over the extent to which we humans, and all manner of things associated with our humanity, are more a matter of nature, or more a matter of culture. To use Kate Soper’s (1995) terms, those who are ‘nature-endorsing’ tend to reproduce a discourse of biologism, the doctrine that everything in human affairs is a matter of nature. Those who, by contrast, are ‘nature-sceptics’ tend to reproduce a discourse of culturalism, what Terry Eagleton defines as the doctrine that everything in human affairs is a matter of culture (Eagleton 2000:91). I use very general terms, but of course, over the centuries there have been significant variations on these themes; however distantly related, a Thomas Hobbes is not an E.O. Wilson.
I will return to Wilson in a moment. First I should say that it is tempting to dismiss this dispute as being as silly as the one between the apple tree owner and the baker. Of course we humans—and most things we make—are a matter of both apples and pie-making, nature and culture. Of course the rest of the ingredients also are made up of natural, or seemingly natural elements which themselves both reveal and require various forms of human intervention.
Alas, the debate is made rather more complicated by an assymetry of power, and by some very dubious circuits of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism. In the real world, the apple tree owners (or their scientific equivalents) have far more power than the bakers of critical social science. In so far as it can be said that modern cultures are dominated by a technocratic consciousness, and in so far as many if not most of their leading institutions have, since the Enlightenment, played at least lip service to the kind of critical rationality associated with positive science, then any claims that the pie-making is important too have tended to be dismissed with arguments of the kind, ‘If the universe is a matter of the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand them, then how can any one claim that the pie-making, let alone the recipe itself, are what really matters?’
I paraphrase the comments made by E.O. Wilson, who in an interview with fellow sociobiologist Steven Pinker, said that ‘everything that’s in the body, including the brain and the action of the mind, is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand it[sic]’, and that ‘there is a unity of the sciences’—a ‘consilience’ —‘through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences.’ In the same interview, Wilson suggested that he was intent on conducting a re-examination of ‘the basic theory and contents of socio-biology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans’(1). The upshot of this and other interventions by sociobiologists is that, in the end as in the beginning, we humans are very little different from ‘nonhumans’.
On some level this must be true. If we adopt a sufficiently celestial frame, then we humans are about as different from chimps, crocodiles, and any Venusians awaiting ‘discovery’ as are two specimens of Formica rufibarbis. This humbling kind of analysis may be a welcome one in a world that is driven by capitalist varieties of anthropocentrism. But note that, in making the point, the sociobiologists tend to continue to speak of ‘nonhumans’. For example, in his beautifully written The Diversity of Life, Wilson makes statements such as ‘For that is the way of the nonhuman world.’
Wilson might argue that there is no contradiction. ‘Human’ and ‘Nonhuman’ are simply two subcategories of that broader category ‘The Universe’ which obeys the laws of physics and chemistry ‘as we understand them’. Or he might suggest that the reference to the nonhuman is no more than a figure of speech, a trope of the kind that we all must use when we generalise.
If it is the latter argument, then a question has to be asked as to how it is that the dichotomy remains so fiercely embedded in the language and culture.
If it is the former argument (that ‘Human’ and ‘Nonhuman’ are no more than subcategories of the Universe), then sociobiologists still need to explain how the two subcategories are to be distinguished, and why one species serves as the a priori, if implicit basis for the second (the ‘nonhuman’).
This is, to be sure, by no means just a matter of ‘language’ in the commonsense notion of ‘semantics’. Even as the advocates of biologism pooh-pooh the ‘humanism’ of those whom they have often treated as cultural ‘relativists’, they engage in an investigative modus operandi that is almost literally cleft in twain by the very humanism that they critique when it suits. The kind of logical positivist endeavour that suffuses Wilson’s thinking and research cannot be maintained without positing a sharp distinction between the researching subject (a human) and the researched object (in the case of myrmecology, a ‘nonhuman’ ant). The distinction is a radically hierarchical one in so far as it preserves for humans the right to ‘do what it takes’ to find out what makes nature tick. This backdoor humanism—call it anthropocentrism if you will—is by no means peculiar to myrmecology; it is at the very heart of modern science more generally.
Animal rights activists might object to this hierarchy in the context of experimentation with (nonhuman) animals in science labs. Those familiar with the cultural history of science would be far more worried about the implications for humans. Sociobiologists and their historical forebears have anthropomorphicised nature in ways that have often served as the basis for Social Darwinist cosmomorphisms. An early example may be found in the words of one Francis Bacon, who was chancellor to the murderous James I, and who suggested to the King that nature’s ‘secrets’ might be discovered by using the same methods that James I used to persecute so-called witches:
For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. Neither am I of the opinion in this history of marvels that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like (…) should be altogether excluded
but
A useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of offences of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his hole object—as your majesty has shown in your own example (Bacon in Merchant 1980:168, italics added by Merchant)
* * *
So what about the challenge by the nature-sceptics, the ‘bakers’ as it were, of the nature vs. culture debate?
History is littered with debates in which one side has lost thanks in part to having been forced to accept at least some of the terms of the dominant side’s discourse. This is arguably what has happened to many nature-sceptics. One of my favourite examples is drawn from a field which has made very significant contributions to our understanding of the relation between space and culture: cultural geography. In the introduction to a classic collection of essays on the cultural geography of landscape, Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove say that ‘A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings… A landscape park is more palpable but no more real, no less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem’ (Daniels & Cosgrove 1988: 1). In so doing, Daniels and Cosgrove doubtless reflect an assumption that has been central to the field’s enquiries, and which is summed up by Nancy Leys Stepan, who in a study on tropical landscapes suggests that ‘nature is always culture before it is nature. Or, as Simon Schama says in Landscape and Memory, his long reflection on the way we invest natural landscapes with memory, longing, nostalgia and history, ‘Even landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product’ (Stepan 2001:15).
In such discourse, it is nature that gets reduced to culture, and in so doing, the researchers fall for the obverse of biologism: culturalism. Echoing Soper, Terry Eagleton notes that, to make its point, culturalism is ‘forced to posit the existence of the very realities it denies. For this ‘metaphysical anti-naturalism, nature, sex and the body are wholly the products of convenion – in which case it is hard to know how one is supposed to judge, for example, that one sexual regime is more emancipated than another’(Eagleton 2000:92).
Make no mistake; Eagleton himself would be the first to critique biologism. But he quite rightly takes aim at the way in which culturalist social theorists may fall for the same dualism that they profess to critique: if the agents of biologism say it’s all down to the apples, the agents of culturalism say it’s all down to the baking. In so doing they make it rather easy for the biologists to point out the seemingly obvious—that surely the baking itself requires the ingredients of a nature which is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry ‘as we understand them’.
In another post I will return to this last little phrase, which I think lets the positivist cat out of its bag. Here it is more important to note that what is lost in the process is the necessary, indeed urgent critique of the dualism itself, of what I described in the second post in this series as a terrible ‘two’, one which is as pervasive as it is misleading. For if it is true that those apples are necessary, it is also true that the relation between the apples and the baking, like each of these aspects in and of themselves, are and must be a matter of mediation in the sense explained by Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno: as Williams puts it, mediation ‘is a direct and necessary activity between different kinds of activity and consciousness. It has it own, always specific forms. The distinction is evident in a comment by Adorno: “mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought” (Williams 1976:206).
The reader may wonder what all of this has to do with media, culture, and environmental education. Three implications (but also applications) come to mind. The first is that when it comes to representing nature, what I describe as the nature media—read the BBCs, the National Geographics, and a smallish group of other corporations that have units devoted to the representation of science and nature—have been, and remain on the vanguard of biologism. So long as they continue to be so, then they too, will continue to reproduce Social Darwinist accounts of humans.
Equally if not more importantly, they will make it difficult to understand the deep, and manifold links between climate change, and the seemingly undisturbed worlds of the tropical rainforests, the African savannahs and other staples in the natural history menu. To return one more time to the opening analogy, it is difficult to explore the relationship between the apples and the baking process (in this case in that oven generated by greenhouse gas emissions) if TV programmes are divided up into those that represent the apples, and those that represent the baking process. To be sure, if those representations which try to bring the two things together still treat the apples and the baking process as being totally different (‘Look at how the baking process is destroying these natural apples!’), then we will have progressed little in the quest for truly critical forms of mediation.
The second application/implication can be found in environmental education more generally. Much of what passes for environmental education in biological reserves, in zoos, and in wildlife centres is also premised on one or another form of biologism. A case in point, the fact that we may readily accept the notion that zoos and other ‘wildlife centres’ do no more than present ‘wildlife’. The same tendency may be found in the assumption that a certain rural space cordoned off to form a biological reserves is itself no more (and no less) than ‘nature itself’. If any form of environmental education sets out from this premise, it has begun to fail its educands almost before it’s begun.
A last application or implication is particularly pertinent to research in the critical social sciences. It’s almost a cliché, but so long as the proverbial ‘gap’ between the natural and the social sciences is allowed to stand, and to stand according to the discursive divides that drive it, then it is difficult to imagine how forms of research and education can emerge that develop the kinds of mediation that are now so urgently required. In saying this, I am as concerned about Wilson’s efforts to promote ‘consilience’ (in effect, the doctrine that all the sciences should see the world as sociobiologists do) as I am by some cultural geographers’ efforts to persuade us that a specimen of Pheidole Harrisonfordi is culture before it is nature.
References
1) in http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wilson03/wilson_print.html, accessed 20 November 2010.
Cosgrove, D. & Daniels, S. (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eagleton, T. (2000) ‘Culture and Nature’ in The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Press.
Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature. New York: Harper.
Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell Press.
Stepan, N. (2001) Picturing Tropical Nature, London: Reaktion Books.
Williams, R. (1976) Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press.
For more on this subject, see this blog’s Scholars Cited series, namely the quotations by Kate Soper and Terry Eagleton.
Copyright © 2010 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved. The posts in this blog may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. The posts must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards, other blogs etc.) without the author’s explicit permission.
If in the first post in this series I used winks, this time I will use triads.
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
It is late on Saturday night, and two men have drunk themselves silly. They slug it out in front of a pub. Alas, as the dull thuds of punches, kicks, and head-butts fill the street, a third man runs out of the pub, says something to the two drunks, and the fighting stops.
What does this story have to with ‘questions in theory and methodology’?
Consider the following question: would an analysis of the fight that focused exclusively on the two drunks do justice to what happened?
Or indeed, would a study that tried to analyse the event by reducing it to two pairs of ‘twos’ (each drunk and the third man, considered separately) be any better?
Even if the fight began between two people, its process and outcome were the result of the intervention of a third. Moreover, the intervention by the third was qualitatively different from the actions of the first two. The first two were slugging it out, while the third somehow managed to intervene—whether to ‘talk reason’, to cajole, or even to threaten (‘If you don’t stop I’ll have you both fired’). Put abstractly, while each of the drunks was in an apparently simple relation of opposition to the other, the third man tried to, and eventually succeeded in mediating between the two.
To be sure, if we think about the fight closely enough, we’d probably discover that the fight was about something else—there was, to use the common parlance, a reason, or a motivation for the fight. In other words, even if a third person had not run out, another form of ‘thirdness’ would have intervened, or rather, was already intervening.
Again, what does this have to do with research in the social sciences?
One way of describing positivist research—or more accurately, research driven by the kind of hypothetico-deductive methodology that often goes with positivism—frequently involves an effort to reduce the social world to a matter of ‘twos’: ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, an ‘independent’ and a ‘dependent’ variable, a subject and an object, etc..
If we were to try to use this kind of model to explain the fight, we probably could shed some light on it. We might, for example, investigate what caused one man to fight the other. If we were to discover several possible causes, we might employ a technique such as factor analysis to try to reduce the variables to one single ‘underlying’ variable, and so forth.
But in doing so, we still wouldn’t be accounting for the mediator, or rather, for the mediation. True, beyond explaining what caused the two men to fight, we might conduct additional analyses that attempted to explain what caused the mediator to intervene, or indeed what in the intervention of the mediator caused the men to stop fighting. Note, though, the paradox: the only way in which we could piece together such analyses to produce an overall explanation would be to interpret the relation among the different sets of twos, the different ‘parts’. Put simply, in the absence of an analysis of mediation, we ourselves would have to produce the mediation—in this case, the mediation required to explain the inter-relation between the different sets of ‘twos’.
Note also that we would be projecting a very particular model on the fight. It was a fight between two people. But to change the old saying, it usually takes more than two to tango, but also, to not tango. Fights—and all sorts of other social events—tend to be at once ‘messy’ and ‘sublime’. Even as blood drips on the pavement and facial features are destroyed, tears may roll down one set of cheeks even as a smile spreads across another. To reduce this kind of complexity to the kind of mechanistic model used to describe the attraction between the parts of atoms is bound to reduce complexity—and this in a manner that fails to do justice to whatever events are being described. Perhaps one day natural scientists will arrive at the same conclusion about the consequences of this kind of model for explanations of the natural world.
The above is a long way of echoing a point made some years ago by Henri Lefebvre, when he underlined the importance of a dialectical relationship between what he described as the ‘triad’ of the perceived, conceived, and lived space. ‘A triad’, said Lefebvre,
‘that is, three elements and not two. Relations with two elements boil down to oppositions, contrasts or antagonisms. They are defined by significant effects: echoes, repercussions, mirror effects. Philosophy has found it very difficult to get beyond such dualisms as subject and object, Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, and the Ego and non-Ego of the Kantians, post-Kantians and neo-Kantians.’ ‘Such a system [that defines intelligibility in terms of opposites and systems of opposites] can have neither materiality nor loose ends: it is a ‘perfect’ system whose rationality is supposed, when subjected to mental scrutiny, to be self-evident. This paradigm apparently has the magic power to turn obscurity into transparency and to move the ‘object’ out of the shadows merely by articulating it’(Lefebvre 1991: 39-40).
Long before even Lefebvre was writing, Charles Sanders Peirce had a similar point to make. As he put it at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘To me, who have for forty years considered the matter from every point of view that I could discover, the inadequacy of Secondness [relations of two] to cover all that is in our minds is so evident that I scarce know how to begin to persuade any person of it who is not already convinced of it. Yet I see a great many thinkers who are trying to construct a system without putting any thirdness [relations of three] into it. (CP 8.331-332)
References
Henri Lefebvre (1991) The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
Charles S. Peirce (1931-58) Collected Papers, Vols. 1-8. Eds. C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Copyright © 2010 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
The posts in this blog may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. The posts must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards, other blogs etc.) without the author’s explicit permission.
This week we received news that ‘Paul has died’. Paul was the octopus (presumably Octopus vulgaris) at Oberhausen’s Sea Life Centre that was celebrated for predicting the outcome of the football matches played by Germany during the 2010 World Cup. Despite the risk of spoiling the general bonhomie that the six-armed and two-legged creature seems to have given rise to, I’d like to use this post to briefly consider aspects of the story that have been overlooked by the corporate media.
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
The first that comes to mind is the absurdity of claiming, as the Oberhausen aquarium is reported to have, that Paul ‘died peacefully of natural causes’. Of course, we have to take the Sea Life Centre’s word for this. But even if it is true that the octopus did die ‘peacefully’ (or the octopus equivalent thereof), and of causes little different from those that kill octopuses in the oceans, the implication is that there was nothing unnatural about Paul’s circumstances. And that is, of course, a rather different kettle of fish (or perhaps I should say, cephalopods).
The second issue is the apparently disposable nature of specimens in aquariums. I mentioned this phenomenon in an earlier post about Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium. When that aquarium managed to kill some of the sharks in its displays, the cry reportedly went up in Plymouth for the specimens’ immediate replacement. Some years later, the director of a zoo noted wryly to me that, if his zoo had allowed three or four elephants to die, the public outcry would have been of an altogether different nature. Alas, now that ‘Paul has died’, Der Spiegel’s international edition is reporting that, although the staff are ‘devastated’, ‘they have a comforting message for a world in mourning — Paul II is waiting in the wings.’ (1)
From an anthropological point of view, this ‘disposability’ brings to the foreground the arbitrary character of popular (and to be sure, not just ‘popular’) boundaries in the classification of animals. Why should it be fine for fish (or indeed marine invertebrates) to die in aquariums, but not for elephants or tigers to do so in zoos? There appears to be a continuity between this context, and that of actual consumption: many of us appear to believe that it’s wrong to kill and eat mammals (esp. the ungulated variety), but swell (or at least, ‘not so bad’) to catch and eat fish. Note the difference in terminology: in common parlance we don’t ‘catch’ wild boar, and ‘kill’ fish.
The disposability of any kind of a creature, especially for the purposes of its display in an aquarium or a zoo, is problematic. But in the case of a cephalopod, there may be additional reasons for concern—at least if we adhere to a relatively explicitly anthropocentric hierarchy of livelihood. In some scientific research communities, cephalopods are given special protection (when compared to other invertebrates) thanks to the fact that the structure of their brains is thought to have centres that enable them to engage in more sophisticated forms of learning, decision-making, memory and sensory analysis. In a word, some think that cephalopods are close enough to us humans (at least in brain structure) to require different treatment from that given to the rest of the invertebrates.
The third issue is the similarity between Paul’s story, and that of Knut the Bear. In both cases, the animals became the objects of particularly intense circuits of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism.
By way of a conceptual aside, the circuit in question involves the process by means of which nature, or an aspect of what passes for nature, is incorporated into a particular group’s cultural imagination, and habitual practices. When someone represents or observes nature, or something that passes for nature, s/he cannot but project human, and thus cultural forms onto it (2). From this perspective, anthropomorphism goes far beyond the simple attribution of human ‘values’ (e.g. Paul died a ‘peaceful’ death). As I understand the term, any humanizing projection onto ‘nature’, be it a matter of ‘values’ or of representation more generally, constitutes a form of anthropomorphism. This applies as much to those instances where someone says that a bear is ‘cute’ (as in the case of Knut), as it does to a scientist saying (or writing) ‘No. 234 is a specimen of Octopus vulgaris’. Even if we can agree that there is a difference in the two sets of statements, both must involve anthropomorphism if only because a cultural form—language, which includes numbers—is being used to represent a more-than-human entity. By this account, any form of representation of nature, or an aspect of what passes for nature, must involve an anthropomorphic projection. The question is not thus whether such a representation is anthropomorphic or not, but rather how it is anthropomorphic.
Back to the circuit: once nature, or one of its real or imputed aspects is anthropomorphicized, it may become the selfsame nature with which an individual or social group identifies, ‘thinks’, and acts. When this happens, it (the ‘nature’) may help individual or group to construct a sense of self, and indeed, of ‘others’. This process, this identification with nature, is what I describe with Edgar Morin (3) as cosmomorphism. The child that says that her daddy is a gorilla, or indeed that acts like a monkey, engages in cosmomorphism. But so does the nation that incorporates one or another animal (an eagle, a bear, a lion…) in an emblem to symbolize its national values.
Put simply (too simply, but perhaps usefully), if anthropomophism involves ‘humanising’ the more-than-human nature, cosmomorphism involves ‘animalising’ the human. The cultural production and reproduction of the two dynamics—anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism—comes to institute a circuit in so far as human forms are projected onto a nature which, thus ‘humanized’, paradoxically serves to identify, express, or ‘confirm’, apparently with no human intervention or mediation, the anthropomorphic subject’s beliefs, culture, or politics.(4)
In Paul’s case, we saw a somewhat unusual case of this kind of process. Paul was anthropomorphicized at once as a kind of betting punter, and a man-made ‘machine’ designed to predict the outcome of Germany’s football games during the last World Cup. When, defying the odds, the octopus apparently succeeded in predicting the outcomes (most of which were favourable to Germany), it became ‘Paul’, and in a sense, ‘one of us’—or at least, the unlikeliest of the sports’ fans. In turn, it seems that many fans identified with Paul’s sporting ‘success’. Such was its fame—and the strength of both the humanization and identification or cosmomorphism—that when the octopus died, it was not that an otherwise anonymous specimen of Octopus vulgaris died at the Oberhausen aquarium, but rather that ‘Paul has died’.
Earlier, I suggested that there was a parallel between ‘Paul’ and ‘Knut’. In fact, there are two: one the one hand, both animals got caught up in a global, and mass-mediated circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism. The animals became, in effect, ‘celebrities’. The second, which went hand in hand with the first, is that both animals did so thanks to the careful efforts of institutions bent on using them to make money. The Berlin Zoo went so far as to trademark Knut. And despite a legal wrangle with the Neumünster Zoo (which owned Knut’s ‘dad’ and tried to claim ownership of Knut), it went on to make, shall we say, a financial killing.
The Oberhausen Aquarium appears to have pulled off a similar coup; I understand that the aquarium is part of an international chain (Sea Life Centres) that is owned by the British Merlin Entertainments, a firm that is second only to Disney in the global visitor attraction stakes, but which is itself a part of the gigantic U.S. private equity firm, the Blackstone Group.
In all of this, it might be assumed that I take it for granted that bears, octopuses and other creatures are neatly and unproblematically incorporated into the actual, and discursive enclosures produced by their zookeepers, and by the media. To contradict this impression, I should like to end this post with a quote from Jean Baudrillard:
‘They, the animals, do not speak. In a universe of increasing speech, of the constraint to confess and to speak, only they remain mute, and for this reason they seem to retreat far from us, behind the horizon of truth. But it is what makes us intimate with them. It is not the ecological problem of their survival that is important, but still and always that of their silence. In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.’ [...] ‘Nowhere do they really speak, because they only furnish the responses one asks for. It is their way of sending the Human back to his circular codes, behind which their silence analyzes us’(5).
By way of a coda: note that Baudrillard himself cannot but make animals ‘speak’… we return to the problem of the circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism.
References
1) D. Crossland, ‘Death of an Oracle: Rest in Peace, Paul the Octopus’, in Der Spiegel Online, 26 October 2010, at http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,725399,00.html, accessed 26 October 2010.
2) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2001) Signs of Anthropomorphism: the case of natural history documentaries on television. Social Semiotics, 11( 3) pp. 289 – 305
3) Edgar Morin (2005) The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
4) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge, p. 42
5) Jean Baudrillard (1994) ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ in Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 129-141.
Copyright © 2010 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved.
The posts in this blog may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. The posts must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards, other blogs etc.) without the author’s explicit permission.
