Discourse Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Discourse i s a term used by social scientists and theorists to refer institutionalized habits of thinking, talking, and narrating, which both reflect, reproduce, and impose understandings of the world. The most prominent theorist influencing nature-society studies that incorporate or adopt the idea of discourse is Michel Foucault, whose social theory directs attention at normal ways of speaking about and categorizing the world; the degree to which they are inherited, imposed, and enforced socially; and the limits and bounds they place on seeing nature and society. As Norman Fairclough explains, for Foucault, the objects of discourse are constituted and transformed according to the rules of some particular discursive formation, rather than existing independently and simply being referred to or talked about in a particular discourse.

Discursive practices, in other words, guide what can and cannot be said in particular places and times. In modernity, the “rules” of discourse are increasingly tied to institutions such as governments, schools, hospitals, and prisons. These institutions, by design, are in the business of producing normative proposals for (individual and collective) social conduct. Accordingly, Foucauldian analyses tend to be highly anti-institutional and particularly skeptical of the norms that arise within discourse.

Foucaultian Discourse

Methodologically, Foucaultian discourse analysis tends to focus on the textual aspects of discourse, rather than the institutions themselves. From various texts, the “rules” of discourse can be extracted, and the silences and displacements inferred. Discourse analysis offers the opportunity to “rewrite” the discourse, laying bare that which was previously disallowed or disavowed. Discourse analysis is thus an openly political maneuver, designed to “destabilize” primary or authoritative texts.

As many “discourses of nature” (biodiversity conservation) are associated with large-scale institutions and also tend to proffer normalizing programs, nature-discourses have come under increased scrutiny from poststructuralists. As Noel Castree explains, “‘Deconstructing’ [discourses of nature] entails ‘denaturalizing’ them: that is, showing them to be social products arising in particular contexts and serving specific social or ecological ends that ought to be questioned.”

There is an assertively normative component to discourse analysis as well: discourses of nature “ought” to be deconstructed. This is representative of a radical “nature-skepticism.” The task at hand is not just to call into question the naturalized discourses, but also to effectively denaturalize them, and so make them harder to take for granted, and easier to unseat. As so much environmental discourse relies to a great degree on the efficacy of statements regarding nature or “the natural,” an effectively denaturalized text is stripped of much of its authority.

Bruce Braun and Joel Wainwright hail this approach as “a departure from existing work in the field which assumes nature to be an unproblematic category, in the sense that it is a thing that is self-present to knowledge.” They argue instead that the object of environmental studies and politics, nature is an effect of power. To make sense of this last statement, it is necessary to examine Foucault’s theorization of power.

For Foucault, power is not something which the state or a dominant group has or possesses. Rather, it is diffuse and omnipresent: people (through discourse) are always operating within a “field of power.” This concept of power was at least partially formulated in an attempt to replace the unrealizable utopian goal of revolution (the overthrow of a singular, oppressive, sovereign power) with one of resistance, where individuals and groups regain a positive political presence within (rather than against) oppression through everyday acts of destabilizing authoritative discourses (as texts, rules, ways of acting). Specifically in terms of knowledge, Foucault argues that there can be no knowledge outside of power, so the concept of knowledge is replaced by power/knowledge.

Conceptualizing nature as a discourse and an “effect of power,” then, is to make a claim that the what we take for granted as “nature” is historically produced, enforced and made to appear normal through power relations. In such a formulation, some ecological advocates, among others, understand nature as unproblematic and unconstructed, even while statements about nature are always inherently political. Such advocates, however wellmeaning, fail to recognize the political character and effects of their discourses, assuming them instead to be “natural” or given.

Braun’s writing on the temperate rainforests of British Columbia is representative of this sort of discourse analysis at work in nature-society studies. In his analysis, he reveals that struggles between the forestry industry and environmentalists, though they appear dramatically opposed to one another, actually adopt common frameworks by inheriting discourses that hold the forests of the region to be natural (and therefore nonhuman). All the while, their tacit discursive consensus render indigenous people, and their claims to the forests of the region, essentially invisible, disallowing their voice in the debates over the use and protection of the forests. This marks an important intervention into the debates over these forests. More generally, the poststructuralist intervention signals important lessons for any critical or reflexive analysis of environmental problems and politics.

Bibliography:

Bruce Braun, “Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (v.87, 1997);
Bruce Braun and Joel Wainwright, “Nature, Poststructuralism, and Politics,” in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, , Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (Blackwell, 2001);
Noel Castree, “Socializing Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics,” in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun , Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (Blackwell, 2001);
Eric Darier, “Foucault Against Environmental Ethics,” in Eric Darier, , Discourses of the Environment (Blackwell, 1999);
David Demeritt, “What Is the ‘Social Construction of Nature’? A Typology and Sympathetic Critique,” Progress in Human Geography (v.26, 2002);
Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Polity, 1992);
Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Blackwell, 1995).