Toward a vocabulary for speaking of the engagement of things into discourse

Abstract

Latour argues that complex environmental problems are sustained and proliferate because the intermeshing of humans and non-humans they embody is systematically obscured, a systematics reproduced by defining discourse narrowly in terms of symbol and meaning. This article argues that discourse is more constructively viewed as a practice constitutive of dynamic ‘relational complexes’ involving people, things and their many properties, competences and accomplishments. A relational epistemology clarifies how the practices constituting these ‘complexes’ generate, reproduce and convey knowledge, in contradistinction to the more conventional focus upon the representational statements they produce, while a Foucaultian analysis illuminates how these ‘complexes’ exhibit power. Overall this perspective suggests that the problems identified by Latour may be addressed via informed, dynamic engagement in contexts manifesting a nexus between knowledge, actions and politics in ways responsive to their interdependencies. Such engagement is illustrated using a public participation project with which the author was involved while the relevance of these ideas for environmental institutions and policy contexts more broadly are examined via recent developments at the International Panel on Climate Change.

Keywords:

• Discourse
• socio-materiality
• ‘relational complex’
• power/knowledge
• public participation

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Michaela Spencer, Rebecca Brown and Johannes Dingler and other participants at the 2003 Hamburg Conference for valuable feedback on and input to an earlier version of this paper. The author also gratefully acknowledges the Bronte Catchment Project team, in particular Roberta Ryan and Susan Rudland.

Notes

1. This argument that Beck's approach (and others advocating ‘reflexive modernization’) falls short in failing to address the systematic character of the contemporary environmental problematique is outlined in Healy (2003b, 2004).

2. The term ‘representationalism’ comes from Rouse (1996).

3. In response to the ‘lay’/’expert’ distinction, Irwin & Michael (2003, p. 28) advocate a ‘lay epistemology’ that acknowledges how “lay people … have knowledge of how they know” and is “concerned with … a complex of judgements about trustworthiness, credibility, usefulness, [and] power”.

4. Rouse does distinguish between the construction of ‘experimental microworlds’ and ‘theoretical modeling’ but regards “scientific research as a … practical activity … that reconstruct[s] the world as well as redescrib[ing] it” (1996, p. 127) and discerns “multiple interactions and overlaps” (p. 130) between the two.

5. Traditional views of knowledge are focused by the ‘ontological status’ of the content of representational statements whether this is conceived in terms of correlation to ‘objects’ or ‘subjects’. The perspective outlined here rather argues that the significance of a particular statement is a function of the setting (and everything constituting that setting) in which it is generated or deployed (see the discussion of the ‘pragmatics of discursive practices’ below).

6. Both Barad and Rouse (1998) use this term to denote a form of relation that performs the identity of interacting entities rather than acting to transfer a prior determined identity.

7. The author had an advisory position with BCP that provided some empirical motivation for the ideas developed in this article.

8. Available online at: http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/council/enviro/stormwaterbak.htm

9. Reflected in the sub-title of the BCP final report ‘Improving stormwater outcomes while strengthening democratic capacity’ (Ryan et al., 2001, p. 1).

10. See Healy (2003a) for elaboration of a notion of ‘performative capacity’ designed to describe the capability to perform socio-material reality.

11. Working Group (WG) I addresses climate science; WG II the potential impacts of climate change, vulnerability and adaptation; while WG III examines mitigation options and their implications.