Читать книгу The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 126

We humans have come to think of the material world as made up of matter to consume. Rosi Braidotti says that ‘Nature is more than the sum of its marketable appropriations: it is also an agent that remains beyond the reach of domestication and commodification’ (Braidotti, 2006: 47). Performance-researcher, Jodie Allinson similarly challenges the advanced capitalist metaphor of environment as ‘consumable resource’ (Allinson, 2014). When natural resources become scarce, they become commodified. Indeed, the very language of natural resources speaks to an advanced capitalist view of nature as a resource to be utilised/colonised by humans – including those humans Anthropos deems to be inferior. People are forcibly moved or murdered, land is systematically stolen by those with special power, rain forests are left to burn to access rich materials that lie beneath the ground, mountains are physically deconstructed to produce material for building houses or roads. Sand dunes, with their own ecologies hosting interdependent communities of creatures, plants and other dwellers, are disappearing with rising sea levels, tramping tourists and the need for sand to build tower blocks and new islands for economic purposes.

This disappearance of matter – wait, no, let's not use a passive term as it promotes dissociation from our responsibilities for these actions – let's talk of matter being disappeared by human activity, directly (for example, cutting down forests, shooting migrating birds) and indirectly (for example, increases in greenhouse gasses causing temperature increases and glaciers to melt). And yet technology has adopted the language of nature to naturalise itself: twitter, web, stream, cloud, amazon, apple, for example. The large corporations who own the mouthpieces of social media both facilitate and obstruct bridging between local communities and the global materiality; the storying of the materiality of lives can build or destroy community investment in sustainability beyond what counts as ‘now’ or ‘here’ or ‘me’ or ‘you’. Barad says, ‘it is possible for entangled relationalities to make connections between entities that do not appear to be proximate in space and time’ (2007: 74).

Braidotti argues that we cannot use the same language to create solutions that has been used to create the problems we face (Braidotti, 2013). But what language do we use? Climate activists have used the language of ‘climate emergency’ to jolt people into an awareness that time is running out for effectively protecting the earth's ravaged ecology. However, language in itself is not enough. Urgent messages about the environment are frequently refuted by those whose short-term interests are served by, for example, deforestation. There are many examples of how language is used against activists to undermine their campaigns, often using pathologising mental health discourses to dismiss powerful speakers especially when from oppressed groups. We need to understand how those not concerned with social justice are using language to maintain an imbalance of power and appropriating the language of the ‘natural’ to continue with their endeavours.

There is a challenge then in social constructionist inquiry to include a presence of other contexts which offer a broader context for the smaller, immediate issues to make visible the implicative influences of changes within our environment on human life. What characterises the movement in and between these levels of context is local reflexivity which asks, ‘What is happening here?’ and global reflexivity which asks, ‘How does our experience here connect with what else is going on out there?’ (Simon, 1998, 2012, 2014).