Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography 9781409420095, 9781409420101, 2011026891, 9781315584492

Citation preview

GEOgRAPHY SPEAKs PERFORMATIVE AsPECTs OF GEOgRAPHY

This page has been left blank intentionally

Geography Speaks Performative Aspects of Geography

ROB SULLIVAN UCLA, USA

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Rob Sullivan 2011 Rob Sullivan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sullivan, Rob. Geography speaks : performative aspects of geography. 1. Cultural geography. 2. Communication and geography. 3. Arts and geography. 4. Speech acts (Linguistics) 5. Performative (Philosophy) I. Title 304.2–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sullivan, Robert E., 1952– Geography speaks:performative aspects of geography/by Rob Sullivan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2009-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-2010-1 (ebook) 1. Human geography—Philosophy. 2. Language and languages—Philosophy. 3. Speech acts (Linguistics) I. Title. GF21.S7935 2011 910—dc23 2011026891 ISBN: 978-1-409-42009-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-58449-2 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgements    Introduction   PART I

vii 1

SETTING THE STAGE

1

Speech Acts  

2

Performing Science  

7 35

PART II GEOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS OF THE PERFORMATIVE 3

The Performance of Place  

57

4

The Performance of Cartography  

83

5

The Performance of Private and Public Space  

103

6

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance  

123

7

The Auto-Performance of Geography  

151

Conclusion  

173

Bibliography    Index   

175 187

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements I was drawn into the subject of performativity in a seminar taught by Michael Curry in the geography department of UCLA during the spring of 2007. For that introduction, I want to thank Michael as well as the other students in the seminar: Elaina Lin, Heidi Miller, Lilly Nguyen, John Slifko, and Tristan Sturm. John Agnew, Michael Curry, Nicholas Entrikin, Timur Hammond, John McCumber, and Tristan Sturm read drafts of the book and offered sound advice as well as encouragement. I also want to thanks the staff at Ashgate who have helped so much: Beth Dixon, Carolyn Court and, especially, Valerie Rose. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Mado Lynn Most, for her strength and support through numerous difficulties. Without her help nothing would have been done.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Introduction In this book we shall explore the ways in which speech act theory and its corollary, the performative, can be applied to geography. Five aspects of the geographical discipline will be examined through the foci of these bonded theories: instances of cartographical construction (i.e. map-making) as variations of speech act performance; the performative aspects of the creation of place; the performative valences of the creation of public and private space (as well as their correlates, public-private space and private-public space); performances of speech acts in relationship to environmental determinism and how they do (or do not) instantiate transformations within the geopolitical sphere; and, finally, the history of the discipline as a sequence of performative acts by geographers themselves as they attempt to establish geography as being constitutive of this or that type of disciplinary method or socio-scientific viewpoint. The creation of place is a process that can be viewed as being deeply implicated in speech act and performance. As pointed out by such thinkers are Yi-Fu Tuan, Michael Curry, and Patricia Seed, places are created by a stunning array of performative acts, acts transforming unbounded space(s) into demarcated place(s). In the third chapter of Geography Speaks, I survey multifarious methods of creating place and attempt to explicate them through speech act and performance theories. The second aspect of geography considered is the cartographic, as mapmaking is itself a performance, indeed a kind of magical performance. The idea that a map in all its irrefrangible flatness can replicate a topographical surface that is most typically anything but flat is based on the essential fiction of representation: that one thing can serve as an analogue for another. The extent to which maps seem to be real as well as scientific indicates the success of the legerdemain they have worked on our collective imagination. This is not to say that they cannot be used to navigate from Place A to Place B, but is simply to point out that they are neither Place A nor Place B. That maps inscribe ideologies onto their surface (indeed, that they must do so), and that maps have frequently been used to create rather than reflect relations of power testifies to their performative capacities. In this chapter, I rely heavily on the works of Denis Cosgrove, Mark Monmonier, J.B. Harley, and Denis Wood. Performativity and cartography commingle as I investigate the ways in which mapping has been used as an act of performance: because a place is represented on a map as being such-and-so, it is such-andso. This is most infamously exemplified by the representation of vast areas as “Empty Lands” (Terra Nullius), and therefore open to be “filled” by European conquest and settlement. I turn then to the division of space into four legal types: public, private, publicprivate, and private-public, as I investigate how these components are performed

2

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

into existence in capitalistic nation-states, i.e. states subject to the requisites of market economies and private property relations. The denotation of both public and private space is self-evident, though problematic, especially now that privacy has itself become more and more perforated by public concerns, but what is meant by public-private and private-public spaces? Public-private spaces are those that, though privately owned, are conditionally accessible to the public: here we can include most commercial establishments, including restaurants, hotels and motels, coffee shops, grocery stores, shopping malls, and so on. Private-public spaces are those that are owned by the public but to which entry is restricted, the most obvious examples being military bases, ordnance testing sites, and numerous governmental offices and buildings (for example, the CIA building in Langley, Virginia). That private space is breached by both public and private entities and that public space interfaces with private space makes any simple demarcations between these ideal types problematic and insecure. That these ideal types continue to exist marks them as limits of conceptualized spatiality, albeit limits more and more punctured by perforations from both the private and public sides of the spatial coin. Such demarcations between these four types of space are established through performative speech acts: this chapter details the processes by which such acts are accomplished as well as the ambiguities and crosshatched perforations which complicate them. Next I move to environmental determinism, an idea once in vogue, then reduced to infamy, and now creeping back into at least a limited amount of usage, if not outright respectability. Environmental determinism forefronts the notion that geography performs and that it performs absolutely: it trumps all else. In such conceptions, geography is privileged as that which inevitably favors certain particularly well-situated nations while relegating others to backwater status. In this chapter, we also briefly examine how political leaders have attempted, sometimes with stunning success, sometimes with catastrophic failure, to instantiate new understandings of space and place through the speaking of words and the doing of deeds. This is most obvious in such examples as Hitler’s construal of a Greater Germany or George W. Bush’s attempt to create a reconfigured Middle East, one transformed by democratic principles and free market capitalism, or what Bush used to call liberty.1 Last, I examine the discipline of geography itself, a field fraught with a perpetual identity crisis and thus overtly vulnerable to pre-emptive acts of performance as geographers attempt to stake out geography as being determined by this or that methodology or philosophical perspective. The history of geography can be viewed as one long performative struggle, as idiographic and nomographic, qualitative and quantitative, cultural and physical agonists feint and parry their 1 The conjunction here of Hitler and Bush is not meant to relegate them to some sort of equivalent status as, to borrow one of George W. Bush’s favorite phrases, “evildoers.” It is merely done to illustrate the concept of performative geopolitical aspirations. Both are war criminals, but of altogether different magnitudes.

Introduction

3

way to some imagined dominance of the profession, using speech acts and other assorted performative acts (articles, presentations, conferences as well as hiring and tenure practices) as their weapons of choice. I limit myself in this chapter to the examination of three seminal works of the 1960s and 70s: Henry Lefebvre’s “Right to the City,” David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Humanistic Geography.” I will elucidate the reasons for these specific selections when we arrive at this chapter. In no way am I making the claim that these are all the performative aspects of geography that either can or should be examined; indeed, there may be others of more significance. However, the selection made here manages, I believe, to demonstrate both the range and variety of geographical performatives without shutting the door on further investigations into this domain. I want to mention a few of the more important works that have incorporated theories of performativity within them. Among them are Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance; Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity; Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast; Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture; and Vikki Bell’s Culture and Performance: the Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory. Some works which have specifically recapitulated the squabble between Derrida and Searle and then realigned it within a more expansive (or at least a different) scope include Hillis J. Miller’s Speech Acts in Literature; Shoshana Felman’s The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages; and Butler’s Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative. Victor Turner’s Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology and From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play, along with Schechner’s Between Theater and Anthropology and Performance Theory, are all works that explore the intersection between ritual, drama, and play. Jeffrey Alexander’s most recent book, The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, continues his crosshatchery of performance and sociology, as he states that “candidates work to present compelling performances of civil competence to citizen audiences at a remove not only geographically but also emotionally and morally. It is the success of these performances [their performativity] that determines how whites, blacks, Jews, Catholics and women distribute their precious votes, and the opinions of these supposedly demographic groups shift significantly in response to coding, narrative, tone, metaphor, setting, and performance in the course of campaign time” (2010: 9). And by no means do I want to give the impression that theories of performance have not been articulated within geography. Among others, we could enumerate Simon Coleman and Mike Crang’s edited collection, Tourism: Between Place and Performance; the special 2000 issue of Environment and Planning D is solely dedicated to the issue of performance and space; and theorists of cartography, such

4

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

as Denis Wood, John Fels, and J.B. Harley have invoked the performative aspect of mapping and maps, but what I attempt to do in Geography Speaks is to supply an overt application of speech act and performance theories exclusively to the discipline of geography. Whether my performance of this performance is felicitous or a “misfire” is a matter left to the reader to adjudicate: I can only perform it and then leave it at that. Prior to setting off on our strictly geographical investigation, we must perforce outline the theory of performance. Though I concentrate on the speech act theory of performance as first articulated by J.L. Austin in the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955, there are a number of other interweaving strands of performance theory which should not be neglected. However, prior to touching on those, I delineate Austin’s work as well as the battle-lines of the famous philosophical rhubarb between Jacques Derrida and John Searle as these two intellectual antagonists feuded over the proper “reading” of Austin’s theoretical framework. We will also apply some of the epistemological lessons gleaned from performance theory to science in general before applying these lessons to the discipline of geography in particular. The first part of the text may require some patience on the part of readers, especially those who are strictly interested in geography; however, I believe it vital to understand the general theory of speech act theory and its evolution prior to applying its principles and tenets to the discipline of geography. Once we have understood how Derrida and Judith Butler widened out speech act theory into a theory of performance that could capture more than Austin ever imagined, we can more fully comprehend its introjection into geography. If this is not undertaken, we risk setting forth into a territory without a proper map, a fatal error for those with any stake in the geographical enterprise. So, in a sense, we will be following a geographical trajectory here as we traverse from Austin to Derrida to Butler to the possible uses of performance in geography. Put in the most basic terms, we will be moving in an ever-widening circle from speech to body to land.

PART I SETTING THE STAGE

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

Speech Acts Searle v. Derrida In this chapter I will outline the crux of the issues that were battled over as various intellectual heirs fought over the proper “reading” of speech act theory and performatives following the death of J.L. Austin in 1960. I will also sketch out the expansive migratory dispersal of these theories as they gradually impacted almost every discipline within the humanities and the social sciences during the last fifty years. As I navigate through this terrain, I will indicate ways in which these theories inflected geography as well as reference some of the works in which geography utilized these theories. However, prior to jumping into this particular arena, we should do a bit of definitional lifting. Just what does performativity mean? What is the difference between performance per se and performativity? Performativity indicates a performance that has been performed successfully; it has been felicitous, to use Austin’s term. In other words, it has had its desired effect (though we will discover, when we bring Judith Butler’s work into this discussion, that desire and its attendants, the unconscious and the body, are things that can lead to certain complications here). “Performative means that discourses constitute the objects of which they speak. For example, states are made possible by a wide range of discursive practices that include immigration policies, military deployments and strategies, cultural debates about normal social behavior, political speeches and economic investments. (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007: 406). Here we gain a preview into the range of the diffusion of performance theory, as it applied to the creation of the state, a subject we shall return to below. Something is performative when a performance intending to bring something into being, brings it into being. Or, in even more basic terms, if it makes something happen, it’s performative. This last definition deliberately omits the intentional aspect, one of the odd results of performativity that we shall explore further down the road. As we will see as we navigate through Austin’s herky-jerky theorizing, the conditions for a performative performance are not always so clear as this rather simple definitional introduction may indicate; nevertheless, let us move forward to Austin in the flesh, as it were. The most controversial move Austin makes in How to do things with Words is his banning of what he calls parasitic utterances.1 I want to start with this because it is the element that eventually leads to the expansion of speech act theory into an 1

I follow Austin’s method of capitalization re the title of his book.

8

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

array of assorted fields. Now perhaps Austin intended this act of exile as simply a methodological choice (this is Searle’s contention), reckoning his task difficult enough as it was, a judgment which can in a certain sense be countenanced or even arouse a certain measure of intellectual sympathy, given the obstacles Austin encounters by merely attempting to construct a theory for speech acts in what he terms ordinary circumstances. Perhaps what caused so much uneasiness was the terminology Austin utilized in his decree of exile of the fictional: perhaps if he had been more tactful in his choice of words, the banishment of this mode of discourse would not have set off such a ruckus. But use these words he did, and here they are, quoted at length, as they form the basis of much of the controversy circumambulating Austin’s book: We are deliberately at present excluding … . the following: a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to every and any utterance – a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances. (1962: 22; italics, Austin).

This prohibition led to Derrida’s observation in his essay, “Signature Event Context,” that every performative utterance in any circumstance whatsoever depends on citation, the very entity that Austin was attempting to exclude from his investigation: as Derrida puts it, “would a performative utterance be possible if a citational doubling did not come to split and dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event?” (1988: 191). Derrida is arguing here that every performative utterance is inherently parasitic in that it cites and reiterates certain formulations applicable to its ‘total speech act situation.’ A bride and groom stating their particular instantiation of ‘I do’s’ are citing preformed utterances just as ineluctably as any given Hamlet citing his particular instantiation of ‘To be or not to be.’ Furthermore, Derrida asserts that citationality and reiterability are constitutive of language itself: “In excluding the general theory of this structural parasitism, does not Austin, who nevertheless claims to describe the facts and events of ordinary language, pass off as ordinary an ethical and teleological determination?” (1988: 190–191). Or, as Derrida puts it when discussing the question of systems in general, “the system constitutes itself by repressing what makes it possible, which is not systematic” (Derrida and Maurizio 2001: 4). Austin reckoned that by cordoning off fictive discourse he was merely making his work a bit simpler, a judgment that seems comical in light of the numerous slippery slopes he himself encounters along his extremely circuitous path as he attempts valiantly but vainly to unpack and then nail down the conceptual superstructure of the speech act. Derrida counters that Austin made

Speech Acts

9

a fatal misstep in his initial exclusion of a domain of language fundamental to the processes of any form of communication. Derrida advocates for a speech act theory that omits nothing and omits nothing necessarily. What he is claiming is that Austin cannot bracket off risk from any act of communication (or, conversely, construct contextual constraints that assure success) because the risk attendant to interpretation (which necessarily includes the danger of misinterpretation) is innate to communication itself: such risk is constitutive of communication, a compulsory component of its performance. Therefore, Austin has made a methodologically “infelicitous” mistake in the very construction of his experiment, rendering the basis of his theories ‘hollow or void,’ to hijack that famous phrase of Austin’s and turn it against him. This problem of fixing the context also destabilizes Austin’s schema. Part of the problem, according to Jonathan Culler’s “Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin,” is the innate boundlessness of context itself: “meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless” (1981: 24). This is so, claims Culler, because “any given context is always open to further description” (1981: 25). That this is so is due to the necessary requirement, given the acquisition of new knowledge, to expand our understanding of ‘any given context;’ that is, if contextual comprehension is a closed system, no one can ever add to the understanding of any particular context through the application of new knowledge. In effect, without such an open understanding, the first understanding of a context would also be its last. Context is “also unmasterable,” says Culler, because “any attempt to codify context can always be grafted onto the context it sought to describe, yielding a new context which escapes the previous formulation” (1981: 25). This is the problem of an infinite regress of codification: any mark attached to a context to define or describe it becomes part of that context, and so on, ad infinitum. Perhaps the “unmasterability” of context can be applied to geography as well: the context of the place becomes a part of the place, and so on, leading to a problem of the infinite regression of the containment of place. Notice that Aristotle struggles with just this conundrum as he outlines his theory of place in Physics. Comparing the understanding of place to wine in a jar, as place is both that which contains and that which is contained, Aristotle states that: “One thing, though, is manifest: that since the vessel is nothing pertaining to that which is in it (the primary ‘what’ and ‘in which’ are different) place will not be either matter or the form, but something else” (1983: 25). A similar problem arises as geographers struggle to define such terms as “place” and “region” – where do their contexts begin and where do they end? In his discussion of the production of localities (“neighborhoods”) in Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai refers to exactly the same problem when he states that neighborhoods “seem paradoxical because they both constitute and require contexts” (1996: 186). Boundaries require both an inside and an outside; therefore, isn’t it essentially paradoxical, and perhaps even arbitrary, that the interior rather than the exterior of the borderline “belongs” to the boundary?

10

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Searle posits a “thesis of the Background [sic],” in order to combat such contextual amorphousness: “The functioning of meaning in particular and intentionality generally is only possible given a set of background capacities, abilities, presuppositions, and general know-how” (1994: 640). These qualities, attached to distinct backgrounds, allow discourse to proceed without falling into the abyss of infinite regress. In order to demonstrate the necessity of his thesis, Searle imagines a hamburger stand in which such a thesis is not obligatory. It then becomes necessary to stipulate that one’s hamburger should not be petrified and should not be mixed with concrete. However, “It will not be adequate for me to say, ‘Well … next time I’ll say ‘No concrete and no petrified hamburgers.’ There will still be an indefinite number of possible ways to misunderstand my utterance. Next time they might bring me a hamburger a mile wide so that they have to knock down a wall of the restaurant and use a lot of trucks and cranes to get the edge of it near me. And so – more or less indefinitely – on. (Searle 1994: 641)

It is only within the constraints provided by communitarian understandings of “Background” conditions that communication can function: “Any use of any concept is always relative to a Background, and consequently a concept can only determine its conditions of satisfaction relative to a set of Background capacities” (Searle 1994: 642). But it is difficult to believe that with a switch of mere terminology (from “context” to “Background” with a capital ‘B’), even given the ‘filling-in’ of the Background that Searle offers up (capacities, know-how, and so on), that the problem of context in regards to speech act theory has been solved to a felicitous degree. There are simply too many unresolved questions left dangling. What is there to prevent the slippage of the “Background” into the same wobbly status as it predecessors? As an aside specifically addressed to geographers, the question of the background-cum-context is one that geographers interested in theoretical questions should explore, as this seems to be at least partially a spatial matter that might yield to a species of ontological or metaphysical cartography. It is closely related to the question of the given, about which there is an extensive literature, which in turn is closely related to the question of the everyday, about which there is again an extensive literature. But these are knotty problems the resolution of which has eluded many thinkers: they should be approached by geographers with a caution equivalent to their extreme degree of difficulty. Part of this difficulty is that, as Derrida states in “Signature Event Context,” Austin’s “analyses at all times require a value of context, and even of a context exhaustively determined” (1988: 14; italics, Derrida). But the goal of determining anything exhaustively predetermines impossibility, as there always remains something else to be determined. “For Derrida, context must be understood in the broadest terms possible,” claim Deborah Dixon and John Paul Jones III in their “Derridean Geographies,” “as ‘the entire real history of the world.’ This is why

Speech Acts

11

his aphoristic phrasing, ‘there’s nothing outside the text’ … is not, as is sometimes alleged, idealist, for in Derrida’s work all texts are in context. As we understand it, context refers to the temporary stabilisation of meanings drawn together in the articulation of a discourse that communicates those meanings in a sensible form by establishing differences among them. Context fixes the relational field of meaning, but it does so only by drawing upon previous contexts that are themselves embedded in still other contexts. (1988: 136).

So, according to Dixon and Jones, the Derridean construal of context can only be temporarily stabilized, and it can be stabilized on that temporary basis only by reference to ‘previous contexts that are themselves embedded in still other contexts,’ suggesting a double-backed set of contextual mirrors, extending from the time of the present into both the past and the future as well as from the space of the here to the far sides of both the hither and the yon. But such a belief in the possibility of endless contextual extension as well as an acknowledgment of the possibility of communicative ruptures and distortions ought to be markers that align Derrida and Austin rather than divide them. For Austin is forever coming up against ruptures, backing his way out of them with comical asides, leaping over them with the agility of a semantical high-wire artist, or throwing his hands up in the air as yet one more possible construction of the felicitous performative is found not only to be wanting but to be flawed to such a degree that it misfires and an entirely new approach is required. Aside from this predilection to fall into linguistic fissures, which should place Austin and Derrida into relatively adjacent theoretical, methodological, or at least temperamental domains, Austin is also quick to introduce conditions conducive to the catalyzation of ruptures into his initial arrangement of the theory of the speech act. For is not infelicity merely a polite term for rupture? Many commentators, including Derrida himself, have noticed this alignment between Austin and Derrida. Stanley Fish states that “with the proper qualifications, he [Derrida] is a philosopher of ordinary language [as is Austin]. In so saying I am suggesting that Derrida and Austin may not be so far apart as some have thought,” especially in light of the fact that by “the conclusion of How to Do Things with Words, the supposedly normative class of constatives is shown to be a member of the supposedly exceptional class of performatives. Once that reversal has been effected, everything that Derrida says follows, including his challenge to the exclusion of stage and fictional utterances” (1982: 712). So, as much as Searle and others in the analytic camp of philosophy may want to separate Austin from the “taint” of a Derridean interpretation, in any final reckoning the distance between them may not be that far. To reiterate what has been claimed so far about Derrida’s reading of Austin, the main thrust of Derrida’s challenge is that all words and signs in any context whatsoever are citations. Given that performative utterances by necessity fall into this all-inclusive category, they rely on citation as well. Such a category,

12

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

incorporating every semiotic entity, includes within it both fictional and nonfictional discourse. According to Derrida, there can be no separation between these two forms of discourse without nullifying the very possibility of communication. As Judith Butler elucidates this idea in Bodies That Matter, “let us remember that reiterations are never simply replicas of the same. And the ‘act’ by which a name authorizes or deauthorizes a set of social or sexual relations is, of necessity, a repetition. ‘Could a performative succeed,’ asks Derrida, ‘if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance … if it were not identifiable in some way as a “citation”?’ If a performative provisionally succeeds … then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition of a prior, authoritative set of practices. (1993: 226–227; italics, Butler).2

Austin’s premier example of a performative utterance, the ‘I do’ in the marriage ceremony, can certainly be construed in such a way as to follow the logic of reiteration and citationality that both Butler and Derrida embrace. The ‘I do’ is never uttered ex nihilo: it only has performative powers due to its accumulation of ‘the force of authority through the repetition of a prior, authoritative set of practices.’ Its force has been instantiated through repetition, and all previous utterances of the term provide the citational background against which any given utterance of the vow is recited. But does this notion, even if accepted as correct, break the barrier between fact and fiction? Isn’t Austin right when he cordons off the ‘I do’ uttered in a play, a poem, or a novel from the ‘I do’ uttered in an actual wedding? After all, no wedded couple has ever stepped forth from the pages of even the most romantic of novels. However, this isn’t the issue here. What Derrida wants to claim is that any ‘real’ wedding still relies on citation and that the repeatability of citationality cannot be sectioned off from any operation of language. This binds fictional and nonfictional discourse in a reciprocity that cannot be sundered. Perhaps this can be better understood if we imagine a bride and groom consulting their minister prior to their wedding. Let us stipulate that the soon-tobe newlyweds are both nervous as well as unfamiliar with the rituals of a wedding and that the minister is gently talking them through the steps of the ceremony. Might this discussion very reasonably come to a point wherein the minister says something like, ‘And then you say, “I do”’? Now that ‘I do’ is a citation of previous ‘I do’s.’ In a sense, the minister’s utterance is non-binding or fictional. But, even so, the bride and groom will base their utterances on this fictional precedent, itself a citation. Now we can imagine a discursive realm in which the fictional and the 2 Butler cites Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc. Gerald Graff, ed.; tr. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). p. 18.

Speech Acts

13

factual are necessarily united into one indivisible whole. For without such unity, the repetition of citations cannot be generated and passed on; that is, they cannot be communicated. Derrida makes this same point in reference to a promise as well as a statement: What would a so called ‘standard’ promise or statement be if it could not be repeated or reproduced? If, for example, (an example of iteration in general), it could not be mimed, reproduced on the stage or, another example (my emphasis, a different example) in a citation? This possibility is part of the so-called ‘standard case.’ It is an essential, internal, and permanent part, and to exclude what Austin himself admitted is a constant possibility from one’s description is to describe something other than the so-called standard case. (1988: 89; italics, Derrida).

Derrida is making the case here that if a possibility is constant, then such a possibility must be an integral part of the (so-called) norm. Constant possibilities cannot simply be bracketed off and discarded, as if they do not exist or as if the norm could exist without them. Derrida’s interpretation of Austin’s construal of speech act theory itself led to much criticism, most notably from Austin’s former pupil at Oxford, John Searle. As Searle refused to allow his own work to appear in Limited, Inc., a book intended to be a compilation of the arguments between Searle and Derrida, Gerald Graff consolidated Searle’s argument in “Reiterating the Difference,” a short chapter in Limited, Inc. Towards the conclusion of this summary of Searle’s position, Graff states that “The relation of fiction to nonfiction is one of logical dependency” (1988: 27). Though Searle insists that Austin’s decision to exclude fictional utterances from his investigation was simply strategic, if an utterance is hollow, void, and parasitic by definition, it would obviously not be able to catalyze any performative force whatsoever (or any other type of force for that matter), and would therefore be innately excluded from any discussion of performatives, no matter what strategy is utilized. The point I wish to make is that, at the least, there seems to be some obvious privileging occurring here. In Austin’s case, there is the privileging of ‘normal use’ and ‘ordinary circumstances’ over ‘abnormal use’ and the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of drama and poetry; in Graff’s case, acting as Searle’s proxy, of nonfiction over fiction. But what if How to do things with Words is a poetic work itself? Or at least a hybrid between fact and fiction? Does that make it ‘parasitic’? But how could Austin’s book possibly be classified in such a way? After all, isn’t it a work of philosophy by one of the most acclaimed thinkers of the analytic school, hardly a bastion for conveyors of the poetic, even if such a sense is concealed under the guise of a study of the operative qualities of language? In Speech Acts in Literature, J. Hillis Miller begins by drawing our attention to the title of Austin’s book. By slotting his study in the “how-to” genre, Austin immediately appropriates a sense of the comic, hinting that his book may be

14

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

waylaid by pratfalls and slips, a promise that is fulfilled as Austin slips and slides throughout his inquiry. Miller also notes that the very inclusion of the ‘how’ in the title instantly foregrounds the ambiguous nature of language: As the dictionary indicates, “how” hovers between being, usually, an adverb and being, sometimes, a noun. As an adverb it hovers again, this time between descriptive, constative uses (“in what manner or way”; to what degree or extent, number or amount”; “in what state or condition,” etc.) and performative uses, for example in an invitation (“How about a game of tennis?”) …. in some uses of “how,” the attempt to decide whether it is constative or performative leaves the other possibility hovering uneasily as a shadow in the background. This is certainly the case with the “how” in How to Do Things with Words. (2001: 7).3

And so Austin even places his book within a framework that draws attention to the destabilizing and subversive effects of language, effects usually thought of as belonging to a linguistic province more attuned to the poetic and the fictional than the scientific and the nonfictional. But of course Austin’s flirtation with the poetic and the dramatic does not end there: Miller goes on to reference Austin’s citation of Euripides’ play, Hippolytus, wherein the eponymous character states that “my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not” (2001: 30).4 Now isn’t this a bit odd, given that Hippolytus “is a character speaking on the stage, a fictitious being whose utterances are firmly excluded by Austin from serious speech acts? How did this figure get in here, in spite of Austin’s exclusion of literature?” (2001: 33).5 How indeed, if not by Austin’s antic need to upend his own argument, a trait he exuberantly displays throughout How to do things with Words, as if he could not help but render his own “felicitous” claims infelicitous. But Austin’s citation from Hippolytus is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg, in terms of incursions into the fictional realm. In The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, Shoshana Felman forefronts the use of the ludic in Austin and its function as both a subversive and self-subversive operator. Referencing Austin’s examples of the saint baptizing penguins as well as the christening of an English ship as Mr. Stalin, Felman states that “What makes us laugh, in the examples, is the unexpectedness of their at once incongruous and trivial character, which brings to mind the figures of speech and the rhetorical strategies of the heroi-comic genre, in which the comic is based, in fact, on the incongruous mix of the sublime and the ridiculous” (2007: 120). Austin’s performance throughout his book on the performative resembles that 3 Miller states that his “example and the definitions come from Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass. G. and C. Merriam, 1949), 401.” 4 Miller cites Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 9–10 for this reference. 5 Austin repeats this example in his essay “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers. Edited by J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, 1970), 236.

Speech Acts

15

of an intoxicated high-wire vaudevillian as he wobbles on his fraying linguistic thread but who, “like a good skier, delights in slides and slips” (Felman 2007: 122). Felman cites “one of Baudelaire’s definitions” of “the nature of the poetic act” as a “‘Stumbling over words like cobblestones,’” concluding that, given that How to do things with words is littered with such stumbles, “The Austinian performance thus participates, in a way, in poetic performance” (2007: 123). But is this a fair conclusion, given that Austin explicitly bans the poetic as well as the dramatic from his purview? Miller unpacks the etymology of “parasitic” in an attempt to answer this question: Parasitic certainly means “dependent on,” as a parasitic plant is dependent on, lives off of, its host. The word “parasitic” originally referred to a man who eats you out of house and home: the man who came to dinner and stayed. It means, etymologically, in Greek, “beside the grain,” para (“beside”) plus sitos (“grain”). The question is whether the parasite may not belong in the home, or come to be at home there, that is, whether literature may not after all be an essential part of the economy of speech acts. If How to Do Things with Words is taken as an example, that is certainly the case, since the parasitic, in the form of jokes, irony, hidden citations, dramatic examples, obscure dialogues, and so on, is essential to the working of the performative revolution Austin is trying to effect. (2001: 36).

But does the simple inclusion of figures of speech, metaphors, jokes, irony, ‘hidden’ citations, and even lines cited from dramas in any way force a classification of How to do things with words into the category of fiction or even budge it a millimeter out of the non-fictional slot? After all, what writer can proceed without using metaphors, especially if it is considered a legitimate theory that words themselves, as stand-ins for objects, ideas, qualities, and so on, are nothing but metaphorical constructions? But doesn’t this very notion, if legitimized, cause an essential destabilization of Austin’s exclusion of the fictional from his discourse? If words are metaphorical fictions themselves (e.g. the word “table” is not the table), then no piece of writing is immune from a parasitic relationship with the fictional; in fact, if this is true, nonfiction is essentially dependent on fiction, as it has no other access to reality except by the metaphorical bridge of language, itself a system which is not the world but a representational assemblage of the same. Whether the above is accepted or not, there is another approach by which How to do things with words can be understood as a fictional work or at least a work with a fictional substructure as its foundation. Miller points out that Austin’s examples instigate an alternate narrative that runs against the grain of the surface of the book: “Austin’s examples tell a surreptitious story. This story goes counter to, or at any rate is not told explicitly by, the overt argument of the book. What is that story? What does it performatively, if covertly, accomplish?” (2001: 49). This

16

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

alternative text, according to Miller, is one fraught with peril, as infelicities, and even to some extent, felicities, pile up into a catastrophic mess: Even the examples of felicitous performatives, however, contribute to what may be called a lurid undertext of violence and catastrophe. This undertext presents, in counterpoint to the serious argument, a continuous story of seriocomic disaster … . In Austin’s examples … . What can go wrong does go wrong. People marry monkeys. Horses are appointed consul. British warships are christened the Generalissimo Stalin by some “low type” who happens to come by. Someone is tempted not to eat an apple, as Adam was tempted by Eve to do, but to have another whack of ice cream, perhaps even more unhealthy than the Edenic apple. Patients in lunatic asylums are boiled alive … . Monkeys utter the command “Go!” Donkeys are shot. Cats are drowned in butter. Dogs or penguins are baptized. The command is given, “Shoot her!” A ferocious bull paws the field, ready to charge, or a thunderstorm threatens, and all you can do is shout “Bull!” or “Thunder!” (2001: 49–50).

This alternate narrative conjures a world disordered to its core, subverting the discourse it is meant to underpin. A cock-eyed world more aligned with a realm the Marx Brothers might inhabit than any universe John Searle could ever occupy. In light of this, Searle’s crimped prose may be read as an attempt to batten down the chaos endemic to and escaping from Austin’s undertext, the steely imperviousness of the tone an antidote to his teacher’s madcap imagination, for Austin’s is a world underwritten by a fiction that pulls the rug out from under its own superstructure. Let me pause here to remind readers that we will not stay forever fixated on what may seem like a discourse strictly focused on words and nothing but words. We are proceeding carefully, and we will eventually navigate around to a discussion strictly centered on the concerns of geography. Meanwhile: patience, my friends. Searle’s effort to stabilize Austin’s theoretical as well as his textual instability may be the primary reason why so many have vilified Searle: when a footloose style evoking a certain charming ambidextrous undecidability is traded in for the rigidified prose indicative of so much analytic philosophy, and theoretical lability is traded in for hubristic certainty, one starts to miss the old master. Searle’s attempt to fix (in both the ‘fasten down’ and ‘repair’ senses of the word) Austin’s work results in a fortressed theory guarding ideas perhaps inherently inconclusive and thus always vulnerable to reformulation. Such an unfinished quality is normal, aligning speech act theory with almost every other theory in the philosophical tradition as refusing to be theorized with any semblance of absolute finality. By even deigning to grant inclusion to the unconscious, Miller’s argument plays havoc with the attempt Searle makes in Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World to completely discount the pressure Freud put on the rational mind as the sole operator of the psyche. In Searle’s construal, we

Speech Acts

17

can ignore subconscious or unconscious pressure in the ‘Real World’ because “Freudian psychology … is no longer taken seriously as a scientific theory” (1998: 5). While it may be true that much of Freud’s theories have been repudiated and Freudian practice has been superseded by pharmaceutical regimes as proctored by psychiatrists and cognitive therapies as proctored by psychologists, Freud’s works are still diligently studied and his excavation of the unconscious is still considered a monumental breakthrough in the exploration of consciousness. We should also note that Searle’s representation of “Freudian psychology … as a proof of the impossibility of rationality” does not reflect a rational estimation of Freud’s thinking; after all, Freud, one of the most incisive rationalists in history, simply happened to be rational enough to realize that there is more to the mind than rationality (1998: 3).6 But there may be a much more substantive reason for Searle to discard Freud, for the unconscious poses a danger of fatally destabilizing speech act theory as promulgated by Searle. Culler notes that “In his Speech Acts Searle proposes, as one of the conditions of promising, that ‘if a purported promise is to be non-defective, the thing promised must be something the hearer wants done, or considers to be in his interest.’ An utterance that promised to do what the listener apparently wants but unconsciously dreads might thus cease to be a promise and become instead a threat; conversely, an utterance that seemed a defective promise – a threat to do what the listener claims not to want – may become a well-formed promise, should unconscious desire be specified as part of the total context. (1981: 25).7

So, for the successful operation of a promise in Searle’s schema, the promise cannot be dislodged by the wobbly nature of the unconscious, which can take a promise for a threat or a threat for a promise. The banishment of Freud from speech act theory helps to insure that the unconscious will be banished from it as well. Perhaps we should assign Freud a role as one of the backstage artistes to Searle’s postulation of the performative speech act, as Freud’s counter-strategies threaten to pull the plug on any schema of the speech act which attempts to place

6 In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse points out an interesting impasse within Freud’s rationality in that Freud insists that the current state of civilization includes within it a norm of rationality which must be subscribed to: “To him [Freud], there was no higher rationality against which the prevailing one could be measured. If the irrationality of guilt feeling is that of civilization itself, then it is rational; and if the abolition of domination destroys culture itself, then it remains the supreme crime, and no effective means for its prevention are irrational.” Marcuse, H. 1962. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. New York: Vintage Books. 73. 7 Culler cites Searle’s Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 1969), p. 59.

18

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

a rarified and ultra-rational consciousness solely in charge of utterances as well as their repercussions and ramifications, i.e. their performance. Perhaps to make a proper claim against Searle’s argument, we should cite a passage of “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in which Searle lays out four “quite specific and pragmatic rules” regulating assertions made about facts or factual situations (1975: 322). We will only concern ourselves with the fourth rule (“The sincerity rule”) which stipulates that “the speaker commits himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition” (1975: 322).8 Let us consider the fourth rule’s pertinence to writers of fiction. First, are fictional writers somehow intrinsically insincere? Do they not mean what they say? Did we ever hear Faulkner or Marquez or Toni Morrison say, ‘I take that all back. I didn’t mean it. I was being insincere’? Couldn’t one make the case that, given that fiction writers as well as other artists carry the burden of creating a wholly imaginary realm, they must be profoundly sincere and believe deeply in the truth of the world they are creating? Second, do not writers (‘speakers’) commit themselves ‘to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition’? If one takes the truth to be an appendage to a descriptive act of empirical reportage, then it is probably correct to state that fiction writers do not abide by that rule. But if one takes the truth to be a statement cohering with the veracity of a world as it is congealing on the page, then it seems that such writers can and, indeed, must commit themselves to this rule. Searle seems to concur with the latter statement: “As far as the acceptability of the ontology [of fiction] is concerned, coherence is a crucial consideration. However, there is no universal criterion for coherence: what counts as coherence in a work in a work of science fiction will not count as coherence in a work of naturalism. What counts as coherence will be in part a function of the contract between author and reader about … conventions” (1975: 331). But even Searle admits that this sense of coherence may be located in a region that overlaps fictional and factual domains: “certain fictional genres are defined by the nonfictional commitments involved in the work of fiction … . In the case of realistic or naturalistic fiction, the author will refer to real places and events intermingling these references with the fictional references, thus making it possible to treat the fictional story as an extension of our existing knowledge” (1975: 331). This comports with his acknowledgement that “most concepts and distinctions are rough at the edges and do not have sharp boundaries,” and, furthermore, that “the distinctions between literal and metaphorical, serious and nonserious, fiction and nonfiction and yes, even true and false, admit of degrees and all apply more or less” (1994: 637–638; italics, Searle). But if borders are inherently fuzzy, and essential distinctions only ‘apply more or less,’ how can fiction and nonfiction be 8 It should be noted here that Searle is stipulating these rules in a context regarding an article in The New York Times, a form of discourse susceptible to verifiability, while mounting them as regulations that pertain to a supposedly unverifiable realm, i.e. the realm of the fictional. Given Searle’s strict rules of demarcation, isn’t this a blatant category mistake?

Speech Acts

19

bracketed off from one another in an absolute way in the formulation of speech act theory? Moreover, if certain genres of fiction can be treated as extensions of our existing knowledge, how can they be hollow or void? Are extensions of knowledge intrinsically parasitic, simply because they are extensional? And where exactly are the boundaries between fiction and fact, ‘more or less’? And why is it that the nonfictional can partake of this extension but the fictional cannot? A novel set in World War Two overlaps with these extensions in an obvious way, but doesn’t a science fiction novel do the same thing, albeit in a different manner and to a different degree? If a sci-fi book is set on a rocket bound for Neptune, this scenario can only communicate to readers because of a shared knowledge of the planets of the Solar System and the (potential) transportation possibilities of rockets, as well as a shared knowledge about rockets in general: that they have engines, travel through space, and so on. Such knowledge doesn’t arise ex nihilo: it depends on knowledge being extended into fictional realms. This is true of even the most utilitarian item: e.g. we know what a chair is in a short story because we know what a chair is in the ‘real world.’ And it’s also true in the most fantastical of tales: in Alice in Wonderland, for instance, we can comprehend what Alice might be thinking when she says: “How queer it seems … to be going messages for a rabbit!” because we extend our knowledge of messages, rabbits, and curious young girls into this counter-domain (Carroll n.d.: 42). But our knowledge of ‘reality’ also depends, to a certain extent on conventions. As Stanley E. Fish says: If it is true, as Searle … and others contend, that we build up the world of a novel by reading it within a set of shaping conventions or interpretive strategies, it is no less true of the emergence into palpable form of the equally conventional world within which we experience real life. The ‘facts’ of a baseball game, of a classroom situation, of a family reunion, of a trip to the grocery store, of a philosophical colloquium on the French language are only facts for those who are proceeding within a prior knowledge of the purposes, goals, and practices that underlie those activities. (1982: 709).

Fish goes on to add that this does not mean that there are not distinctions between “different kinds of interpretive practices,” but that such practices (e.g., interpretation of the law and interpretation of fiction) are akin in both being precisely practices of interpretation and both being ruled by certain conventions (1982: 709). To decree that one of these domains is aligned with the factual while one is not, only serves to totalize their dissimilarities while obfuscating their similarities. After all, doesn’t fiction also create knowledge that is extended into the “real world”? In Marxism and Literary Criticism, Eagleton reports that “true knowledge, for both Lenin and Lukács, is not thereby a matter of initial sense-impressions: it

20

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

is, Lukács claims, ‘a more profound and comprehensive reflection of objective reality than is given in appearance.’ In other words, it is a perception of the categories which underlie those appearances – categories which are discoverable by scientific theory or (for Lukács) great art’” (1976: 45).9 For those too diffident or conservative to consider Lenin and Lukács as proper sources for aesthetic and epistemological expertise, consider this statement regarding poetry from Kant’s Critique of Judgment: Poetry fortifies the mind. … . Poetry plays with illusion, which it produces at will, and yet without using illusion to deceive us, for poetry tells us itself that its pursuit is mere play, though this play can still be used purposively by the understanding for its own business. (1987: 196–197).

So the understanding can apprehend the ‘play’ of poetry and use it ‘purposively … for its own business;’ if among this business and these purposes there is not an expansion of knowledge, then one would have to accuse the understanding of being a residual faculty, nugatory to the nth degree. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke notes that it is primarily through the arts that people come to a knowledge of both manners and mores: “It is by imitation far more than by precept that we learn every thing; and what we learn thus we acquire not only far more effectually, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives … . Herein it is that painting and many other agreeable arts have laid one of the principle foundations of their power” (1958: 49). And, writing of the theatre of early 17th century in Europe, Jeffrey Alexander makes the point that during that era “playwrights wove texts from the fabric of contemporary social life, but they employed their imagination to do so in a sharply accented, highly stimulating, and provocative manner. The performances of these scripted representations were furnaces that forged metaphors circulating back to society, marking a kind of figure-eight movement from society to theatre and back to society again,” thereby manifesting a relationship of reciprocity between society and the stage (2004: 544).10And if poetry, plays, and fiction do provide for an extension of knowledge, then once again there is a system of reciprocity (a feedback-loop) between the realms of fact and fiction, realms quarantined from each other by Austin and Searle. We should also consider the expansive use of fictional examples in the work of the sociologist, Erving Goffman. In Frame Analysis, he cites the work of Aristophanes (Peace), Jack Gelber (The Connection), Jean Genet (The Blacks), Borges (Labyrinths), Spike Mulligan (The Goon Show), Ionesco (Victims of Duty and The Bald Soprano), Joan Didion (Play It as It Lays), Fitzgerald (The Great 9 Eagleton doesn’t cite a source for his quote. 10 Alexander cites Richard Schechner’s Ritual, Play, and Social Drama (New York: Seabury Press, 1977) and Victor Turner’s From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Plays (Baltimore, PAJ Press, 1982).

Speech Acts

21

Gatsby), Nabokov (Pale Fire), Peter Handke (Offending the Audience), as well as Shakespeare (Hamlet and Henry IV) and the work of the radical theatre troupe, The Living Theater (Goffman 1974: passim). Goffman even cites Spike Mulligan’s Goon Show as an illustration of the ambiguities of framing: SEAGOON: Well done, little three-adolescent hybrid. Lead me to President Ford’s headquarters and this quarter of liquorice all-sorts is yours. BLUEBOTTLE: Oooh! Licorish! Thinks. I must be careful how many of these I eat. Right, Captain, quick – jump into this cardboard bootbox. Hurriedly wraps up captain in brown paper parcel labeled ‘Explosives’ and stuffs him through headquarters letter box. Jumps on to passing dustcart and exits left to buy bowler before price goes up. Thinks – that wasn’t a very big part for Bluebottle. (1974: 415–416).11

So here we have Bluebottle vaulting from one frame to the next, from ‘licorish’lover to weight-watcher to stage-direction-reader and, finally, to ridden-withanxiety thespian. This fictional feat of frame-vaulting is used to amplify our knowledge of ‘factual’ frame-vaulting, as Goffman once again disturbs our normative expectations of the parameters of knowledge agglomeration. But if even the unlikely combination of Burke, Goffman, Alexander, Kant, Lenin, and Lukács are not enough to convince the wary reader that knowledge accumulation can accrue from the artistic realm, doesn’t Flaubert’s famous description of a particular hat in Madame Bovary amplify our knowledge about the wonderful possibilities of hats in general? It was one of those hybrid hats, in which you could find elements of a busby, a lancer cap, a bowler, an otterskin cap, and a nightcap, one of those poor concoctions whose mute ugliness contains depths of expression like the face of an imbecile. Egg shaped and stiffened with whalebone, it began with three circular sausage-like twists, then alternate diamonds of velvet and rabbit fur, separated by red bands; then came a sort of bag ending in a cardboard-lined polygon covered with complicated braiding from which a small crosspiece of gold threads dangled like a tassel at the end of a long, too thin cord. It was a new hat: the visor gleamed. (1964: 28).

And doesn’t Steinbeck expand our geographical knowledge of the Salinas Valley when he opens East of Eden with this description: The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay … . 11 Goffman cites the BBC’s Goon Show scripts (1952–1960), 121, for this reference.

22

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill came up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with white sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone. There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot. (2003: 3–4).

That knowledge of regional geography could (or should) be supplemented by the study of fiction is buttressed by geographers themselves. According to Douglas C.D. Pocock’s “Geography and Literature,” a session of the 1972 meeting of the International Geographical Union was devoted to the “use of the regional novel in teaching regional geography” (1982: 88). This idea was supported by the noted geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, who asserts that the Victorian novel should be considered as “a model for the regional geographer” (1982: 89).12 Pocock also notes geographer J.W. Watson’s claim that “in over forty years of active writing … [I] never … published a single piece without appeal to imaginative literature” (1982: 89). Now, having made our case for the essential cross-hatchery of fiction and nonfiction, let us return to Austin’s citation of Hippolytus’s line: “my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not.” Judith Butler suggests that this ‘backstage artiste,’ an artiste who does not necessarily obey the dictates of the tongue, is the body and the unconscious. Such a suggestion calls for a theoretical understanding of the place of the body and the unconscious as they exist in a tri-partite arrangement with consciousness. As for consciousness, try as it might, it can never “completely eradicate the unconsciousness,” states Ben Highmore in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: Freud’s examples of parapraxes (slips of the tongue, bungled actions and so on) are evidence of the unconscious exerting itself on everyday consciousness. Indeed, the whole of psychoanalysis can be seen as explaining and treating the symptomatic irruptions of unconscious material as they press upon ordinary consciousness: obsessions, repetitions, remembered dreams, sublimations – not to mention the vast symptomology of the ordinary and extraordinary instances of neurosis and psychosis. (2002: 164).

This relentless capacity of the unconscious to ‘press upon’ the conscious causes ‘ordinary consciousness’ to be placed within a perilous state of constantly being tipped asunder and infiltrated by agents of the unconscious: ‘slips of the tongue, 12 Pocock cites Tuan’s “Literature and Geography: Implications for Geographical Research.” In Ley, D. and Samuels, M.S., editors, Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems. (Chicago, Maaroufa Press, 1978).

Speech Acts

23

bungled actions, and so on.’ Indeed, it could be argued that there is no such thing as ‘ordinary consciousness,’ given that it is so frequently inflected by ‘symptomatic irruptions of unconscious material … obsessions, repetitions, remembered dreams, obsessions.’ One could append to this an argument that the very existence of a socalled ordinary consciousness (or indeed any consciousness at all) is of course quite extraordinary. As for the body, referencing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s “work on the embodied mind,” the geographer Adam Moore obliquely underscores Butler’s claim that a sole focus on consciousness simply occludes the necessary functions of the somatic and the unconscious: “they [Lakoff and Johnson] contend that cognitive science has demonstrated that: (1) the mind is inherently embodied; (2) thought is mostly unconscious; and (3) abstract concepts are largely metaphorical” (2008: 215–216).13 The first two stipulations substantiate the core of Butler’s claims while the third undermines both Austin’s admittedly tentative and Searle’s resolutely irrefrangible claims. This induction by cognitive scientists of the body and the brain into the essential operations of reason undercuts any construal of the performative speech act as an action solely adjudicated by the dictates of a disembodied reason. It also provides a scientific underpinning to Butler’s claim that the body, along with its somewhat undependable doppelganger, the unconscious, must be considered if one is to institute a viable and valid theory of speech acts. Bolstering such claims, an essay by Jason Lim in Geographies of Sexualities emphasizes the innate indeterminacy of the body and its affects. Citing Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Lim writes that The question of what a body can do is an open question because of the indeterminacy of affect: ‘no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of.… You do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.’ A body’s affects – its capacities for action and relation – are indeterminate, in part, because these capacities are constantly changing. (2007: 55).14

But it is not only that the body in and of itself is constantly changing; it is also changing because it interacts with other bodies (bodies which themselves are also constantly changing): “They [bodies] change because they are the outcome of the interactions and encounters the body has with other bodies” (Lim 2007: 55). If bodies are indeed such sites of indeterminacy, and if they are so mobile, then hooking theoretical constructs onto them must be innately problematic. And, if such is the case, then it becomes incumbent upon any theorist attempting to create 13 Moore references Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. 14 Lim quotes Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. (San Francisco: City Lights), 125.

24

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

a foundation for her theory to at least reckon with this problem. Otherwise, how can the theory be considered valid? But Butler cuts even deeper into the viability of Austin’s theory when she questions the ontology of any subject who might perform any speech act. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler’s questioning of normative gendering leads her to question the “metaphysics of substance,” as she calls it, citing Nietzsche, as well as Michael Haar’s “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language. Haar argues that a number of philosophical ontologies have been trapped within certain illusions of “Being” and “Substance” that are fostered by the belief that the grammatical formulation of subject and predicate reflects the prior ontological reality of substance and attribute. These constructs, argues Haar, constitute the artificial philosophical means by which simplicity, order, and identity are effectively instituted. In no sense, however, do they reveal or represent some true order of things. (1990: 27–28).15

Lining up subject to substance and predicate to attribute in parallel formations and then calling into question their truth value seems to drive a fissure into the very idea of a subject who could perform any speech act, felicitous, infelicitous, or any other kind that may fall between Austin’s binary. As Butler puts it, “If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility” (1990: 32; italics, Butler). Here we should take note that Butler specifically calls into question the substantive integrity of man and woman as nouns; this emphasis calls to mind the ancient conflation between being and being, that is being as noun, whether “it” be ‘revealed’ or ‘represented’ via gender, sex, race, or simply name, and being as verb, whether “that” be ‘revealed’ or ‘represented’ via thinking, running, having sex, or speaking one’s name. Heidegger parses this difference in Being and Time by stating that “The ‘essence’ of this [human] being lies in its to be. The whatness (essentia) of this being must be understood in terms of its being (existentia) insofar as one can speak of it at all” (1996: 39 [42]).16 Basically, the question boils down to: are we nouns or are we verbs? That is, are we constituted as nouns or do we operate as verbs? Or is this a false choice and the correct answer is a both/and solution: we are constituted as noun/substances and we operate as verbs/actions. Heidegger seems to favor the last option, as he states that ‘whatness … must be understood’ 15 Michael Haar’s “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language” was published in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Edited by David Allison (New York; Delta, 1977). Butler cites 17–18. 16 Heidegger appends a footnote to the first sentence: “that it ‘has’ to be; definition.”

Speech Acts

25

in relation to existence; in other words, the noun (being, substance) can only be understood in terms of its relation to its verb (being, action), or substance can only be determined by its relationship to action, or, rather, in action. This schema would seem to leave the ontology of Austin’s speech act theory intact, as a speaker (noun/ subject) would be understood in relation to speaking (verb/predicate). However, in Gender Trouble, Butler takes her argument in a different direction, turning to Nietzsche instead of Heidegger: The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.’ In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (1990: 33).17

Now if ‘the deed is everything,’ yet the subject performing the deed is ‘a fiction,’ then who is it that does the deed? Or is it that the words and actions themselves constitute the deed and need no doer to instantiate themselves? In other words, is it, as Wittgenstein famously states, that “Words are deeds”? But the prisoner languishing in jail knows that it was the judge pronouncing the sentence that put him in a cell. If that performative act had been performed by the bailiff, the janitor, or the prosecutor, the prisoner could have ignored the sentence; being that it was the judge who made the utterance, the prisoner had to obey it. And if the prisoner bases an appeal on the precedence of Nietzsche stating that doers are mere fictions appended to deeds and therefore a judge has no factuality as a doer, the judge in this case could agree but still decide that his deed of sentencing the prisoner will stand and cite Nietzsche’s privileging of the deed. In similar fashion, if a fan screams “You’re out!” the baseball player can shrug it off; but if the umpire makes that call, the player must trudge to the bench, out, indubitably. And if the coach tries to attribute a fictional quality to the umpire (“You are as nothing!” or something to that effect), the ump can concur, but still allow his deed to stand within the parameters of Nietzsche’s schema. This issue of destabilized subjectivity also focuses attention on the power relations underling the construction of subjectivity: The concept of performativity recognizes that ‘the subject’ is constituted through matrices of power/discourse, matrices that are continually reproduced through processes of resignification, or repetition of hegemonic gendered (racialized, sexualized) discourses … . Butler profoundly challenges traditional notions of human identity, moving away from treating identity as a natural attribute 17

Butler cites On the Genealogy of Morals, 45.

26

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography to recognizing that there is no foundational moment in the doing of identity. Subjects continually perform identities that are prescribed by hegemonic discourses. (Nelson 1999: 337; italics, Nelson).

Here is where we can note that Butler and Foucault have been linked to undermine traditional performances of identity. Following this move, performativity can be used to unpack issues regarding the performance of race, sex, the nation-state, and so on. Butler’s work on the performance of gender threw open the doors of what had been a rather narrowly circumscribed speech act theory allowing it to have a much more expanded range of application. For her part, Butler directly addresses the implications of the embodiment of language as well as the incorporation of the unconscious into the thinking processes appended to language. She claims that the exclusion of any consideration of both the instability inherent to the body and the ‘undertext’ of the unconscious following from Austin’s construal of the speech act unsettles the claims he makes for speech act theory from their foundation and sends them crashing. In her response to Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body, Butler claims that: When the body speaks, it fails to fulfill the claims made on behalf of consciousness. But the body is not “outside” the speech act. At once the organ of speech, the very organic condition of speech, and the vehicle of speech, the body signifies the organic conditions for verbalization. So if there is no speech act without speech, and no speech without the organic, there is surely no speech act without the organic. But what does the organic dimension of speech do to the claims made in speech, and on behalf of speech? (2007: 144).

What Butler goes on to argue is that the claim at the center of speech act theory – that the speech act represents “cognitive intention” – is intrinsically entangled with the organic, the organic being necessary for the performance of such acts (2007: 145). Such a construct which presumes “a relation between body and language … puts into crisis the very relation of representation presumed by the sovereign and intentional ‘I’” (Butler 2007: 145).18 This involvement of the body with language and, via extension, with the performative aspect of speech acts, necessarily destabilizes the claims made by speech acts because the body carries with it “unconscious fantasy” and so “works precisely against [cognitive] intention” (Butler 2007: 147). The body signifies what is unintentional, what is not admitted into the domain of “intention,” primarily longings, the unconscious and its aims. Unconscious aims, 18 The issue of Butler, subjectivity, and performativity are addressed by Moya Lloyd in “Performativity, Parody, Politics.” Theory Culture Society. 1999, 16, 195–213, and by Lise Nelson in “Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity.” Gender, Place & Culture, 6: 4, 331–353.

Speech Acts

27

although precisely not “intentional,” belong to the “I.” Being an unintegrated assemblage of conscious and unconscious, the “I” cannot stand knowingly for itself. Or when it claims to stand for itself … it finds that it has not taken stock of the full range of aims by which its actions are motivated, and it cannot. (Butler 2007: 147; italics, Butler).

It cannot take ‘stock of the full range of aims by which its actions are motivated’ precisely because this construal of the “I” has relegated the unconscious and its partner, the body, to the uncharted (and perhaps unchartable) realm of the ‘backstage artiste.’ Miller brings our attention to the footnote that accompanies Austin’s mention of this ungovernable artiste: this “odd and obscure footnote” obfuscates the thrust of the expulsion of the dramatic by stating that while Austin does not ban “‘all offstage performers – the lights men, the stage manager, even the prompter,” he does object to the presence of “certain officious understudies, who would duplicate the play [in this case, Hippolytus]’” (2001: 33).19 Well, this is certainly odd. According to the footnote, the words spoken by Hippolytus are acceptable and should be included within the sphere of speech act theory; in fact, they are cited by Austin himself! The various back-stage technicians are permitted ingress as well, granting actuality to the realm of the wings, the flies, the light board, the guys and stays, and so on. Does this liberality extend to the make-up artist, the costume designer, and the pyrotechnics expert who may create combustible spectacles such as clouds of smoke and balls of fire? One assumes so, even though this opens the door to counter-worlds which distort reality while inventing alternate versions of actuality. But why does Austin ban ‘certain officious understudies, who would duplicate the play’? After all, understudies are typically lowly players, underpaid, and rarely get the opportunity to even grace the stage: what is the danger here? The subterranean duplication of the play must be the culprit. Picture it: ‘officious’ understudies, an entire troupe of such offbeat types, replicating the play in a dim underground chamber several levels below the ‘legitimate’ stage: might this be a case of what de Certeau calls “silent technologies [that] determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions”? (2002: 66). But if these underground artistes are merely duplicating the play, what is the problem? Indeed, isn’t that their assigned task, precisely so they can be ready in case they are called into service? However, what if they are so ‘officious’ that they take it upon themselves to stage an alternative version of the officially sanctioned performance, a performance which they regard as straying from the true intentionality of the text? What if their interpretation of the text is one that incorporates the unconscious as well as the conscious, the body as well as the mind? And what if this counter-text is the undertext, an underground reversal of the play in which the words are actuated by a wily combination of the organs of the body, driven by its desires, and the antic 19 Miller cites J.L. Austin. How to Do Things with words. 2nd Edition. Editors: J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10.

28

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

felicity of the unconscious, driven by its fancies? Might not this be the true peril to Austin’s schema, a peril in which the chaos of Austin’s undertext disjoints the slippery veneer of the text? “We might also say that, just as the performative presupposes a referential field to act upon and transform, so it also seeks to transform that field in accord with wishes and desires that are carried in language that precede and exceed the strategic intentions of the speaker” (Butler 2007: 150). Here, in Butler’s statement, we can note the correspondence between the first construction (‘the performative presupposes a referential field to act upon and transform’) with the play as it is acted upon the ‘legitimate’ stage, and the further correspondence with the second construction (‘it also seeks to transform that field in accord with wishes and desires that are carried in language, that precede and exceed the strategic intentions of the speaker’) with the play as it performed in the chamber of the counter-textual. This subversion of Austin is made possible by his decision to mark as extraneous (‘parasitic … hollow or void’) that which does not fit within the constraints of his schema. But parasites must live somewhere. They persist and subside, despite Austin’s infelicitous performative attempt to ban them. And from their place of exile, parasites either return or stay put; one way or another, they must be reckoned with, as their ‘duplicitous’ duplications of reality threaten to invade, infect, and/or overthrow any formulation of actuality that has excluded them. And so the officious understudies in their various disguises pervade How to do things with Words, whether manifesting themselves as fictional counter-texts, inserting themselves into Austin’s project via the antic route of his undertext, or as the corporeal body, destabilizing language as it projects its desires onto the transparency of the textual surface, or as the unconscious, slipping beneath Austin’s slippery text while adding layers of subtextual ramifications to ‘intentional’ words meant to operate at only one level. Their duplications of the official text are manholes from which these unruly players emerge, announcing that they have returned from exile to proclaim their fair share of veracity. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, though the parsing out of “fair shares of veracity” calls for a sage who can fuse Searle with Derrida, Butler with Austin, and the officious understudies with the featured players. Such an expansive schema calls for reconciliation: to encompass the entire scope of the speech act in all its permutations requires the both-and approach of the wave-particle model of comprehending light: “If light is sent through a measurement instrument which consists of a double pinhole, then light will appear as a wave phenomenon. If the instrument instead consists of a collection of recoiling scatterers, then the light will be observed as a stream of particles” (Olsson 1975: 419). Applying this schema to language, from one perspective, utilizing Butler’s instruments, the bodily undertext of fiction is privileged; from another perspective, using Austin’s tools, the rational surface-text of non-fiction is privileged. But, being that bodies have minds and minds bodies, would it not make better sense to use both instruments? In this way the fictional and the factual would

Speech Acts

29

be conjoined in balance, or in a dialectical state of tension, and we could continue exploring the ramifications of speech act theory from a place of equipoise. Now that we have seen how Austin’s original theory was unleashed from its sequestered terrain, pried open and let loose, liberated, as it were, by Derrida and Butler; and now that we have also explored some of the analytical apparatus of both Austin’s original application of speech act theory as well as some of its later applications, let us turn to a more general examination of the diffusion of performativity. Dissemination of Performance Speech act theory and its primary functional component, performativity, have been put to work in a wide variety of disciplines during the fifty-five years since Austin first set them forth on their “felicitous” way. The thinker most responsible for this diffusion is undoubtedly Judith Butler: in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in 1990, Butler theorizes gender identity as a series of performative acts that are inscribed upon “the surface of the body … . Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. (1990: 173; italics Butler).

By apprehending that words are “merely” one particular genus of the more general phylum of signs and by inferring that what must apply to words in particular may also apply to signs in general, Butler mobilized speech act theory and “performed” it within the theoretical frameworks of feminism as well as queer theory. However, other strands of thought have been “performing” performance as well, and these can be traced back to a number of disparate sources. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (oddly enough, it appears that Goffman composed this circa 1955, the year of Austin’s Harvard lectures20) focuses on the performance of role-playing in social situations, as well as the “back stage” and the “front stage” of the social context: The perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance; the principles involved are dramaturgical ones. I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and 20 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was first published by the University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Group in 1956. It was subsequently published by Penguin in 1959.

30

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them. (1959: xi; italics, mine).

In a sense, Goffman operates on performative functions at a street level perspective while Austin theorizes at a penthouse level (or, perhaps more aptly, at an ivy tower level), Goffman on situations of concrete behavior, Austin on circumstances of abstract speech; yet their focus on performance per se places their work at least in a conjunctive domains. Meanwhile, anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, in their field studies in Asia and Africa (Geertz in Java, Bali, and Morocco; Turner in Zambia), were noticing the congruence of ritual and performance as well as the multiple ways in which ritual as performance functions: “Since it [ritual] is tacitly held to communicate the deepest values of the group regularly performing it, it has a ‘paradigmatic’ function, in both of the senses argued for by Clifford Geertz. As a ‘model for’, ritual can anticipate, even generate change; as a ‘model of,’ it may inscribe order in the minds, hearts, and wills of participants” (Turner 1982: 82; italics and quote marks, Turner). This is a construction comporting nicely with Austin’s speech act theory, as it allows for acts that can make things happen, i.e., that can ‘generate change,’ as well as ‘inscribe order.’ But of course its provenance is far removed from Oxford, and Austin’s schema does not seem to have much of a link to the work of either Turner or Geertz, let alone any sort of decisive causal connection to them. Turner’s partnership with theatre director and performance theorist Richard Schechner allied academic anthropology with the performance work of one of the foremost practitioners of American avant-garde theatre. The two men worked together, synthesizing ritual and text as well as anthropology and theatre into a new field that ultimately came to be called Performance Studies. In his forward to Schechner’s Between Theater and Anthropology, Turner sets this alliance within an autobiographical frame: Almost by chance, though we had read snatches of each other’s publications, Schechner and I met a few hours before Clifford Geertz’s 1977 Trilling Lecture (for which I was a commentator) in New York, poured out on and to one another, and began a relationship that has had me performing ethnographic texts of rituals and ‘social dramas’ with drama as well as anthropology students in New York, and Schechner giving lectures on Indian folk and Japanese traditional theater to anthropological and other ‘academic’ audiences in the United States and elsewhere (1985: xii).

For his part, Schechner states that performance is “an inclusive category” that includes “plays, games, sports, performance in everyday life, and ritual” (1998: 357–358). Here, of course, we can trace the lineage from Goffman, and, indeed, Goffman was a visiting faculty member in the Performance Studies department of NYU, where Schechner has taught since 1967. Schechner adds that “Performance

Speech Acts

31

studies is unfinished, open, multivocal, and self-contradictory. Thus any call for or work toward a ‘unified field’ is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of the fluidity and playfulness fundamental to performance studies” (1998: 361). All this is well and fine, as far as it goes; however, it does add weight to my contention that any definitional stability to the terms “performance” and “performative” is bound to be wobbly, yielding to the oncoming traffic of differentiated meanings and temporary construals. Again, there does not seem to be any direct continuity between Austin’s work and that of Turner and Schechner’s. However, we can imagine that the banishment of fiction and plays from a theoretical framework would not sit well with those who have focused their lifework on the drama of the ritual and the ritual of the drama. This lack of continuity can be confusing, in that any mention of performance theory or performativity ends up leading to ambiguity, as no clear-cut referent is tethered to these terms, though I would say that performance theory would generally be linked to the anthropological-dramaturgical while performativity would be linked to speech act theory and the philosophy of language. Still, this situation makes for some confusion, creating a somewhat opaque theoretical nexus for performativity, simultaneously referring to too much and yet not enough.21 There does seem to be a wide gap between Austin’s theory of performance and performance as enunciated by Peggy Phelan, one of the most important thinkers in the Turner-Schechner lineage and a former professor in the Performance Studies Department of NYU. Her construal of the temporality of performance seems diametrically opposed to the understanding of time in relationship to the performative in both Austin’s and Derrida’s construal of the same. “Performance’s life is in the present,” she states in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993: 146). In contradistinction to this, Austin and Derrida perceive the performance of a speech act as having repercussions through time, both back to its antecedent from which it draws its citational quality and forward as the successful speech act inscribes itself in actions occurring in time. But Phelan is describing something altogether different: she is referring to literal performances or what used to be called happenings. These are conceived of as occurring once, never to be repeated, as if their existence is written indelibly on one moment in time. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations; once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its

21 For a generally thoughtful and comprehensive, but I think far too tidy, overview of the definitional problem, see the introduction to Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, by Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim and Claire Waterton. It’s interesting to note that though Austin is referenced in this introduction, he is cited in none of the twelve essays in this collection.

32

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology … becomes itself through disappearance. (Phelan 1993: 146; italics, Phelan).

Phelan’s conception of the performance is one subsumed in a purity usually associated with regimes of strict asceticism, a stand-alone world outside of any “impurities” associated with media dissemination or replication. However, the citational reiteration necessary to the performative speech act must exist in a regime of discourse circulating precisely in a domain dependent on the dissemination of representations of representations. No wonder there’s conflation and confusion with that wobbly term, “performance.” As Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury put it, “A concept which allows such latitude of interpretation is not always easy to work with: it can simply become a kind of dump, a site which simply signals what is or what is not of interest” (2000: 419). Add to this, that the lexical dimension of “performance” is polyvalent, and confusion piles on conflation, resulting in befuddlement. As Catherine Bell puts it: The term “performance” harbors some basic ambiguity. The oldest meanings of the noun denote the accomplishment or execution of a specified action, most notably a command or a promise. Similarly, performance has also come to mean the enactment of a script or score, as in a theatrical play or musical recital. More recent uses, however, emphasize a type of event in which the very activity of the agent or artist is the most critical dimension and not the completion of the action. (1998: 205).

Though I could certainly be mistaken, as this is denotative and connotative terrain fraught with peril, I would say that the first meaning articulated by Bell aligns with Austin’s and Derrida’s while the second aligns with Taylor’s and Schechner’s. The third meaning (i.e., ‘More recent uses … ’) seems to comport more with the term “the performative” rather than with “performance” per se; however, it seems to me that anything truly performative would have to lead to the completion of an action and not simply gesture “actively” in that direction. But, the main point I wish to make here is that somewhat of a lexical abyss is associated with this terminology and that unless otherwise indicated, I will generally be referencing Austin’s schema (and the work deriving from his schema) when I use the term. The sociologist, Jeffrey C. Alexander, has also utilized performance to an extensive degree in his work. And, at least to a certain extent, he seems to have attempted to construct a macro-performance theory of society to complement Goffman’s micro perspective: while Goffman zooms in to the minutiae of daily life, Alexander pulls back to take in society en masse. “I will develop a systematic, macro-sociological model of social action as cultural performance,” states Alexander in “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy” (2004: 529). In this article, Alexander develops a performative reading of such social performances:

Speech Acts

33

Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display to others the meaning of their social situation. This meaning may or may not be one to which they subjectively adhere; it is the meaning that they, as social actors, consciously or unconsciously, wish to have others believe. In order for their display to be effective, actors must offer a plausible performance, one that leads those to whom their actions and gestures are directed to accept their motives and explanations as a reasonable account … . Successful performance depends on the ability to convince others that one’s performance is true, with all the ambiguities that the notion of aesthetic truth implies. (2004: 529–530).

We should note here that aesthetic truth has no bearing whatsoever on Austin’s construal of performativity: the umpire calling “out!’ or the bride and groom saying their “I do’s” can do so in the ugliest fashion imaginable and still create a successful performance, given that they are the appropriate actors in the appropriate circumstances. Bourdieu points this out in Language and Symbolic Power: “By trying to understand the power of linguistic manifestations linguistically, by looking in language for the principle of logic and effectiveness of the language of institution, one forgets that authority comes to language from outside” (1991: 109). However, Bourdieu mistakenly attributes such a linguistic myopia to Austin: “This is the essence of the error which is expressed in its most accomplished form by Austin … when he thinks he has found in discourse itself – in the linguistic substance of speech as it were – the key to the efficacy of speech” (1991: 107, 109). But Austin repeatedly emphasizes the dependence of the successful speech act (its felicity, its performativity) on appropriate speakers in appropriate circumstances. It doesn’t even matter for Austin whether others “believe” these utterances to be true: the truth of the utterances lies in the appropriateness of their contextual frame: if a speech act, insincere as it may be, leads to the designated action necessarily hinged to it, it is, ipso facto, true. But then of course someone would have to believe it for its hinged action to ensue, so perhaps there is no impasse between Austin and Alexander in this matter after all. Still, the only point I wish to make is that Alexander has used performance as a primary component in his work, thus further expanding the range of performativity. Just as Butler and others moved speech act theory and performatives into a restless encounter with the body and the unconscious, geographers have had to acknowledge that other factors besides a hegemonic rationalistic totality have inflected the practices of cartography (see Chapter 3 for more on this). We have also indicated ways in which contextual plasticity have problematized speech act theory: this concern will be familiar to anyone who has followed the attempts of geographical theorists to nail down such polymer terms as territory, place, region, and space. Now, our first job accomplished, at least to some degree, let us turn to science in general before proceeding to geography in particular.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

Performing Science Prior to turning our focus to performativity as applied within geography, I think it important to make a more general exploration of performance within science as a whole. Again, I counsel some patience while we tread through this water: the strictly geographical domain is coming, and soon. Science, considered by many the discipline which should or indeed does steadfastly monitor the domain of the irrefutable and irrefragable, is notoriously replete with numerous instances of conflation between fact and fiction as well as numerous acts of performance. Generations of scientists penned tracts and treatises establishing or augmenting the ‘truth’ about ether and phlogiston, spontaneous combustion, the analysis and treatment of the humours, and so on. But then our common understanding of epistemology may be entirely unhinged by the artificial constraints scientists require to create the necessary contingencies for the performance of the “constructions of facts,” at least as this process is described by the sociologist of science, Bruno Latour. Scientific facts, according to Latour, arise out of the rigorously designed and highly constricted parameters of experiments under tightly controlled laboratory conditions: “Facts were facts – meaning exact – because they were fabricated – meaning that they emerged out of artificial situations” (2005: 90). In short, they are performed. Latour destabilizes our dependence on matters of fact on at least two fronts: first by reminding us that scientific facts are only made demonstrable by the human construction of ambiances in which facts can be brought forth into the undetermined space of the experimental field, tested, and either confirmed or falsified; and, secondly, that it is only by a linguistic agreement that the term ‘fact’ refers to an entity that can only emerge out of such contingencies: “Matters of fact do not describe what sort of agencies are populating the world any better than the words ‘social’, ‘symbolic’, and ‘discursive’ describe what it is a human actor” (2005: 110). That scientists in other disciplines also construct their objects of study is bolstered by J. Nicholas Entrikin in his book, The Betweenness of Place: “The ‘object’ of special histories is to some extent ‘constructed’ by historians in the same way that the geographer may be said to ‘construct the ‘objects’ of place and region ... ‘Facts’ are not given, but rather are constructed in relation to specific cognitive interests” (1991: 87, 95). Latour goes on to reject the idea that the fusion of the artificial and the confirmable leads to a collapse of knowledge; rather, it leads to a scientific mind-set attuned to a method by which we can learn “how to feed off uncertainties” while rejecting the rush to shatter uncertainties through “premature” processes of “unification into matters of fact” (2005: 115). Such feeding off of uncertainty leads to an understanding of scientific knowledge as

36

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

not something that is once and forever concretely realized, but as something that transforms performatively over time. In Reassembling the Social, Latour invokes multiple examples from multiple disciplines to show that scientific theories are not held in iron-clad perpetuity but instead are highly negotiated and swiftly evolving: spermatozoids used to be obstinate little machos swimming forcefully toward the powerless ovule; they are now attracted, enrolled, and seduced by an egg the agency of which is becoming so subtle now that it can select the good sperm from the bad – or at least this is what is now disputed in developmental physiology. Genes were supposed to transport information coding for the proteins, but they are also considered as competing with one another for food, thus ruining the information transfer metaphor – or at least this is what is now disputed among some geneticists. Chimpanzees were supposed to be nice sociable partners offering the image of a good savage paradise but now look fiercely competitive, prone to assassination and to devious Machiavellian plots – or at least this is what is disputed in primatology. Topsoil was supposed to be a compact set of inert matter arranged in layers of different colors that soil scientists learned how to map; it now swarms with such a great number of micro organisms that only microzoologists can explain this miniaturized jungle – or at least this is what is disputed among some pedologists. Computers were supposed to be stupid digital machines but now appear to be achieving digitality through a bewildering set of material analog signals bearing no relation with formal calculations – or at least this is what is disputed among some theorists of computing. (2005: 115–116; italics, Latour).

By positing a notion of scientific theory not determined by a tightly bound plexus of matters of fact but as disputed junctions of controversy where theories evolve through contention and over time, Latour reminds us once again of the contingency of fact. He also thoroughly destabilizes the notion that necessity demands an either/or choice between fact and fiction: “While before you had to go back and forth between reality and fiction as if it was the only road worth taking, it is now possible to distinguish the procedures allowing for realities – now in the plural – and those leading to stability and unity” (Latour 2005: 119). But there is never a guarantee that what is now stabilized and unified will not one day become destabilized and fragmented or that what is now indisputable may some day become disputed. Those made uncomfortable by the destabilization of matters of fact should “remember that being a matter of fact is not a ‘natural’ mode of existence but, strangely enough, an anthropomorphism. Things, chairs, cats, mats, and black holes never behave like matters of fact” (Latour 2005: 255). That we may behave like matters of fact – “for political reasons, to resist enquiries,” according to Latour – provides no justification for casting our status as titular factual entities upon every other object in the universe (2005: 255).

Performing Science

37

Latour’s schema is attacked with considerable force by Pierre Bourdieu in his Science of Science and Reflexivity: “By saying that facts are artificial in the sense of manufactured, Latour … intimate[s] that they are fictitious, not objective, not authentic” (2004: 26). Rather than considering a fact as an entity that is constructed (performed) in a “laboratory, itself an artificial universe, cut off from the world in countless ways, physically, socially and also by the capital of instruments that is handled there” (2004: 26), Bourdieu insists that: The fact is won, constructed, observed, in and through the dialectal communication among subjects, that is to say through the process of verification, collective production of truth, in and through negotiation, transaction, and also homologation, ratified by the explicitly expressed consensus – homologein – (and not only in the dialectic between hypotheses and experiment) … . The scientific fact is completely realized as such only when it is constituted by the totality of the field and when everyone has collaborated in constituting it as a known and recognized fact. (2004: 73).

Though Bourdieu seems to have a cogent point here, he has in effect only widened the arena in which the social construction of the fact is performed. Instead of a discrete laboratory manufacturing facts, he posits a discrete society manufacturing facts. That Bourdieu’s expanded entity may be subject to the same constraints as Latour’s restricted entity, albeit on a much vaster scale, seems to have escaped his notice. That this expanded entity has misrecognized fictions and verified them as facts on numerous occasions of course goes without saying. Yet Bourdieu may be right in taking Latour and his colleagues to task, for, as he puts it, applying “the ‘radicality effect’” to their findings and “moving” them beyond a reasonable pale (2004: 26). And Sarah Whatmore may be right when she states in her Hybrid Geographies that “Latour is too chary when situating his own knowledge practices,” but I would still grant Latour et al. the latitude to attempt to transport their findings beyond the site of their origination, provided, of course, that such efforts are subjected to the scrutiny of critical review, which, as Bourdieu’s critique itself instantiates, occurs on a fairly regular basis to any theory that gains either a certain notoriety or assumes the status of a given (2002: 162). Though this essay lacks the space to deal adequately with the history of the fact and its manufacture, a performative vault into a status tantamount to the very stuff of reality, I would like to touch briefly on some intriguing aspects of that history. The story of how facts came to acquire their place as markers of the veridical in the modern era is brilliantly explored by Mary Poovey in her book, A History of the Modern Fact. Poovey cites the creation of double-entry bookkeeping as the prime mover in this endeavor. By “creating the impression of a ‘fit’ between a systematic arrangement of words and the things of the world,” double-entry bookkeeping “weakened the epistemological skepticism associated with Cicero” (1998: 40–41). To achieve a balance in their books, “something in addition to arithmetic” was “required” by double-entry bookkeepers: “to balance the sums on

38

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

the facing pages, the accountant had to supplement records to actual transactions with numbers that had no referent in the company’s business” (Poovey 1998: 54). This turn to fictitious capital resulted in a privileging of “quantification over qualitative descriptions,” even though “that wholly fictitious number – the number imported” into the books did not “refer to a transaction but simply” was inserted “to rectify the books” (Poovey 1998: 54). Poovey points out that the status of the ‘facts’ presented in such books was based on their precision, not their accuracy: “Because double-entry bookkeeping’s sign of virtue – the balance – depended on a sum that had no referent – the number added simply to produce the balance – the rectitude of the system as a whole was a matter of formal precision, not referential accuracy” (1998: 55). Oddly, “The priority accorded to formal precision tended to create what it purported to describe” (Poovey 1998: 56). Such acts of financial transubstantiation were accomplished (performed), according to Poovey, by a hylozoic process whereby fictitious entries, through assuming the title of “Stock,” “Money,” or “Profit and Loss,” were reified as such (1998: 57). That facts exist within the parameters of a fabricated narrative is argued by Stanley Fish in Is There a Text in This Class? Fish claims that identification (or specification of facts) is always within a story. Some stories, however, are more prestigious than others; and one story is always the standard one, the one that presents itself as uniquely true and is, in general, so accepted. Other, nonstandard, stories will of course continue to be told, but they will be regarded as nonfactual, when, in fact, they will only be nonauthorized. (1980: 239).

The notion that fictitious creations are regularly created by capitalists certainly didn’t seem like exotic twaddle to Marx as he worked out his economic theories. The development of credit is tantamount to the development of fiction, according to Marx, as credit is “money bet on production that does not yet exist” (Harvey 1989a: 107). But such a construal of credit, connected as it is to production, is much too conservative to align with the role credit plays in the current era. Harvey reflects this through a reformulation of this definition as it applies to economic conditions in the 1930s by stating that “the capacity for ‘fictitious capital formation’ … is defined as capital that has a nominal money value and paper existence, but which at a given moment in time has no backing in terms of real productive activity or physical assets as collateral” (1989a: 182). In The Limits to Capital, Harvey states that there are “as many different markets for fictitious capital as there are forms of property ownership under capitalism” (1982: 276). Harvey’s inventory includes the stock market (“This market is a market for fictitious capital”), “rights to a portion of future tax revenue,” “property right to commodities,” as well as “rights to land, buildings, natural recourses (oil drilling, mineral exploration rights, etc.” (1982: 276). As paper duplicates (fictional replicas) of these entities trade hands, their fictitious value can increase or decrease without any link to a conception of truth on the ground. Since 1990 the respective speculative bubbles of the dot-com

Performing Science

39

and the housing booms have only served to heighten awareness of the fictional quality of the financial system. Enron executives created fictional value tethered only to the recklessness of their own imaginations (e.g., “the energy company’s use of so-called special purpose entities [SPEs] – enterprises that were effectively controlled by Enron but weren’t consolidated on its balance sheet” (Petruno 2007: C4.), but their downfall doesn’t seem to have retarded the trend towards further fictionalization of capital markets – SIV’s (structured investment vehicles – also created “to hold assets off their [major banks] asset sheets” (Petruno: 2007: C4) are apparently ‘structured’ so circuitously that even their creators do not understand the composition of these ‘vehicles.’ Certainly Marx’s and Harvey’s formulation of fictitious capital has been borne out by the recent Wall Street meltdown. However, let us leave this brief digression into the creation of ‘facts’ in the economic sphere and return to the scientific domain. The conflation of fact and fiction in double-entry bookkeeping and the subsequent expansion of fictitious capital is coincident with the rise of metaphoric thinking in science. The incremental expansion of this rise is noted by geographer Michael R. Curry in his book, The Work in the World – Geographical Practice and the Written Word: It is not simply that we need to see that geographers now and again use metaphor, for discovery or a heuristic device or even as a broad strategic tool. Rather, as Gunnar Olsson said, we must now recognize – as he believes many have – that while to ‘tell the truth is to claim that a = b and be believed when you do it … after Nietzsche everybody knows that a in fact is not b … meaningful truth contains an element of lying, for every truth is formulated around a nucleus of difference.’ (1996: 64).1

Citing a number of scientific theorists such as Charles Bazerman and Joseph Gusfield, Curry buttresses Latour’s contention that science is much more an arena of disputation than of confirmation by arguing that by differentiating “the persuasive elements of the works of science” from “what is left over,” we will arrive at a much more pellucid conception of the “truths of science” (1996: 65).2 But Curry goes on to point out that many scientific writers now acknowledge that even this remainder of ‘what is left over’ once ‘the persuasive elements’ have been pared away, never rests on an unassailable foundation, given that “In the modern world, all language turns out to be persuasive; the scientists’ dreams of a distinction between the demonstrations of science and the persuasions of the rhetor were simply that, dreams … any work is now argued by many to be figural, 1 Curry quotes from an unpublished manuscript of Gunnar Olsson’s titled “Braids of Justification,” 1989. 2 Curry cites Bazerman’s Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science and Gusfield’s “The Literary Rhetoric of Science: Comedy and Pathos in Drinking Driving Research.”

40

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

rhetorical, and intertextual” (1996: 66–67; italics, Curry). Proleptically fending off objections by absolutists, Curry makes the claim that “The recognition that metaphor is all around is one that lately seems to need little argument; we hear about metaphor in all branches of geography. The notion that texts are written to persuade is implicit, or explicit, in most style manuals and works written for aspiring geographers” (1996: 67). Or as Richard Rorty boldly put it: “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons … Truth is not out there” as some sort of distinct and separate realm, divorced from our own linguistic postulation of ‘what counts’ as truth.3 In his Putting Science in its Place – Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, David N. Livingstone makes the seemingly intrepid claim that the truths of science are contingent upon location: “the meaning of scientific theories is not stable; rather, it is mobile and varies from place to place. And that meaning takes shape in response to spatial forces at every level of analysis – from the macropolitical geography of national regions to the microsocial geography of local cultures” (2003: 4). Livingstone justifies this claim by reminding us that science is a human activity and by further noting that “human activities always take place somewhere” (2003: 5). This obvious claim is then complicated by a delineation of place encompassing within it a wide variety of contingent impingements: “where an individual, a social group, a state, or a subcontinent is located in material space is … highly significant” (Livingstone 2003: 6). This does not translate to the strong claim that space or place determines scientific discoveries, but to the weaker yet still noteworthy claim that the discursive space in which ideas flourish or wither (are they successful or unsuccessful performances?) is conditioned by their settings. “They [ideas] must resonate with their environments or they could not find expression, secure agreement, or mobilize followers” (Livingstone 2003: 7). So does this mean that Livingstone believes that scientists must be surrounded by adherents and tokens of acclaim in order to assert their findings, hardly the state of affairs in which many a controversial discovery has been propagated? Not quite: Livingstone acknowledges that the scientist “must also be sufficiently ‘disarticulated’ from their social environments to permit them to reshape the very settings they emerged from. Spaces both enable and constrain discourse” (2003: 7). Though specific places provide specific frameworks in which certain ideas can be posited, once an idea is postulated and then broadcast, it can be transformed by the contingencies of reception: “As ideas circulate, they undergo translation and transformation because people encounter representations differently in different circumstances. If theories must be understood in the context of the period and place they emerge from, their reception must also be temporally and spatially situated” (Livingstone 2003: 11–12). Yet even experiments conducted in the same place can lead to disparate results: “Every experimental physicist knows 3 These quotes are cited by Patricia Cohen in her obituary, “Richard Rorty, Contemporary Philosopher, Dies at 75” New York Times. June 11, 2007. p. A21.

Performing Science

41

that very dissimilar things may happen under what appear to be precisely similar conditions” (Popper: 1944: 133). Given this concession, that dissimilar results can happen under precisely similar conditions, is it any wonder that dissimilar results can happen under precisely dissimilar conditions? In “The Poverty of Historicism,” Karl Popper admits that though “it is an important postulate of scientific method that we should search for laws with an unlimited realm of validity, … . we can never be quite certain if whether our laws are universally valid, or whether they hold only in a certain period (for example, perhaps, only in a period in which the universe expands) or only in a certain region (perhaps in a region of comparatively weak gravitational fields)” (1944: 136–137). Citing the variety of ways in which pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory was received or ‘read’ in England, Livingstone argues that respective ‘readings’ of this theory relied on “distinctive cultures of reading” which “can be detected within regions and between them, within cities and between them, within neighborhoods and between them” (2003: 115). Leading Tories, such as Lord Francis Egerton, found such evolutionary theories “poisonous,” and “warmly embraced … refutations streaming from the pens” of scientists critical of such theories (Livingstone 2003: 115). On the other hand, “progressive Whigs who gathered in the drawing room of Sir John Hobhouse,” found these theories “boldly visionary and gloriously free of bigotry or prejudice” (Livingstone 2003: 115). However, such discrepancies in the reception of theoretical ideas within a relatively homogenous culture are only part of the much thornier nexus of problems Livingstone attempts to unpack. Once the theory of evolution had been formally posited by Darwin via the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and its conclusions distributed throughout the world, the immediate reaction and eventual utilization of the theory also reflected variations tied to the contingencies of place. In Russia, a country with a long history of communalism, mutual aid, and “a political climate favoring cooperation,” scientists tended to embrace “versions of evolution that minimized the role of competition; they remained deeply skeptical of the Malthusian elements in the Darwinian scheme” (Livingstone 2003: 123). Meanwhile, in New Zealand, “Darwinism was espoused because it was seen as justifying an ethnic struggle for life and as legitimizing the settlers’ routing of the Maori” (Livingstone 2003: 122). That similar types of justifications based on the grossest distortions of natural selection were used from the post-bellum United States to Nazi Germany as rationales for everything from segregated soda fountains to mass exterminations is of course widely known. But, oddly enough, such knowledge doesn’t as often lead to the seemingly obvious deduction that science and location are hinged together in a necessary relationship. Much as we might like to think that laboratories, universities, books, and even experimental conclusions exist in a supra-rarified zone outside of the messy webs of pre-existing theories, biases, and superstitions, they emphatically do not; they are no more independent of national prejudices, racial claims, and religious notions than any other intellectual production or scientific performance.

42

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Livingstone buttresses this claim by reminding us that science, along with its attendant construction and dispersal of facts and theories, must be performed in or between sites, and that such sites depend on institutions and social networks which support such endeavors. Research labs, museums, think tanks, and libraries are not stand-alone entities springing up out of nowhere: they require extensive and intensive frameworks of spatial, financial, and epistemological undergirding. It is also within these spaces that students are socialized into their respective scientific communities. Here they learn the questions to be asked, the appropriate methods of tackling problems, and the accepted codes of interpretation. Here decisions are settled about what passes as scientific knowledge, how it should be acquired, and the means by which claims are warranted. In these venues practitioners absorb the core values, convictions, and conventions of their tradition of inquiry. (Livingstone 2003: 18–19).

Though scientific sites share these basic parameters of inquiry, the “site-specific conditions of knowledge making” varies wildly, resulting in practices as disparate in location as “an Isaac Newton conducting light experiments in a darkened room in Trinity College Cambridge, an Alfred Russell Wallace mapping plant and animal distributions in Borneo, or a Josef Mengele carrying out experiments in racial hygiene at Auschwitz” (Livingstone 2003: 19). The apocryphal tale of Newton’s discovery of gravity underneath the apple tree situates the dawning of the theory in situ: place is instrumental here, it is an exigent component of the performance of discovery, the orchard, its tree, and its apple participating in a decidedly direct fashion in Newton’s processes of thought. But does such situating make one wonder what might have happened if Newton had been strolling through open fields that particularly eventful day instead of reclining under that fateful and famous apple tree? This odd but troubling question will be addressed below. We should return here to Popper’s point that even findings replicated in the same sites are not entirely stable. In the provocatively titled “The Truth Wears Off,” an article in the December 13 2010 edition of The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer describes the increasing worry scientists are having regarding the staying power of their “facts.” The “decline effect,” a term used as a stand-in for the erosion of “positive” experimental results over the course of repeated experiments performed by the same scientists in the same lab, “demonstrate[s] the slipperiness of empiricism” (Lehrer 2010: 57). Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard … practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And that is why the decline effect is so troubling … . The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it

Performing Science

43

can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. (Lehrer 2010: 57).

If that corollary is so – ‘just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true’ – then science is on shaky ground indeed, no matter where it’s performed. Lehrer mixes into his skeptical stew “publication bias,” a term he uses to describe “the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results” (Lehrer 2010: 55). This tendency becomes even greater of course when commercial enterprises, such as pharmaceutical companies, have a stake in experimental findings, but publication bias also can be found “in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology” (Lehrer 2010: 55), a notion that makes one wonder if Lehrer’s skepticism holds steady here, as psychology and ecology are (or least can be) enmeshed, to one degree or another, in large corporate interests. However, the central point here is the one previously mentioned in regards to Popper’s comments: if experiments performed at the same site frequently do not arrive at the same conclusions, then we can expect that experiments done at dissimilar sites will have even greater trouble maintaining “stable” results. The reminder that science is directed, at least to a certain extent, by the demands of corporations, may be a notion anathematic to those who believe in a pure and disinterested science, but aligns neatly with those who view science with an understanding that science responds precisely to such interests. Harvey, for instance, claims that science is under harness “to those who are in control of the means of production,” a perfectly obvious statement to those who follow the tenets of Marx (Harvey 1972: 2). “The coalition of industry and government heavily directs scientific activity. Thus manipulation and control [of science] mean manipulation and control in the interests of a particular group in society rather than in the interests of society as a whole” (Harvey 1972: 2). Lehrer’s reporting buttresses Harvey’s “radical” claim: for instance, Lehrer tell us that John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, recently found that “out of four hundred and thirty-two” scientific studies “on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women,” only “one was consistently replicable” (Lehrer 2010: 56). Ioannidis puts the blame on financial as well as psychological motivations: scientists and the institutions they represent may have a financial interest in the outcomes of their research, and a stubborn desire to hold fast to claims that have been disproven causes findings to outlive their own “truth value.” Once formulated in sites, theories are further limited by geographic scope. The expectation that scientific notions will be broadcast unencumbered by distortions or misunderstandings requires a belief in absolute norms of understanding unperturbed by spatial, social, economic, or epistemological discrepancies. Such a smooth disbursement almost never occurs. As the geographer John Agnew puts it in his essay, “Know-Where: Geographies of Knowledge of World Politics,” “Knowledge creation and dissemination are never innocent of at least weak ontological commitments, be they national, class, gender, or something else”

44

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

(2007: 141). Agnew references an example of an ontological commitment of the national kind from a paper by Pamela Asquith, ”Japanese Science and the Western Hegemonies: Primatology and the Limits Set to Questions;” here cultural emphases and presuppositions seem to have profound determinative effects on scientific findings: Perspectives on the “nature of nature” reflect unarticulated assumptions about the roles of groups and individuals in the behavior of apes and monkeys. In Japan, primatologists engage in long-term observation of groups with an emphasis on inter- and intra-group relations, ranking, and individual to group affiliation. In Canada, the focus lies in intense short-term observation of adaptive behaviors of individuals. These differences do not seem to be coincidental. Japanese human society is famously group-oriented compared with Canada or the United States … this study is an arresting example of how culturally embedded science can be and thus how knowledge is not constructed in the same way in all places even when certain common canons of observation and recording information are still operative. (2007: 143).

While elsewhere in his essay, Agnew warns of the possible negative effects of adhering to extreme classification schemes along ethnic and national lines (referencing Stephen E. Bronner’s citation of “right-wing pre-occupation with ‘Jewish physics,’ ‘Italian mathematics,’ and the like” in Bronner’s book Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement), he still maintains there is such a thing as a “geography of knowledge” which entails several different understandings of how knowledge is created in specific sites and how it is then transformed as it circulates. Agnew delineates five separate geographies of knowledge (2007: 141). The first is the ethnographic variety, illustrated by the example from Asquith’s paper of the culturally inflected discrepancies between the findings of Japanese and Canadian scientists in their observations of primates. The ethnographic geography of knowledge focuses on variations in knowledge production and consumption as they relate to “the venues and sites in which” they are created and consumed (Agnew 2007: 142). “Border thinking” is the term Agnew adopts for the second variety of geographic epistemology; knowledge implicated in colonial practices falls under this heading: “From this viewpoint, the modernity associated with Europe can no longer be imagined as the only home to epistemology” (Agnew 2007: 143). Though closely related to the ethnographic variety of knowing, “border thinking” is differentiated from the wider cultural net inherent to the first genus by specifically reflecting “particular colonial histories and how these stimulate indigenously generated local content” in response to knowledge that had been transferred to them from their former imperial masters (Agnew 2007: 144). The third station in Agnew’s taxonomy is a place-inflected epistemology: as particularities of specific sites impact ways of knowing, knowledge itself gains a local character. Agnew’s geopolitical perspective on this leads him to

Performing Science

45

conclude that “Americans and U.S. policy makers bring to their actions in the world a whole set of presuppositions about the world that emanate from their experiences as ‘Americans,’ particularly narratives about U.S. history and the U.S. ‘mission’ in the world.” This tendency is not an exclusively American one: Agnew references the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose presuppositions about the world were heavily impacted by being a German living from 1889 to 1976 and thus a member of the generation whose particular experiences included living during the regimes and administrations of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the occupation of the Allies, and the Federal Republic of Germany. To claim that such contingencies made no difference to Heidegger’s epistemological presuppositions would be very problematic, especially when we recall that Heidegger’s ontological schema was rooted in a belief that Germany’s primary historical task was a rejuvenation of a Pre-Socratic ontology and that he believed (at least for a period of time, the extent of which is a matter of intense controversy) that the Nazis were specifically ordained to complete such a task.4 A more “innocent” version of this variety of geographically inflected knowledge accumulation is supplied by Trevor Barnes in his description of David Harvey’s evolution as a thinker: Knowledge never arrives from pure brainpower. It is the outcome of grounded practice. Scientists are not faceless organs of scientific rationality, but real people with particular kinds of socially defined bodies, histories, skills, and interests. Furthermore, those characteristics make a difference to the kind of knowledge produced. For example, that Harvey grew up during the Second World War, went to Cambridge University during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was at Bristol University for much of the 1960s, shaped the writing of Explanation in Geography. The book was not a bolt out of the blue, nor the distillation of a pure form of rationality measured drop by drop on to the page, but arose in large part from the social practices of Harvey living at a particular time and place. (2006: 30).

On the other hand, Barnes cautions against a reading of intellectual products as fully determined by time and place: “Lives and books are complicated, possessing their own agency, always resisting any final definitive statement” (2006: 30). Yet to omit geography from the set of determining effects of knowledge production is

4 There are many books on Heidegger’s complicated relationship with the Nazis, among them: Bambach, Charles. Heidegger’s Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2003); Sluga, Hans Heidegger’s Crisis. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993); Farias, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism. Translated by G. Ricci (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1989); and Derrida, Jacques; Of Spirit – Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989).

46

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

an omission without justification, reflecting the illusion that knowledge pops up out of nowhere. Agnew’s fourth geography of knowledge is the result of the “spatial diffusion” of concepts, ideas, and institutional structures from hegemonic powers to subordinate nation-states: “elites (and populations) accept and even laud ideas and practices about world politics and their place in it that they import from more powerful countries and organizations” (2007: 145). Referencing the Cold War as well as the current contest between “militant Islam and the U.S. government,” Agnew posits both as examples of conflicts that to a great degree revolve around a battle over the spatial diffusion of ideas (2007: 145). Agnew stipulates that a “geography of reading” constitutes the fifth geographical version of epistemology (2007: 145). On a textual level, knowledge is modified by translation as books move between languages and across borders. On an ideological level, ideas are modified as they are recruited by various actors across the globe for their particular purposes. “In a sense, therefore, knowledge is made [performed] as it circulates; it is never made completely in one place and then simply consumed as is elsewhere” (Agnew 2007: 145–146). Here we can think back to Livingstone’s citation of the modifications Darwin’s theories underwent as they moved from place to place. Agnew makes no pretensions of having devised a total inventory of the typologies of the geographies of knowledge or their respective interrelationships; neither does he privilege one over another; indeed, he acknowledges that any “relatively complete account would need to interrogate, relate, and then combine all of them;” but he has indicated some of the main ways in which knowledge is inflected and modified as it moves its performative settings about the globe. Disbursement of knowledge is also rendered problematic by the relative ability and capacity to replicate the experimental conditions necessary to confirm or possibly disprove findings made elsewhere – i.e. to perform them. Such capacities and abilities depend on a wide number of variables; it’s not only that what may have been possible to do in say, a Manchester lab in the 1700s may have been inconceivable in Madagascar, China, France, or Egypt at the same time, it’s also that, according to Livingstone, the very conception of what science is varies from site to site: “Science is not to be thought of as some transcendent entity that bears no trace of the parochial or contingent. It needs rather to be qualified by temporal and regional adjectives. At one scope of operations, science is always an ancient Chinese, a medieval Islamic, an early modern English, a Renaissance French, a Jeffersonian American, an Enlightenment Scottish thing – or some modifying variant” (2003: 13). Alluding to Thomas Nagle’s notion of the validity of a scientific objectivity founded on a distanced detachment, Livingstone goes on to say that “all of this means that the idea that there is a single, unified scientific rationality is highly dubious. What has been promoted as scientific objectivity, as the ‘view from nowhere,’ turns out to have always been a ‘view from somewhere’” (2003: 184). For how could it be otherwise? “It is only when the practices and procedures that are mobilized to generate knowledge are located – sited – that

Performing Science

47

scientific inquiry can be made intelligible as a human undertaking” (Livingstone 2003: 86). As we have already hinted, political as well as economic expediency puts its imprimatur on science, making the pure pursuit of knowledge more an ideal than a reality. The objects of research are frequently tethered to state funding and so do not arise out of a simple and purified scientific curiosity. That state involvement and governmental interference, with their various discourses of power, might not only skew the findings of science but set an agenda for the initial choice of objects of scientific inquiry prior to any conclusionary findings should come as no surprise to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the history of science. From Calvin’s co-option of scientific ‘miracles’ as underwriters of God’s providence to the American government’s harnessing of science for the creation of the atom bomb in the Manhattan Project, discourses of power tied to nexuses of control within the state and the church have skewed science in both its objects of research and its findings. The university, though conceived of (at least in its modern incarnation) as a neutral arbitrator of knowledge, is frequently prone to skew its research to exigencies of funding. In a New Yorker article of October 23 2006, Anthony Grafton states that “dwindling public support has forced university administrators to look for other sources of funding, and to assess professors and programs through the paradigm of the efficient market. Outside backers tend to direct their support toward disciplines that offer practical salable results – the biological sciences, for instance, and the quantitative social sciences – and universities themselves have an incentive to channel money into work that will generate patents for them” (2006: 87). As donors direct their funding into certain areas, so those areas attract administrative attention and professorial expertise; meanwhile, other areas and avenues of knowledge wither; it would be quite naïve to believe that (possible) objects of research, along with the knowledge generated by such research, will not be effected by such economically-impacted decisions and operations. In short, science is frequently performed within a prescribed and presupposed performative range. More generally, “Science and science policy are deeply social processes, as those who study their social dynamics well know. Scientific knowledge is shaped by the cultural practices of scientists and by the social and political contexts in which research is funded, conducted, evaluated, and disseminated” (Vincent and Finkel 2010: 2). Indeed, how could it not be? Science does not exist on the head of a pin, locked inside a vacuum. It exists in the world and is fraught with both the contingencies and the exigencies of the world. Numerous arbitrary factors can influence the reception of university research as well. In Science of Science and Reflexivity, Bourdieu states that “among physicists, frequency of citation depends on the university to which a scientist is attached, and it is known that a researcher’s symbolic capital and therefore the reception of his work, depends in part on the symbolic capital of his laboratory” (2004: 57). He adds that whatever political leverage scientists manage to muster – whether in or out of academia – also tends to skew the funding of research projects:

48

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography The power that scientific administrators exert over scientific fields, and which, whatever their intentions, is far from being governed by strictly scientific considerations (especially in the social sciences), can always exploit the internal divisions within the fields. And, in these areas as elsewhere, what I call the law of Zhdanovism – the law that those poorest in specific capital, in other words those least eminent on scientific criteria, tend to appeal to external powers to enhance their strength, and even sometimes to triumph, in their scientific struggles – comes into play. (2004: 58).

Whether Bourdieu is wide of the mark by either under- or overstating his case, the gist of his claim is plausible: to believe that such decisions as research funding exist outside the reach of political influence (that is, a “wide” definition of political influence) would be extremely naïve. If this is granted, then it follows that scientific findings as well as the knowledge they produce are contingent, at least to a degree, on a politically tinged decision-making process. However, it does not follow that such findings are necessarily false or lack any substance. But it should make us alert to the high probability that knowledge creation, its performativity, is a highly politicized affair and that many possible avenues to the performance of knowledge are closed due to factors extraneous to what is touchingly referred to as ‘pure science.’ But is this situation anything new? Tracing the university back to its inception, we can note that research as well as teaching have always been inflected by such concerns: the first universities in Paris and Bologna “were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions,” and were for a very long time subservient to the power of the Church and its need to ensure that its universities were loyal institutions whose main business would be the training of theologians who could be trusted as compliant servants of the Church (Grafton 2007: 83). However, though Catholicism has received the brunt of the charge of overstepping its bounds in its negative influence on the development of science, the record of Protestantism has also not been clear of the accusation of using science and the production of knowledge for its own parochial and performative ends. Frequently, such involvement resulted in muddy admixtures of religious creed tinged with scientific findings, or, conversely, scientific practices tinged with religious overtones. For instance, even though such an emblematic Puritan as Cotton Mather was instrumental in introducing the smallpox inoculation into the Massachusetts Colony, he “agreed with common opinion that the epidemic represented a judgment sent upon the land for its sins” (Middlekauff 1971: 357). In The Geographical Tradition, Livingstone recounts a similar admixture in the sermon of one Thomas Doolittle: Numerous sophisticated scientific explanations of earthquakes were advanced and the meteorological events that were believed to herald earth tremors were also catalogued. And yet interwoven with the scientific accounts that might be given of them, many earthquakes were equally regarded as supernatural events; they were indications of divine displeasure, and were therefore the grounds for

Performing Science

49

moral reformation by the creative transformation of mortal dread into godly fear. (1992: 111).

Such linking of catastrophes to God’s retributive wrath will of course already be nauseatingly familiar to those conversant with contemporary fundamentalist rationales of hurricanes, fires, and other disasters, both natural and man-made, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The notion that states skew science will also be nauseatingly familiar to those who have even the faintest knowledge of the gross manipulation of scientific findings (mis-performance) by the Bush Administration. In only one of the numerous instances of the Administration’s warping of legitimate findings regarding climate change, The Washington Post of October 25 2007 reported that the written testimony delivered to Congress by Julie L. Gerberding, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had been heavily impacted by political pressure, shrinking from 12 pages to six after it was reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB removed several sections of the testimony that detailed how global warming would affect Americans. … White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding’s testimony, beginning with a section in which she planned to say that many organizations are working to address climate change but that, “despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed,” and that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public concern.” … OSTP [the Office of Science and Technology Policy] spokeswoman Kristin Scuderi wrote that the president’s science adviser and his aides were trying to “strengthen the testimony, not to remove the weak sections entirely.” (Eilperin 2007).

However, even given the evidence that scientific findings are notoriously and almost continually subject to distortion by leaders of every ideological stripe (e.g., Lysenko’s project under Stalin to parse a Communist from a capitalist biology), the proper question remains: does the fact that the facts of science go through the wringer of political expediency or religious rationale before being delivered to the public nullify those facts themselves? Of course it doesn’t, but it does return us to the question of just how those facts are finally construed into any kind of coherence. And it also returns us to the indisputable evidence that “facts” are often variable from place to place and that what was fact during one period becomes unspeakable nonsense during another as their performative utility is nullified. The ‘fact’ that Africans were of a subhuman variety of the species Homo Sapiens was considered well-nigh irrefutable in every quarter of the socalled civilized world less than two hundred years ago. Scientists did not have to resort to such remote places as Africa to postulate findings stained with racist presuppositions. As late as 1951, the geographer Herbert John Fleure in A Natural

50

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

History of Man in Britain, Conceived as a Study of Changing Relations Between Men and Environments let it be known that the doliochocephalic, dark-haired inhabitants of western Britain – particularly in Wales and western Scotland – had provided the country with important ‘elements in medicine and surgery’. He [Fleure] still suspected that while the preponderance of singing, oratory, and religious zealotry in Wales might be the result of environment, it was a real ‘possibility that racial characteristics may play a part too’. (Livingstone 1992: 288).5

That scientists as celebrated as James Watson still seem to believe such claptrap only testifies to the adhesive power of such “facts” and their capacity to find refuge even in the most educated and “scientific” of human beings. One would think that even the slightest knowledge of the messy history of what we might call the perdurance of fictional facts would alert us to the elusive reliability of fact, but this doesn’t seem to be the case: facts reign supreme, despite their checkered history. The contingent nature of scientific fact is also supported by the evolving “facts” of cosmography and geography. What some believed to be flat is now round. The sun that orbited the Earth is now orbited by the Earth. The East Indies to which Columbus set sail was the West Indies, but of course they weren’t the West Indies until given that title, a fact laminated on those islands by their conquerors and made possible by the power inherent to conquering, that of naming or renaming. What was the Soviet Union is now Russia. ‘Iraq’ did not exist until Britain and France made it so following the conclusion of World War One. That such a catalogue could continue endlessly testifies to the instability of received knowledge and the inability of fact to maintain its stability as new knowledge and revised states of affairs are etched into existence, effaced, and then replaced anew. Indeed, sometimes the only thing that seems to maintain its certitude is the labile itself. Weber discusses an aspect of this problem, at least as he sees it in terms of his historically inflected sociology, in his essay, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science.” “Let us assume that we have succeeded by means of psychology or otherwise in analyzing all the observed and imaginable relationships of social phenomena 5 Livingstone cites H.J. Fleure’s A Natural History of Man in Britain, Conceived as a Study of Changing Relations between Men and Environment (London, 1951) pp. 195, 197. Also note that “in 1929 H.J. Fleure could legitimately consider the politics of head shape in the South Wales coal field: ‘in an industrial district where the crowd psychology is what in politics is called red, or at least pink, the short dark longhead will be likely to vote on the left side of the electorate and may use his traditional oratorical powers to no little purpose.’” This is cited from David Matless’s “The Use of Cartographic Literacy.” From Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove. (Reaktion Books: London, 1999). 207. Matless references Fleure’s “Regional Surveys and Welfare,” South-Eastern Naturalist, 34 (1929) 73–82, 81.

Performing Science

51

into some elementary ‘factors,’ that we have made an exhaustive analysis and classification of them and then formulated rigorously exact laws covering their behavior” (Weber 1949: 75). Here we should retrieve our discussion of context and its properties of infinite regression, which demonstrated that such an exhaustive analysis is a non-starter, as the contextual parameters continually expand, fold over upon themselves, expand once again, ad infinitum. Still, Weber is asking us only to assume that such an analysis has occurred. “As an analytical tool, it would be as useful as a textbook of organic chemical compounds would be for our knowledge of the biogenetic aspect of the animal and plant world. In each case, certainly an important and useful preliminary step would have been taken. In neither case can concrete reality be deduced from “laws” and “factors.” This is not because some higher mysterious powers reside in living phenomena (such as “dominants,” entelechies,” or whatever they might be called). This, however, a problem in its own right [sic]. The real reason is that the analysis of reality is concerned with the configuration into which those (hypothetical!) “factors” are arranged to form a cultural phenomena which is historically significant to us. Furthermore, if we wish to “explain” this individual configuration “causally” we must invoke other individual configurations on the basis of which we will explain it with the aid of those (hypothetical!) “laws.” (1949: 75; italics, Weber).

Weber here, in this final sentence, touches on our “worry” about context, as one configuration requires another, each with its own set of (hypothetical!) ‘laws,’ and so on and so on. Weber goes on to assert that “The significance of a configuration of cultural phenomena and the basis of this significance cannot be derived from and rendered intelligible by a system of analytical laws, however perfect it may be, since the significance of cultural events presupposes a value-orientation towards these events” (1949: 76; italics, Weber). Now, while it seems easy to dismiss Weber’s claims as only relevant to “factors” gleaned through an analysis of cultural phenomena, when we add a caveat that all analysis is undertaken within a culture and so all analysis is circumambulated as well as pervaded through and through by cultural implications, then they become much more difficult to dismiss. One of the problems in capturing and then retaining scientific knowledge may be the media in which such knowledge is first articulated and then transmitted – that is, language itself. Fritz Mauthner, according to Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in their book, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, believed that “the inescapable ambiguity of language permits sufficient clarity to establish a pragmatic unity of purpose but, as an instrument for coming to know and understand the world, language is of very little value” (1973: 128). Language is “eminently qualified to mediate subjective states between individuals – that is, to convey emotions,” but “precisely because it is essentially metaphorical, language is well adapted to poetry, but ill adapted to science and philosophy … . The metaphysical nature of language precludes all univocity and thereby makes any sort of precise scientific knowledge impossible.

52

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Science too is, at best, poetry” (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 128–129). This is so because, in Mauthner’s words: It is impossible to arrest the conceptual content of words permanently. Therefore knowledge of the world through language is impossible. It is possible to arrest the motive content of words. Therefore art is possible through language, verbal art, poetry. (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 129).6

Transposing this admittedly very strong claim to a counterfactual edition of How to do things with Words might well show that Austin could have hit his mark more accurately if he had written a series of interconnecting sonnets instead of a philosophical work! While this supposition may be justifiably branded facetious as well as querulous, that does nothing to negate the underpinnings of Mauthner’s claim: namely, if language is inherently ambiguous and if science is inherently precise, then the capturing of the latter by the means of the former seems ephemeral at best. Austin’s candid difficulties with the subject at hand testify (at least in part) to the linguistic slipperiness Mauthner cites. Of course, scientists, and philosophers (at least those of the analytic camp) can counter this argument by asserting that this is exactly why mathematical and logical symbols are utilized in their disciplines instead of mere words. However, the purchase of these symbols on reality may be every bit, or even more, tenuous than language’s purchase on the same. Ernst Mach approached this problem with a positivist cast of mind and the methodology of a historicist. Though he does not take up Mauthner’s strong claim, he raises other problems for the epistemology of science: The historical investigation of the development of a science is most needful, lest the principles treasured up in it become a system of half-understood precepts, or worse, a system of prejudices. Historical investigation not only promotes the understanding of that which is but also brings new possibilities before us by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental. (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 137). 7

By linking the conventional and the accidental to the existent, Mach destabilizes ‘that which is.’ And since any historical investigation of scientific claims entails an examination of the existent distanced by unspecified numbers of temporal 6 Janik and Toulmin are citing Mauthner’s Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Neue Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1901–1903). Vol. I, 34. 7 Janik and Toulmin are here quoting Mach’s Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargestellt, 5th edition. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1904). 278–279. Translation of this is provided by Thomas J. McCormack, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development. 6th edition with revisions through the 9th German edition. (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960), 316.

Performing Science

53

removes, then historical investigations of ‘that which was’ is necessarily made labile by temporal (as well as conventional and accidental) filters through which we attempt to discern it. Mach seems to support this by stating that: Every unbiased mind must admit that the age in which the chief development of science of mechanics took place was an age of predominantly theological cast. Theological questions were excited by everything and modified everything. (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 137).8

Mach references such concepts as ‘the laws of nature’ and the notion of ‘force’ as supports for his argument. Here we run aground on a nettlesome problem: Mach, operating on the accidental and conventional understanding of ‘that which is’ is attempting an analysis of ‘that which was,’ which, according to his analysis, was also fraught with the unreliability of the accidental and the conventional, in this case, that ‘everything’ in that age was inflected by a ‘predominantly theological cast.’ However, let us suppose that Mach is operating in an age of a predominantly non-theological cast of mind and that, in reality a theological cast of mind actually incorporates a clearer understanding of ‘that which is’ more than a non-theological one. Then, unknowingly, Mach is interpreting the history of science through false lenses. Furthermore, Mach’s acceptance of an ‘in great measure’ contingent understanding of ‘that which is’ necessarily unsettles his understanding both of ‘that which is’ and especially of its counterpart, ‘that which was,’ given that any understanding of the past is filtered through an infinite series of contingentlystructured instances of ‘that which is.’ In addition, we may discover that the scientific frame of mind we are now ostensibly operating under may be every bit as liable to the contingencies of convention and accident as its theological forbearer. Science’s replacement as the guarantor of truth no more guarantees truth than God once did. In his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn supports Mach’s contention that the contingent plays a role in the construction and acceptance of scientific fact: Individual scientists embrace a new paradigm for all sorts of reasons and usually for several at once. Some of these reasons – for example, the sun worship that helped make Kepler a Copernican – lie outside the apparent sphere of science entirely. Others must depend upon idiosyncrasies of autobiography and personality. Even the nationality or the prior reputation of the innovator and his teachers can sometimes play a significant role. (1970: 152–153).9

8 Cited from Mach’s Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargestellt, Mach – 493 (translation 546). 9 For the Kepler connection to sun worship, Kuhn cites E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (rev. ed.; New York, 1932), 44–49.

54

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Kuhn adds that scientists also adopt new paradigms through an “appeal … rarely made entirely explicit … to the individual’s sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic – the new theory is said to be ‘neater,’ ‘more suitable,’ or ‘simpler’ than the old” (1970: 157). He states that faith also plays a major part when a new paradigm is first asserted by a scientist: The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith. (1970: 158).

Such a reliance on faith discloses a concealed link from the modern secular scientist to the theological cast of mind that girded scientists such as Newton as they developed and then broadcast their paradigms. That such things as faith, God, the contingencies of history, or the conventions of society may play roles in the theoretical presuppositions of those who construct scientific facts does not of course transform such facts into fictions. However, it does lend credence to the notion that the fundament of science is much more labile than is usually supposed. That an absolute boundary exists between fact and fiction, the rational and the imaginative, may be more of a fiction than anything else. “The arts and sciences are connected,” states the science fiction author Ray Bradbury in The New York Times of August 22 2007 (Shaftel 2007: B1). “Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination” (Shaftel 2007: B1). Such a construct, placing the imaginative prior to the rational, reverses the dependency of fiction on nonfiction. But is the use of metaphor equivalent to the act of fictionalizing? If one accepts that language, as a system of signs, is metaphorical by its nature, then the paradigmatic metaphors that catalyze the theories of science bear a very strong resemblance to the metaphorical realities that catalyze the fictions of writers. That imagination in the form of metaphorical thinking is the common root of both science and literature testifies to the irrationality of privileging either fiction or nonfiction as the originary and primary tool of thought. And once that irrationality is acknowledged, Austin’s privileging of fact over fiction becomes irrational as well.

PART II GEOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS OF THE PERFORMATIVE

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 3

The Performance of Place The performance of place in its modes of both place creation and place maintenance will form the purview of this chapter. However, prior to proceeding, it may behoove us to inquire as to what exactly we are referring to when we use the word “place.” As a famously wobbly concept, place has been a much maligned and, to a certain odd extent, a quite controversial term among those engaged in discourse concerning geography and those fields contiguous to it, including political science, sociology, urban planning, and philosophy. The inquiry into the meaning of place can be viewed as part and parcel of a much wider inquiry into the fundamental understanding of many primary concepts in geography, for, as Reece Jones puts it: In recent years, there has been a rethinking of a whole range of taken-for-granted categories and concepts in geographical research. Notions of space, place, nature, scale, gender and identity, to name a few, have been revisited. It seems that almost every key analytic concept has been reconstructed and problematized to the point that it is almost impossible to use any of these categories without qualifying them with ‘scare quotes.’ (2009: 174).

Such inquiries have of course been afoot across numerous disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences since at least the mid-1960s, and, on the one hand, a certain quixotic element is inherent in such incessant and restless definitional quests, as any conceptual construal can be undone, once driven into the corner of the infinite regress of battening down the definitional constraints by which it battens down its definitional constraints (and so on), thus leading to a kind of endless somersaulting through terms and categorical frameworks; on the other hand, such inquiries can be extremely fruitful, bearing unforeseen gifts of rigor to terms which had subsisted for ages, suspended upon vague claims to foundational clarity, as well as realigning definitional frameworks which had reified imaginary construals or blocked out disenfranchised groups from gaining purchases upon definitional fields. Place has often been conceived as harboring an affective element. Places, as they exist through the inflections of emotional memory (that is, if indeed they do exist in such a way), are bounded by the experiences they have encompassed within their borders. The “special quality of place,” writes Mike Crang, “created through long-term attachment and the convergence of many factors – the daily rhythms, personal histories and secular and/or religious rituals” leads to a definition of place as a “convergence” and “fusion” of these various quotidian elements into

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

58

a “whole” (2005: 204). Now, though there may be some general truth to what Crang is positing here, isn’t it precisely this type of construal that renders place susceptible to charges of fuzziness? How do we define and measure place if it is bounded by emotional memory and created by the ‘convergence of many factors’? Yet perhaps it is that very incommensurability, the resistance of emotion and memory to calibration, which makes place such a powerful conceptual tool. In Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph quotes the novelist Wallace Stegner as writing that “I still sometimes dream … of a bend in the Whitemud River below Martin’s Dam. Every time I have that dream I am haunted, on awaking, by a sense of meanings just withheld and by a profound nostalgic melancholy … . What interests me is the mere fact that this dead loop of a river known only for a few years should be so charged with my potency in my consciousness … this is still the place toward which my well-conditioned unconsciousness turns like an old horse heading for the barn. (1976: 37).1

Whether justified or not, such “melancholic” construals have often given place a certain whiff of softness, as if the emotional value imbricated in places by the very nature of that emotion devalues place, renders its definitional framework murky, loose, or, worse, besots it with affective overtones which transgress against the strictures of intellectual rigor. In The Betweenness of Place, Entrikin suggests that “place” occupies a lexical and epistemological position mid-way between the view from nowhere and the view from somewhere: The conflict between the relatively objective, external vision embodied in our theoretical outlook [the view from nowhere], and the relatively subjective, internal vision that we have of ourselves as individual agents [the view from somewhere] represents a basic polarity of human consciousness. The tendency has been to reduce one side to the other, by suggesting that all that is real from the subjective view is reducible to the objective or vice-versa. (1991: 9).

Such a location creates a third pole around which place can be situated; not only does this deft maneuver position place beyond the totalizing reach of either the objective or subjective binaries, it also strikes a blow against the totalizing nature of binaries themselves. As such a strictly regimented bi-polar ideational catchment system necessarily limits the operations of thought, it has been a major concern of recent thinkers if not to annihilate this system, to at least reduce or temper its absolute hold on the structure of cogitation. Entrikin’s construal of the betweenness of place has opened up possibilities for alternatives to the either/ or system of thought so endemic to traditional Western epistemology. And it has 1

Relph cites Stegner’s Wolf-Willow. The Viking Press: New York, 1962. 21-22.

The Performance of Place

59

allowed geographers as well as other thinkers associated with the discipline to reconceptualize basic notions of what might be called the place of place. But perhaps my own construal of Entrikin’s conception has delimited it too much, for instead of a fixed third position between the view from nowhere and the view from somewhere, Entrikin’s concept allows for a mobility between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity: such alacrity has the potential to fully capture the subtleties inherent to place without sacrificing either scientific fact or the power of affect. As Entrikin puts it: To understand place requires that we have access to both an objective and a subjective reality. From the decentered vantage point of the theoretical scientist, place becomes either a location or a set of generic relations and thereby loses much of its significance for human action. From the centered viewpoint of the subject, place has meaning only in relation to an individual’s or a group’s goals and concerns. Place is best viewed from points in between. (1991: 5).

The polyvalent mobility of the ‘points in between’ offers up a viewing platform (or, rather, a congeries of ever-moving viewing platforms) from which to best think about place. But, leaving aside this important theoretical distinction, how does Entrikin define place, that is, once it is situated in the mobile in-between? Entrikin attempts to at least partially answer this by stating that “the geographical concept of place refers to the areal context of events, objects and actions” (1991: 6). But doesn’t this construal merely shift the definitional burden from “place” to “context”? This question doesn’t slip past Entrikin, as he immediately tries to batten down the parameters of context: “It [the geographical context of place] is a context that includes natural elements and human constructions, both material and ideal” (1991: 6). Place then is an areal configuration that consists of a commingling of ‘natural elements’ and human activity. This still leaves the problem of scale dangling in mid-air as such a definition could conform to both a nation-state such as Brazil as well as the passenger seat of a Mini-Cooper. It also doesn’t encompass the more amorphous conceptions of place denoted by such vernacular phrases as “I’ve finally got my head in the right place;” however, given the extensive perimeters of the word, construing one definition to cover all uses of “place” is a task beyond even the powers of a lexical Shakespeare. Entrikin suggests that a sense of place is made possible by psychological and semantic navigation between complementary notions of the same: the two aspects of place, the natural and the symbolic, “reflect differing attitudes that we take toward place. We live our lives in place and have a sense of being part of place, but we also view place as something separate, something external. Our neighborhood is both an area centered on ourselves and our home, as well as an area containing houses, streets and people that we may view from a decentered or an outsider’s

60

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography perspective. Thus place is both a center of meaning and the external context of our actions. (1991: 7).

Or, referring back to Aristotle, as both that which contains and that which is contained. But doesn’t Entrikin’s conception put us right back in that binary from which he is attempting to extract us? If place is simultaneously ‘a center of meaning’ or a construal aligning with a subjective stance, and ‘the external context of our actions’ or a construal aligning with an objective stance, then how have we escaped from the bi-polar dogma which Entrikin claims has hitherto constrained our concept of place? But here is the move that rescues us from such an impasse: the conjunctions ‘and’ as well as ‘both’ in that sentence indicate the in-betweenness in which the concept of place can properly be situated. Re-stating the sentence with an emphasis to denote this meaning: ‘ Thus place is both a center of meaning and the external context of our actions.’ It is precisely the relative and mobile coordination between the subjective and the objective that gives Entrikin’s construal of place its cogency. Still and yet, even Entrikin admits that place carries with it its own special brand of elusiveness, making any final determination of its definitional core a quixotic task: “no essence or universal structure of place exists to be uncovered or discovered” (1991: 3). Perhaps as long as we remain modest in our definitional quest, the various denotations and connotations of place remain within our grasp. Once we exceed the scope of modesty, place is gone, it flees. So, given the slippery status of the definitional stability of “place,” rather than being further waylaid by an ever elusive attempt to define and delimit it, let us stipulate that a place is a more or less bounded area with a certain agreedupon coherence subtending its use. Granted that this definition is more or less inadequate, we shall assume that any definition is more or less similarly inadequate and proceed without an iota of definitional remorse. Now, after that exegesis on place and its definitional constraints, we shall turn to our main agenda here, the performance of place. In “Rootedness versus Sense of Place,” Yi-Fu Tuan delineates a number of ways in which places are made. He claims that there are “deliberative ways of creating and maintaining place for which speech, gesture, and the making of things are the common means,” and also that “Words have great power in creating place” (Tuan 1980: 6). Notice that Tuan is contending here that various modes of performance utilizing the ‘common means’ of ‘speech, gesture, and the making of things’ are required not only for creating places but for maintaining them as well; so here Tuan asserts that the performance of place is not a stand-alone event but an ongoing performative, or at least a performative that must be repeated on an occasional basis. The sociologist Arjun Appadurai also stresses the performative component of the maintenance of place (or what he calls “locality”): in Modernity at Large, he claims that

The Performance of Place

61

locality is an inherently fragile social achievement. Even in the most intimate, spatially confined, geographically isolated situations, locality must be maintained carefully against various kinds of odds. These odds have at various times and places been conceptualized differently. In many societies, boundaries are zones of danger requiring special ritual maintenance; in other sorts of societies, social relations are inherently fissive, creating a persistent tendency for some neighborhoods to dissolve. In yet other situations, ecology and inhabited spaces are forever shifting, thus contributing an endemic sense of anxiety and instability to social life. (1996: 179).

This maintenance aspect can be witnessed by special practices such as the Rogation Day walking of the bounds, a practice which has been retrieved from its Roman origins in many English countryside parishes. It can also be witnessed by mundane practices such as the sweeping of floors, the scrubbing of tiles, the cleaning of walls, and other more or less circadian tasks dedicated to the maintenance of places. Tuan presents both routine and extraordinary practices as evidence of the power of the verbal and the gestural to perform place. “Australian aborigines maintain their awareness of place not so much with material fabrications as with words and gestures – with the stories they tell and the rituals they perform” (Tuan 1980: 6). Here we should turn to Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, and the words of one of his aboriginal informants: “‘A song … was both map and directionfinder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country’” (1987: 13). Songs, for the aborigines of Australia, besides being or at least reflecting cartographic knowledge, perform place: creating and maintaining place, they provide “song-lines,” a sung form of cartography which guides those with knowledge of the songs from one place to another. “The telling itself, not always accompanied by ritual, has the power to endow a site with vibrant meaning. Telling is perhaps not quite the word, for frequently the myths are delivered through songs,” states Tuan of these practices (1991: 687). The role of song in creating, performing, and maintaining place is not a distinctive characteristic of the aborigines of Australia in particular or of the remote or “exotic” in general: indeed, it is quite surprising and even somewhat astonishing to note how many American popular songs concern themselves with place, and, indeed, such songs – both in their creation and in their dissemination throughout the cultural nexus – can be conceived of as place-making performatives. However, this should not be conflated with the geographic knowledge inscribed within Aboriginal songs; popular Western songs rarely provide actual directions or inscribe systems of mapping within the minds of their listeners; however, they do frequently contribute to the social construction of place. Songs associated with cities, or even emblematic of cities, such as “New York, New York,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” are not simply odes to cosmopolitan entities: they simultaneously symbolize and instantiate places; “New York, New York,” broadcast in Yankee Stadium after every “home” baseball game, inscribes the city as a place worthy of its own panegyric. As sung by Frank

62

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Sinatra, the most classic of big city “saloon singers,” this version of “New York, New York” has become a synecdoche for the city: it is the city. Songs memorializing place have been known to be so powerful a purveyor of an incapacitating form of nostalgia that they have even been banned. In his biography of Rousseau, Leo Damrosch tell us that “a response to familiar melodies was thought to be an especially Swiss trait, notably in the Alpine cowherds’ song called the ranz des vaches, which was well known to arouse such painful homesickness that the French king forbade his Swiss troops to play it” (2005: 229). Damrosch adds that in the Dictionary of Music, Rousseau notes that “‘These effects, which do nothing for foreigners, derive only from habit, memories, and a thousand circumstances that this air retraces in its listeners, recalling for them their country, their former pleasures, their youth, and all their ways of living, awakening a bitter grief at having lost all that’” (2005: 229–230).2 Songs can both serve as stand-ins for and performances of place, doing double duty as performative vehicles. The rap song, “Straight Out of Compton,” is not only an outlet for urban rage of the African-American gangbanging variety, it also establishes Compton as a place with a certain reputation, one inscribed with relentless violence: “When something happens in South Central Los Angeles, nothing happens. It’s just another nigger dead.” The song performs Compton as a place as the song’s performance makes the place of Compton: the song is a performative with temporal effects extending into the past (written through the retrieval of memories of Compton), the present (as it glorifies Compton in the moments of singing and hearing the song), and the future (as it shapes the reputation of Compton).3 “My Old Kentucky Home,” though obviously of a much different sentiment and style than “Straight out of Compton,” does much the same thing. It performs a Kentucky that ostensibly exists while also creating a Kentucky for those who may never step foot in the state. Or listen to The Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” a straight-forward tribute to place, but, again, one that has served not only to represent or perform a place existing within the memories of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but one that has also created, due to the song’s as well as the band’s popularity, a transformation of the actual Penny Lane of Liverpool into a tourist site commemorating The Beatles, an era, a song (“Penny Lane”), as well as a place, that is, itself: Penny Lane. “Strawberry Fields Forever” has performed a kind of obverse transit to the trajectory of “Penny Lane,” as the place celebrated in the song is an imaginary site where “nothing is real;” however, following the murder of John Lennon in 1980, Yoko Ono in collaboration with the City of New York created a “real” strawberry field in Central Park as a memorial to the slain Beatle. My point here is that the creation and performance of songs valorizing and contributing to the ongoing performance of places is not a practice 2 Damrosch cites “Musique,” Dictionnaire de Musique, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Marcel Raymond et al., 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–1995). 5: 924. Translated by Damrosch. 3 For website that coordinates rap songs with their geographies, see rapmap. whatupgeek.com. Thanks to Michael Shin for this reference.

The Performance of Place

63

“merely” of the exotic; indeed, it is an everyday practice in the West, even if its performative place-making mechanisms are not generally recognized as such. Place making, according to Tuan, can also be effectuated by talk, storytelling, naming practices, and gossip. “City people are constantly ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ places by talking about them. A network of gossip can elevate one shop to prominence and consign another one to oblivion” (Tuan 1980: 6). Following this line of thought, restaurant critics, for instance, are performers of place, as their reviews can “make or break” places. Here we can interpolate two excerpts from reviews by Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold of the L.A. Weekly. The first thing you should know about Takimi, a Japanese-ish restaurant on top of the 811 Wilshire building downtown, is that it offers a splendid view of the rooftop pool at the Standard, which means, if you are so inclined, that you can spy on attractive people in extremely small bathing suits while you enjoy sashimi tacos, indifferent robata-seared meats and $125 bottles of Ken sake. The second thing you should know is that Takimi is the kind of place where almost everything is garnished with piped rosettes of “caviar” mashed potatoes, which dyes the spuds Barbie-box pink. (2010: 34).

Well, it doesn’t take much critical insight to note that Gold is doing his utmost, with every acerbic arrow in his very acerbic quiver, to transform the ‘Japaneseish’ Takimi into a non-place, suitable only for ogling ‘attractive people’ in ‘small’ bathing suits. So that if Gold has any influence upon his readers at all, Takimi, ostensibly a place, will soon no longer reside within that category. Here is Gold in a much friendlier guise: I am not sure that I have ever tasted a tamale as wonderful as the tamales at the venerable Jaunito’s in East L.A., savory tamales steamed in rich stock instead of water, slender, pliant shells of masa lovingly patted into cornhusks, unrolling to reveal tender, superthin tubes of masa that seem almost engineered around fillings of pork in dusky red-sweet chili sauce, stewed chicken, or melted cheese spiked with sweet green chiles. A Juanito’s tamale, made the same way since Kennedy was in the White House, is a tamale worthy of a great metropolis. (2010: 34).

Now, while the last line may tend towards the melodramatic, in that any attempt to equalize great metropolises with tamales may be terminally fraught with peril, we must concede that if a place can be created through the broadcast of reputation, this is the type of broadcasting that could do it. Place making through the creation of reputation is of course not confined to “professionals” – “normal” folk are constantly creating place through “the spreading of the word,” as everyday gossip can instantiate place through the creation of a good reputation, or, conversely, relegate it to oblivion. As Tuan says, “A shop is only a shop when it has customers; in a sense, a place is its reputation,”

64

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

and such reputations are primarily established by the communicative mode of word-of-mouth (1980: 6; italics, mine). Storytelling, more generally, is one of the primary performative instigators of place. From surfers relaying the particulars of a remote and newly discovered surf spot to oil executives listening to accounts of a recently located deposit of black gold to amateur critics posting reviews of restaurants and assorted other places on Yelp, narratives create places as they create the reputations of places. The narration of blight is also of prime importance in the signifying of an urban neighborhood as ripe for redevelopment just as the hyping of “up-and-coming” neighborhoods is of prime importance in signifying them as areas in which to invest. “A sustained stream of ghetto rhetoric,” writes Nicholas Blomley of precisely the former kind of narrative strategy, “marks out the Downtown Eastside [of Vancouver] as a zone of marginality and moral deviance” (2004: 90). Transforming what may simply be places where the poor and the marginalized live into places scarred by an irredeemable blight that must be razed in order to be resurrected is a place making strategy that has been used countless times by city planners working in conjunction with developers. The point is that it is story-telling which is doing the performative work here, a ‘ghetto rhetoric’ of blight leading directly to a reconfiguration of place with condos replacing SROs and Starbucks replacing corner dives. A narration of place into its place is described by Timothy R. Tangherlini in his essay about the re-inscription of Koreatown in the aftermath of the Los Angeles “riots” of 1992.4 Much of it burned to the ground, Koreatown was narrated back into existence, in a certain sense recreated, through what Tangherlini calls “riot narratives” (1999: 158). “In the process of narrating, the pre-riot images of Koreatown are mapped onto the post-riot space, recalling and, through this memorializing, reestablishing the pre-riot Koreatown … . Accordingly, even as a narrator tells of the destruction of Koreatown (or in some cases the defense of Koreatown), a strong image of Koreatown emerges … . Through the recall of the events in place, the place reemerges as a conceptually mapped area. Even though a narrative may concern the destruction of Koreatown, simply by recalling Koreatown, the narrator rejects the notion of

4 The proper nominal term to describe these events has been much discussed. “Uprising” seems to be the preferred term; but, however unjust the Rodney King verdict was, and it certainly was incredibly unjust, it’s difficult to certify the near-beating to death of a working class truck driver, the burning of immigrant-owned stores, and the looting of VCRs and TV sets as events indicative of an uprising with revolutionary ramifications. I say this with at least somewhat of a “inside” view on the events of April 1992, as I was and am a resident of the West Adams neighborhood on the northern edge of South Central L.A. and could see the glow of the fires from my porch at the time. The use of “uprising” tells us more about the yearning of academics to recast these events in radical overtones that comport with their analyses and political predilections than it does about the actual nature of the event itself, which may have started with a revolutionary intent but soon devolved into chaos. Perhaps “upheaval” is the best term to use.

The Performance of Place

65

a destroyed Koreatown, consequently, narratively reconstitutes it. (Tangherlini 1999: 158–159).

So what happens here is that the narration of place retrieves the narrated place from the past, setting it within the present, so it can rejuvenate itself and be reestablished in the future. Thus a kind of cross-stitchery of time is instigated in this effort to (re)create place. Valorization of place through temporal coordinates is frequently utilized as a place-making tactic. Notably in the United States, a kind of continual call to the principles of the Founding Fathers is used to justify many a policy, from the most regressive to the most progressive. These calls, though typically framed in terms that recall people (Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Washington) rather than places (Valley Forge, Concord, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg), encompass a “patriotic” model that includes the places with the people referenced in the call – i.e., every mention of Jefferson conjures at least a hint of Monticello, every mention of Washington gestures towards Mt. Vernon and Valley Forge. These in turn gesture toward an ideal place – the City on the Hill – invoking a paradigm of America saturated with people and places which ostensibly symbolize the nation. Here, references to an “ideal” past are aids in the performance of place (the USA) in the present. References to an “ideal” future can also be aids in the creation of place. In Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea, Laura C. Nelson describes a South Korean government which invoked a vision of a better future as an instrument to create a place, the South Korea of the present, in this case, the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout this period, the carrot of a better, more equitable, wealthier, democratic (and unified) Korea was dangled before the population by the government and its media and institutions. From the government’s perspective, compared to the past as a unifying (but passive) discourse, the future had the galvanizing advantage of being a vision that must be achieved through leadership (the government) and public action (the citizens). This orientation toward the future was linked with other aspects of personal purpose. The hope that their children would live to see a prosperous, unified Korea was a complex and powerful motivation for many South Koreans to endure hard labor and rough circumstances. (Nelson 2000: 20–21; italics, Nelson).

In such a temporal schema, the people are being asked to regard sacrifices experienced in the present from a viewpoint situated in a hypothetical future that regards the present in the light of a past conditioned by those very (currently enacted) sacrifices. The sociologist, philosopher, and banker Alfred Schutz calls such a temporal arrangement (i.e., a tense) the modo futuri exacti or what I prefer to call the hypothetical future anterior; and, though it might seem exotic, it is an extremely common method of thinking about plans, goals, and ends with their coordinated means. The present status of a place (or situation) is justified in terms

66

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

of a future in which this present is now a past. However, such a strategy can backfire: once the goal is realized, can the same level of sacrifice be justified? In fact, according to Nelson, this is precisely what happened in the case of South Korea as the “sacrificial” era of the 60s and 70s resulted, at least for some, in the economic “miracle” of the 1980s and 90s: “With nationalism as the fuel for South Korean industrialization, the emphasis on an imagined future as the site of the ‘real’ nation helped to defer judgment on the success and fairness of economic and political policies. Ironically, the achievements of the national economy themselves contributed to the waning persuasive power of the discourse of the future nation” (2000: 21). Its very success had ruined the paradigm. The naming of places, or their renaming, as the case may be, is also one of the key aspects of place creation. Renaming in and of itself is one of the primary weapons of conquest, as the new name transforms features in the image of the conqueror while its imposed usage inscribes the power of the conqueror into the consciousness of the conquered. “The proper name and the geographical feature so merge in the consciousness of the people who know both that to change the name is to change, however subtly and inexplicitly, the feature itself” (Tuan 1991: 688). While changing the feature and the conquered who once “owned” the feature, the naming also changes those who do the naming: “The act of naming not only constitutes the place and people named, but also constitutes the subjects who name;” for instance, “the ‘evil’ Muslims of the Middle East,” by the very act of branding them as evil, “constitute [perform] the goodness of those describing them as such” (Sturm 2010: 137). Since we have performed them as bad (“evildoers”), we are, ipso facto, good. Stephen Greenblatt notes that Columbus followed the practice of renaming upon landfall in “the New World”: The founding action of Christian imperialism is a christening. Such a christening entails the cancellation of the native name – the erasure of the alien, perhaps demonic, identity – and hence a kind of making new; it is at once an exorcism, an appropriation, and a gift. Christening then is the culminating instance of the marvelous speech act: in the wonder of the proper name, the movement from ignorance to knowledge, the taking of possession, the conferral of identity are fused in a moment of pure linguistic formalism. (1991: 83).

Such “primordial” acts of naming are viewed by Christian explorers as directly reflective of Genesis 2:19 and Adam’s bestowal of names upon the fauna and flora of the Garden of Eden; this new version of paradise becomes parsed into discrete places through the performance of the naming of places by the representatives of the Church and the Crown. Tuan also indices place naming as one of the elemental factors in place making: “Explorers conjure places out of the wilderness by simply naming certain peaks and rivers. When the farmers and traders move in, they enter an already baptized world” (1980: 6). What is of course a bit obtuse on Tuan’s part here is his notion

The Performance of Place

67

that such places were not already bearing names; more outrageous is his notion that such places did not even exist until their “conjuring” by explorers; true, the performance of these places may not have existed for the Western explorers and the ‘farmers and traders’ following in their wake until their (re)naming; but the implication here is that there were no places in the West at all until such conjuring occurred. This, along with Tuan’s Christian-inflected idea that ‘farmers and traders’ move into ‘an already baptized world’ is enough to set the teeth grinding; such a construal, without further explication, naturalizes these “baptismal” place naming practices as if they were an unmitigated good that had been performed for the general betterment of all humanity, conjuring places out of a primeval void, and not a device of expropriation for a “chosen few,” those seemingly goodhearted farmers and traders who “settled” the West. Perhaps I am being a bit too harsh on Tuan, passing summary judgment from a more “politically-enlightened” era, but his words leave him open for such adjudication, and perhaps there is good in recalling that even the most enlightened of observers may appear to be somewhat benighted to those from a later era. In The Road to Botany Bay, Paul Carter articulates the same issue with perhaps a bit more caution and clarity than Tuan while maintaining an understanding of place as performed: “In the absence of a bilingual nomenclature, the would-be settler was more than ever obliged to settle the country rhetorically, rather than etymologically: he had, more than ever, to conjure up the object of his desire and, through the act of articulating it, to bring it into being” (1987: 137). For another perspicacious understanding of this matter, consider Blomley’s assertions in Unsettling the City: “Spatial naming as a means of ordering is of immense political significance … . The denial or effacement of names can be seen as an erasure of alternative forms of property, as many colonial subjects can attest” (2004: 68). Blomley also reminds us that the erasure rather than merely the creation of place names can entail definitive instances of performative action as well: in battles over the development of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver in the 1990s, the developer, in alliance with City officials, sometimes completely erased the neighborhood’s name off maps of prospective developments; as a neighborhood newsletter put it during the height of the struggle: “‘ … the City insists that the Downtown Eastside must be gentrified … . One way they can do it is by eliminating the Downtown Eastside from city maps’” (2004: 69). The disappearance of the place name creates a terra nullius open for the taking: “‘By leaving a community off a map, they erase the people who live there and make them invisible. That way, the neighborhood is left open for whatever changes they have … in store’” (Blomley 2004: 69). A parallel between this and the erasure of indigenous place names during colonizing ventures is of course quite obvious. An excellent laboratory for the observation of the performance of place, though one distanced by vectors of time, is provided by the practices of the early imperial powers, a subject brilliantly examined by Patricia Seed in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. In a stunning variety of ways, including “planting crosses, standards, banners, and coats of

68

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

arms – marching in processions, measuring the stars, drawing maps, speaking certain words, or remaining silent,” imperial agents “performed” possession upon places hitherto not their own (1995: 2). For instance, in 1612 when the French took possession of the “Isle Saint Ann … a tiny uninhabited island at the mouth of the Amazon,” a series of theatrically religious rituals was enacted establishing possession of place (Seed 1995: 41). These rituals were spectacles of a quite self-conscious variety on the part of the French: they were staged explicitly as performances transferring property rights from native Americans to the French, though the French seemed to have desired that such “uncouth” ends would be veiled by the ceremonial beauty of ritual. It also served their “benign” purposes to cast the “Natives” as players in this ceremony of transference, as their presence ostensibly testified to the consensual nature of the transference of sovereignty from the “Natives” to the King and the Church. That some of this “consent” may have been a result of a certain overwrought form of imperial hermeneutics on the part of the French does not escape Seed’s acute eye: Frenchmen often described indigenous consent as appearing in facial expressions, movements of bodies, and shouts. They also believed that what they construed as the natives’ emotional state during these ceremonies communicated their agreement … . While they could have been making a noise customary at public ceremonies or expressing delight in the spectacular pageantry itself, the Frenchmen in the Caribbean understood the shouts to establish “joy” at the onset of French colonial rule. (1995: 59).

Seed reports of one Lord de Razilly, the leader of the French expedition to the Amazon, as stating that the Indians “‘were transported with pleasure and happiness that they had always desired to ally themselves with the French, and to be their friends [sic],’’’ (1995: 46).5 Just how this was communicated is a mystery, as such conceptual understanding seems to exceed the limits to which ‘facial expressions, movements of bodies, and shouts’ can reach; nevertheless, for the French, consent and even consensual ‘joy’ had been conveyed; therefore, the distinctively French form of place making could proceed without the burden of imperial guilt, presuming that such guilt existed in the first place. Here, perhaps at least part of what the French were after was a conflation of place and actor through performance. In “Thou Shalt Not Misinterpret: Landscape as Legal Performance,” Nicolas Howe invokes Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of a successful performance as instigating

5 Seed cites Claude d’Abbeville’s Histoire de la Mission des Peres capuchins en l’isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisins (Graz, Austria, 1963; orig. pub. 1614), 161v-162v; italics, Seed.

The Performance of Place

69

a state of ‘fusion,’ a moment of psychological identification in which actors’ reasons and roles seem ‘natural,’ ‘sincere,’ and ‘authentic,’ and in which the necessary dramatic elements – for example, script, stage, actor, audience – are tied together into a seamless, seemingly organic whole … . What is more, that audience will become so emotionally invested in the outcome of a dramatic conflict that places and actors become conflated. (Howe 2008: 438).6

So, with these notions in mind, we can now understand the actions of the French as creating a conflation between themselves and the place itself through the instrument of their symbolic performance. However, we need to remember that the French as well as the Indians are both symbolic stand-ins for the Church and the Crown, on the one hand, and for the place itself, on the other. Therefore, once the successful performance was mounted and performed, the dynamics of conflation ensued, switching the rights of possession from the indigenous to the imperialists. The performance itself, as described by Seed, can also be seen as a conflation of natural elements intercalated with French signifiers, as shortly after making landfall, “a tree was cut to make a cross while a hymn was chanted. The litanies of the Virgin Mary sung, the expedition’s commander then carried the cross to a small hill where it was fixed. Another hymn was sung as the cross and the island were solemnly blessed with holy water” (Seed 1995: 41). Here, hill and cross, the island and the “holy” water, are commingled to perform a kind of reverse transubstantiation of the land from the Indians to the Crown and the Church. These were only preliminary measures however: “To take possession of the Amazon region would require an even more elaborately staged theatrical ritual in which indigenous people participated as well” (Seed 1995: 41–42). Having “promised to embrace both Catholicism and an alliance with the French,” the Tupi Indians, as well as four Capuchin monks who had sailed with the expedition, were incorporated into these rites (Seed 1995: 43). Seed writes that there was “a slightly unreal atmosphere – almost a Hollywood staging” to these events: There are costumes (sky blue tunics with the fleur-de-lis, blue shirts with white crosses), music (sacred chants), props (incense burners [censers], crucifixes, candlesticks), and a large procession carefully ordered by rank. The culmination would be the visually dramatic moment of stationing a cross while surrounded by large groups of members from a Tupi tribe. Furthermore the entire scene was set five hundred kilometers east of the mouth of the Amazon, the river that

6 Howe is not citing Alexander here; rather, these are his own quotation marks, ostensibly intended to highlight the dramatic quality inherent in the performance. Howe notes that Alexander’s “fusion” notion is taken from “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Social performance: symbolic action, cultural pragmatics, and ritual. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, B. Giesen, and J.L. Mast. New York: Cambridge University Press, 29–90.

70

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography tantalized all of sixteenth-century Europe with its enormous size and legends of riches. (1995: 42–43; brackets, Seed).

Of course ceremonial practices instantiating possession of place are entirely contingent and vary widely amongst peoples. The ritual by virtue of which the French took possession of the Isle Saint Ann (and by an avaricious territorial extension only a colonial power could have the hubristic effrontery to muster, the entire Amazonian region) can be contrasted with the much more quotidian methods by which the Puritans took possession of places within the New England region. Erecting fences, building houses, and working the land by enclosing fields and gardens were the signs by which the Pilgrims signaled or performed possession of their plots of land. Seed references the words of the “Anglican” Richard Eburne’s A Plaine Pathway to Plantations to demonstrate that the will of the Lord was recruited as a tool to justify possession of place: “‘It was God’s express commandment to Adam Gen[esis] 1:28 that he should fill the earth and subdue it. By virtue of which charter he and his have ever since had the privilege to spread themselves from place to place and to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy any region or country whatsoever which they should find either not preoccupied’” (1995: 32–33).7 That these ‘plaine’ Protestant ways of occupying places previously ‘not preoccupied’ provides a stark contrast to the elaborate methods by which the French occupied places, should not distract us from the fact that in both instances what is being inscribed on the land through these various modes is ownership and what is being performed is the creation of place. The English also relied on the repetition and the routinization innate to the practices of gardening and tilling as primary methods of instantiating place: that which is iterated and reiterated on and in the soil is leveraged by these very performances into discrete places. Such actions not only transform space into place, they also provide a legal claim to place. Usufruct instigates rights of ownership to places the “nature” of which has been “mixed” with “the labour of his [sic] body,” which actions transform the worked piece of nature into “his property,” to cite Locke’s famous terminology (1980: 19). The “owner,” then, is “one who mixes his or her labor with a thing and by, commingling that labor with the thing, establishes ownership of it” (Rose 1995: 181). “Thus, planting the garden involved neither simple physical exertion nor mere aesthetic enjoyment; planting the garden was an act of taking possession of the New World for England. It was not a law that entitled Englishmen to possess the New World, it was an action which established their rights” (Seed 1995: 30–31; italics, Seed). However, such actions should not prevent us from noting that the English also used surveying and mapping to stake out their colonial claims: “From the beginning, the Virginia Company of London employed surveyors and avidly sought information regarding the cartography of the country,” indicating the performative 7 Italics, mine. Brackets, Seed. Seed cites Richard Eburne, A Plaine Pathway to Plantations, ed. Louis B. Wright (Ithaca, N.Y. 1962; orig. pub. 1624) 41.

The Performance of Place

71

practices of cartography and its role in making place as well as creating claims for such places (Seed 1995: 23). Indeed, the garden wall and the field fence can be “read” as adumbrations of more extended and more formal boundaries, those borders which will be surveyed, mapped, established, regulated, and enforced by the imperial state. But an emphasis on these “mundane” performative place making practices should also not blind us to the more grandiose practices of the transformation of New England into a place suitable for the “errand into the wilderness,” the phrase used as a title for an election sermon delivered by the Reverend Samuel Danforth on May 11, 1670 (Miller 1964: 1–2). The Puritans had set forth from England and Holland not simply to erect any old place surrounded by garden walls and tilled fields with a goal of bringing forth crops for subsistence. They had sailed to the New World with the goal of creating a place where a “due form of ecclesiastical government” set within the template of “the pure Biblical polity” as “set forth in full detail by the New Testament” would be established (Miller 1964: 5). The ends for which this errand were cast went well beyond gardening and tilling; Perry Miller, articulating those ends through the words of John Winthrop, puts them as follows: “to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord, to increase the body of Christ, and to preserve our posterity from the corruptions of this evil world, so that they in turn shall work out their salvation under the purity and power of Biblical ordinances” (1964: 5–6). Here, the place being made is not simply a Congregated New England, but a Congregated World, as, upon witnessing the “deliverance” of the Puritans to the New Jerusalem, ‘they (i.e. everyone else) in turn [will] work out their salvation under the purity and power of Biblical ordinances.’ Miller states that the New England Puritans believed they were “performing a job not so much for Jehovah as for history, which was the wisdom of Jehovah as expressed through time” (1964: 11). Such convictions directly led to much of the restrictive legal and governmental practices of Massachusetts and so greatly inflected the creation of place in America. All I am attempting to do here is widen the scope of the place making aspirations of the English beyond the more routine practices which Seed describes to include the more “lofty” goals of the Puritans: to set off the English as “plain” in their modes of place making and the French as “fancy” in theirs seems to oversimplify the story of the performative methodologies utilized by the “Saints” in the New World. Of course the “purity” of the place making ambitions of the Puritans was doomed to failure; Miller highlights the self-recriminating quality of the secondand third-generation New Englanders as they castigated themselves, wondering what went wrong with their “errand”: “the second and third generations suffered a failure of nerve; they weren’t the men their fathers had been, and they knew it … . All these children could do was tell each other they were on probation and that their chances of making good did not seem very promising” (1964: 3). So, despite the place making performatives of banishing as well as hanging many Quakers, Anabaptists, Arminians, and Antinomians, and despite their rigorous self-policing, the Separatists of the late 1600s and early 1700s evidently believed

72

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

they had failed miserably in their attempt to maintain the New Jerusalem in New England. A “staggering compendium of iniquity” had spoiled the errand into the wilderness, including “manifestations of pride – contention in the churches, insubordination of inferiors toward superiors, particularly of those inferiors who had, unaccountably, acquired more wealth than their betters, and, astonishingly, a shocking extravagance in attire, especially on the part of those of the meaner sort, who persisted in dressing beyond their means” (Miller 1964: 7–8). In this construal, the maintenance aspect of the performance has not kept its part of the bargain, “letting down” the creation aspect of the performance of place. Yet, out of this “den of iniquity,” which indelibly stained the “purity” of the original mission of the Saints, new forms of place making performatives would arise. One of the most singular occurred with the partnership of Cotton Mather, third generation Puritan, and his slave, Onesimus, as they combined forces to battle the smallpox epidemic of 1721. Though inoculation had been practiced in Greece and Turkey prior to this time, its use was neither well known nor widely practiced in the West; in Massachusetts the epidemic was generally interpreted as a sign that God was displeased with his flock and was thus punishing them with smallpox. Mather, however, was wise enough to listen to “Onesimus and other blacks in Boston, telling the story of inoculation in Africa that successfully suppressed the disease,” describing “a technique of cutting the skin, and infecting the body” (Middlekauff 1971: 354). Despite much opposition to the practice, many were vaccinated by Mather and successfully withstood the ravages of the disease. The reason I include this as a place making practice and one that is at least somewhat emblematic of all places and especially emblematic of places such as the United States wherein a mixture of peoples from across the globe have commingled (albeit in often restrictive manners and under legal as well as customary constraints), is that this specific combination of African knowledge and the at least partial Puritan willingness to embrace and use that knowledge, is a symbol (as well as an instantiation) of place making modes which inscribe “impure” admixtures upon place. It is not the strictly Separatist practices of place making which are now making New England a distinct place, but the commingling signified by African-cum-slave ways working on English bodies which is performing place. Such practices, perhaps best slotted under the cultural rubric, are of course legion, but here I at least wanted to feint in that direction with the singular “medical” partnership of Mather and Onesimus. Returning to the theme of place making through the exploration and colonization of the “New World,” the Spanish, for their part, took a very different approach to the performance of place than either the English or the French. A recitation of a formalized speech known as the Requirement (Requerimiento) “was the principal means by which Spaniards enacted political authority over the New World during the era of their most extensive conquest (1512–1573)” (Seed 1995: 70). This imperial piece of oration, which Anthony Pagden calls “that curious declaration of the Indians’ obligations to submit to Spanish rule and be converted to the Christian faith,” is a document which “all the conquistadores carried with them and were

The Performance of Place

73

required to read out loud to the Indians before attacking them,” expropriating their lands as well as their lives (1982: 51). However, the Requerimiento should not be interpreted as a mere militaristic prolegomena to battle, as this ritualized speech was viewed by the Spanish as a necessary political performance in the eventual establishment of the right to dominion: To initiate a war that results in legitimate political dominion over the conquered, the procedures for launching it must be carefully proscribed by the same political authorities that will later claim to have established lawful dominion. To establish the right to rule by virtue of conquest means that all the soldiers, captains, and leaders in battle must follow the political steps they have been commanded to undertake. For what is at stake is not simply their own personal control over a region, but the legitimate government of an entire state. To omit the rituals would be to jeopardize the establishment of legitimate dominion. (Seed 1995: 70).

Here, place is transubstantiated, performed anew, reconstituted, as it is simultaneously placed under the dominion of the Spanish crown and the Catholic Church, and, of course, ultimately, under the dominion of Christ and the Christian God, as in such an understanding both Spain and the Church are mere stand-ins or substitutes for Christ and God. Seed points out that the performance of the Requerimiento did not “automatically create community or signify an interior state of belief” on either the part of the Spanish or, certainly, of the Indians, who of course did not understand a word of what was being uttered (1995: 88). However, as a political device, it justified the requisition of the bounty of the land for the Crown and the Church: the Indians, ostensibly, had been informed of their obligations and thus the conquest could proceed. As a performance of place, it did not remove the Indians from their lands, as the Spanish lacked the settlers necessary for that form of direct expropriation, but it did reformulate places and lands as now under the control of the Crown and the Church. However, for the Spanish (and the Portuguese), such practices were also a form of baptism: Tuan, referencing Mircea Eliade’s classic, The Sacred and the Profane, tells us that “when the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores raised the cross over the new territories, they consecrated them in the name of Jesus Christ and believed that, by doing so, they enabled the territories to undergo a ‘new birth.’ … The newly discovered country was ‘recreated’ by the cross – reinstated into God’s cosmos – as though it had no prior existence, or that its prior state was one of unredeemed wildness” (1991: 687).8 Newly “baptized” (Christened), the land could now be appropriated without any concern for restitution or worry over guilt (if indeed those concerns or worries had ever been issues), simply because it was new and therefore by definition had never been inhabited. If the land was also given a new name, so much the better, as “the new name itself has the power 8 Tuan references page 32 of The Sacred and the Profane. 1959. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

74

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

to wipe out the past and call forth the new. Naming is power – the creative power to call something into being, to render the invisible visible, to impart a certain character to things” (Tuan 1991: 688). Here, we should add the negative obverse to Tuan’s positive schema: the new name can also render the visible invisible, call things “out” of power, and efface numerous characteristics of things: witness the repeated erasures of Indian territories by the mere inscription of new names on them or the ascription of terra nullius to terra that were not nullius at all. Columbus landed in Hispaniola well before the creation of the Requerimiento in 1512 by “the eminent Spanish legal scholar Juan Lopez Palacios Rubios,” a creation instigated by the severe criticism of the Crown’s legitimization practices by the Dominican friars of Hispaniola (Seed 1995: 72). But Columbus also enacted his own set of performatives upon making landfall in the Caribbean. In Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt tell us that “what we get” from Columbus “is a series of speech acts: a proclamation (pregón) by which Columbus takes possession of the islands followed by the giving of new names” (1991: 54). Here we should recall Tuan’s suggestion that “words have great power in creating place” (1980: 6). However, for the Spanish, mere oratory was insufficient “because Columbus’s culture does not entirely trust verbal testimony, because its judicial procedures require written proofs, he makes certain to perform his speech acts in the presence of the fleet’s recorder … ensuring that everything would be written down and consequently have greater authority. The papers are carefully sealed, preserved, carried back across thousands of leagues of ocean to officials who in turn countersign and process them according to the procedural rules; the notarized documents are a token of the truth of the encounter and hence of the legality of the claim. (Greenblatt 1991: 57).

This sequence of verbal, written, procedural, and legal performatives “guarantees” the probity and the success of the Spanish claim (its felicity): there can be no argument with the solidity as well as the multivalent aspects of the entitlement, at least when viewed through a perspective similar to that of the Spanish, i.e., a European one. And, according to Greenblatt, this is precisely the audience Columbus and his Spanish patrons had in mind, for, after all, the Indians, even if they could have comprehended the words of Columbus’s proclamation, did not exist “in the same universe of discourse” as the Europeans (1991: 59); the oration, the “ritual of possession, though … apparently directed toward the natives, has its full meaning then in relation to other European powers when they come to hear of the discovery,” and so Columbus “proceeds to establish the correct claim by the proper formal speech act” (1991: 60). This formalized sequence of acts – verbal, written, procedural, legal – is paramount, because, again according to Greenblatt, the performance of the oration in the presence of the Indians is recognized by the Spanish as being not quite “good enough.” In other words, its very perpetrators view it as a profoundly infelicitous speech act: how can a legal claim rest on

The Performance of Place

75

the assent of a party that has no comprehension of the language in which the performative is uttered? “Columbus’s founding speech act in the New World is spectacularly ‘infelicitous’ in virtually every one of the senses detailed by Austin in How To Do Things With Words: it is a misfire, a misinvocation, a misapplication, and a misexecution” (Greenblatt 1991: 65). Yet it is precisely the formal quality of this performative, coupled with the natives’ status as legal ciphers that allows the claim to proceed: formalism, being essentially empty, is matched with the emptiness of the legal status of the Indians and thus cancels out the infelicitous nature of the speech act. The legal status of the natives as non-entities was justified due to their perceived status as beings without sovereignty over their land or, rather, as beings without the capacity to even attempt the attainment of the status of sovereignty: “Ceremonies of the taking of possession were performed … in … territories in which the native rulers were not regarded as sovereign because of a relatively low state of civilization or political organization” (Keller 1967: 13). Still, the Spanish were compelled to warrant the original speech act with written, procedural, and legal elaborations, and then, instigated by clerical criticism, refashion Columbus’s pregón into the Requerimiento some twenty years later. Turning to the place making ways of the Portuguese colonizers, Seed notes that they relied primarily on astronomical observation and the taking of coordinates based upon these observations to construct a “scientific” method of place making. The first imperial power to round the Cape of Good Hope as well as the first to master the navigation of the treacherous waters of the South Atlantic, the Portuguese “claimed a right to exercise a commercial monopoly over regions inaccessible without their techniques” of navigation (Seed 1995: 128). Once instantiated, commercial practices had their own self-perpetuating place making capacities, but the initial appropriation of regions “discovered” by Portuguese explorers re-made such regions into constituent parts of the Portuguese domain. According to Seed, it was the knowledge-based scientific grounds of these discoveries that led to the distinctive mode of Portuguese place making: Because Portuguese claims to the New World and to West Africa were founded upon the creation of knowledge, they left few physical markers as signs of discovery, since it was the knowledge of means – not the ends – that they claimed to possess. While the Portuguese primarily marked their discovery of regions by latitude numbers, recorded in logs and transferred to maps, they sometimes noted their discoveries by an object on land – a stone pillar or a cross. (1995: 131).

Seed seems to depict the Portuguese as not so much making places on the land as making places on the map: “the Portuguese were … mapping a grid – an imaginary network of numbers – latitudes noted by astronomers and pilots, recorded both in the subsequent guides and fixed upon the land by the visible symbols of stone pillars and occasional crosses … . The Portuguese discoveries mapped space

76

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

with a network of numbers, rather than describing or occupying a place” (1995: 133). This form of expropriation was “an astronomical ritual … that bore political significance” as the “Portuguese established their claim to dominion through discovering numbers that fixed the place on earth by the position of the sun in the sky” (Seed 1995: 133). In this construal, places have been remade through a repositioning within an astronomical grid, a synoptic practice that re-inscribed places through possession of scientific knowledge turned upon the indigenous who gazed at those same stars without knowing that the positioning of those celestial bodies in relationship to their land, their places, and their bodies was reconfiguring them into Portuguese subjects. The regions so ritualized were transformed into places falling under Portuguese dominion, for, once inscribed on the map, these places came under the twin umbrellas of the epistemological sphere of Western knowledge and the imperial jurisdiction of the Portuguese empire and were then subjected to the place-making ways of imperial mercantilism. To a great extent, the Dutch relied on narratives to claim and then remake the places they discovered. “The Dutch claimed discovery upon having revealed, scrutinized, or precisely described previously unknown coastlines, harbors, rivers, and channels” (Seed 1995: 152). However, like the Portuguese, the Dutch “consistently referred to precise latitudes to assert the boundaries of their claim” (Seed 1995: 152). The Dutch also laid claim to regions by arguing that “nautical discovery … represented … a substantial effort of labor and capital which created ownership rights” (Seed 1995: 153). Once appropriated by outlays of effort and capital, the Dutch maintained places by trade and commerce: “Possession was not sustained by landing or settling but by sailing and trading … . Thus, an activity carried out largely by private citizens – commerce – was essential to sustaining Dutch dominion over the New World” (Seed 1995: 155–156). The carrying out of such commerce of course involved a tremendous amount of placemaking practices, from the divestment of indigenous resources to the creation of mercantile exchanges. In his essay “‘Hereness’ and the normativity of place,” Michael Curry draws up his own list of the necessary steps by which a place is created through performance. These “place-making function[s] include engagement in ritual practices, associating symbols with the place-to-be, bringing about a change in the natural environment, creating elements of a built environment, measuring and classifying, instituting laws, and constructing narratives about places (i.e., telling stories about them)” (Curry 1999: 98). Here I would like to combine two of these elements and then add a variation to this combination. It seems that creating elements of a built environment must bring about a change in the natural environment, and it also seems that the change in the natural environment could be more precisely characterized as a scarring of that environment. For instance, one cuts down trees in order to make a house; in that action, a built environment is created, and through that creation the natural environment is scarred as tree stumps become visible markers testifying to both the transformation of the environment and the power of the builders to transform their surroundings: one constructs place

The Performance of Place

77

by creative destruction, to take Schumpeter’s renowned phrase out of its economic domain and transport it into the place-making sphere. According to Appadurai, this scarring process may be one of the necessary components in colonization in particular and to place-making in general: All locality building has a moment of colonization, a moment both historical and chronotypic, when there is a formal recognition that the production of a neighborhood requires deliberate, risky, even violent action in respect to the soil, forests, animals, and other human beings. A good deal of the violence associated with foundational ritual is a recognition of the force that is required to wrest a locality from previously uncontrolled peoples and places … . The production of a neighborhood is inherently colonizing, in the sense that it involves the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic and rebellious. (1996: 183–184).

Such performative acts of violence seems to hold true, whether we refer to the classical exemplars of colonization, such as the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, or the gentrification of inner city neighborhoods. The first yuppies to brave “the wilds” of the Lower East Side in the 1980s were on a colonizing mission, albeit one of a quite a different valance than that of the Spanish in the 1500s, and their incursion eventually necessitated the eradication and displacement of those “natives” who originally lived in Alphabet City. Before forging ahead, we should cite Blomley as he reminds us that the dispossession typically required of any colonizing process is not some archaic practice, relegated to the pages of history books, but an ongoing project: “Dispossession has occurred (and continues to occur) in many ways, including military violence, forcible removal, legal fraud, state expropriation, forced extinguishment, treaty abrogation, and the nonenforcement of protective legislation” (2004: 110). This in itself is a list of ways of place making, the full exploration of which could fill several volumes; but the point I wish to make here is that the “historic” quality of my investigation should not blind us to the fact that dispossession is not a product of a by-gone era: it subsists in lands which have been conquered and exists in lands which are being expropriated at the present moment. From the foregoing we can discern that, at least in the Western tradition, the creation of place was performed through spatial demarcation and calibration, religious rites and religious conversion, chanting, uttering and singing; building (which of course entails the destruction and relocation of natural elements), the establishment of laws, the procedures of adjudication as well as the operations of discipline and punishment, the planting of banners and flags,9 and the naming of 9 It’s interesting to compare this with the Soviet and American landings on the moon: “When In 1959 the Soviet Union landed the first man-made missile on the moon, carrying among other items a copy of the Soviet national emblem, the question of whether the Soviets intended to claim sovereignty rights on that newly opened territory was

78

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

place, a performative act that transforms the place into a linguistic entity (a proper name) which can then be iterated and reiterated as a means to further establish title to discrete pieces of land, i.e., places.10 One thing, among others, we can discern in such practices is the adumbration of what would later be termed the commidification of place. Such commodificative performatives launch place into the orbit of use and exchange values: “The very boundaries of place, as well as the meaning of those boundaries, are a result of the intersecting searches for use and exchange values” (Logan and Molotch 1987: 44). To ignore this is to ignore that places are related to a circulating and spatialized economy, i.e., one that is oriented around economically coordinated places. As Lefebvre puts it in Right to the City: “The project of developers presents itself as opportunity and place of privilege: the place of happiness in a daily life miraculously and marvelously transformed” (1996: 84). Here we might imagine those housing developments with such melodiously saccharine place names as “Pleasant Valley,” “Hidden Hills” or “Willow Place.” Such place making tactics on the part of developers can be seen merely as the best method of marketing their products, for, under an economic regime of capitalism, “landowners must … treat the land as a pure financial asset, a form of fictitious capital, and seek, thereby, an active role in coordinating the flow of capital into and through the land” (Harvey 1989b: 97). This is true even for the most environmentally benign landowner: the fact that they may be reversing the predominant economic model through land preservation does nothing to destabilize that model: their acts assume that model. The capitalist land developer and the land preservationist are both engaged in place making, no matter what we may think of their respective practices. At a much smaller scale, place making occurs within every workplace and home. From the Department of Motor Vehicles worker who decorates her cubicle with snapshots of relatives and pets to the interior decorator picking out furniture with his Malibu client, the creation of place is occurring. immediately raised. The Soviet government denied any such intention, and later the United States indicated that the landings of American astronauts on the moon and the flying of the flag at the landing sites did not constitute any claim on surrounding territory” (Gottmann 1973: 5). 10 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams, alluding to Jane Austen, touches on the making of place via the construction and/or enhancement of the manor house in eighteenth-century England: “The genius of the place was the making of a place: that socially resonant word which echoed through the eighteenth century and which Jane Austen picked up, ironically, in the improving talk of Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park: ‘By such improvements as I have suggested … you may give it a higher character. You may raise it into a place.’” Such creations of place are of course not exclusive to the estates of the English countryside circa 1800: see, for instance, the creation of the Green Zone by the U.S. government in Baghdad following the invasion of March, 2003; and we could add many more examples as well. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press: New York, 1973. 124. Williams cites Austen’s Mansfield Park, chapter xxv.

The Performance of Place

79

The creation and maintenance of place, with a specific market-oriented strategy targeting a particular demographic sector of the population, is also the primary subject matter of numerous magazines, such as Architectural Digest, Sunset, and HD Living (“High-Definition Lifestyle and Electronics; the good life! Creating a beautiful home … inside and out”). For instance, the March 2010 edition of Sunset (“the innovation issue”) proclaims that “10 Amazing getaways: One-ofa-kind places in incredible locations” will be revealed inside its covers. Place creation or, perhaps more accurately, place valorization, is performed within the pages as we get tips on the “20 Best Towns of the Future,” among them Tucson, which is described as a “place-in-the-making” where “a new guard of architects and designers is changing the look of Tucson by designing fresh, innovative, and environmentally sound buildings,” while Oakland is billed as “San Francisco’s scruffy neighbor to the east” which has “quietly cultivated a food revolution with urban farming, DIY [Do-It-Yourself] classes, meat CSAs [Community-Supported Agricultural associations], and a foraging movement to take full advantage of all that backyard fruit,” and Boise is pitched as having “garnered high marks from Forbes as one of the top places to start a business … . Got a start-up idea? Boise wants you” (Ciarmello and Schoech 2010: 73, 77). These glorified blurbs are designed, it seems, to refashion places inherently complicated by all the kinds of economic, racial, and environmental issues modern American cities are heir to (after all, it was in March 2010 – the same month this issue of Sunset was released – that the Bay Area Rapid Transport system security officer, Johannes Mehserle, was being tried for the murder of Oscar Grant, an Oakland resident, a murder that occurred at an Oakland BART station) into places where such problems are either being blithely ignored or cleverly addressed by high-tech cutting-edge urban folk who display all the virtues of the bourgeois intelligentsia so valorized by urban geographers such as Richard Florida. Florida’s assertion, along with its widespread acceptance, at least by city planners and municipal administrators, that there is “a positive relationship between technological creativity (measured as regional innovation and hightechnology industry) and cultural creativity (measured by a ‘bohemian index,’ the regional share of artists, musicians, and cultural producers),” has led cities to remake themselves as places shimmering with culture and overtly hospitable to artists and neo-bohemians (2002: 744). The acceptance of this model has led cities to compete fiercely for museums, symphonies, and other cultural markers, as well as to foster coffee shops, art galleries, and, in general, to be viewed as “happening” places where those with the high-tech skills necessary for a thriving regional economy will want to settle and therefore reproduce the place’s “coolness index.” What Florida claims is that “talent does not simply show up in a region; rather, certain regional factors appear to play a role in creating an environment [or place] or habitat [or place] that can attract and retain talent or human capital” (2002: 754). This approach emphasizes a “‘people climate’” rather than a “‘business climate’” as the primary prerequisite for creating a place where a thriving economy will be generated (Florida 2002: 754).

80

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

However, in contradistinction to Florida’s place making strategy (“build a cultural nexus and they will come”), Peter Hall suggests, upon consideration of the flourishing periods of Athens and Venice, that “it seems that an initial economic advantage is massively transformed into a much larger cultural one” (2000: 647), and that these centers flourished during periods of “great social and intellectual turbulence;” they were not “comfortable places at all,” striated with bohemian markers of comfort and ease (2000: 646). And Allen Scott insists that there “can be no standard or boilerplate approach to the problem of economic development. Each case needs to be treated on its own merits, paying full attention to the unique historical and geographic conditions that are found in each individual place” (2004: 478). Though Scott admits that there now exists “an accelerating convergence between the economic and the cultural,” he criticizes Florida’s “euphoric analysis” for paying “far too little attention to the concrete technological, organizational, and geographic conditions that underlie the actual formation of labor markets” (2004: 482, 468). Without needing to resolve this dispute, which, as a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, may be irresolvable, we can, I think, come to an agreement that both the business and the cultural model are prime instigators of place making. Both models lead to distinctive modes of place creation, whether museums and coffee shops or logistical infrastructure and burgeoning labor markets are the initial instigators. Place has also frequently been performed in terms of perceived gender norms, and preferred sexual orientations; as Gill Valentine says “Everyday interactions at work, home and in the community do not occur between asexual individuals but between people with sexual identities and labels, in sexualized locations” (1993: 241; italics, mine). Such locations have to be performed into existence: they do not simply pop up sexualized out of the blue. For instance, “gay spaces” are created by “the claiming of urban territory” as areas in which homosexual identities are not repressed but celebrated (Myslik 1996: 167). They then have to be maintained and defended as such; as Wayne Myslik writes of the experience of gay men when visiting Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle: As George described how he feels when he visited Dupont Circle his face lit up and his whole body became animated. His trip out of the dark metro tunnel had meaning for many of the gay men with whom I spoke, such as Don, who also was describing the first time he came out of that dark metro tunnel into the sunlight. For these men, Dupont Circle is more than just a residential or commercial concentration of gay men. It is a political and cultural centre with great emotional significance. (1996: 167). Reiterated as a gay space each time a homosexual comes out up ‘out of the dark metro tunnel’ into the sunlight of Dupont Circle and re-claims it such a space, a maintenance of place along the lines of Tuan’s prescription is occurring: the performance of the neighborhood as homosexual is re-inscribed by gay men visiting it as such and through these re-inscriptions, it continues its performance, and is further re-inscribed, and so on. Gay space in San Francisco has been so successfully performed that it has been institutionalized: when the local elementary school in the Castro Street neighborhood

The Performance of Place

81

had its name changed from Douglass School to Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in 1996 (there is a Harvey Milk High School in New York City as well), the performance of gay space had been formalized into a public entity (harveymilk. com/about/about-the-school/#history). In 2010 the GLBT History Museum opened in the Castro as well, further formalizing the felicitous performance of “gayness” and alternative sexual orientations in this, the most famous gay neighborhood in the world. However, the successful performance of gay space can also invite counterperformances of heterosexual violence. As a case in point, in July and August of 2011, Long Beach’s Broadway Corridor, a GLBT neighborhood, became the site of assaults on gay men; in such cases, the felicitous performance of alternative space has spun off a kind of twisted by-product as a target for the “felicitous” performance of heterosexual male violence. The performance of heterosexual space doesn’t always operate through violence of course, but the exclusion of alternative forms of sexuality is very often one of its primary markers. Valentine defines the “heterosexing of space” as a specifically “performative act naturalized through repetition and regulation (1996: 146). This repetition takes the form of many acts: from heterosexual couples kissing and holding hands as they make their way down the street, to advertisements and window displays which present images of contented `nuclear’ families; and from heterosexualized conversations that permeate queues at bus stops and banks, to the piped music articulating heterosexual desires that fill shops, bars and restaurants. (Valentine 1996: 146). This makes for a bifurcation of public space, with displays of heterosexuality normalized while displays of homosexuality are “relegated to the margins of the [gay] ‘ghetto’ and the back street bar and preferably, the closeted or private space of the `home’” (Valentine 1996: 146–147). We should note here the role of repetition, which we notched as one of the primary performative practices of English colonists in New England, is here cited by Valentine as primary in the performance of “straight” space, just as we included it as primary in the performance of “gay” space. And, though we have barely nicked the veneer of the topic of the performance of ‘sexualized locations,’ we must leave it at that in this quicksilver survey of placemaking performatives. Nevertheless, it needs to be inserted as one of the most insistent and persistent ways of performing place: to leave it unacknowledged as such would be reprehensible. Place making, at least of a certain very odd variety, is also practiced by demographic marketing companies as they match data from census reports with zip codes to create “segments” populated by “lifestyle types.” Claritas, owned by the Nielsen Company, has divvied up the United States into 66 of these lifestyle types, ranging from the most elite of consumers – “Upper Crust: The nation’s most exclusive address, Upper Crust is the wealthiest lifestyle in America – a haven for empty-nesting couples between the ages of 45 and 64. No segment has a higher concentration of residents earning over $100,000 a year and possessing a postgraduate degree. And none has a more opulent standard of living.” – to the most marginal – “Low-Rise Living: The most economically challenged

82

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

urban segment, Low-Rise Living is known as a transient world for middle age, ethnically diverse singles and single parents. Home values are low – about half the national average – and even then less than a quarter of residents can afford to own real estate. Typically, the commercial base of Mom and-Pop stores is struggling and in need of a renaissance” (claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Content: accessed July 29, 2010). This transforms every site in America from a place into a virtual cluster inhabited by various demographic ideal types, leading to a construal of place as simply, or merely, abstracted zones of economic possibilities based on consumer profiling. Here abstract places are created by compiling and indexing data from actual places. Such a system casts an invisible net over places: places become identified not by visible markers but by sets of consumer profiles based on income ranges, purchasing proclivities, and so on. Perhaps, though, this should not be counted so much as place creation as place representation, for geodemographic marketing companies such as Claritas are making the argument that “One could find a set of signs, key purchases, ways of dress, types of residences, that represented the place and everyone within it” (Curry 2005: 687). This is the gist of the Claritas’ “You Are Where you Live” strategy, an effort to weld personhood to place through consumeristic Ideal Types. We could dismiss this as nonsense; however, as we have seen, new ways of representing places – including or excluding them from maps, for instance, or the planting of flags or crosses in their soil – can lead to new configurations of places. We have surveyed some, but certainly not all, of the performative aspects of place making, from the conquistadors uttering their Requerimientos to the DMV employee in her cubicle pinning up pictures of her pets and her family. But I hope we have dug deep enough to understand the self-evident truth of Blomley’s assertion that “The power to define a place can often mean the power to decide the destiny of that place” (2004: 147).

Chapter 4

The Performance of Cartography

Although cartographers write about the art as well as the science of mapmaking, science has overshadowed the competition between the two. The corollary is that when historians assess maps, their interpretation is molded by this idea of what maps are supposed to be. In our own Western culture, at least since the Enlightenment, cartography has been defined as a factual science. The premise is that a map should offer a transparent window on the world (Harley 1990: 3–4).1

The conceit, as elucidated above by the geographer J.B. Harley, that a map can ‘offer a transparent window on the world’ is the primary constitutive pretence of the cartographer’s trade: the map, in effect, is the cartographer’s performance, it is her performative vehicle. Maps, in turn, once created, once performed, have their own performative domain: they can make things happen, creating dominion, countries, nations, lands. In this chapter, we will be investigating the nature of these performances, both their extent and their felicity or, perhaps better, the (possible) extent of their (possible) felicity. On the opening page of How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier claims that the pretence of the transparency of mapping and maps is indispensible to cartography: “To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality … . Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential” (1991: 1). The very notion that one is actually looking at the world as they gaze at a map is obviously a misconception: one is instead looking at a visual representation of a place. But, being that the map’s performativity is so much ingrained into the underlying texture of that which is assumed as given, it is a misconception that frequently goes unnoticed, even by geographers. In The Power of Maps, Denis Wood claims that we should “site the source of the map in a realm more diffuse than cartography,” and that we should “insist on a sociology of the map” (1992: 18; italics, Wood). Wood goes on to ask if such a recognition of the social construction of mapping (especially the political context of its performative provenance) might reduce the products of cartography to objects constructed via opinion and surmises. In other words, once questions of social construction are factored into the cartographic equation, does that necessarily mean that maps become mere doxological fabrications? Wood resists this thesis by arguing that without drawing attention to the social construction of mapping, cartographers run the risk of falsely representing maps as an actual 1 This is cited in Denis Wood with John Fels, The Power of Maps. (The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1992), 18.

84

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

“window on the world;” that is, as transparent reflections as well as reifications of ‘ground truth’ (1992: 19). Without an admission that maps are representations and, therefore, like any representation, are impacted by factors besides a strict empirical correlation to what the representation presumes to present, a misreading of their status is unavoidable. “What is elided,” without such an acknowledgment, Wood claims, “is precisely the social construction of [for instance] the property line, the social construction of the border, the social construction of the hundred-year flood line, which – like everything else we map – is not a line you can see, not a high water mark drawn in mud on a wall or in debris along a bank, but no more than a more-or-less careful extrapolation from a statistical storm to a whorl of contour lines” (1992: 19; italics, Wood).

Once this elision is recognized, an entire set of nettlesome issues arises: No sooner are maps acknowledged as social constructions than their contingent, their conditional, their … arbitrary character is unveiled. Suddenly the things represented by these lines are opened to discussion and debate, the interest in them of owner, state, insurance company is made apparent. Once it is acknowledged that the map creates these boundaries, it can no longer be accepted as representing these ‘realities’ which alone the map is capable of embodying. (Wood 1992: 19; italics and ellipsis, Wood).

This generally unacknowledged disparity between creation and representation makes for a gap, invisible to those who ‘see’ mapping as a process entailing transparent representations, yet visible to those who ‘see’ mapping as a process (a performance or a series of performances) entailing social creation. Or, perhaps, we more closely hit the mark if we assert that the legibility of the creation of the social parameters of cartography are frequently obscured is reliant, and reliant to an even obvious degree, on the social circumstances under which respective mappings are made. Maps, as Denis Wood and John Fels assert in The Natures of Maps, “in collaboration with other sign systems” create “ideology, transform the world into ideology, and by printing the world on paper construct[s] the ideological. Whatever its subject is will be turned into something it isn’t and in the process inescapably, unavoidably made ideological” (2008: 6–7; italics, Wood and Fels). That ideology may (or even must) inflect cartography and that maps, in turn, assist in the transformation of the world into ideology, make mapping a primary nexus of the performative. The extent to which maps seem to be “real” as well as scientific only indicates the success of their performance on our collective imagination: “Maps, it is assumed, are statements of geographical fact; they are produced by neutral technologies; they just are. Maps have been thoroughly naturalized within our society; they are natural objects … . In modern society, the nature of maps is selfevident” (Edney 1996: 187, 186). While this ‘self-evident’ naturalization of maps

The Performance of Cartography

85

has been widely noted, their apparent conjunction with “reality” perdures; as Denis Cosgrove states is his introduction to Mappings, “the ambiguities of mapping’s claims have long been widely recognized … . But the instrumental use of maps in daily life can obscure the epistemological and interpretive challenges that mapping presents” (1999: 2). Cosgrove believes that such challenges are inherent to a process not strictly delimited by an empirical norm: The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political or moral. By the same token, the mapping’s record is not confined to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated. The world figured through mapping may thus be material or immaterial, actual or desired, whole or part, in various ways experienced, remembered or projected. In scale, mapping may trace a line or delimit and limn a territory in any length or size, from the whole of creation to its tiniest fragments … . Acts of mapping are creative, sometimes anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the world, and the map is both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagements. (1999: 2).

Perhaps maps are “best viewed as ‘a controlled fiction’” (Harley 2001: 107), or as “controlled speculations,” as David Harvey calls them in Explanation in Geography (1969: 371): “map signs do not represent the real world directly, but represent geographic concepts about the world” (Harvey 1969: 373).2 As James Corner points out in “The Agency of Mapping,” the status of maps as a ‘controlled fiction’ is due to the “inevitable abstractness of maps, the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and codification. Map devices such as frame, scale, orientation, projection, indexing and naming reveal artificial geographies that remain unavailable to human eyes. Maps present only one version of the earth’s surface, an eidetic fiction constructed from factual observation” (1999: 215). It is exactly these performative aspects of mapping, this admixture of the factual and the fictional, which gives maps their unsteady hold on what appears to be either an exclusively fictional or an exclusively factual domain: they perform their work at the junction of fact and fiction, thereby defying a totalizing categorization into either one or the other realm. That maps are fictional constructions becomes obvious when it is acknowledged that “maps look nothing like their subject, not only because of their vantage point but also because they present all parts at once, with an immediacy unavailable to the grounded individual” (Corner 1999: 225). Indeed, if maps ‘looked’ exactly ‘like their subject,’ they would be utterly worthless and absolutely redundant as they would be nothing other than the ground we walk on. Just such a bizarre situation is famously imagined in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, wherein a map is drawn to “the scale a mile to the mile,” so that eventually the denizens of Carroll’s fabulist realm “‘now use the 2 Harley is citing 103 of Philip C. Muehrcke’s Map Use: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation (Madison, 1978).

86

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’” (1965: 608–609). A juxtaposition to this construction of a single (as well as a singular) map completely congruent with its landmass, is offered by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space as he asks the question: “How many maps, in the descriptive and geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents?” (1991: 85). As Lefebvre conceives it, the answer tends towards the asymptotic: It is doubtful whether a finite number can be given in answer to this sort of question. What we are most likely confronted with here is a sort of instant infinity … . It is not only the codes – the map’s legend, the conventional signs of map-making and map-reading – that are liable to change, but also the objects represented, the lens through which they are viewed, and the scale used. (1991: 85).

So, on the one hand, mapping as a totalized representation omnivorously swallows that which it presents; on the other hand, mapping as an exhaustive representation endlessly fragments, splintering off new mappings as it assumes an infinite variety of perspectives from which to situate its restless representations: by the setting of these labile parameters, we can gauge the expansively polymer domain of the possible in cartography’s performance. Once again, this is not meant to deny the utility of cartography: maps are indeed instruments to get from here to there but, indubitably, they are neither here nor there. We are merely pressing on any general claim that cartography mobilizes a facticity unmediated by regimes of power (in whatever form) and/or untethered to inflections produced by the imagination (in whatever guise). In other words, maps are performed. That such wariness regarding the veridical quality of maps is warranted is due to the transparency they seem to assume, a transparency that belies their fabrication and the performative valences of their creation: As expertly produced, measured representations ... maps are conventionally taken to be stable, accurate, indisputable mirrors of reality, providing the logical basis for future decision making as well as the means for later projecting a designed plan back onto the ground. It is generally assumed that if the survey is quantitative, objective and rational, it is also true and neutral, thereby helping to legitimize and enact future plans and decisions. Thus, mapping precedes planning because it is assumed that the map will objectively identify and make visible the terms around which a planning project may then be rationally developed, evaluated and built. What remains overlooked in this sequence, however, is the fact that maps are highly artificial and fallible constructions, virtual abstractions that possess great force in terms of how people see and act. (Corner 1999: 215–216).

The Performance of Cartography

87

Even our conception of continental masses is not immune to the power of cartography to shape the ways in which we perceive the world: in a very real sense, maps “perform” the continents upon us. In The Myth of Continents, Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen argue that the division of the Earth’s landmasses into continents is the result of a social construction inflected by the contingencies of history. This is especially clear, they claim, in the sectoring off of Europe from Asia: That Europe’s continental status may be denied with a wink but then continually confirmed in practice does not indicate a simple oversight. Nor can it be dismissed as a mere convenience, a simplification necessary for making sense of a complex world.... Viewing Europe and Asia as parts of a single continent would have been far more geographically accurate, but it would also have failed to grant Europe the priority that Europeans and their descendents overseas believed it deserved. By positing a continental division between Europe and Asia, Western scholars were able to reinforce the notion of a cultural dichotomy between these two areas – a dichotomy that was essential to modern Europe’s identity as a civilization. (Lewis and Wigen 1997: 36).

Denis Cosgrove buttresses this view in Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World: “‘Europe’ and ‘European’ are of course not natural geographic or ethnographic categories; they are contingent and historical constructions. This is especially true for Europe as a geographical space: of all the ‘continents’, Europe is the most mythical” (2008: 136). Yet its performance has been magnificently felicitous: that there is a universal consensus that there is a continent called Europe attests to the success of this particular performative as does the universal consensus that there is a continent called Asia. In terms of Asia, Tuan states that it “was defined negatively as all that was not Europe. Asia’s reason for existence was to serve as the backward, yet glamorous because exotic, Other. It had no independent reality; and yet, in the course of time, people who lived in this European creation began to accept it” (1991: 689). Here we should reference Edward Said’s writing on the “Oriental” as work excavating just such conceptual frameworks. That there have been numerous infelicities in the history of mapping should come as no surprise: indeed, cartographic misfires are legion. For instance, some “of the first maps of the United States show the central meridian running through Philadelphia. The “Meridian of Philadelphia” gradually gave place to a Washington, D.C., zero meridian. On L’Enfant’s plan of Washington, the 0o 0’ line passes through “Congress House.” Other contemporary projets put the line through the “President’s House” (Henrikson 1997: 101).3

3 Henrikson cites “American prime meridians,” by Joseph Hyde Pratt, Geographical Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr. 1942), 233–244.

88

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

However, given that the Greenwich Mean Line was not adopted as the “‘common zero of longitude’” until 1884 (with the French holding out for Paris until 1911 when they finally acceded to the selection of the Royal Observatory as the Prime Meridian), it is little wonder that zero meridians sprouted up all across the globe (Pratt 1942: 234).4 Indeed, up to 1870, such meridians ran through numerous locations, including “Greenwich, Paris, Ferro, Naples, Christiania, Copenhagen, Brussels, Madrid, Cadiz, Pulkova, Rome, Stockholm, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Washington” (Pratt 1942: 233–234). In 1932 Hendrik Willem Van Loon reported that “even today … there still are German, French and American maps which show” the prime meridian “running through Berlin, Paris and Washington” (1932: 64). But perhaps, to be fair, these should not be strictly classified as infelicities: they should instead be categorized as simple byproducts of a certain haphazardness that holds sway over any domain until the settling of a regime of standardization. In retrospect, of course it appears that a plethora of misfires occurred in this longitudinal tug-of-war, what with zero meridians sprouting up everywhere from Paris to Rio and from Ferro to Pulkova. Yet at the time such performances must have seemed absolutely appropriate and supremely felicitous; else why were they performed? Similarly, the division of the world between Spain and Portugal in 1494 must have seemed “appropriate” to the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Catholic Church, which oversaw the negotiations and then blessed the results of what may be viewed today as the most extraordinarily presumptuous and infelicitous cartographic performance in the history of the world. This demarcation between the two budding Iberian empires “which initially was set at 100 leagues to the west of the Azores and Cape Verdes Islands,” with everything to the west of that marker going to Spain and everything east to Portugal, was later amended as the Portuguese “would have none of it and after tough bargaining on their part, the line was changed to the meridian 370 leagues west of the islands at the famous treaty of Tordesillas” (Livingstone 1992: 44–45). Denizens of the “New World” were not immune to such infelicities. The evercommonsensical Benjamin Franklin insensibly partook of one of the grandest of misfires in what can be construed as a kind of epiphenomenal infelicity engrafted onto an original infelicity perpetrated by Charles I: “In 1629 Charles I, in a fit of political magnanimity and geographic ignorance,” writes H.W. Brands in The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, “had granted to Sir Robert Heath an enormous tract of land [in America] extending from the 31st parallel to the 36th and from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea (the Pacific)” (2000: 336). This cock-eyed grant, presumably stretching across the American colony and then enveloping the Pacific as well, foreshadows the madcap larcenies of the South Sea Bubble, whose real estate infelicities are only rivaled by those perpetrated in the recent sub-prime meltdown. 150 years after the magnanimous 4 Pratt here cites H.M. Strong’s “Universal world time,” Geographical Review, Vol. 25, 1935, 479–484, 481.

The Performance of Cartography

89

‘fit’ of Charles I, Benjamin Franklin schemed with Sir Robert Heath’s heirs to make good on this fabulous grant, but nothing came of it, though this did not stop Franklin and his illegitimate son, William, from attempting to organize and capitalize upon a colony in Illinois, a project that Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the American Department under George III, rejected, and so “the two Franklins’ dream of western wealth danced beyond their reach” (Brands 2000: 384); that is, it misfired. Of course not every land scheme or colonization project ended in a misfire. Frequently, what was projected onto the map turned into a reality, with the very projection seemingly part of its realization. Writing of a map of Virginia compiled in 1612 by Captain John Smith, David B. Quinn states that this “map went through many editions and was no doubt widely known in England. It enabled intending colonists to plan future settlements, especially from 1618 onward, and was helpful for merchants organizing trading expeditions to specific areas; without a map of this kind their task would have been much more difficult” (1990: 61). So, in this instance, Quinn claims that Smith’s map ‘enabled’ colonists and ‘was helpful’ to merchants: given the truth of those claims, such acts of agency attributed to maps (the former set in active terms, the latter in passive terms) highlights their performative capacities when coupled with those willing and able to utilize them. James Edward Oglethorpe erased unpleasant details both major and minor on the maps he used to promote the colonization of Georgia in the 1730s. In an article from the 1986 volume of Imago Mundi, Louis de Vorsey, Jr. informs us that Oglethorpe “utilized cartographic language in his efforts to launch Britain’s last colonial venture on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. In his hands … maps became far more than simple systems for the communication of spatial information. Aided by Benjamin Martyn, secretary of the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America, he produced maps which were carefully calculated to forward the greater goals underlying the genesis of the Georgia scheme. (1986: 35).

In an effort to soft-pedal the peril of the Georgia wilderness and reinforce the notion of English control in the region, Oglethorpe effaced evidence of indigenous peoples and distanced the relative proximity of both the French and the Spanish. Working off a previous mapping, Oglethorpe deleted from his representation of the proposed colony such items as “Here the Carolina Indians leave their Canoes when they goe to War against ye Floridians” as well as “the Road of the Ochese going to War with the Floridians;” Oglethorpe also erased French settlements and Spanish forts, all in a cartographic performance intended to make Georgia palatable to influential members of Parliament as well as prospective colonists (Wycoff 1986: 37).5 5 Also omitted are: “A French factory, Caphna 200 men, Cayachpie 300 men, Chicasa 600 men,” and so on.

90

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Such elisions, whether intentional or not, are what J.B. Harley calls instances of “cartographic silences.” In detailing such practices in early modern Europe, Harley advises his readers to consider such omissions acts of “active human performance,’” thereby placing such exclusions explicitly within the performative domain (1988: 58). For Harley, “Silence and utterance are not alternatives but constituent parts of map language, each necessary for the understanding of the other,” and, furthermore, that “silences on maps may sometimes become the determinate part of the cartographic message” (1988: 58). Selection is of course a requisite step in any cartography: if all was included, the map would either be entirely overwhelmed with information or it would transform into the land itself, as in Carroll’s Bruno and Sylvie, Concluded. However, processes of selection have often been guided by rationalizations far removed from any semblance of scientific rationality. For instance, as Harley points out, the state is “frequently able to impose its own rules upon … cartographic knowledge, giving rise to the silences that are induced by those occasions of deliberate secrecy and censorship that recur so often in the history of European mapping” (1988: 59). In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as the European system of empire began to congeal and the various nation-states of Europe to coalesce, maps began to be “recognized as a visual language communicating proprietorial or territorial rights in both practical and symbolic senses” (Harley 1988: 59). David Quinn points out that Edward Wright’s world map of 1599 was used “to substantiate English claims, in the North to the land discovered by the Cabots, and in the far West to Drake’s ‘Nova Albion’” (Quinn 1990: 57). Maps were “a crucial part of the technical infrastructure necessary for the plantation and governance of the space seized by the English Crown,” claims Gearolid Ó Tuathail, writing of the English incursion into Ireland (1996: 4). Geography, in such a case, was not some neutral discipline in the imperial project, but “was a foreign imposition, a form of knowledge conceived in imperial capitals and dedicated to the territorialization of space along lines established by royal authority. Geography was not something already possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth by an expanding, centralizing imperial state. It was not a noun but a verb, a geo-graphing, an earth-writing by ambitious endocolonizing and exocolonizing states who sought to seize space and organize it to fit their own cultural visions and material interests. (Ó Tuathail 1996: 2; italics, Ó Tuathail).

And in the solipsistic epistemology of the Europeans, the very knowledge of cartography, the ability to survey and then inscribe the results onto a map, as opposed to the indigenous “ignorance” and non-performance of the same, gave the imperialists “justification” for their territorial claims: the very non-performance of mapping was positive proof to the Europeans that no formal title to the land was held by the Indians. Maps could reflect both knowledge and possession; without them, neither was possible.

The Performance of Cartography

91

These processes were not limited to the European exploration and appropriation of the Americas. The Siamese elite, having learned the fundamental importance of cartography from the British, used the performativity of mapping in the 1890s during their cartographical “battles” with the French along the Siam border with Vietnam and Laos: It seems that Siam expected mapping to be the means which could determine once and for all the boundary of the realm. By mapping, that is to say, the ambiguity of margins was expected to be eradicated and the clear-cut limits of the realm of Siam would appear. Mapping technology was no longer alien or suspicious to them. Apparently they realized that in order to counter the French claim, modern cartography was the only geographical language the West could hear and only a modern map could make an argument. (Winichakul 1994: 121).

The mapping of Siam, according to Thongchai Winichakul in his Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, not only aided the Siamese in their border disputes with the French, it also led to the creation of the idea of Siamese nationhood: “The geo-body of a nation is merely an effect of modern geographical discourse whose prime technology is a map” (1994: 17). The geo-body, according to Winichakul, is the physical identification of a people with its nation, leading to a collectivized bodily sense of nationhood, and the main conveyor or articulator of the nation to the people is the nation’s image on the map and the people’s identification with such an image: “To a considerable extent, the knowledge about the Siamese nationhood has been created by our conception of Siam-on-the-map, emerging from maps and existing nowhere apart from maps” (1994: 17). The map, in this construal, is the primary performative operator in the creation of a sense of embodied nationhood and personalized nationality. By extension, it is therefore also a prime instigator of subjectivity. Such an understanding of the performative efficacy of cartography in Asia may not have relied on a “borrowing” of the imperial lineage of Britain, for, as William A. Callahan informs us in Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations, “cartography was part of the legitimization of the Chinese empire. Tributary states presented maps to the emperor as marks of subservience. As the ancient history the Han shu puts it: ‘The Son of Heaven receives maps and registers from the four seas.’ World maps were not merely strategic or cosmological, so much as part of general claims of feudal overlordship … . These maps were artifacts of both religious and political ritual in a foreign policy performance; the performances were not just among the states as in modern diplomacy, but among Heaven, Earth, and Man. (2004: 86).

Such an explicitly performative reading could be dismissed as merely a retrospective misreading on Callahan’s part; but can we suppose that these maps were presented

92

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

as simply “pretty pictures” and that they did not have some sort of ritualistic and performative aspect? Such a supposition is hard to imagine as veridical. But maps can also serve as performances of what has been lost by a nation: in Callahan’s “The Cartography of National Humiliation and the Emergence of China’s Geobody,” a kind of reverse operation of the Siamese case as outlined by Winichakul is delineated. After acknowledging that “maps are an important part of the continual self-crafting of any nation’s image” (2009: 141), Callahan demonstrates how maps of “lost” territories can be powerful components in the creation of a nation’s geobody as well, in this case, China’s. The Chinese have created numerous “national humiliation maps” during the last century, charting the extent of Chinese territory “lost” to the Japanese, the Russians, the Vietnamese, and others. For instance, a “1927 map lists fifteen lost ‘homeland territories,’ fifteen lost ‘vassals,’ four ‘territorial concessions,” and another fourteen lost and disputed ‘maritime territories’” (Callahan 2009: 155–156). Such maps, produced by a variety of Chinese regimes, including the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, serve to construct identity practices: the humiliation maps “constitute a symbolic discourse that can mobilize the masses. In this way, maps not only tell us about the geopolitics of international borders; when they inscribe space as a geobody, maps tell us abut the biopolitics of national identity practices” (Callahan 2009: 144). So, once again, maps inscribe subjectivity as they perform collective identity, in the Chinese case through the etching of lost territory upon the national geobody. Once mapping was understood as a specific practice bestowing specific powers, maps became highly fortified state secrets, their performative capacities tightly sequestered. Indeed, cartographic larceny became quite common, despite attempts by authorities to protect their maps as state property “controlled in a few powerful hands, those of the sovereign, an inner circle of ministers, or the principal merchants and navigators involved with a venture” (Harley 1988: 61). The Velasco map, “an English conflation” of the Hudson River, much of it based on the work of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain and compiled by acts of “successful espionage by the English,” was in turn “captured” by Alonso de Velasco, Spanish ambassador to England from 1609 to 1613 (Quinn 1990: 44). Such acts of “international espionage” were routine, according to David B. Quinn’s “Maps of the Age of European Exploration,” as “all the European powers did their best to obtain information from the Spanish cartographic center in Seville,” and the “Spanish ambassadors in England were of course always trying to obtain secret information about new exploration;” indeed, “Velasco’s predecessor had laid hands on an unpublished map of Virginia” (1990: 59). I include these incidents not to draw particular attention to acts of cartographic espionage in the imperial age, though they do harbor a certain historical charm, but to indicate the performative value of maps in general: if maps could not give their bearers the power to perform felicitous acts, cartographic thievery would never occur. Such performative value becomes more obvious to a contemporary perspective when we consider the worth of military cartography and resource mapping. When

The Performance of Cartography

93

the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, a combined operation of NASA, Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (a branch of the U.S. Geological Survey), sent the space shuttle Endeavour on an eleven-day mission in February 2000 to map 112 million square kilometers of Earth, resulting in data “sufficient … to fill 20,600 compact discs,” it wasn’t done simply to collect pretty pictures of the planet: “The United States Defence Department declared that the function of Endeavour’s mission was to improve the aim of missiles and the deployment of troops” (Scafi 2006: 18–19). Maps of course have been invaluable tools for the military for millennia, as both offensive and defensive exigencies have been prime drivers of cartographic innovation and, in turn, acts of military cartography have performed a kind of cognitive spatial cohesive surgery upon the collective mind. For instance, Vauban’s fortressing of France and its resulting spatial imaginary, reflected in mappings and then replicated in the minds of the French, assisted in the formulation of the French nation-state as a coherent physical entity, a geobody, fortressed borders circumambulating the whole. Yet maps also perform many other tasks, including serving as a kind of a standin for travel. Instead of actually visiting a place, one gazes at it on the map and transfers one’s self to that location: “A conventional trope in the prefatory pages of the atlas for much of its history,” writes Cosgrove in Geography and Vision, “was that it offered the wonder of the vast and varied world in images that could be consulted in the privacy of one’s study, negating the time, discomfort and potential danger of travelling to see such things in person” (2008: 6). Here, maps offer a performative hassle-free instantaneous gratuitous visitation to any place on the globe. “The same idea, differently expressed,” Cosgrove continues, “was used to promote air photographs in the early years of flight, and it remains a part of the imaginative attraction of popular geographies such as National Geographic Magazine and Google Earth” (2008: 6). However, in The Natures of Maps, Wood and Fels point out that National Geographic maps do much more than serve as stand-ins for exotic locales: By joining the Society (and one must join in order to subscribe to the magazine), one is made a participant in a scientific organization that produced geographic knowledge that, as everyone knew, was ultimately codified in the form of a map … . That is to say, the map is the evidence of the production of knowledge that transforms Society membership from a magazine subscription into a really significant form of cultural capital (the map is a knowledge fetish). (2008: 45; italics, Wood and Fels).

Here a hinged performative relationship is posited: the supporting member, through his or her subscription and its linkage to membership in the Society, is a kind of tertiary adjunct assistant in the production of knowledge which is reified in the map, which, in turn, doubles back and anoints the member with the fetishized cultural capital of the map. So, here the map performs the task of a double-backed gateway to knowledge: it decodes the land and the seas while coding its viewer

94

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

as a bearer of cultural capital. Wood and Fels argue that the cartographic practices of the Society have greatly impacted our view of the Earth and our perspective on nature. Referencing the Society’s 1979 map of “Australia: Land of Living Fossils,” they point out that what “is in fact a highly arbitrary, limited, and patronizing vision of nature is passed off as a straightforward fact of geography” (2008: 48; italics, Wood and Fels). This should give us pause when we find ourselves regarding maps as constructions free of contention. Indeed, maps have frequently been precisely such sites of contention. And, if this is true, how could they be reduced to simple factual reflections of what is? Arno Peters’ ‘revolutionary’ Orthogonal Map of the World, unveiled in May of 1973, was an attempt by a leftist cartographer to remedy the detrimental social and political effects of the Mercator projection. That such deleterious effects had resulted from the Mercator map was due, Peters contended, to its inherent privileging of Europe and the United States by its warping (compressing) of Third World nations: “‘Since Mercator produced his global map over four hundred years ago for the age of European world domination, cartographers have clung to it despite its having been long outdated by events … . The Eurocentric world concept, as the last expression of a subjective global view of primitive peoples, must give way to an objective global concept,’” i.e. the Peters’ projection, which would serve as “an antidote for the Mercator projection’s dastardly ‘Eurocentric’ worldview” (Monmonier 2004: 154, 145).6 In effect, Peters was hoping that the performance of his map would outperform the performance of the Mercator projection, rendering it null and void. Indeed, his projection was adopted by Oxfam, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Council of Churches, but was eventually abandoned as cartographers pointed out that it was riddled with mathematical error and therefore did not live up to its claim of representing an ‘objective global concept.’ But this rejection of Peters’ reformist cartography by mapmakers was not intended as an assertion that the Mercator projection was a true representation of ground truth; indeed, it had long been recognized by many cartographers that the Mercator did not accurately reflect the world as it is, and others before Peters had attempted to reshape the cartographic image of the globe. In The Natures of Maps, Wood and John Fels point out that “the Peters projection … is identical to James Gall’s 1885 Orthographic Projection … which never attracted any attention at all” (2008: 9). However, the failure of cartography to successfully recreate ground truth must be considered a problem endemic to any venture that attempts to transplant three-dimensional topography to a flat sheet of paper: terrain defies such compression and will always result in disarticulation. The notion that via modern scientific techniques such as GPS, Google Earth, Remote-Sensing, digital mapping, and Landstat, we have arrived at a point in time in which we have transcended such disarticulation and can finally gain an utterly transparent 6 Monmonier quotes Peters’ Die Neue Kartographie/The New Cartography. Klagenfurt, Austria: Universitatsverlag Carinthia; New York: Friendship Press, 1983, 149.

The Performance of Cartography

95

window on the world via cartography is a conceit: “a big deal is made about the failures of maps in the past to reflect the ‘real world.’ This leads to much selfrighteous indignation over the loss of learning during the dark ages when the lamp of learning was extinguished … thereby permitting contemporary maps to appear as the windows they have – presumably by dint of hard effort and the ‘scientific’ attention to standards – triumphantly become” (Wood 1992: 20; italics, Wood). This sense of triumphalism can sometimes blind the modern cartographer to the innate unsteadiness of her trade. Such unsteadiness is revealed by mapmakers who do not understand “that as a situated pragmatics,” cartographers must begin their task “with the clear understanding that what the map represents and the ways in which it represents are not guaranteed by anything behind it” (Pickles 2004: 67). Instead, maps are constructed through certain modalities, such as projection, scale, symbolization, and selection. According to Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps, each of these essential elements of cartography is “a source of distortion” (1991: 5). With so many opportunities for distortion, it is no wonder that maps often ‘misstate’ what exists on the ground. But the claim I am making is that these somewhat obvious sources of distortion only serve to occlude the fundamental distortion of cartography: that the map is not a fact, but a ‘controlled fiction’ and, what is more, a controlled fiction performed upon its consumers. However, despite this stronger claim, that the map in and of itself is inherently a distortion, let us take a brief survey of one of Monmonier’s categories of distortion, that of selection. Selection is one of the primary processes of mapping: not everything can go on a map. Only certain things can be performed on any planisphere. The motivational structures governing such selections are always tinged with contingency. Sometimes there are innocent explanations for a map’s selective criteria: why should a map of golf courses in England include soccer stadiums in Spain (or soccer stadiums in England, for that matter)? But frequently selections have been made with distinct political and economic agendas in mind: in 1523 when attorneys and court geographers from Castile and Portugal once again divided the globe into western and eastern halves, their immediate concern may have been the resolution of the dispute as to which empire controlled the possession of the Moluccas, but the map which they produced laid claim to jurisdictions of a rather broader economic and political scope (Brotton 1999: 81–84). William Bunge had a distinctly different concept in mind when he mounted his Detroit Geographical Expedition in 1970; paraphrasing Marx’s famous passage from the Theses on Feuerbach, Bunge stated that “‘it is not the function of geographers to merely map the earth, but to change it’”; Bunge, along with his students from Wayne State University, recruited residents from inner city Detroit to create “oughtness maps,” that is, a cartography built upon local knowledge of the qualities specifically lacking in a community and charted with the intent to transform such conditions (Wood 1992: 189; italics, Wood).7 In examinations of instances of medieval European cartography, it must 7 Wood cites from William Bunge, Field Notes: Discussion Paper No. 1: The Detroit Geographical Expedition. The Society for Human Exploration. Detroit, 1969. 39.

96

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

be remembered that they “cannot be understood without examining the intellectual practices of clerks and monks and the ways they dealt with written texts and images, the religious context of the particular culture and the contemporary interpretation of ancient encyclopedaedic works … . Mappaemundi in the Western Middle Ages were linked with a vision of God, looking at the world from God’s place and looking at God through the world he created” (Jacob 1996: 193–194). As Christian Jacob says in “Toward a Cultural History of Cartography,” maps “construct their own worlds through the filtering, translation, and hierarchical and taxonomical organization of data” (1996: 192). That these ‘worlds’ may reflect transitory as well as somewhat imaginary and grandiose power relations, as in the case of the Portuguese and Castilian bifurcation of the world, or be inflected by ideological prerequisites or religious beliefs, as in the Bunge charts of the inner city of Detroit and the Mappaemundi of the Middle Ages, in no way negates their status as maps; it merely alerts us to the contingency of the process of selection which impacts all instances of cartography. It should also alert us to the “self-legitimating” role that maps have often filled throughout history: maps can actuate as well as enforce a certain performative force (Jacob 1996: 194). As stated previously, effacements or ‘silences’ on maps often carry performative baggage: “In colonial mapping, as in eighteenth-century North America, silences on maps may also be regarded as discrimination against native peoples. A map such as Fry and Jefferson’s of Virginia (1751) suggests that Europeans had always lived there: where ‘Indian nations’ are depicted on it, it is more as a signpost to future colonial expansion than as recognition of their ethnic integrity” (Harley 2002: 67). Such ‘empty’ or ‘unknown lands,’ as they were often labeled on colonial and imperial maps, were of course quite well known to the peoples who filled this ‘emptiness.’ Absolute erasures on maps often reflect political policies; Harley points out that “surveyors working for English proprietors sometimes excluded the cabins of the Irish from their otherwise ‘accurate’ maps” (Harley 2002: 67). Here we see maps working as instruments of State actors who had come to understand that practices of cartography in conjunction with the power of the State can make things happen: “Representations, when allied with state power, not only depict the world, they can remake it” (Blomley 2004: 7). Whether cartographical erasures or elisions are deliberate or not is almost beside the point, as they embody, instantiate, and move forward state policy regardless of, in this case, the surveyor’s or proprietor’s state of mind. In A History of Spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geocoded world, John Pickles states that The map has been an archetype for … hegemonic projects in the historical construction of the nation-states, where it has been an essential tool in territorializing the state by extending systems of policing and administration, and in establishing a sense of national identity at home and abroad (sometimes in the face of explicit internal disunity or rebellion). The state must consistently attempt to capture the discursive and ideological field not only through the more

The Performance of Cartography

97

obvious organs of public opinion, but also by the appropriation of space (and the map) to its purposes and by the symbolic constitution of mapped space as national space. (2004: 39).

Here regimes of external as well as internal colonization are manifested as imperial and national maps institutionalize their power through cartography. Maps not only function as “objective surface[s],” they also function as a method of “positively reinforcing entrenched social and political interests (those of merchants, land owners, administrators, tax-collectors, for instance)” (Jacob 1996: 194). J.B. Harley was instrumental in bringing this performative aspect of cartography to the fore. In “Deconstructing the Map,” Harley applies Derridean notions to mapping as he surveys the direct and indirect effects of various modes of power as they are manifested in cartography even as technical advances seem to give the impression that more objective registers of mapping are being articulated: Precision of instrument and technique merely serves to reinforce the image, with its encrustation of myth, as a selective perspective on the world. Thus maps of local estates in the European ancien régime, though derived from instrumental survey, were a metaphor for a social structure based on landed property. County and regional maps, though founded on scientific triangulation, were an articulation of local values and rights. Maps of the European states, though constructed along arcs of the meridian, serves still as a symbolic shorthand for a complex of nationalist ideas. And world maps, though increasingly drawn on mathematically defined projections, nevertheless gave a spiraling twist to the manifest destiny of European overseas conquest and colonization. In each of these examples we can trace the contours of metaphor in a scientific map. This in turn enhances our understanding of how the text works as an instrument operating on social reality. (1989: 162).

In this construal, mapping techniques are instruments of state power, not only inscribing lines on a map, but inscribing them straight onto the contours of social reality as well. In this sense, they can be thought of as a disciplinary regime, a la Foucault: “In the first instance, discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space. To achieve this end, it employs several techniques … . Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed it upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony” (1995: 141; italics, Foucault). Such enclosures are primary aids in the formation of docile bodies by the demarcation as well as the institution of borders, inclusionary and exclusionary zones, property lines, and so on. Harley also points out that it is not cartographers acting as autonomous agents who make the selection of what to inscribe upon any particular map but the patrons employing them:

98

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography The most familiar sense of power in cartography is that of power external to maps and mapping. This serves to link maps to the center of political power. Power is exerted on cartography. Behind most cartographers there is a patron; in innumerable instances the makers of cartographic texts were responding to external needs. Power is also exerted with cartography. Monarchs, ministers, state institutions, the Church, have all initiated programs of mapping for their own ends. In modern Western society maps quickly became crucial to the maintenance of state power – to its boundaries, to its commerce, to its internal administration, to control of populations, and to its military strength. (1989: 165; italics, Harley).

Or, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the lines and inscriptions of cartography “compose us, as they compose our map” (1988: 203). Using mapping to inscribe as well as instantiate power is nothing new: Dilke relates that at the dawn of imperial Rome, Augustus had a practical interest in sponsoring the new map of the inhabited world … . On the re-establishment of peace after the civil wars, he was determined on the one hand to found new colonies to provide land for discharged veterans, on the other hand to build up a new image of Rome as a benevolent head of a vast empire. Mapping enabled him to carry out these objectives and to perfect a task begun by Julius Caesar. It became, among other things, a useful tool in the propaganda of imperial Rome. (1985: 41).

The propagandistic or “educative” force of cartography also seems to have at least partially motivated Christopher Saxton’s mapping of the English counties during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. As Nicholas Blomley indicates in Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power, Saxton’s “maps and chorographies were much more than objectives representations of English space. It becomes immediately clear that the atlases, at least, can be seen as continuing an earlier trend, that of the centralization of national power at the expense of local, feudal authority. It is well known, for example, that the survey and publication of Saxton’s maps had the full backing of the Crown. Indeed, the idea of collecting and publishing maps of the kingdom appears to have been suggested by the Queen’s printer in the 1570s, as the link between mapmaking and the imperatives of statehood became increasingly clear. (1994: 84).

The English may have been replicating the practice of the Holy Roman Empire here: it appears that prior to Saxton’s project, the “Holy Roman Emperors sponsored the production of … atlases because they created an impression of chorographic unity that, it was hoped, would help in the political process of consolidating the empire”

The Performance of Cartography

99

(Olwig 2002: 35). Here, atlases perform the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, or at least it is hoped that they will help in such a performance. In a 1954 study for the RAND Corporation on the post-World War Two revival of the Nazi-era geopolitical organ, Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, E.W. Schnitzer8 points out that “in the opinion” of Haushofer and his followers at the German geopolitical Institute in Munich, “the foremost purpose of a map was to teach a political lesson” (1954: 22). A map was to be used as a vehicle for propaganda rather than as an objective analysis of geographic data, with an emphasis “always on … the political consequences of geographic facts”; Haushofer and his colleagues, according to Schnitzer, “clearly recognized how maps could be used to convey nonscientific propaganda. Some geopolitical maps, by means of arbitrarily drawn lines, suggestive arrows, and other devices, were constructed to confuse the reader deliberately in order to guide his opinion into a certain desired channel. Truthfulness and accuracy of presentation were desirable only so long as they served the propagandistic intent of the map maker. Through numerous devices, cartography was turned into a kind of magic capable of demonstrating the most misleading of distorted facts. (1954: 23).

This is clearly a statement with the utmost of performative implications, reflecting a belief that cartography can “perform” implantations of ignorance as well as knowledge upon the collective mind. In this case, maps were created to represent Germany’s lack of space. Using “a complex system of geopolitical symbols, consisting of arrows, wedges, crosshatching, clamps, pincers, circles, and so forth, to depict advance in space, racial or economic infiltration, lines of thrust, encirclement, alliances, and other movements of geopolitical forces” (Schnitzer 1954: 22–23), maps were explicitly formulated to establish the idea that “to be free and safeguard its future existence Germany needs geographic and military living space” (Gyorgy 1942: 72). The Germans were doing nothing new by recruiting maps as educative instruments, though the ends they wished to put into effect though the use of their instruments were certainly unique. Maps have been used as performative tools of education throughout the millennia. Theophrastus, “successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic School,” requested that “panels [pinakes] showing maps of the world [periodoi ges] should be set up in the lower cloister” of the School, “evidently with the general aim of educating the public of Athens” (Dilke 1985: 31). Kropotkin believed that the study of geography had the power to “teach us, 8 It would be interesting to know if this E.W. Schnitzer is the same person as an Ewald Schnitzer who wrote an article titled “Geopolitics as an Element in Social Education,” which was published in the Harvard Educational Review of 1938 (No. 8, 507– 516). Ó Tuathail cites page 516 of this text on page 135 of his Critical Geopolitics: “Among the benefits of using geopolitics in social education suggested by Schnitzer is its facilitating fuller discussion of ‘inheritance and racial hygiene.’”

100

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

from our earliest childhood, that we are all brethren, whatever our nationality” (1885: 941). In contradistinction to such an idealistic perspective, the propaganda purposes for which maps have been utilized can also be construed as motivated with pedagogical ends in mind, no matter how warped some of those ends may have been; after all, as Foucault has so ably demonstrated, the lines between education and state discipline are anything but distinct. The pedagogical power of maps is still viewed as relevant by the state, no matter how much “the death of distance” may be shouted from the globalizing rooftops. For instance, as reported by Hector Becerra in the April 28 2010 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the State of California recently produced a “fault activity map,” adding “50 new surface earthquake faults” to the California Geological Survey map, with the express purposes of aiding planning and educating the public (2010: A1). Becerra quotes Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones as saying that “‘every classroom in California should have these maps on the wall. I don’t think we do enough to educate the general public about these features’” (2010: A1). But there’s another more obvious, but perhaps precisely because of this obviousness, more unnoticed educative aspect to cartography: maps, “whether regional or local, even simple city plans, allow their user to find the answer: ‘I am there’” (Jacob 2006: 339). In The Sovereign Map, Jacob wants to make the claim that this realization of the identity of “I” with “there” gives the self a “first and final reference” point (2007: 340). Such an indexical “lesson” can allow an individual to gain “a stable reference that grounds my identity, can show me my anchoring point in space. This essential point of reference appears only in the minimal but irreducible distance resulting from the representation. It is only in the gaze upon the image, and thus upon a place where I am not, that I can become conscious of my position. Metaphor is at the heart of this intellectual operation that allows space to be organized around an existential center. The pedagogy of maps and geography is often based on this starting point, which allows environing space to be spread out in respect to a point of reference: more than a point, it is a zone, a form, or a country. This fundamental place constitutes the center of the mental map, around which countries both near and far, as well as the continental environment, will unfold in my imagination and memory. This place of reference is marked by permanence and stability, its reassuring and familiar value resulting from this fixity, from its recurrent presence, a first and final reference. (Jacob 2006: 339–340).

However, such a realization depends on a self cognizant of the distance between itself and a point of “thereness” on the map. In other words, it depends on an awareness of the metaphorical quality of the map and its concomitant metaphorical relationship with a set of indexical coordinates. That Jacob may realize this, at least while writing this passage, is all very fine, but to suppose that the average or even supra-sophisticated map-user does the same seems to stretch credulity to

The Performance of Cartography

101

the bursting point. Still, theoretically at least, Jacob’s thinking holds water, to link another metaphor to his metaphorical reading of the pedagogical value of the map. Even though cartographers are typically subtended under the jurisdiction of regimes of power, this should not distract us from our central thesis, maps in and of themselves create power. As Harley puts it, “Cartographers manufacture power: they create a spatial panopticon. It is a power embedded in the map text. We can talk about the power of the map just as we already talk about the power of the word or about the book as a force for change” (Harley 1989: 165). Pickles’s construal of mapping buttresses Harley’s performative contentions: “The map is a conjured object that created categories, boundaries and territories: the spaces of temperature, biota, populations, regions, spaces and objects attain the reality that is particular to them through the combined and multiplies acts of mapping, delimiting, bounding, categorizing” (2004: 94). Even the selection of what qualifies as a map is a process fretted with discourses of power. The stick charts of the Marshall Islands are now understood as being extremely sophisticated mappings of the patterns of ocean swells as they relate to the location of the various islands in the Marshall chain. Yet the form of seashells woven into structures of palm tree ribs does not articulate with Western notions of cartography and so their inclusion in the archive of mapping has only recently occurred and is done on a contingent basis, as exemplars of the mapping practices of the Other. Performed cartographies are also relegated to the margins: “In some societies, gestural and performative practices are central to the ways in which people structure and represent their worlds spatially, serving as tools of waywinding and spatial representation” (Pickles 2004: 15). The Aztecs devised maps that not only operated spatially but temporally: their maps are “not a snapshot in time but a representation of events that occurred over a number of years” (Thrower 1999: 9). However, here we should intervene to note that the combination of spatial and temporal elements in cartography was not an exclusive practice of the “exotic”: Imperial maps were often inscribed with the various dates upon which explorers ‘discovered’ new lands and added them to the imperial domain: thus they were inscribed with both diachronic and synchronic markers. Chatwin describes the autochthonous peoples of Australia as possessing a highly sophisticated cartography based on the relationship between tribal lineage, landmarks, and song. Chatwin’s informant explains that “each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints … these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as ‘ways’ of communication between the most far-flung tribes. (1987: 13).

And to retrieve a citation from Songlines already referenced: “‘A song,’ he said, ‘was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country’ (Chatwin 1987: 13).

102

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Maps can also serve as images of imagined futures. In such a construal, maps are blueprints of possibility for planners, architects, military strategists, and utopian dreamers; in such a conception, maps manifest a certain fictive quality as they depict visions of reality that may come to be, or not. As Corner puts it, “For the landscape architect and urban planner, maps are sites for the imaging and projecting of alternative worlds. Thus maps are in-between the virtual and the real” (1999: 225). From this cartographical perspective, the question, “‘Did you find that in the world or did you make it up?’ denotes an irrelevant distinction. More important is how the map permits a kind of excavation (downward) and extension (outward) to expose, reveal and construct latent possibilities within a greater milieu. The map ‘gathers’ and ‘shows’ things presently (and always) invisible, things which may appear incongruous or untimely, but which may also harbor enormous potential for the unfolding of alternative events. (Corner 1999: 225).

Here what the map reflects is not this world, but an alternative one, with the map alluding to a world that will exist once the possibilities entailed in the map are performed. In this chapter, we have demonstrated some, but certainly not all, of the many ways in which the cartographical dimension of geography reflects the performative. Next we turn to private and public spaces: their creation and maintenance is also constituted by performative acts.

Chapter 5

The Performance of Private and Public Space The demarcation of private space from public space (or visa versa) is the next performative domain we will explore. First we will examine some of the performative differentials thought to sector off the private from the public; following this, we will attempt to demonstrate that any attempt to draw any absolute line between the public and the private is inherently problematic. Along the course of this investigation, we will also examine the various (ad)mixtures of what can be termed public-private space and private-public spaces. According to many theorists, it is innate to the nature of the privacy of private places as well as the publicity of public places that they possess (or perform) certain ameliorative effects (or actions). For those who tend to the valorization of private property, the very owning of such property by an individual creates the best use of that property because “if a single person owns land, he [sic] will attempt to maximize its present value by taking into account alternative future time streams of benefits and costs and selecting that one which he believes will maximize the present value of his privately-owned land rights. We all know that this means that he will attempt to take into account the supply and demand conditions that he thinks will exist after his death. (Demsetz 1995: 154).

Leaving aside, for the moment at least, the assumption that we all know that ‘he will take into account the supply and demand conditions that he thinks will exist after his death’ and the presupposition undergirding this assumption, to wit, that the conditions of supply and demand somehow naturally entail the best use of land (or any other form of private property), this individually-inflected argument forms only part of the performative domain that private property is said to encompass. For the holding of private property is also said to catalyze certain moral qualities in its possessors, as if possession in and of itself performs acts of ethical habilitation upon property owners. The tone of this was captured in President George W. Bush’s advocacy of “an ownership society” – that the ownership of a house or the holding of stocks and bonds “naturally” creates good citizens as well as a “blossoming” civilization. That instead it created bundled derivatives so sliced-and-diced with composite mortgages that discrete mortgages could not even be recomposed, as well as creating millions of owners who have been foreclosed upon, has not seemed to deflate the enthusiasm of those who foment for a strictly privatized society. Granted that the following was written well before the

104

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

2008 meltdown of the world economy and the concomitant collapse of the housing bubble, I would be shocked if the author, Tom Bethell, would retract a word of it, given the obdurate adhesion of neoliberals to a pure market ideology: “The great explanatory hypothesis of history … becomes: When property is privatized, and the rule of law is established, in such a way that all including the rulers themselves are subject to the same law, economies will prosper and civilization will blossom” (1998: 3). Here, it is the very privatization of property in conjunction with the establishment of a universal set of laws that directly leads to the general prosperity of the economy and the universal efflorescence of civilization. It goes without saying that neither Marx nor Proudhon would concur with Bethell’s evaluation, but then neither would Garrett Hardin: in his famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin asks if the system of private property is “perfectly just” (1968: 1247). He answers his own query in the matter-of-fact tone of the scientist: “As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance – that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more” (Hardin 1968: 1247). Here we run into problems associated with Social Darwinism and overwrought forms of power: who will render these decisions regarding correlations between legal possession and biological inheritance; however, Hardin wastes no time on this matter, as he continues post-haste: “An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust – but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system” (1968: 1247). Without dallying too long to fully investigate the ramifications of Hardin’s essay, we should point out that his judgment of private property, along with Bethell’s, Marx’s, and Proudhon’s (who famously stated that “property is theft”) all attest to the performative power of private property, irrespective of the social-political angle from which their respective judgments are rendered. But it is also at the individual scale that such performative processes are thought to follow from ownership: “Ownership entails not only the granting of rights but also the adoption of obligations” (Singer 2000: 17). Such a mixture of rights and obligations, as performed by the very act of ownership, has again frequently been construed as carrying with it a moral valence. Even a spatial thinker as highly attuned to the positive functions of public space as Nicholas Blomley attests to this: “The separation and privileging of property rights … sustains valued political functions – most importantly, that of the liberty of the owner. Maintaining the distinction between owner and state, in this sense, is critical. Property also promises a decentralization and dispersal of power” (2004: 4). Here I might add that it is of value for critics of private property regimes to not undervalue ‘the liberty of the owner’ – regimes in which the state can confiscate private property at will have been demonstrated by history to be highly undesirable. However, such reminders should not deter us from ignoring civic obligations accruing to private property owners.

The Performance of Private and Public Space

105

Such obligations can be widely or narrowly constructed; in Joseph Singer’s Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property, these obligations are drawn widely and in a progressive direction: I want to demonstrate that mutual obligations among property owners and between owners and nonowners are dictated partly by the enlightened selfinterest of owners themselves and partly by considerations of justice. Some obligations of owners of property toward nonowners are morally justified even when this entails some measure of sacrifice of self-interest. Some obligations legitimately rest on owners to share their wealth to enable nonowners to have an opportunity to become owners. (2000: 17–18).

Others conceive of the obligations of property owners much more narrowly: “a private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods” (Bethell 1998: 10). Or, as Carole Rose puts it, emphasizing the benefits of private property for the commonweal rather than the individual, “Security of property would encourage owners to invest time and effort in what they had, thus making their property even more valuable. And in turn, this would have positive consequences for the nation’s wealth and strength” (1994: 80). Thus a kind of a virtuous property circle is created, from the sense of security provided by the nation to the property owner and then from the owner back to the nation, and so on. But even Bethell’s seemingly narrow conception of the benefits of private property accruing solely to the individual is broadened out by him to incorporate a vision of social justice: Such a [private property] system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts. Property sets up fences, but it also surrounds us with mirrors, reflecting back upon us the consequences of our own behavior. Both the prudent and the profligate will tend to experience their deserts. Therefore, a society of private property goes some way toward institutionalizing justice. (1998: 10).

Here, we should note that this ‘some way toward the institutionalizing of justice’ is left dangling, its scope of qualification left to the reader’s imagination; still, even Bethell’s conservative account of property rights claims to incorporate a scheme of justice, thus contributing to our thesis that private property possesses performative power. Bethell’s argument supplements a long line of thinkers who believe that ownership specifically provides the sense of independence necessary to self-rule: Republican property was not as hierarchical as monarchic property was, because it was thought that in a republic the people rule themselves, and as a consequence a much broader range of citizens needed to have property. Montesquieu’s writing supported this position, and although he would never have advocated such a thing for monarchic/aristocratic France, he noted that democratic republics entailed a

106

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography much wider and more equal dispersal of property. The reason, repeated again and again in the early American republic, was that property lent independence to individuals and that independence enabled them to exercise the autonomous judgment necessary for their common self-rule. (Rose 1994: 61).

Jeremy Waldron also attests to (or least reports on) the inherent “moralizing effect” which private property endows to its owners: It is sometimes said that the ownership of private property has a great moralizing effect on the individual owner. It promotes virtues like responsibility, prudence, and self-reliance; it gives him [sic] a place to stand in the world, a place where he can be confident that his freedom will be recognized and respected; and it affords him control of at least a minimum of those natural resources access to which is a necessary condition of his agency. (Often indeed it is said that private ownership has such moralizing effects that only those who own property are fit to be citizens in a republic). (1988: 22).

Passing over the nuisance that Waldron never informs his readers as to the identities of those whom ‘sometimes’ say such things, it is interesting, in light of our subject matter, that Waldron, a legal scholar, frames this issue squarely in a place-inflected manner: the moralizing effect of the ownership of private property gives the owner ‘a place to stand in the world,’ which place also serves to buttress the owner’s confidence that ‘his freedom will be recognized and respected.’ Now, to a certain degree, this notion seems obvious: of course ownership bequeaths such place-inflected benefits. However, when we consider that it is specifically a place in which to stand in the world that performs the bequeathing in Waldron’s account, then we can easily note that this is a distinctly geographically performative way of framing the issue. The place itself, in conjunction with its relationship to its owner and all the various legal and moral benefits that may accrue from that relationship, performs power, performs confidence, performs freedom. One last remark on Waldron’s passage before we move on: we should note that it is not only frequently said that ‘private ownership has such moralizing effects that only those who own property are fit to be citizens in a republic,’ but that this is a saying frequently enacted in a negative fashion, famously in the United States Constitution, in which citizen rights were only given to those (white) men who owned private property (and, infamously, one slave counted as three-fifths of one vote, that fractionalized vote of course accruing to the master’s benefit). Waldron also cites the expansive performative power of private property as seen from a range of ideological viewpoints: Where a socialist sees private property ownership as corrupting, degrading, and alienating, they [those who perceive a positive ethical relationship between private property and individual freedom] see it as ennobling, fulfilling, and liberating; and where a historical materialist sees individual private property

The Performance of Private and Public Space

107

as a transient phenomenon, an essentially bourgeois or petit-bourgeois idea connected basically to the early and middle stages of capitalist construction, those basically idealist thinkers see it as a transcendent necessity for the formation and the integration of individual human autonomy, connected with the satisfaction of some of the deepest and morally most important human needs. (1988: 130).

In this construction, Waldron gives private property an almost hypertrophic polymer performative capacity: it is definitive in its ability to provide the sine qua non for a wide set of believers, from communists to socialists to adherents of the purest private property regime. The negative outcome of the communist experiment with state ownership of property in the Soviet Union has also led to a corresponding positive evaluation of private property regimes in general. As articulated by Ha-Joon Chang, “the lack of private property institutions in the socialist societies eliminates the individual incentive to remain efficient and improve productivity” (2002: 30). Implicit in this argument is that individual private property regimes maximize efficiency and productivity, a position we have seen supported to various degrees by Bethell, Demetz, and Rose. And the very collapse of what was the world’s largest holder of public property could not but lend support to those who advocate for strict private property regimes, as if the implosion of one system must automatically confer absolute legitimacy on the opposite model. Now that we have sketched out, however thinly, some of the (possible) performative aspects of private property, let us turn to its counterpart, public property and its performative aspects. In Brave New Neighbors: The Privatization of Public Space, Margaret Kohn argues for a robust reading of the performative potency of public space: “a democratic society requires public forums. Perhaps a monarchy or fascist government can effectively orchestrate ritualistic uses of public space that reflect the existing social order, but a democratic society maintains its legitimacy by incorporating new ideas and demands. In theory, the political system facilitates the competition between groups with different ideas about how to govern. Public space is crucial because it is a stage on which groups can debate alternative views on policy and principle. (2004: 25).

So, in this line of thought, Kohn attributes great performative energy to public space, whether of the monarchical, fascistic, or democratic mode. Foucault tells us much about the “spectacular” use of the first mode; Hitler refined the use of fascistic public space, conceiving and utilizing it as both a political and an aesthetic space rolled out on a massively pulverizing scale; and Kohn perceives the mode of democratic public space as one in which privately-held opinions are challenged by the exchange of ideas available in a thriving public space: “Vibrant public space fosters other public goods.

108

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography Most notably, it facilitates the diffusion of political information, especially marginal or dissenting views that are underrepresented in the corporatedominated media. Otherwise invisible points of view – the universities exploit the Third World by allowing their lucrative athletic wear to be manufactured in sweatshops or the reasons for abolishing the federal income tax – can be disseminated in the less competitive arena of public space. (2004: 189).

And Kohn affirms the continuing efficacy of public space for such uses despite the proliferation of the Internet and the conception of it as a virtual public space replacing actual public space: there has arisen a “broad-based consensus that public space has become an anachronism in a wired and wireless age of global telecommunications. Who needs the Hyde Park speakers’ corner when there are countless Internet bulletin boards that are more accessible?” (2004: 49). Contra this ‘broad-based consensus,’ Kohn wants to say that unpredictable encounters with heterogeneous others give actual public space both its liveliness as well as its utility as a political forum whereas virtual “public” spaces, such as political blogs and activist web-sites, are predictable and relatively closed spaces, tending to attract like-minded “true” believers: Public spaces are characterized by general accessibility, collective ownership, and a tendency to foster interaction between individuals … . The political encounters that take us by surprise in the streets have the distinctive capacity to interrupt our routines, our insularity, our solipsism. Unlike the information that we seek out in the controlled environment of our computer terminal, it is often the unexpected that can be transformative. (2004: 191, 50).

Whether one agrees with Kohn on her point about the “closed” quality of opinion and information gleaned from the Internet, she indubitably presents a performative reading of public property. Goffman also posits a positive reading of public space, albeit one with less of an overt political valance: “The assumption of mutual regard and good will built into open regions guarantees a rationale for discounting the potential nefariousness of contact among the unacquainted, this being one basis for social accessibility” (1963: 136). Of course that ‘assumption of good will and mutual regard’ is the same backdrop that criminals such as pickpockets and pedophiles rely on for the unencumbered projection of their “skill set” into ‘open regions.’ Yet when such regions operate according to normative planning schemes, such mutual regard and good will can permeate such spaces. Kohn also credits public space with fostering a tolerance of difference: “The individual is constituted as a subject through interactions with other people. The built environment facilitates interactions with certain people and limits contact with others” (2004: 201). A public space that has filtered out difference is one that has constricted tolerance for the other; conversely, a public space open to the other is one that at least allows for the possibility of encounters with the other

The Performance of Private and Public Space

109

and the (possible) toleration of difference: “If public space is where difference is encountered then it must be structured in a manner that enables difference to be expressed and where particular conducts and uses are not privileged beyond those of others” (Ruppert 2006: 280). As Evelyn S. Ruppert indicates in her essay, “Rights to Public Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty,” public space also allows the (or a or many) public[s] to be publicized: “Through the process of claiming space in public, that is, creating spaces, social groups also contest who is the public and themselves become public … . Public space is an important part of defining and contesting the public” (Ruppert 2006: 276). This holds true for those of the left or the right, whether the ‘social groups’ becoming public consist of anarchist collectives (if that’s not an oxymoron) or Tea Party protestors: “The public is understood to consist of multiple publics, counter-publics, and dissenting groups” (Ruppert 2006: 280). Again, notice the performative component of this process: the public (of any variety, be it ‘multiple publics, counter-publics, and dissenting groups’ or what-have-you) marshals space by the performance of appearing in public and making themselves known to the remaining public, at least to whatever extent this is possible – after all, “Anything that addresses a public is meant to undergo circulation” (Warner 2002: 91), such circulation consisting of media coverage, word-of-mouth dissemination, and so on. In the modern capitalistic nation-state, dominated as it is by the ownership model, the valorization of private property catalyzes a situation in which public space “takes on exceptional importance” (Mitchell 2003: 34), due to its very scarcity and the constant and creeping expropriation of public space by private entities. This understanding of the extreme importance of access to public space, an access which can allow the marginalized to represent their interests, is one that – in Don Mitchell’s reading of it – leads to a highly performative view of such space: rather than operating within the circumscribed confines of officially sanctioned public space, “it is when, to fulfill a pressing need, some group or another takes space and through its actions makes it public,” that the space thus made public comes into its full performative potential (2003: 35; italics, Mitchell). Here, it is the very taking and the making of public space, along with the capacity of such a transformed space to serve as a space of representation for those engaged in such actions, that gives public space a power “both fundamental to and a product of social justice” (Mitchell 2003: 36). The manifestation of social justice, then, is a direct product of the performative powers of public spaces taken and made in this way. Mitchell uses the case of Berkeley’s People’s Park as his example par excellence: here is a case of a parcel of land being taken in 1969 by a certain sector of the public (“activists and the homeless”) from the University of California, a public entity, which planned to construct a parking lot on the land, and made into a public park, which in 1991 fell under the joint-jurisdiction of the University and another public entity, the City of Berkeley (Mitchell 2003: 128). Whether one accepts the vision of People’s Park as conceived by the activists who appropriated the land – a place in which “free interactions, user determinations,

110

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

and the absence of coercion by powerful institutions,” or the vision of the Park as conceived by those of the University and City administrations – a place of “orderly retreat” in which “a properly behaved [and] … appropriate public (students, middle class residents and visitors, etc.)” would use the park to “experience the spectacle of the city” – either vision explicitly reflects a performative understanding of what public space can do (Mitchell 2003: 128; italics, Mitchell). This transference of public land by the public to the public and then its subsequent realignment under the control of two branches of public governance (the City of Berkeley and the University of California) begins to hint at part of the greater story I wish to tell, which is the complexity of spatial jurisdiction and space’s fragmentation into multiple overlapping private and public spheres. But, prior to launching into that discussion, let us continue with our explication of the performative valances of the public domain. A negative reading of the performative powers of public space also, of course, testifies to the magnitude of such powers. Bethell claims that “The communal setting, in which well-defined property rights are missing, introduces perverse incentives and encourages greed, selfishness, idleness, suspicion and a brooding sense of injustice,” due to the inevitable problem of free-ridership, whereas “the widespread and secure ownership of property is the sine qua non of prosperity” (1998: 45, 341). So, according to Bethell, distinct and very strong results ensue by the adoption of either a communal or an ownership model of property: both models are therefore highly performative. This belief in the negative economic consequences of either property held in common or an over-dedication of property to public use stems from a belief that private ownership “naturally” yields the maximum utilization of land and other forms of property, so let us return to arguments favoring such regimes. Carol Rose cites two of the most common claims in favor of private property: in the first place, “exclusive control [of property] makes it possible for owners to identify other owners, and for all to exchange the things upon which they have labored until these things arrive in the hands of those who value them most highly – to the great cumulative advantage of all. (1994: 105).

Here, the very processes of exchange are conceived as leading to the most effective use of whatever is being exchanged, with the assumption being that those who pay the most will also put the item to its best use. This does not seem to be an inevitable logical outcome, however, for there is no reason to believe that those who can pay the most even need the item under exchange, leading to the complete nullification of both use of the property per se and Rose’s claim as well. Rose also argues that because owners “can exclude outsiders [from their property], owners alone may capture the value of their individual investments of the things they own, and as a consequence property rights encourage them to put time, labor, and care into the development of resources” (1994: 105). But, once again, this argument does not seem to quite hold together, as mere “encouragement” does not lead to

The Performance of Private and Public Space

111

any sort of inevitable ‘development of resources’; there are legions of cases in which private property owners, for a wide variety of reasons, have allowed their resources to decrease rather than increase in value. Still, these are the gist of two of the main “effective use” claims made in favor of private property regimes, at least as they are outlined by Rose. Locke, typically regarded as the prime philosophical justifier of the private appropriation of the commons, qualifies private property claims in a number of important ways. In Waldron’s estimation, Locke believes that “negligent or deliberate loss of use-value without use” could “retrospectively” lead to a case in which the appropriation is deemed “illegitimate” and the appropriator “guilty of a grave transgression of natural law. He has prevented an existing object created by God for human use from affording satisfaction to any human need or want” (1988: 208). Furthermore, once again according to Waldron, Locke insists that “the demands of a desperately needy man [sic] take precedence over the ordinary decisions of a property owner” (1988: 161). In such situations, any first claim to the commons, even one legitimated by Locke’s schema of the mixing of labor with the soil, is cancelled out by the overriding desperation of the person in need. However, what’s of import for the greater argument we are making is that any decision the appropriator (or for that matter ‘the desperately needy man’) makes in regards to the property in question has a highly performative valence, whether it be of a ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate’ variety in regards to Locke’s property schema. Locke’s justification of appropriation brings to mind Rousseau’s hypothetical construction of what, if true, must be the one of the greatest performative utterances as well as one of the most egregious con jobs of history; that is, Rousseau’s statement in the opening of Part Two of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (Rousseau 1992: 44; italics, Rousseau).1 First let us note that Rousseau’s schema depends on two performative actions: first, the act of enclosing the plot of land and, second, the utterance: this is mine. Rousseau makes no bones about his take on the overall value as well as the general acceptance of these performatives: he considers the consequences of these hinged actions to be tragic and to be the most incredible swindle ever perpetrated: What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and

1 In his biography of Rousseau, Damrosch states that “Pascal had said virtually the same thing a century earlier in the Pensées: ‘Mine, thine. Ce chien est a moi, “This dog is mine,” these poor children say; “That’s my place in the sun.” There is the beginning and image of the usurpation of the whole earth’” (2005: 239). However, according to Damrosch, Pascal takes this as a sign of the innate sinfulness of man whereas Rousseau takes it as a sign of man’s problematic social and political condition. Damrosch cites Pascal, Pensées, “no. 293 in the Brunschwicg numeration.”

112

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” (Rousseau 1992: 44).

Rousseau quickly qualifies his hypothesis, by stating that “this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which only could have arisen successively, was not formed all at once in the human mind,” but required “great progress … much industry and enlightenment … before arriving at this final stage in the state of nature” (1992: 44). Still, even given this backtracking, Rousseau’s evocation of the prototype of the property owner who ‘took it into his head to say this is mine’ must stand as a shining exemplar of the performative, without qualification. All these various claims about the proper definitional realms of private and public property have highly performative consequences in the “real” world: Definitional questions are more than a disinterested taxonomic exercise, but prove immensely consequential. Put bluntly, the adjudication of what is, and what is not property makes important things happen. And, of course, what or who qualifies as an owner or object of ownership, and the precise nature of the relationship “against all others” has long been politically charged. Can people be owned, for example? Can individuals exercise private property rights over objects of shared cultural value? Who is entitled to own? (Blomley 2004: 4).

Advocates of the ownership model have been very successful at presenting private possession of “property as fixed, natural, and objective,” while those who have argued for a more communal conception of property have had to contend with both the dysfunctional nature and the virtual obliteration of communistic regimes as well as the overwhelming acceptance of the idea that the communal model is inexorably and inevitably doomed to “tragedy” (Blomley 2004: 5). However, both the “naturalness” and “objectivity” of private property and the inevitability of the “tragedy of the commons” are contingent notions, no matter how commonsensical they may seem. We do not have adequate space in the present study to properly demonstrate the labile quality of these assumptions, but perhaps the following discussion of the innate unsteadiness of both public and private space will go some way towards making the case for these assertions. But property cannot simply be bifurcated into two utterly distinct domains of the private and the public, with individual property owners on one side and the state on the other: “Ownership need not be only vested in private parties or organized governments” (Blomley 2004: 64). While the definitional scope of the commons will vary from culture to culture and state to state, the commons exceeds both state and private ownership, as such things as rivers, air, and water are conceived, at least to a certain degree, as belonging to “an unorganized, nonexclusive public at large” (Rose 1994: 122). This idea is embodied in the idea of the public trust – rights accruing to the public at large “that may be asserted against the public’s own representatives” (Rose 1994: 121–122). What’s extraordinary about this right is

The Performance of Private and Public Space

113

that it is claimed for “an unknown set of persons, who in fact could be considerably less than a majority,” and who indeed may exist as mere virtual people, contingent others, strangers who may have need to use a discrete part of the commons in the future (Rose 1994: 119). And yet, even given the unknown and virtual otherness of this set of claimants, it is a right well established in law in those nations seemingly most dedicated to the “sanctity” of the private property regime, namely, the United States and Britain (Blomley 2004: 64). Parenthetically, Max Weber draws similar conclusions about the nature of social conduct as well as the value of money in that they are directed towards others who may or may not be known: Social conduct … may be oriented to the past, present, or future conduct of others … . The “others” may be known or unknown individuals or they may constitute an indefinite quantity. For example, “money” is a medium of exchange which the individual accepts in payment because his conduct is oriented in the expectation that numerous but unknown and undetermined “others” will on their part, sometime in the future, accept it as a means of exchange (Weber 1962: 55).

One more caveat must be subtended to these remarks concerning property, as the additional quality of the essential itinerant nature of the law, its mobile and contingent processes of evolution, must be attached to any such discussion: “Property rights and property regimes are not static and the outcomes of these rights and regimes are not inevitable or fully determined” (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008: xxiii). No matter how the law may be viewed as fixed through authority and precedent, it is never absolutely immovable and indeed adapts, albeit perhaps at a snail’s speed as well as with a certain grudging sense of distress directed towards this inevitable process, yet still it evolves in reflection of changing mores, customs, and practices. Let us now turn to the issue of the inherent instability of either strictly publiclyor privately-defined spaces, as in theory private and public space may be absolutely bifurcated but in practice this is seldom, if ever, the case. For instance, we like to think that the home is the archetypical private space, a refuge and a haven, a domain that allows for no public intrusion. But of course the very existence of property taxes punctures this myth: the public intrudes to a certain degree simply by assessing private property and claiming a certain amount of revenue upon them. Restrictions upon private ownership also flow from a host of public agencies as well as from regulations subtended to homeowner and neighborhood associations. In the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, for example, hedges cannot exceed designated height limits; those who violate this rule risk having intrusive neighbors, tape measures in hand, reporting them to the neighborhood association as violators of the common code. Sycamore trees, seen as nuisances by some homeowners due to their “tendency” to shed leaves during autumn, cannot be chopped down in Los Angeles, as they are protected due to their general capacity to beautify the city. Parking cars on front lawns is prohibited as is working on cars

114

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

on the same. If crimes are suspected of being committed in the sacrosanct realm of the home, public authorities may take note and send police, warrant in hand, to barge through the front door. A whole host of nuisance and negligence laws and regulations allow representatives of public agencies to intrude into homes when such laws and regulations are violated or even seem to have been violated. In Behavior in Public Places, Goffman lays out some of the confluences of these overlapping jurisdictions. First, he highlights the restricted nature of private space: “Rules of trespass … prevent unauthorized individuals from entering a private dwelling place at any time, and a semiprivate one during off hours” (1963: 10). So here we have public entities (the police, serving as representatives of the law) guaranteeing the privacy of private space. But Goffman points out that the police also guarantee the publicity of public space, as they are the last defenders of certain societal norms which have been reified into law: Being present in a public place without an orientation to apparent goals outside the situation is sometimes called lolling, when position is fixed, and loitering, when some movement is entailed. Either can be deemed sufficiently improper to merit legal action. On many of our city streets, especially at certain hours, the police will question anyone who appears to be doing nothing and ask him to “move along.” (In London, a recent court ruling established that an individual has a right to walk on the street but no legal right merely to stand on it). In Chicago, an individual in the uniform of a hobo can loll on “the stem,” but once off this preserve he is required to look as if he were intent on getting to some business destination. (1963: 56–57).

These restrictions will vary from culture to culture and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and will often be used to move dissidents off of public space, as they were in the early 1900s in Spokane, Washington, when private businessmen and public authorities collaborated to do battle against members of the Industrial Workers of the World who were challenging free speech restrictions by reading such inflammatory material as the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence on the public sidewalk and going to jail for that offense. Goffman also points out a variety of other limits to the use of public space: Less familiar are the many rulings that restrict the right to be present in open, unwalled pubic places; in nineteenth-century London, for example, the exclusion of certain categories [of people] from some parks, and the informal exclusion of common people from rising promenades such as Rotten Row; in Islamic cities built on a quartier basis, the restriction of persons to their own neighborhood after dark; the temporary prohibitions, during periods of martial law, upon being about after dark; evening curfews making it illegal for youths below a certain age to be about without the company of an adult; boarding-school rulings about late-hour presence on town streets; military rulings placing certain areas out of bounds or off limits for categories of personnel; informal police rulings

The Performance of Private and Public Space

115

requiring night-time racial segregation on public streets in designated areas of the city. (1963: 10).

Here we should add to Goffman’s list as well as amend it by including the exclusion of women from many public areas throughout history as well as the ongoing racial exclusion of a variety of categories of peoples in many areas of the world on a daily as well as a nightly basis. To be a young African-American male on a stroll on public streets in the exclusive Los Angeles area of Bel-Air at high noon is not illegal per se but is certainly not to be advised, as private security guards will likely be called into action to question the “intruder.” Susan M. Schweik outlines a different set of restrictions which were put into effect in various municipalities across the United States after the end of the Civil War. “Ugly Laws,” restraining “the unsightly” from making appearances in public were enacted in a number of cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Omaha, and Columbus, Ohio. “City leaders in the era of the ordinances struggled to … discourage unseemly sightings of diseases, maiming, and deformity” (Schweik 2009: 91). Public space is conceived here as an instrument of education: “Public space, in this model, is pedagogic space; what you allow in public is what children learn is allowed in public. If you allow unsightliness a foothold, the next generation will be even more ugly. To display something publicly is to spread it” (Schweik 2009: 89). Clearly, there was some magical thinking afoot here, as if the mere sight of the maimed might be contagious. However, the ugly laws should not be brushed aside as mere curiosities of a benighted era: their legacy lives on in laws and regulations against the homeless and in cultural norms against which we judge the proper and improper appearance of those who present themselves in public. Implicit codes and explicit laws govern the parameters of both behavior and appearance in public space, at least to a certain extent. One aspect of the regime of these explicit regulations are zoning and building codes, the infraction of which can lead to public inspection, fines and even jail time, if serious enough violations have occurred; as the web-site of the Code Enforcement Division of the Los Angeles Housing Department puts it: It is the mission of the Los Angeles Housing Department Code Enforcement Division to identify and facilitate the abatement of physical conditions and characteristics of substandard and unsanitary residential buildings and dwelling units which render them unfit or unsafe for human occupancy and habitation, and which conditions and characteristics are such as to be detrimental to or jeopardize the health, safety and welfare of their occupants and of the public. The existence of such substandard buildings and dwelling units threatens the physical, social and economic stability of sound residential buildings and areas, and of their supporting neighborhood facilities and institutions; necessitates disproportionate expenditures of public funds for remedial action; impairs the efficient and economical exercise of governmental powers and functions;

116

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography and destroys the amenity of residential areas and neighborhoods and of the community as a whole. For these reasons it is the policy of the Code Enforcement Division to protect and promote the existence of sound and wholesome residential buildings, dwelling units and neighborhoods by enforcement of such standards, regulations and procedures as will remedy the existence or prevent the development or creation of dangerous, substandard, or unsanitary and deficient residential buildings and dwelling units. (www. cris.lacity.org/cris/informationcenter/code/index.htm).

Just what constitutes ‘sound and wholesome’ conditions for residential use will vary, but the point here is that public entities such as the Code Enforcement Division of the Los Angeles Building Department have the right as well as the obligation to fracture the segmentation between public and private space when they enforce the rules and regulations underlying their jurisdictional domain. And so, even though it may be quite correct to assert that “there is a tendency to view property as essentially private” in societies dominated by the ownership model of property, there are numerous (possible) perforations that have been built into this model (Blomley 2004: 5). Also built into the system are obligations to the public borne by the owners of private property; as Evelyn S. Ruppert puts it: “State recognition of private property grants owners rights,” – here we already perceive an entailment between public authorities and private property owners – “which means that owners have an enforceable claim to some use or benefit of their property, a claim which in turn the state enforces” (2006: 278). For many libertarians, this is the normative extent of state power: protect private property and do nothing else, that’s the government’s sole bailiwick. Ruppert continues: “But obligations are always imposed in the name of broader public interest or use value” (2006: 278). Here, we may want to interject by arguing that this does not always happen and that any mention of ‘use value’ would be well outside the normative terminology of those public figures who could impose such obligations upon private property owners: but never mind, these are quibbles. Let me be gracious and allow Ruppert to speak for herself without further disruption: “For example, private property rights entail restrictions and obligations founded on the principles that there is an inherent public interest in private land, and that any public space is a shared space. This gives rise to regulations such as building codes, property standards, and zoning that are imposed by governments on private property. For instance, the private home of an owner is regulated in a number of direct and indirect ways, from what one can build to the property standards one must maintain. (2006: 278).

But even in a society very much dominated by the ownership model (what Rose calls “a well-oiled property machine”) such as the United States, it may be recognized

The Performance of Private and Public Space

117

that “some resources are most economically produced and managed on a large scale … and are best allocated to joint control rather than to individuals,” further eroding any strict and stable scission between public and private spheres (Rose 1994: 54). Water and air, roads and navigable waterways, defense and police, have all generally been thought of as more efficiently managed as public resources, though access to beaches, roads, and waterways have been amongst the most contentious of spatial legal issues, and the privatization of the military proceeds apace, at least in the United States. Public parks, beaches, plazas, and squares have been conceived as places in which citizens can re-create themselves, both via access to beauty and opportunities for recreation as well as through the sharing of opinion. But even the most cherished of public parks, such as Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada of California, are sliced through with private contractors and sub-contractors (in Yosemite euphemistically known as “authorized park concessionaries”) who attend to such niceties as food provision, waste disposal, back-country guidance, and transportation needs. And the combined public and private spaces of the city are crisscrossed with a stunning array of governmental and non-governmental entities, making it difficult to parse just which components of municipal agencies and private associations are in charge of what. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward W. Soja describes the mish-mash of spatial regulatory bodies in New York City as viewed from the top of the Empire State Building: Above (and below) each of us is a stratification of almost innumerable and virtually invisible spatial authorities. Decades ago, it was noted that looking out from the top of the Empire State Building in New York City one could see, if boundaries were visible, more than 1,500 governments. If we could see further into the thick layers of spatial regulation that enmesh us, the numbers would zoom even higher, boggling our geographical imaginations (Soja 2010: 44–45).

Once the spatial regulations traceable to private entities such as co-op and condo boards, neighborhood associations, (“An estimated 47 millions Americans lived [sic] in 231,000 neighborhoods governed by Residential Community Associations (RCAs) and the number is growing. In Los Angeles and San Diego counties, seventy percent of new housing developments are governed by RCAs” (Kohn 2004: 116)) and Business Improvement Districts are factored into this calculation (“There are over 1000 BIDs in the United States and more than forty in New York City alone” (Kohn 2004: 82)), the number cited by Soja increases substantially. And when we consider that every one of these private and public entities enjoys a certain domain of performative powers, i.e. the capacity and the ability to make things happen in private and/or public space, we cannot deny that these are layers and layers of property regimes, overlapping one another, in which the performative is operating and to a ‘boggling’ degree. So, though it may seem like a simple divide should separate public from private space and as though a clear division seems to exist between these two realms, at least at a theoretical level, in actuality there is no such strict and

118

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

simple demarcation, for, as Blomley states in Unsettling the City, “When we look carefully, it is clear that property is a much more capacious category than it first appears” (2004: 15). As noted already, even the alleged sanctity of private property claims are much more unstable than is usually supposed. Besides the familiarly known processes of eminent domain, in which the government engages in the performative appropriation (though some would call it “expropriation”) of private land for a “greater” public good, thus puncturing that supposedly fine line between the private and the public, there are a number of more obscure ways in which individual ownership can be “sacrificed.” For instance, in Property and Persuasion, Carol Rose informs us of the legal processes of “adverse possession” and “implied dedication.” Adverse possession occurs when property owners default on their property to a trespasser by allowing the trespasser to use their land without objection over a certain extended period of time, typically twenty years. If the “title owner takes no action to get rid of him [the trespasser]” during the allotted time, not only can the property owner “not sue him for recovery” of their land, “but the law recognizes him [once again, the trespasser] as the title owner” (Rose 1994: 15). Rose even glosses actions such as original possession as well as the maintenance of possession with a variation of performance theory: Possession … begins to look even more like something that requires a kind of communication, and the original claim to … property looks like a kind of speech, with the audience composed of all others who might be interested in claiming the object in question. Moreover, some venerable statutory law requires the acquirer to keep on speaking, lest she lose title through the odd but fascinating doctrine of adverse possession. (1994: 14; italics, Rose).

We should note the parallel between Rose’s requirement that the owner ‘keep on speaking’ with Tuan’s emphasis on the maintenance as well as the creation of place. Customary and common use of land over a more or less extended period of time can lead to cases of “implied dedication.” In the English countryside, for example, where such activities as “horse races, dances, and cricket matches” have been in continual practice on certain parcels of land over a prolonged period of time, such “ancient use” may preempt private titles to those parcels, at least during the periods when these activities occur (Rose 1994: 134). The age-old sanctity of Maypole and Morris dancing appears to trump private property rights in such cases. In the United States, the doctrine of implied dedication has protected towns from “holdout” property owners who have refused to allow the continual use of “their” land that happens to lie within customary “public squares” (Rose 1994: 130). Here “custom” is given a performative valence by Rose: “custom is a medium through which a seemingly ‘unorganized’ public may organize itself and act, and even in a sense ‘speak’ with the force of law,” and indeed speak with such a force as to actuate changes in the privileges usually entailed in the private ownership of land (1994: 134).

The Performance of Private and Public Space

119

Even regimes very much dominated by the private property model are much more riddled with a variety of ownership forms than simply the sole owner form typically thought of as archetypical in such a regime.2 “While dominant mappings of property offer us very persuasive models of ownership as determinate, contained, and bounded, law recognizes a considerable diversity of possible tenurial arrangements of which individual ownership is only one” (Blomley 2004: 16). Blomley goes on to cite Joseph Singer’s lengthy recitation of this diversity: [J]oint ownership (tenancy in common, joint tenancy), leasing arrangements (perhaps subsidized by government welfare payments), cooperatives, condominiums, subdivisions, homeowners’ associations, ground leases, charitable land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, tribal property (including original title, recognized tribal title, and restricted trust allotments), public housing, and government property. (Singer 1996: 1462–1463).

Blomley adds to this already extensive list the flabbergasting category of ‘privately owned public space,’ an “‘oxymoronic invention’” that “complicates the categories of the ownership model;” such spaces are created when zoning laws reward “developers who produce spaces of public access with increased density. Ownership of such spaces, however, is vested with the developer, and conditional access is granted to the public” (Blomley 2004: 16). And Rose even conceives of private property as merely an adjunct of public property, albeit a privileged one: Like any common property, a property regime has obvious returns for scale for a commercial people, and becomes more valuable as more participate and as all rights holders can enter into commercial transactions with one another. In this sense, a property right regime is in itself as much ‘inherently public property’ as the roads and waterways that carry public commerce, and the public protects its meta-property through the police power. (1994: 144).

Though we have neither the time, the need, nor the inclination to unpack all the forms in Singer’s recitation and Blomley’s and Rose’s addendums, suffice it to say that there exists a great deal of diversity even within a strict private ownership construal of property. Private developers working with city planners have crafted a variety of publicprivate partnerships as well as public-private trade-offs, further abrading any strict 2 It should be noted that states nominally dominated by public property regimes are also riddled with a variety of ownership forms: cf. these works on the extremely complex real estate situation in China: Zheng, Siqi, Fenjie Long, C. Cindy Fan and Yizhen Gu (2009) “Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing,” Eurasian Geography and Economics, 50(4), 425–446; and Hsing, You-tien. 2001. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press.

120

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

border between private and public spaces. For instance, in the Los Angeles Times of August 13 2010, Ann M. Simmons reports that the “developers of a proposed $1-billion hotel, office and retail complex,” claim “the project would reap huge benefits for Los Angeles, but that they need economic assistance from the city before they can move forward” (Simmons 2010: AA1). Simmons adds that such public “assistance for hotel renovation and development projects are not uncommon … . In 2005, the City Council agreed to provide up to $290 million in subsidies and loans for construction of a 55-story hotel next to the Los Angeles Convention Center” (2010: AA6). Whether such subsidies actually reap ‘huge benefits’ for the public is a matter of much controversy: in the Times article, Simmons quotes Richard Green, director of the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate and a professor in USC’s business school as saying that “‘There’s a long history of cities subsiding [sic] hotels and convention centers without much to show for it afterwards’” (2010: AA6). The pertinent point for us, however, is not whether the public garners one penny of actual benefits from such subsidies: the mere fact that such subsidies are proposed and entailed within the deed of purchase, and on a fairly regular basis, supports our contention that perforations of the divide between public and private space occur, and that they occur on a frequent basis. That such perforations have a performative valence is reflected in the simple and irretrievable fact that they exist, occurring through acts of speech and writing leading directly to acts upon the land (developments of hotels, shopping centers, what-have-you) in question. In the State of California, the Brown Act “sharply limits the nature of government deliberation and action that can occur outside the public purview. The basic rule is that all government actions and discussions are open to the public with a few exceptions, such as individual performance reviews, and hiring and firing decisions” (Girion 2010: AA3). Now, while this may be called the state’s “open-meeting law” and it has been used to pry open much of the secretive nature of government, I would not count on the law to provide access into Governor Jerry Brown’s office the next time one may happen to be in Sacramento. However, there are an almost countless variety of ways in which public officials can gain access to private space; though some of these consist of egregious violations of privacy, others are welcome additions to the arsenal of tools with which brazen violators of the law can be investigated and arrested. For instance, in the Los Angeles Times of August 17 2010, one can read (with some satisfaction, I might add) a story about Benny and Nissan Pirian, owners of four carwash businesses in the L.A. area; the Brothers Pirian “were sentenced to a year in jail and are expected to have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages” for multiple violations of the criminal and the labor codes (Blankstein 2010: AA4). Among other things, “a vast majority of the workers at the carwashes were required to arrive at least 15 minutes before their shifts and to stay half an hour after closing. None of the workers were paid overtime and they were discouraged from taking rest breaks or were denied breaks entirely,

The Performance of Private and Public Space

121

even during extreme heat. The workers were paid a flat rate of $35 or $40 a day in violation of minimum-wage laws, according to deputy city attorneys. Some worked for tips alone. (Blankstein 2010: AA4).

So here we have yet another instance of the puncturing of the barrier between the private and the public, and a highly performative one at that, resulting, as it did, in guilty verdicts, sentences to prison (one of Austin’s examples par excellence of the performative speech act), and back wages to be paid. Such puncturing is not that unusual, the precise point being that the public and private realms are crisscrossed with exactly these kinds of performative actions. So, as we have seen, the “simple” division of public from private is highly problematic, as “property is always in a process of becoming rather than a fixed and stable category. Conflict and struggles over the rights to space attest to this, from the claims of squatters” to those seeking to reclaim public space from criminals (Ruppert 2006: 281). Even putatively public space is frequently accessible on only a very limited basis: the public may “own” a missile testing range but it has no right to meander through the site, even though it has paid for and maintains the site through tax revenues. I refer to such spaces as private-public domains: stateowned, publicly financed, yet highly restricted in terms of access. The public may own city hall, but try barging into a meeting in a councilwoman’s office and, as stated previously in regard to the governor’s office, the limits of public ownership will become immediately apparent. What I call public-private space – such places as coffee shops, restaurants, and virtually any commercial establishment – is also very restricted in terms of access. For instance, entering a Starbucks and then staying there for any extended period of time requires a purchase; in certain establishments, customers that violate dress codes may be asked to leave; those who perform inappropriate actions in inappropriate places my have to vacate the premises tout suite: imagine a guitar player plugging in his amp in a clothing store and wailing away on a Jimi Hendrix tune: what may be felicitous in the Hard Rock Cafe may be very infelicitous at a Macy’s. Conversely, we would also find it quite odd, though perhaps not quite as annoying, if someone went shopping for dresses in a night club: they may be accused of making a category mistake or of merely being more than a little bit confused. Though, once again, I must confess to only skimming the surface of what is a heavily theorized and very complex domain, I trust I have made my point that this is an intensely performative sphere, no matter how one conceives of the ethical ramifications of public, private, private-public, or public-private spaces. Next, we turn to the geopolitical realm and environmental determinism, in which, once again, we will discover a geographic domain run through with the performative.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 6

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

Regensberg has a beautiful situation. The lie of the land was bound to invite the founding of a town. Goethe, Italian Voyage.

Consider this blurb which appeared in Foreign Policy of June 2010, promoting Robert D. Kaplan’s “The Revenge of Geography,”: “People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever” (2009: 1). The promo goes on to suggest that we need “to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best,” in order “to understand the coming struggles” (2009: 1). This is stated with all earnestness and complete sincerity in an era when others have proclaimed the death of distance, the placelessness of place, and advocated the idea that globalization has rendered geography nugatory. This is also the era when non-state actors use indeterminate locations while state actors use “black sites” as part of their tactical “trickeration,” converting the solidity of location into the slipperiness of the void, thus giving geography in its deterministic formulation even more of a “slippery” status than it already “enjoyed.” So what gives with this resurrection of a deterministic geography? Does it have any validity or conceptual purchase? I may not be able to fully resolve these questions, but I do know one thing: much of this revivified environmental determinism smacks heavily (one is tempted to say “determinatively”) of the performative. We will proceed down two roads here. The first will outline this deterministic aspect of geography: that is, that geography, in and of itself, determines events. Then we will flip the coin over, as it were, to briefly examine how political leaders have used performative utterances to make (or at least attempt to make) geopolitical change. In “The Revenge of Geography,” Kaplan asserts that “rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography

124

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint. (2009: 98).

This constitutes quite a set of claims, and I doubt whether they can withstand either an abstract and rigorous critique or the concrete and equally rigorous test of time, but there can be no denying that this set of claims renders geography performative, and to a maximum degree. Now, it may not be quite as transparent as Kaplan wishes that the ‘natural frontiers of the globe’ are ‘the only restraint’ remaining to buck up the social order, and, furthermore, there may be quite an argument to be made that the existence of “natural” frontiers are few and far between; still, it is somewhat bracing for a modern student of geography to witness such performative claims being made for our discipline: why, the topographic chest fairly puffs with pride! But poking fun at Kaplan’s hubristic claims does not do much to test the veracity of his argument. Is it true that “we” need to leaven “liberal universalism” and “the [humanistic] individualism of Isaiah Berlin” (buffers Kaplan sets up as at least partial obstacles to the true comprehension of current world affairs) with “the dictates … of geography” (2009: 105) in order to truly understand the limitations of “our” (i.e. the America’s) power? Is it right that a return to Mackinder and a retrieval of the Victorian understanding of the primary importance of geography and its concomitant determinism will inevitably lead to “wise policymaking” (2009: 105)? Now, while I am certain that a certain basic understanding of geography and the limitations which areal formations may possibly impose on the mobility of power might come in handy for even the most otherwise enlightened of leaders, I see no guarantee of wise policymaking flowing from the knowledge of whatever limits geography may or may not impose. However, that is not the issue here. The point is that Kaplan is making forthright and powerful performative claims on behalf of geography. Whether such claims as Pakistan’s “dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic” is true is beside the point: that such claims are being made and that they are being taken seriously (or at least seriously enough to appear in one of America’s leading establishment foreign policy venues) is what concerns us here (Kaplan 2009: 102). Their truth or falsity is almost inconsequential; their performance is what is noteworthy. Kaplan’s resuscitation of environmental determinism is remarkable, in light of the absolute disrepute into which that concept had once fallen. But Kaplan does not stand alone in this effort. Others, most notably Jared Diamond, have been moving through this conceptual terrain as well; and still others, such as Henry Kissinger and Paul Kennedy, never left it behind. But, prior to examining their respective contributions to this discussion, we should sketch out, albeit briefly and in somewhat cursory fashion, the peripatetic history of an idea whose time has perhaps returned. Environmental determinism is one of those odd late nineteenth-century byproducts of a misreading of Darwin “leavened” by a misunderstanding of Malthus; akin to its intellectual cousin, Darwinism, environmental determinism was

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

125

perhaps doomed from the start to be appropriated for less than noble purposes. Or perhaps it was a warped notion from its very get-go. Or, as Richard Peet puts it, “Environmental determinism, I argue, was geography’s contribution to Social Darwinist ideology, providing a naturalist explanation of which societies were fittest in the imperial struggle for world domination” (1985: 310). As first articulated by the German zoologist, journalist, travel writer, political activist, and geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, this brand of determinism conceives of the nation as analogous to a biological organism, and, like an organism, the nation has to expand as its biological needs expand.1 “As a logical development of this theory, states can expand, contract, live, prosper, decay, and die just as living organisms do” (Kiss 1942: 635). Simon Dalby lays the theory out quite nicely in his Creating the Second Cold War: “States were conceptualized in terms of organic entities with quasi-biological functioning. This was tied to the Darwinian ideas of struggle producing progress. Thus, expansion was likened to growth and territorial expansion was ipso facto a good thing” (1990: 35). However, not all such theories deserved the qualifier of being ‘quasi-biological;’ they wear their biology right out on their sleeves. Indeed, in some of the construals of the organic “living” state, the state possesses its own consciousness and agency. For instance, in Rudolf Kjellén’s Der Staat als Lebensform, he claims that it is “the ambition of the state to become organically united with the soil. States try to choose geographical units, such as a region, to ally themselves with, and through this alliance to transform themselves into natural units” (1917: 61; italics, mine).2 In his “magnum opus, the Political Geography of 1897,” Ratzel “dilated on the biological analogy of the state as an organism which inevitably underwent population enlargement to the point where resource exhaustion or territorial expansion was inevitable. For the state, to exist, was to expand. In expounding these Malthus-like principles, Ratzel believed he had disclosed the natural laws of the territorial growth of states and he happily located the contemporary colonial thrust of the European powers in Africa as the manifestation of their quest for Lebensraum. Imperial history was the spatial story of a struggle for existence … . Here was a naturalistic theodicy that justified the imperial order in the language of scientific geography. (Livingstone 1992: 200–201).

A Großraum component of Ratzel’s theory kicks in as growing states burst through the constraints of their restrictive (small) size: “His [Ratzel’s] vision 1 The concept of Lebensraum can be viewed as a sub-concept of another popular German concept of the era, Lebensphilosophie. Cf. Kurt Sontheimer’s “Anti-Democratic Thought in the Weimar Republic,” in The Path to Dictatorship, 1918–1933: The Essays by German Scholars. 1966. Translated by John Conway. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 32–49. 2 Cited in Kiss, G. 1942. Political geography into geopolitics: recent trends in Germany. Geographical Review. Vol. 32 No. 4, October 1942, 632–645, 639.

126

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

of the state as an expanding organism led him to the conviction that the ideal towards which modern advanced states must aspire was Großraum” (Livingstone 1992: 201). Of course this concern for “living space” may also have resulted from the “shrinkage“ of distance due to improvements in methods of transportation: “The ability to overcome distance … opened the door to the idea of the shortage of space” (Osterhammal and Petersson 2005: 91). The railroad, the car, and the airplane compressed time and space, leading to a “shortage” of both. Returning from a visit to the United States as a journalist for Kölnische Zeitung (Wanklyn 1961), Ratzel, awed by the sheer magnitude of America and its concomitant potential, began to equate the size of a state with its level of evolutionary development: “Since the areas of states grow with their civilization, people in a low state of civilization are naturally collected in a very small political organization, and the lower their condition the smaller are the states” (1896: 352). Though such notions were written in support of the necessity of Germany’s colonial expansion – Ratzel “founded the Munich Association for the Defense of German Interests Abroad” (Livingstone 1992: 201) and was also an “early member of the Kolonialverein of 1882 and of its successor, the Kolonialgesellschaft, founded in 1887” (Smith 1980: 66) – it is fairly easy to understand how such ideas could easily be transferred into an intra-European context, which is exactly what happened. However, before proceeding into the rise and fall of geopolitics and the use or misuse of Ratzel’s theories by the Nazis, it may be best to backtrack a bit and interrogate our basic premises. Instead of tracing environmental determinism to Ratzel, it may be more accurate and more useful for our purposes to widen the range of our inquiry to encompass a much broader scope than that which is contained within the ambit we have so far circumnavigated. The late nineteenthcentury German form of environmental determinism was generated neither out of the void nor merely through the misapplication of Darwinian and/or Malthusian theoretical frameworks. Read Tocqueville on the Mississippi River Valley and the West Indies and the environment as determined is writ large: The valley watered by the Mississippi seems created for it alone; it dispenses good and evil at will like a local god … . All things considered, the valley of the Mississippi is the most magnificent habitation ever prepared by God for man. When the Europeans landed on the shores of the West Indies, and later of South America, they thought themselves transported to the fabled lands of the poets … . Everything seen in these enchanted islands seems devised to meet man’s needs or serve his pleasures. (Tocqueville 1969: 25–26).

This brand of determinism, in which God, or God’s proxy, Nature, has “arranged” or “devised” things for “Man” is the prototypical Western form of environmental determinism. And, “naturally,” the primary source for this form of environmental determinism is the Bible.

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

127

Now of course Locke had already “appropriated” numerous Biblical passages in his effort to justify the appropriation of land: Those grants God made of the world to Adam, and to Noah, and his sons, it is very clear, that God, as King David says, [Psalm 140] has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common … . But I shall endeavour to shew, how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without the any express compact of all the commoners. (1980: 18; italics, Locke).

The basic train of thought here is that since God gave “man” the duty, or the liberty, through the “the law” to “subdue” the earth, this led to man’s “dominion” over the same, and, quite naturally, “appropriation” follows, which “necessarily introduces private property” (Locke 1980: 22). Thus the fate of the environment (“the earth” and its “title”) is determined by the lineage, as elaborated in Genesis and the remainder of the Bible, of the divine linkage between man and God. This construction of what might be called an environmental theodicy was used to justify domestic appropriation (enclosure) and foreign expropriation (colonization). The Puritans, settling in what they conceived of as the “New Jerusalem,” believed that God had sent them to the “New World” in order to consecrate both the “newly discovered” land and their mission thereon. The great scholar of the history of early New England, Perry Miller, tells us that the paradigmatic Puritan preacher, John Winthrop, “declared that the societies of New England were in a direct covenant relationship with Jehovah, exactly as the chosen people of the Old Testament had been; they had agreed with Him to abide by the rules of righteousness, to practice the true polity, to dedicate themselves to doing His will on earth. If they lived up to their promise, He would reward them with material prosperity; if they faltered, He would chastise them with physical affliction until they reformed. (1967: 51).

Such a dedication to do ‘His will on earth’ seemed to be reflected to the Puritans in the very land upon which they had settled: cultivating the “wilds” of New England, transforming it into a font of ‘material prosperity’ was but part and parcel of the Puritan Covenant with God. Their settlement upon the land was a divine performance blessed and ordained (or rather, preordained) by the Lord. Thus, a sanctified form of environmental determinism had joined man and earth in New England in a divine project to test both the righteousness of man and to celebrate God. New England, through the mystical coordination of man’s destiny with God’s plan, had been “chosen” as the site for this “because therein saints [the elect among the Puritan brethren] could determine and administer the laws and the natural inhabitants be either incited or compelled to obey. In Massachusetts and Connecticut these conditions had been fulfilled” (Miller 1967: 51).

128

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

A chosen land for a chosen people became an essential way in which Americans came to understand the country in which they lived. That a manifest density encompassed both the possession of the West as well as the East Coast seemed to be confirmed by the very “integrity” of the continental mass: its wholeness, ocean to ocean and coast to coast, was viewed as a tacit justification – nay, as explicit justification - of the idea that one nation was ordained to possess it: otherwise, why did it have such a shape? This is environmental determinism to the maximum degree, and was advocated by politicians such as President Polk and celebrated by poets such as Walt Whitman, a great proponent of the elemental “natural integrity” of continental unification: “He [Whitman] fixed his hopes on the great West where, he believed, a freer and more democratic America was taking shape. He was an expansionist, full of ardent hopes, an apostle of ‘manifest destiny’” (Parrington 1930: 71). Once conceived, this performative geographic vision was duly performed: the West was “settled,” the Mexicans shoved out of the Southwest, the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington duly incorporated into the Union, and continental “integrity” accomplished. To Frederick Jackson Turner, American expansion into the frontier regions of the West was the measuring rod of America itself; it was both its bellwether and its watermark; its settlement “settling” not only the land but also creating a distinctive American character as well as the institutions of American and even European life: “What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely” (1965: 38). Whitman rejoiced in this expansionism, launching into poetic arias re California and its “virgin lands” and “myriad leaves” in his “Song of the Redwood Tree”: Not wan from Asia’s fetiches [sic], Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds everywhere,) But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes, peacefully builded thence, These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore, To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new, You promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate. (1931: 213, 215; italics, Whitman).

That these ‘virgin lands’ and ‘myriad leaves’ had been given ‘to the new culminating man’ had been preordained in Whitman’s construal by: You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age working in death the same as life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

129

Mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal’d but ever alert, You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued … (1931: 215; italics, Whitman).

So here we see that an ‘unseen moral essence’ is the force that ‘really’ shapes and molds the New World, ‘adjusting it to Time and Space’ as it aligns it with a ‘hidden national will,’ which lies in the depths (‘your abysms’) of what seems to be the bearer of this invisible moral essence. Instead of a Biblical God being in charge of the performative direction of the land (the United States of America), Whitman has it that a kind of mystical energy commingling with a national will is working in concert to perform, in this case, a “taking possession” of “the flashing and golden pageant of California” in order to clear “the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir to thee past so grand, to build a grander future” (1931: 217). Manifest destiny, the taking of the West by a “swarming and busy race” is justified in Whitman’s poetics as the “natural” telos of “past and present purposes tenaciously pursued;” the “moral essence” of the “national will” has deemed it to be so and so it is done, accomplished, and performed, but it is a performance predetermined and predestined by the encounter of this “swarming and busy race” with this environment, i.e., the American land (1931: 215, 217). The “bestowal” of the space of the West to the “swarming and busy race” is also coordinated by Whitman to time: Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Out time, our term has come. Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers, We who have grandly fill’d our time; With nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them. For them predicted long, For a superber [sic] race, they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings! (1931: 214; italics, Whitman).

Though a bit opaque, these lines seem to reveal the existence of a temporal determinism linked to the environmental determinism bestowing these Western lands to the “superber” (white) race at this particular moment in time. Untethered from any necessary connection to God, environmental determinism could now flourish in a kind of half-baked stew of deism, nationalistic ideology, and quasi-scientific theory while still allowing “God” into the mix, if “His” presence was required for a religiously anointed performance of expropriation. Rather than conceiving of the history of the idea of environmental determinism as consisting of one era in which the notion of a strictly God-based form of determinism was

130

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

predominant only to be succeeded by another in which a “scientifically”-based form gained predominance, it might serve us better to think of these two eras as overlapping and commingling, at least to some degree. God became “national will” and “Nature” as well as “Science,” at least to a certain extent; the terms may have changed, but the effect was much the same: a performance of humankind upon the land was determined by transcendent powers; all that was left to do was to satisfy the terms of that predetermined contract granting such a performance. There is a more standard version of the lineage of environmental determinism that should be noted here as well. This traces the theory from Aristotle (in his Politics, especially Books I and VII) to Bodin (in Bodin’s “tying of history to geography, of culture to nature, he anticipated the later materialism and relativism of the ‘harder’ environmental determinists” (Livingstone 1992: 97)), and then from Montesquieu, who “laid great emphasis on the climate and terrain of a country in explaining the governmental type best suited to it” (Jay 1984:38), to Herder and then on to Hegel (his brand of determinism had it that Germany was the “natural” heir to the hegemony of Greece and Rome) before it’s picked up by Ratzel.3 Due to the constraints of the present study, this lineage is merely indicated and not fleshed out to any significant degree. Now that we have to some degree filled in the “scientific” form of environmental determinism with its theological and poetic antecedents, let us return to Ratzel and investigate the legacy of his notions. One of the most prominent of his disciples was the American geographer, Ellen Churchill Semple. In her most important work, Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography, first published in 1911, she does not hesitate to place “man” and “his” geography into a complete deterministic alignment, as the opening passage of Influences of Geographic Environment clearly demonstrates: Man is a product of the earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. (1911: 1).

Here “she” has replaced God as well as Whitman’s “national will,” and, in conjunction with “Man,” formed a kind of naturalistic dynamic duo to overcome whatever obstacles may arise from the surface of the earth (that is, from her), be they of an irrigational or a navigational kind. She “mothered him,” she “fed him” and then she was kind enough to whisper “hints” to the “solution” of man’s earthbound “difficulties” into his earth-inflicted ears in order to surmount whatever problems he confronted. This is an environmental determinism governed by the 3 For a nice summary of this strand, see Gyorgy’s Geopolitics, The New German Science, Part I, Chapter I.

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

131

tandem talents of Mother Earth and Man, talents which “naturally” respond to one another (as would any Mother and Child) as they simultaneously respond to the particulars of man’s given environmental situation: “On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar” (Semple 1911: 1). Semple attempts to place geography into its “rightful” place alongside history, the nineteenth-century discipline par excellence,4 geography being the “stable force” counterbalancing the “shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive” history of “man” (1911: 2): Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem – shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. (Semple 1911: 2).

So geography, in Semple’s conception, might not be quite coeval with history, as it simply provides a ‘physical basis’ for its disciplinary consociate, but, nevertheless, it does provide the “sleepless stability” of the land upon which history can run its ‘shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive’ course. Such a bond, performed by the stable adhesion of the geographic element in conjunction with the passage of time, leads indubitably to deterministic outcomes: “Back of Massachusetts’ passionate abolition movement, it [‘geography’] sees the granite soil and boulder-strewn fields of New England; back of the South’s long fight for the maintenance of slavery, it sees the rich plantations of tidewater Virginia and teeming fertility of the Mississippi bottom lands. This is the significance of Herder’s saying that ‘history is geography set into motion.’ What is today a fact of geography becomes to-morrow a factor of history. (Semple 1911: 11).

Such ‘facts of geography,’ once hooked up to time, can, according to this theory, lead directly to determinate outcomes:

4 “The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history,” writes Foucault in “Of Other Space.” Neil Smith differs with this unqualified assessment of history as supreme in that period; cf. American Empire, 9–10. At least in terms of the westward expansion of the United States, geography, rather than history, ruled: so claims Smith. This difference may hinge on geography itself: Foucault, in a “history-bound” Europe, seeing history as the exemplar of nineteenth-century disciplines; Smith, in the relatively “new” America, preferring geography for that role.

132

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography History tends to repeat itself largely owing to this steady, unchanging geographic element. If the ancient Roman consul in far-away Britain often assumed an independence of action and initiative unknown in the provincial governors of Gaul, and if, centuries later, Roman Catholicism in England maintained a similar independence towards the Holy See, both facts have their cause in the remoteness of Britain from the center of political or ecclesiastical power in Rome. (Semple 1911: 2–3).

Such a reading mirrors Ratzel’s maxim that “A certain area, its location being unchanged [just how an area’s location could be changed, barring geological upheavals, is beyond my level of expertise, but never mind], always transmits the same impulse to states and nations just as streams enter a turbulent section of its course, or resumes its quiet, even flow at the same location” (Ratzel 1923: 180). Here, it may be instructive to contrast this determinism based on geography with a brand of determinism based on ethnicity. Van Loon “informs” us that “the British Isles, if overrun by Neapolitans or Berbers instead of having been conquered by the restless fighters of northern Europe, would never have become the center of an empire one hundred and fifty times as large as the mother country and containing one-sixth of all the human beings now assembled on the planet” (1932: 11). One suspects that in such a counter-history lollygagging boatmen or flea-bitten fellahin would have been lounging around the banks of the Thames instead of the ‘restless fighters’ of the mother country. Now while it may be true, and indeed most likely is true, that the ‘remoteness’ of Britain may be one cause factoring into Britain’s trans-historical ‘independence’ from Rome, Semple labels this as the cause, as if nothing else determines the course of events but distance and its friction or a lack of the same. In this construal, Semple is following her own maxim that “Geographical environment, through the persistence of its influence, acquires peculiar significance. Its effect is not restricted to a given historical event or epoch, but, except when temporarily met by some strong counteracting force, tends to make itself felt under varying guise in all succeeding history. It is the permanent element in the shifting fate of races” (1911: 6). Such a deterministic maxim is imperiled when a ‘strong counteracting force’ supersedes its temporary status and seems to gain permanence. For instance, by most estimates, the United States has always been deemed fortunate to be isolated by two oceans from the Eurasian continent: this geographic fact seems to give America a deterministic edge in terms of security from entanglements, incursions, or outright invasion. Yet in The Geography of the Peace, published in 1944, Nicholas Spykman warns Americans that they are in peril through the encirclement of the Western Hemisphere: Summing up the geographical position of the United States, we must note that it is surrounded by the Eurasian land mass plus the continents of Africa and Australia. In terms of territory, this area is two and one half times the size of the New World; in terms of population, it is ten times the size; and, in terms of

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

133

energy output, it is approximately equal. To the east of us is located Western Europe, which is a center of power defined by both population density and mechanical energy. To the west lies another great power center expressing its force largely in terms of population density. (1944: 33).

We should first note that this was composed during the height of the Second World War; as Spykman reminds us, at the beginning of 1942, Germany and Japan had achieved a good part of their objectives … . We were then confronted with the possibility of complete encirclement, in which case we might have had to face the unified power of the whole Eurasian land mass. The strength of the powers of the Eastern Hemisphere would have been overpowering. (1944: 34).

However, even granting the historical circumstances subtending Spykman’s assessment, could not any nation or any landmass plead a case for geographical encirclement once other powers are aligned against it? Any and every place can be conceived (or determined) as surrounded: given enemies in different locations and/ or a mindset susceptible to a defensive stance (or a collective state of paranoia), encirclement seems to be the default position. Add in inter-continental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, and all the other accoutrements of post-World War Two weapon systems such as MIRVs, ICBMs, and DEADs (Destruction Entrusted Automatic Devices), and the friction of distance vis-à-vis defense seems to abrade into nothingness: once weapons can vault over any delimitation of distance, all nations exist in circumstances of permanent encirclement. Add in the tactics of terrorism, and one is not only continually encircled but the defensive circle itself has become antiquated, having been superseded by the conjoined performances of infiltration and invisibility. The deterministic estimate of oceans is likewise subject to change; or perhaps, given our subject matter, we might better phrase it by stating that the oceans seem to be liable to an array of performative effects. Oceans, perceived at one time as “natural barrier frontiers,” became avenues of exchange, migration, and communication once sailors learned how to navigate them (Gyorgy 1942: 150, n. 6). “The open ocean was once such a formidable barrier that it completely separated the western from the eastern continents. Now it is the main artery of world commerce” (Broek 1940: 14–15). Carl Ritter also underlines the paradoxical instrumentality of great bodies of water: “Nor must we overlook the fact that, despite what was said above, regarding the oceans as the greatest barriers to the spread of civilization, that smaller seas aided it, for the very country of which I speak [“Western Africa, northern Africa, and southeastern Europe … the homes of the earliest culture”] was intersected by five important seas, and to them it is under immeasurable obligations for its development” (1973: 67). That such an extended parcel of land could have an ‘obligation’ to its circumambient waters provides us with a prickly problem of agency, but, as we operate under a compulsion in

134

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

regards to our subject matter, we will move on without further comment except to add that, as Scott Martelle states in his review of Simon Winchester’s Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, “Wars … arose not because of the Atlantic [despite its having ‘a million stories’], but because of the civilizations that rose around it” (2010: E12). And so let us return to Semple and the racial component of environmental determinism, which she touches upon in Influences of Geographic Environment (‘the shifting fate of races’). This talk of “race” and “races,” which we saw adumbrated in Whitman’s “vision” of a “superber race” of “man” superseding the ostensibly less superb race of “savages” in California, will of course capture environmental determinism and twist it to its own fatal ends as it is placed under the aegis of Adolf Hitler, with his vision of the environmental destiny of a master race and its need for Lebensraum. This it not to say that Whitman and Semple are direct forbearers of the Nazis, or that even Ratzel could or should be tallied in that category, but it is to say that a toxic racial “scientific” ideology was abroad in this era, there for the taking: that it was taken and used by Hitler and his followers for their own fateful purposes is simply a fact of history. This racially tinged environmental determinism is reflected in quite a pellucid fashion by Joseph Conrad in his Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899. In the opening passages of the novel, as Marlow and the narrator of the story sail down the Thames, an evocation (“in effect a hymn”) of the river is enunciated by Conrad, an evocation of “the Englishness of the river … . With the passing of the centuries … the English river has become an object of veneration for good men … . The Thames has its own light, it is a source of light to the world” (Trilling 1999: xliii). The river itself has been illuminated from its “primordially dark, inscrutable” beginnings (Trilling 1999: xliii) by the very comings and goings of Englishmen upon its waters: Hunters of gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!... The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (Conrad 1999: 5).

In contradistinction to this, the Congo and its “race” have not been “blessed” with this fortunate version of a reciprocal deterministic relationship, with the Thames being slowly purged of its darkness by the deeds of men and the benightedness of the “race” likewise being slowly purged by the growing illumination of the river. Instead, the African river, still wrapped in the shroud of the primordial, has “stained” its people in the shade of its own darkness. “Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick,

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

135

heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine … . And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” (Conrad 1999: 41, 42).

This is the evocation of a place where the “Earth seemed unearthly” (Conrad 1999: 44), and is yet to be tamed into English domesticity. And it is also an invocation in which the “race of men” peopling the river’s banks must mirror, must duplicate, in an environmentally deterministic fashion, the river’s character, its thick sluggishness, its primitive torpor (to replicate a bit of Conrad’s melodramatic diction). The “race” must perform what the Congo and its environs are performing: the ‘implacable force’ of the jungle, its furious reciprocity, demands such a performance. And Conrad delivers just such a performance: “And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity – and he had filed teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge … ” (1999: 45).

Van Loon, some thirty years later, testifies to much the same sentiments as Conrad: “This land of contrast [Africa] seems to do dreadful things to people. It warps their vision. It kills their susceptibilities to the finer sides of life. The ceaseless carnage of the veldt and forest gets into their blood” (1932: 452). Europeans who linger too long in this ‘land of carnage’ slip into the savagery seemingly endemic to these tropical climes: And a quiet little mousy official, fresh from the stiff respectability of a slumbering Belgian village, turns into a monster who has women flogged to death because they fail to bring an extra pound of rubber; and then quietly smokes his afterdinner cigar while the insects devour some poor black devil, mutilated because he was in arrears with his ivory. (Van Loon 1932: 452–453).

Here, instead of accusing Van Loon of simple racism, it may be closer to the mark of accusing him of reading too much Conrad, and being racist. And here, instead of similarly accusing Conrad of simple racism (“Conrad was a bloody racist,” unequivocally states Chinua Achebe (1999: xlix)), a charge to which he is certainly liable, let us rather charge him with climatic determinism, a “scientific” theory that was a corollary of both the racism and the environmental determinism of the epoch. Semple is adept at delineating this:

136

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography The North Temperate Zone is preeminently the culture zone of the earth. It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past three centuries … . Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will … . Where man has remained in the Tropics, he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child. (1911: 633, 634).

Given such premises, the “adoption” of these “childish races” by those from the North Temperate Zone could easily be viewed as an act of enlightened charity bestowed upon those ‘of feeble intellect and will.’ However, the people of the “North” were susceptible to their own environmentally determined dilemma, a conundrum which geography in its various configurations had ostensibly performed upon them. As detailed by Sir Harold Mackinder in his famous “The Geographical Pivot of History,” the nations of Western Europe were in the crosshairs of the Pivot Area or the Heartland of Eurasia, “the unbroken lowland of the east,” basically the East European and Russian steppes,5 an area, which, according to Mackinder, had generated “a remarkable succession of Turanian, nomadic peoples – Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmuks. Under Attila the Huns established themselves in the midst of the Pusstas, in the uttermost Danubian outlier of the steppes, and thence dealt blows northward, westward, and southward against the settled peoples of Europe. A large part of modern history might be written as a commentary upon the changes directly or indirectly ensuing from these raids. (1951: 31, 34–35).

That this ‘unbroken lowland’ was not seen by Mackinder as a two-way street, heading east as well as west, is perhaps simply a prime example of the remarkable perceptual solipsism which people exhibit when thinking of geography, whereby they tend to see areal configurations through their end of the geographical telescope, 5 In his 1956 article, “Heartland and Rimland in Eurasian History,” Donald Meinig states that “Mackinder defined his heartland hydrographically, as including the Eurasian area in which the rivers drain either to the interior or to the seasonally frozen Arctic.” He goes on to offer his own definition: “A more stable yet functional heartland may be defined as that portion of the great Eurasian steppe and desert belt bounded on the west by the Volga basin and the Caspian Sea, on the north by the southern margin of the great northern forest, on the east by the highlands forming the inner margin of the historic Chinese culture area, and on the south by the nearly continuous mountainous zone from Sikang, through the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Kopet Dagh to the southern end of the Caspian” (1956: 556–557).

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

137

as it were. After all, if one were to reverse vantage points and view events from the Russian angle, one might consider the Swedish and French incursions (a bit more recent than the invasion of Europe by the Huns under Attila) as proof positive of exactly the opposite conclusions which Mackinder reaches; fast-forward and add the German invasion of “the Heartland” and the case becomes much stronger. But Europeans perceive the relationship from the other end of the areal lens: Geography tells us how precarious is the position of the promontories that we call Europe, in relation to the immense hinterland that we call Asia. There is one theme that runs through the histories of the Mediterranean, the European, and the Western culture: the man of the steppe against the man of the sown; the mounted horde against the dwellers of the city; mass against form. (StrauszHupé 1952: 82).

Though Mackinder tends towards environmental determinism (“As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history,” he asks, “does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident?” (1942: 198)), such a tendency does not qualify him an “absolute believer” in environmental determinism: “The actual balance of political power, at any given time is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility[!], equipment, and competition of the competing peoples” (1942: 201). However, his ideas do “take world politics out of the realm of the historically contingent and into the realm of the geographically predictable. Geography trumps history” (Agnew 2002: 69). So perhaps we can view Mackinder’s theories as being of the geographically probabilistic rather than of the geographically deterministic variety. Geopolitics, a term first minted by the Swedish geographer, Rudolf Kjellén in 1899 (Livingstone 1992: 245), became the field in which environmental determinism reached a kind of reverse apogee (otherwise known as a nadir). As taken up by the German military theorist, professor, and general, Karl Haushofer, geopolitics became a tool in the arsenal of Nazi ideological weapons by which Großraum and Lebensraum were translated into justifications for invasions north, south, east, and west. Haushofer was acquainted with Ratzel’s theories from an early age; indeed, “Ratzel was a close friend of Haushofer’s father (Max), who taught economic geography at Munich’s Polytechnicum. Young Karl often accompanied both men on their walks along the Isar river [sic]. It was on these strolls that Ratzel … first roused the boy’s interest in the then virgin field of political geography and thus gained his most famous disciple. (Dorpalen 1942: 52).

Haushofer’s interest in geopolitics was further piqued by an extended visit to Japan prior to World War One; returning to Germany convinced that Japan “was a nation whose political and social outlook showed striking similarities with that of

138

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Prussia-Germany … . as early as 1919 … Haushofer stated with absolute certainty that the Reich’s salvation lay in an alliance with Japan” (Dorpalen 1942: 161). Following the conclusion of World War One, Haushofer established “the famous and powerful Geopolitical Institute of Munich” (Gyorgy 1942: 70)6 and in 1924 founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, a “scientific” journal seemingly dedicated to the propagation of spatially inflected theory but with an overt emphasis on the spatial “problems” of post-Versailles Germany. According to Karl A. Wittfogel in an article published in 1929, the time (as well as the place) for such an enterprise was ripe: “Geopolitical writings shot up like mushrooms in the rain” during this period (1929: 22). Extrapolating Ratzel’s theory of organic space and shifting it into an overt political-military context, Haushofer forges a link between Lebensraum, Großraum, the nation-state (i.e., Germany), and world power. In such a formation, “victory and defeat, gain and loss become … essentially spatial concepts and space itself the only acceptable historical standard measuring the destinies of nations or states. The acute spatial rivalry of individual states, in turn, increases the value of land and leads to an appreciation of geographic areas in general” (Gyorgy 1942: 112). Here, geography, with space as its stand-in, has trumped history: a people’s destiny can only be calibrated by its possession of land. Such a conception of the value of land, of necessary room, of required space, a space that must perfectly match the burgeoning needs of a burgeoning population, becomes a “scientific” rationale for German expansion: geography here performs expansion, it demands it. And geography becomes performative in two correlated ways: first, a feedback loop is created, for, as land becomes more and more valorized, geopolitics and 6 In his Critical Geopolitics, Ó Tuathail claims that the German Geopolitical Institute was “nonexistent.” However, beyond stating that it was an “Academy,” not an “Institute,” he doesn’t offer much direct evidence to support this claim (1996: 131), though he does refer to an article by an H. Heske, “Karl Haushofer: His Role in German Geopolitics and in Nazi Politics,” in the Political Geography Quarterly of 1987 (No. 6, 135–144). However, in “German Geography: War Work and Present Status,” which appeared in the July 1946 edition of Geographical Review, Thomas R. Smith and Lloyd D. Black describe the findings of a visit they made to Germany between March and December of 1945. Though they state that numerous geographers worked for various branches of the Nazi military, creating maps and geographic handbooks, they discovered that “No trace has yet been found of any large research-intelligence organization under Haushofer’s direction. The Deutsche Akademie in Munich, of which he was president, has been suggested. Although the files of the Akademie may have been a useful source of information, there is no indication that Haushofer was able to dominate its work for his own geopolitical research. The full story is yet to be told, but it appears that the important and sinister influence which the ‘Great Geopolitician’ was reported to have exerted on the German High Command was more a product of American imagination than actual fact … . Whatever influence Haushofer exerted on military affairs, aside from his writings, seems to have been a personal one based on his relationship with Hess.” (404). Granting the veracity of this, it still does not subtract from the points I am attempting to make here, that Haushofer’s writings were performative and that they had an impact.

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

139

geographers (aka geo-politicians) become more and more valorized; and, second, the “scientifically verified” need for more land helps to justify expansionist wars, so that “room” (or the perceived lack of the same) leads to the performance of war. Haushofer’s influence upon Hitler and other leading Nazis is a matter of much controversy. It has been rumored that he helped Hitler in the composition of several chapters of Mein Kampf, though Haushofer vehemently denied this following the conclusion of the war (Schnitzer 1954: 9). However, Haushofer was “well acquainted with Rudolf Hess. Hess had been his aide-de-camp in World War I, had attended Haushofer’s classes in Munich, and had introduced him to Hitler” (Schnitzer 1954: 9- 10). Regardless of the extent of Haushofer’s direct contact with Hitler and other leading Nazis, by 1935 the study of a distinctly fascistic variety of geopolitics had been institutionalized within the German state. Indeed, “in the summer of 1935, a permanent new clearinghouse was created in Berlin, in an attempt to bridge the gap between official National Socialism and Haushofer’s private research group. This powerful clearing agency, the Haus der Reichsplanung, came to occupy quarters in the main offices of the Nazi Party” (Gyorgy 1942: 97). Then, in December of ’35, the ministers for education and religion formed “a new, over-all central governmental agency, the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung. This streamlined new official body was destined to bring about close and lasting contacts between the three main types of geopolitical research centers, the governmental, educational and academic organizations” (Gyorgy 1942: 98; underlining, Gyorgy’s). Such close collaboration between the Nazis and Haushofer and other geographers did not endure through the course of the war: indeed, by 1944 “Nazi suspicion had fallen” on Haushofer and he “was sent to the Dachau concentration camp” (Schnitzer 1954: 4). By this time, Haushofer’s son had been executed for plotting against Hitler’s life. Following the war, Haushofer (along with his wife), committed suicide after being classified as a war criminal. How much of an influence Haushofer’s spatial thinking in particular and environmental determinism in general had on Hitler and Nazism is also a matter of much debate. Gyorgy points out that Mein Kampf is inflected with geopolitical concepts of a Haushoferian variety: “Hitler discovers a discrepancy between the country’s population and its area, holding it [such a discrepancy] responsible for Germany’s weakness” (1942: 72); but to believe that Hitler relied on Haushofer’s ideas for the construction of his brand of totalitarianism seems fanciful. Spatial “science” was merely one part of the noxious brew of the German form of fascism. This is not meant to minimize the significance of Haushofer’s geopolitical notions or to cede its culpability in the overall crime of Nazism; it is simply to make the claim that Hitler did not require justification from academics and their geostrategical ideas to perform his actions. The veneer of scientism did lend a certain deformed credence to Nazism (at least in the crudity of their own minds), and geo-spatial thinking certainly inflected both the ideology of Nazism and the strategy of the German military. To what extent it did so is of course debatable as well as unquantifiable, but to whatever extent it did, that is the extent of the

140

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

performative powers of environmental determinism in regards to Nazi Germany and its expansive actions during World War Two. The fact that a specifically warped version of geopolitics undergirded by a inherently warped version of environmental determinism did have an impact on the Nazis, combined with the horrendous results of German aggression in World War Two, led to a general retreat from these ideas. In a kind of academic and cognitive panic, leading American geographers branded geopolitics as, if not inherently evil, at least extremely prone to incoherence: “Geopolitics presents a distorted view of the historical, political, and geographical relations of the world and its parts,” claimed the leading American geographer of the era, Isaiah Bowman, in the October 1942 edition of Geographical Review (1942: 646). “There is no such thing as a general science of geopolitics … geographical materialism [aka environmental determinism] is nothing but a dynamic nihilism which flourishes only in a nation which has buried its gods and is worshipping Mars instead,” stated Hans W. Weigart in the July 1942 edition of Foreign Affairs. Despite such a negative judgment of Haushofer’s fundamental concepts, Weigart paradoxically also invokes “the truly Faustian nature of his [Haushofer’s] genius” (1942: 733, 734). And George Kiss wrote in the October 1942 edition of Geographical Review that “one major tendency” of “recent trends in German political geography” is “an unwavering line pointing towards the German goal of supremacy on the continent of Europe, of German expansion towards the great open spaces of Eurasia, with the ‘empire of the world in sight’” (1942: 645). These scholarly articles followed on the heels of popular stories about Haushofer in Life (an unattributed piece published in November 1939), and Reader’s Digest (June 1941) by Frederick Sondern Jr. The latter piece, “The Thousand Scientists behind Hitler,” combined with the 1942 U.S. Army propaganda films, Prologue to War and The Nazi Strike, suddenly vaulted Haushofer (who had already been vaunted as the “philosopher of Nazism,” “Germany’s brain truster” and the “inexhaustible Ideas Man for Hitler” by the article in Life in 1939) as well as the entire German geopolitical venture into prominence, giving geopolitics (and by extension, political geography; and by further extension, geography as a whole) as practiced by anyone anywhere the distinct whiff of notoriety (Ó Tuathail 1996: 115–119). 1942 also witnessed the publication of such books as Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power by Robert Strausz-Hupé in which statements such as the following “educated” Americans about the role of geopolitics in Nazi Germany: The slogans of Nazi ideology, however, are derived primarily from geographical concepts. In Nazi political philosophy the solution to all internal socioeconomic problems is sought by the conquest of space and still more space. Whence the intense preoccupation of National Socialism with geography from Hitler’s earliest beginnings to this day, and the Fuhrer’s endless perorations on Lebensraum. (1942: 4).

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

141

One of the obvious drawbacks of such an single-mindedly geopolitical reading of Nazi ideology was that it “marginalized anti-Semitism and the foremost diabolical possibility that the Nazis did attempt: the complete annihilation of the Jews of Europe. If German geopolitics was a myth that enlightened, it was also a myth that blinded” (Ó Tuathail 1996: 139). As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was primarily about racial, not spatial, concerns: “‘eastern Jewry, as the breeding ground [Keimzelle] of World Jewry, was to be annihilated’” (1996: 149). It was Russian Jews, claims Goldhagen, not Russian Lebensraum, which provided the dominant motivation for Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The intellectual fallout from the Nazi utilization of geopolitics was intense; the entire geography department at Harvard was terminated in 1948 and to this day has not been resuscitated. “‘Geography is not a university subject,’” Harvard president James Conant succinctly declared at the time (Smith 2003: 443). Political geography was tainted as well and was not revivified until Harold and Margaret Sprout and Jean Gottmann led it into new directions in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Gottmann and the Sprouts offered routes out of the impasse into which political geography had fallen. If Gottmann offered a political geography informed by wide reading in political theory and a personal history [Gottmann had twice been a refugee, once from the Ukraine following the Russian Revolution and once from France following the Nazi invasion] that saw political territoriality as always historically contingent, the Sprouts provided a way of ‘keeping the physical in political geography’ while placing it in the context of human perception and decision-making. (Agnew 2002: 99).

The possibilism derived from Vidal de la Blache rather than the determinism derived from Ratzel began to be the matrix of Western political geography. Location and areal relationships certainly impacted political and military action; however, they did not provide the sole determinant of such actions. Here, the (possible) performative valence of geography became one amongst a number of other (possible) performative valances: geographical factors, along with economical, logistical, and other components composed one large unified performative force field. However, environmental determinism and geopolitics, and in exceedingly performative manifestations, never completely abandoned the political stage. In fact, some, such as Simon Dalby, claim they never even made an exit from the stage: “Spatial understanding of power became so commonly understood, i.e. hegemonic, that explicit reference to them in terms of geopolitics was simply irrelevant. Power was understood in terms of the filling of political spaces which are organized in specific territorial configurations” (1990: 38). But explicit reference to geopolitics along with implicit allusion to environmental determinism did hover in the wings,

142

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

waiting for the right personage to come along and embrace its dubious legacy. It was Henry Kissinger who took up this tainted mantle and resurrected geopolitics: Kissinger’s infamous luster gave geopolitics a renewed respectability, or at least a revived notoriety: in either case, it brought it back to front stage. “Because of Kissinger’s popularization of the term, geopolitics spiraled well beyond the socalled geopolitical tradition to become a synonym for the space of global politics” (Ó Tuathail 1996: 17). In agreement with Dalby, John Agnew points out that the effacement of geopolitics during the post-World War Two era was a fiction: “the denial of the word ‘geopolitics’ because of its putative links to imperialism and Nazi ideology, even as the practice of geopolitics continued to be integral to international relations in theory and practice, is read as a means of pretending innocence of politics or geopolitical views” (2000: 97). This assumption of geopolitical innocence suited the new expansionist policies of the United States for, while “geography is as important to American hegemony today as it was to European hegemony,” the “American Empire” sees “itself as beyond geography” (Smith 2002: 4). Here, global aspirations nullify geographical particularities, and geopolitical ambitions are hidden behind an American universalism promoting economic equality and democratic freedom. Such a geographic performance is best practiced with the form of legerdemain associated with misdirection: geopolitics reigns supreme while “geopolitics” no longer exists. Kissinger’s Diplomacy is saturated with geopolitical conceptions of a strong environmental deterministic strain, even to the extent of reading geopolitics retroactively and anachronistically into the past: Kissinger states that Richelieu’s “vocation as a cardinal did not keep Richelieu from seeing that the Hapsburg’s attempt to re-establish the Catholic religion as a geopolitical threat to France’s security. To him, it was not a religious act but a political maneuver by Austria to achieve dominance in Central Europe and thereby reduce France to secondclass status” (1994: 59). Kissinger also casts pre-Bismarck Prussia in a decidedly deterministic frame: “Its oddly shaped frontiers stretched across Northern Germany from the partly Polish east to the partly Latinized Rhineland (which was separated from Prussia’s original territory by the Kingdom of Hanover), providing the Prussian state with an overwhelming sense of national mission – if for no other purpose than to defend its fragmented territories” (1996: 80). Here, geography, Prussia’s ‘oddly shaped frontiers’ as well as its ‘fragmented territories,’ performs an adumbration of a pan-Germanic national mission: it is self-evident to Kissinger that such odd areal configurations compel Prussia to embrace a specifically geopolitically-inflected mission of national unification. Reinvigorated by Bismarck’s leadership, Prussia finds further performative sustenance from its “odd” configuration: Kissinger states that “It was as if Prussia’s very outlines – a series of oddly shaped enclaves stretching across the North German plain from the Vistula to west of the Rhine – had destined it to lead the quest for German unity” (1996: 128): geography here gestures unequivocally towards unity; its very lack of unity “manifestly” performs unity, it destines it. And Great Britain becomes the

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

143

“dominant country in Europe” during the nineteenth century because it “had the advantages of geographic isolation and imperviousness to domestic upheavals on the Continent” (Kissinger 1996: 95); isolation, the lack of continuity, in and of itself performs British dominance. One of the great (or most infamous) geopolitical performatives of the twentieth century was the articulation and dissemination of the Domino Theory. First formulated in “NCS document 64,” a U.S. National Security Document of 1950, the theory “predicted that, if Indochina fell, Burma and Thailand would soon follow” and the rest of Southeast Asia would soon come toppling after (Kissinger 1996: 624). Following upon the theoretical implications of the Domino Theory, an imagined geographical future impels a presently performed war. Futuristic geographic calamities trump current ones: they outperform them. Kissinger, in a kind of rear-view mirror piece of stealthily performed historical misdirection, makes the claim that the theory played out precisely as predicted: the fall of South Vietnam reflected the fact that “the historical correlation of forces had shifted in its [the USSR’s] favor. As a result, it tried to expand into Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, and ultimately Afghanistan” (1996: 701). None of these countries are remotely contiguous with Vietnam: in Kissinger’s imaginative geographic plasticity, the dominoes have vaulted over space into South Asia, the Middle East, and even into Southwest Africa. In this construal, the performance of geopolitics outdistances distance, hop-scotching over areal delimitations as it retroactively legitimates the Domino Theory. To classify Kissinger as a strict environmental determinist would be a category mistake: he is much too aware of the importance of other factors in the playing out of international relations, including the abiding salience of military might as well as the pivotal role of grand historical personalities (such as his), to countenance a reliance on “mere” geography. I am simply using his career to reference the renewal of geopolitics as a legitimate exercise, insofar as such a controversial figure as Kissinger can grant credibility to anything. That such thinkers as Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan (“containment” being a spatially-inflected geopolitical term par excellence), John Meirshimier, David Landes, and Paul Kennedy were also instrumental in the revivification of geopolitics subsequent to its period of infamy during and following World War Two, is a story too long to tell at this conjuncture. However, the term “environmental determinist” has been repeatedly hurled at Jared Diamond, as if the two words were a two-pronged spear that would, in one fell blow, decapitate the messenger as well as his message. Following the 1997 publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and its subsequent success as a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner, a number of geographers blasted Diamond. In “Environmentalism and Eurocentrism,” James M. Blaut, complains that Diamond has attempted to revive the “musty, fusty” theory of environmental determinism (“a relic of the past”) by placing causation for the development of technology squarely and solely within the confines of the environment (1999: 391). In Gun,

144

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Germs, and Steel, “Everything important that has happened to humans since the Paleolithic era,” Blaut writes, “is due to environmental influences. More importantly, all of the important differences between human societies, all of the differences that led some societies to prosper and progress and others to fail, are due to the nature of each society’s local environment and to its geographical location. History as a whole reflects these environmental differences and forces. Culture is largely irrelevant; the environment explains all of the main tendencies of history … . The final outcome of these environmentally caused processes is the rise and dominance of Europe. (1999: 392).

The main thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that the east-west axis of Eurasia as opposed to the north-south axes of Africa and the Western Hemisphere, along with several limiting geographical factors such as the impasses of deserts, isthmuses, and mountain ranges, led to the relatively easy diffusion of food stuffs and technology in Eurasia in contrast to their lack of diffusion in Africa and the Americas. Ergo, “Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography – in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (Diamond 1997: 400–401). In this schema, the house-hunters’ creed of “location, location, location” trumps all else: continental axes and areas perform historical destiny, even though these are simply ‘accidents.’ Diamond proleptically fends off charges of resurrecting environmental determinism by stating that “the label” of “‘geographic determinism’” seems to have unpleasant connotations, such as that human creativity counts for nothing or that we humans are passive robots helplessly programmed by climate, fauna, and flora. Of course these fears are misplaced. Without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting our meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago. All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments. (1997: 408).

For an academic of any variety, but especially for a putative practitioner of the “science of history” to be so blithely ignorant and breezily dismissive of the historical uses (or abuses) of environmental determinism is astonishing. Diamond’s insouciance about the term’s ‘seeming … unpleasant connotations’ reeks of an almost willful intellectual benightedness. However, in an attempt to

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

145

approach Diamond’s thesis in a more temperate manner, the main problem with the gist of his claim is that even when stripped of its racism, determinism [of whatever variety] only succeeds at neatly modeling history when fundamental facets of that history are ignored. Diamond fully disregards culture as a social force, treating it as a source of only minor idiosyncrasies, the small error term in the equation in which environmental factors explain the great bulk of societal variance. (Cowell 2003: 807).

For, “what humans did in an area involved the active agency of culture in the shaping of the landscape. Nature merely provided the materials that set the limits within which lay many possible choices” (Peet 1985: 327–328). Or, to channel Marx by way of Karl Wittfogel: “Marx often pointed out that to examine complicated correlations ‘without a very extensive analysis of the connecting links’ results in ‘a purely arbitrary determination’ instead of lucid explanations” (1929: 23).7 But we need not dally any longer here: the main point to make regarding Diamond is that his ideas, no matter how wrong we may (or may not) judge them to be, are indicative of a return to what Kaplan calls “the revenge of geography.” We can witness evidence of this return in the blithe manner in which Ian Morris, the author of Why the West Rules – For Now, states that “The past shows that … geography shapes the development of societies,” without the slightest of caveats or even the barest of acknowledgements that “geography” in and of itself cannot “shape” anything (2010: 34). Here, let me be quick to aver that, of course, the “shapes” of geography impact all sorts of developments, but they have neither the agency nor the kinesthetic power to shape anything. The “formations” of geography frequently yield to developments that would be surprising to one who holds a strictly deterministic view; for instance, Jean Gottmann points out that the island of Delos assumed much more significance in the ancient world than its “tiny and ill-shaped” configuration would lead a rigorous determinist to surmise: Delos was in Hellenistic and Roman times one of the major markets and maritime centers of the Eastern Mediterranean. The location on such a small and rugged island of a powerful city and seaport was surprising. It still appears today as a marvel to the visitor who looks at the island bristling with the monumental remnants of great buildings, temples, villas, warehouses, and hostels – a sort of small Hellenistic Manhattan. (1973: 23).

Gottmann makes it clear that it is cultural factors that “determined” the import of the “ill-shaped” island: 7 Wittfogel cites Marx’s Theorien über den Mehrwert, Fourth Edition (Stuttgart, 1921). Vol. III, 430.

146

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography Such unlikely development of the small territory was made possible by the sanctuary function, which made it safe and an active center of pilgrimage, and later by a clever policy of alliances, shifting from the Ionian League to Athens to Samos, and again to Athens, then to Egypt, and finally between Rome and Athens. In the first century B.C., involved in the maritime struggle between Rome and Athens, Delos was devastated and soon lost both its emporium and sanctuary functions. The island was abandoned after the second century A.D. Its story is perhaps the most remarkable example of a tiny and ill-shaped territory blooming with extraordinary prosperity for hundreds of years, to become only a monument to its own past. (1973: 23).

The sanctuary function referred to by Gottmann, a function resulting from the alleged birth of Apollo on Delos, is a reminder that mystical and religious functions have determined historical development every bit as much as strict geographic impingements. When Constantine shifted the center of the Roman Empire from a site on the Tiber River to one on the Bosporus, he did so because “it was dictated by divine will as seen by the emperor in a vision. Rome and Constantinople were good capitals not so much because they were great crossroads as because they were mystical crossroads” (Gottmann 1973: 27; italics, Gottmann). Those who may claim that the Delos case, based as it is on the evidence of one small island, does not carry sufficient weight to trump the claims of environmental determinism should consider the case of Greece itself. To many in the ancient world, including Aristotle, its location seemed perfectly situated for the attainment of continual dominance into the foreseeable future. In Book VII of the Politics, Aristotle notes its privileged intermediary position between Asia and Europe, predicting that “if it could be formed into one state,” Greece “would be able to rule the world” (1941: 1327b). Note that this dominance is possible only if political developments yield up the necessary preconditions. Though Alexander’s ascendance created precisely those conditions, Greece’s predominance was shortlived and the nation has faded into backwater status during the last two thousand years, despite its “pivotal” geographic situation. We could also point out Japan’s volatile ups and downs over the past four centuries as evidence for our claim. Its self-imposed sequestration during the Tokugawa period was a cultural and political decision; the determining factors of its opening effected by causes of a military, economic, and cultural kind; its rise before World War Two, though driven by a geographical desire for a Pacific empire (a so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”), included martial-cultural components; and its stunning ascent and relative decline as a great economic power following World War Two did not necessarily have anything to do with its status as an island. This of course does not mean that its geographical situation had nothing to do with its historical development during the last few centuries; only that its location is not the sole determining factor in its development and, furthermore, that a specifically geographical factor can only be understood if it is linked with many other determinants, including cultural, economic, religious, and military components.

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

147

Here we should mention that if the thesis of the environmental determinists was truly valid, nation-states and other assorted territorial entities would have to reach stasis and then simply be affixed there: having achieved the condition which their geography demands, no further change could ensue. For if geography trumps all, then change can only occur when geography changes. And if this were so, the evolution of nation-states would have to be geared to geologic time, which hardly seems to be the case. While we are engaged in sketching in historical examples, we should not neglect the case of Europe in the period from the fall of Rome to the end of the feudal era. In this epoch, crudely dubbed the Dark and the Middle Ages, geography dropped by the proverbial wayside as a determining factor, at least in terms of political organization: “European society in the period from the fifth century to the twelfth century was too fluid and nomadic to give any substance to a territorial concept … . Individuals drew their rights from the group they belonged to rather than the place they came from” (Gottmann 1973: 28). Gottmann himself qualifies this when he adds that taxation during this period was based on spatial principles: “wealth rested on some clear spatial basis: ownership of the land, gathering of tolls, enforcing monopolistic rights, of which minting money was one. Each of these had to be located in specific areas and places, and rights were exercised within certain geographic boundaries, though the latter could shift over time” (1973: 55). Still, these spatial markers don’t nullify the main idea enunciated here, that sovereignty during this era was affixed to the person of the lord rather than the extent of the territory. Foucault calls the shift from the paradigm of the state centered on the prince to a state centered on territory “undoubtedly one of the most fundamental mutations in both the form of Western political life and the form of Western history” (2007: 294). For Kaplan, the current economic crisis (or crises) only serves to highlight the deterministic quality of the environment: due to “weakening social orders and other creations of humankind,” we are left with “the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint” to the “conflict and instability” subtending the global economic meltdown (2009: 98). Here, it seems that the seas and mountains are the sole surviving barriers to universal catastrophe. What Kaplan dubs, in an odd mish-mash of geographical and geological terminology, “the deeper tectonic forces of geography” are once again, as was “wisely” understood in the Victorian era, the prime catalysts driving the forces of international politics: “We all must learn to think like Victorians [such as Mackinder]. This is what must guide and inform our newly discovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists” (Kaplan 2009: 105). One hardly knew until this pronouncement that humanists were so honored, especially those of a liberal variety. Among other observations, Kaplan notes that It is not an accident that Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower. There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East’s universal joint,

148

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape – plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of the adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. (2009: 105).

Again, akin to Diamond, there is a nonchalant yet almost willful ignorance displayed in this sketch of Iran. That countries are geographically logical or illogical ignores both the arbitrary quality of borders and the temporary nature of nation-states. To think that lines crossing deserts and mountains express geographic logic betrays ignorance of both the exigent nature of logic and the contingent quality of power politics, in which borders do not follow “natural” geographies but are derived from the dominions of military might and political power, and are often simply drawn in a somewhat haphazard and even arbitrary manner. As John Agnew says, “Whatever their concrete significance for the everyday lives of those living adjacent to them, the essential arbitrariness of many national boundaries or boundary-segments deserves underlining” (2001: 13). One cursory reading of a general reference book, such as an encyclopedia, would have disabused Kaplan of at least some of his a-historical and a-geographical notions regarding Iran; the following is taken from The World Book Encyclopedia: In 1826, Russia invaded Iran. Russia wanted to expand its territory and gain an outlet to the Persian Gulf. It defeated Iran in 1827. In 1828, the two countries signed the Treaty of Turkomanchai. The agreement gave Russia the land north of the Aras River, the present [1991] boundary between the two countries. In 1856, Iran tried to recapture its territory in northwestern Afghanistan. But Great Britain controlled Afghanistan and declared war on Iran. In 1857, Iran and Britain signed a peace treaty, under which Iran gave up all claims to Afghanistan. (Banuazizi 1991: 409).

Here, it seems that military potency rather than “natural” boundaries determined Iran’s geographical configuration. But that Iran was once Persia as well as an empire should be enough of a testament to the fact that nations as well as countries are vulnerable to the value of time to ably demonstrate that Kaplan is far off the mark in his analysis of the ‘venerable record’ of this or any other nation-state as a permanent entity. As Donald Meinig once put it, “It is an all too common assumption that ‘geography’ and ‘human nature’ remain the two persistent factors within the fluid complex of human affairs. Few illusions could be more dangerous” (1956: 553). Still, Kaplan’s ideas do also ably demonstrate a formidable faith in the performative force of geography. “Liberal universalism,” Kaplan tells us, “ … is in large measure bound and determined by geography” (2009: 105). Geography’s

Environmental Determinism and Geopolitical Performance

149

performative powers, its “dictates,” are ignored at our own peril, for “rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it” (Kaplan 2009: 105, 98) and “we” are susceptible to geopolitical blindness as well as the hubris attendant to that disability if we neglect geography’s decrees. To lend Kaplan a limited portion of the benefit of the doubt, perhaps what he is rather over-enthusiastically reacting to is the general revival of political geography itself. According to John Agnew, who perhaps can be dubbed the dean of political geographers, “The end of the Cold War has been a boon to the field of political geography. There is now a need to understand a vast and differentiated world that no longer can be reduced to a set of overriding categories (such as East versus West, communist versus capitalist, and so on) that drove conventional perspectives on world affairs for so long … . Not only have old certainties about international boundaries, spheres of influence, the purposes of alliances (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the pecking order of world powers come into question, but also many of the established premises of those who have long dominated the study of international politics and the world economy in the United States have become moot. These premises include the settled identities of states; the division of the world into grand regions as the First, Second, and Third World; the primacy of states over other geographical units (such as cities or trading blocs) in economic transactions; and the supposed declining significance of the religious, ethnic, and other “nonmodern” affiliations. (Agnew 2000: 91).

With this explication in mind, we may think that geographic hyperbole is simply a performance of a topical kind. Here, let me reiterate that I am not making the claim that geography does not matter. But, rather, aligning myself with Gottmann, I agree with his assessment that “There is no doubt today that civilized societies do not behave according to the dictates of the environing natural conditions but use the conditions for their own purposes, which differ with time and place” (1973: 71). Further on in The Significance of Territory, in a discussion of Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, Gottmann adds that Jefferson demonstrates that “The decisive factors for the country’s stature are the quality of the people and the system of laws, for these will determine the use of the territory by the people” (1973: 90). Now that I have outlined, at least to a certain degree, the performative dimensions of environmental determinism, let me very briefly indicate the scope of the performative dimensions of strategic decisions. To state the perfectly obvious, there were areal consequences to the military decisions of a Hitler, a Napoleon, a Bush, an Obama, or of any other leader with the appropriate powers at hand to transform decisions into actions. Geography enters a performative zone when Napoleon invades Russia. Likewise, when Hitler does the same. That both invasions end in catastrophic failure does not nullify the performative powers of geography; in fact, geographers and historians would most likely concur that

150

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

the performative powers of geography were highlighted by those very failures. When George W. Bush orders troops to invade Iraq and Barack Obama withdraws some of those same troops while reinforcing U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, geography’s performative powers are thrown into high relief. Things ensue from geo-strategically-inflected decisions: they have impacts. Borders get punctured, redrawn, erased. Nations are created; nations disappear. People are killed; people disappear. Biological and chemical weapons dropped on Vietnam by members of the U.S. Air Force are still percolating in the ground. There’s the real domino effect: Agent Orange and Napalm still burning holes in the soil of South Vietnam. That’s geography, performed.

Chapter 7

The Auto-Performance of Geography Next on our agenda are performances of geographers themselves, as they attempt to “discipline” the discipline of geography through definitional performatives. Geography is famously ambiguous as a discipline, and has often been criticized as such. The intellectual rigour of geography is often questioned nowadays by practitioners and observers alike. Some of the discipline’s current leaders speak of the “vacuum’ at the core of geography, of its formlessness, of its conceptual sickliness, while spectators from other subjects remind us of its lack of intellectual repute. (Livingstone 1992: 32).

Not only is the subject bifurcated between physical and cultural geographies, providing the discipline with the possibility, or probability, of internal incoherence, but it has simultaneously often advertised itself as the grand synthetic discipline (“the queen of sciences”), providing the discipline with the possibility, or probability, of external incoherence as well. This double-backed incoherence, an internal bifurcation and an external over-extension, has frequently fractured the discipline to the near-breaking point. And this is no new problem: in Geography in the Middle Ages, George Kimble tells us that “The Ancients, for all their enlightenment, could not make up their minds about its [geography’s] significance. One school – the Platonists – held that it should be considered as a branch of physics. Another – the Aristotelians – averred that, as it was primarily concerned with measurement, it ought to be regarded as a branch of applied mathematics, like geometry or astronomy. The scholars of the Middle Ages, the intellectual inheritors of the Ancients, were equally embarrassed. Geography, they affirmed, could not reasonably be fitted into the Quadrivium or the Trivium. So it came to stand for the odds and ends of knowledge unaccommodated by the seven liberal arts. (1938: 1).

This account, assigning geographers to the mere scraps left over from the academic table, the pathetic remains, those unaccommodated odds and ends, is an account dripping with a bathos which must inevitably lead to some sort of definitional breakdown, a kind of lexical seizure or a series of such convulsions, depositing geographic practitioners in a paralytic disciplinary heap, odds and ends fracturing in disjunctions around them.

152

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Such a definitional meltdown has, at the very least, left geography with an onagain off-again identity crisis, making it ripe for a definitional performance that will finally and forever constrain geography within an inviolable border. Hence, there have been many attempts at just such a virtuoso feat, grandiose attempts to irrevocably rein in the discipline with a definitional performance par excellence. That most, or all, of these attempts have been more or less infelicitous is besides the point; of course they were infelicitous: who is ever in the position to have the final say on the definitional parameters of any discipline, let alone one as notoriously labile as geography? Simply that they were attempted and have had some sort of impact, no matter how fleeting, is what concerns us here. Again, as with other chapters, this admonition must be made: this survey in no way pretends to be complete or exhaustive; neither does it aspire to set the standard as a catalogue of geographic performatives. I am merely attempting to bring them within our purview, observe and examine them, and then move on to any conclusionary remarks we can draw. In such a cursory review and with an audience born after the turn of the twentieth century, it makes little sense to return to the writings of Eratosthenes, Strabo, Ptolemy, or, jumping forward some 1700 years, even to Ritter, who stated that the intended object of study of the geographic discipline, that is, the Earth, “is not merely a region of immense spaces, of vast superficies, it is the theater where all the forces of Nature and the laws of Nature are displayed in their variety and independencies. Besides this, it is the field of all human effort, and the scene of a Divine revelation. The Earth must be studied, therefore, in a threefold relation: to the Universe, to Nature, to History. (1973: xvi).

However, Ritter’s citation cannot be passed up without at least a modicum of analysis regarding its performative tang. Ritter’s conclusion posits a performance of geography as a true science of sciences, as it places under its aegis not only astronomy, botany, zoology, and history but cosmology and theology as well, at least in its Christian varieties. That geography instead was destined to a certain fragmentary implosion testifies not only to the coming of the disciplinary regime within the academy, but also to a hubristic ricochet effect from its own grandiose definitional ambitions. A performance of such a scope as Ritter’s could never be maintained, especially in an era when information began to explode exponentially: its very range dooms it to inchoate insensibility. Let us breezily skip over a hundred years of geographic thought as if it never existed: this testifies not only to our rough and ready methodology, but also to our desire to spare the reader from pages of combative analyses of geographicallyinflected performatives. Certainly there were performative utterances occurring

The Auto-Performance of Geography

153

during this period – Bowman’s privileging of the “pioneer fringe,” for instance;1 as well as Carl Sauer’s promotion of regionalism,2 and the battle between those who reckoned geographers should follow an nomographic rather than a idiographic formulation of their findings;3 but a closer reading of three pieces from one period, I think, will give us a deeper insight into the creation and dissemination of performative thought within the discipline. And so we will concentrate on three pieces from the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s, a period when various geographers were doing their damndest to turn the discipline away from a strict and sole adherence to the quantitative analysis brought on by the so-called SQR (Spatial Quantitative Revolution) of the 1950s and 60s. These three works are: David Harvey’s book, Social Justice and the City, and two essays, Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” and Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Geography as Humanism.” All are highly influential pieces and all reflect high levels of performativity while displaying this in distinctly disparate ways. I should add that while Tuan’s essay and Harvey’s book can be viewed as responses to or representations of the upheaval in the field of geography in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an upheaval reflecting and representing a more general upheaval occurring at the time, Lefebvre’s essay is not strictly a response to anything as limited as the SQR or squabbles over the direction of geography. I should quickly insert that this is not meant to indicate that Tuan and Harvey were either merely responding to such concerns or to an identical set of concerns; it is simply to state that Lefebvre’s essay arises from a different disciplinary and historical trajectory that the one circumambulating Anglo-American geography. Turning first to 1973 and Social Justice and the City, Harvey tells us in the introduction that “It seemed a reasonable starting assumption, for example, that principles of social justice had some relevance for the application of spatial and geographical principles to urban and regional planning” (1973: 9). This turns out to be a strong performative thinly disguised by obvious qualifiers: it only seems reasonable to proceed in such a way; such an approach has some relevance for the application of spatial and geographical principles to urban and regional planning; and, finally, and perhaps most oddly, this performative is offered only as an example of “how ideas in social and moral philosophy … could be related to geographical enquiry and to those fields of intellectual endeavour, such as planning and regional science, with which geography has much in common” (Harvey 1973: 9). 1 See Bowman’s The Pioneer Fringe (1931) and the book he edited, Limits of Land Settlement (1937), as well as Neil Smith’s American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003). 2 See Sauer’s “The Morphology of Landscape” University of California Publications in Geography 2, 2, 19–54, 1925. 3 See F.K. Schaefer’s essay, “Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodical Examination.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43, 226–249, 1953; and Richard Hartshorne’s “The Nature of Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, XXIX (1939), 171–658.

154

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

But the relevance of social justice is not a mere exemplar for Harvey; neither does it simply offer some relevance; social justice, its projection into geographic analysis, especially into the fields of urban and regional planning, provides the nexus and plexus of the book’s entire project, and, indeed, proves to be Harvey’s central concern, the very spine of his work, from this period till the present day. Which is fine: do not mistake my intentions: I am not condemning Harvey for this concern: indeed, I applaud it. All I am pointing out is that Harvey indicates his social justice turn as if it was simply one among many possible turns, when it is instead a performative statement attempting to put into effect a turn to social justice within the entire discipline of geography: the book is intended to make this happen: Harvey’s very words, despite the qualifiers, signals that intent. Harvey had been much more forthcoming in regards to these intentions in “Revolutionary and Counter Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation,” an article which was published in Antipode in 1972 (and is reprinted in Social Justice and the City): “Our paradigm is not coping well. It is ripe for overthrow. The objective social conditions demand that we say something sensible and coherent or else forever (through lack of credibility or, even worse, through the further deterioration of the objective social conditions) remain silent. It is the emerging objective social conditions and our patent inability to cope with them which essentially explains the necessity for a revolution in geographic thought. (1972: 6).

Harvey’s performance in Social Justice and the City was, to a great degree, successful. It was felicitous. It was performative. He was the appropriate person set within the appropriate circumstance to make such a turn occur. Those circumstances include, but are not limited to, his brilliance as a thinker and his command of the language, the successful performance of his previous book, Explanation in Geography, which set the stage for the possibility of a felicitous performance of his next book (“Harvey was no observer standing on the sidelines,” states Derek Gregory of Harvey’s professional status at this time, “He occupied a central place in the experimental reconfiguration of the field, and had made several avant-garde contributions to spatial analysis” (2006: 3)); the turbulence associated with the upheavals of the 1960s which were intimately tied to questions of social justice; the radical turns of other empirically-oriented geographers occurring at the same time (for instance, William Bunge’s work with the Detroit Geographical Expedition); and Harvey’s position as a professor at Johns Hopkins as well as that university’s proximity to Baltimore: “Since I had just moved to Baltimore, it seemed appropriate to use that city, together with other cities with which I was familiar, as a backdrop against which to explore questions that arose from projecting social and moral philosophical considerations into the traditional matrix of geographical enquiry” (1973: 9). Here, once again, Harvey is being coy, or perhaps simply cautious: he most certainly is not going

The Auto-Performance of Geography

155

to fold these ‘considerations into the traditional matrix of geographical enquiry.’ He will do quite the opposite, folding them into the revolutionary matrix of Marx and Lefebvre. And Trevor Barnes places a much more determinative effect on Harvey’s move to Baltimore than Harvey does, reflecting perhaps not a coyness on Harvey’s part, but possibly a partial inability to ‘read’ one’s own life from an interior perspective: “Coming to America was critical [for the political evolution of Harvey’s thought]. Specifically, Harvey’s move from Bristol to Baltimore was formative. Baltimore ‘had gone up in flames’ the year before Harvey arrived. Civil rights issues were paramount, and made literally concrete to Harvey when he slept on the pavement outside the Black Panthers’ Baltimore headquarters to protect that organization from potential violence following the police killing of its leader, Fred Hampton, in December 1969. (2006: 39).

But Harvey retains that curiously demure quality when he introduces Marxism into the mix, as he does so obliquely, as if forced to merely because of the gross inefficacy of other available theories. According to Harvey, the problem is that theories other than Marxism separate fact from value, the real from the ideal, and in so doing, they have separated theory from practice: “I do not turn to it [Marxism] out of some a priori sense of its inherent superiority (although I find myself naturally in tune with its general presupposition of and commitment to change), but because I can find no other way of accomplishing what I set out to do or of understanding what has to be understood … I suppose I am likely to be categorized as a ‘Marxist’ of sorts” (1973: 17). So the Marxist turn in geography is accomplished as a kind of default operation: ostensibly, Harvey has been backed into this particular performative. And his “evolution … from a liberal to a socialist (Marxist) conception … that occurs in” Social Justice and the City is a performative as well, despite its insecure footing within the text, its teeter-totter introduction into Harvey’s autobiographical exegesis of his intellectual trajectory (1973: 15). We might recall here Austin’s own nimble self-deprecating pratfalls as he stumbles through How to do things with words: there’s an odd-bedfellows effect at work here, Harvey and Austin both performing similar defaulting somersaults (turns) into their profoundly differentiated hypotheses. “The problem of the proper conceptualization of space is resolved through human practice with respect to it. In other words, there are no philosophical answers to philosophical questions that arise over the nature of space – the answers lie in human practice” (Harvey 1973: 13). Here the valence of Harvey’s performance is much more straightforward: this is unequivocal; there are no qualifiers attached to these proclamations: their declaration is made univocally: human practice is the locus in which these matters can be resolved. And since Marx “collapses the distinctions” between “the innumerable dualisms which … pervade post-Renaissance philosophy,” and in the process folds together observation and explanation, leading to a unified focus on human practice free

156

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

of the methodological and philosophical impasses plaguing other theoretical approaches, then Marx is, ipso facto, the guide to follow (Harvey 1973: 14). Harvey’s inclusion of Lefebvre within his “traditional” approach heralds another signal performative occurring in Social Justice and the City. Here the performance is meant to spatialize Marx and to move Marxism itself from an industrial to an urban paradigm as both the provenance and current hub of revolutionary activity. Many believe that Marx, as a historical materialist, never effectively dealt with what would come to be described as the space economy: the geographical component of Marxism is not its strong suite. This reflects both Marx’s emphasis on historical determinism as well as his era’s emphasis on history as a discipline. Now there are those who question this thesis, claiming that the master does indeed have a strong spatial theory embedded within his schema, but, be that as it may (or may not) be, it is still generally believed that Marx failed to inject a proper geographical component into the fundaments of Communism, therefore leaving Marxism without a stable spatial foundation. Harvey intends to provide a corrective to this deficiency, and, via the aid of Lefebvre’s revolutionary urbanism, with Social Justice and the City he begins a long performative project of attempting to do just that: It is in the interpretation of contemporary urbanism that Lefebvre seeks to break new ground. He notes that the object of Marx’s investigation was industrial society, its modes of organization and the social relationships it expressed. Marx interpreted history in terms of past relationships which were fundamental to the emergence of industrial capitalism. (1973: 305–306).

Lefebvre wants to shift Marxism from an industrial to an urban matrix: “Industrial society is seen [by Lefebvre] not as an end in itself but as a preparatory stage for urbanism. Industrialization, he argues, can only find its fulfillment in urbanization, and urbanization is now coming to dominate industrial production and organization. Industrialization, once the producer of urbanism, is now being produced by it” (Harvey 1973: 306). By flipping the causality of industrialization and urbanism, with urbanism now privileged over industrialization, as it is when it is placed in the primary role of the producer of industrialization, Lefebvre is performing both a spatial (geographical) and a temporal (historical) performative. He updates Marxism into (his perception of) present circumstances, in which urbanism has assumed a predominant position, and he spatializes Marxism as well, moving it from abstracted factories to dynamic cities. What Harvey does is merely a piggyback performance, jumping on top of Lefebvre’s theories and riding them to the conclusion of Social Justice and the City (“Synthesis”). But, despite its essentially epiphenomenal nature, Harvey’s performance turns out to be truly performative: the inclusion of Lefebvre into his schema begins to move Lefebvre into the discourse of American geography, contributes to the spatialization of Marxism within theoretical discourse, and calls for the establishment of a new mission for “revolutionary” theorists. The following, the

The Auto-Performance of Geography

157

final passage of Social Justice and the City, inscribes this mission with a definitive performative inflection: “A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to be brought into being. It remains for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based on exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation” (1973: 314). Cast in discourses of both theory and practice, this passage constitutes a direct call for “revolutionary” performances of both thought and action: its ambition is to perform both the theory and the practice into being, with thought and action leading the “transformative” charge. But there is a whole other dimension in which Social Justice and the City wants to be performative. As Michael Curry deftly points out in The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the Written Word, the writing, publication, and dissemination of a book does not occur in a vacuum. Books are intended as professional achievements as well as theoretical reflections. Harvey himself highlights such motivations in “What Kind of Geography for What Kind of Public Policy?” an essay published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 1974: “Personal ambition is very significant for us all since we are raised in an economic and social system that is inherently both individualistic and competitive … . Vaunting personal ambition is probably the most significant of all motivating factors explaining individual behavior” (1974: 19). However, Harvey qualifies this by emphasizing the essentially quixotic choice of geography as an arena in which to pursue personal ambition: “But … it is to be doubted if an academic possessed of enormous personal ambition would choose to start from what, in Britain at least, must surely be a disadvantageous base in the pecking order of academic disciplines” (1974: 19). Indeed, why choose the backwater of geography as a launching pad for anything other than the most mundane of careers? Still, that the performances of works (e.g., the writing of books) is at least partially based on the performance of aspiration should not escape our account; that we can do so without accusing a noted scholar such as Harvey of careerism warrants the wide scope of our inquiry. Underlining the way in which Harvey, especially in his introductions to his various books, “presents his work as a kind of philosophical autobiography, a confessional,” Curry asks us to conceptualize Harvey, the author, as presenting “his texts as works needing to be seen as achievement and [Harvey] suggests that they cannot truly be read or judged in isolation from biographical facts that characterize the nature of that achievement” (1996: 140). Here, Curry is asking us to view Harvey’s books as performances of the self; the texts are presented by the writer as autobiographical achievements, performances of the author-as-self (or the self-as-author). “The very act of [Harvey’s] writing is presented as an act of self-renewal” (Curry 1996: 141). But as Curry notes, such confessional writing is not evaluated in the same terms as scientific writing: “My point is that although one adopts one set of standards

158

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography for criticizing the explicit positivist works and another for criticizing the explicit politics of a Marxist, there is another set altogether to be invoked in judging works that are confessional in nature. In part this is because a critique of a confessional is more directly and explicitly a critique of an its author than is a critique of a work of positivist theory, which pretends to be authorless … . Whatever else we may wish to say about this way of thinking about the relationship between the author and the text [in the confessional genre], it certainly is not the conventional way of thinking about that relationship within science. (1996: 141).

Indeed, for someone such as Harvey, who displays an adamantine touch with logic as well as a flair for analysis, there are almost jolting autobiographical asides in Social Justice and the City. For, not only do the introductory remarks bring the “space” of Harvey’s autobiography into the text, but even in the final chapter similar semi-confessional remarks obtrude here and there, performing the writer’s self as he synthesizes the corpus of the text. The point here is not to damn Harvey for dabbling in the confessional mode, but to indicate that any author of any work is typically performing multiple performatives, some explicit some implicit, some having to do with (possible) revolutionary action, others with (possible) theoretical upheavals, some with professional aspirations, others with personal ambitions, some (perhaps) felicitous some (perhaps) infelicitous, and that these various levels of performative projection can, and frequently do, occur within the same text. Whether Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, along with other related shorter works of his from the 1970s, catalyzed an outright revolution in the streets or even a paradigm shift within geography itself should not set the standard of whether or not the book was performative. Not every empirical geographer doing spatial analysis suddenly threw out their regression graphs and produced works stoked high with revolutionary fervor promoting social equity: “Of course much of the geographical academy remained untouched by these early statements of Marxist avowal” (Livingstone 1992: 331). But a strong line of Marxist and/or Marxistinflected geographical analysis did follow Harvey’s lead, perhaps most powerfully through the work of Harvey himself, but also including the work of such notable figures as Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, and, much later, Don Mitchell. Social Justice and the City certainly created and/or substantially strengthened one strain of geographic thought and, at least to the extent that this strain can be adjudicated to be of import, it was performative. In a bit of a fawning tone, Noel Castree notes that “Even the most gifted thinker would be pleased to pen one or two germinal texts in a lifetime. That Harvey has written several – including many now-classic papers and essays – speaks to his prodigious talents and immense intellectual energy. The architectural sweep and grandeur of his intellectual edifice knows few equivalents within contemporary Marxism, and certainly none within his home discipline of geography. (2006: 247).

The Auto-Performance of Geography

159

Soja adopts much the same tone, with a touch of hyperbole thrown in for good measure, in his “Margin/Alia: Social Justice and the New Cultural Politics”: “Looking back over the last half of the twentieth century, it is difficult to find a book which has had a more definitive agenda-setting influence on so many disciplines than David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City” (1997: 180). Still, despite the hagiographic overtones of these eulogies, it is hard to disagree with Castree and Soja about the sheer performativity of Harvey’s work, even if we might not agree with its extent. Buttressing this is the fact that a conference at Oxford University in March 1994 commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Social Justice and the City. This conference in turn led to a collection of essays, The Urbanization of Injustice, which was published by New York University Press in 1997.4 Granted that these were purely academic performances, but they were performances nevertheless; and, it should be added, no domain being hermetically sealed from another, any performance in one domain may have effects on another. One never knows where the ripples lead. Bearing all this in mind (if that’s possible), let us turn to our next object of analysis: Lefebvre’s “Right to the City.” This essay, though plagued by what seems to be a less-than-felicitous translation as well as Lefebvre’s “flair” for contorted diction, is remarkable in that it offers up four revolutionary proposals, all of them heavily inflected with a performative twist. Two of these are quite explicit, two implicit. “The Right to the City” is also remarkable in that, akin to other highly performative political texts, such as The Declaration of Rights of Citizens, The Declaration of Independence,5 and The Communist Manifesto, we can, at least to a certain extent, trace its performance from initial utterance to enactment in law. First, let us outline the two explicit performatives in Lefebvre’s essay. With that combination of nonchalance and temerity so indicative of Lefebvre’s modus operandi, he suggests upheavals in both the revolutionary models of communism and liberal democracy. In Marxism, as we have already stated, it is Lefebvre’s claim that urbanism needs to supersede industrialization as the matrix of revolutionary change. This rearrangement will have two by-products: it will correctly situate prospective revolutionary action within its proper (updated) domain, and it will add the “missing” spatial dimension to Marxism. Second, representative democracy as functioning through the liberal capitalistic state will be updated by complementing individual rights with social (collective) rights: Until now, only those individual needs, motivated by the so-called society of consumption (a bureaucratic society of managed consumption) have been prospected, and moreover manipulated rather than effectively known and

4 Soja’s “Margin/Alia: Social Justice and the New Cultural Politics” is included in this book. 5 For the performativity of The Declaration of Independence, see Jay Fleigelman. 1993. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford university press. Thanks to John Slifko for this reference.

160

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography recognized. Social needs have an anthropological function. Opposed and complementary, they include the need for security and opening, the need for certainty and adventure, that of organization of work and play, the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable, of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and investments, of independence (even solitude) and communication, of immediate and long-term prospects. (Lefebvre 1996: 147; italics, mine).

Here, Lefebvre is making the argument that, to cite the Brazilian legal scholar Edesio Fernandes, an updating of the Declaration of the Rights of Citizens is of utmost importance so that new legal-political conditions can be created so as to affirm a notion of social citizenship that effectively expresses contemporary social relations, that is, the new relations that have been formed between individuals, within society, and between individuals and society. (2007: 206).

So, essentially, to follow along on Fernandes’ line of thought, the constitutional documents underwriting France and other liberal states no longer reflect ‘the new relations that have been formed between individuals, within society, and between individuals and society,’ thus making these documents antiquated as they leave a huge gap between the rights they enumerate and contemporary reality, a reality which entails social needs as well as individual rights. The third performative constituent in Lefebvre’s essay consists of a revolution in the template for urban planning: being that the “old humanism died in the World Wars … . It is dead. Its mummified and embalmed corpse weighs heavily and does not smell good,” urban planning needs to reflect this transformation and change from a human to a universal scale; what precisely Lefebvre intends here is anyone’s guess, as he does not flesh this out, only insisting that the architects of the era have arrayed themselves on the wrong path: “Architects seem to have established and dogmatized an ensemble of significations” (1996: 149, 152). Lefebvre’s outline for the fourth revolutionary transformation is even sketchier, and is perhaps nothing more than hinted at: this is a call for a supersession of a perceptual schema based solely on vision to one that is multi-perceptual, pan-sensorial: the human being of the new urban order is moving “towards [becoming] a polyvalent, polysensorial, urban man [sic] capable of complex and transparent relations with the world (the environment and himself)” (Lefebvre 1996: 149). Lefebvre states that the multi-dimensional, polyvalent, pan-sensorial, Marxist, and liberal democratic revolution he imagines is conceivable, given that the present society “finds itself incomplete,” as it is undergoing a crisis “of social and cultural disintegration” (1996: 156; italics, Lefebvre). But it is also incomplete because its underlying principles no longer reflect a society that has outstripped its fundamental presuppositions, presuppositions privileging individual over collective rights. Contemporary social form is no longer reflected in the antiquated law undergirding

The Auto-Performance of Geography

161

it. In that “this society finds itself incomplete … there are [necessarily] holes and chasms” within it (Lefebvre 1996: 156). It is within the spaces created by these ‘holes and chasms’ that revolutionary change becomes possible. “These voids are not there due to chance. They are the places of the possible” (Lefebvre 1996: 156). But, “The conditions of the possible can only be realized in the course of a radical metamorphosis,” and such a metamorphosis can only be led by that old standard bearer, the working class: “Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization” (Lefebvre 1996: 156, 158). “The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to the traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life … . The right to the city is like a cry and a demand” (Lefebvre 1996: 158; italics, Lefebvre). But a demand for what, exactly? Fernandes states that, once shaken loose of its dense web of theoretical opacities, Lefebvre’s demand for a ‘renewed right to urban life’ can be distilled into two basic components: “The ‘right to the city’ would basically consist of the right of all city dwellers to fully enjoy urban life with all of its services and advantages – the right to habitation – as well as taking direct part in the management of cities – the right to participation” (2007: 208). These rights to direct participation and full habitation (“the two pillars Lefebvre proposed as the core of the ‘right to the city’” (Fernandes 2007: 211)) have now been institutionalized in both Columbia6 and Brazil (Fernandes 2007: 204), which is somewhat surprising, given that the former is one of the most conservative of Latin American countries and the latter one of the most liberal. A right to the city law was passed in Brazil in 2001 (Federal Law no. 10.257), granting extensive municipal control to local governmental councils and formalizing much of Brazil’s informal urban housing. This has ameliorated, or at least recognized, some of the urban pressures in the country, as in Brazil some 80% of the population is urban and some 50% of the urban population resides in favelas. The Brazilian City Statute actuated much of the ideational apparatus of Lefebvre’s schema; it performed it: In conceptual terms, the City Statute broke with the long-standing, individualistic tradition of civil law and set the basis for a new legal-political paradigm for urban land use and development control in Brazil, especially by consolidating the constitutional approach to urban property rights, namely the right to urban property is assured and recognized as a fundamental individual right provided that a socio-environmental function is accomplished, this function that is determined by urban legislation. Moreover, the legal order in force also determines that the city itself has to fulfill a socio-environmental function. (Fernandes 2007: 212–213; italics, mine).

6 According to Fernandes, the Columbian law was enacted in 1997. Though I have no reason to doubt Fernandes’s reporting here, I have found so far no further evidence of this law.

162

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

While retaining individual property rights, the statute does so only within a legal superstructure in which the city has been redefined so that private property must fulfill, in its parts and as a whole, a socio-environmental function. For, according to the statute, property, purely utilized to create surplus value, no longer reigns supreme: it still may create such a surplus, but only provided it also accomplishes some sort of ‘socio-environmental function,’ broadly construed. Such a right to the city thus “demands more than just houses and apartments: it demands the redevelopment of the city in a manner responsive to the needs, desires, and pleasures of its inhabitants, especially its oppressed inhabitants” (Mitchell 2003: 21). And, while this may not constitute the full-blown multi-dimensional revolution Lefebvre imagined, it does establish the legal nexus for a decisive reformation of urban space along lines conceived in Lefebvre’s original conception of the right to the city. The guarantee to habitation, embedded in the legal process of formalizing the housing in the favelas, also hypostatizes a least a portion of Lefebvre’s original vision: “Simply guaranteeing the right to housing may not be sufficient to guaranteeing a right to the city, but it is a necessary step to guaranteeing that right” (Mitchell 2003: 19). Given that the Brazilian City Statute is a direct performance of one necessary step of the fulfillment of Lefebvre’s theory, it is also one necessary step of a performative linkage from uttered word to settled law. There may those who object by insisting that Lefebvre’s theories could never be truly and/or completely performed without a “radical restructuring of social, political, and economic relations, both in the city and beyond” (Purcell 2002: 101). However, if fully played out, a city with its values based on a conception of social-environmental values rather than on strict and sole market values has the potential to institute such a reconstruction. This obviously qualifies my claim somewhat, and it may be that no conclusions can be drawn about both the efficacy and the revolutionary potential of Brazil’s City Statute until a sufficient amount of time has passed to gauge the breadth of commitment of Brazilian civic society to the law; as Fernandes says, “In the last analysis … the future of the new law will fundamentally depend on the wide mobilization of Brazilian society, within and without the state apparatus, so as to effect Lefebvre’s longclaimed ‘right to the city’” (2007: 218). But even if clipped of the full weight of Lefebvre’s initial schema and even if dependant on the ‘wide mobilization of Brazilian society’ over time, the law is still a direct descendent of Lefebvre’s ideas and is therefore performative of them. And, if replicated elsewhere, the right to the city as now inscribed in Brazilian and Columbian law, may prove to be a performative link in one long performative chain: “As Lefebvre fully understood, the ‘right to habitation’ cannot be dissociated from the ‘right to participation’, and it is only through a broader, strengthened legal-political arena that the terms of a new political contract of social citizenship can be drafted for Brazilian cities and citizens. There is a lesson here for cities elsewhere” (Fernandes 2007: 218). That lesson may be construed as: the right to the city has been performed in Brazil; why not perform it elsewhere, or anywhere.

The Auto-Performance of Geography

163

Yi-Fu Tuan writes in a distinctly performative way: he creates and establishes ideas as he composes. For instance, in the first sentence of “Place: an Experiential Perspective,” an essay first published in April of 1975 in the Geographical Review, Tuan says that: “Interest in place and in the meaning of place is universal” (1975: 151). This is certainly an odd sentence. Can it be understood as a statement of fact? Perhaps, but wouldn’t that mean that Tuan has himself verified this by trekking hither and yon and over and around and everywhichway, confirming the ubiquity of his claim? I suppose it is falsifiable: if one could locate someone somewhere who is not interested in place as well as its meaning, then the statement is false. But more than declaiming this as a statement of fact, Tuan utters this opening as if the sentence itself brings what is said into being. Or, more precisely, that his recognition of this condition (that ‘interest in place and the meaning of place is universal’) brings a hitherto unrecognized characteristic of a geographical kind into the forefront of collective cognition. Taken this way, Tuan’s claim is a performance performing an act of recognizing a pre-existing state of affairs. In his 1976 essay, “Humanistic Geography,” Tuan performs geography in a humanistic vein; his essay strives to create the necessary and sufficient conditions for a humanistic geography to spring into existence.7 By clearly and distinctly defining “humanism” and its by-product, “humanistic geography,” Tuan’s strategy seems to be to will this sub-field into existence through the mere clarity and puissance of his own utterance. He begins with what at first glance appears to be a series of simple declarative statements: Humanistic geography reflects upon geographical phenomena with the ultimate purpose of achieving a better understanding of man and his condition. Humanistic geography is thus not an earth science in its ultimate aim. It belongs with the humanities and the social sciences to the extent that they all share the hope of providing an accurate picture of the human world. (Tuan 1976: 266).

Though set forth modestly, as if merely reflecting a rather obvious state of affairs, this passage is a powerful performative declaration attempting in and of itself to instantiate humanistic geography as not only a credible academic enterprise but also a credible avenue to ‘a better understanding of man and his condition.’ It also tries to situate this sub-discipline as a synthetic enterprise free to range across the borders between the humanities and the social sciences as it goes about its business of formulating this ‘better understanding.’ Given that geography as an academic discipline has long considered itself as a “poor cousin” within the social sciences, and that the social sciences, in turn, has long considered itself a poor cousin to the natural sciences, this is a startling proclamation, though it may not seem so today, when, at least to some both within and without the discipline, Tuan’s construal of a 7 Tuan also examines similar ideas in “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” Progress in Geography, Vol. 6 (1974) 211–252.

164

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

humanistic geography (or a human or a cultural geography) is viewed as precisely “at home” within both the humanities and the social sciences. We should also consider the topicality of Tuan’s statement and, here, I would like to tie Tuan’s performance to Harvey’s. Though it might seem odd to link Tuan’s humanistic turn to Harvey’s Marxist turn, they are both similarly performative in that they both originate from a desire to vault geography out of the purely quantitative calculus that had come to dominate the discipline in the 1960s. Regarding Tuan and other humanistic geographers, Entrikin states that “The humanist approach is defined by its proponents in geography and other human sciences as a reaction against what they believe to be an overly objective, narrow, mechanistic and deterministic view of man presented in much of the contemporary research in the human sciences” (1976: 616). And, according to David Livingstone, Harvey believed that those practicing geography at this time (1973) had to reconceive of the discipline as “a social practice needing transformation; to continue to produce further empirical studies of wretched social conditions without reformist commitments would be counter-revolutionary … . An integral ingredient of this conceptual re-evaluation was Harvey’s recognition of the ideological captivity of science … . Here he rejected the logical positivism that had ‘provided a general paradigmatic basis of scientific enquiry’ in general and for the conventional Malthusian analysis of global resource questions in particular. The assumption of science’s ethical and cognitive neutrality was now simply untenable, given the constitutive ‘connections between method, ideology and substantive conclusions’. Scientific explanation just was ideological, and the sooner this was universally recognized the better. (1992: 330; italics, Livingstone).8

Livingstone also tells us that from another direction, “a number of geographers [including Tuan] began issuing a series of ‘humanistic’ critiques of positivist spatial science during the 1970s … . What united these critics was what they opposed, namely, the disappearance of the human agent as a thinking, feeling, subject from the geographical conversation” (1992: 337). Tuan, in particular, was convinced that “geographies disclosed the psychological essences and emotional attachments of their human creators,” and that geographies, in turn, are created by humans (Livingstone 1992: 339). So here we can see that Harvey is attempting to insert social justice into geography while Tuan attempts to insert human subjectivity into the same: we could say that while Harvey performs a turn out to the “larger” world of objective economic and social conditions under a regime of late capitalism, Tuan performs a turn in to the “smaller” world of subjective experience and perception. Yet both performances are rooted in the same soil: a hypertrophic urge to lift geography out of the “dark” constraints of a restrictively8 Livingstone does not provide a source for these citations; I presume they come from Social Justice and the City.

The Auto-Performance of Geography

165

construed spatial brand of quantitative analytics into a more expansive realm, whether of a humanistic or a Marxist variety. “Does humanistic geography offer a fresh way of looking at geographical phenomena?” Tuan asks early in his essay, “Humanistic Geography” (1976: 267). Notice how he frames the answer to this question (a question stated so simply it deftly deflects the degree of difficulty of the task implicated within it): “To provide an answer I have briefly explored five themes of general interest to geographers: geographical knowledge, territory and place, crowding and privacy, livelihood and economics, and religion” (Tuan 1976: 267). Here, though he does not claim to provide the answer to the question, he certainly does claim to provide an answer, a rhetorical trope simultaneously offering the possibility that his answer may become the answer and that other answers may be added on to his answer to form a fuller, more complete response to the initial question; thus the opening gambit of the sentence is a polyvalent performative, opening up possibilities that shoot off everywhichway. That the sheer audacity of the intellectual heft inherent in the five themes he will ‘briefly explore’ – themes of ‘general interest to geographers’ – does not take our breath away is testimony to Tuan’s performative ease, his rhetorical alacrity, his stylistic finesse. Such weighty subjects as religion, livelihood and economics, and geographical knowledge, the investigation of any one of which (and these are only three of the five!) could easily fill seven lifetimes of Herculean labor, does not seem to subtract from Tuan’s claim that through this exploration, an answer to the question (“Does humanistic geography offer a fresh way of looking at geographical phenomena?”) will naturally ensue. This is performativity done on a high wire, yet done with that delicate sense of balance and grace absolutely necessary for that art. Read the following passage for the skill deployed by Tuan at performing definitional parameters: What is the role of emotion and thought in the attachment to place? Consider the animal as it moves along a path, pausing from time to time. The animal pauses for a reason, usually to satisfy an important biological need – the need to rest, drink, eat, or mate. The location of a pause becomes for the animal a place, a center of meaning which it may defend against intruders. This model of animal behavior and feeling for place is readily applicable to human beings. We pause to answer biological exigencies; each pause establishes a location as significant, transforming it into place. (Tuan 1976: 269).

Consider, once again, Tuan’s audacity. We are being asked to accept as givens that the location of an animal’s pause becomes a place, that such a place has ‘a center of meaning’ for the creature so paused, and that this locus, this center of meaning, now a place, has such a significant meaning that the animal may thereafter defend the place against intruders. We are then asked to accept this model as ‘readily applicable to human beings,’ as if the model can be shifted to creatures such as us without the slightest abrasion in meaning and significance. Next we are told

166

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

that our pauses, at least those due to biological exigencies (resting, drinking, defecating, eating, mating), are transformed into places. Without a quiver in his steady tone, Tuan here performs a construal of a performance of place making. This is how places are made, Tuan is saying here, this is how they are performed into existence, his words conjoined into sentences in turn attempting to perform his hypothesis into existence. So it is a double-backed performance: the animals and people performing pauses into places, the words and sentences performing ideas into beliefs, or, even more powerfully, into theory, into fact. Whether Tuan succeeds in this effort is almost beside the point. Or is it? Is Tuan actually misfiring here? Is he in the appropriate circumstance to make such claims? Well, at the time of the publication of this article, 1976, Tuan is a professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, then as now one of the most esteemed departments in the country; he has done field work in Arizona and New Mexico and published the findings of that work (Pediments in southeastern Arizona and Climate of New Mexico, the latter written with Cyril Everard and Jerold G. Widdison); his book, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, has appeared (in 1974), its critical success lending Tuan academic and intellectual credibility; the journal in which “Humanistic Geography” appears, The Annals of the Association of American Geographers, is the flagship publication for geography in the United States; and Tuan certainly possesses the intellectual acumen and writing skills necessary for the task he has assigned himself: it seems that these items should fit the criteria for an utterance of a geographic kind which will bring into being that which is being uttered. But can anyone, no matter how centrally situated within his or her particular discipline, say anything along the lines of what Tuan is attempting to say and do so felicitously? In other words, is Tuan trying to say too much here? Can his utterance carry the weight of his performance? Or, rather, conversely, can his performance carry the weight of his utterance? Or, once again, can the performance and the utterance carry the weight of one another, or is this a balancing act so precarious that it all must come tumbling down? But can performance and utterance even be separated in this way? Or are they inseparable components of that same act? Regardless of the answers to these questions, does it all come crashing down around Tuan, buckling under a load of performative utterances the import of which is too cumbersome for the words intended to bring them into being? And are they merely statements of a geographical kind? Don’t they also cross over into zoology, anthropology, sociology, and perhaps even psychology as well as philosophy of mind? Has Tuan exceeded his limits of expertise? Or, as a humantistically oriented geographer, is he just plying his particular craft, one that synthesizes knowledge from a wide range of fields, including all those mentioned above? Leaving those questions in abeyance, let us move to Tuan’s conclusion. Once again, he begins with a seemingly simple question: “How does a humanist geographer contribute to human welfare, as, for example, in the design of a better physical environment?” (1976: 275). And once again, the answer covers a staggering range of possibilities while still being uttered in a diction conveying

The Auto-Performance of Geography

167

the ease of the effortless: “Generally speaking, the humanist’s competence lies in interpreting human experience in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity. His main function as a geographer is to clarify the meaning of concepts, symbols, and aspirations as they pertain to space and place” (1976: 275). Stated straightforwardly, as if the task described were of the utmost simplicity and as if he was describing something always and already assumed, Tuan is actually attempting to perform into existence that which is exceedingly fraught with multiple layers of difficulties. It’s as if Tuan believes that inserting this claim without a nod towards both its problematic and performative nature will deflect attention away from these very qualities. Tuan leaves generalities aside at least for the moment as he then offers guidance to a hypothetical (male) humanist geographer: Here is a specific hint of how he can serve. People’s response to physical setting is mediated by culture, which is so much a part of day-to-day living that it can rarely be seen by the inhabitants themselves. One of the humanist’s functions is to make the virtues and defects of a culture explicit. He should be able to suggest to the planner that in some cultures people prefer to live close together; on the other hand, he should be able to remind people that togetherness, however desirable, is achieved at the cost of certain other human values. The humanist will show how place is a shared feeling and a concept as much as a location and a physical environment. He can suggest means by which a sense of place may be enhanced. (1976: 275).

Here we get a prospective job description for a humanistic geography that Tuan is creating before our eyes: what could be more performative than that! This cataloguing of what the humanist geographer should be able to do constitutes a set of normative functionalities for this yet-to-be-established profession. Tuan’s act of cataloguing the tasks involved in this “job” is a performative act attempting to will (to perform) such a job into existence. Let us now wrap this up by considering the relative “success” of the three performances we have examined. Should Tuan’s essay and Harvey’s book be judged performative failures when compared to Lefebvre’s “Right to the City,” because, on the one hand, humanistic geography now seems to have only enjoyed a brief efflorescence and, though a Marxist turn certainly occurred within the discipline of geography, the revolution never happened (at least not yet); and, on the other hand, Lefebvre’s right to the city has at least partially been inscribed into law? Well, even if Harvey’s Marxist turn hasn’t been reified in law, it certainly has had an impact on geography and related fields. Of course, as indicated previously, Harvey didn’t perform this turn all his own, it wasn’t a solo act: he was making his move within a social and academic setting in which a more general turn to the left was occurring. And, though Harvey might have possibly or occasionally dreamed that Justice and the City would follow a transformative path straight from his pen to the revolution, this does not mean that anything short of that constitutes failure.

168

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

A Marxist turn within geography did happen; Harvey’s ideas had (and still have) an impact both within geography and across other fields. What sort of ripple-effect they have had on the rest of society is of course impossible to gauge,9 but this almost seems besides the point: that they were performative, even to a certain limited degree, which I believe would be very difficult to deny, goes to prove that they were performative per se. Tuan’s performance was performative as well. No, humanistic geography did not take over the discipline and spill across into other fields, its holistic notions propagating like so many academic rabbits; still, it had an impact and human geography is certainly alive and well in numerous universities across the world. Geographers such as Denis Cosgrove with his work on landscape and vision, Anne Buttimer with her investigations into the ethics of geography, and Michael Curry with his examination of digital geographies have carried human geography into a diverse array of inquiries. A humanistic geography per se did not survive, however, perhaps, at least partially, because geographers themselves were more comfortable with inserting a brand of existential phenomenology into cultural geography than adopting Tuan’s more loose-limbed humanism. In “Contemporary Humanism in Geography,” published in The Annals of the Association of American Geographers shortly after Tuan’s piece appeared, Entrikin folds humanistic geography into existential phenomenology prior to relegating it to the subordinate task of performing “a potentially useful function in reaffirming the importance of the study of meaning and value in human geography, making geographers aware of their often extreme interpretations of science, and making scientists aware of the social and cultural factors involved in so-called objective research. As criticism, however, the humanist perspective does not fulfill the role suggested by some of its proponents of providing the essential insight, or presuppositionless basis for, a scientific geography. (1976: 632).

Humanistic geography almost seems to be somewhat embarrassing in this appraisal, as if Tuan had not been quite astute enough to realize that all he was doing was bastardizing existential phenomenology, and that, furthermore, it was only through playing a ‘potentially useful’ functional role that humanistic geography might have any sort of legitimate future in the discipline. In the same issue of The Annals in which Tuan’s piece originally appeared (June of 1976), Buttimer also throws her support behind a geographically imbued existential phenomenology as the tool most likely to resolve “the common task we face: a concerted effort to reconcile heart and mind, knowledge and action, [quantitative 9 In “The Detour of Critical Theory,” Castree notes this as well: “Wither his [Harvey’s] ideas have travelled and with what consequences is a contingent question … . And it is unanswerable, in the abstract at least, because only an empirical analysis of who has heard or read Harvey, and with what effects, can ultimately tell us how influential he has been” (2006: 249).

The Auto-Performance of Geography

169

and qualitative methodologies], in our everyday worlds” (1976: 278). It should be added that Buttimer doesn’t deflect humanism in quite the offhand way Entrikin does; for example, Entrikin says that humanistic geographers have admitted that their approach “remains methodologically obscure” (1976: 629),10 while Buttimer offers the more sanguine estimate that humanism supplies geographers “a preamble to, rather than the operational formula for, research methods” (1976: 291). However, though some may think Tuan’s ideas somewhat obscure, quaint, or soft, his holistic vision of a geography of place seems to have been vindicated, albeit indirectly, by the latest in neuroscience, at least as understood by UC Berkeley philosopher of mind, Alva Noë. In Out of Our Heads, published in 2009, Noë states that the functioning of the mind can only be comprehended if a deeply environmentally-inflected schema is appended to an understanding of its workings: None of this is meant to challenge the pivotal role of the brain and nervous system to the whole story. But we can acknowledge this fact without conceding that the brain and the nervous system are the whole story. For it is only the brain and nervous system that allows for a body schema, and we can come to understand the coming to be of this distributed self only by focusing our attention on the animal or person in action, acting on and acted on by the environment. (Noë, 2009: 80–81; italics, Noë).

So, here, the mind can only begin to be comprehended if we refrain from treating it as an abstracted entity in a vat, but instead conceptualize it as an organ that acts on and is acted upon by the environment, by the world. This is a vision of the mind thoroughly implicating geography into its schema. Landmarks, tools, shared places and practices, belong to the machinery of our being. We are partly constituted by a flow of activity with the world around us. Which is just to say that, in an important sense, we are not separate from the world, we are of it, part of it. (Noë 2009: 95; italics, mine).

Much the same thing (albeit coming from a different direction) is done by what are called the New Materialists. For instance, in her latest book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett gives to things a performative valence from which they can form bridges into our consciousness. Commenting on a “particular assemblage” consisting of a work glove, a dead rat, a “dense mat of oak pollen,” a bottle cap, and a wooden stick that she encounters on “a sunny morning on June 4 in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore,” Bennett

10 Entrikin here refers to a footnote (no. 2, p. 24) in Buttimer’s “Values in Geography.”

170

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive ‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects. When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. (2010: 4–5; italics, mine).

Here, much as in Noë’s conception, consciousness is not conceived as a stand-alone item, divorced from the world in the hoary symbol of the brain-in-the-vat. Rather, consciousness, “me,” is connected with the ever shifting ‘contingent tableaus’ of a shimmering world. An obvious by-product of this is that, again akin to Noë’s conception, the mind (“we”) is not construed as sectored off from the world but is constituted in and through its connection to the world. This renders both Noë’s and Bennett’s constructions of the mind intimately tethered to the environment, to the world, or, in other words, to geography. Tuan, I believe, was attempting to say much the same thing, though he was approaching this from a different angle. Mind and being, psychology and sociology, neuroscience and physiology, cannot be sectored off from environmental influence, from the inflections of place. Even the most clinical of scientists works in a place, as do geographers with the most spatially inflected of methodologies, and such places have impacts and effects, both on those who work in them and on the work they do, as Latour has clearly demonstrated. “How mere space becomes an intensely human place is a task for the humanist geographer; it appeals to such distinctively humanistic interests as the nature of experience, the quality of the emotional bond to physical objects, and the role of concepts and symbols in the creation of place identity” (Tuan 1976: 269). As a performance of the importance of place and the role of those who study that import, this still stands as cogent and powerful, even if, to a certain degree, the groundbreaking nature of Tuan’s work has been obscured by its acceptance. Its successful performance has occluded its origins; Michael Curry, writing in 1999, elucidates this tendency: In recent years the concept of place has moved into the mainstream of geographical and other discussions, to the extent that it is difficult to see that not so long ago it was absent. Before the path-breaking works by Tuan, Relph, and Buttimer, discussion within geography focused instead on concepts such as space, distance, and especially region. Now only 25 years old, those pioneering works have nonetheless receded into the penumbra cast by the very popularity of the concept. (1999: 95).

Here, the idea has been so well performed, its performance has disappeared. We can spot this as well in the Tuanian phrase, “A sense of place,” which has become such a commonplace that it is a cliché. Thus, in the October 26 2010 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the filmmaker David Lynch is quoted as saying, “You know,

The Auto-Performance of Geography

171

a lot of cinema is a sense of place, to create a world” (Olsen 2010: D5). This does not mean that there is some direct lineage from Tuan’s pen to Lynch’s mouth, but that Tuan’s concept has indirectly performed its way into general use. Felicitous to the nth degree, it recedes into a performative horizon as its performance performs both hither and yon.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Conclusion Throughout the course of this book, we have seen how speech act theory and its subsequent development into various theories of performance have branched out in multiple ways. Little did Austin think, I imagine, that his initial postulations would have such broad application. But this is often the fate of theoretical constructs: once conceived in alignment with a particular subject, they have a way of exfoliating far beyond their matrix. Derrida’s transposition of Austin’s discourse from the strictly factual to include the fictional as well, and Butler’s transposition of speech act theory into discourses of the body and gender and sexual orientation expanded Austin’s initial schema into domains from which it could be taken even further afield. Ergo, its dissemination across the humanities and the social sciences. What has been interesting in this distribution is its geographically expansive exfoliation. Starting with language of a restricted kind, that of nonfiction, the theory was moved by Derrida into fiction, and then into the body by Butler prior to being spread outside of the body, into such things as maps, places, and areal formations. So its provenance was cephalic, the “interior” organs of language (breath, teeth, tongue), and then somatic before its subsequent diffusion outside the body, a ripple effect spreading outward from the brain into gender, sexual orientation, the construction of geo-bodies and the nation-state, and so on. The germination of performativity, its wide diffusion, has allowed us to articulate the ways in which performance and geography are intertwined. Through its application in cartography, the creation and maintenance of places, the differentiation of private and public property regimes, its use (or misuse) in the notion of environmental determinism, and its utilization as a tool to define the parameters of the geographical discipline, the performative has found “rich soil” within geography. By no means, am I making the claim that I have plumbed the depths of the performative as it applies to geography; certainly, there are other aspects of geography to which performance theory can be aligned. And I also do not make the claim that I am the first to introject the performative into geographical realms: throughout the book, I have cited others who have come before me. However, I hope I have at least adequately “performed” the task of bringing under one roof, as it were, what I consider to be the primary applications of the performative within geography. I should also hope by now that the notion of geography as a performative venue seems not only perfectly legitimate but perfectly obvious as well. But then, perhaps it seemed to be that way from the very beginning, and this book was merely a hammering home of a point already assumed. Even when it has been construed as a misapplication of performativity, as in the case of environmental determinism,

174

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

the performance of geographical performativity has been performative; i.e., it has had consequences. Ratzel, Haushofer, and Semple may have been all wrong and all wrong in many ways; nevertheless, their ideas had a definite impact. The main thing I have hoped to accomplish in this book is to demonstrate that geography matters. It performs, and in a wide variety of ways. I am not attempting to make the claim that geography should be pushed to the forefront of the social sciences (though I reserve the right to make that claim at a future point in time), but I am making the claim that geography cannot be shunted into the shadows of the social sciences as if it’s a woebegone stepchild, better stored in an outof-the-way closet. Geography is central, that’s my performative claim. If I have moved that claim even an inch further to its general recognition, then mine is a performance well done. Meanwhile, pay attention. Geography is performing. Everywhere.

Bibliography Achebe, C. 1999. An image of Africa. In Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary. New York: The Modern Library. Agnew, J. 1997. Approaching political geography, in Political Geography: A Reader. Edited by John Agnew. London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, a Member of the Hodder Headline Group, 5–9. Agnew, J.A. 2000. Global political geography beyond geopolitics. International Studies Review. Vol. 2 No. 1, 91–99. Agnew. J. 2001. National boundaries and Europe’s borders, in Reinventing Geopolitics: Geographies of Modern Statehood. Hettner-Lecture 2000. Heidelberg, Germany: Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg. Agnew, J. 2002. Making Political Geography. London: Hodder Education, an Hachette UK Company. Agnew, J. 2007. Know-where: geographies of knowledge of world politics. International Political Sociology. I, 138–148. Alexander, J.C. 2004. Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory, 22:4, 528–573. Alexander, J.C. 2010. The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Aristotle. 1941. Politics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1127–1324. Aristotle. 1983. Aristotle’s Physics, Books III and IV. Translated by Edward Hussey. Clarendon Press: Oxford; Oxford University Press: New York. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to do things with Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Banuazizi, A. 1991. Iran. The World Book Encyclopedia. Vol. 10: I. Chicago, London, Sydney, Toronto: World Book, Inc.: A Scott Fetzer company, 400– 409. Barnes, T. 2006. Between deduction and dialectics: David Harvey on knowledge, in David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 26–46. Bell, C. 1998. Performance, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bethell, T. 1998. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

176

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Bialasiewicz L., Campbell D., Edney S., Graham S., Jeffrey A., Williams A.J. 2007. Performing security: the imaginative geographies of current US strategy. Political Geography, 26, 405–422. Blankstein, A. 2010. Carwash owners get jail for treatment of workers. Los Angeles Times. August 17, AA4. Blaut, J.M. 1999. Environmentalism and Eurocentrism. Geographical Review. Vol. 89 No. 3, 391–408. Blomley, N.K. 1994. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York, London: The Guilford Press. Blomley, N. 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. Routledge: New York and London. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 2004. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bowman, I. 1942. Geography vs. geopolitics. Geographical Review. Vol. 32. No. 4, 646–658. Brands, H.W. 2000. The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Doubleday. Broek, J.O.M. 1940. The problem of natural frontiers, in Frontiers of the Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brotton, J. 1999. Terrestrial globalism, in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books. Burke, E. 1958. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Reality. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. 2007. Afterword, in The Scandal of the Speaking Body, in The Claims of Literature – A Shoshana Felman Reader. Edited by Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz, & Ulrich Baer. New York: Fordham University Press. Buttimer, A. 1976. Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 66, No. 2, 277–292. Callahan, W.A. 2004. Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Callahan, W.A. 2009. The cartography of national humiliation maps and the emergence of China’s geobody. Public Culture 21:1, Duke University Press, 141–173. Carroll, L. n.d. Alice in Wonderland. Mount Vernon: Peter Pauper Press. Carroll, L. 1965. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded in The Works of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. Middlesex: Spring Books.

Bibliography

177

Castree, N. 2006. The detour of critical theory, in David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 247–269. Certeau, M. 2002. General introduction to the practice of everyday life, in The Everyday Life Reader. Edited by Ben Highmore. London and New York: Routledge. Chang, H. 2002. Globalisation, Economic Development and the Role of the State. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd. Chatwin, B. 1987. The Songlines. New York: Viking. Ciarmello, C. and Schoech, S. 2010. 20 best towns of the future. Sunset, March, 68–77. claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Content/tabs/filterMenuFrameWork.jsp?page=../ Segments/snapshot.jsp&menuid=91&submenuid=911. Welcome to you are where you live, the ZIP Code look-up feature of MyBestSegments.com. Accessed July 29, 2010. Cohen, P. 2007. Richard Rorty, contemporary philosopher, dies at 75. New York Times. June 11, A21. Conrad, J. 1999. Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary. New York: The Modern Library. Corner, J. 1999. The agency of mapping, in Mappings. Edited by Denis Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books, 213–252. Cosgrove, D. 1999. Introduction to Mappings. Edited by Denis Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books, 1–24. Cosgrove, D. 2008. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London, New York: I.B. Tauris. Cowell, M. 2003. Geographic isolation: origins of the Guns, Germs, and Steel model. Antipode. Vol. 35, Issue 4, 807–812. Crang, M. 2005. Time: space, in Spaces of Geographical Thought: Deconstructing Human Geography’s Binaries. Edited by Paul Cloke and Ron Johnstone. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications,199–220. cris.lacity.org/cris/informationcenter/code/index.htm. Accessed August 10, 2010. Culler, J. 1981. Convention and meaning: Derrida and Austin. New Literary History, The University of Virginia, 15–30. Curry, M.R. 1996. The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the Written Word. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Curry, M. 1999. Hereness and the normativity of place, in Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain. Edited by James Proctor and David Smith. London: Routledge, 95–106. Curry, M.R. 2005. Toward a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes. Annals of the Association of American Geographies. 95 (3), 680–691. Dalby, S. 1990. Creating the Second Cold War: The Discourse of Politics. London: Pinter Publishers; New York: Guilford Publications, Inc.

178

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Damrosch, L. 2005. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Translation by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press. Demsetz, H. 1995. Toward a theory of property rights, in Perspectives on Property Law, edited by Robert C. Ellickson, Carol M. Rose, and Bruce A. Ackerman. Boston, New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 148–157. Derrida, J. 1988. Limited, Inc. Evanstown, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M. 2001. A Taste for the Secret. Translated by Giacomo Donis. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company. Dixon, D. and Jones III, J.P. 2005. Derridean geographies. Antipode, Vol. 37, No. 2, 242–245. Dorpalen, A. 1942. The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, Inc. Eagleton, T. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Edney, M.H. 1996. Theory and the history of cartography. Imago Mundi. Vol. 48,185–191. Eilperin, J. 2007. Senator Boxer seeks answers on redacted testimony. The Washington Post. 25 October. Accessed via www.truthout.org. October 26, 2007. Entrikin, J.N. 1976. Contemporary humanism in geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 66, No. 4, 615–632. Entrikin, J.N. 1991. The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Felman, S. 2007. The Claims of Literature – A Shoshana Felman Reader. Edited by Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz, & Ulrich Baer. New York: Fordham University Press. Fernandes, E. 2007. Constructing the ‘right to the city’ in Brazil. Social Legal Studies. 16; 201–219. Fish, S. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? – The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. Fish, S.E. 1982. With the compliments of the author: reflections on Austin and Derrida. Critical Inquiry 8, 693–721. Flaubert, G. 1964. Madame Bovary. Translated by Mildred Marmur. New York, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada: Signet Classics. Florida, R. 2002. The economic geography of talent. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 743–755. Foreignpolicy.com. Accessed on August 13, 2010. Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Bibliography

179

Foucault, M. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Girion, L. 2010. County probes leaks on child deaths. Los Angeles Times. 16 August, AA3. Goethe, J.W. 1962. Italian Journey. Translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. London: Penguin Books. Goffman. E. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan Limited. Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Gold, J. 2010. Where to eat now, in The L.A. Weekly, Vol. 32, No. 31, 34. Goldhagen, D.J. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gottmann, J. 1973. The Significance of Territory. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia. Gould, P. and White, R. 1974. Mental Maps. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Graff, G. 1988. Summary of ‘reiterating the differences,’ in Limited, Inc. Evanstown, IL: Northwestern University Press. Grafton, A. 2006. The nutty professors. The New Yorker. October 23, 87. Greenblatt, S. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gregory, D. 2006. Troubling geographies, in David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 1–25. Gyorgy, A. 1942. Geopolitics, the New German Science. A PhD thesis submitted to the History Department, University of California, Los Angeles. Hall, P. 2000. Creative cities and economic development. Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4, 639–649. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. 162 Science, 1243–1248. Harley, J.B. 1988. Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe. Imago Mundi, Vol. 40, 57–76. Harley, B. 1989. Deconstructing the map. Cartographica. 26/2, 1–20. Harley, B. 1990. Texts and contexts in the interpretation of early maps, in, From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps. Edited by David Buisseret. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harley, J.B. 2002. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Edited by Paul Laxton. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D. 1969. Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. 1972. Revolutionary and counter revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation. Antipode. Vol. 4, Issue 2, 1–13. Harvey, D. 1973. Social Justice and the City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D. 1974. What kind of geography for what kind of public policy? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. No. 63, 18–24.

180

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Harvey, D. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwood. Harvey, D. 1989a. The Condition of Postmodernity – An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Harvey, D. 1989b. The Urban Experience. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. harveymilk.com/about/about-the-school/#history. Accessed 10 August 2011. Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Henrikson, A.K. 1997. America’s changing place in the world: from ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’?, in Political Geography: A Reader, edited by John Agnew. London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, a Member of the Hodder Headline Group, 93–97. Highmore, B. 2002. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Howe, N. 2008. Thou shalt not misinterpret: landscape as legal performance. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 98 (2), 435–460. Jacob, C. 1996. Toward a cultural history of cartography. Imago Mundi, Vol. 48, 191–198. Jacob, C. 2007. The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History. Translated by Tom Conley. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Janik, A. and Toulmin, S. 1973. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jay, M. 1984. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jones, R. 2009. Categories, borders and boundaries. Progress in Human Geography 33(2), 174–189. Kant, I. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Kaplan, R.D. 2009. The revenge of geography. Foreign Policy, 96–105. Keller, A.S.; Lissitzyn, O.J.; Mann, F.J. 1967. Creation of Rights of Sovereignty through Symbolic Acts: 1400–1800. New York: AMS Press, Inc. Kimble, G.H.T. 1938. Geography in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Kiss, G. 1942. Political geography into geopolitics: recent trends in Germany. Geographical Review. Vol. 32 No. 4, 632–645. Kissinger, H. 1996. Diplomacy. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks. Kjellén, R. 1917. Der Staat als Lebensform. Translated by Margaret Langfeldt. Leipzig. Fourth edition revised by J. Sandmeier, Berlin-Grunewald, 1924. Kohn, M. 2004. Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. New York and London: Routledge. Kropotkin, P. 1885. What geography ought to be. The Nineteenth Century. V. 18, 940–956.

Bibliography

181

Kuhn, T.S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Action-NetworkTheory. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. 1996. Writings on Cities. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Lehrer, J. 2010. The truth wears off. The New Yorker. December 13, 52–57. Lewis, M.W. and Wigen, K. E. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Lim, J. 2007. Queer critique and the politics of affect, in Geographies of Sexualities. Edited by Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing, Limited, 53–67. Livingstone, D. N. 1992. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; and Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing. Livingstone, D.N. 2003. Putting Science in its Place – Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Locke, J. 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Logan, J. R., and Molotch, H. L. 2007. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Mackinder, H. 1951. The Scope and the Methods of Geography and The Geographical Pivot of History. London: The Royal Geographical Society. Martelle, S. 2010. Cast into the watery depths. Los Angeles Times. December 12, E12. Meinig, D. 1956. Heartland and rimland in Eurasian history. The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. 9, No. 3, 553–569. Middlekauff, R. 1971. The Mathers – Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, H.J. 2001. Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Miller, P. 1964. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Miller, P. 1967. Nature’s Nation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Mitchell, D. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York, London: The Guilford Press. Monmonier, M. 1991. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Monmonier, M. 2004. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

182

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Moore, A. 2008. Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (2), 203–225. Morris, I. 2010. Why Western science conquered the world. New Scientist. October 30, 32–34. Myslik, W.D. 1996. Renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces, in Bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. Edited by Nancy Duncan. London and New York: Routledge, 156–169. Nelson, L. 1999. Bodies (and spaces) do matter: the limits of performativity. Gender, Place & Culture, 6: 4, 331–353. Nelson, L.C. 2000. Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Noë, A. 2009. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Olsen, M. 2010. David Lynch’s film stew. Los Angeles Times. October 26, D5. Olsson, G. 1975. Birds in Egg. Ann Arbor: Michigan Geographical Publication No. 15, Department of Geography, University of Michigan. Olwig, K.R. 2002. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ó Tuathail, G. 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Osterhammel, J. and Petersson, N.P. 2005. Globalization: A Short History. Translated by Dona Geyer. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Pagden, A. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology. Cambridge, UK, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Parrington, V.L. 1930. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Peet, R. 1985, The social origins of environmental determinism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 75 No. 3, 309–333. Petruno, T. 2007. Tough ‘07 has lessons worth remembering. Los Angeles Times. December 22, C4. Phelan, P. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Pickles, J. 2004. A History of Spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geocoded world. London and New York: Routledge. Pocock, D.C.D. 1988. Geography and literature. Progress in Human Geography 12; 87, 87–102. Poovey, M. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Popper, K. 1944. The poverty of historicism. II. A criticism of historicist methods. Economica. Vol. ii, No. 43, 119–137.

Bibliography

183

Pratt, J.H. 1942. American prime meridians. Geographical Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, 233–244. Purcell, M. 2002. Excavating Lefebvre: the right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal. 58, 99–108. Quinn, D.B. 1990. Maps of the age of European exploration, in From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps. Edited by David Buisseret. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 41–66. Ratzel, F. 1896. The territorial growth of states. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 12, 351–61. Ratzel, F. 1923. Politische Geographie, 3rd edition, revised and enlarged by Oberhummer, Munich and Berlin. Relph, E. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Ritter, C. 1973. Comparative Geography. Translated by William L. Gage. New York: AMS Press, Inc. Rose, C. 1994. Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press. Rose, C.M. 1995. Possession as the origin of property, in Perspectives on Property Law, edited by Robert C. Ellickson, Carol M. Rose, and Bruce A. Ackerman. Boston, New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 181–189. Rousseau, J. 1992 . Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Ruppert, E.S. 2006. Rights to public space: regulatory reconfigurations of liberty. Urban Geography, 27, 3, 271–292. Scafi, A. 2006. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Schechner, R. 1998. What is performance studies anyway?, in The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York and London: New York University Press. Schnitzer, E.W. 1954. German Geopolitics Revived: A Survey of Geopolitical Writing in Germany Today. A Research Memorandum produced by Project RAND for the United States Air Force. Santa Monica, California: The RAND Corporation. Schweik, S.M. 2009. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press. Scott, A.J. 2004. Cultural-products industries and urban economic development: prospects for growth and market contestation in global context. Urban Affairs Review, 39, 461–489. Searle, J.R. 1975. The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, 319–332. Searle, J.R. 1994. Literary theory and its discontents. New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 3, 637–667. Searle, J.R. 1998. Mind, Language and Society – Philosophy in the Real World. New York: Basic Books.

184

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Seed, P. 1995. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge, UK; New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Semple, E.C. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography. New York: Henry Holt and Company; London: Constable & Company Ltd. Shaftel, D. 2007. Vintage Bradbury, packaged anew. New York Times. August 22, B1. Simmons, A.M. 2010. Wilshire Grand developer seeks public assistance. Los Angeles Times. August 13, AA1, AA6. Singer, J. 1996. No right to exclude: public and private accommodations and private property. Northwestern University Law Review, 90, 4, 1283–1497. Singer, J. 2000. Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, N. 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Smith, T.R., and Black, L.D. 1946. German geography: war work and present status. Geographical Review. Vol. 36, No. 3, 398–408. Smith, W.D. 1980. Friedrich Ratzel and the origins of Lebensraum. German Studies Review. Vol. 3, No. 1, 51–68. Soja, E.W. 1997. Margin/alia: social justice and the new cultural politics, in The Urbanization of Injustice. Edited by Andy Merrifield and Eric Swyngedouw. New York: New York University Press. Soja, E.W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Spykman, N.J. 1944. The Geography of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Staeheli, L.A. and Mitchell, D. 2008. The People’s Property? Power, Politics, and the Public. New York, London: Routledge. Steinbeck, J. 2003. East of Eden. New York: Viking. Strausz-Hupé, R. 1942. Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Strausz-Hupé, R. 1952. The Zone of Indifference. New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons. Sturm, T. 2010. Imagining apocalyptic geopolitics: American citationality of evil others, in Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. Edited by Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 133–154. Tangherlini, T.R. 1999. Remapping Koreatown: folklore, narrative and the Los Angeles Riots. Western Folklore. Vol. 58, No. 2, 149–173. Thrift, N, and Dewsbury, J-D. 2000. Dead geographies – and how to make them live. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Volume 18, 411–432. Thrower, N.J.W. 1999. Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Bibliography

185

Tocqueville, A.D. 1969. Democracy in America. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc. Trilling, L. 1999. Society and authenticity, in Heart of Darkness & Selections from the Congo Diary. New York: The Modern Library. Tuan, Y. 1975. Place: an experiential perspective. Geographical Review. Vol. 65 No 2, 151–165. Tuan, Y. 1976. Humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 66, No. 2, 266–276. Tuan, Y. 1980. Rootedness versus sense of place. Landscape 24, 1, 3–8. Tuan, Y. 1991. Language and the making of place: a narrative-descriptive approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 81. No. 4, 684–696. Turner, F.J. 1965. The Frontier in American History. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Turner, V. 1985. Foreword, in Between Theater and Anthropology, by Richard Schechner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Valentine, G. 1993. Negotiating and managing multiple sexual identities: lesbian time-space strategies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2, 237–248. Valentine, G. 1996. (Re)negotiating the `heterosexual street’: lesbian productions of space, in Bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. Edited by Nancy Duncan. London and New York: Routledge, 146–155. Van Loon, H.W. 1932. Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In. New York: Simon and Schuster. Vincent, M.B. and Frickel, S. 2010. Disaster science: between calamity and recovery. Itemsandissues.ssrc.org. Accessed July 23, 2010. Vorsey, Jr., L. 1986. Maps in colonial promotion: James Edward Oglethorpe’s use of maps in ‘selling’ the Georgia scheme. Imago Mundi, Vol. 38, 35–45. Waldron, J. 1988. The Right to Private Property. Clarendon Press: Oxford. Wanklyn, H. 1961. Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography. London, New York: Cambridge University Press. Warner, M. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Weber, M. 1949. “Objectivity” in social science, in The Methodology of the Social Sciences by Max Weber. Translated by Edwards A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: The Free Press, 50–112. Weber, M. 1962. Basic Concepts in Sociology. Translated by H.P. Secher. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Weigart, H.W. 1942. Haushofer and the Pacific. Foreign Affairs. Vol. 20. No. 4, 732–742. Whatmore, S. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: natures cultures spaces. London, Thousand Oaks, Delhi: Sage Publications. Whitman, W. 1931. Leaves of Grass. New York: Aventine Press.

186

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Winichakul, T. 1994. Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-body of a Nation. University of Hawaii Press. Wittfogel, K.A. 1929. Geopolitics, geographical materialism, and Marxism. 21–72. Originally published as Geopolitik, geographischer metrialismus und Marxismus in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus. Vol. III, nos. 1, 4, 5. Wood, D. with Fels, J. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York and London: The Guilford Press. Wood, D. and Fels, J. 2008. The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Wyckoff, W. 1988. Mapping the ‘new’ El Dorado: Pikes Peak promotional cartography, 1859–1861. Imago Mundi, Vol. 40, 32–45.

Index

Achebe, C. 135 Agnew, J. vii, 43–6, 137, 141–2, 148–9 Alexander, J.C. 3, 20–21, 32–3, 68–9, 146 Appadurai, A. 9, 60, 77 Aristotle 9, 60, 99, 130, 146 Austin, J.L. 3–4, 7–16, 20, 22–33, 52, 54, 75, 121, 155, 173 Barnes, T. 45, 155 Bennett, J. 169–70 Bethell, T. 104–5, 107, 110 Bialasiewicz, L. 7 Black, L.D. 138 Blaut, J.M. 143–4 Blomley, N. 64, 67, 77, 82, 96, 98, 104, 112–13, 116, 118–19 Bourdieu, P. 33, 37, 47–8 Bowman, I. 140, 153 Brazil 59, 160–62 Brotton, J. 95 Burke, E. 20–21 Bush, G.W. 2, 49, 103, 149–50 Butler, J. 3–4, 7, 12, 22–9, 33, 173 Buttimer, A. 168–70 Callahan, W.A. 91–2 capitalism 2, 38, 78, 98, 156, 164 Carroll, L. 19, 85, 90 cartography v, 1, 3, 10, 33, 61, 70–71, 83–7, 89–101, 173 Castree, N. 158–9, 168 Certeau, M. 127 Chatwin, B. 61, 101 China 46, 91–2, 119, 143 Conrad, J. 134–5 Corner, J. 85–6, 102 Cosgrove, D. 1, 50, 85, 87, 93, 168 Crang, M. 3, 57–8 Culler, J. 9, 17

Curry, M.R. 1, 39–40, 76, 82, 157, 168, 170 Dalby, S. 125, 141–2 Darwin, C. 41, 46, 104, 124–6 Deleuze, G. 23, 98 Demsetz, H. 103 Derrida, J. 3–4, 7–13, 28–9, 31–2, 45, 52, 173 Diamond, J. 124, 143–5, 148 Dixon, D. 10–11 Dorpalen, A. 137–8 Eagleton, T. 19–20 Entrikin, J.N. vii, 35, 58–60, 164, 168–9 environmental determinism v, 1–2, 121, 123–31, 133–5, 137, 139–41, 143–7, 149, 173 Felman, S. 3, 14–15, 26 Fels, J. 4, 83–4, 93–4 Fernandes, E. 160–62 Fish, S. 11, 19, 38 Flaubert, G. 21 Florida, R. 79–80 France 46, 50, 93, 97, 105, 131, 141, 160 Franklin, B. 65, 88–9 Foucault, M. 26, 97, 100, 107, 131, 147 Freud, S. 16–17, 22 Germany 2, 41, 45, 99, 125–6, 130, 133, 137–40, 142 God 47, 49, 53–4, 70, 72–3, 96, 111, 126–7, 129–30, 140 Goethe, J.W. 123 Goffman, E. 20–21, 29–30, 32, 108, 114–15 Gold, J. 63 Goldhagen, D.J. 141 Graff, G. 12–13

188

Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography

Grafton, A. 47–8 Greenblatt, S. 66, 74–5 Gregory, D. 154 Guattari, F. 98 Gyorgy, A.99, 130, 133, 138–9 Hall, P. 80 Hardin, J. 104 Harley, B. 1, 4, 83, 85, 90, 92, 96–8, 101 Harvey, D. 3, 38–9, 43, 45, 78, 81, 85, 153–9, 164, 167–8 Haushofer, K. 99,137–40, 174 Heidegger, M. 24–5, 45 Highmore, B. 22 Hitler, A. 2, 107, 134, 139–41, 149 Howe, N. 68–9 humanistic geography 3, 163–9 Iran 147–8 Iraq 50, 150 Jacob, C. 96–7, 100–101 Janik, A. 51–3 Jay, M. 130 Jones, III, J.P. 10–11 Jones, R. 57 Kant, I. 20–21 Kaplan, R.D. 123–4, 154, 147–9 Kimble, G.H.T. 151 Kiss, G. 125 Kissinger, H. 124, 144–3 Kjellén, R. 125, 137 Kohn, M. 107–8, 117 Kropotkin, P. 99 Kuhn, T.S. 53–4 Latour, B. 35–7, 39, 170 Lefebvre, H. 3, 78, 86, 153, 155–6, 159–62, 167 Lewis, M.W. 87 Livingstone, D.N. 40–42, 46–8, 50, 88, 125–6, 130, 137, 151, 158, 164 Locke, J. 70, 111, 127 Mackinder, H. 124, 136–7, 147 Manifest Destiny 97, 128–9 Marx, K. 38–9, 43, 95, 104, 145, 155–6

Marxism, Marxist 19, 155–6, 158–60, 164–5, 167–8 Marx Brothers, The 16 Meinig, D. 136, 148 Middlekauf, R. 48, 72 Miller, J.H. 3, 13–16, 27 Miller, P. 71–2, 127 Mitchell, D. 109–10, 113, 158, 162 Molotch, H.L. 78 Monmonier, M. 1, 83, 94–5 Moore, A. 23 Myslik, W. 80 Nazi/Nazism 41, 45, 99, 126, 134, 137–42 Nelson, L. 26 Nelson, L. C. 65–6 Newton, I. 42, 54 Noë, A. 169–70 Obama, B. 3, 149–50 Olsson, G. 28, 39 Olwig, K.R. 99 Osterhammel, J. 126 Ó Tuathail, G. 90, 99, 138, 140–42 Pagden, A. 72 Parrington, V.L. 128 Peet, R. 125, 145 Petersson, N.P. 126 Phelan, P. 3, 31–2 Pickles, J. 95–6, 101 Pocock, D.C.D. 22 Poovey, M. 37–8 Popper, K. 41–3 Pratt, J.H. 87–8 property private property 2, 103–7, 109–13, 116–19, 121, 127, 162, 173 private-public property 2, 103, 121 public property 2, 68, 92, 97, 103–13, 116–19, 121, 173 public-private property 2, 103, 119, 121 Prussia 138, 142 Purcell, M. 162 Quinn, D.B. 89–90, 92

Index Ratzel, F. 125–6, 130, 132, 134, 137–8, 141, 174 Relph, E. 58, 170 Ritter, C. 133, 152 Rose, C. 70, 105–7, 110–13, 116–19 Rousseau, J. 62, 111–12 Ruppert, E.S. 109, 116, 121 Russia 41, 50, 92, 136–7, 141, 148–9 Scafi, A. 93 Schechner, R. 3, 20, 30–32 Schnitzer, E.W. 99, 139 Schweik, S. 115 Scott, A.J. 80, 158 Searle, J. 3–4, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 16–20, 23, 28 Seed, P. 1, 67–76 Semple, E.C. 130–32, 134–5, 174 Siam 91–2 Singer, J. 104–5, 119 Smith, N. 131, 141–2, 153, 158 Smith, T.R. 138 Smith, W.D. 126 Soja, E.W. 117, 158–9 Speech Act Theory 1, 3–4, 7–11, 13, 16–17, 19, 23–7, 29–33, 173 Spykman, N.J. 132–3 Staeheli, L.A. 113 Steinbeck, J. 21 Strausz-Hupé, R. 140 Sturm, T. 66

189

Tangherlini, T.R. 64–5 Thailand 143 Thrower, N.J.W. 101 Tocqueville, A.D. 126 Toulmin, S. 51, 52–3 Trilling, L. 134 Tuan, Y. 1, 3, 22, 60–61, 63, 66–7, 73–4, 80, 87, 118, 153, 163–71 Turner, F.J. 128 Turner, V. 3, 20, 30–31 United States of America 30, 41, 44, 65, 72, 78, 81, 87, 93–4, 106, 113, 115–18, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 142, 149, 166 USSR 143 Valentine, G. 80–81 Van Loon, H.W. 88, 132, 135 Vietnam 91–2, 143, 150 Waldron, J. 106–7, 111 Warner, M. 109 Weber, M. 50–51, 113 Weigart, H.W. 140 Whatmore, S. 37 Whitman, W. 128–30, 134 Wigen, K.E. 87 Winichakul, T. 91–2 Wittfogel, K.A. 138, 145 Wood, D. 1, 4, 83–4, 93–5 Wyckoff, W. 89