Geographical Imaginations is at once a profound nd peneticting read ng of geography as a discipline and a discourse, and also an imaginative ond sustoined attomp! to sitvote that discourte within the fabric of contemporary social theory. lis focus is on understanding the ways in which social life is variously embedded in place, space, and londscope. In the fulllment of this objective, historical imagination, tex tual exegesis, philosophical scrutiny, sociological interpretotion, ond geographical sensitvly ore interwoven in such 0 way os fo move spatial discourse to new levels of soptistication and subilly Jn mopping human geography inlo contemporary social theory, the cuthor addresses, reinlerprets and questions key theoretical debatos ond issues—postcolonialism, stucluation theory, feminism, deconstution, posimodemism, and posistucturalism, and explores the crucial connec- tion between space, power, and knowledge. Defily argued and illustrated throughout with pointed examples, Geographical Imaginations is both a lucid critique of contemporary social theory and o fundamental contribution to the undersianding of social fe and its intrinsic spatial. Derek Gregory was bom in England in 1951. He grew up in Ken, received his undergraduate and posigraduate education at the University of Cambridge where he was a fellow of Sidney Sussex College and University Lecturer in Geography until 1989, Since then he has been Professor of Geogrophy al the University of British Columbia, His pre vious books include Ideology, Science, and Human Geography (1978), cond Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution {1982} (Cover design: il Bretborh ’ Cover iusroton: Leopold Suvoge,Vilefanche sur mer, 1915, ‘eproduced by kind pemision of Cente Georges Pompidou, Farts: © ADAGP, Faris ond DACS, london, 1993. ‘ m8 18B-N-0-631~18931-0 12 547 $19.95 GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGIN 17/94 BLACKWELL a amide 1A 6 Od UR ¥ *(auos118351U" CEO Tic IMAGINATIONSGEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS For Angela, Ben, Katherine and Jaimie DEREK GREGORY BLACKWELLCopyright © Derek Gregory 199% “The sight of Derek Gregory tobe idoued a author ofthis work has been atered in accordance withthe Copycght, Designs and Patent Act 1988, Fest poled 1994 Blac Pelee 238 Main Sree (Cambsdge, Massachusees 02142, USA Oxford O84 {JF, UK {All rights served, Except for the qvoson of shore pasages for the purposes of| ‘tice and review, no par may be reproduce, toed ina seuseal stem, of ‘eum, in any form or by any meats secon, mechanical, otocopyog, resorting or otherwise, without the poe permission of the publisher ecept in the Usted Suter of Ametice thie han eet coher sh comin thar ictal no, by way of tad or otherwise, be lent, el, hied ont, or otherize ‘culated witout the pubher’s prior consent in any form of binding ce cove other than tha in which itt published aad thous salar condition inctding this ‘ondton Being impored on he subsecpent purse Library of Cons Cabling Potion Dats Gregor, Date, 1951 “Geoqeapical imaginations / Decek Gregory pcm Inclades bibliogrphical references ond index ISBN 04651-18329.9 (An) OG31-1331-0 (pb) 1. Geography—Philesopy. Culeral studies. [. Tid gn.cr. 1995 s3.ssot 910'01—aea0 ar Brith Labrary Ct in Pabtin Dots ‘ACIP catlogee record for tie book i aalble om the Besh Libary, “Typctt in Gasaioad on 105/12 pe by Pare Tech Comporaton, Pondichery, Ladle Printed inthe United State of America “This book is pint on acre paper Contents Preface PART I STRANGE LESSONS IN DEEP SPACE Introduction Maps of the intellectual Iandscare ‘Travelling theory Geography and the world-as-exhibition Visualization Cook’s Tour: anthropology and geography Borders: sociology and geography Frontiers: economics and geogrphy Geography and the cartographic anxiety Descartes and deconstruction ‘Marks: politcal economy and haman geography Signs: social theory and human geography ‘Traces: cultural studies and human geography Imaginative geographies and geographical imaginations PART IL CAPITAL CITIES Intsoduetion City/commodity/culture: spatiality and the polities of representation Maps of modecnity ‘The literary diver: David Harvey and Second Empite Patis Passages: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project ‘The Vega cap: Allan Pred and fin-de-siécle Stockholm Archives and archacologies 106 133 203 209 214 214 217 227 241 254ae vi Contents 4 Chinatown, Past Three? Uncovering postmodern geographies Pastiche ‘A bistory of the present Learning fam Los Angeles Watching the detectives PART II] BETWEEN TWO CONTINENTS Introduction American dream Dreams of unity 8 Dream of Liberty? Cover version Imagining liberty Representing power Dream of Liberty Tie cancion of postmodemty 6 Modernity and the production of space May 68 and Harvey 69 Hegel’s ghost ‘A history of space The eye of power Dreams of liberty and wings of desise Select bibliography Name Index Subject Indéx 257 257 258. 290 312 37 318 322, 327 327 329 334 337 343 348. 349) 354 368 395 a5 47 425 432 1 Figures Maps of an intellectual landscape. 2 Joseph Banks surrounded by trophies from u 2 3 14 15 16 7 18 19 21 2 23 24 28 26 28 3a the voyage of the Endeaour Foucault's archaeology of the human sciences Interior with a Gaographer. Reclus’s proposed Great Globe at the Place d’Alme, Pais. Lasch’s “solid-state” landscape. Tensions in Harvey's landscape of capitalism, Social steucture and spatial structure. Marxism and post-Marxiso ‘The duality of structure “Time-space selations and structuration theory. “The web model of time-geography. “Time-space distanciation and time-space compression. Jan van dex Struct’s America "The Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles. ‘The Maitatsine movement, Kano City, December 1980, ‘The Hausmannization of Paris. ‘The triangulation of Pats. Passage de Opéra, Galerie du Barométre, Pasis. Benjamin’s dialectical image. ‘The daily path of Sérmlands-Nisse ‘Montage: the time-geogtaphy of Sormlands-Nisse Soja’ flight over Los Angeles. Dream of Liberty. ‘The Statue of Liberty on the Rue de Chazclles, Pats, Beaux-Arts Ball, New York, 1931. Lefebvee’s urban revolution. “The production of abstract space. Spatiality, capitalism, and modernity in carly twentieth-century Europe. ‘The eye of power. Transitions in late ewentieth-century capitalism. 28 38 38 57 92 95 101 413 15 116 121 130 155 202 218 223 232 237 251 252 300 328 333 336 a7 383. 399 401 412Acknowledgements Tam gratefol to the following for permission to reproduce material: William Heinemann, Led., and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., for the epigraph from Antoine de Sain-Exupéry, Wind, sand, and stars (teanslated by Lewis Gallantiéze); Blackwell Publishes for the epigraph from Neil Smith, Uneven desclopment: Nature, capital and the production of space; FaxperCollins for the epigraph from Michel Tournies, Friday or The Other Islnd Pion, Led., for the epigraph from Rosalyn Destsche, “Boys town”; Penguin Books for the cpigsaph from William Boyd, An Icecream War; Blackwell Publishers for the epigraph from Peter Haggett, The gugrapher's art, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for the epigraph from Italo Calvino, Invisible cites; Pion, Led, for the epigraph from Allen Scott and Edward Soja, “Los Angeles: Capital of the late twentieth century”; the Association of American Geographers for the epigraph from Pierce Lewis, “Beyond description”; Hamish Hamil- ton, Ltd., for the eplgeaph from Raymond Chandler, The High window, Random House for the epigraph from Elizabeth Wilson, Hadluinations: Life in the postmader city, Heinemann Publishing for the epigraph from Graham Swife, Waterland the Association of American Geographers for the epigraph from Carl Saues, “Foreword to historical geography”; Random House and Jonathan Cape for the epig-aph from James Joyce, Ubsses, Blackwell Publishers for the epigeaph frcm David Harvey, Tbe condition of postmadernity: An enquiry inte te origins of eubural change, Penguin Books for the epigraph from Emile Zola, L'Assommoir (translated by L. W. Tancock) the University of Minnesota Press for the cpigraph from Kristin Ross, The emergence of socal space: Rimband and the Pais Commune. ‘Chapter 3 is @ revised and extended version of an essay that fitst appeared in Strategies: A journal of teor, cuter, and polities, Chapter 4 is a revised and extended version of an essay that first appeared in Gengryfisha Annaler. 1 am grateful to the editors and publishers for allowing me to use that ‘material here. Tam also indebted to my good friends Michael Dear, Allan Pred, Edward Soja, and Michael Watts for permission to reproduce illustrations from their own work, Preface When I left the University of Cambsidge in 1989 to come to the University of British Columbia, I had in my baggage the manuscript of a book which I had called The Geegraphical Imagination, and since that book was very different from this one an explaration of how I came to abendon that daft (I threw it away at the end of my first term) and to write Geegiaphical Imaginations might help 20 make sense of what follows. I now realize — and writing tis book has helped me realize ~ that moving to Canada required me to think about three issues which, if 1 thought about them at all in Enghnd, [ had never foregrounded, and yet L now had to come to terms with them not as purely intellectual concerns but as matters of everyday practice. In the first place, I had to confront 1 colonial legacy that faced in two directions. On the one side was the Continuing pieseme of Euupeus pasts: he Cayed tes, wow xo sult cultural as political or economic, waich bind Anglophone Canada to Britain and Francophone Canada to France, and also the tangled braids that cxisscross the border between Canada and the United States. On the other side was the inscription of Europecn power and knowledge (and ignorance) con the lives and lands of native peoples. In the second place, I found myself living in an avowedly multicultural society — with its share of racial tensions, prejudices, and discriminations as well as its enrichments, vibraneies, and differences — and teaching at a university where many people could trace their roots to quite other continents, and most often to an Asia that could not be reduced to Europe's Other. And in the third place, I was working at 2 university where ques:ions of gender and sexuality were taken more seriously than I had been accustomed, and in the wake of the hideous massacce of womea students at the Ecole Polyoschnique in Montréal those questions took on a new and agonizing seriousness. All of these things have helped to make me aware of my own “other: ness,” troublingly and imperfectly. and in many ways the essays ia this book represent an attempt to think these issues through, to come to terms. ‘with my transplantation from Europe to North America and to understandx Preface the continuing importance of 1 European horizon of meaning in my own work. These are not purely perional preoccupations, for in this increasingly interconnected world the predicamene of culture, as James Clifford calls it, touches all of us in myriad ways. If I think it has a special salience in geogtaphy, it is because I have started to understand my own situatedness and to think about its implica:ions in a discipline that has had as one of its central concerns an understanding of other people and other places. “Discipline” is a double-edged erm, of course, and it cuts in two directions: by this T mean to imply not a set of sovereign concepts, still less any rigorous policing operation, but instead a more diffuse (though nonetheless deep-seated) acknowledgment of the importance of place and space that shapes the ways many of us azproach our work and our lives, This habit Of mind is rooted in all sorts of experienecs, inside and outside the academy, and it grows in different ways in different places. But such a metaphor is also duplicitous, for it usually grafts geography onto the classical tee of knowledge ~ systematic, hierarchical, grounded ~ so that its cultivators can. scrutinize its fruit, fuss over its pruning, and worry about its felling, But it may be more appropriate to think instead of the nomadic tracks and multiplicities of the thizome (and here I borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattar): 0 open up ocr geogephies to interruptions and displace ments, f0 attend to other wavs of traveling, and to follow new lines of flight. In this connection I have been fortunate in being able to join a remarkably talented and worderfully diverse group of geographers in Vancouver. It is a pleasute to thank the colleagues, graduate students, and friends who have sustained me on this journey (and to note how often those colleagues and graduate students err good friends). I owe a particular and continuing debt to Trevor Barnes, Nick Blomley, Alison Blunt, Michael Brown, Noel Castree, Danie! Clayton, Robyn Dowling, Cole Harris, Marwan Hassan, Daniel Hiebert, Brian Klinkenberg, David Ley, Terry McGee, Cathy ‘Nesmith, Tim Oke, Geraldine Pratt, Olav Slaymaker, Matthew Sparke, Lynn Stewart, Bruce Willems-Braun, Jonathan Wills, and Graeme Wyn. In thinking about the predieiment of positionality in this crossroads city, have become aware of many weiters who insist that it is both impossible and illegitimate to speak for or even about others; but as a teacher of geography I believe I have 2 esponsibility to enlarge the horizons of the classtoom and the seminar. I know that I eannot claim to do so from some Archimedian promontory; I know, too, that there are dangers in doing so ~ of being invasive, appropriative — and I do not pretend to have any answers to these anxieties But the consequences of not doing so, of locking ourselves in our own worlds, seem to me far more troubling, 1 pat the problem in pedagogic teems because I have always done research in order to teach. I know there will be readers who will wonder at the “relevance” of these concerns, particularly those who have a rather different view of research and its rewards, but my hope is that the ideas I discuss Preface xi here — and the practices of evtical inquiry I seek to foster ~ might inform not only the conduet of research but also the practice of teaching, T have organized this book as a set of essays that consider diverse geo- graphical imaginations, not “the” geographical imagination — a distinction for which I will be eternally grateful to Denis Cosgeove — but they do nonetheless spiral around common set of themes dealing with power, knowledge, and spatiality. The phrasing is Michel Foucault's, but it is obvious to me how much my interest in these questions owes to David Harvey, whose work is centrally present in every one of these essays and to whom I owe more than I can adequately express. His Socal justice and the city was published at the end of my frst year as a postgraduate student, which was also the start of my fins year as @ lecturer at Cambridge. I can still remember the shock. This was the first book in geography that I knew T didn’t understand. Trained in spatial science, I was accustomed to technical difficulty, but conceptual difficulty was an’ altogether different order of things, particulasly when it required an engagement with social theory and 4 recognition of ethical and political responsibility. It was in that, book, too, that Harvey first wrote about his “geographical imagination” and registered a series of claims above the importance of place and space in the conduct and constitution of social life. Those ideas have continued to guide ~ and on occasion to provoke ~ my own work; they still scom to me some of the most creative interventions in the discourse of geography. But I am acutely aware of another thematic that is present only in the margins of this book. I am conscious of the question of “nature” ~ living in this vast, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying land, how could T not be? = but for the most part I have concerned myself with the politics of spatiality. This is not because I think environmental questions are unim- portant, and I welcome the contemporary interest in political ecology. But, rather like the outsider in Richard Rorcy’s Pbilorophy and the Mirror of Nate ‘who keeps wanting to talk about something else even though the conver- sation has moved on, I still want to talk about spatiality: I do not think its questions have been resolved, and I am convinced that they are connected in profound ways to what is now often called the culture ~ and caltural politics ~ of nature T have implied that this has been a nomadic project, and I have been encouraged in my wanderings by any number of other friends outside Vancouver, including Alan Baker, Mark Billinge, Nicholas Clifford, Stuart Coxbsidge, Michael Dear, Rosalyn Deutsche, Felix Drives, Nick Entikio, ‘Tony Giddens, Peter Gould, Michael Heffernan, Peter Jackson, Ron Johnston, Joba Paul Jones, Gesry Kearns, Doreen Massey, John Langton, Linda McDowell, Gunnar Olsson, Chris Philo, John Pickles, Allan Pred, Gillian Rose, Edward Soja, Susan Smith, David Stoddart, Michael Storper, Nigel ‘Thrift, Dick Walker, and Michael Watts. [am particularly grateful to David Livingstone and Neil Smith, who commented in vigorous and constructivexii Preface detail on a first version of the book, to Paul Jance, who converted my rough sketches into finished diagrams, Stephanie Argeros-Magean, who cdited the manuscript with great skill and sensitivity, and above all to John Davey, who has taken a charceveristically warm and intelligent interest in the project. Derck Gregory ‘Vancouver PART I Strange Lessons in Deep SpaceIntroduction But wat @ strange lesson in secgreply I was given! Guillaume did not teach Sain to me, be made the country my frend... The details that e drew ap from oblivion, from their inconcrable remotes, no geographer bad ben concerned to explore. Becaace it washed the banks of reat cies, the Ebro River svat of interest fo mapvmakers. But vat bed they todo with that brook ring secretly through the watersvecds to he west of Moti, that brook nowising a sen score or t00 of flowers? "areal of that brook: it breaks up the whale fed. Mark it on your map.” AB, I was to remember that sepeat in the grat near Motnil...And those ‘ing valerons sbesp ready to charge mo on the slope of a hilt Lite by lit, under the la, te Spain of my map ica a srt of fyland, The creases I marked to indicate safety zones and trape were s0 meaty buoys and Deans, Pct the fare, she they hep, tbe brook. And, cacy where she stood, I ce a bay to mark the shepbordes forgetten by the geagepbers. ‘Antoine ce Saint-Exupéry, Wind, sand, and stare The twentieth century bas ushered ix tbe discovery of deep space, or at least its social construction, and yet it is only as the century draws to a clase that ‘his fndamental discovery ts becoming apparent... Deep space is quintessentially sial space; itis physical extent iynsed with roial intent Neil Smith, Uneven development ‘When T began to draft the essays in Part I, my intention was to introduce the history of geography to readers outside the discipline and, at the same ‘ime, to call into question some of the ways in which that history had been swritten by those inside the discipline. As I worked on this material, however, the distinction became increasingly problematic, Traces of the origi purpose ste probably still present, but I now think of these essays as interventions in a discourse rather than a discipline. They sketch out two narratives.4 Strange Lessons in Degp Space ‘The first concerns what one might call the “socialization” of human geography (and T hope the inevitable distortions of such 2 shorthand will be forgiven). In one sense, clearly, human geogeaphy has always been socialized. Even the rigid nataraism of environmental determinism or the unyielding physicalism of spaial science was 2 social construction. But it is only recently, I think, that many of its practitioners have come to reflect, ccitically and systematically, on the connections between social practice and human geography. In doing s0, they (Wwe) have learned “strange lessons”: insights into human life on earth which, on occasion, soar into the sky like the aviator in Saint-Exupéry’s novella (and I will have more to say about these acrial views in due course) but which are also as often grounded in the profoundly existential significance of place, space, and landscape to people like Guillamet and the anonymous shepherdess (forgotten in more ‘ways than one). ‘The second narrative approaches from a different direction. Many of those working in the other humanities and social sciences have also become interested in questions of place, space, and landscape ~ in the ontological significance of what Neil Smith calls “deep space.” Their stadies have multiple origins, but they treat the production of social space, of human spatialty, ia new and immensely productive ways. In philosophy, for example, I think of various rereadings of Martin Heidegger's texts and the geographies written into many of Michel Foucaul’s histories of the present; in historical materialism, I think of the work of Fredsic Jameson and Hensi Lefebvre; in feminism and roststrueturalism, of bell hooks and Donna Haraway; and in cultural studes and posteolonialism, of Edward Said and Gayatsi Chakravorty Spivak. The list is incomplete and heteroclite, like the “Chinese encyclopedia” with which Foucault opens The order of things, and I do not mean to imply that any of these proposals should be accepted uuneritically. But the startling juxtapositions in a brief roll call like. this conjure up a sense of political and intellectual ebullition that is, T think, unprecedented, It is out of tae fusion between these two narratives that the discourse I have in mind is generated." T can peshaps describe this in another way. At the opening of the last decade, Clifford Geerte spoke of a “efiguration of social thought” in which the boundaries between formal intellectual inguity and imaginative writing were becoming blurred. As the “closet physicists” of social science were rerumed to the closet, Geertz declared, so social life was increasingly conceived as a game, a drama, or a tex. And, as usual, he had no doubt what this meant: “All this fiddling around with the properties of composition, inquiry, " Ge Rdamunds Buakse,“Saine-Eauptr'sgeogrphy leon: Att and scence inthe cteston and culeaion of landscape values," Anal ye Asano Amen Gopyahss 80 (1980) pp, 96-108: [at Smith, “Aferword: The beginning of geography,” ie his Ue dpm Nate! ond se pducon of te (Onfords Bhckwall Publishers, 2nd ed, 1990) pp. 160-78 Introduction 5 and explanation represents, of course, a radical alteration in the sociological imagination.” So it does. But what Geertz failed to notice (or did not think significand) was that all three metaphors concern constructed spaces in which human aetion literally takes plac. I hold no brief for any of these particular ways of thinking about social life, let me say, but I do think it highly unlikely that those spatial implications would have been unremarked by the end of that decade. For these “strange lessons in deep space” have ‘more than metaphorical significance. Indeed, one of the most compelling aims of the project that Smith describes is to transcend the partitions between “metaphorical space” and “material space.” And since I have used two metaphors — mapping and traveling ~ to think about much of what follows, I want to establish their materiality before I set out. ‘Maps of the intellectual landscape In Chapters 1 and 2 1 consteuct a “map” of the intellectual landscape by following the path shown in figure 1, on which I have plotted the relations between human geography and a nunber of other disciplines in the humanities and the social seiences, In the first essay I move down the lefthand side currumac stoves t 181. 19m centre p— ANTHROPOLOGY — ritzocweny || Feconomes- I. poLrricas Economy Figure 1 Maps of a intlleteal landespe of the diagram, because I think that in many ways modern human geography has been defined through a seties of strategic encounters with anthropology in the eighteenth certury, sociology at the tutn of the nine teenth and twentieth centuries, and economies in the middle of the twentieth century. I pay particular attention to three episodes which, taken together, bear directly on a specifically modern constellation of power, knowledge, and spatiality in which visualization occupies a central place — what I call “geography and the world-as-exhibition.” In the second essay I move up the * Ciford Geers, “Blared genres: The reigaraton of social thought” ia his Loud hve for exe 0 arprve stip (New You Basic Books, 1983) pp. 19-35; che esay wes fst, bled in 19806 Strange Lessons in Deep Space righthand side of the figure and suggest that the critique of modern spatial science in the closing decades of the ewenticth century has involved reactivation of the preceding dialogues in reverse order, from political ‘economy through social theory to cultural studies. In doing so, the assump- tions and privileges that inkece within the woeld-as-exhibition have been called into question, s0 it seems to me, and the complexity and contingency ‘of human spatiality has produced what I describe as “geography and the cartographic anxiety.” This is by no means a cisinterested representation. History is nevet innocent; it is always “history-for,” and intellectual histories are no differ- ‘ent. They aze ways of locating claims within traditions that seek to establish them as authoritative and legitimate, and also ways of positioning claims in opposition to other traditions and so establishing their own authority and legitimacy by negation. { don’t think it much matters whether these stories are the metanarratives that excite Lyotard’s postmodern rage or the more modest pets ricits that he endorses: All of them function as hetotical devices. They ate all strategies that seek to persuade readers of the cogency of their leading propositions. The same is true of my “tap.” Its objectivity is a serious fiction that represents a particular intellectual landscape from 4 particular point of view. As Felix Driver puts it: Representing geography’s past inevitably an act of the present, however much wwe attempt fo commune with the past. Indeed, the idea of mapping the historical landscape depends on the constuction of perspective, a view from the presen, acound which the panoramas aie made to revolve’ 1 imagine it is hardly necessary to add that in confessing all this 1 have not once abandoned the rhetorical field; after all, the confessional has its own poetics of persuasion. And yet, as T have implied, the metaphoric of mapping — of panorama and perspective ~ is itself problematic. According to two critics, ‘This notion of map-able space involves a specific epistemic topography: a land: scape, a form of knowing or secing which denies its structuring by the gaze of ‘white male bourgeois knowers on Other knowns. It limits the possibility of exitique by refusing to acknowledge other kinds of space.* But I wane to ask: Always? Everywhere? I understand (and share in) this cartographic anxiety, but when these objections are put in this particular 2 Flix Driver, “Geography's empire: histories of geographical knowledge,” Ennoeswar end Plasng D: Sxl end Span 10 (1992) pp. 2-0 the guotaion is fre p36. e Sephen Pile and Gillan Rove, “Al oe noting? Poller and exsgae in the moderssm/pose modernism debate” Emin oed Faming D: Sct and pu 10 (1992) pp. 123-36; the quotation ie from p. 13 Inireduction 1 form they seem to me to accept cartography’s own historiography even as they contest it. It is perfectly truc that historians have usually presented cartography as the Survey of Reason, 2 narrative journey of progress from darkness to enlightenment, in the course of which maps become supposedly more “accurate” and more “objectve.” But itis also true that there is now a ctitical historiography, which las established the implication of maps in the constitution of systems of power-knowiedge and, through the work of Brian Harley in parcculac, has suggested ways of deconstructing their technologies fof power! In doing s0, it has become apparent that mapping is necessatily situated, embodied, partial: Ake all othr practices of riprsetaton, This swakes it misleading to counterpose metaphors of mapping that supposedly always and everywhere “refuse to acknowledge other kinds of space” with other metaphors that somehow ineluctably do, There is no reason to suppose that “location,” for example, automatically challenges the supremacy of the kaowing male gaze {and the history of location theory and spatial science provides « compelling argument for exactly the opposite). Given these critical historiographies, itis surely presumptuous to claim that “images of maps, landscapes, and spaces” are always advanced as “unproblematic” by those who use them, while images of location, position, and geomerry ~ all of which are advanced in the essay fiom which I draw these admonitions ~ are not, What entitles the critics t0 asscrt their own privilege in this way? My point is that all metaphors are problematic and chat “translation terms” like these ~ scemingly general tems sed in strategic and contingent ways, as James Clifford calls them — get us a certain distance and fall apact® For my part, I believe it is possible to use images of maps, landscapes, and spaces aid alto images of location, position, and geometry in ways that challenge the Archimedian view of knowiedge, in ways that insist chat geographies of knowing make a difference. But these art not absolutes, and the differences that chey are able wo make depend on the specific ways in which they are used. Not oly ean conventional cartographic discourse be tumed against itself, for example; not only can the mapping, metaphoric be ised ironically or pacodically; but itis also possible to envisage other more open forms of cartographic discourse.” 5 J Brian Hace, “taps, knowedge ad yes” ia Denia Cngrve and Stephen Danis (ds, Te iaspuly of lndnge (Coody Cambigs University Tees, 1988) pp 277-125 tn, “Deconswocing the mp in Trevor Barner and James Duncen (Cs), Whig serie Dos, nd mln thereon of nape (Londo: Rowe 192 pp. 231-1 3 Fame Cfo, “aveling cles” n Lawrence Grong, Cay Neon and Paula Teicher (eis), Calin! tb (New Yorks Rowe 1992) pp. 9-112 Gaaham Lgesn, "Decslnising the mp: Porton, possunctraisn and he cao zap venetian 20 (9B) pp 115-31. Hogan ts he psy of more open dco tt aopaphy more coy than I woud wh w te plug, veining dericsabing “anogapy” of Giles Delece and Fae Gama, A oti lars Cin ad hp (innerpul: Uiveiy of Ninseon Pst 187) hi wae fist pushed io rane in 1580.8 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space Tn constructing and reacing my map, I need to identify both the “internal” and the “external” coordinates of human geography. The first Of these tasks is scazecly ucusual. There are many internalist histories of geography that focus on the individuals, schools, and traditions that are supposed to have played a part in the making of che discipline. Buc most Of these assume that a discussive space was already reserved for geography; that one simply had to wait for the explorers, surveyors and settlers 0 appear and convert that immanent claim into a palpable reality. Such a procedure does litele justice to the complexities of disciplinary emergence, and when I insist on the importance of the “internal” I do not mean to imply that the history of human geography can be reduced to a series of purely intellectual arguments (On the contrary, geograpay (like cartography) has always been a thor~ oughly practical and deeply politicized discourse, and it continues to be marked by its origins. But I do think that its. philosophico-theoretical contours need to be drawn with considerable care, because the topographies of human geography cannot be interpolated as so many responses to changes in the “zeal.” To do so would be to make the same mistake as internelist histories, only ia reverse: to think of geography as a discipline: in-waiting, whose formation is determined not so much by the internal logic of intellectual inguity as the imperatives of an “external” reality. If the ctitique of realism has taught us anything, it is surely that the process of representation is constructive not mimetic, that it results in “something made,” a “fiction” in the otiginal sense of the word. One does not have to endorse Rorty’s pragmatism (to take a particularly audacious example) to see dhut his shaering of dhe pedestal on whicl: analytical philosophy placed itself as quite literally “the mirror of nature” has a mote general cogency: that discourse is act an unproblematic feflection of the world but i instead an intervention in the world The problem is thus to find some ‘way of blucring the conventional distinctions between the “internal” and the “external,” and at the very least of recognizing that what is thought of 4s internal of external is the product of a reciprocal process of constitution. ‘The predicament is compounded because those distinctions have been blurred in other ways too. The history of modern geography has often * 1 ove the smack co Clifford Gets “Thick desesprion: Toward a interpretive henry of cure” i his Te inept af eae (New Yor Base Books, 1973) pp. 30. His cain is tote percnlar than mine Ethnogrphies, 0 he aay, are "Feions, ia the sense dat they ae “Tomehing cad; “something fshoned”~ the orginal meaning of ftio ~ not that they ace fle, afar, or meri “se” thought xpeineats” (p18). Rice’ Rony, Pipl and te ame of tare (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1980 ‘what mazers Bete is aot 20 much the specifies of Rortys posison ~ about vhich T have -onsietalereerations~ but the wier eqns of salyeal philosophy a che "evra dominant” tf the Western plosophical tadion, Thit i not conBined to Rosy, of course, and a more fomplee survey is provided in Kerneth Bayes, James Bohuin, and Thomas McCarty (ds) ‘Afr Ppl: Eed or ransernation’ (Cazbrige: NIT Press, 1987) pp Invoduction 9 been presented as an intellectual gizetcer. In the eighteenth century geography is supposedly a “Burozean science”; in the aineteenth century distinctive schools of geography are identified with particular national traditions (“the French School,” “the German School”); and in the rwen- tieth century particular places are often used as markers in the intellectual landscape (“the Chicago School,” “the Berkeley School,” and more recently still even “the Los Angeles Schoo?”), Bue the global circulation of information and ideas — with all its inequalities, restrictions, and deformations — has made many of these parocbialisms unusually problematic. No doubt we have retained some of them, and I suspect that we have invented a host of new ones, but there is nevertteless an important sense in which our “local knowledge” simply isn’t local any more. Clifford argues that we now have to make sense of a world wthout stable vantage points; a world in Which the observers and the observed are in ceaseless, Quid, and interactive motion; 2 world where “human ways of life increasingly influence, domia- ate, parody, translate, and subver: one another.” All of this constitutes what he deseribes as the predicament of ethnographic modeznity: We ground things, now, on a moving earth. There is no longer any place of overview (mountaintop) from which t map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to represent the word. Mountains are in constant motion. So are Islands: for one cannot occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world fom which to journey out and analyze other culeures.” This is as pressing for intellectual activity as it is For any other sphere of social life, perhape even moro so, and with thic in miad I aloo have to attend to the prospects and perils of “traveling theory.” ‘Traveling theory T have borrowed the phrase from Edward Said, who uses it to draw attention to the sitwateduess of theory: “Theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges.” Said also cmphasizes that those situations are always overdetermined and constantly changing, and that 20 theory “exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported.”"' But what “theory”? and which “situation”? I suggest there are two overlapping motifs at work here. The first has been caprured most "© James Ciffod, “Inwodvction: paral wth,” ia James Cilferd and George Marcos (eds, Wrating ie Te ae ard pec of eiagraby (Bethe. Univers of Calferin Prete, 1985) 1226 the quottion from p. 22 '" Edward Sad, “Traveling theory,” in is Te Worl be et ond th cis (London: Faber sd Faber, 1980) pp. 26-47; the quocaton is from pp. 241—42,10 Strange Lessons in Deep Space perceptively by Jonathan Culer in his description of contemporary theory as a genre. He explains it like this: “Theory” is a genre because of the way its works function... {to} exceed the disciplinary framework within which they would normally be evaluated and which ‘would help to identify their solid contributions co knowledge. To put it another ‘way, what distinguishes the members of this genre is their ability fo function not ‘as demonstrations within the pucameters of # discipline but 25 redeseriptions that challenge disciphnary boundaries. The works we allude to as “theory” are those that have had the power to make the strange familiar and to make readers conceive of their ovn thinking, hehavice and institutions in new ways. ‘Though they may rely on familiar techniques of demonstration and argument, their force comes ~ and this is what places them in the genre I am identifying — not from the accepted procedures of a particular discipline bur from the persuasive novelty of theit redescriptions.” Although 1 find the differert arguments of Derrida and Foucault particu- larly compelling, I should say at once that, unlike Culler, my own interest is not circumscribed by poststeucturalism. My focus in what follows will bbe on social theory more generally, which I conceive as a seties of overlap- ping, contending and colliding discourses that seck, in various ways and for various purposes, to reflect explicitly on the constitution of social life and to make social practices intelligible, This is a minimalist definition, of course, and further discrimination is necessary. My particular concern is with the multiple discourses of entical #eop: discourses that seek not only to make social life intelligibe but also to make it beter, This may seein a curiously anemic way of expressing myself, but when I think of the bloody consequences of many more traditional, supposedly disinterested modes of inguiry, I prefer this simple declaration of hope to those pious positivities. Caitical theory is a large and fractured discursive space, by no means confined to the Frankfurt School and its legatees, but it is held in a state of common tension ly the interopaton of ts ovm normativty. And. as past of that concern, many of the discourses of most moment challenge traditional ideas of what “theory” is (or might be), and think of their own function as one of interruption and interventior in the representation and negotiation of social life. Ie is in exactly this sense, too, that Caller thinks of them (and their “persuasive redescriptions”) as transgressive. Coller makes much of the capacity of theory to cross and call into question disciplinary boundaries. Now the intellectual division of labor has always been an untidy affair ~ which is, in part, why there have been so many new disciplines and intesdisciplinary projects brought into being — but it is not completely arbitrary. It is always possible to provide reasons * Jonathan Cull, Ox dancin Thr and rion str arc (London: Rowdee, 1983) Pe Intrdaction i (historical reasons) for the boundasies being drawn this way rather than that, Once those boundaries are esteblished, however, they usually become institutionalized. All the apparatus of the academy is mobilized to mask and, on occasion, to police them. But these divisions do not correspond to any natural breaks in the intellectual landscape; social life does not respect them and ideas flow cross them, Te is this busy cross-border traffic that I have in mind when I talk about social theory as a disrourse. This is not just another word for “conversation,” ‘or if itis then it is conversation in a greatly enlarged sense. For discourse refers to all the ways in which we communicate with one another, to that ‘vast network of signs, symbols, and practices through which we make our ‘world(s) meaningful to ourselves and to others. It is pasticularly helpful, 1 think, in clasifying the situatedness of theory: the contexts and easements that Shape our local knowledges, however imperiously global theic claims to know, and the practical consequences of understanding (and indeed being in) the world like this rather than like that. This state of affairs is not peculiar t0 the humanitics and the social sciences. These ideas.also bear directly on the natural sciences and, as Joseph Rowse has shown in a marvelous exposition of their pro:ocols and procedures, even the labor- atory sciences are grounded in specific sites and discursive practices whose various “local knowledges” are progressively and provisionally extended into other sites and other practices, As he also shows, to speak of discourse rather than discipline is not to escape the bonds between power and knowledge. On the contrary, to use this vocabulary is to reflect explicidy fon those constellations and their distinctive regimes of truth.” In much the same way, and for many of the same reasons, I am more interested in the discousses of geography than in the discipline of geography. Geography in this expanded sense is not confined to any one discipline, or even (0 the specialized vocabularies of the academy; it travels instead through social practices at large and is implicated in myraid topogeaphies of power and knowledge. We routinely make sense of places, spaces, and landscapes in four everyeay lives ~ in different ways and for different purposes ~ and these “popular geographies” are as portant to the conduct of social life 45 are our understandings of (say) biography and history.” ® Joseph Rouse, Knead pane: Tne pica php fine (bas Cor Univesity ee, 196, Fthe ermple it not casual cnt. Mill once defined what be cab “Whe social lnagiation” ata sity trv! he maple nvnecsons Setwcen bogephy and Hiory i ost cm present. Bot he mace pin that he not rene ti In ay Sey pry sense Sd tht he bbc of mind ould be found sae the whole Fld of the haowniter end the toca ences See C. Woigh Mil, The mia mease (New Vote Oxford University Pes 185, One of ay own cones 1 big the socslegal agian, i al various ome Io nog with ove “png iagnadons” at abo eae che sea. pny coches2 Strange Lessons in Deep Space But when we are required to think critically and systematically about social life and social space, we usually need to distance ourselves from those commonplace, taken-for-granted assumptions. We can never suspend them altogether, and our reflections will make sense, to ourselves and to other people, only if they zetin some connection with the ordinary meanings that are embedded in the day-to-day negotiations of lifeworlds. Bur we need to interrogat: those “common sense” understandings: We need to make them answer to other questions, to have them speak to other audiences, to make them visible rom other perspectives. And we also need to show how they engage aith one another; how they connect or collide in complexes of action and reaction in place and over space to transform the temulous geographies of modemity "This has become one of the central tasks of social theory, which T insise is not the possession of ary one discipline ~ not sociology, not even the social sciences — but is, rather, chat medium within which anyone who seeks to account for social life must work. I say “must work” because empiricism is not an optica. Tae facts do not and never will speak for themselves, and no one in che humanities or the social sciences can escape working with a medium that seeks to make social life intelligible and to allerge the matter-of-facteess of “the fects.” And I say “working with” because social cheory does aot come ready-made. As I have sai, it provides 4 series of partial, often problematic and ahvays situated knowledges that require constant reworking as they are made to engige with different positions and places. Conecived thus, social theory, like geography, is a eaveling distouise” masked by its vasiows origina and moving fom one site to another. For this reason, T think of working with social theory as spinning a rwliple heemeneutic berween its diferent sites rather than any “double hermencutie” that confines social theory co a single site.” But this is to move coward a second motif and an altogether different sense of traveling and tracsgression that has to do with the globalization of intellectual cultures. The trope of traveling, of tracking “roots” and “routes,” has become an established gente of intellectual inquity ~ and of contemporary writing more generally ~ and ic is one that will occupy central place in what follows. But itis important to understand that in its present form it does not so much redraw our maps of the intellectual Iandscape 28 call the very principles of mapping into question." In many ways modecn social theory still bears the marks of its Enlightenment origins, and its claims to know continue to respond to Kant’s attempt to "5 CE Anthony Giddens, Mar mb of lagi! mitods A pasion eg of prin xis London: Huehinron, 1926) p- 182 ‘eatery Starter, "Or, rather on aot collecting Clifford" Selena Joma of cara end ial pave 29 (399) pp. 89-55 he is 4 tea commen oa James Cliord, Ti pene elas Toscano ep State aed art (Carbeige: Harvard University Pres, 1988). Introduction 3 install reason as the undispoted arbiter in all spheres of socal life: in fcience, morality, and art T sopmose it is a characteite of modern intellectuals — of “vniversal intelleccals” a8 Pogeante once called them ~ co see themselves as legislators: as dealers in generalities rather than brokers in partcuars, uniquely qualified to chatt the coutse of socctyn-genctal or society-8-totality.” The discourses of modern social theory are dtiven by an assertive generality, 50 to spe, in whic, as Habermas putt “he transcendent moment of universality bursts every provincality asunder” He accepts that these discourses aw inevitibly “carters of context-bound eveaydey practice,” embedded in a particular hece and now, but he insists that they also typealy claim to erst all particulates and to tanscird time and space.” It is precisely tis claim Hat the metaphor of traveling calls into question. Bue it docs not fepace it with ts opposite. The objection is not so much that social theories are inescapably context-bound, boc rather that the igi of “traveling theory” need to be serapatoway acknowledged because ie wll always be fteghted with a host of assumptions, often desved from differeat and radically incommensvrabe sites, which may not ~ and asvally should not ~ suevive the journey intact. Traveling thus becomes a way of resisting the imperial ambitions of theory, of making those who wosk with ie accountable for ts movernents, and of challenging what Donaa Haraway calls “the polities of closure.” ‘And yet 2s bell hooks point ou: in a moving reflection on these theres, holding on to the metaphor of travel can also be a way of dinging on (© imperialism: or at any sate, it comes with its own baggage in which, as she says, it is not casy to find room for “the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants at Els Islnd, the foreed relocation of Japanese-Amecicans, oF the plight of che homeless” For hooks, asa black ‘woman living in the Unived States, “to travel isto eacounter the erroring force of white supremacy. Certainly, to read many of Clifford’s essays is to be ceminded of the privileges that acceue to the elites of Western intellectual culture. The freedom to move, to read, to write that he enjoys is a sitated freedom, a “cosmopolitanisen” that is, like my own, gendered, classed and (jronically) located, T doubt that Clifford is unaware of this. What disturbs him, I take aypmant Bauman, Legian and inten: On modi, prude, ad clea (Cam beige Potty Pres, 1987). TW yicgen Habermas, The plonphia! dinar of mdenity (Camides: Pony Press, 1987) pp, 320-08, "> Donna Haway,“Siasted knowledges: The sience question in feminism and the prviege ‘ot parial perspective” in er Simi, Cys erd Won Tria of mre (London: Rowdee, 199) pp. 183-201 tall hooks, “Repciening witenss in the black imagination” ia Lawrence Grosbers, Cry [dion and Pra Trocher (ds), Cafe sniy (New York: Rouledgs, 1992) pp. 335-46 che potas ate frm pp. 384614 Strange Lessons in Deep Space ig, is the assumption that particular classes of people are cosmopolitan (teavelers”) while the rest are merely local (“natives”). He argues that this is merely the ideology of one, extremely powerful “traveling culture,” and that there are indeed numerous other traveling cultures constituted through Force as well as by privilege. And in his later writings in particular Clifford seems to me to provide a way of “traveling with maps” that involves more than redrawing and annotaing them as he goes, his function more than the “sexibe of our scxibblings” patronized and pigeonholed by Paul Rabinow.” For Clifford’s maps call int question their own enabling conventions by traveling: They worry away at their orientation, scale, and grid, their presences tnd absences, in ways that clarify the modalities by means of which, as he puts it himself, “cultural aralysis constitutes its objects ~ societies, trndi- tions, communities, identities — in spatial terms and through specific spatial practices of research.” "These concems are, pethaps, still privileges and luxuries; all spatial metaphors are no doubt compromised and tainted; and acknowledging these restrictions will not issue in an innocent inguity conducted in a state of ‘grace. But reminding oneself of the clinging mud of metaphor, of the mundanity and materiality of intellectual inquiry, is nonetheless a vital critical achievement. ‘This is not the place to attempt a rigorous genealogy of human geo- graphy. What follows is a series of vignettes of, in the terms of my containing metaphors, fixer of position, which trace the emergence of a distinctive tradition of Western intellectual inquiry. I should perhaps make i clear that these do aot constitute even the outlines of an alternative history. Such a project would have to attend much more scrupulously t0 archival matters than is possible here. All I seek to do is make a series of incisions into the conventicnal historiography of geography and show that its strategic episodes can be made to speak to many other histories. It should also be remembered chat “human geography” did not emerge in ‘any institutionalized sense until the closing decades of the nineteenth ‘century; but its development appealed to much older traditions of inquiry through exactly the kind of legitimating devices that 1 mentioned earlier For now, it will be enough to off-centre those appeals and call some of their assumptions into question. 2 card, “Thvebig als! p. 108 Pal Rabeow, “Represents ate soit Mody snd pont moriy an kroplogy” in Cord aed Maras, in cr, pp 234-65 the quotation in fom ps 282 s Camord, Tiavng cles” p. 97; Brace Robin, “Comparsvecoxopoltensn:” Sua Tt 31/32 (982) pp. 102-85. Geogtaphy and the World-as-Exhibition I demand, 1 insist, that everything around me shall bencforth be measured, tested, certified, mathematical, and ratimal. One of my tarks must be to make 4 fill survey of the island, its distanes and its contours, and incorporate all thse details in am acarate sarvepr's map. I should lke every plant.to be bled, evry bird tobe ringed, every animal to be branded. I shall not be contewt sti bis opague and impenetrable plac filed with sere ferments and malignant stirings, Bas been transformed inte a calculated design, visible and intelligible 1 its wry depths! Michel Toutnies, Friday or the other island Distancing, mastering, objectifying — the voyeuristic look exercises control through 1 viewaltation which merges with « vititigation of its objec Rosalya Deutsche, Byys town Visualization In this essay I offer a particular pers2ective on the constitution of modem geography. I have selected three episodes in its history whieh, at fist sight, might seem to have little in common: the eighteenth-century European odyssey in the South Pacific; the celebrated regional geographies of late sineteenth- and early twentieth-century France; and the emergence of spatial science in Anglophone geography in the decades following World War IL ‘The evidence from these episodes is heterogeneous, but when it is brought into the same frame it brings what I want to call the problematic of wswalzation into particularly clear focus. A number of writers have already drawn attention to vision as what Martin Jay calls “the master sense of the modern fem”: to the ubiquity of the visual tropes that (deliberately) stud my preceding sentences and to the gendeting of the gaze that is there in Jay’s16 Siragge Lesions in Deep Space own summary description.’ But these claims assume 2 special significance in geography, because the discipline continued to privilege sight long after many others beeame more — well, circumspect. “Geography,” writes one ‘commentator, “is to such an extent a visual discipline that, uniquely among the social sciences, sight is almost certainly a prerequisite for its pursuit.” This is hyperbole, of couse, but the classical origins of geography are closely identified with the optical practices of cartography and geometry; its interests have often been assumed to lie in the landscape and the particular “way of seeing” that this implies, and its decidedly modern interest in theory invokes visualization ot only covertly, through the Greek thea (outward appearance”, and bora (“to look closely”) of “theory” ise, but also openly, through the display and analysis of spatial structures. None of these individual coordinates are confined to geography, but their joint intersection with its disciplinary trajectory does, T think, intensify and particulatize its ocularcentrism: its charactesistically visual appropriation of the world. In taking “the supremacy of the eye for granted,” declares Tua its practitioners “move with the mainstream of modern culture.” Maybe 05 but the visual thematic of modern culeuse is by n0 means an unerit cone, and I hope to show that it is possible to draw on ideas from art history and the history of seience, from philosophy and critical theory, to interrogate geography’s visual thematic. Cook’s Tour: anthropology and geography 1 cut into the history of modern geogeaphy in the second half of the ‘ighteenth century when, so David Stoddart claims, geography frst emerged sa distinctively modem science. In doing so he is deliberately cweaking, the noses of historians who tave identified much earlier surfaces of emergence. He knows only too well that the standard histories of geography parade Eratosthenes, Strabo, and Ptolemy across theie pages, followed by Hakluyt, Purchas, and Varenius, but he insists that these figures are remote from the concerns of modern resders. “Their contributions have meaning in the contexts only of their own time, not of ours.” Such a dismissal is contentious, of course, anc it is intended to be so. An intesest in these ‘writers does not immediately imply any antiquatianism. * barn Ja, “Scope regimes of mode,” ia Sco Lash and Jonthan Foednan (es) Meir iy Onfork Blache Publis, 1982) pp. 17895. } thee venue are daa orn D. C.D. Pocock, "Sight aed owl” Tanaris of te neo Brits Cag 6 (981 9p. 385-98 and Ys Ths," 9d pete” Gia ‘ager (Sp 415-22 David Stor, "Geography ~ 1 Baropea sees” in his On epi al ny (Oxford: Blawel Pater, 1980) pp. 28-10 Goograply and tbe world-asexbibiton a7 Livingstone has presented a compelling case for the importance of geography to the construction of modernity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On his reading, the Scientific Revolution of the seven teenth century may have depended, in complex but nonetheless crucial ‘ways, on the voyages of discovery. Livingstone argues that these “first-hand encounters with the world” — whic, like Stoddart, he regards as “the very stulf of geography” ~ “brought an immense cognitive and cultural challenge to tradition.” But I suspect Stoddatt’s response, and one which Livingstone anticipates in his own essay, would be to say that those carly geographies just as often confirmed or reinforced the compulsions of tradition. What- ever force it may have had in other directions, geography — like other forms of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ~ was also deeply implicated in magic and myth, cosmography shaded indiscriminately into astrology, and the shores of empirical science were still distant, blurred. On this reading, the difference berween the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries tums not so much on the distinction between myth and direct observation as on the different sears accorded to information derived from the two, Those “other” knowledges are absent from the standacd histories ‘of geography too, but Stoddart’s point is simply that they have no place in the modmy discipline at all. His diagnostic question is equally simple: “When did inah become our cent criterion?” Ir is not, of course, as simple s all chat, and I will want to suggest considerable caution about absolutizing “Truth” in this way. But what Stoddatt has in mind is the emergence of geogmphy as a quintessentially empirical scene, and T want +o begin by thinking through some of the implications of bis argument. Adventures in natural bistory Stoddart’s history is unorthodox. He dates the transformation of geography {nto an empirical science to 1769, the year in which Cook frst entered the Pacific. The apparent precision of the date is deceptive since in many ways the invocation of Cook is Ggurutive: He is made to stand for a cluster of overlapping intellectual traditions. But in more conventional histories of geography he does not appear at al; or if he does, itis as litle more then 4 bystander whose voyages are used 10 cottect Ptolemy's errors and complete the outlines of the world map, so that they become narrowly empirical in significance rather than way stations en route to an empitical sens, Only in Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian shore does Cook appeat, as he does in Stoddart’s account, as the superintendent of “a scientife’ underaking, a * David Livingston, “Geoguphy, uation and the sdenterevoltin: An interpretative essy;” Trsecins, li of Bish Caras 15 (1990) pp. 359-73, the quotation is fom p. 36418 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space hhabinger of the ninereenth-ccntury scientific waveling of Humboldt, Daswin, and the Challewger” and as che bearer of a discourse that legitimated itself through “liability in detsil and authenticty.”* "The ostensible purpose of Cook’s first voyage (1768-1771) was 0 participate in an international project to observe the transit of Venus, an fevent that would not take place again until 1874, IF the passage of the planet across the face of the sun could be observed at different stations azound the world, it was hoped that astronomers would be able to calculate the distance between the eaith and the sun, an achievement of considerable importance to both science and the art of navigation. Accordingly, Cook’s inetructions were to sail to Tabiti and set up a temporary observatory, But there was also a substantial interest both within the Royal Society and at court in having Cook explore and chart the South Pacific and, so it was hoped (sill more fervently, I imagine), “discover” the hypothesized great southera continent, fra australis incagita. Such a mission had obvious implications for Britain as a maritime power, and this bricf was duly incorporated into Cook's secret instructions. Shortly before the Budavour set sal, however, a young botanist, Joseph Banks, persuaded the Admiralty to allow him to accompany the expedition, Following the precedent set by Bougainville and other French voyagers, be Drought with him rwo mituralists, both former students of the Swedish botanist Cael von Linné (Linnaeus), and two illustators. Linnacus was the author of Sytema nature (1738), one of the founding texts of natural history, and he soon learned of Banks's intentions. He was informed by one corres- pondent that: No people ever went to sea better fitted our for the purpose of Natural History ‘They have got a five library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving ingects; all kinds of nets, wawls, drags and hooks for coral Gshing, they have even a curious contrivance of 2 telescope, by which, put jnto the water, you cin see the botcom at great depth.’ Similar provisions were made for subsequent voyages. Johann Forster and his son George accompanied Cook on his second voyage, while Banks himself became President of the Royal Society and acted 26 the veritable “custodian of the Cook model” for later expeditions.” * carne Glacken, Tato te Radio sare Na ad clay wre eg fo ei ties 1 ted of te gt ety (Bde Unereray oF Calera Pre, 1967 P 50 OC “Beabol, (ody Tv Una of tr Bndesvous, 768-1771 (Cambadge: Cambridge rivesiy Prem 1958) p hs Belo le Lianeor “te igh pet of betel suis” bat pete another meuphoe Donald None scans uch clo tothe mat a deebig in fone of the agents of “he cate of toa” ee hin Nutr ane A ty of ele ier (Corbedge: Cambsdge Unive Pres, 1985) p28 and pee. pani Mackay, eae fC: Epi, sie on ein 1780-180 (Londons Coon Heim, 1985p. 20. Grography and the worldnassechibition 19 Stoddact argues that the work of chese tears of scientists, collectors, and itlustrators displayed three features of decisive significance for the formation of geography as a distinctly modern, avowedly “objective” science: a concern for realism in description, for systematic classification in collection, and for the comparative method in explazation. But Stoddart presses this further. Neither Banks nor the Forsters confined themselves to plants and animals. They also took a keen interest in peoples, and in much the same way. Although Banks participated in many of the practices and rituals of the aboriginal peoples he encountered in Tahiti and elsewhere, he seems to have approached them “as he did any other species”; the Forsters were uninter ested in even Banks's rudimentary attempts at participant observation, and preferred to hold their objects at a distance and attempt “above all else to compase and categorize the cultures they observed.”* Hence what I take to be Stoddart’s central claim: that it was “the extension of [these] scientific methods of observation, classification, and comparison to peoples and societies that made our own subject possible.” ‘This is a revisionist history, as I have already indicated, and Stoddart makes no bones about it - My heroes are not the usual ones ~ the Ritters, Ratzels, Hettners, entombed by conventional wisdom. My geography springs from Forster, Darwin, Huxley: and it wworks.!® Yet one ought not to take this too literally. For all the disclaimers, the traditional pantheon continues to east its shadow over Stoddar’s narrative, “Humboldt was born in the year Cook first saw the Pacific,” he remarks, “Rier in the year he died there." Indeed, Banks and the Forsters are cast ‘as the precursors of @ tradition of field science (rather than “desk-bound ‘scholasticism”) that aviminated in the work of Humboldt, who thus becomes “the inberitor of the great tradiion of exploratory field science of the Enlightenment.”"" Stoddart plainly invokes Cook’s voyage in order 10 "Lyne Wiikey, Voge of dicwene Cate Gok and the eration of te Pasi (New Yor Willan Moweow, 1987) pp. 1-12, 12, 20 Y Stoddart, “Geography” pp. 32-83, 35 i one thing to csim that these development made ‘modecn geoyraphy possible, but quite aneter eo sy that they also made tance from other branches of knowledge, incidiag anthropolgy and sociology (p. 2). 1 do not think this second, stcgager thers can be snened, and ia ht follows I Focus of the fe. Wed, pt Revo thx may bein ony, but in other ways, 8 I wl show in a moment, Stor falls the convention of mainstem hstorography: 4 celebration of heres ot hercnes, sed Exapran bezoes to boot. I foes primasly on tht wosblesme adecte, ba fr « primary “ueuion ofthe gender contraction of mainatzeam htonogrphies see Mona Domoeh, “Toward 4 fist histxiegeaphy of gegrapy,” Thamar, sino Br Coppin 16 (191) pp. 98-10, 1 Sroddert, Or Grp, p35 ter, “Pimbelde andthe emergence of scientific geography 1 have quoted from the ppetipe cans, ws fr a8 its author knows the volume for which the ‘Gary was commitsioned never appeated in >ine20 Strange Lessons in Deep Space anchor geography within natural history and the natural sciences, but he also wants to establish that science, exploration and, indeed, “adventure” occupied (and, by implication, continue to occupy) a common space: to show that field science vas (and semains) an indissoluble moment in the advance of science more generally. That sense of (manly?) adveoture is not incidental to Stoddart’s own investigations, and his history constantly invokes it. “On uninhabited Pacific atolls,” he writes, “sailing along the barrier reefs of Australis and Belize, in the mangrove swamps of Ban- gladesh, on English coastal marshes, T have been concerned with making sense of nature.” Adventure is an integral part of Stoddar’s geography, but ie exists in tension with his conception of science. For “adventure” surely requires the emoronal investment and the affective response that he finds in Darwin’s reaction to nature, which he sees as both a paradox and a complement to Darwia’s view of science. “On the one hand, Darwin’s reaction was emotional and integrative; he grasped like Humboldt, the harmony and wholeness of the Cosmos.” Making sense of nature in sis ‘way was a response to the siren song of the romantic sublime, Stoddart suggests, and it was reflected in Darwin’s vocabulary: He found “stillness, desolation, solitude,” fele “wonder, awe, admiration.” And yet “on the other hhand, these was his analstical, instrumental, scientific approach, measuring, and comparing, dissecting objects ovt from their background for closer investigation.” Twill cerurn to this distinction in a moment, but I should frst emphasize that there is no doubt asout the importance of the Endeavour nor of the extraordinary significance of the South Pacific for the development of the natural sciences. Over the next century or so, as Smith notes, the region “provided a challenging aew field of experience for Europeans, one which placed unprecedented pressure upon the Biblical creation theory and provided, simultaneously, wealth of new evidence out of which was fashioned eventually the first scientifically credible theory of evolution.” Seen in this light, Stoddart’s more particular purpose is to use Cook’s voyage to ‘establish the historical provenance of what he has long taken to be Dacwin’s seminal importance for modem geography." Historians sailing in different waters, guided by different geographies, would evidently identify other routes and other ports-cf-call. If the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt at % Seoddac, “On geogmphy” pss im “Geography, exploration and dtcowey.” be a 1p, 142-57 am, "Grandeur in he view of if,” eae, yp. 219-28. 2 emacd Sith, Fang san and he Sent Pac (New Haven: Yale Uaiversey Press, 1985) p sgeach of the geoguaphical vork ofthe pst banda years --his ether expel o imply taken is iasprason fom bile, and in pacula feoen Daewin™: David Stoddart, “Darwie’s Jimpacton geogzaphy." ia bis Or gray, pp. 158-79. Other scholars prefer Lamarc see J. A Campbell and David Liingytons, "Neo-Lamercism and the developenent of geography in the ‘United State and Grest Brain’ Tato, dine of Brine Ganpapse& (1983) pp 257-94 Geography and the worlécasecchbition a the end of the cighteenth century was a “sort of fiest enabling experience for modern Orientalism,” for example, it also provided a beacon for the reorientation of French geography." Stoddart makes litle of these ventares, and his “European science” is a largely English affair. Stil, the importance of his argument les in the connections he makes becween Europe and the globalizing project of natural history. For it is those connections, it seems to me, that are directly implicatec in the relations between geography and antheopology. Evurspean science and its regine of trath 1 should begin by clarifying “natural history.” There are several standard histoviographies, but T have found Foucaul’s account in The order of things pasticularly helpful. Foucault trests natural history as a “regional” space within what he calls che classical episteme. An episteme is, very roughly, 2 conceptual grid that provides conceptions of order, sign and language that allow a series of discursive practices to qualify as “knowledge.” In Renaissance Europe, Foucault argues, the episteme was structured by resemblance, a way of thinking and being in the world in which there was rno gap between “words” and “things,” no difference in principle between signs on parchment and signs in nature. The world was known through a ramifying network of signatures, cach one providing a glimpse into the design of the perfect whole, In the late seventeenth and eighteenth ‘entusies, however, Foucault claims that a space opened between the wor az “words” were diseociated feom “things” 0 resemblance yielded to rpruentatin. And it was within that gap that the discourse of natural history was constituted as part of a project to navigate the passage between the two of, as Foucault puts it, “to bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things observed as close as possible to words” Since this concern occupies so much of this chapter, I ought to underline ‘810 of its most important implications. The first is the accent on vision and visibility. Natural history, says Foucault, “is nothing more than the ‘nomination of the visible,” revesling what is seen theough what is said, and is concerned with the structure of the visible world, with “surfaces ‘nd lines” not with “functions and invisible tissue.”"* This matters because Edvard Suki, Orit (Londor Peaguia Books, 1985) p. 122 for a move dead ~ and rote minced ~ account, see Anne Godlee, “Tadions, eri and new parsgms in te se of| the modern French dace of ography, 60-185,” Anal the Auman of Aue Gagaptr 13 $80) pp. 192-20 8 Michel Foul, The or of tings echo ofthe ben wr (Londo: Tavistock, 1970; dis was Bet pabshed in France i 15662 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space by this means “the idea of a natural ‘history’ takes on 2 meaning close to the original Greck sense of a ‘secing’.”” So, for Linnacus, the rationality of nature could be disclosed through a taxonomy that classified plants by the visual characteristics of their reproductive parts. Only by this means, Goldsmith later wrote in ais History of the Barth, by system and method, could one “hope to dissipste the glare, if I may so express it, which arises from a multiplicity of objects at once presenting themselves to the view.” If this was the “Ariadne’s thread?” that would guide the botanist through the labyrinth, as Linnacus argued, it was also a mapping of a logical order onto a supposedly “natural order”: a sort of “optics” of plant morphology jn which nature was seen a9 table and spatialzed’" The second implication follows directly: natural history is, in the modern sense of the word, thus resolutely somhistorial. ‘The locus of this histony is 1 won-femporaf rectangle [the table] in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside the other, their surfaces visible, grouped according to cheie common features and thus alrady viswally analyzed, and bearers of nothing but their own individual With these considerations in mind, Stoddart’s account might be clarified in three main ways, In the first place, the “objective science” which is the lodestar of his history must not be confused with any naive realism, Stoddart accentuates the importance of measurement and calibration, of innovations in instrumentation and illustration, which enabled reports to be based on “direct observarion.” The power of these reports was farther enhanced by the practice of collecting which, as Thomas has shown, attested in the most insistently matecial of ways to the fact of having visited remote places and observed novd phenomena. These specimens could then be nscribed within an emergent grid of intellectual authority in Europe: “Those who speculated wihout having engaged in direct observation were "” Gay Gating, Mie! Fences aca of reife mao (Cambie Cambridge Univercy Press, 1985) p 163 And, inded, Fours own work bas atone ofits cee concems a Nsory ‘of wap of sexing: John Rajchman “Foocalts art of sein” in his Php arte: Ese of the 80 (New York: Columbia Untesy Pres, 1990 pp 62-102 ' ajchman, "ovenut's at.” pp. 75-76 ames Eaton, Rao etd expr: Te npsattn of stud sre i the sore of Carl os Low (Beteey: Uriversy of Calforaia Pres, 1971) The Inngasgs of mapping isnot mpl: Carson dws acexion t Linnaeus’ justfeaton of the sync arangement of pater ito five groope “Geogmphy pasres Fom Kingdom to canon ough the inevering evince, teitoy. and. dite malty scence passe fem legion solder by meas of cohort, manip and squad” (p15). "The analogy spent ety to Fons tid of power, knowledge, and spi, sce Michel Foucaul, "Questions on geogapy.” in his Por leovge Sed rier vad eer wing, 1972-1977 (oh Colin Gendon) (Biheon Hayes Pres, 1980) pp. 6377 ® Fouanl, One of tings p. 115 emphasis aed Geography and ibe worldnas exhibition 2B rendered unreliable by the special claims of a few to direct knowledge’ ‘But these reports and observations were direct only in the (important) sense that they were produced by people who visited the lands they described: they continued to be mediated by European conceptual categories and European ways of seeing. I have used the plutal of those terms because it sccms nccessaty to cesist essentializing “Europe” and implying a singular European gize. As Smith shows with great care and subtlety, there was a complex dialogue between the contrasting traditions that the draftsmen and the artists on board the Endeatoxr brought to bear on their work. ‘The influence of the former on the latter seems to have been decisive, so much so that in the course of the early nineteenth century “the sciences of visible nature,” as Smith calls geology, botany, zoology and (significantly) anthopology, “imposed their interests upon the graphic arts.” But this new interest in accurate recording nonetheless continued to operate “within an intsicate interplay of ideas in which, for the most part, European observers sought to come to grips with the [acw] realities of the Pacific by interpreting them in familiar terms.” This sort of argument does not turn on an extreme coltural relativism, but neither does it eat the process of tepreséntation as, unitary of unproblematic. That process was rendered still more complicated ‘on Cook’s return to England, when the Admiralty hired a freelance writer, John Hawkesworth, to turn the journals and the log of the first voyage into 4 natrative that would appeal to 2 general audience. In order to do so, Hawkesworth drew freely on classical mythology and travelers? tales to embellish and dramatize the narrative, and the original illotrations. were reworked into images that would be familiar to a European public.” In the second place, the figure of Cook does not represent quite the scientitic tradition for which Stodiare secks paternity. According to Paul Caster, Cook’s own journals stand in contrast to the records made by Banks and the other scientists who accompanied him, Cook's was (quite literally) a “geo-graphy,” a writing of lands, which respected the intrinsic and singular spatiality of experience ~ the phease is Carter's ~ rather than the spatiality of classification, whereas Banks produced a botany that was preoccupied ‘with abstraction, with domesticating difference by caging it within a general taxonomic grid.” Although Cook’s journal was the product of a great deal ® Nicholas Thomas, oglu! cl ion i he Pfc Ca bike: Hacvand Usversiy Dressy 991) pe | one the cononal Beno clei wan a shay oncened hun, and Thomas dau beween a mere “eon” hich ba no aaa tle Surewonk ihn which te bj could be cafed or heared and “a more Shoei scours,” whch dd inded die obj sete pecmers tin some oes tnjaal anwar (pp 140-4). Sh, Eiapo sen, pe i, 15-6 *2 al Canes, “hn tine of mas” fa hi Th rd to Bug Bas Arey velit (Condon: Faben 1857 pp 133. 8; Balehole, Enewr, pp. eeali-ecit Wither, VoFigure 2 Josph Barks surrounded ly trophies from the voyage of the Endeavour [are ginal by Banjara Wat, December 1771; mezzoint engraning by J. R. Snith, $773} Gengraphy and the world-as-exhibition 25 of drafting and redrafting, and in che process he copied some of Banks's own notes, Carter insists that the distinction is one of substance: ‘Banks’s interest in texonomy quite excludes as part of his knowledge the circumstances of discovery. Knowledge, for Banks, is precisely what survives unimpaired the translation from soll to plate and Latin desciption. There is, in Banks's philosophy, no sense of limitation, no sense of what might have been missed, no sense of the ‘particular a8 special. By & curious irony, even though he sets out & botanize on the fuppositon his botanical knowledge is incomplete, is knowledge is always complete: each object, found, aanslated into a scientie fat, and detached from its historical snd geographical surroundings becomes complete world in itself... ls] existence in & given, living epace it lost in the moment of scentific discovery.” ‘The blanke surround of the botanical plate was dead, Carter continues, but the blank spaces of Cook's maps and charts were active; and the lines, numbers, and names drawn on them preserved, in graphical form, the ‘races of particular encounters and the memories of particular experiences, and they also prefigured — made possible ~ the particulars of other journeyings. “The same calculations that enabled him to steer a course also ‘enabled him to leave the coastlines he sighted where they were.” In the face of Carter's enthusiasm for Cook, it aceds to be remembered that it was Cook who sighted those coastlines and that the “spatiaity of experience” that he respected was his apm: chat this was a way of drawing that world within his own, Europeaa horizon of meaning. But he did so in ways chat were significantly different from Banks, and the distinction can be drawn in another, still roe general way! Ta his lecrutes. ar Konigsberg on geography, Kant emphasized that classification could pro: ceed cither logically or physically. It is dhe first of these that Stoddart has in mind when he writes so approvingly of the extension of the scientific method of classification to peoples and societies: It provides for what Kant called “natucal system” ~ “a system of nature” like that of Linnaean taxonomy ~ in which clements are placed in the same category on the basis of their similarity. But Kant ins proceeded differently; thet they both relied on a physical classification that ed that history and geography Canter, "An ovtins:” pp. 21-22. If nacre wesc be seat book, however, the graeme of Botaay Bay was fr from being immediately ineligible. The Gest president of the Linnean Sosy confersed titi wich tists the fotint "san scarcely mec with any Sed pointe fiom which to daw his analogies, and even those that appear most promising. ate Sreqatdy in ogc of mute, instead of inouming Bim The wbole cite of plans sich a fs ight ‘cer fale co Bs aequsinanc, se occupying I in Nat's chi, om which he is 2eustommed {© depend, prove, on eer examination, tol eeangers” It 998, of cours, the fonction of Lietein aonomy to ise those “tral strangers” with esi Mdenshy paper. See Rost Gibson, Sth f the Wet Peocloaion xd the artis cintin of Ante (Blontogtor: Tones Univery Press, 1992) pp 24-25, Comex, Bote Bop. 23.26 Strange Lessons in Deep Space places elements together on the basis of their proximity. IF there was a Precursor of Stoddatt’s goography on board the Endeavoxr, then it must surely be Banks, not Cook, and the geography that he inaugurates is evidently very different from Kant’s. The consequences of spatializing knowledge in this abstract, logical way (figure 2) are brought out very clearly, I ¢hink, in this passage from Mary Louise Prat’s aptly titled Jnperial Eyes One by one the plane's life forms were t be dawn out of the tangled threads ‘of their life surroundings and rewoven into Buropean-based patterns of global unity and order. The (lettered, male, European) eje that held the systems could fanasize (natualize”) new stes/sights immediately upon contact, by incorpor- ating them into the language of the system, The differences of distance factored themselves out of the picere Within this opti, those differences were spatialized: They were placed in that “non-temporal rectangle,” the table, which had no space for Kant’s geography. In the third place, and following dicectly from these remarks, the generalizing science that is supposed to have provided the origin of modern geography (and much elx) was no simple “extension.” Placing other peoples and societies witha its highly particular horizon of meaning had the most radical of consequences for the constitution of the human sciences and their conception of human subjects. The two “great devices” that Stoddart singles out for particular attention in bringing “the huge diversity of nature” within “the boands of reason and comprehension” — namely, classification and compariton — were the central pinions of the classical episteme. Its claims to “truth” were not tronehictorical, however, and neither was the ttibunal to which it appealed. What displaced the classical episteme and inaugurated the modern episteme was, precisely, the incorp- oration of “man” within the conceptual grid of Buropean knowledge. Here too Kant is a figure of decisive importance, and Foucault suggests that his Critique of Pare Reason, published 20 years after Cook’s first voyage, matked “the threshold of our modernity” by drawing attention to the epistemic structuring of the world by the human subject. “As the archaeology of out thought easily shows,” Foucault concluded in a striking and often repeated phrase, “man is an invention of recent date.” What he meant was that the limits of representation were not breached until the years between 1775 and 1825: It was then that “man” was constituted as both an object of knowledge and a subject that knows, and in the process the space of European knowledge “‘topoted,” “shattered,” and dissolved invo « radically sew confgaraton.® ® sary Louise Peat, Impuis e Trod wring and tranntration (Lodo Rowe) p31 % oucale, Ont of ig, pp. 2, 312,386. The gendering oF these puages i (my cs) Gates snd (many case) eae appropriate: tx Geneviere Loy Te mon fra Ma” and eee” ie Waten phil (Loner: Methuen, 1984. TE Geography and the world-as-exibition 27 ‘Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the classical identity between thought and representation gave way to systematic reflection on the specificity of representation, to a characterstcally modern emphasis on ryfleciviy. ‘There are two thematics in Foueault’s account that seem to bear ditectly on the protomodem discourses of anthropology and geography. The first was the investment of knowledge with historicity. Buropean knowledge invented for itself “a depth in which what mateess is a0 longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces on the basis of their primitive ‘and inac- cessible nucleus, origin, causality and history."” The consequences for anthropology and, T think, anthropogeography were dramatic. In the course of the nineteenth century both discourses pivoted around an axis “whereby differences residing in geographical space were {rotated} until they became differences residing in developmental historical ime.” As McGrane puts it “bgend Europe was henceforth bor Europe.” ‘The second thematic was the dissolution of knowledge as a homogeneous space. Foucault argues that once the unitary field of visibility ang, order was “opened up in depth,” knowledge was no longer mapped ' a single, general science of onder but was instead distributed across a three-dimensional space. On the first side were the mathematical sciences; on che second side, the empirical sciences (biology, economics and linguistics); and on the third side, philosophical reflexion. These axes tciangulated the space of the new “human sciences” (induding sociology and psychology), which ‘existed in a state of constant, creative, and highly unstable tension with their enframing discourses (Ggure 3). In turn they attempted mathematical fotmalizations, they borrowed models from the empirical sciences, and they surrendered themseives to philosophical reflection.” ‘The implications of this second set of claims for anthopology and human geography ate more complicated. The position of antheopology was ambiguous: Foucault describes it as a “counter-scienc<” that “ceaselessly ‘unmakes? that very man who is ereating and re-creatig his positivity in che human sciences.” Human geography had no place at ll withia the human sciences as Foucault conceived them, although it would not be diffieult to wace the same «epistemic displacements in its mocera history: mathematization; biological, ‘economic and linguistic analogues; philosophical ceflection. My purpose is not to imply that Foucault's archaeology is unproblematic, however, still less that it can be used as a template from which to zecover the archae- logies of anthropology or geogrephy in any disect way: Foucault’s own ® owes, One of tings p. 25% ® ‘emazd McGrane, Hoe! antiplg Swity and the clr (New Yorks Colas University Pris, 1985) p. 4 ® Boocal, Oni of tings p34, 38728 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space BIOLOGY Economics Linguistics PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION positive Sciences we uuwan Sones “ARE MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Figere 3 Foucault's arcavolegy of the buat ecionces view was quite the opposite.” But I do think that the disjuncture ~ the “threshold” ~ that he places between the classical and the modern calls into question any simple “extension” of the methods of the natural sciences “to people and societies.” Foucault’s own account concerned the incorporation of European “man” within the grid of the human sciences. It was this process, so he claimed, that was centrally involvee in the constitution of a modality of power that was characteristic of modern societies. He argued that the prevalent form of power in previous societies was sowrign power, a jusidico-political model in which power “descended” from the heights to the depths, from the center to the margins. But in the course of the eighteenth century this was joined and jostled (but no: replaced) by a profoundly nonsovereign power: an anonymous, polymorptous, and capillary disciplinary power, rooted in the depths and the margins, vhich established what Foucault called a society of normalization: [As power becomes more amnnymous and more functional, those on whom it is cxercised tend to be more strongly individualized; itis excreted by surveilance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative aecouats, by comparative measures that have the “norm” as reference rather than. geneslogies aiving ancestors as points of reference.” Disciplinary power is inherently spatializing, Foucault suggests, in its guze, its grids, its architectures. It is also intrinsically productive: It produces © Michel Fouaul, “Quesions on geography,” in ht Per/kmie Sted nein ad ar rie, 1972-1977 Brghoce Hates, 1960) pp. 63-7. 3 Michel Foucsls, Die apis: Tie it of te prin (London: Penguin 1977) p. 193; his vss fist pushed in Frace ia 175 se aho Two lectus” in Bis Phe / Ate, pp. T8108. Geography and the world-asechibition 29 Juman bodies as human subjects, a process that Foucault calls asejtisrement to convey both subjection and “subjectfication.” These are provocative suggestions and they have much to say about the constitution of a dispersed “spatial science” of sorts, already visible in the seventeenth century and emboldened in the, course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concerned with what Foucault describes 2s an anatomo-polities of the Iruman body and a bio-politics of the human population.” ‘These developments are, I suspect, of direct relevance to any genealogy of the discourse of geography. But Foucaull’s account of the human sciences was confined to Europe and, according to one otherwise sympath- etic commentator, he seemed hrgely “unaware of the extent t0 which [ese] ideas of discourse and discipline are assertively European” and of how they were used to administer, study, and reconstruct, and then t0 ‘occupy, rule, and exploit “almos: the whole of the non-European wotld.” For this reason Said argued thet much of what Foucault urged “makes greatest sense not as an ethnocentric model of how power is exercised in modem society, but as part of a much larger picture involving the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.”** Maybe 50; other cites are more skeptical. But if one does move not only beyond Foucault's aschacology toward his genealogy but also beyond Europe, T am not sure that the distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power is thea able to address the incorporation of sox-Enrapean “man” into the table and the pri. Many writers have argued that the European construction of the other as a figure of “nonseason” was an essential moment in the self-constitution fof the Buropean subject as the sovereign igure of reason and normality. And it is certainly possible to reverse the direction of the Linnaean gaze, as Pratt suggests, “looking at Zurope from the imperial frontier” and connecting the scientific appropriation of the non-European world to processes of discipline and normalization within Burope. But suppose that gaze is held steady; suppose the imperial frontier is kept in view ~ what then? The self-image of late cightcenth-century science was undoubtedly fone of innocence, and Pratt makes much of its planctary project as a discourse of “anticonquest” ~ a means whereby Europeans were promised intellectual possession of the world without physical dispossession of the people who inhabited it. What she calls the “conspicuous innocence” of the naturalist thus acquired meaning only in relation to the unnamed but % Micha Foycaut, Te bie of somes An iron (London: Penguin Books, 1978) 0, 139-45; his was fist plished in France in 1976 3. Bard Said “Cc betreen calire and aie" in Bi The wr Het ad the ite (Condon: Faber, 1984) pp. 178-225; the siottion i from p. 222 1 is for this tesson that Sid takes 20 toch of the Napoleonic expdiion. Its objeie was “to render (Feyp) completly open, 10 make i toly accesible to Emon sceainy” and Wereby tun "ino a deparinest of Pench learing Said, Onan, pS30 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space nonetheless palpable “guilt of conquest.” But the incorporation of non- European “man” into the table, the taxonomy and the grid effectively prised non-European people avay from the land which they inhabited, and once they had been textually eemoved from the landscape, it was presumably easier t0 do so plysizaly as well. It was not necessary to confine them to the formal categories of a European taxonomy since the rules of logical classification — of a “sameness” inscribed within an economy of difference = continued to underwrite less formal textual strategies, ‘As Pratt shows in a particularly powerful essay, for example, John Barrow’s account of his early nineteenth-century travels through “the land of the Bushmen” in southern Africa was remarkable for the way in which the narrative of the journey ind the description of the landscape were emptied of indigenous human presence. “The Bushmen” (the [Kung) are present in the next only as faint seratches on the surface of the land, traces of cultivation and signs of habitation, until they are eventually paraded around a separate ethnographe arena, a “bodyscape” altogether separate from the landscape.” But this is not sovereign power, I think, and neither is it — in this form ~ disciplinary power cither. In any event, from this perspective it is surely incontrovertible that the “extension” of the methods of natural history and, ultimately, of natural science to peoples and societies was powered by more than the sails of reason. These nominally scientific advances were at the same time, in complex and sometimes opaque ways, the speatheads of colonialism and conquest. For this reason I am puzzled by the contrast Stoddart seems to make between the European discovery of America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their ciscovery of Australia and the South Pacific in the eighteenth century. Inthe firs case, the questions raised were primarily theological and philosophical rather than scientific, ...It proved impoadble to subsume the cultates of the Andes and the ‘Amazon within accepted European models: in consequence European accounts of the New Wodd are overwhelmingly records of conquest and destruction But matters were more complcated. The European discovery of the New World brought in its wake, by viete of its “newness,” what Paggen describes as a “metaphysical unease” which may have contributed directly to the eventual hegemony of the experimental method, Precisely because the New Would could not be codified within the existing corpus of fixed texts, Kepler believed that Columbus had been instrumental in showing that “modern man had no choice but to be a rational experimentalist.” ‘This was a thoroughly modem reading of Columbus, however, and Pagden % Patt, Japa rs, pp. 336, SET. % steddar, On Goya, p32: Geography and the worldnas exibition 3t suggests that Humboldt was nearer the historical mark when he saw Columbus as the embodiment of a new mora! attitude toward nature and “human nature” and compared him wm “the two great poets of the natural world, Buffon and Goethe” Bur Iam not sure that one has to choose between these interpretations, and it znay be that this is the rock on which Stoddart’s comparison founders too. Although Columbus was untutored in the sciences, Butzer argues that his ability “to observe, compare and describe” was of immense importance in establishing a tradition of scientific appropriation that extended from his son Fernando Colon’s landscepe taxonomy through Oviedo’s biotic tzxonomy to Acosta’s attempt t0 estab- lish “2 scientific and ontological framework for the New World” in his Historia natural (\S9), Te seems equaliy likely that the moral dimensions of that intellectual encounter were far from straightforward. While he by 20 means diminishes the impress of domination and destruction, Greenblatt suggests that Columbus's voyage initiated “a century of intense wonder” — a project that involved not only “the colonizing of the marvelous” but, if one reads some texts in particular ways (and I hear those hesitations and qualifications t00), also conferred upon the marvelous what he callé “a striking indeterminacy.” His argumen: is @ rich and subtle one, but it turns on the suggestion that “wonder” leads (and lead) in two opposite directions. One is the path to estrangement, objzctification and possession; che other, less familiar, is the path to se-recognition and acceptance of alterity. As I read Greenblatt, even Columbus, on occasion, and as he followed the first, seems 10 have contemplated th: second.” ‘These complications do not reverse Stoddar’s judgment in the first case But what of the second The scienttic project represented by Cook's voyages may not have been “interventionist in any immediate sense,” as ‘Thomas cautions, and it would be quite wrong to foreshorten the colonial past.™ Bue itis seareely possible to claim that the European encounter with the peoples of the South Pacific was disinterested or that the protocols of “objective science” left their world as it was. As the Comaroffs have recently reminded us: ‘The essence of colonization inheres less in political overrule then ia seizing and transforming “others” by the very act of sonceptualizing, inscribing and interacting ‘with them on terms not of their choosing; in making them into pliant objects and % Anthony Pagden, “The impact of the New Wodld on the Old The history of an ide.” Regia and nee snd 30 (989) pp. th 7 Kat Boter, “Prom Coltsbus to Acoma” Ans of he Audie of Arran Gagaphes 82 (0992) pp. 59-65; Stephen Greenbla, Manon prerinr Toe moder of he New Wor (Chics Usiery of Chicago Pros, 1991) pp. M4, 2425, 6-65, 135. Stoddatt dsetes Oviedo std ‘Acosa “rate exceptions” but they were nonetheless immensely mporant and chee natural ioe were in many respect seminal works Moms, Esta gar, 13832 Strange Lessons in. Deep Space silenced subjects of our scripts and scenatios; ia assuming the capacity ta “represent” them, the active verb itself conflating polities and poetics.” In other ways, of course, “they” were neither pliant nor silenced, and in the eatly phases of the colorial encounter in particular indigenous peoples could be “no less powerful and no less able to appropriate than the whites ‘who imagine(d] themselves as intruders.” This is an important qualifica- tion, but others would sharpen the point still further and insist on the intrinsic ambiguity of inscription and “possession.” Thus: Possessing Tahiti was a complicated affur, Indeed, who possessed whom? Native and Stranger e&ch possessed th: other in theit interpretation of the other. They possessed one another in an ethnographic moment thut got trinseribed into text and symbol They each archived that text and symbol in their respective cultural institutions. They cach made caigo of the things they collected from one another, put their cargo in their respective museums, remade the things they collected into new cultural artifacts. They entrained cherselves with ther histories of encounter. Because each reeding of che text each display of the symbol, each entertainment in the histories, ech viewing of the cargo enlarged the original encounter, made a process of it, each possession of the other became a selfipossession as well Possessing the other, ike possesing the pas, is always fall of delusions” So it is. Bur surely one of the most insidious delusions is to presume that this was an equal and symmetrical process Stoddart’s “objective science” was objective ~ and no doubt, remains objective ~ in all of these ways, then, and yet its modalities of power lie heynnd the compass of his account. To be ture, one muct make allowances for the heterogeneity of European colonial discourses. If these aimed to construct a “mechanism of mastery” — and literally so, as the women displayed as the frontispiece of Stoddar’s history of geography suggest — they did not speak with ore voice and neither were they altogether indifferent to context, But their main thrust (and the sexual connotation is not inappropriate) can be stated quite direety. As one of those most affected by the expeditions put it 200 years later, on the occasion of the Cook Bicentennial, “Fuck ycur Captain Cook! He stole our land.” In stealing that Jand those who came after also stole biography, history, and © Jean Comezff sod John Conall, OF rnin end csi: Coit estoy nd umn Sith Af, wl. (CoSego: University of Chicago Press 191). 15. © Thomas, Energi, 9. 186, * Greg Desing, Possessing Tait? Arcana i Oana 21 1986) pp. 03-18, the quotation sm ps U7. “The tematk i qucted in H.C. Brookfield, “On one geography anda Thitd Wotld," Tad, Ista f Bris Gegyapbs 88 (1573) po. 1-204 the euotston Ket ps 1D. Beookfilsrepestion ‘of the semack ened Htring in the colonial dovecots the lnguage wis demed objectionable For s survey of otbes, mote objesonile aspects ofthe encouatct, sce Alan Moorehead, Tt fae! Geography and she worldnas exhibition 33 identity. George Forster had warned as much: “If the knowledge of a few individuals can only be acquired at such price as the happiness of nations, i would be better for the discoverers, and the discovered, that the South Sea had still remained unknown tc Europe and its restless inhabitants.” In all of these ways, I think,one must conclude that Stoddart’s geography was plainly not only 2 distinctively “European science,” as he says, but also a distineily Euroantric science. Surprisingly, Stoddart’s own historio~ graphy contributes to that sense of closure. Non-European traditions of geography are disallowed and even dispossessed of their own “intellectual structure” in ways that steikingly confirm Said’s view of one of the essential motifs of European imaginative geography: “A line is drawn berween «wo continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.”"* And yet, as the previous paragraphs have shown, the trajectory of this “modern” geography, this “European science,” cannot be separated from those other societies and the “peosle without history.”"* Bue this requires 1 way of remapping those spaces of power-knowledge or, better, of exploring the interconnections between power, knowledge, and spatility. As Y have suggested, some of the most semiral cross-fertilizations during this period ‘were those between anthropology end geography and what became known as anthropogeography is a tradition of basic importance to the formation of the modern discipline. This is necessarily to use “anthropology” and “geography” in highly general, diffuse, and overlapping ways. Kant lectured ‘on both of them at Kénigsberg for over 30 years and believed that together they formed the corslity of pragmatie, empirical knowledge of che world.” Bat ncither of them was formalized, institutionalized, and professionalized in a modern, disciplinary sense with. the Western academy until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Anthropogeography continued to be of sgreat moment; one reads its concems in Ratzel and also in Sauer. Yer it ‘was the encounter with another infant discipline, sociology, that added new dimension to geography as an “objective seience.” Inpac At aet of fh he of te Sth Pf, 1767-440 (London: Pengin, 1966). The repcsaon of "ae and” a5 finn, 10 Be maseed by a powerful mascine ces, is + cognon rope of calor discourse and I diese itn more det blow pp 129-32. wih Monge p 230 Su Onna. 57 There wee power, acute Anbie and Chinese cons of coal 2 The phawe of courte] have barowel elm Hs Wol rad th pk ont sas (Beta Univesity of abfcia Pees 196, Se ako JoanoesFablan, Te ad th the iso exon matr tot (New Yoke Coun Unies Pe, 1983) and MaGene, Bond ‘otha AY of tae et fons on mtbrglogr ergy & only begining to declop 4 Geel tteogophy of compante supination: so Felx Diver, "Googaphys expe Hit tor of geographies know” Lovo ed Ping Dr Sat and Sp 10 (882) pp. 23-40 eee As May, Ki ene of ral on an a ppp hag Toro: Universi of Toronto Press, 1970 9p. 1-3M4 Strange Lesions in Disp Spare Borders: sociology and geography T have stid enough to be able to work more disectly toward geography and the world-asexhibtion; to consider the possibilty that, by the closing, ecades of the nineteenth century, it was a characteristic of European ways of knowing to render things «s objects to be viewed and, as Timothy Mitchell puis it, to “Set the world up as piceure....[and arrange] it before an audience as an object on dsplay, to be viewed, investigated, and experi- ceaced,” This machinery of representation was not confined to the z00, the ‘museum, and the exhibition ~ all European icons of the nineteenth century — but was, so Mitchell claims, consttusive of European modecnty at large.” Enframing the world ‘To grasp the implications cf this way of knowing, Mitchell draws upon fone of Heidegger's later essays, which refers to modemity as “the age of the world picture,” by which he said he did not mean a picture of the world “but the world conceived and grasped as « picture.” ‘To think of a picture in this way implies both a setting of the world in place before oneself, a an object over aad against the viewing subject, and a making of the world intelligible as a systematic order through a process of enframing But Heidegger was advancing a series of more of less ontological claims. Alehough he traced enftaming back to Descattes in the seventeenth century, this was a purely nominal gecture: More fundamentally, it was supjused to represent “the apocalyptic culmination of over two millennia of Sens ergstenbei.?™ T do not propose to follow that abstract history here; but Heidegger's argument can be made to intersect in complex and historically more specific ways with the genealogy of linear perspective. This had its origins in Bruaelleschi's marvelous experiments during the Italian Renaissance, but it wat more than an optis of atistic representation; more, even, than the visible surface of a technology of power implicated jn the calculations of the merchant, the surveyor, aad the general.” Tt also * See two works by Timothy Mitel: “The world as exibition,” Comparten in sey ‘aed bite 31 1989) pp. 217-36; and Cabuicng Eee Cambridge Cambor University Pees, 1985), What follows is deeply indbecd co Michel's belllnt account, but Ihave some weserations shout ic and sess these in more dei below, pp. 175-76, 180-8 “© Richacd Woln, The pics of Bins The puta Hox of Marta Huger (New Yor Corbin Universy Pees, 190) pp. IGG Semen deriv fom Heidegger's theory of Serie ‘= svowrelyandhumanise project hat sought to dle the authentic destiny of Bing (Deis) hich, so he claimed, had been suppaszed (frgoten, nrune) in the couse of human bisory ° Nari Keznp, The ee of or Opal ther nsec afro Srl to Sra (Sew Havers Yale University Press, 1990}; Denis Corgrove, "Prospect pespective and the evolution of the landscape ies,” Tsao of th Ie of Bris Grp 1 (1985) pp. 45-62. ™ Goegrsphy ana the world-asexibition 35 Figire 4 Soterior with Geogeapher (Jan Vermeer, 1663}. formed part of a series of Renaissance codes that were involved, crucially, in the development of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century “codes through which a visual world fwas] constructed according to syste- matized constants and from which any inconsistencies and irregularities [were] banished to ensure the formation of a homogeneous, unified and fully legible space." Crary shows that the camera obscura assumed a Jonathan Cees, “Moderising vision” ip Hal Roster (ed), Vasko and simlty atlas Bay Pret, 1988) pp. 23-44; the quotation ie om p38 For a filler session, see de, “The iment bcs and subject” in hi Tenia’ of te eure: wie ond moda te rien stay (Caabridge: MIT Pres, 1950) pp. 25-66.36 Strange Lessons in Deep Space preeminent importance in delimiting and defining the relations between observer and world, and it was this, so he claims, that provided both the foundation and the framework for an objectivist epistemology which, as Heidegger suggested, was set out by Descartes, It was also embodied in Vermeet’s painting, Interior with 2 Guagrapher (c. 1669), which shows the scholar at work in a shadowy study, poring over a chart flooded with light from the casement (figure 4}, The camera ~ the study — becomes the site within which an orderly projection of the world is made available for inspection by the mind, and Crary sees the porteayal of the geographer as a particulary lucid evoeatior of the autonomous subject “that has appro- plated for itself the capacity Zor intellectually mastering the infinite existence ‘of bodies in space.”"" By extension, we can surely say that it was much the same optic that framed Stoddart’s “objective science” at the end of the eighteenth century Mitchell follows these lines of inquiry into the nineteenth century in cofdet to show that the process of enframing was historically implicated in the operation of colonial, or better “colonizing” power. “Colonizing” is to be preferred, I think, because the constellation of power-knowledge that he has in mind was not confined to Europe's colonies (though, as he shows with considerable sophisticaton, it was undoubtedly important there t00). But precisely because it put in place an inside and an outside, a center and A margin, this was a way of seeing the world as a differentiated, integrated, hictarchically ordered whole. What matters is not so much the visual meta- photic as the sense of systematicity, because this is che same unity — the same “field of projection,” Crary ealls it — provided by the model of the camera obscura Seen like that, one can better understand Heidegger's claim that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.” For it is through the process of enframing that “man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.” Within this modern optic, the “certainty of truth” is made to turn on the need to establish a distance between observer and observed. From that 5 Cary, Tcnge of te share, pp. 43-47. 16 acide that in spall pating Vesmeer epited the assonomer inthe seme aston, pong over a ele gobe. The evo canvases ae sometimes confused, but then, ab Cex remit, in both paintings Vermeer worked withthe same gue: “Race than opposed by she objec of tei ry, the eat andthe heavens, the geographer and the asuonomer engage ina common enterprise of observing aspects of » sige mcivible ‘exttioe™ (p46) Marin Heideges, "The age ofthe world pict,” in his Tle gneine nari hula, ond tir says (Neve York: Harper and Rove, 1977) pp. 115-545 the eeeay ws oxignaly writen in 1938, What is decisive about hi, Heeger angie, i tit “Man himeelf expressly thes up this postion as one constituted by himself...and tha he makes ic secure tthe soli fring forthe Possible development of umanigy New for the fi ee ether any such ting 4 "posion? ‘of man” (p. 143, The affintes berwen these csime and Fools abiequent eabortion of ‘he modean epsteme ae, I think, obvaus (ce above, pp. 26-2), Geegrapy and the worldnas exhibition 31 position (from that perspective) onder may be dis-covered and represented. As Mitchell explains Without s separation of the self from 2 picture... it becomes impossible to grasp “the whole.” The experience of the world as a picture set up before a subject is linked to the unusual conception of the world as an enframed totaliey, something thae forms a structure or system.” What makes such 2 conception so unusual is that the process of enframing ‘on which it relies conjures up a ftamework that seems to exist apart from, and prior to, the objects it contains — a framework that appears “as order itself, conceived in no other terms than the order of what was ordestess, the coordinator of what was discontinuous.” This is a highly particular way of thinking about ~ and, indeed, >eing in ~ the world, so Mitchell argues, which is peculiar to European modernity. Indeed, non-Occidental visitors to the world exhibitions at the close of the aineteenth century sawr them as emblematic of “the strange character of the West, a place where one ‘was continually pressed into service as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent.” Mitchell seizes on this aperu to rework Heidegger’s original characterization and bring it into a sharper fin-de-siéele foeus. Trading on Benjamin's suggestive sketch of the world exhibitions at the end of the nineteenth century as “sites of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish,” in Which “the character of a commedity [was extended) to the universe,” he describes this particular constellation of power-knowledge not as “the world as picture” but “the world-as-exhbition.”** Exhibitions and tableaux ‘What have these, perhaps forbidcingly abstract considerations to do with ‘geography? In the first place, they can be given the most concrete of forms. ® sce i tee ivoing Faber?» atenp render the “bwldeing chaos of calcu” tt vs oa Ewopeta seasity)niateenh-cnny Hg, but hs aegonent 8 @ gener ne, Ia Imuch tbe same way Sud (Onn, pp 18-89) noes tae Pauber i ieee “wot ony fn the content of what hese but In bar ete the wy by which dhe Oden sometes Holy bot ahrayeatenctvey, scoma to presen lf to i's he so obser thet the won oF the Oren "ar spec, or abla (p.S8) wos by no mene wacomanes. Which, Cabnat Ags pp. 3-14; Waler Beajmin, "Pr, capital of tbe aipeendh scoany” in his Recs Ere, eps, eating! mings (i, Pree Denes) (New Yorke Schocken Boos, 198) pp. 46-62 Benn’ ety was Ee poled io 1955. What Michels snbscidon doc st sake safe det, howe, the we which te proces of enfamiog ons ot only obs bea aber Paly fo tt sent, Isp, io fb raw ateon tothe gsndeing ofthe gue. This zbounds aot ooly Michell specie ana of Colonial Egy bu also on ha oe gene dscstion of finesiée Barope sc so Grea Polk, "Medernty snd she spaces of fii” her Vinee ond ma Potty, fin the Sv of ot (Loon: Rowe, 198) pp 0-5038 Sirange Lessons in Deep Space Figare 5 Recles's proposed Grat Glebe at the Place d’Albna, Paris {Galeron, 1897), Mitchell opens his account st the World Exhibition in Patis in 1889, which coincided with the Intemational Congress of Geographical Sciences presided over by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the architect of the Suez Canal (One of the most imposing exhibits was the enormous Villard-Cotard globe, over 40 meters in circumference, showing mountains, oceans, and cities with what visitors took co be an astonishing verisimilitude. For the World Exhibition of 1900 the geographer Elisée Recl:s proposed the construction of a still larger globe. Visitors would travel around its circumference on a spiral staircase o tramway, observing its finely sculptured relief at close ‘quarters, and then move inside where a vast panorama would be projected across its vault (figure 5). Although these globes are powerful expressions of the world-as-exhibition, what matters is not so much their particular iconography but the wider constellation in which they are set! a spectacular geography in which the world itself appeared as an exhibition, ‘One ought not to be quite so literal about things, however, and 1 want +o suggest in the second (and more interesting) place that much the same SG. Donbar, "Bisée Recs sad the Grest Globe," Stith srumpbicd agen: 90. (1974) ‘pp. 57-46, These were by no means the fest “yeat globe,” be it war not unt the ainesenth ‘ceatry that globes were plaaned 50 lige eat they ad © be att outdoors, Two gems were payed in Pais in (823 and 1844, nd in 1851 Jamer Wyld, Geographer tothe Quesn,constrcted 4 globe in Teiester Square as « potate vente 0 cape on the toute flocking to London. for the Great Bxhibion, Geography and the worldrasexbibition 39 machinery of representation was deployed during the institutionalization of the French school of human geography at the tuen of the century. Consider, for a moment, Vidal de la Blacre’s Tablean de la givgraphie de la France. Ya this, probably the classic monograph of the French school, written when Vidal was in his late fifties, the country is represented as a picture: one composed of “a mnutiplicity of stades,” “a wealth of tones” — the landscapes of the different localities or fags ~ in which “all discordant tints melt into a series of graduated shades.” One extic has suggested that the very title of the book invoked, and was perhaps intended to invoke, “the geographer as landscape painter.” For Vidal imposed “solely visual criteria” on his renderings, treating landscape (as he said himself) as “what the eye embraces with a look,” as “that part of the country that nature offers up to the eye that looks at it” Others have commented on geography’s visual obsession before ~ its graphos, not logos ~ but in Vidal’s case the gaze was doubly purposive. He was at pains to present France as 2 coherent and in some sense 2 complete composition. France is one of those [courtties} chat took shape catliest. While in ‘the more continental parts of Europe, the grest countries of the future, Seythia and Germany, ‘were only looming in semi-darkness, the outlines of France were already discernible, ‘The emboldening of those outlines ~ the framing of France, as it were — ‘was by no means inevitable. Its telos was zealized through collective human action, whose achievement was both revealed in and confirmed by the very legibility of the landscape ~ the visual expression that made the country the image of its people A country is 2 storchouse of dormant energies, lsd up in the germ by Nature but depending for employment upon man. It is man who reveals & country’s individ- ualiy by moulding it to his own use. He establishes a connection benveen untelated features, substicuting for the eandem effects of local circumstances a systematic co-operation of forces. Only then does 2 country acquire 2 specific character differentiating it from others, tll at length it hecomes, a8 it were, a medal struck jn the likeness of people * ‘The parallel with Michelet’s Tabwas is striking. This had been published in 1833 as a section of his [iséoire de la France, but in 1875 it was expanded % aul Vidal de I Biche, Tabor dl graph de le Frama (Pais Hachets, 1909. The easly sections have been ttaculated into nglsh se The peat of Fre (London: Chestophers, 1928 im guotadons ae fom pp. 5758, 69 7 Kestia Ross, The enone of ial pce Rial oad the Pais Comme (Minneapolis: Univesity ‘of Minneiot Pret, 1988) pp. 85-87, Basie Gibin, “Le paying, le teran et ks geogmphes” “Hrd 9 (1978) pp. 74-89. Ror leo drove atenton to Vidas use of venual metaphors in these passages zad his implicit feminization of andseape and “retire.” I restn to this below, 3 Nidal, Ply p14.