Mapping the Subject

Geographies of Cultural Transformation

Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134852284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Rejecting static and reductionist understandings of subjectivity, this book asks how people find their place in the world. Mapping the Subject is an inter-disciplinary exploration of subjectivity, which focuses on the importance of space in the constitution of acting, thinking, feeling individuals.
The authors develop their arguments through detailed case studies and clear theoretical expositions. Themes discussed are organised into four parts: constructing the subject, sexuality and subjectivity, the limits of identity, and the politics of the subject.
There is, here, a commitment to mapping the subject - a subject which is in some ways fluid, in other ways fixed; which is located in constantly unfolding power, knowledge and social relationships. This book is, moreover, about new maps for the subject.

1

Introduction

Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift

The human subject is difficult to map for numerous reasons. There is the difficulty of mapping something that does not have precise boundaries. There is the difficulty of mapping something that cannot be counted as singular but only as a mass of different and sometimes conflicting subject positions. There is the difficulty of mapping something that is always on the move, culturally, and in fact. There is the difficulty of mapping something that is only partially locatable in time-space. Then, finally, there is the difficulty of deploying the representational metaphor of mapping with its history of subordination to an Enlightenment logic in which everything can be surveyed and pinned down.

There is, however, another way of thinking of mapping, as wayfinding. This is the process of ‘Visiting in turn all, or most, of the positions one takes to constitute the field…[covering] descriptively as much of the terrain as possible, exploring it on foot rather than looking down at it from an airplane’ (Mathy 1993:15) and it is this meaning that is deployed in this introductory chapter. In spirit, wayfinding is probably closest to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between mapping and mere tracing;

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented towards an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious… The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual group or social formation… A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing which always comes back ‘to the same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’.

(1988:12)

This introductory chapter is therefore an attempt to find a way through the forests of literature on the subject. The first section of this chapter discusses the subject which figures in geographical discourse, arguing that subjectivity has been examined only rarely and in very specific ways. In the latter section, we move on to consider the matter of terms; even wayfinding requires some landmarks. This path is not meant to be definitive, but to raise questions about commonly assumed notions—the body, the self, the person, identity and the subject—which this collection of essays refuses to take for granted. Inevitably, we fail to cover all the terrain but, hopefully, we will have provided the reader with the beginnings of a map or, more accurately perhaps, a map of beginnings.

Geographies of the Subject

In everyday life, certain words are bandied around with thoughtless abandon, such as body, self, person, identity and subject. When these words are used in this way, they become solid triangulation points with which it is possible to map ‘the subject’ into the social landscape. Phrases including these words appear obvious—the words themselves seem to need no further elaboration. For example, the line in the old song—‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’—plays on the ambiguity of the phrase ‘hold against’, while the ‘it’ of ‘a beautiful body’ is cheerfully assumed. Other expressions, however, speak of greater anxiety about the everyday experience and understanding of these co-ordinates of the subject: what does it mean to say ‘She is beside herself with anger’? She may be angry because someone has tried to chat her up using that line from the old song, but how can she be ‘beside’ her own self—has she cracked in two or was she already split? Or has she lost control, but control over what? This is not just an expression—it speaks of an experience of self, body, identity and subjectivity that cannot be quite so easily contained within dictionary definitions or commonplace understandings of what these words mean. The question becomes how terms such as body, self, subjectivity and so on, are to be mapped; crudely, positions have been taken up in relation to a particular dualism, namely structure/agency. This dualism expresses the problem of subject formation in relation to, on the one side, social rules, sanctions and prohibitions and, on the other side, the individual’s feelings, thoughts and actions.

In geography, in the first article to directly address the problem of subject formation, Thrift outlines a research agenda based on the possibility of a theory of social action which recognises both the determinations of structure on the actions of individuals and the determination of individuals to do things, sometimes differently (Thrift 1983a). What is at stake is most famously summarised by Marx’s ‘unobjectionable’ aphorism: ‘people make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing’ (Marx 1852). The problem lies in the precise relationship between ‘people’, ‘history’, ‘circumstances’ and ‘choosing’. Thrift shows that, in trying to understand the position of the individual about the social world, social theory has usually decided to resolve the issue either on the side of structure or on the side of agency. To simplify greatly: on the side of structure, it is argued that circumstances by and large determine what people choose to do—from this position, it is a short step to believe that circumstances determine what people do and that people are unwitting dupes to the dominant logic of the social structure (whether this is named as capitalism or patriarchy or…and so on); on the side of agency, it is argued that people make history, though bound by certain constraints—from here, it is a short step to believe that people are completely free to choose what to do, without constraint on their actions.

These positions can be caricatured still further.

From the perspective of structure, our triangulation points of the subject (body, self, person, identity, subjectivity) have no meaning outside their relationship within a system of social relations: thus, the body only has meaning as, for example, ‘labour-power’ or ‘male’, or the self only has meaning in relationship to ‘class consciousness’ or ‘masculine’, for example. Whatever the theory of the dominant system of meaning and power, it is this that fills the empty containers of body, self, person, identity. Outside the dominant system—whether it be capitalism, patriarchy or something else—these components are assumed to do nothing. The challenge, then, is to change the system.

From the perspective of agency, the co-ordinates of body, self, person, identity and subjectivity have their own internal meaning, though this is commonly taken to be hidden under a great depth of received ideas, which are usually understood to disguise their true meaning. The individual’s experiences of body, self, person, identity and subjectivity are seen as central to understanding their (true) meaning. The body (for example) can mean anything that an individual takes it to mean, taking on different qualities at different times: thus, it could be experienced as male, weak, white, old and so on depending on the way the body is coded in a social setting and the way that setting is decoded and recoded. Though cloaked in the meaning of culture, the task is to strip the body (for example) to its bare essentials. Because the subject’s body, self, person, identity and subjectivity are assumed to derive their deep or true meaning either from their own inherent qualities or from the intersubjective experiences of the individual, they are open to contest through changing their meaning.

The problem, for Thrift (1983a), was to conceptualise body, self, person, identity, subjectivity in terms of both structures and agency: after all, social structures could not exist without human subjectivity; on the other hand, social structures at least set the parameters within which humans behave and at most set the rules for ‘allowed’, ‘prohibited’ and ‘enabled’ thoughts and actions. For Thrift, ‘human agency must be seen for what it is, a continuous flow of conduct through time and space constantly interpellating social structure’ (1983a:31). The individual acts in time and space—located, moving, encountering, interpreting, feeling, being and doing.

Through the processes of socialization, the extant physical environment, and so on, individuals draw upon social structure. But at each moment they do this they must also reconstitute that structure through the production or the reproduction of the conditions of production and reproduction. They therefore have the possibility, as, in some sense, capable and knowing agents, of reconstituting or even transforming that structure.

(Thrift 1983a:29)

Through this dualism—structure/agency—it is possible to locate co-ordinates such as the body and the self not only in relation to structural determinations and the meanings they give to the lives of individuals but also in terms of the relationship between the meanings people give to their lives and the choices they subsequently make. It is clear that history must be viewed from both sides of the coin—and the problem Marx’s aphorism raises appears to have been solved.

However, the structure/agency dualism has not exhausted the mapping of the subject: more recently, the debate has been recast onto the terrain of language, or more properly ‘discourse’. One outstanding problem with the way the structure/agency dualism operated was that it still seemed unable to interrogate ‘everyday life’ as simultaneously real, imaginary and symbolic. The assumption that terms such as the body or the self had identifiable meanings informed the structure/agency debate. This assumption was challenged in poststructuralist thought.

By concentrating simultaneously on ‘discourse’ as an identifiable practice or institution and the interanimations between different discursive practices, it was possible to argue that the co-ordinates of subjectivity were constituted by the practices that they seemingly described. Words such as body and self seem to describe things, but in fact disguise their constitution by those very words. Institutional practices such as the madhouse, prisons, schools and universities, rather than containing particular subjects, actually and actively create them: thus, prisons create prisoners, universities create students. Prisoners and students are inconceivable outside of the institutions that give them meaning. The structure/agency debate had been twisted: ‘discourse’ was neither structure nor agency and both structure and agency. From this perspective, the body or the self becomes a location within various power-riddled discursive positions, but where the body or the self is not a passive medium on which cultural meanings are merely inscribed; they are neither a thing nor a free-floating set of attributes. Aware of the discursive production of subjectivity and the facts of life, Elspeth Probyn proposes that the self:

is a doubled entity: it is involved in the ways in which we go about our everyday lives, and it puts into motion a mode of theory that problematizes the material conditions of those practices. Unlike the chickens which are presumably sexed one way or the other, once and for all, a gendered self is constantly reproduced within the changing mutations of difference. While its sex is known, the ways in which it is constantly re-gendered are never fixed or stable. One way of imaging this self is to think of it as a combination of acetate transparencies: layers and layers of lines and directions that are figured together and in depth, only then to be rearranged.

(1993:1)

Thus, the focus of an analysis of the self or body has changed from identifying their location on the continuum between structural and personal determination to looking at the ways in which subjectivity is reproduced in time and space: for example, the truth of sex is ‘performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence’ (Butler 1990:24). The co-ordinates of subjectivity are, thereby, reproduced both through discursive practices and through power-laden regulatory practices. ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1990:33).

Questions still remain—and they relate to the map of the subject: co-ordinates—such as body, self, identity, subjectivity—appear to tell us who the individual is, what they are like, whether we like them, but this is dependent on the kind of map on which we place these co-ordinates. The ‘mapping’ metaphor, which appears to tell us a great deal, actually hides other relationships. Thus, Catherine Nash shows how a flat, two-dimensional map articulated masculinist and colonial desire to control the land and place its subjects within places which it controlled (1993). She suggests that post-colonial discourses gave the map ‘Volume and height’, where the map subverts its own authority by disclaiming its ability to re-present the true, real world (1993:52). Thus, the representation of topography ‘becomes a shifting ground, a spatial metaphor which frees conceptions of identity and landscape from repressive fixity and solidity’ (Nash 1993:52). Under this conception, the map must suffer continual renaming and remapping in order to prevent its closure around one dominant cartography of meaning and power.

This book seeks to take apart the cotton-woolled security surrounding maps of the subject, to release the co-ordinates of subjectivity from static, uniform, transparent notions of place and being, which seemingly inform the way the subject is thought of. From this perspective, it is inappropriate to think the co-ordinates of subjectivity as being like lines and directions on layers and layers of transparent acetate sheets. Problems lie in the seeming stability, transparency and autonomy of each layer of the self—and a self seems to stand outside the layers choosing the arrangement of the layers. At the very least, the self would appear to be constituted through these layers and unable to ‘shuffle’ identity in this way. Other metaphors will need to be found, other maps need to be drawn, which are more capable of elucidating the fixity and fluidity, the ambivalence and ambiguity, the transparency and opacity and the surface and depth of the mapped subject.

Territories of the Subject

Mapping the subject usually begins as a journey away from the forbidden territory of Enlightenment thought, from the Cartesian division of mind and body (or reason and nature) and the tenets of humanism (especially the privileging of the human, the individual, consciousness, agency, self-knowledge and experience). But making this journey means negotiating a whole series of interconnected terms—the body, the self, identity—the person, the subject—which are both the main terrains of inquiry and the chief cartographic tools that we have to hand. It is no surprise, then, that these terms are usually equivocal, often ambiguous, sometimes evasive and always contested. What follows is not, therefore, a set of definitional terms. Rather, it is an attempt to get a preliminary feel for the lie of the land.

Whilst we do not believe that there is a requirement for any absolute exactitude, it is, nevertheless, dangerous to avoid any attempt to define these tools. Therefore in this section, we attempt to give at least a minimum of form to these ideas which will constitute the contested territories of this book.

The first term is the body. Harré has highlighted the enormous number of ways in which the body can be used in societies:

we use our bodies for grounding personal identity in ourselves and recognising it in others. We use other bodies as points of reference in relating to other material things. We use our bodies for the assignment of all sorts of roles, tasks, duties and strategies. We use our bodies for practical action. We use our bodies for the expression of moral judgements. We use the condition of our bodies for legitimating a withdrawal from the demands of everyday life. We use our bodies for reproducing the human species. We use our bodies for artwork, as surfaces for decoration, and as new material for sculpture. We use human bodies for reproducing the human species. We use human bodies for the management of the people so embodied. We use our own bodies and those of others to command the cosmos. We use our bodies as message boards, and their parts as succinct codes. We use our bodies for fun, for amusement and for pastimes.

(1991:257)

Given this bewildering variety, it is still possible to identify at least five related but distinct approaches to the study of the body. The first of these sees the body as a part of a general temporal and spatial logic, an ‘order of connection’: ‘this is the order found in nature’s logic which perpetuates the living, a logic of multitudinous paths that interect, which works through living things rather than imposes itself upon them from outside and above’ (Brennan 1993:86). This is the kind of order found in time-geography and similar attempts to map the logic of corporeality. The second approach identifies the body as part of a prediscursive realm through an emphasis on bodily movement. As Merleau-Ponty (1962a: 140) puts it:

our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of [theoretical knowledge]; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia’ which has to be recognised as original and perhaps as primary.

A third approach considers the body as an origin. This is a notion often found in psychological theory, whether as identification with the father, or, latterly, to make up for the ‘originary absence’ in Freudian theory, the Mother (Irigaray 1985a). A fourth approach to the body sees it as a site of cultural consumption, a surface to be written on, ‘an externality that presents itself to others and to culture as a writing or inscriptive surface’ (Grosz 1989:10). Thus, for example, women’s clothes may inscribe ‘maternity’ on their bodies. In this approach the body becomes significant ‘only insofar as it is deemed to be by factors external to the body, be they social systems (Turner), discourse (Foucault) or shared vocabularies of body (Goffman)’ (Shilling 1993:99).

What is clear is that the body, understood as a biological entity, has undergone significant spatial augmentation. On one level, there is the physical extension of capacities made possible through the various media of telecommunications. The body is able, as a result, to act at a distance. At another level the body now has much greater capacities for peripatetic movement through the development of transportation. Fifth and finally, the body can be physically constructed in ways that were not available before. ‘Medical’ developments like plastic surgery mean that the body can be continually represented.

We have identified logical, prediscursive, psychological, cultural and social approaches to the body. So far as the next term, the self is concerned, the range of approaches that can be adopted are not just complex but bewildering in their variety. In the literature, the meaning of the self constantly slides from the simply ego of ‘folk psychology’ to complex, even heroic, projects of self-creation of the Nietzschean and, more recently, Foucaldian kind: ‘one thing is needful—to “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare act!’ (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, cited in Glover 1988:131). Ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mapping the Subject
• Part I: Constructing the subject
• Part II: Sexuality and subjectivity
• Part III: The limits of identity
• Part IV: The politics of the subject
• Bibliography
• Index