Place/Culture/Representation

James S. Duncan, David Ley, James S. Duncan, David Ley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415094511
• eBook ISBN: 9781135860356
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Spatial and cultural analysis have recently found much common ground, focusing in particular on the nature of the city. Place/Culture/Representation brings together new and established voices involved in the reshaping of cultural geography.
The authors argue that as we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning. Writing becomes as much about the author as it is about purported geographical reality. The issue becomes not scientific truth as the end but the interpretation of cultural constructions as the means.
Discussing authorial power, discourses of the other, texts and textuality, landscape metaphor, the sites of power-knowledge relations and notions of community and the sense of place, the authors explore the ways in which a more fluid and sensitive geographer's art can help us make sense of ourselves and the landscapes and places we inhabit and think about.

1
Introduction

Representing the place of culture

James Duncan and David Ley

Topographical Survey

The drawing by Joanne Sharp entitled Topographical Survey, which appears on the facing page, parodies and calls into question a traditional form of geographical representation, the map. Sharp has created a space between two discourses – that of the cartographic surveyor on the one hand, and that of the Foucauldian critique of surveillance on the other. Not only does the drawing expose the concealed values behind the map but so too does its title, for if one performs a close reading of the dictionary definitions of ‘topography’ and ‘survey’ one can see that running alongside a language of ‘objective’ science is another language of power.

Topography: The science or practice of describing a particular place, city, town, manor, parish, or tract of land.

(The Oxford Universal Dictionary)

Topography claims to be a ‘science’, that is, a discourse of technical, objective, rational, Enlightenment knowledge. Such knowledge is often claimed to be universal in its scope and free of cultural or political interests. But topography (like cartography)¹ also is a ‘practice’, knowledge put to use, knowledge in the service of power that is deeply intertwined in the cultural, social and political webs of a society. Such knowledge is intended to describe the way in which a social formation is made visible on the face of the earth. It is a practice which describes boundaries, including property relations, and thereby objectifies them, rationalizes them and makes them seem like objects of nature through the legitimizing tropes of the discourse of science. Topography is a system of knowledge which can encompass the world; its purview (as the artist shows) takes in the rural and the urban, the secular and the religious. Its theoretical reach even extends beyond the edge of settlement to empty tracts of land. Topography is also therefore a science of domination – confirming boundaries, securing norms and treating questionable social conventions as unquestioned social facts.

Survey: The act of looking at something as a whole, or from a commanding position.

(The Oxford Universal Dictionary)

Here we have the power of observation – the very process that produces the science of topography. It claims to be a totalizing gaze, rational and universal, which sees the whole and orders it. In practice it is usually a white, male, elite, Eurocentric observer who orders the world that he looks upon, one whose observations and classifications provide the rules of representation, of inclusion and exclusion, of precedent and antecedent, of inferior and superior.

Topographical Survey speaks not simply about mapping but more broadly about the nature of representation in cultural geography. The picture and its title also raise the question of mimesis, of an accurate copy. By adopting the discourse of science, thus claiming to grasp the whole, to assume a commanding position, the surveyor ‘captures’ the world in miniature. The world is mimetically reduced to the text. Topographical Survey attacks the surveyor’s imperial gaze by returning it; locating this surveyor within the landscape fractures the illusion of absence and reveals, and thus problematizes, the claims to power through mimesis. One might also read in this picture a new cultural geography no longer surveyed exclusively from the authoritative perspective of the Berkeley School and its inspirational leader, Carl Sauer. One of the major tasks of this volume is to begin to map out a series of alternative ways of seeing and interpreting within the field of cultural geography.

On Representation

The task of scholars is to represent the world to others in speech and print. Yet until recently representation has not been widely problematized either within geography or within Anglo-American social science more broadly. Perhaps because it is so central to our whole enterprise, the question of how we should represent the world has usually been taken for granted. This fundamental level of agreement concerns the issue of mimesis, the belief that we should strive to produce as accurate a reflection of the world as possible. Within this broad area of consensus, debate has swirled around the issue of how best to achieve an accurate copy of reality in our writings.

Within twentieth-century Anglo-American human geography we can discern four major modes of representation, two of which operate within the framework of mimetic representation and two of which pose varying degrees of challenge to mimesis. The first and dominant mode in traditional cultural geography, and indeed most of human geography until the 1950s, was ‘descriptive fieldwork’ based upon observation. The assumption underlying this position is that trained observation transcribed into clear prose and unencumbered by abstract theorizing produces an accurate understanding of the world.

The second mode is a form of mimesis loosely based upon positivist science. Although popular within geography more generally since the 1950s it has had almost no impact upon the practice of cultural geography because in its drive to produce abstract, reductionist descriptions of the world there is little or no room for the differences between places produced by cultural variation. Although these two modes of representation are thought to be opposed because the former values the concrete and the particular and the latter the abstract and the general, the representational claims of these two types of practice are basically similar in that they both accept the goal of achieving mimesis. Their rhetorical claims differ primarily in that the former draws upon nineteenth-century models of science and is more concerned with description and classification, while the latter draws upon early twentieth-century models and is more concerned with the construction of spatial theory.

The third type of practice is a postmodernism which represents a radical attack upon the mimetic theory of representation and the search for truth.² In this sense it is anti-foundational in that it explicitly rejects the totalizing ambitions of modern social science. A postmodern orientation distrusts and interrogates all meta-narratives including those of the researcher. Such an epistemology, if taken seriously, is inescapably and radically relativist. Although there has been great interest within geography in postmodernism of late, few geographers, as we shall see, have been willing to embrace its epistemology to this extent.

The fourth type of practice is interpretative and its basis is hermeneutics. Unlike the first two positions, it acknowledges the role of the interpreter and therefore rules out mimesis in the strict sense of the term. Rather than setting up a model of a universal, value-neutral researcher whose task is to proceed in such a manner that s/he is converted into a cipher, this approach recognizes that interpretation is a dialogue between one’s data – other places and other people –and the researcher who is embedded within a particular intellectual and institutional context. It is precisely the interpersonal – and intercultural – nature of the hermeneutic method which poses a challenge to mimesis, since a ‘perfect copy’ of the world clearly is not possible if the interpreter is present in that textual copy. A number of theoretical positions within geography can be accommodated by adopting a broad definition of hermeneutics. For example, certain types of humanistic geography (Buttimer, 1974; Ley and Samuels 1978), including Marxian humanism (Cosgrove 1983), as well as a new cultural geography influenced by the work of Clifford Geertz and post-structural anthropologists (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Duncan 1990; Duncan and Duncan 1988, forthcoming; Gregory 1989; Ley 1987, 1989), all adopt hermeneutic modes of representation.

The Critique of Mimetic Theories of Representation

Of late there have been calls by Rabinow (1986) and others for the abandonment of theories of representation that are mimetic and posit universal validity. The ‘crisis of representation’ in ethnography, as Marcus and Fischer (1986) have termed it, is part of a broader attack within a number of fields upon mimesis and the ‘natural attitude’ which underlies it. This ‘natural attitude’ stems from the philosophers of the Enlightenment, for whom language and imagery appeared to be perfect, transparent media through which reality could be represented to understanding. However, in modern literary and art criticism they are thought of as ‘a prison house’ (Jameson 1972) which locks us into particular modes of understanding and separates us from the world. The opacity of these media, it is argued, stems from the fact that there is no neutral, univocal, ‘visible world’ out there to match our vision against. Put slightly differently, ‘there is no vision without purpose … the innocent eye is blind’ for the ‘world is already clothed in our systems of representation’ (Mitchell 1986: 38).³ As such our representations of the world cannot be other than ‘partial truths’ (Clifford 1986a).

Bryson (1983: 13–15) defines realism as ‘the coincidence between a representation and that which a society assumes as its reality’. However, for a society to maintain the illusion that its representations are natural representations it must conceal their historic specificity. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus, a coherent set of values and orientations, Bryson argues that ‘culture produces itself around a “habitus” which, though discontinuous with the natural world, merges into it as an order whose join with Nature is nowhere visible’. Here Bryson uses the term ‘nature’ to refer to external reality. While we may not see the difference between the world and our own representations of it, he is saying, others, whose cultural site or point of view differs from ours, may see our discrepancies (though perhaps not their own) much more clearly. This ‘invisible join’ between reality and cultural representations of it, which is so essential to the ‘natural attitude’ of objectivism and cultural reproduction, might not be acknowledged, he argues, were it not for modes of representation such as painting which, at different historical periods under the influence of varying conventions of genre, and under different social formations, have produced dissimilar essential copies of the world. Any appeal to the natural attitude in painting, then, is a mystification.

In literature the natural attitude takes the form of literary realism and is equally suspect for it conceals the social construction of language. As Eagleton points out, ‘it helps to confirm the prejudice that there is a form of “ordinary language” which is somehow natural. This natural language gives us reality “as it is” ’ (1983: 135). Realism is ideological according to Eagleton, for it passes off as natural that which is in fact cultural. It is such a transformation of cultural productions that are historically specific that Barthes (1986: 129, 143) terms myth. Myths, he says, naturalize; they turn history into nature. The myth of realism creates ‘a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves’. This mythology of mimesis, Jay (1986: 182) argues, must be overcome by the realization that ‘what is “seen” is not a given, objective reality … but an epistemological field constructed as much linguistically as visually’. Perhaps Foucault (1970: 251) best captures the enormity of the task facing those who wish to traverse the treacherous terrain of representation when he writes that ‘the visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss’.

White (1978: 130) points out that historians are also guilty of thinking that language can serve as a perfectly transparent medium of representation if only they can find the right words to allow the meaning of an event to ‘display itself to consciousness’. LaCapra (1983: 74–5) claims that historians who hold this view combine the paradigm of late nineteenth-century science with that of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Both share the pre-critical conception of facts as the ultimate ‘givens’ of an account.

Within geography the humanistic critique (Ley and Samuels 1978) was one of the first sustained attacks upon the positivist variant of mimesis discussed earlier, arguing for the centrality of values and valuing in the construction of knowledge. It was only later with the rise of interest in cultural theory that older, descriptive perspectives on mimesis (such as narrative) were subjected to scrutiny. A critical view of the mimetic claims of description builds a more serious divide between a traditional cultural geography committed to theory-free empiricism and a recent cultural geography committed to theory-laden interpretation. The critique of mimesis has recently been extended into cartography by Harley (1988, 1992) using the methods of deconstruction and by Pickles (1992) using the insights of hermeneutics. Both authors demonstrate how, in spite of rhetorical claims to objectivity, maps are texts within discourses of power.

A tenacious set of cultural conventions constantly subverts the achievement of mimesis. A powerful criticism of Western representation has been provided by feminists who have argued that Enlightenment epistemologies are profoundly gendered by patriarchal presuppositions (Harding 1986). The quest for abstraction, for a detached objectivity which disavows any distraction by values in its practice, is said to be characteristic of a Western male. In such a conceptual space there seems to be no room for knowledge as encounter, as ‘one of the regions of my care’ (Buttimer 1974). Marxism, particularly its abstract, economic variants, is derived from a similar tradition of Western rationality and has also collided with the criticism of a gender blindness which in essentializing the female form has not escaped a pervasively patriarchal view of the world (Deutsche 1991; Massey 1991). In mainstream social science, gendered presuppositions, for example of home and ‘work’, not only colour representations of men and women but also reflect an unequal distribution of power which constrains what female identities may yet become. The division between the private realm of the home and the public realm of civil society has been a gendered dualism, admitting men...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction Representing the place of culture
• Part I On Representation in Cultural Geography
• Part II On Representing Residential Landscapes
• Part III On Representing Institutional Cultures
• Part IV On Representing Cultural Geography
• Index