The Diversion of Culture, the Politics of Cultural
Geography
Neil
Smith
“Power is
like a violin. It is held by the
left hand and played by the right.”
Buenos Aires
aphorism
In 1995, US geographer Don Mitchell published
an article called “There’s no such thing as culture” (Mitchell 1995). Mitchell was responding to the explosion
of cultural analyses in geography since the 1980s, to the emergence of cultural
studies, and to the so-called “cultural turn” in social theory more
broadly. His central argument was
not so much that culture as an identifiable facet of human life did not exist,
but rather that the ontological status attributed to culture in the “new
cultural geography” was specious, illusionary, and politically dangerous. Increasingly rendered an “object” of
study in English-speaking geography, culture was now largely reified in US and
especially British geography.
Mitchell applied to the new cultural geography a parallel critique to
that applied by this new cultural geography to its own nemesis, traditional
cultural geography. That is, the
new cultural geography deploys a “superorganic” conception of culture according
to which culture is universal, an all-encompassing totality that suffuses all
aspects of social life; further,
the concept of culture claims for itself some kind of ontological priority as
regards social practice. More than
a decade later, it is clear that Mitchell’s warning failed to stem the tide of
“culturalism” (Amin 200X) which today dominates the human side of the
discipline. Why has the power of
“culture” been so pervasive in human geography and in the social sciences more
broadly? And how has cultural
geography become increasingly a diversion from the kinds of politics that
launched it in the first place? In
this presentation I want to offer an assessment of the political role that the
“new cultural geography” has played in Anglo-American geography; to suggest ways
in which, within a geographical context, the concept of culture might be rescued
from itself; and to rethink the connection between cultural politics and
political economy.
This lecture comes in four parts.
In the first part I will briefly examine the historical contours of
cultural geography, precisely because it has lessons to teach us. Second I will offer an appreciation and
critique of the “cultural turn.” Third I want to argue the ways in which
cultural geography has today become a diversion, contributing to an
anti-politics. And finally I want
to suggest some alternatives.
Historical Contours
of Cultural Geography
Multiple meanings attach to the notion of culture, perhaps because
historically, in western societies at least, the concept of culture developed in
counterpoint to nature. “Culture”
named the process and results of human attempts to separate themselves from
nature. According to Raymond
Williams (1993), “culture” came to encapsulate three connected realities: it
referred to the development of certain ideas and groupings of ideas, to a
densely interlinked array of social practices, and ultimately to a way of
life. With such a broad-ranging and
amorphous definition, resulting in no small part from the fact that culture
(“Kultur”) came to be defined by the eighteenth century in opposition to an
equally all-encompassing “nature,” it is not difficult to understand how
“culture” is amenable to a totalizing treatment. Cultural geography emerged in nineteenth
century Europe, still largely undifferentiated
from what would now be understood as social/cultural anthropology, and as part
of a wider Enlightenment pursuit of moral philosophy. In different national contexts, cultural
geography took on different accents and levels of importance, but in the
European context, this subdiscipline was closely tied to the needs and
knowledges of colonial expansion.
From Madrid to Berlin, Rome to London, cultural geography
identified different human cultures across the world and explained them very
much in terms of the characteristics of the regions they occupied. This did not necessarily involve an
environmental determinism but very often it did: culture was the product of
environment. Or at least, culture
could not be understood separate from environment and region – or else what was
the rationale for cultural geography. It had multiple motivations and effects,
but cultural geography fundamentally contributed to the encyclopedia of colonial
knowledge concerning the social reproduction of potential labour power and the
social habits and consumption practices of those who might comprise a market for
European factories.
In Britain, cultural geography was
especially tied to colonial expansion whereas an emerging social geography
addressed many of the same kinds of questions at home. In Germany, by
contrast, the intellectual opposition of “Kultur und Natur” was so strong that
cultural geography dominated the human side of the field. This was the tradition that most
influenced US geography in the late nineteenth
century, and as the discipline began to develop its social rather than physical
side after World War I, cultural geography was human geography. However progressive in this context,
Carl Sauer (1925) was a central early figure in mid-twentieth century cultural
geography in the United
States, helping to establish the superorganic
conception of culture which became the norm. A quarter century later, one of the most
prominent figures in twentieth century cultural geography in the
United
States, Wilbur Zelinsky, expressed this
superorganicism precisely:
... the totality of
culture is much greater than the simple sum of its parts, so much so that it
appears to be a superorganic entity living and changing according to a still
obscure set of internal laws.
Although individual minds are needed to sustain it, by some remarkable
process culture also lives on its own, quite apart from the single person or his
volition, as a sort of ‘macro-idea’, a shared abstraction with a special mode of
existence and set of rules (Zelinsky, 1973, 71).
In disciplinary terms, the cultural turn in geography, beginning in the
1980s reacted against this superorganic vision of cultural geography. Not only was cultural geography
criticized as totalizing, but its evident idealism – culture as an idea – was
also challenged. Long before this
direct challenge, cultural geography of the colonial/American sort had become
moribund, lifeless, in the face of far more vibrant alternatives: namely, the
quantitative revolution of the 1960s quickly followed by the social theory
revolution of the 1970s – marxism, phenomenology, feminism, political ecology,
postcolonial theory, and much more.
We are still living through the latter period – and the backlash against
it – notwithstanding the resurgence of quantitative positivism at the hands of
GIS technologies, and the increasing divorce (in the Anglo-American world at
least) of intellectual social theory from class politics and from many other
political movements.
Against this historical backdrop, the new cultural geography of the 1980s
and afterward promised a radically new and politically energized approach to the
connection between culture and politics, geography and cultural practice. It was fuelled not just by a narrow
critique of traditional twentieth century cultural geography, although that
played a larger part in the earliest work than is generally acknowledged. It was fuelled too by a combination of
other influences. First, the new
cultural geography was part of a larger shift in left politics toward a politics
of culture. At one level this shift
was prompted by the political movements of the 1960s as they became
institutionalized in identity politics, in the broadest sense. Arguably the major concern for feminist
political writing in the early 1980s, for example, was, as political theorist
Nancy Hartsock put it at the time, that feminism lacked its own coherent
theory. That was about to change,
and with a vengeance. In search of
a theoretical foundation for these avowedly anti-foundational movements,
feminist theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory galvanized an
extraordinary creativity in social scientific research. Second, and obviously related, the new
cultural geography drew inspiration from the brief flowering of postmodernism in
the 1980s and the early 1990s, and its emphasis on the discursive interpretation
of material and popular culture.
This shift had nothing to do with the existing anthropological literature
on material culture; rather, it emphasized the consumer cultures of the period
in Europe and North America. Nothing in this period was more
overanalyzed than Madonna’s clothing choices. Cultural studies became the
academic incarnation of this work, its own ghetto of celebratory
representationality, increasingly distanced from the social experiences of many
it represented. Third, what
postmodernism skimmed over in its search for the weightiest meaning embedded in
the most superficial cultural gesture, poststructuralism seemed to
backfill. The politics of
poststructural theory, especially but not only that of Foucault, was twisted in
translation into English as a micropolitics of the cultural interstices of
everyday life, foundationally antagonistic to any kind of political economy (or
even cultural politics) that did not reaffirm a certain post-economic
individualism. But to my reading,
Foucault, whose work is so thoroughly rooted in Marx (even in critique), and who
is nevertheless generally treated in Anglo-American circles as the ant-Marx –
Foucault must be defended. In the
first place he must be defended against so many English-language Foucauldians.
But that would be to embark on a different project.
This brings us to the fourth rationale for the new cultural
geography. More than anything the
new cultural geography represented a reaction to the power of marxist and
political economic analyses in geography from the 1970s onward. The new cultural geography galvanized
critiques from an eclectic range of theoretical influences to present an
alternative to 1970s and 1980s political economy. From the late 1960s to the mid 1980s,
marxist work had taken English-speaking geography by storm. Marxism found itself strangely powerful
in the discipline of geography in the early years of the Thatcher, Reagan and
Kohl regimes and at a time when the US supported more criminal dictatorships in
Latin America than at any time since.
If the strength of marxism in Anglo-American geography was surely an
untenable situation in the long run it was a heady prospect in the short term.
The older superorganic culturalism, from Sauer to Zelinsky, seemed to many still
to be struggling to enter the twentieth century and was no serious obstacle to
marxist work. And the “new”
positivist geography, which with its scientific matrices, equations and
algorithms had sparked such hope in the early 1960s, was also for a quite
different reason incapable of neutralizing marxist theory. Against the backdrop of the 1960s and
1970s revolts, the new positivism seemed dramatically irrelevant to the
political demands of the time and to any attempt to understand the “production
of space,” as Henri Lefebvre would call it at the time. Anglo-American geography had never had
any deeply rooted social theory; even its pragmatism was untheorized in the
United
States where theories of pragmatism ruled
political philosophers for much of the century. Without significant social theory,
geography at best shared certain social or scholarly prejudices that were often
borrowed, never well thought out: environmental determinism, positivism,
cultural historicism, and so forth.
The discipline did not have the theoretical sophistication to deal with
the marxist challenge, or even to deflect it; in short, it had no immune system
to fight this social theoretical novelty which provided deeper and broader
explanations for the social nature of geography than had ever been proposed in
the past. Many young positivists
quickly and unceremoniously abandoned positivism and realigned themselves with
marxist social theory in one form or another. David Harvey may have been the
most prominent but he was only one of many: Eric Sheppard, Michael Webber,
Doreen Massey, Jim Blaut, among many others in Anglo-American geography.
The new cultural geography of the 1980s and afterward was based on a
fundamental challenge to the intellectual power and claims of this marxist
work. It insisted that culture and
not just the economy was political too.
It mobilized critiques of structuralism – especially critiques of Louis
Althusser – as if they were critiques of marxism tout court (Duncan and Ley
1982). With only passing attention
to the work it would dismiss, but bolstered by identitarian, culturalist and
post-structuralist critiques, the new cultural geography focused especially on
questions of consumption. Social
production, for the new cultural geography, was now passé in a supposedly
postindustrial world, unless one was concerned with the production of
representations, the making of discourse.
Otherwise, the emphasis lay on the mode of consumption and the cultural
field through which images, social differences, and cultural ideas were
consumed. The French psychological
theory of Lacan, and the psychologically influenced theory of Derrida or
Kristeva, played a particularly important role here. The politics of consumption became
entwined with the politics of subject formation; whereas social production might
be seen as narrowly responsible for the creation of economic value, consumption
became increasingly connected to the issue of subject
construction.
The Cultural Turn —
a Critique
There can be no questioning the insistence on the politics of culture,
nor indeed the importance of such an insistence in the 1980s and afterward. There are a number of reasons for this,
but in addition to the intellectual and political developments already
mentioned, the world looked very different in this period compared to the
post-world war II era. The 1980s
ushered in a period of massive economic expansion in the centers of European and
North American power, and even more unprecedented economic growth among elites,
dictatorships, ruling classes and professional classes throughout the
world. This brought wealth for many
and burgeoning consumption and a sense that in a new supposedly postindustrial
world the political questions may be changing. The cultural turn in academia in many
ways represented a response to these shifts. The explosion of “image capitalism,”
facilitated by computer, internet and satellite technologies that were unknown
to the world’s masses two decades ago, did not invent Bollywood or hip hop, nor
Google nor My Space social networking, nor myriad other cultural productions,
but “image capitalism” did bring about the globalization of these cultural
forms. The cultural turn, and with
it cultural geography, responded with the claim that relations of consumption
now dominated, even eclipsed, relations of production, and the focus of cultural
scholarship adjusted accordingly to such questions of consumption.
It is fair to say that in its earliest versions, the new cultural
geography attempted to fill in a vital and missing area of scholarship. As it evolved, however, this focus on
consumption has become more and more exclusionary and reductionist. First, what some people in the so-called
West still call a postindustrial world, in which culture and consumption rule,
is actually a quite limited phenomenon.
The luxury of distance from the production process is both a class
question and a question of geography.
In European and North American societies where the percentage of
extraction and manufacturing employment is declining, class divisions have
become more not less deep: uneven development has become more not less
extreme. While workers’ wages
have remained constant or even declined over the last four decades in the
United
States, the incomes of the highest earning 1%
have risen 300%. The level of
inequality in the US, as
measured statistically by Gini coefficients, is much more extreme than in 1970
and exceeds the comparable rates for even Russia, China or India. The pay of corporate Chief Executive
Officers (CEOs) in the US was 42 times that of the average
wage worker in 1982; today it
is an astonishing ratio of 364:1.
In 2006, four corporate bosses in equity and hedge fund (financial)
companies actually took home an income of over $1 billion. The top 20 US CEOs – corporate bosses –
averaged $658 million each, last year – a cool $2.8 million per working day of
the year. On that kind of salary, you can afford a lot of consumption. The unequal share of wealth in the
United
States has returned to the levels of the 1930s
Depression.
Second, this criminal intensification of uneven development is global and
local as much as national.
The productive work that sustains the US ruling class, and Europe and
North America more generally, increasingly takes place in the cities and
villages of China, the factories of Sao Paulo and Mumbai, the smaller cities of
South and East Asia, Latin America, and to a far more limited extent,
sub-Saharan Africa. There too, the
inequalities between rich and poor are expanding to unprecedented levels. In the heartlands of Europe and North
America – and it is important to remember that the US remains the world’s
largest manufacturing economy, still accounting for more than a fifth of global
production – this work disproportionately employs women, immigrants and minorities, or
else it is ideologically disguised as some kind of “service” work.
About these changing realities, cultural geography has been
remarkably silent. Insofar as these
realities are “out of sight” they are too readily “out of cultural mind.” In fact, there are more workers in the
world today, more people involved in social production, than at any previous
time, but the cultural geography of work barely exists as a focus of academic
research. In this respect, the new
cultural geography, which has prided itself on colonizing the cutting edge of
social change – the new power of consumption – is actually dramatically
irrelevant to much that is happening in the world and to large parts of the
lives of the majority of people.
From this point of view, the new cultural geography at least in the
English-speaking world has increasingly come to represent an extremely
ethnocentric and class-privileged view of the world.
Third, it is important to examine critically the nature of the new
cultural geography’s critique of marxist analysis. For the new cultural geography, marxism
was incapable or uninterested in engaging a cultural critique. But this is patently false. Quite apart from the cultural writings
of classical marxists – Trotsky on art, for example – one can think of Gramsci
whose political writings completely embraced the question of social reproduction
and consumption. Or there is Henri
Lefebvre, a fervent marxist critic of much 1970s French poststructuralist theory
(despite the efforts of English-language cultural geographers to absorb him into
exactly that poststruturalism) – Lefebvre who in the 1940s, while a member of
the communist party, began pioneering the analysis of everyday life. Marxists such as Raymond Williams and
Edward Thompson for decades advanced a cultural marxist critique, and the
cultural marxist tradition was even stronger in continental Europe – Perry
Anderson’s classic History of Western Marxism never mentioned political
economy – and in Latin America. It is certainly true that the revival of
marxism in English-speaking geography oriented significantly toward a
spatialized political economy.
Traditional economic geography of the 1960s recognized no social or
cultural difference at all, except via income, employment status and other such
statistical measures, and marxist work insisted on the discussion of social
class and race, social movements and environment, gender and imperialism. A dispassionate examination of the pages
of Antipode: a Radical Journal of Geography, the major outlet for
radical ideas after 1969 quickly confirms the diversity and indeed eclecticism
of radical geography in the 1970s and 1980s. And even the most prominent marxists in
geography have never been focused purely on the economic. David Harvey, to take the most obvious
example, was concerned about the cultural geography of Paris throughout his
thirty-year analytical involvement with that city (Harvey 1985; 2003). And there are many other examples. This makes it even more significant that
the new cultural geography has tried to fashion itself in such direct opposition
to marxist political economy. Why
is the new cultural geography so opposed to political economy? Why does the new cultural geography seem
more drawn to Madonna, for example, to discourse on cultural fashion, or to
used-clothing sales – none of these especially geographical concerns – than it
does to the questions of everyday life among workers in the Chinese factories
that make the fashions that Madonna wears?
My critique here is not that a new cultural geography was unnecessary;
clearly it was. Rather, the work
done by the new cultural geography today is very different from the work it
might have done given its origins.
The politics of consumption is an inherently important topic, but not
when the focus on culture and consumption becomes an excuse to exclude cultures
of production and the working lives of people around the world. The social construction of the subject,
as pioneered in poststructuralist work, is perhaps even more important insofar
as it can help provide an understanding of how and why people abdure or tolerate
repressive power applied to them, become complicit in that power, and how and
why they revolt against that power.
But this perspective has lost any utility when it refuses to recognized
structured social differences of class, for example, and cuts itself off from
social movements, including labour and class movements that are (among others)
capable of making social change. It
has lost its utility, in short, when it becomes a powerless social
constructionism, often expressed in the passive voice – “the other is constructed as ....” –
instead of explaining how and especially why power relations work in everyday
life as they do. And how these
power relations, which after all are deeply ingrained in the productions of
cultural space – a point made by Professor Lobato Correa and a point not lost to
traditional cultural geography – how these power relations might be
overthrown.
Dancing from
Politics
Discursively and ideologically, the seemingly political mission of
the new cultural geography, at least in the English-speaking literature, is
repeated over and over again, or simply taken for granted. But it is now a largely empty
claim. When second hand shopping in
Northern England or the political culture of gentrified New York restaurants
become the leading edge of the new cultural geography, it is not unreasonable to
ask what is actually left of the politics.
Cultural geography, we have to conclude, has distanced itself from
politics in the same way that it earlier distanced itself from political
economy. The politics of culture
has become an empty assertion, a nostrum, a shibboleth, a token of
resistance without any substance. Politics has in fact been replaced by two
things: first, the quintessentially poststructuralist belief that if one simply
changes the discourse, the world will follow. The idealist fallacy here, of course, is
that while the power of ideas can never be underestimated, it takes social
action to put them into practice.
Second, and closely connected, politics in the new cultural geography is
reduced to ethics. The vacuum
vacated by politics is increasingly filled by an ethical individualism that sees
no political responsibility except for a certain moral correctness. Sanctimony substitutes for
organization. Liberalism returns
via the wide open front door of a pretend radicalism.
The old cultural geography withered and became vulnerable to critique
precisely because it failed to remain relevant in a world where the old
superorganic categories of discrete cultures, national cultures, and culturally
defined civilizations no longer made sense. As the apparent postwar fixity of nation
states and a First, Second, and Third World dissolved in the 1970s, the new
cultural geography both expressed the emerging mobility and social flexibility
of a globalized world but also, especially in its postmodern incarnation, came
too easily to function as a discourse for the consumption ideologies of
globalization itself. The cultural
turn increasingly provides a new technology of how the natives at home
consume. Let me put this even more
directly. What began as an
oppositional project in the 1980s, a critique of a traditional cultural
geography that was unable to extract itself from the colonial and expansionist
agendas of national states, too often ended up, however unintentionally, as a
barely critical and often celebratory discourse of globalization. Diversity has moved from being a radical
demand in terms of race, gender and sexuality to a policy enthusiastically
supported by governments and corporations around the world. Multiculturalism, also once a radical
demand, is now also state policy despite the continuation of racism, gender and
sexual discrimination. To the
extent that the new cultural geography does not critique this state of affairs –
diversity and multiculturalism as establishment policy – but continues to
champion ideas that are now state policy, it has become complicit in the work of
global neoliberalism. The economy
may indeed be ideologically culturalized, but on whose terms, and for what
social goals? For the new cultural
geography, politics increasingly happens by osmosis or simply
assumption.
Not only has the new cultural geography progressively denied political
economy, but it has largely avoided commentary on the major political events of
the last few years. There are, to
be sure, discursive analyses of the racism that has accompanied the
manufacturing of Arabs and Muslims as the new enemies of bourgeois democracy and
free markets. But in a period of brutal war where are the careful cultural
geographical critiques of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of
Civilizations? No other text in
broad support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the potentially imminent escalation into
Iran and/or
Syria calls out for critical cultural
geographical attention? Instead,
risking the same fate as the traditional cultural geography it still strives to
displace, the new cultural geography has proven irrelevant and not even
especially interested in tackling these kinds of political issues that appear in
blogs, on the internet, and on the front pages of newspapers every day. The most apt comparison I can think of
is US cultural and political geography in the 1930s which, confronted with the
rise of geopolitics, was paralyzed by its inability to see geography in a
political register. Geography, they
believed, was science, and politics was something completely different. There were no politics in science, they
argued. Their refusal to become
publicly involved condemned American geography to several decades of
irrelevance.
The situation with the new cultural geography today is different,
obviously, but not very different.
In an ironic twist, this new cultural geography rooted especially in
Britain has become the mirror
image of 1930s US geography – a copy except reversed
as in a mirror. The new cultural
geography already sees itself as necessarily political – politics is in
its founding DNA, inside the microcosmic interstices of its own being. The wars in Afghanistan and the Middle
East may appear as political to some, but they may not be especially
political for other in the new cultural geography. Hence the lack of attention by such
cultural geographers to an ideologue like Huntington. In this perspective, geopolitical or
geoeconomic war is just boring – not at all fun to research. Cultural geography, the argument goes,
has far more important questions.
Like dancing. In case you
think that I am exaggerating about the political decay of the new cultural
geography, or that I am somehow misinterpreting its trajectory, let me quote as
evidence the following from a very prominent English cultural geographer who has
devoted several articles to, among other important issues, dancing. In a new book, he
writes:
In days when the Iraq War,
Afghanistan, 9/11, 7/7 and other such events often seem to have claimed total
occupation of the Western academic psyche, and many academics have reacted with
mammoth statements about warfare, imperialism, capitalism, global warming and
numerous other waypoints on the road to perdition, it is difficult to remember
that other kinds of political impulse might also have something to say...."
(Thrift 2007: )
The cultural politics of
war, and of an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis needlessly killed, have clearly got
in the way of this scholar’s comfortable world view. And what might this world view
look like? Apart from dancing? At a time when airports have been turned
into major palaces of consumption and into extraordinary spaces of state
security against the people, this same geographer has declared to his university
that he wants to turn the university into “an academic Heathrow.” If that is the new cultural geography in
action, we surely need alternatives.
The new cultural geography has indeed become a diversion. On the one hand it can be as much fun as
– dancing. On the other hand, it
increasingly deliberately diverts our attention from anything political. There might be a case here for arguing
that the intense angst around the Iraq war itself produced social
insecurity as a means of social control – but that is not our dancer’s
argument. The intent to divert our
political attention could hardly be more obvious.
As London based cultural theorist Slazoj Zizek (NYT 10/11/07) has
recently argued, “All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural
studies,” and “culture,” he goes on to say, “has commonly become the name for
all those things we practice without taking seriously.” In the same spirit, the new cultural
geography in fact looks like a paradigmatic case of what Manchester geographer
Erik Swyngedouw (2007), in a keynote lecture to the Royal Geographical Society
in London, has described as the “post-political.” In a post-political world, for
Swyngedouw, the signs, representations and claims of politics are mobilized
against any effective politics at all.
After the New
Cultural Geography: Politics by the Front Door
Let me conclude by asking but not necessarily answering a question: How
do we reintroduce politics to cultural geography, or indeed cultural geography
to politics? In general, I
think that a revived cultural geography needs to be critically involved in the
major political issues of the day, and I will make several modest
proposals. First, it is not too
late for a critique of Huntington’s Clash of
Civilizations, a critique which may not any more grab headlines but which
might be valuable insofar as the civilizational ideology of Huntington is widely and
deeply believed and needs to be exposed. How does the unspoken geography of
resource location, social control capital accumulation and consumption intersect
with Huntington’s civilizational map of the
world? Second, I would agree with
Benno Werlen that cultural geography should have a voice in environmental
issues, a voice that has till now been largely missing, especially in
discussions of sustainability. But
this issue highlights precisely the importance of connecting a cultural with a
political economic approach.
Why? Because political
economic and political ecological critiques of sustainability are beginning to
argue that the language of sustainability is now so generally co-opted that it
has no radical or critical intent whatsoever. It is less the environment that is to be
sustained today; apparently; rather the sustainability of profit rates is the
central question. A cultural
geography that engages the ideology of sustainability without taking this
critique seriously does little more than perpetuate that ideology – divert us
from the cultural damage done under the flag of
sustainability.
Third, I think we need a broader critique of how politics works through
culture, and vice versa. An
identity model is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. A recently published book by the
literary critic, Tim Brennan, might be helpful here. In Wars of Position, Brennan
(2006) argues that since the 1980s, largely coincident with the rise of this
latest round of neo-liberal globalization, the nature of politics has
changed. In an earlier period,
politics was about belief.
People organized and mobilized on the basis of what they believed
to be right, and against inequality, exploitation, oppression and other
wrongs. Today, Brennan argues,
politics has increasingly become about being. Who we are, our identities, has
become more important in defining politics than what we believe. In terms of cultural geography, an
identity politics can lead right back to a traditional assertion of identity as
an expression of place.
Alternatively, it can lead away from geography entirely as in much of the
new cultural geography. In either
case there is a misreading identity.
Identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s began as a radical challenge to
traditional modes of politics which either ignored or marginalized questions of
race, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity. It provided a theoretical understanding
of multiple oppressions but also a basis for social solidarity. But these radical, oppositional roots of
identity politics are now largely withered. Instead, today, it is possible to
see identity politics as a kind of ideological therapy entirely consistent with
globalization. Its slogan might
be: “Arise you individuals of a
globalizing world. You have nothing
but your identities to lose.”
What better a therapy for a globalizing world which threatens the
specificity of identity than a politics that emphasizes diversity and everyone’s
multicultural uniqueness.
The point here is not a critique of cultural geography and even less a
critique of culture per se.
If anything it is a promotion of the politics of culture. But this is a politics of culture which,
I would insist, is intimately connected to political economy, political ecology,
and to a politics of resistance. The new cultural geography in the
English-speaking world has run out of fuel; its perspective is becoming narrower
and narrower and less and less political.
Instead, what is required is a radical reconstruction of cultural
geography entwined with the critiques of political economy and the imperative of
critical social and political resistance.
Which brings us back to Don Mitchell and why “There’s no such thing as
culture.” Contradictory as this
sounds, perhaps it is necessary for us to learn again that “there is no such
thing as culture,” at least in its present meaning, before a more politically
vibrant cultural geography can be reconstructed.
References
Amin, S (200X)
Monthly Review
Brennan, T. (2006)
Wars of Position
Mitchell, D (1995) There’s
no such thing as culture.
Sauer, C. (1925) The
Morphology of Landscape
Thrift, N. Non-representational theory (Routledge,
2007).
Williams, R (1993)
Keywords
Zelinsky, W (1973)
The Cultural geography of the United States. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ.
Gibson-Graham
b. draw on postmodernist and
poststructuralsit theory
re-universalizing of
culture (UK)
Sayer
Melissa Wright
Conference at International Conference "Cultural Issues in Economic,
Social and Politics Geographies". International Geographical Union. Buenos
Aires, Argentina. October 9-11, 2007.