These were the readings for the third week of my Key Concepts in Human Geography course.

Agnew, J. (2010). Ethics or militarism? The role of the AAG in what was originally a dispute over informed consent. Political Geography, 29(8), 422–423.

Bryan, J. (2010). Force multipliers: Geography, militarism, and the Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 414–416.

Cruz, M. (Kiado). (2010). A living space: The relationship between land and property in the community. Political Geography, 29(8), 420–421.

Gould, P. (1979). Geography 1957–1977: The Augean Period. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 69(1), 139–151.

Herlihy, P. H. (2010). Self-appointed gatekeepers attack the American Geographical Society’s first Bowman Expedition. Political Geography, 29(8), 417–419.

Hudson, B. (2008). The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918. In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 140–153.

Rose, G. (1993). No Place for Women? In Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 41–61.

Steinberg, P. E. (2010). Professional ethics and the politics of geographic knowledge: The Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 413.

Rather than follow the historical narrative of empire within geography, I instead chose to focus my response on the first four chapters of Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. The course organiser has recommended that I read the following discussion of the book:

Duncan, N., Domosh, M., & Rose, G. (2004). Classics in human geography revisited. Progress in Human Geography, 28(3), 363–368.

Here is my response, written before I completed reading the book.

There is sometimes a point, midway through a good crime fiction novel, where the person I had thought to be guilty turns out to be (most likely) innocent. This is an exciting moment. Initial suspicions have been denied but the suspense persists. I start thinking in other directions, turning different possibilities over in my head. But this is also a moment which establishes an expectation for what is to follow. Will I be thrilled to discover something new and unexpected? Or disappointed to find my initial suspect found guilty after all?

Having not read more than the first four chapters of Feminism and Geography, I feel as if I’m exactly at that moment. This is probably not too surprising to anyone familiar with the book’s structure. The opening chapter establishes the minority signifier of the Same/Other gender binary: the “imagined feminine Woman” (Rose 1993, 11). Chapters two and three use this to underscore Rose’s devastating critique of time-geography and humanistic geography respectively. The first is portrayed as conceiving of space in Cartesian terms. Movement is managed without bodies and knowledge formed without emotion. This is a geography which ignores Woman in favour of masculine rationality. By contrast the second—humanistic geogrpahy—is intrigued by Woman and sets out to uncover a geography of emotion and meaning. Humanistic (phenomenological and existential) approaches conceive of place not in its particularities, but in its universal essences. This erases Woman by making embodied experience a domain of masculine knowledge-making. In the fourth chapter, the concern that I had with Rose’s deconstruction of geography was raised and deftly sidestepped. Surely, I had assumed, by positioning her critique within the Same/Other binary Rose was also serving to reify its power. While my concern was granted, the affirmation of Same/Other was revealed to have been for the purpose of strategic critique, made from a consciously shifting and oscillating subject position. In the pages that remain her, Rose has promised to elaborate “a different kind of knowledge by drawing on different theorizations of different experiences” (Rose 1993, 85). I’m at the hinge of the book and I’m keen to dive back in and see where it takes me.

In this mid-point reflection, I want to describe in greater depth the character of my initial critique, partly as a way of trying to think through what I found to be suspicious. To do this I will: describe in more detail Rose’s logic of the binary-imaginary; suggest that this leads to a strategic essentialism which moves Rose philosophically from poststructuralism towards pragmatism; and conclude with a bit of speculation about where Rose might be going.

The Same/Other binary, which is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, functions as a dyadic logic wherein each part, Same and Other, is defined in relation to the other. Same, or Man, is understood as having a concrete identity only through its distinction to Other, or Woman. Gendered difference is therefore socially constructed but still able to affect world through the performativity of its subject positions (see Butler 1990). Importantly, Same/Other is not an equal relationship; Same is always in a position of domination to the Other on which it depends. Rose applies this logic to more areas of life than Man/Woman. Culture/Nature also acts as a binary which structures knowledge. Similarly the difference between conceptual and grounded research (Rose 1993, 74):

theory – empirics general – specific abstract – concrete nomological – contextualising

The binary logic is also be applied to Rose’s critique of time-geography and humanistic geography (modified from Rose 1993, 75):

time geography – humanistic geography social-scientific – aesthetic rational – emotional space – place public – private social – body knowledge – emotion transparent – opaque

While Same/Other operates as a dyadic pair, it is also possible to read down each of the columns listed above. The left column can be loosely conceived of as representing masculine characteristics and the right as representing feminine characteristics.

As these binaries are taken to be socially constructed the question then arises: why is Rose so adamant in structuring her arguments around them? Rose’s critique of time geography is founded on its inherent masculinity. Her critique of humanistic geography on the other hand, is founded on a masculinity produced through an engagement with the feminine. These would seem to be inconsistent positions and “in some way complicit with the geographical discourse… engaged” (Rose 1993, 82). That is, by affirming the binary of Man/Woman, she is in fact reinforcing its hegemony. For Rose, this inconsistency is resolved through a “[refusal] to make a choice between two strategies” (Rose 1993, 83). As masculine knowledge-making acts at diverse capacities and scales, so too must its points resistance. Similarly her complicity with Man/Woman is positioned as a strategic attempt to face masculinity head on so as to “undermine the authority of the Same by seeking out the incoherences of its supposedly singular and stable position” (Rose 1993, 84). Her critiques do not confirm Man/Woman, because Rose is not asserting that they are real. Instead, her attack on geography is a strategic essentialism: “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 1988, 13). Choosing a position primarily for its instrumental function rather than its explanatory weight, seems to me like the non-essentialised logic of pragmatism more so than the poststructuralism with which Rose is typically associated[1].

I want to conclude by reflecting on two possible directions in which Rose might be headed. These are based on my admittedly rather limited knowledge of feminist political theory. The first is the ontological trick of J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) in which the rejection of the hegemonic binary of liberalism/socialism (or capitalism/communism) forms the basis for an exploration of alternative economic geographies. Applied to Rose’s work, a denial of the hegemony of masculine knowledge-making would not act in direct opposition to the dominations of Woman, but rather in parallel to them; not as a counter-hegemony but as an alter-hegemonic project. This would involve a recognition of the various and variegated ways in which bodies and subjectivities are gendered. The problem with this approach is that it fails to oppose the very real power dynamics which do operate through gender. The second is the epistemic commitment of intersectionality (Valentine 2007), wherein gender is not held to be above other sites of political contestation (such as class, race, sexuality, age and disability) but entangled with them. This might allow for more subtle and situated oppositions to masculine knowledge-making within the academy. Intersectionality does not offer a robust conceptual framework however, and so might not allow for the forms of engagement which Rose is adopting. I’m aware that both of these ideas were developed after Feminism and Geography, but it may be possible to find traces of them in the work. Whatever Rose goes with, I’m certain that it will be provocative and stimulating.

There is a risk in addressing only part of someone’s argument. It becomes easy to reduce their views and portray a caricature their position. Trying to write a response to a half-read book is, as such, something of a challenge—my reaction to the work is still quite open and shifting. I’m not entirely uncomfortable with this position. It seems like I’m here a lot. I guess I’ll have to let you know what I really think when I’m done.

Notes

I find it problematic that there is a concept designed to absolve academics from any potential (in)action inherent to their theorising—it sounds an awful lot like a cop-out to me. Given however that strategic essentialism is borrowed from postcolonial studies, it is probably a mode of public engagement which I would want to analyse at greater depth before critiquing more formally.

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The End Of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In R. Guha & G. C. Spivak (Eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–32.

I had just bought an The Internationale-esque pair of pajama shorts. “Why do you think people buy socialist merchandise even though they don’t support socialism?” Counter- culture, you said. It makes it cool. The postcards I had brought back from Pyongyang stared from their places on my wall, the paper faces waving flags for the socialist cause smiling sweetly at us. We wondered if the people in North Korea were happy.

I said yes, I think they are, at least the ones in the city, remembering how Lee’s face shone with awe as he talked about the day he had been less than fifty meters away from Kim Jong- Un, the laughter of the families at the amusement parks, and the dowdy harridan who tried to speak to me on the metro. Yes, the people in Pyongyang looked happy, at least the few that I saw. Maybe not the ones toiling in the fields, I said. Definitely not the old woman from one of the villages I saw— while on a passing train out of the country and back to China— whose overladen cart capsized upon her as she pulled it downhill. “If only she had a donkey,” I said plaintively. I wished I could have helped her, that I hadn’t whizzed by in my comfortable seat as voyeur to this country. What if she’s dead? What if her family doesn’t have enough money to pay for her medical expenses?

Yet I wondered whether I had even seen it at all, whether it had even happened. I was aware that the chances of me passing by in that train and seeing the cart collapse on her at that precise second were infinitesimal— did I, in a desire to unearth something, anything, that would have exposed the truth (what truth?) of this country apart from the polished version they show tourists, hallucinate it to justify the arguments I wanted to have for the potential better lives the North Koreans outside Pyongyang could have?

We talked about choice. They are happy because they do not know any other way to be, I argued. How Orwellian, how Nineteen Eighty-Four. Their newspapers are not newspapers, I cried. They are unable to compare their lives to the lives of people outside their country if their national newspapers or media-controlled television channels do not report anything apart from the Good News of the state.

But what’s the point of keeping up with the news, you said. Reading the news is always depressing. There is an inverse relationship between longevity and knowledge. People who lead simple, halcyon lives away from metropolitan areas are happier, and thus live longer. News is cyclic, just history repeating itself infinitely. Presidents get elected, re-elected, step-down, and new presidents come in. What’s the difference? Leaders are overthrown, a city here attacked, another dictator there rises, a hurricane destroys this town, a typhoon ravages another. It’s happened so many times before, and it will keep on happening, again and again and again. What’s the point of reading the news, if it makes us unhappy, and is just— like Rudge from History Boys tells his scandalized interviewers from Christchurch to the guffaws of his classmates— “one fucking thing after another”?

If people had a choice between living on an idyllic island farming and knowing about the world, they would choose knowledge, I said. In my opinion, people read the news because only by knowing world events can one begin to confirm and construct his place within the dispassionate recurrences of history. To me, the world is marked by a collective desire to get out of Plato’s cave. Progress and civilization are thus the marks and results of human attempts to surmount these great continuities, these indifferent, universal conditions of human existence. Keeping up with the news, I argued— even though they are “one fucking thing after another”— is hence the first, crucial step in the process of trying to understand one’s place within the permanent, ahistorical, contexts of human life. Only then can one maybe, just maybe, feel like he could do something to impact and disrupt the impersonal cycles of history.

No, you argued, it’d be better to live a simple life, to not read the news. The media reports both the good and the bad, but it’s the bad that tends to stick in one’s mind, and which reduces one’s happiness, and hence one’s length of life. People in the cities choose to relocate to these idyllic places, to get away from the soul-sucking misery of noise, technology, consumerism and bad news. All of them say they are happy. And all of them live longer.

The first time I took notice of you had been because of something you said. Fresh- faced and invincible, you told me your life goal was to find a way to preserve your brain so that even after death, after your physical body had wasted away, you would still be functional, still alive. My modern-day Peter Pan, who swept me away on a beach in Thailand. Afraid of death, of growing old, I remember how morose you were on your twenty-fifth birthday; “I’m hitting my late-twenties”. It’s not hard to imagine the numerous long nights you have spent in darkened rooms before the glare of computer screens, fervently acquainting yourself with transhumanism or any technological possibility of transforming and prolonging your life span.

Ronald Bailey has called H+ the “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity”. But the knowledge that H+ technology would not be made widely accessible within this generation leaves current mankind two options: knowledge, or longevity. So you quietly argued for the simple life, for what little of immortality you could grasp.

But when I asked which you would choose, longevity or knowledge, I already knew the answer.

“I’d choose knowledge”: almost sadly, knowing that it meant disqualifying its opposite.

And this act of conceding from the boy who never wanted to grow up, this recognition of your own mortality, made my heart ache in places I never knew it could. You have told me how impossibly idealistic you are, and it is both my privilege and great joy to be here with you as your ideals strengthen and morph, grow and painfully wither. And there, in your arms, this sense of unmitigated amazement overcame me.

Knowledge is knowing and loving the world. My mind was filled with the vastness of the history of our planet. Or what very, very little of it my mind could occupy. I imagined civilizations rising and falling, the dust and ruins of fallen cities, Caesar’s betrayed face as he bled himself dry and Nebuchadnezzar’s glee seeing the Temple of the Lord burn. I imagined Chögyam Trungpa leading the monks out of Tibet through the mountains without map or compass, and Ozymandias's shattered visage on the desert floor. I imagined Jesus’s anguish in Gethsemane, and I thought of present day Gaza.

In your arms, I remembered the stifling heat in the bus I took from Prague to Český Krumlov, the swollen eyes and hungover face that looked at me from behind darkened shades. I remembered sitting on top of the world looking down and singing Mykonos. I remembered lying on the floor wheezing for breath and feeling as if my heart was going to fail. I remembered how, unable to sleep, my mind raced on the morning train leaving Berlin for Dresden. I remembered my grandmother singing in her dusty apartment, and how I had burst into tears upon entering the Hagia Sophia. I remembered my lips on my mother’s shaved head, and tears, and refusing to leave my room in Austria for days. I remember lying on the cold floor and talking into the night in Kaesong, and the first time I went to church and met God. And I remembered the best night of my life when—with a look of profound stupefaction— you told me you loved me. “Was that scary to say?”

And I’ve always known this, always, always. The reason I don’t want to die. I love God, and know without the shadow of a doubt that He loves me too, loves me better and loved me first. And I feel Jesus’s arms around me every day, and the stirrings of the Holy Spirit within me as I ask for wisdom before each decision to be made. But I don’t want to leave for heaven. I can’t seem to comprehend how some people my age aren’t afraid of death, how they take comfort in the thought of leaving the world and going back to God.

I love the world, I said. I love it more than I want to go to heaven. I don’t ever want to leave this world. I love people. I love knowing people, I love talking to them, and trying to understand the constructs of individuality that everyone— every single person on earth— tries to build up in attempts to create the only part of himself that actually matters in this disinterested world. I love the philosophies people come up with that they deem telic, constitutive of what it is means to face and understand what being human seems to be all about. I have lately been reading about people who faced the perceived negation of life— death, and the convictions they came up with as a result. Gillian Rose called for an adherence to the adage, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”, in order to “pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace”. Anatole Broyard believed that by being “intoxicated by [his] illness” he could produce an alternate narrative that could outwit his cancer. In the face of death, Rose’s rigorous discipline of the mind and Broyard’s ignited literary sensibilities illustrate their equanimity with death in the face of the panic of creation.

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the Sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” (Ecclesiastes 1:3-5)

Ecclesiastes proclaims that since everything ends in death, everything we do is thus futile and essentially meaningless. In light of this perceived senselessness, one should thus enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life and take enjoyment in one’s work. Gifts from the hand of God. I intend to do just that. I want to know as much about this lovely, adorable world as I can before my time is up. 

Reading the news, knowing the world, getting the hell out of Plato’s cave thus gives us a goal— the only possible goal in this dewdrop world that seems to “abideth forever”— the process of discovering the conditions of possible experiences that can inform us of who we really are, and what we are thus compelled to be apart from powers not ourselves. If I could choose, I wouldn’t want to live without knowledge, I would want to strive, and strive, and strive in the hopes that my actions could somehow influence the indifferent hands of probability that govern my life, that history is not just “one fucking thing after another”. I hope that one day, after living this life to the absolute fullest, having done all that I possibly could, not being crushed under an overturned cart, perhaps I could then— like Rose and Broyard— come to an understanding of life in relation to death. Extinction then would not matter, for I would have lived all the way till death, and would thus know the truth of existence that would enable me to die alive. And if I could find ways by which this truth could somehow be imparted to people, and empower them to strive for this knowledge of and love of the world, only then would I be rendered imperishable, only then would my going be more than a maybe-hallucination belonging to someone on a passing train.

“I love the world too,” you said. And knowing that you did too— more than anyone else— I wondered what went through your mind, what you imagined and remembered of your own earthly wanderings, and what you wished to see from now on.