The Dictionary of Human Geography (79 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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geographical imagination
A sensitivity towards the significance of pLace and space, Landscape and nature, in the constitution and conduct of life on Earth. As such, a geo graphical imagination is by no means the exclusive preserve of the academic discipline of geography. H.C. Prince (1962) portrayed it as ?a persistent and universal instinct of [humankind]?. The geographical imagination as he saw it was a response to places and landscapes, above all to their co mingling of ?cuLture? and ?nature?, that ?calls into action our powers of sympathetic insight and im aginative understanding? and whose rendering ?is a creative art? (cf. Cosgrove, 2006b). Prince?s emphasis on art and, by implication, on geography?s place among the humanities, was in part a critical response to the reformu lation of the discipline as a spatiaL science. To Prince, these formal abstractions were in genious and inventive but, ?like abstract paint ing?, they would always remain indirect approaches to a world to which the freshest, fullest and richest response was, in his view, literary (whereas Cosgrove, who was profou ndly sympathetic to Prince?s vision, made a compelling case for a visual and aesthetic sens ibility though he expressed this in luminous prose too). In Prince?s view, it was vitally important to preserve ?a direct experience of landscape? through the art of geographical description (see also representation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Some ten years later, David Harvey (1973) provided a discussion of the geographical im agination that also recognized the value of the aesthetic, but Harvey departed from Prince's account in two particularly significant ways: Harvey's critique of spatial science was much more open to formal theoretical vocabularies (indeed, it relied on them), and its character istic emphasis was on place and space rather than landscape and nature (which had occu pied a much more prominent position in Prince's discussion). In Harvey's eyes, there fore, the geographical imagination enables ?in dividual[s] to recognize the role of space and place in [their] own biographies, to relate to the spaces [they] see around [them], and to recognize how transactions between individ uals and between organizations are affected by the space that separates them . . . , to judge the relevance of events in other places ..., to fashion and use space creatively, and to appreciate the meaning of the spatial forms created by others'. Harvey wanted to contrast the geographical imagination with, but also to connect it to, what sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) had called ?the sociological imagin ation', a capacity that ?enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations be tween the two in society'. Neither Harvey nor Mills confined the terms to their own disciplines; they both said they were talking about ?habits of mind' that transcended par ticular disciplines and spiralled far beyond the discourse of the academy. Nonetheless, much of the discussion that followed from Harvey's intervention was concerned with formal questions of theory and method. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A central preoccupation was the articulation of sociaL theory, broadly conceived, and humAN geography. ?It has been a fundamen tal concern of mine for several years now,' so Harvey (1973) had written, ?to heal the breach in our thought between what appear to be two distinctive and indeed irreconcilable modes of analysis', and he presented his seminal Social Justice and the City as (in part) a ?quest to bridge the gap between sociological and geo graphical imaginations'. It was urgently neces sary to humanize human geography, and ideas and concepts were drawn in from the human ities and (especially) the social sciences in particular, from poLiticaL economy, sociaL theory and nominally ?cultural' disciplines such as anthropology and cultural studies. En route, however, it became clear that the reverse movement was equally important, sensitizing these other fields to a geographical imagination, because most of them took a so called ?compositional' approach that had no interest in place or space (cf. coNTextuaLitY). This was a challenging project, and it involved not only geographers but also original, vital contributions from other disciplines. Indeed, some of the most intriguing and influential spatializations were produced by scholars out side the formal enclosures of Geography: Foucault and Deleuze in phiLosophy, Giddens and Urry in sociology, and Jameson and Said in comparative literature. Some ten years after Social justice, Harvey (1984) calibrated the mag nitude of the collaborative, interdisciplinary the oretical task like this: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The insertion of space, place, locale and milieu into any social theory has a numbing effect upon that theory's central proposi tions . . . Marx, Marshall, Weber and Durkheim all have this in common: they prioritize time over space and, where they treat the latter at all, tend to view it unprob lematically as the site or context for histor ical action. Whenever social theorists of whatever stripe actively interrogate the meaning of geographical categories, they are forced either to make so many ad hoc adjustments to their theory that it splinters into incoherence, or else to abandon their theory in favour of some language derived from pure geometry. The insertion of spatial concepts into social theory has not yet been successfully accomplished. Yet social theory that ignores the materialities of actual geographical configurations, relations and processes lacks validity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Subsequent commentators reported consid erable progress in sensitizing social theory and social thought more generally to these con cerns. There was (and remains) an immensely productive dialogue between marxism and human geography, especially through eco nomic geography and historicaL geog raphy (see also Marxist geography), and these conversations and their critiques spilled over into a number of other politico intellectual traditions (Harvey, 1990; cf. Cas tree, 2007). The rise of postmodernism was hailed as emblematic of a distinctively geogra phical (or at any rate ?spatial?) imagination (Soja, 1989), and the interest in post colonialism and post structuraLism contributed in still more radical ways to the critique of abstract and universal models of subject, society and space. But three other dimensions of the geo graphical imagination have received close attention in recent years, and each of them works towards the production of ?impure' geographies that depart considerably from the closures and clinical approaches of Geography with a capital G. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the first place, there has been a renewed interrogation of academic versions of the geograph ical imagination, and in particular of the two versions proposed by Prince and Harvey (above). Influenced by post structuralism in different ways and to different degrees, and in particular by a focus on geography as Dis course, several critics have argued that geog raphy is not simply framed by or reflective of changes in the ?real? world: on the contrary, its discourses are constitutive of that world. For Gregory (1994) and Deutsche (1995), draw ing on Mitchell?s (1989) account of the world as exhibition, human geography is construed as ?a site where images of the city and space more generally are set up as reality', as fabri cations in the double sense of imaginative works and works that are made, and hence as ?the effects rather than the groundof disciplinary knowledge? (emphasis added). Thus the mod ern geographical imagination, in its usual hegemonic form, not only ?stages the world as exhibition and at the same time is fabri cated by the picture it creates'; it also charac teristically disavows its dependence by adopting an objectivist epistemoLogy that separates itself from the picture as an autono mous, all seeing ?spectatorial' subject (Deutsche, 1995). Such an epistemology is, as she remarks, a vehicle for ?the silent spatial production' of ?the self possessed subject of geographical knowledge who, severed from its object, is positioned to perceive an external totality and so avoids the partiality of immer sion in the world' (cf. situateD knowLeDge). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gillian Rose (1993) emphasizes that this is both an act of mastery hence her critique of the masculinism of geographical knowledge but also an act that is shot through with ambivalence: (NEW PARAGRAPH) In geography, a controlling, objective dis tance is not the only relationship which positions the knower in relation to his object of study. There is rather an ambivalence, which produces the restlessness of the signi fiers within the discipline's dualistic think ing. On the one hand, there is a fear of the Other, of an involvement with the Other, which does produce a distance and a desire to dominate in order to maintain that dis tance. This is central to social scientific masculinism. On the other hand, there is also a desire for knowledge and intimacy, for closeness and humility in order to learn, and this is the desire of aesthetic mas culinity to invoke its other. (Rose, 1993, p. 77) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rose's critique identifies the first position (?social scientific masculinity') with projects such as Harvey's and the second position (?aesthetic masculinity') with projects such as Prince?s. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rose and Deutsche both urged that this recognition of the limits (rather than the presumed completeness) of geographical knowledge's involve an engagement with psychoanaLytic theory in order to grapple not with the conscious and creative exercise of the ?imagination? something that concerned Prince (1962) in particular and humaNistic geography in general but with the imagin ary: in other words, with ?the psychic register in which the subject searches for plenitude, for a reflection of its own completeness' (cf. geographicaL imaginary). By this means, Rose (1993, p. 85) suggests, it is possible ?to think about a different kind of geographical imagination which could enable a recognition of radical difference from itself; an imagination sensitive to difference and power which allows others rather than an other' (see also feminist geographies; queer theory). In the same spirit, experiments with non representationaL theory may also be seen as creative attempts to apprehend the world in terms that are not limited to cognition and consciousness (see also affect). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the second place, and closely connected to these departures, there has been a pluraliza tion of geographical imaginations. Many human geographers have become reluctant to speak of ?the? geographical imagination unless they are referring to a hegemonic form of geograph ical enquiry, and then usually as an object of critique and are much more interested in the possibilities and predicaments that arise from working in the spaces between different philosophical and theoretical traditions (see Gregory, 1994). Closely connected to the production of these ?impure' geographies, there has also been a considerable interest in geographical knowledges that are not confined to (indeed, have often been excluded from) the formalizations of the academy. The boundaries of geography have thus been called into question through the recovery of quite other imaginative geographies that can have extraordinary powerful effects (cf. per formativity): for example, the geographical imaginations deployed to wage war (see miLi tary geography), conveyed through traveL writing, or mobilized in popular culture and politics (e.g. Pred, 2000). Critical studies of these geographical imaginations are not being conducted in an annex to the central struc tures of geography. Not only are they informed by contemporary politico intellectual preoccu pations but they also contest the conventional partitions between ?high? and ?low? cultures and imaginations. The circulation of dis courses in and out of academic institutions is of vital importance to the elucidation of the politics of geographical imaginations, but also to their conduct: hence the interest in pubLic geographies that transcend a narrow, instru mental concern with policy formulation to ad dress political issues within a wider public sphere. A number of these contributions have been informed by post colonialism, which has inspired a belated recognition of the white ness of dominant geographical imaginations and the importance of geographical imagin ations outside the global north (see anglo centrism; ethnocentrism; eurocentrism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Third, there has been a renewed engagement with ?nature?. The impetus for this has come from outside the discipline as much as from within, through precisely the political engage ments and public, ?popular? geographies iden tified in the last paragraph. And yet in the previous paragraphs ?nature? has effectively been displaced from the central position it was once accorded within most major tradi tions of geography and its place taken by space. The price paid for the articulation of a distinctively ?human? geography in the wake of what many critics saw as a dehumanizing spa tial science was ?a peculiar silence on the ques tion of nature? (Fitzsimmons, 1989). This has changed dramatically in recent years. These newer formulations do not eschew the signifi cance of space on the contrary, often informed by actor network theory, they elaborate a topoLogicaL ?spatial imagin ation? but they do so in ways that produce a much more sensuous, lively geographical imagination. For they ?alert us to a world of commotion in which the sites, tracks and con tours of social life are constantly in the making through networks of actants in relation that are at once local and global, natural and cul tural, and always more than human? (What more, 1999b, p. 33). Such an approach, as Whatmore notes, ?implicates geographical im aginations and practices both in the purifying logic which . . . fragments living fabrics of as sociation and designates the proper places of ??nature?? and ??society??, and in the promise of its refusal? (p. 34; emphases added). To fulfil such a promise, critical enquiry will require the production of radically ?impure?, heteroge neous geographies. The philosopher A.N. Whitehead once famously remarked, ?Nature doesn?t come as clean as you can think it.? And for the reasons spelled out in these paragraphs, many would agree that geographical imagin ations are at last becoming much dirtier. (NEW PARAGRAPH) All that said, there are two further dimen sions of geographical imaginations that have received rather less attention, and both return us to the concerns originally voiced by Prince and Harvey. On one side, there have been attempts to experiment with forms of geo graphical expression to realize the imagina tive capacities and creative potential of geography in something like the sense that Prince used the term, the sort of sensibility that invites a reaction of surprise, even won der: ?I?ve never thought of

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