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A place for other stories:
evidence and authorship in experimental times
Mitch Rose
2/4/2016
Keywords: stories, the other, scribes, ethics, creative geographies In recent years geographers have borrowed from a variety of creative literary forms to find new ways of telling stories. And yet despite the profusion of experimentation, there has been little in the way of intellectual justification for why such formats are necessary. The aim of this paper is to provide such a rationale. Specifically, it argues that stories are more than evidence. Traditionally, the role of stories is to support a particular theory, framework or hypothesis and, in doing so, provide the substantive evidence by which an argument can be judged. The consequence is that stories are subsumed to the author’s explanatory framework. There is little purpose to reading the story since we already know the ending. We know what the characters and events will do and the purpose the story will serve. Drawing upon the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro, this paper positions stories as the origin of our thinking, rather than its evidence. Specifically it argues that stories have a purpose beyond evidence, beyond the author and beyond the empirical situation from which they are derived. By acknowledging the role of stories in our thinking, the paper situates a place for stories that is defined not by what they prove but by what they give to us as both authors and subjects.
Acknowledgements: special thanks to Emilie Cameron whose email dialogue sparked the basis for this paper. Also thank you to Elizabeth Gagen for her guidance and thoughts on earlier drafts and to two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable insights and comments.
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The "I" is the miracle of the "You."
"This follows from a certain logic," he said: "the 'I' to designate the 'You,' the 'You' to justify
the 'I,'
Edmond Jabes (1991)
i. Braided worlds
In the opening chapter of Braided Worlds, Gottlieb and Graham’s (2012) auto-biographic
ethnography about a family trip to rural Benglend in northern Cote d’Ivoire, they tell a story
that establishes one of the recurring themes of the text. Philip Graham (a novelist) and Alma
Gottlieb (an anthropologist) have visited Benglend numerous times before, but this time they
are traveling with their 6 year old son. The night of their arrival, Philip is reading bedtime
stories when he is visited by Andre, one of his oldest friends in the village. Andre and Philip
have not seen each other for many years and ritual greetings and affirmative exchanges are
required. But Philip chooses to finish the story. Philips realises that Andre will interpret this
as a snub. Regardless of how careful his explanation or how sensitive his approach, Philip
knows that Andre will not understand his son’s need for continuity in a time of great change
(Andre has never left Cote d’Ivoire) nor his own decision to prioritise the needs of a 6 year-
old boy over his formal obligations (the Beng do not priories children over adults). Similarly,
Philip knows it will be impossible to explain to his 6 year-old son Andre’s cultural pre-
suppositions and the concessions they demand. The situation, he realises, is inherently
irreconcilable. Phillip will disappoint someone--and there is nothing he can do about it.
These kinds of situations proliferate throughout Gottlieb and Graham’s text: problems
forced into emergence through the interplay of events, expectations and poor timing. As
Gottlieb and Graham contend with colleagues, activists, friends, American dignitaries and the
needs of their son, they consistently expose (rather than hide) their vulnerability to an
ethnographic situation that utterly defies their capacity to manage it. Contrary to the norm of
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ethnographic writing, there is an abiding undercurrent of helplessness in their narrative;
ethnography does not appear as a method but as a situation, and a situation driven by events
wholly outside their control. The emphasis of their text, therefore, is not on explaining the
Beng but on illuminating the situations that call for explanation. Rather than emphasising
academic sageness or retrospective insight, the text resolutely focuses on the present, and the
issues, anxieties and problems the present consistently presents. In providing this perspective
the writers illustrate how the happenstance which shapes the ethnographic encounter is its
greatest asset; how the demands that the situation gives rise to, are precisely the dynamics
that allow thought to emerge. The story they tell, the reader senses, is not one they are
fashioning but one they are being fashioned by. And the result is a behind the scenes
documentary of the event of thought--the situations that give rise to thinking.
It has been over twenty years since Cronon (1992) published the article that serves as the
inspiration (both in terms of content and title) for this discussion. Writing at a time when the
postmodern assault on representation was at its peak, Cronon provides an earnest defence of
the role of stories in environmental history and by implication, the geographical humanities
more broadly. Places, Cronon argues, have many stories within them. And while the politics
of representation may make all stories fallible, their loss of innocence should not translate
into a loss of significance. Stories are the way historians and humans make sense of the
world: “stripped of the story” Cronon argues, “we lose track of understanding itself” (1369).
What is interesting about Cronon’s defence, however, is that he never fully answers the
question he situates, that is, he never confidently establishes what the place of stories is.
While he argues that stories have a place, he is decidedly (and self-consciously) ambivalent
about how to defend that place in relation to the academy’s expectations of knowledge,
evidence, proof and truth. This is a question that still haunts us. As Cameron (2012) notes,
while there has been a positive efflorescence of story-telling in geography in recent years;i it
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is unclear what this creativity does for geography: “what is at stake when one turns one’s
attention to small and local stories and asks what is expressed and revealed by such stories?”
(588). While Cameron’s emphasis is on how story-telling holds up to questions of social
justice (rather than positivist standards of proof), there is a similar ambivalence about what
role stories play in geography and whether that role is warranted and/or necessary. The
question is a legitimate one. While there are some very well-developed justifications for
story-telling in the discipline (Lorimer 2006; Lorimer and Parr 2014), it is also true that the
impetus to ‘be creative’ has over-run the inclination to explain why we should do so.
Geography, after-all, is not literature. To borrow a phrase from Gottlieb and Graham, art and
science are braided worlds: they influence and inflect each other, but are also different. While
the artist can comfortably eschew the demand to decipher, elucidate or rationalise their work,
the academic is asked (always and unremittingly) to explain: to provide an account for
oneself in the language of reason, interpretation and justification. The central aim of this
article is to answer this call to explain. It endeavours to not only establish the legitimacy of
creative work in geography but give purpose and direction for further experimentation.ii
Following on from Gottlieb and Graham, the central argument here is that stories can do
more than provide evidence for our thinking. They can also illuminate how thought itself
takes place. The purpose of the paper is to explain this potential as well as honour the
capacities it provides. The discussion is divided into four parts. Part one makes a strong
distinction between stories and empirics. It argues that stories and empirics do different work
and that understanding the stories one tells within an empirical frame severely curtails their
intellectual possibilities. Part two conceptualises stories as the origin, rather than evidence, of
our thinking. Drawing upon the anthropologist Vivieros de Castro (2014), this section
illustrates how reflective subjectivity is constituted through our engagement with others and
the stories others tell. Parts three and four develop the implications of this position. The
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former argues for a reconceptualization of our conception of authorship based on the concept
of the scribe, and the latter focuses on re-orienting our understanding of the ethics of
representation. The final section argues that by acknowledging and honouring the role for
stories in our thinking we can (pace Cronon) establish a place for stories in the academy.
ii. Stories and empirics
Over the last two decades, geographers have often referred to empirical work as a way of
telling stories (Revill and Seymour 2001; Gilmartin 2015). But writing stories and writing
empirics are very different endeavours. The work of empirics is the work of evidence. Its
purpose is to illuminate some truth or insight, often expressed through a theory. Once we
know the theory, we already know the structure, trajectory and purpose of the story. Thus,
while Mitchell (1996) may write a very compelling and eminently readable narrative about
the plight of migrant workers in California, we ultimately know before-hand what purpose
these stories will serve. The characters stand as ‘pre-cut’ figures in a broader intellectual
argument (Crapanzano 1986, 22). The issue here is not one of mechanics, felicity or style (all
of which can be found in these well-written narratives) but about purpose. In the endeavour to
be convincing and water-tight, empirics attempt to leave little daylight between the writing
and the world itself. Their purpose is not to tell a story but to evidence a theory. And theories,
as Jackson (2013) suggests, are one of the principal means by which we misrecognise the
other, making the other “an object whose only value is to confirm our suspicions or prove our
point of view” (2013, 2). Regardless of how an author chooses to make their topic readable,
empirical narratives, by definition, give away the ending. By embedding certain expectations
of evidence and proof, empirics (at their best) lucidly and plainly fore-tell the purpose of their
narrative and actively (though no doubt subtly) work to stem any shadow of other possible
readings.
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The work of stories is different. Though stating clearly and definitively what that work is,
is not an easy task. For Ricour (1981) the work of stories is to weave together and order the
subject’s confused and unformed conception of temporal life. Thus, stories reflect and re-plot
our temporal experiences in order to make them comprehensible. Bakhtin (1968), however,
does not see stories as linear expressions but as multivalent forms that embed within them
multiple registers of experience that are open to a variety of potential readings and options.
Similarly Barthes (1974) argues that stories should not be approached as a systems of
signifieds but as a “a galaxy of signifiers”: “[the story] has no beginning; it is reversible; we
gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the
main one” (5). Benjamin (1986) also sees stories as being forged from multiplicity,
specifically through the wisdom and morality accrued through human social experience. The
story for Benjamin is distinctive from the novel which he dismisses as a solipsistic work
predicated on the solitary genius of the artist rather than the accrued morality of generations.
Despite this diverse set of conceptualisations of the purpose and effects of stories, one can
argue that, at their heart, stories are a modality of passage (Stewart 1996). A means of
moving from events that cannot be readily sublimated or comprehended to the realm of
language and the order, meaning and bearing that language necessitates. This gap exists in all
writing: empirical, fictional, mythic, etc. But the issue is how this gap is traversed. When
theory plays the mediating or translational role, the story is forced into a relation of
correspondence. In other words, as empirics, stories must bear the imprint of the world to
which it is aligned. How often do we tell the story of the social scientist who is grappling to
make sense of her data when (suddenly, finally, thankfully) she finds the theory that allows
the story to fall into place. Theory’s role is not simply to make sense (this is the role of any
story) but to make sense in a manner that allows word and world to correlate; to mediate a
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correspondence where the gap between event and narrative is bridged by the illuminative
power of theoretical coherence.
Stories however acknowledge a certain distance between words and world. They do not
endeavour (nor claim) to represent reality. While they certainly endeavour to capture
something real, that reality is not measured through a criteria of correspondence. On the
contrary, it is measured through the story’s capacity to affect, move or incite. The
verisimilitude of stories cannot be measured by their mimetic qualities. They do not tie
together but reach out, striving across an unbridgeable distance not to mirror the world but to
transpose it to another dimension, “a place from which the world seems, at once, to have
fallen away and to have grown more pressing” (Stewart, 1996, 38). Blanchot (1993) takes
this point further by arguing that it is precisely the story’s sublimation of the real that makes
its reality effective: “I recognise very well”, he states, “that there is speech only because
what ‘is’ has disappeared in what names it” (36). It is through the act of writing that the real
comes to appear (in representation) and simultaneously disappear, since the event itself has
been erased by its writing. Mattingly’s (1998) ethnographic work on rehabilitative
physiotherapy illustrates this dynamic well. As patients supplant the unspeakable nature of
their trauma with narratives about their recovery, the traumatic event recedes from view.
Thus, as narrative makes the events understandable and (potentially) surmountable, the
trauma is silenced, unpronounceable even as it is the origin of the plotlines it inspires. For
Mattingly, it is precisely the narration of trauma that makes the trauma present (in the act of
its narration) and simultaneously disappear.
Stories thus involve a process of transubstantiation--a change of nature rather than simply
a change of state. Stories write the world different than what it is: strange, foreign, intense
and always destructive of its referent. As Jackson suggests (2012), writing involves a certain
blindness to our subject, “a matter of working in the dark…of trying to cross the wide
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Sargasso Sea that separates us” (2). In referencing Rhys (1982) famous book Jackson implies
that writing is a means of connecting by virtue of estrangement and dislocation: “the
storyteller…always begin[s] with a disclaimer, locating events far off and long ago. Once
upon a time, in a distant land….safe places where one could call the shots, reworking one’s
experience into a shape…more coherent, more perfect than reality allowed” (77). Reaching
across an infinite horizon, stories engender connection not through transparency but through
a trick of the light, making the world more real by destroying the reality it purports to reflect.
At this point, it is important to introduce a number of qualifications. First my ambition
here is not to critique empirical writing, empirical work or the scientific method. I am
personally and professionally invested in these forms of writing and regularly judge research
based upon its ability to convincingly evidence an argument through empirical data. Second,
I am not critiquing the use of theory per se or the practice of deductive research (inductive
research is no less epistemologically loaded and is equally embedded in the task of using
stories as evidence). Finally my aim is not to purify the distinction between ‘creative’ and
empirical writing. Creativity is embedded in all social science research and in geography in
particular (as this journal itself testifies). Yet, while empirics can be creative, thoughtful and
impassioned, they still serve a purpose that is different from stories. It is this distinction that
is the heart of the present project. Stories cannot be empirics nor can they supplant the work
empirics do. Stories and empirics do different things. And if we accept this distinction than it
raises the question of whether stories can have a place within the intellectual project of the
academy? If we understand stories as narratives that, in their nature, cannot operatively
engender (due to a lack of method and purpose) an alignment between word and world, then
what is their purpose within our intellectual purview? What is their work or role and how is it
intellectually justified? This is the topic of the next section.
iii. The origin of thought
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If we are going to determine a potential place for stories it is important to consider more
carefully the work that stories do. Without question stories do many things as their capacity
to affect allows them to be sublimated into a range of social, cultural and political projects
(Stewart 2007). But stories are also a means to think. They call on us to contemplate and
consider even as they move and entertain. While Geertz (1973) attributes the re-telling of
stories (e.g., Aboriginal Dreamwalks, Homeric poems, Shakespearian dramas) as a form of
cultural practice, a means of affirming community values by repeating them in a dramatic
setting, stories do more than confirm what we know. Indeed, the pull of stories lie in what we
do not know, in what is not-yet-heard. Their gravitational force resides in the anticipation of
surprise rather than the affirmation of normativity. And it is this capacity for revelation, in the
story’s infinite ability to intrigue, where their intellectual potential resides.
In thinking through this potential more carefully, I draw upon the work of Viveiros de
Castro’s and his call for anthropologists to engage with indigenous intellectual practices or
what he calls ‘native ontologies’(see 2004b; 2004a; 2012; 2014) . His rationale for this
manoeuvre is not first and foremost predicated on what we can ‘learn’ from the native, or at
least not in the sense that this question has been historically posed. Rather, his interest is in
attempting to trace the origin of anthropological theory: “What does the anthropologist owe
to the people they study?” (Viveiros do Castro 2104, 40). Is the native simply a source for our
data? Does she simply provide the means for us to justify or prove our various objects of
intellectual creativity? Or could the native be thought of as the source of our knowledge? In
other words, could the native be thought as the origin of our thinking: “couldn’t one shift to a
perspective showing that the source of the most interesting concepts, problems, entities and
agents introduced into thought by anthropological theory is in the imaginative power of the
societies…that they propose to explain? Doesn’t the originality of anthropology instead
reside there – in this always-equivocal but often fecund alliance between the conceptions and
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practices coming from the worlds of the so-called ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of anthropology?”
(2014, 40). While the question Viveiros de Castro poses is similar to the one I raise above,
i.e., can the native do more than provide evidence for our thinking, he introduces an
additional dimension. For Viveiros de Castro’s, the point is not simply that the native cannot
stand for proof. It is that the native is the origin for the thinking we endeavour to prove.
Anthropological thought, he suggests, has its source in the thoughts and contemplations of
others. Our thinking is derived from these others--the other is the means by which we think.
At one level it could be argued that Viveiros de Castro is making the somewhat banal
observations that we are not the sole author of our writing and that our writing is inspired or
influenced by our engagements with others. But such a reading does not get at the full
implications of his critique. Indeed, for Viveiros de Castro, there is the intimation of a shell
game. While we may acknowledge the extent to which the other serves as the source of our
thinking, the rigour of our work is based upon our ability to position the other as its evidence.
Thus elevating the singularity of our own capacities and obscuring the essential role of
others. Such a manoeuvre is in keeping with the institutional expectations of the academy
and, more significantly our ingrained presumptions about authorship. In Derrida’s (1982)
essay the Ends of Man he traces how the tradition of enlightenment subjectivity positions the
author as the sole progenitor of his thoughts, i.e., of thoughts that are resolutely presumed and
conceived as his own. Such a presumption remains the cornerstone of the modern academic
institution. Regardless of how far academics have eroded Cartesian formulations of the self-
standing subject (the subject who is the source and governor of his own thinking) the
infrastructure of intellectual professionalism is fundamentally predicated on the presumption
that we are the owners of our thoughts. To be an author is to produce something affective
from the dark mysterious crucible of one’s own interior. It is to have a voice that bears an
imprint or tenor that is conceptualised by us and our audience as distinctly and uniquely ours.
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In this light it is no wonder that plagiarism is the academy’s deepest crime. In not properly
delineating what belongs to us and what belongs to others, we do not only run the risk of
intellectual theft, we potentially disrupt the conceptual apparatus of authorship itself. As
Foucault might argue, the sacred seal of propriety is the underlying presumption that bonds
us to the academy and its institutional mechanisms of governance, i.e., its rules, rewards and
sanctioned methods of practice. Authorship is the means by which we understand ourselves
as academic subjects. And the academy is the apparatus that sanctifies and supports those
subject formations.
So how does Viveiros de Castro’s conception of the native help us understand the
potential of stories, or more accurately, how does it illuminate a potential place for stories in
the academy? The argument that organises the remainder of this article is that stories, freed
from the burden of evidence, have the potential to acknowledge that which allows us to think.
One of the key components of Viveiros de Castro’s work is that it is not native thought alone
that engenders anthropological theory. Rather, thinking emerges from the anthropological
encounter, that is, from the crashing of different ontological systems and the thinking that
emerges when precarious ontologies meet. In this sense, there is always a story to how
thought occurs, to how a particular idea emerges from the wreckage of our engagements with
difference. Thus, rather than positioning these stories at the back-end of our work, using it to
justify the credibility of the thinking that occurs (and that we subsequently claim), the
suggestion here is we move it to the front, tracing and illuminating the encounters, events and
happenstance that allowed a certain trajectory of thought to transpire. The purpose of stories,
therefore, becomes a means of earnestly acknowledging the others that give rise to thought. It
is a means not simply of recognising the agency of others but acknowledging our reliance on
that agency. In this manner, we can potentially accept that we are not the masters of our
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narrative and that stories are not resources that we can put to work. Rather we work for them.
Our thinking, at its heart, is at the mercy of others and the stories that others give.
The next two sections of this article outline two significant implications of this potential
place for stories. The next section (section 4) outlines its implications for our conceptions of
authorship. Specifically it develops further the question of what it means to be an author who
is not the sole owner of one’s thoughts. Section five examines the ethical implications of this
position. Specifically this means re-considering the ‘ethics’ of representation to focus not on
how we represent others but how we honour and acknowledge the other’s role in our
thinking.
iv. Conceptions of authorship
Questioning the role of the author has a long history in geography (Duncan and Duncan
1988; Duncan James and Ley 1993; Cosgrove and Domosh 1993; Agnew and Livingstone
2011). The phrase ‘death of the author’(which comes from Barthes 1977) was a popular
shorthand for early post-structural work that challenged the uni-directional conceptions of
social and spatial power prevalent in the 1970s and 80s. Even as this work explored the
operations of social power in the landscape, they were conscious of the limitations of
authorial control and celebrated the interpretative capacities of agents (e.g., see Routledge
1993; Smith 1993; Soja 1996; Moore 1997; Morin and Guelke 1998; Sharp et al. 2000). And
yet, for all the emphasis on interpretative resistance, it would be an overstatement to suggest
that this work seriously undermined the position of the author. While it did question the
authority of texts, and was willing to expand the definition of texts in quite radical ways, the
standing of those that produce texts remained relatively untouched. In this sense, one could
argue that the much touted death of the author never really happened. While there was
certainly a disenchantment with the authority of texts and a concomitant questioning of the
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power of textual production, such issues never fundamentally problematized the status of the
author or the ownership or possession of the author’s words.
The aim of this section is to develop a conception of the writing subject whose identity is
not steeped in notions of ownership or origination. Specifically, it does this by reviving the
ancient idea of the scribe. Broadly speaking a scribe can be defined as a literate elite who
served a ruling or priestly caste (see Carr 2009; also see Orton 1989). In societies were the
vast majority of the population were illiterate, scribes were the means by which written
correspondences, judicial decrees and bureaucratic processes was transacted. In the courts of
the ancient empires, scribes were the administrative heart of the imperial system and worked
to keep its various judicial, mercantile, military and religious functions operative. As such
they often encompassed a range of roles including accountant, paymaster, administrator,
clerk, copyist and teacher. It was precisely this range of roles that lead to the scribe being a
figure of both reverence and debate. At one level, this debate concerned the nature of the
scribe’s office. While scribes were proximate to state power they were not themselves its
source, thus questions about the appropriate role of the scribe (were they advisors, enforcers
or functionaries?) was a recurring theme in scribal writing (Perdue 2008). At another level,
however, these debates concerned the nature of the scribe’s material, that is, the mysteries
and power of language. Words in the Ancient Near East were conceived as manifestations or
artefacts of divine systems (ibid). One can see this in the prosaic writings of imperial
administration, where scribes lettered the decrees, pronouncements and decisions of kings
who (in the Egyptian and Persian tradition in particular) were directly associated with Gods.
And one can see this in the more ‘literary’ works (e.g., imperial histories, encomiums,
genealogies, biographies and epics) where scribes regularly give thanks to the exterior forces
that were not only responsible for the felicity of their words but also for their reception and
success. As Hurowitz (2008) suggests, while the extensiveness of a scribe’s training
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mattered, their success was also dependent upon abilities that were seen to be divinely
endowed. Thus it is not surprising that the opening lines of scribal texts (as well as the
colophons) were often both highly self-congratulatory and humble; one the one hand
recounting their extensive training and simultaneously giving thanks to the gods that have
bestowed such virtues upon them, as Smith suggests, scribes “projected their scribal activities
on high, on a god who ...was a teacher in his heavenly court. They hypostatized the scribe and
scribal activities in the figure of Divine Wisdom” (Smith 1975, 48, also see Orton 1989).
It is precisely this idea of the scribe as a conduit for forces that transcend him that is
significant here. As Orton (1989) suggests, “to be a scribe in Babylon, as indeed in Egypt, in
Assyria and in Sumer beforehand, was in large part to be an eminent interpreter of mysteries
for the benefit of the court and ultimately for the nation, though the art itself remained largely
esoteric” (41-42). Thus while the scribe transacted language and writing for the court, the
practice involved an element of divination. The good scribe is one that is attuned to the divine
mysteries of language and can forge it into the practical functions of state. This consolidation
between the legalistic and esoteric is perhaps best epitomised by the second century Jewish
scribe Ben Sira. In his didactic texts, Ben Sira emphasises that the key to wisdom is not
predicated on reading but on listening: “a teachable student is one who has an attentive ear”
(Sirach 3:29 quoted in Carr 2009, 208). As Orton (1989) elaborates, for Ben Sirach “the
scribe's occupation is with understanding matters …that are in some way 'hidden' from
others. He is a professional 'understander'” (Orton 1989). What is being understood however,
is not the author’s own ideas or even the author’s own words, but the laws, values and
principals enshrined in the Torah. This wisdom is not Ben Sira’s own. Rather, as he suggests,
“God hast put into my mouth as it were rain for all [those who thirst]…they shall be a torrent
[overflowing its banks] and like the [bottom]less seas. They shall suddenly gush forth which
were hidden in secret” (Sirach 1QH8 quoted in Orton 1989, 74). While Ben Sira helps us
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understand, the source of that knowledge is not within himself. Rather it derives from sources
outside him, mysteries which he transcribes and delivers but does not engender.
At first glance, it is difficult to establish the scribe as an equate-able counter to modern
notions of authorship, particularly since the source of scribal knowledge is divine. My
interest, however, has less to do with the terms of the relationship and more to do with the
relationship itself. The scribe was not seen to be the origin of his thoughts. Rather his
thoughts were given to him by others. And while those others were sublimated into a host of
divinities and spiritual traditions, the alterity that these deities named cannot be so readily
rejected or dismissed. Indeed, it is precisely those mysteries that have been utterly annihilated
by our contemporary conceptions of authorship. My suggestion here is not that we need to
build new totems or supplicate our muse, but that we recognize and acknowledge how
otherness, and the mysteriousness that inheres in alterity, enjoins us to write. It is others and
what we do not know of them that is the origin of our thinking. The scribe’s enduring
capacity to see the origin of writing as inhering in forces, events and encounters outside
themselves and acknowledging (and even celebrating) their role in the text’s composition, is
what I am attending to. While academics no doubt recognize the role of informants and often
give thanks to their participation, in the transposition of others to academic evidence, the
informant’s gift of thought is occluded by the author’s personal capacities. This is not
wisdom in the scribal sense but an intellectual game, a reversal legitimated through the
institutional sanctity of evidence. While I am not arguing that we should forsake authorship
and embrace the scribe, I am using the figure of the scribe to put forth an alternative
conception of the writing subject, a subject that is first and foremost oriented towards
exteriority, i.e., towards the others that provision our thinking. Writing, for the scribe, is not
simply a gift from others but is a gift that requires recognition. And while we may not need to
supplicate the source of our writing in the same way, they do need to be acknowledged. There
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is a demand at the heart of this conception of the writing subject to honour those others; to
recognise that which is the source of our writing and refrain from claiming too much for
ourselves.
v. The ethics of authorship
While the emphasis of the previous section was on outlining an alternative conception of the
writing subject, the purpose of this section is to explore the ethical implications for writing in
this manner. If our stories are not our own (if they are gifted from others), then how do we
understand the ethical and political obligations of telling them? To what extent can we be
responsible for stories that are not ours, i.e., fundamentally not under our control or
dominion? How do we think through the ‘politics of representation’ when we are not the
origin or owners of the objects we represent? To understand the question we need to review
the politics of writing and representation in the discipline. Specifically, this means looking at
two traditions: (1) the feminist ‘social geography’ tradition of Holloway (2005, 2007),
Skelton (2000) Valentine (1993, 1996) and others (Bell and Valentine 1995; Bell and Binnie
2004) and (2) the feminist field-work tradition, represented by Katz (1994), Moss (1993),
Radcliffe (1996), Nast (1994) Wolfe (1987; 1991) and more recently by Pain (2007; 2008),
Bondi (2002, 2003, 2007), Pratt (2000, 2010), Nagar (2003; 2013) and others (Cameron and
Gibson 2005; Cahill, Sultana, and Pain 2007). In both of these traditions there is a strong
emphasis on the politics of writing the stories of others. The focus of this section is on
reviewing these traditions and exploring the avenues they provide for an ethics predicated on
the acknowledgement of the others that give us our stories.
The feminist ‘social geography’ tradition historically focused on those communities,
classes and/or identity groups that for various social, economic and geographic reasons are
excluded from the resources and opportunities available to others. Anderson’s (1987) ground-
breaking work on Vancouver’s Chinatown is a classic example of how racist political
16
imaginaries can concretise into materialist practices that keep immigrant communities
spatially and socially marginalised. Work by Valentine (1993) illustrates how far less
materialist practices have the capacity to designate who belongs where and when (also see
Domosh 1998) and work by Sibley (1995), Dwyer (2015) and Ahmed (2012) illustrate the
social dynamics and mechanisms that can be employed to situate expectations about the
spatial parameters of inclusion. In terms of writing, however, what distinguishes this work is
the long-standing tradition of using stories to give marginalised groups ‘a voice’. Drawing
upon the post-colonial work of Said (1979) and Spivak (1996), the question here is how to
amplify and reveal the voices of the marginalised others within conversations of the dominant
(McDowell 1992). The purpose of this strategy is two-fold. On the one hand, its illuminates
the plight of the marginal and the effects of social exclusion. But on the other it also works to
queer the mainstream (Munoz 2010), that is, to reveal the presence of what Sibley calls ‘the
imperfect people’ within and thus to question the holism and certainty that defines the
dominant. In this framing, the question of how to speak for others becomes central. Thus,
debates turned upon who has the right and/or capacity to speak on the other’s behalf (see
Routledge 1997) as well as the political effectivity of giving voice (Hubbard 1999).
The feminist fieldwork tradition, while similarly concerned with the status and well-being
of marginalised and subaltern others, takes a somewhat different tack. Here the emphasis is
on understanding and ameliorating (as far as possible) the differential power relations
embedded in the research process. As Wolfe (1996) suggests, power differentials saturate
(unwittingly and unavoidably) the research context--from setting questions, collecting data to
the writing and publishing results. The hallmark of this tradition is an emphasis on reflexivity:
an ongoing meditation on the dynamics, limits and possibilities of research and its
emancipatory parameters and potential. Long-standing topics include questions of
positionality (Haraway 1991; Rose 1993; Browne 2008), obligation and care (Staeheli and
17
Brown 2003; Lawson 2007; Mcewan and Goodman 2010) and the nature of listening
(England 1994; Nairn 1997). More relevant for this project, however, are the techniques that
have developed to mitigate the authority that inheres in authorship. In the work of Bondi
(2002, 2007), Nagar (2003; 2013) and others (Mountz et al. 2003; Gibson-Graham and
Roelvink 2011) there is a thoughtful and rigorous endeavour to question the author’s
sovereignty and the singularity of her voice. Through strategies of collaboration, engagement
and distributed authorship, these writers in particular have sought ways to cultivate texts that
are not only more inclusive but acknowledges the author’s debt to others.
The reason I raise these traditions is not only because they represent a set of engaging
debates about the ethical nature of writing, but because they constitute an innovative place for
stories in the academy. Whether the aim is to open the discipline to a multitude of voices or
to acknowledge our reliance on the voices of others, the literature serves as the necessary
counter-example to the critique I presented in section 1, i.e., these stories do not reduce the
other’s narrative to evidence. On the contrary, there is an effort to establish an alternative
place for stories: a place where the story’s effectiveness is measured not only by its ethics,
but also its capacity to move and affect, even if those effects are measured primarily by their
impact on social change. And yet, while this work has been inspirational to the current
project, I also want to distinguish the place I am attempting to clear both in terms of the way
it invites and engages with otherness and in terms of the work I am attempting to make
stories do.
In terms of the tradition of giving voice to the marginal, the debates often concerned ‘who
has the right to speak’ (see Bondi and Domosh 1992; Radcliffe 1994; Kobayashi 1994). As
Routledge (1996) argues, there is always the “danger of producing a narcissistic self-centring
which locates myself-as-author at the centre of an heroic or romanticized narrative” (401).
Similar debates in anthropology surround what Ortner (1995) calls the politics of
18
ethnographic refusal, where silence is perceived to be the only legitimate means of
negotiating the freighted politics of representation (also see Simpson 2007; Fernando 2014).
While these critiques are trenchant, the solutions to them are somewhat facile. For Routledge
(1996) it is to create a negotiated third space where political activism and writing can inform
each other through a reflexive trialectic, while for Fernando (2014) the solution is silence
when it is impossible to represent the other. All such solutions fall back on a conception of
writing where the author is presumed to be a sovereign subject responsible for words and
ideas that are conceptualised first and foremost as belonging to her. While a number of
feminist authors have recognised and critiqued this position for its politics (Hooks 1990; Hill
Collins 1990; Peake and Trotz 1999; Valentine 2007), my interest concerns the way it
situates the writing subject. In the very ambition to ‘give voice’ to the other, there is a
movement of self-realisation--an establishment of one-self as the voice that gives. In the
transposition of the other from someone that gives to someone that needs, we lose sight of
how the capacity to be responsible is itself given by others. Others give us not simply the
right but the ontological aptitude to speak.
Feminism and feminist practice has moved on immensely from this tradition and recent
work in the feminist fieldwork vein has produced more potent intersections with the approach
I am attempting to clear. Indeed, in the work of Pratt (2000, 2010), Bondi (2003, 2007),
Nagar (2003; 2013) and Gibson-Graham (2006) there is an attentiveness to how the
collaborative process and the event of engagement with others, engenders hybrid, mobile and
porous subjectivities. Pratt (2003) in particular emphasises how research disrupts subjectivity,
exposing its lack of firm ground and opening absences and fallibilities that she (the subject)
must think through in order to reconstitute herself as a writing and thinking being. This is a
conception of the writing subject that is very similar to the one I am attempting to trace; a
19
subject whose capacity to think and write is gifted by others. But I would make two
distinctions.
The first surrounds the question of responsibility. In much of the feminist scholarship, the
commitment to others is political (as well as personal). This is to say that the event of
encounter, exposure and thought is precipitated by a desire to facilitate social justice and/or
engender various relations of emancipation and care. While authors are no doubt careful not
to pre-determine what social justice means or the modality of care that can and should take
place, the purpose of listening is to be responsible, as Nagar suggests “the spirit of listening,
sharing and collaborative decision-making [is] about where these stories should speak, for
whom, in what languages and with what purpose” (368). The only thing I would add to this
sentiment is that there is an ontological point that proceeds the political one. As a scribe, it is
our exposure to the other that allows us to speak. There is no voice that precedes this
exposure. Thus, all speaking, writing and doing is reliant on the other’s arrival and the stories
they tell.
This leads to the second point. In the desire to engage with others, there is often within
this literature a desire for reciprocity and exchange, that is, a desire for the other to be a
partner and/or collaborator (to varying degrees) in the research process. My question here
does not concern the means or techniques by which this process is facilitated, a topic which
has already received much thoughtful work, e.g., in participatory methods (Pain and Kindon
2007) distributed authorship (Bondi 2002) and in collaborative political activism (Nagar and
Ali 2003; Pain 2003; Pratt 2003). My question rather concerns the underlying ambition that
such techniques situate, namely, the desire for equality. While many authors are very careful
not to presume (or imply) sameness between themselves and their collaborators, there is an
underlying desire for correspondence, an ambition to meet on level ground and speak through
(as far as possible) the social, cultural, racial, sexual and ethnic differences that divide them.
20
While such a task is noble and necessary, it nonetheless wrongly stages the relation between
writer and other. In contrast, I would argue that the relation between scribe and subject is
(and must be) one of irremediable inequality. This is an inequality that precedes relations of
power and is unaffected by the various strategies we (as writers) may use to mitigate them. It
is an inequality that resides in our reliance on the other. As Pratt (2012) suggests, in the
acknowledgements of her monograph, her book “grew out of, was nourished by, and lives
within…[her] collaborations; there is very little to say beyond this. The book would not exist
without [them]” (ix, emphasis mine). The implication here is that Pratt’s relation with her
informants is one of unremitting reliance (a sentiment familiar to anyone who has engaged in
long-term fieldwork). It is the other’s arrival and the stories they tell us that allows us to
write. And we are beholden to those stories (and the ones that tell them) in a manner that no
convention or technique can modify. Regardless of how much social, political and economic
power we bring to the research situation, we are always at the other’s mercy. It is not simply
our capacity for authorship that is held in their hands, but our capacity to be a subject, that is
our capacity to speak not only for them but for ourselves. Who we are as writing subjects (as
beings that have the capacity to listen, write and speak) is reliant on the arrival of the other
and the demand imminent to their story--the demand to listen. And while such a demand no
doubt situates a relation of responsibility (which feminist geographers have long been well-
attuned) it is important to recognise that that responsibility is situated in a relation of
ontological inequality; a relation where we are utterly and wholly beholden to the other. The
ethics of writing is thus an ethics that honours our social obligations alongside our
ontological dependence. It is an ethics that acknowledges the ontological primacy of the
other’s arrival.
vi. Conclusions
21
Towards the beginning of his famous essay Poetically man dwells Heidegger (1971) states
that “man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language
remains the master of man. When this relation of dominance gets inverted, man hits upon
strange manoeuvres” (p. 215). My purpose in this article has been to suggest that we, as
authors, are guilty not of forgetting our responsibility to others (this is something academics
are often very aware of) but rather our humility before others. In other words, while we are
acutely aware of our obligation to others, we conceive of that obligation in relation to our
own capacities (our ability to engage, reflect and choose), rather than in relation to our
vulnerability (our reliance on others and the stories they tell). Such forgetting has indeed led
to some strange manoeuvres. When the stories that lead us to think are positioned as the
evidence for our thoughts, we come to see language and writing as a tool that is ours to use
and others as a proxy for its truth. It is only when we approach language as an opening to the
other, only when we acknowledge the other’s call as imminent to the very act of thinking
itself, that we understand the thoughts we speak and the words with which we speak them do
not originate from within but constitute a response. “Man first speaks” Heidegger continues,
“when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal” (216). Hearing
this appeal constitutes the conceptual heart of this paper. Its purpose, first and foremost is to
illuminate that we, as writers, are not the architects or the origin of our voice. Inherent in the
ambition to give a voice to the marginal, the vulnerable and excluded is a potential
misconstruction of our status vis-à-vis these others. It is not us who give the other a voice. It
is they who give us ours.
While there is a long tradition in anthropology, geography and feminist studies of
recognising the ethics of writing, as well as earnest engagements with the debt we owe to
others, too often such work does not transpire into serious questioning of the ontological
status and standing of authorship. More often than not, it leads to a re-assertion of the
22
author’s sovereignty. In the practice of reflecting upon the ethics, politics and possibilities (or
impossibilities) of representation, collaboration and cooperative political action, there is the
danger of re-stablishing our responsibility, that is, to affirm ourselves as (on the one hand)
having freedom from the other and (on the other) obligated to use that freedom responsibly.
In such cases we affirm our sovereign power for choice and self-reflection, our ability to talk
to ourselves about the options we (as writing subjects) face. If nothing else the purpose of this
article has been to provide a check on this inclination towards personal self-belief, i.e., the
idea that we have (or could potentially have) mastery over not only ourselves and our story,
but our very capacity to think. It is through this framing that we can see the kind of place I
am attempting to clear for stories in the academy. The refusal to treat stories as evidence is a
refusal to present them as post-facto conclusions formed by an already constituted subject. By
letting stories be stories we recognise and acknowledge that which allowed us to think.
Stories, in this framing, are the events that give us a voice. What this means in terms of the
actual practice of writing is beyond the scope of this article. Indeed, I see this question as an
issue of technique and while I myself have evolved my own approach to writing stories (see
Rose 2014), I see this as only one possibility.
That said, I have argued for at least two re-orientations in terms of our current conception
of the writing subject. First, I have argued for a reconceptualization of authorship and second,
for a re-imagination of authorial responsibility. In both cases the ambition is to illustrate how
our obligation to the other is non- reciprocal--how we (as writers) are wholly indebted to the
other and the stories that others give. As Jabes suggests, the ‘I’ is the miracle of the ‘you’.
What we think of as our voice is actually not ours at all, but is given to us by an other: the
miracle of an other’s story, arriving from nowhere, surprising, interesting and perhaps
entertaining but always constitutive. It is to this miracle where our obligation lies. Honouring
that which allows us to speak. Recognising how that which we take to be most our own (our
23
writing, our ideas, our voice) does not derive from us but is a gift from the other and the
stories that others endlessly and generously provide.
24
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Transactions for the Institute for British Geographers 30 (3):234-247.———. 2009. Landscape, absence and the geographies of love. Transactions of the Institute of British
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MITCH ROSE is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Earth Science at Aberystwyth
University, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests are in
cultural geography, cultural theory and the history and culture of the Middle East.
i This statement is evidenced not only by the proliferation of self-consciously creative work (Wylie 2005; Edensor 2008; Lorimer and Lund 2008; Rose 2010; DeSilvey, Ryan, and Bond 2014; Parr and Stevenson 2014) but also by the rise of special issues (Leeuw and Marston 2013; Lorimer and Parr 2014) and the emergence of this very journal whose remit is to “showcase a wealth of creative and experimental work being undertaken by geographers” (Cresswell et al. 2015: 3).
ii In the endeavour to confer legitimacy on certain work there resides the danger of delineating sanctioned forms of creative practice. Thus, even as this paper attempts to provide an intellectual rationale for creative forms of story-telling, this should not imply a desire to foreclose the myriad ways of writing stories nor suggest any limits on the creative possibilities inherent to the practice of doing geography. Creative geographic practice is proliferating throughout the discipline in both representational and non-representational terms, e.g., see work by Pratt (2003), Hawkins (2009), McCormack (2014), Kuper (2013) and Wylie (2009). I see this project as a supplement to this work rather than as an attempt to limit the boundaries of creative geographic practice.