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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

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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

Geographers 34 (3):275-289.

MITCH ROSE is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Earth Science at Aberystwyth

University, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB UK. E-mail: mitch.rose@aber.ac.uk. 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.