harvey d - geographical knowledge in the eye of power - reflections on derek gregory's geographical...

8/22/2019 Harvey D - Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power - Reflections on Derek Gregory's Geographical I

1/5

160 HarveyI

I

tion of social theory (critical social theory, hewould insist). His work is thus a dialogic invi-tation-not only for geographers, but also fortheorists in other disciplines-to reflect on therelationships between knowledge, power, andspace. The result is not the imposition of afoundationalist disciplinary terrain echoing anearlier history, but an engagement betweencritical social theory and human geography.It is in this spirit of interaction that the pres-ent Forum came to pass. Invited were two ge-ographers, David Harvey and Cindi Katz, andone art historian and critic, Rosalyn Deutsche.Since much of Harveys own ground-breakingwork is examined in Geographical Irnagina-tions, I am especially pleased by his participa-tion in this project. Readers of this and othergeography journals will also know Cindi Katz,whose research explores the boundaries be-tween political economy, cultural forms, andthe practices of everyday life. In these spheres,she has examined the construction of identityand the production of space and nature insuchdiverse contexts as the Sudan and Harlem.Rosalyn Deutsche, though perhaps new tosome of our readers, is one of those socialtheorists we can count as a participant rather

than a spectator. An avowed interdisciplinarian,Deutsche writes widely on the connectionsbetween aesthetic practices and urban socialconditions such as gentrification, redevelop-ment, and homelessness; the repression offeminism and sexuality incritical spatial theory;public art and public space; and radical de-mocracy. She has taught in the MassachusettsInstitute of Technologys History, Theory andCriticism of Architecture and Art Program andat the Cooper Union, Queens College of theCity University of New York, The School ofVisual Arts, and Rutgers University.Finally, thanks are due to Derek Gregory forhis willingness to participate in this Forum and,more importantly, for his work over the pastfifteen years to question entrenched discipli-nary boundaries. It is partly through his effortsthat there is a place where both humanistic andsocial scientific scholars can meet and reflecton the spatiality of social life.

ReferenceGregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. O x -

ford: Blackwell .

EvaluationGeographical Knowledge in the Eye ofPower: Reflections on Derek GregorysGeographical Imaginations

David HarveyDepartment of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The J ohns Hopkins University

D:::tusly Gregory has written a marvel-forthcoming book. And it has abecoming cover, though I haveyet to work out its full significance. But I didlearn a lot from reading this most erudite andinat least one respect exemplary piece of criti-cal writing.I ought, however, to declare my partiality.My own work figures heavily inGregorys con-

cerns and I find his treatment of it eminentlyfair. He engages seriously with my arguments,tries to read what I have written as a whole, aspart of an on-going project, and, while he ap-propriately maintains a critical distance (andAnnak ofthe Association ofAmerican Geographers, 8511), 1995,pp. 160-1640 1995 byAssociation of American GeographersPublished byBlackwell Publishers, 238 Mam Street, Cambr i dg , MA 02142, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lJF,UK


2/5

Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power 161thereby creates plenty of room for disagree-ment and debate) he refrains from that knock-about destructiveness that these days oftenpasses for critical discussion. Gregory hasstruggled to be fair and faithful to the intentionsof the authors he considers. We, the authors,are allowed to speak largely for ourselves,while he weaves an erudite thread of his owncritical argument around the diverse things thatsome of us have been trying to say. If the bookmanages only to set a standard for the mannerof critical discussion within geography, thenthis will be a major contribution.

Gregorys concerns, however, reach far be-yond the boundaries of our discipline. This isin part because the geographical imagination isfar too pervasive and important a facet of in-tellectual life to be left alone to geographers.Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, Benjamin,J ameson, Lefebvre, Giddens, bell hooks,Haraway, Spivak, Said, and Geertz populatethe text and here, too, Gregory has achievedsomething very special. For it is plainly his in-tention to take what he considers the very bestof geographical work and treat it on a par withsome of the very best writings from philoso-phy, sociology, anthropology, and the like andto illustrate the major contributions that geog-raphers have made, are making, and can maketo social and literary theory. Time will tell howsuccessful he has been in this, but I believe hiserudition will generally carry the day. He oftenwrites of both the possibilities and difficultiesof folding in one kind of perspective, theory,or body of work with another and in so doingdeploys the baroque concept of the fold togreat effect (Deleuze1993).The intricate traceshe follows from within geography and acrossa multiplicity of other disciplines not only re-veal hitherto hidden connections, but alsoserve to embed geographical work more firmlyin a wider context of enquiry and debate. Gre-gory has rendered a very vital political serviceto geographers by producing a book that canact as a knowledgeable guide for social andliterary theorists interested in certain aspects ofour work. Iam not, unfortunately, sanguine thatprofessional geographers, with their obsessionfor CIS as saving grace, will take advantage ofsuch an intellectual opening ( I note, for exam-ple, that the National Academy committeecharged with rediscovering geography hasno one who can speak well to the sorts ofconcerns that Gregory raises and that none of

the geographers whose imagination he high-lights are participants).

Gregorys overwhelming concern for linkagewith literary and social theory has, however,been bought at a certain cost. To begin with,his legendary skills as phraseur and the intri-cate (baroque) paths he sometimes followsoften put the book out of reach of those unfa-miliar with the terrain he is traversing. It willtherefore appear to some as an ethereal con-versation about and among a select group ofthe initiated I can imagine many of my ex-col-leagues in Oxford protesting that they cannotunderstand what he is about and that it seemsmere pretentious ramblingto them). I think thatwould be an unfortunate reaction, but Gregorycould have done more to counter it. Also, inhis laudable concern to be fair, Gregory attimes distances himself so far, politically andintellectually, from what is being said that it ishard to locate not only where he stands oncertain crucial issues but what he himself istrying to do. Furthermore, the choice of geo-graphical imaginations has largely been dic-tated by how well these mesh with externalcurrents of thought-themselves to some de-gree trendy and even cultish-in social and lit-erary theory. Many within geography willjustifiably protest at the inherent bias in hischoice.

I begin with the most singular, and to memost shocking absence of all. No physical ge-ographers, apparently, are endowed with ageographical imagination worthy of note. Thegap between literary theory, certain branchesof social theory such as critical anthropology,and science and technology is extraordinarilyimportant these days and geography, with itspeculiar tradition of trying to make physical,social scientific, and humanities approachescoexist, is an active site of such an intersection.The fact that the intersection is contentious,problematic, and frequently painful does notjustify shying away from it. I think, for example,of the work of Bruno Latour (1993) or EmilyMartins (1994) ethnographic consideration ofhow scientists work in the field of immunologyas exemplars of the kind of study that couldwell go on within the confines of geography ifonly sufficient imagination were brought tobear. Unfortunately, Gregorys particular con-cerns within literary and social theory here leadhim away from considering a crucial point ofcontestation within the geographical imagina-


3/5

162 Harvey

tion. The effect is not only to increase distanceswithin the discipline but also to turn away fromlooking carefully and critically at all these dis-courses about ozone holes, global warming,desertification, environmental hazards, popu-lation problems, and the like that play such animportant role in shaping not only geographybut also popular geographical knowledge. Wecan, and ought, to do far better on topics ofthis sort than wait for someone like AndrewRoss (1 991 ) to tell us what to think.

Gregory might reasonably claim that hecould not possibly deal with everything of sig-nificance within geography. But I am personallyconvinced that neglect of this crucial problemof the physical-human geography intersectionis more than just a casual absence. It is a tacitdisavowal of and a polemical attack against acertain conception of the geographical imagi-nation that is desperately in need of sustenanceand critical appraisal.

The second critical absence is one that liesinternal to his textual strategy. In his first chap-ter, The World as Exhibition, Gregory takesup what is fast becoming a very conventionalview of the encounter of the West with therest of the world. It was an encounter thatsought to subsume the world under the all-en-compassing and dominating gaze of a sup-posedly dominant culture bent upon an impe-rialist project of colonization. The trend in lit-erary theory, subsequent to Saids crucial writ-ing on Orientalism, is to insist that as muchdamage has been done by this imperializinggaze as was done by the swords, bayonets,muskets, and administrative violence of the co-lonial powers, and that the decolonizationprocess that ameliorated the latter has left be-hind the much more serious problem of whatto do with the long-lasting and nefarious psy-chological effects of cultural imperialism.

Gregorys approach here is to proceed as ifSaids Orientalism-rightly a very influentialbook-first revealed the complicity of much oftraditional geography in a culturally imperialistand colonizing project. ButBill Bunge had longbefore taken up the cudgels against what hecalled the view from Buckingham Palace andJ im Blaut, in article after article (and now bookafter book-see Blaut1976; 1987; 1992; 1993)has engaged in a powerful critique of ethno-centrism in geographical writing. But BIaut hasbeen erased from Gregorys map of the criticalgeographical imagination-not a singre refer-

ence to his work in a book that treats thewhole question of the colonial encounter asfundamental! This absence, this erasure of twoof the most fertile critical geographical imagi-nations of the latter half of the twentieth cen-tury has serious consequences. am personallypersuaded, for example, that the history of thegeographical expeditions that Bunge launchedis far more interesting and potentially sig-nificant than all the derives of the Situationists(now regarded as so trendy) conductedaround the same time (on this point, see Mer-rifield n.d.).

In any case, Saids argument, as he now rec-ognizes, needs some nuancing. To begin with,the imperialist gaze was not homogeneousbut extraordinarily heterogeneous, and thosegazed upon were by no means passive, en-gaged as they were in a variety of practices ofresistance, complicity, subversion, and in-volvement (sometimes to their own advan-tage), that made the whole colonial encountera rather more complex affair than a simple im-position of the imperialist gaze upon the wholeworld. Yet, in certain circles, the tendency toexcorciate the imperialist gaze and to wallowin post-colonial guilt has generated such a pho-bia against looking, against seeing, against visu-alizing that we are in danger of plucking oureyes out and trying to do without any kind ofvision at all. But if memory is crucially depend-ent upon visualization (an equation that helpsexplain why memory can often play such ex-traordinary tricks), then to forego visualizationis to condemn ourselves to oblivion. Thisplainly is not Gregorys aim, but in that case heis obliged to tell us more than he cares, notwhether or not we should look and gaze, visu-alize, and picture (and in his awed wonder atPierce Lewiss powers of description he plainlyreinstates visceral reactions as fundamental tothe geographical imagination), but exactly howand in what ways we should (or should not)use our powers of vision and our capacity toconstruct spatialized metaphors of deep mean-ing as we struggle to construct understandingsof the world. Gregory sees the question, buthe does not move towards any kind of answer.My own view is that there is much that isunnecessarily constraining, guilt-laden andeven arbitrary deriving from writing on thegaze (itself a rather dreadful term) these daysand that an initially insightful and liberatorythought has come to the point where it de-


4/5

Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power 163serves a far more powerful critique than Gre-gory is prepared to give.

In part, this question turns on another: howto conceptualize that "other" which is alwaysbeing visualized and how the play of poweroperates within the particular choice of visuali-zation. Here, too, there has been a great dealwritten that is both liberatory and insightful andGregory has quite properly taken pains to reg-ister it. I do not object to what he does say, butregret that the critical discussion stops short atthe point where critical advance is desperatelyneeded. My own view, here, is that Westernthought has in this regard fallen victim to oneof its own most powerful conceits-that indi-viduals are self-contained entities who, in theirlust for economic advantage, power, or what-ever, go out and create subservient others (beit workers, women, colonized subjects, raciallymarked bodies, or whomever). A more dialec-tical view would have it that the self-other re-lation is fundamental to all formations of selfand identity and that the only interesting ques-tion concerns the various modalities of powerwithin which relations between self and otherunfold. Put another way, if the creation of anysense of self depends on a process of "other-ing" then the creation of "others" (made somuch of in the literature) is a universal notpartial facet of the human condition, and it nec-essarily has constructive as well as destructiveaspects.

This issue also relates, of course, to the ques-tion of positionality and power relations in theproduction of geographical understandings. Itis fundamental to Gregory's thesis that knowl-edge is power and that its construction and usedepends heavily upon the positionality, predis-positions, projective needs (usually masked),and hidden desires of the enquirer. It is partofGregory's project to reveal the hidden plays ofpower and positionalities operating within sup-posedly neutral depictions of the world as wellas within the abstractions of theory.

He is right in this, but again fails to take theargument further. For there is a pervasive sensethat there is something so partial as to bewrong with positionality while power too oftentakes on some connotation of an evil eye ofdomination. Gregory too often forgets Gid-dens's injunction to think of power in a two-sided way, as power to dominate others butalso as power to do, to create, to emancipate-why else do we talk so positively of empow-

erment of women, post-colonial subjects, theoppressed, or the working class? Even J ohnMajor promotes empowerment by cuttingtaxes to encourage the shop-therefore-I-amidentity politics of contemporary capitalism.The opposition I have chosen here is importantbecause it points up the issue of what and forwhom power is going to be used. If, for exam-ple, I can construct some eye of power thatwould make one jot of difference to the rav-ages wrought by corporate capitalism or uponthe ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and the relig-ious right, Iwould not hesitate one second todo it. Gregory is not wrong to insist that thetwo forms of power bear a very complex rela-tion to each other but he fails to chart a wayto think through such dilemmas in more so-phisticated ways.

This reluctance derives, I suspect, from Gre-gory's critical resistance to anything thatsmacks of transcendental argument on thegrounds that to transcend (or even to try totranscend) what "others" say is in some sensearrogant and dismissive of their views and in-terests. But active deployment of knowledge asa form of power is always about transcendingsomething. Gregory is extremely knowledge-able and insofar as he deploys that knowledgewith all the force at his command (and wouldsubmit that this is precisely what he does togreat effect in Geographical Imaginations) thenhe is most certainly trying to transcend manyof the qualities of the debate in contemporarygeography and to impose his own voice uponthem. I have no problem with that at all andpersonally welcome his efforts. But there issomething odd about attacking notions of tran-scendence and the exercise of knowledge aspower when others do it, while actually engag-ing in the practice himself in the text's con-struction.

The effect is to allow Gregory to seem to bereasonably nice to &eryone. But it alsoamounts to a refusal to position himself politi-cally with respect to the debates extant withingeography in particular or society in general.He may well regard this as a harsh judgmentbecause he again and again points out his ownpositionality (though usually in the form of amea culpa) and goes out of his way to concedeas much as he can to feminists and postcolonialsubjects (and if the race question was more inthe forefront of debate within the discipline Iam sure he would have taken that up more


5/5

164 Katzforcefully too, rather than leaving it barely vis-ible and dangling at the end of the first chap-ter). How well those concessions satisfy I willleave others to examine (my impression is that,for both good and bad reasons, they do notand will not). But the sub-text is that he is notbeing as nice to everyone as he seems.Throughout much of the book he seems to belocated in some hermetically sealed galacticAWACS surveying all below with troubledmein and gentle countenance, dispensing wis-dom and learned judgments, much as thegrand sage of Francis Bacons Solomons Housepresented himself to the people in that won-derfully prescient utopian fable of New Atlantis(see Leiss 1974: chapter 3) .The only other political framing I can dis-cover is that given in his introduction and con-clusion. The former alerts us to the importanceof his transition from Cambridge, where hewas apparently unaware that women and post-colonial subjects existed, to Vancouver, wherehe discovered both; the latter holds it a goodidea to reach out and touch bodies, not in amood of arrogance, aggression and conquest,but in a spirit of humility, understanding, andcare (p. 416). I accept these sentiments asgenuinely meant, but I worry how easy it willbe to mock them. In any case, by his ownlights, such sentiments ought never be takenat face value and deserve to be called to intel-lectual and political account. As it stands, the

effect is to depoliticize rather than sensitizegeographical work to the issues that Gregoryseems to believe are important.

ReferencesBlaut, I. 1976. Where was Capitalism Born? An-tipode 8(2):1-11.-. 1987. The National Question: Decolonizingthe Theory of Nationalism. London: Zed Books.-. 1992. 1492: The Debate on Colonialism,Eurocentrism and History. Trenton, New Jersey:Africa World Press.-. 1993. The Colonizers Model of the World.New York: The Guilford Press.Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Ba-roque. London: Athlone Press.Latour, B. 1993. We have never been Modern. He-

me1Hemstead, England: Harvester W heatsheaf.Leiss, W. 1974. The Domination of Nature. Boston:Beacon Press.Martin, E. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking fmmunityin American Culture from the Days of Polio tothe Age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.Merrifield, A. n.d. Situated Knowledge through Ex-ploration: Reflections on Bunges GeographicalExpeditions. Forthcoming in Antipode.

Ross, A. 1991. Strange Weather; Culture, Scienceand Technology in the Age of Limits. London:Verso.Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: PantheonBooks.

Major /M nor:Theory, Nature, and PoliticsCindi Katz

The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York

eographical Imaginations is Derek Gre-gorys utopian gesture. It aspires toG expose the present in a way that letsus glimpse the outlines of a better future. Likethe angels inWim Wenders Wings of Desirewith which he closes the book, Gregorys proj-ect is to articulate the fragments of the every-day in a way which would reveal them . . .as

being structured by and within the same so-cio-historical situation. The angels wanderingsand investigations textualize the otherwiseradically invisible structure of a history [andgeography] in which all the fragments share(Casarino 1990, cited in Gregory p. 415). InGeographical Imaginations, Gregory wandersthrough and investigates the texts of social

Annals of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 85(1),1995, pp. 164-1 68Ql995 by Associationof American GeographersPublishedby Blackwell P ublishers. 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, and 108 Covvley Road, Oxford, OX4 lIF, UK

harvey d - geographical knowledge in the eye of power - reflections on derek gregory's geographical...

Documents