Spacing Deconstruction

11

Spacing Deconstruction

Keith Woodward

Th e ideal formal geographic description is the map. Anything that has equal distribution over the earth at any given time may be expressed by the map as a pattern of units in spatial occurrence. In this sense geographic description may be applied to an unlimited number of phenomena. Th us there is a geography of every disease, of dialects and idioms, of bank failures, perhaps of genius. Th at such a form of description is used for so many things indicates that it provides a distinctive means of inspection. Th e spacing of phenomena over the earth expresses the general geographic problem of distribution, which leads us to ask about the meaning of presence or absence, massing or thinning of any thing or group of things variable as to areal extension.

Carl O. Sauer 1

Oft en conceived as a spacing, the force of deconstruction collapses the oppositions that classically constituted the space-time dyad. Consequently, its infl uence upon critical human geography has been far-reaching. Western spatial thought has tended to equate space with presence, to assume that it is static and transparently available to empirical observation, and thus to grant it a certain ontological givenness. On the one hand, deconstructive geographers highlight how these spatial logics oft en carry traces of “ geographic imaginaries ” that install hierarchies, privileges, and alterities at the intersections of space and social life. 2 Scientifi c explanation, for example, has historically privileged certain spaces — the fi eld site, the space of the encounter — as the sites in which knowledge becomes manifest. And yet, this very logic can mask the many fi ctions that sustain and disseminate diff erence. On the other hand, they also question suppositions that, although representations of the world might invoke, evoke, and mime geographic realities, are only secondary in the production of spaces. Accordingly, modes of geographic representation, such as maps, come to be viewed as merely correlational tools that reference far more real and complex, preexisting and present spaces of experience.

Th is chapter explores the recent eff orts by several critical geographers to deconstruct the common notions that drive these dichotomies between thought, space, presence, and representation. Looking to geography ’ s “ carto-semiotic ” systems (maps and mapping)

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Spacing Deconstruction 223

as well as its longstanding conversation with phenomenological accounts of spatiality (the space of experience), it considers how encounters with Derrida have inspired new ways of thinking about space and spacing. Aft er examining the aporias within geography ’ s semiotic terrains, it describes the changes to geographic representation in light of new practices in critical cartography. Following upon this, it examines the “ place ” of presence and absence in landscape studies that explore intimate, embodied spaces of the encounter (e.g., the sense of place). Finally, it asks how such interventions might speak to the politics of spacing when conceived as both a geographic and a deconstructive eff ort.

Spacing semiotics

Th inking diff é rance as a kind of “ spacing ” challenges the restoration of the metaphysics of presence in “ Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. ” 3 Specifi cally, Derrida queries the prevailing tendency to place signs and presence in proximate relation to one another such that each is rendered an object of intuition . 4 In connection with this, he casts doubt upon the immediacy of experiential knowledge (whether empirical or auto-aff ective) and thus problematizes Western traditions that grant speech a privileged, presentational connection to language and meaning while marginalizing representational modes such as writing. Destabilizing such hierarchies, Derrida describes the tendency for signs to come loose from their structural moorings, to detach from localized articulations and disseminate across disparate fi elds, such that diff erence proliferates by installing their traces in the “ intuitive ” fi ctions of other systems. Th is acknowledgment that signifi cation wanders recognizes that diff é rance is a kind of force: 5 the movement of signifi cation arises from velocities, where traces of now absent contexts lend to meanings to come (in the form of gestures to the “ outsides ” of future signifyings). Th us diff er á nce is simultaneously a diff ering and a deferring: it confronts the history of philosophy with a philosophy “ to come. ” Th e Western privileging of presence eff ectively miscalculates the stakes at play in the circulation of signs, for, as Derrida notes, “ Force itself is never present; it is only a play of diff erences and quantities. ” 6 Diff é rance invokes the momentum through which the happening of signs is displaced onto their diff erencing . It is appropriate, then, that Derrida ’ s deconstruction of semiotics should discover within Husserl ’ s phenomenology of signs 7 the squeaky wheel upon which Saussurean linguistics overturns itself. 8

Th at Husserlian turning point helps reverse phenomenology ’ s privileged assumptions regarding the proximity of speech to language (with regard to meaning) and of language to the transcendental image (with regard to the object of presentation). It is telling that, within the same discussion, Derrida signals an affi nity with Charles Sanders Peirce, who likewise conceptualizes signifi cation as an endlessly circulating, generative process. Peirce, he asserts, is both “ more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of [the] becoming-unmotivated . . . of the symbol ” 9 and “ closer [than Husserl?] to [being?] the inventor of the word phenomenology. ” 10 Peirce off ers his own spacing-out of semiotics, where mobile symbols render pointless the search for any initial or terminal, indicative or derivative points upon which the play of signs might fi nally rest or be exhausted.


Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts224

Rather than implicating — however errantly — any such object, image, or message, the continuous generation of meaning is enabled by the circulation of its symbols. Strongly resonating with Derrida ’ s wandering “ dissemination ” : both fi nd within the generative character of signs a perpetual capacity to diff erentiate, grow, supplement, and extend signifi cation. Th e very notion of spacing, according to Derrida, “ signifi es, precisely, the impossibility of reducing the chain to one of its links or of absolutely approving one – or the other. ” 11 Such a system cannot be reduced to a catalog of objects and their attendant signifi ers, it is rather itself productive, signifying: “ manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign . . . Th e so-called “ thing-itself ” is always already a representamen. ” 12

Peirce ’ s wandering system has been relatively marginalized within Western critical doxa in favor of more linear, hierarchical and presentist logics that tend to mask or hide discontinuity and diff erence in circulating signs. Derrida ’ s deconstructive focus upon popular constructions of language and presence targets the erasure of space in signifi cation; that is, the supposition that intuition can jump the gap between cognition-representation and language-speech, and thereby engender and privilege their “ internal ” relations. Anchored to accounts of speech and phenomena, this gap arises with a fundamentally transcendental idealist chord struck by Descartes and sustained by Kant: 13 maintaining that intuition negotiates phenomenal experience via an internal schema — pure time — thus establishing representation as correlational supplements to external present reality. Nowhere is this notion more explicitly Derrida ’ s target than in his deconstruction of the common notion that links temporality to dynamism and mutability while simultaneously restricting spatiality to linearity and stasis. Th is dichotomy was central to the Cartesian reading of space as extensio , a totality of quantifi able distances extending from a perceiving subject. From this perspective, space is a kind of measurable emptiness that, much like the modern view of the sign, awaits an object whose presence will make manifest its specifi c points. Th at is, space becomes an ideal container . How else could a space manifest itself without the prior presence of a population of objects that constitute its points, take up positions within it, and allow us to measure, quantify, and affi rm it? Th e Cartesian reading of space off ers another iteration of the perceiver/presence problem. Here, space is rendered both contingent and static: Contingent because it can only become manifest through the presences of (1) a population of object-presences constituting it by distributing within it, and (2) a subject-perceiver (representer) who constitutes it as the extension of (its) objects from his/her body; Static because in such relations it is rendered absolutely passive, a vacuum to be fi lled with things and processes.

One of geography ’ s key contributions to contemporary critical thought has been its challenge to marginalizations and dematerializations of space. Th is intervention has drawn considerably upon the deconstructive prying-open, for example, of the gaps between words within a written text — absent-presences, the operative lacunae, spacings — where the production of meaning is mediated, interrupted, and enabled by progressions and distanciations — timings . Th e unfolding, emergent relation between signs and their spaces provides the hammer with which Derrida cracks open the production of meaning by problematizing the supposedly intuitive correspondences between speech and phenomena, meaning and presentation. Resultantly, representation



is extended well beyond the cognitive image and beyond even the grapheme — the mark — to the spacings that distance them and extend their meaning production.

Th us, three aspects of deconstruction add nuance to our conceptualizations of space: (1) it locates a productive site in the gap between speech/writing and signs/presence (diff erence), (2) it follows the circulation of meaning (to come) by surveying texts for the traces of other meanings (dissemination), and (3) it perpetually delays the determination of meaning by distancing signs from any specifi c idea-image in favor of becoming somethings else (deferral). Each dimension develops a complex critical counter-picture that reverses the conditional relations between space and presence, making possible otherwise static spaces, emerging spaces — spacings — become the epistemic, graphic, diff erent-deferred, and temporal conditions for signifi cation, meaning, and even thought. Deconstruction ’ s participation in geographic thought has had as much to do with Derrida ’ s discovery of a spacing unconditioned by abstract extension as it will with geography ’ s recent eff orts to describe signs unconditioned by presence. If the distanciated relation that he is most keen to deconstruct is signaled under the heading of speech and phenomena, then underwriting his infl uence upon geography is the growing desire to interrogate and initiate more nuanced, dynamic understandings and representations of space. It is to several of these that I now turn.

Deconstructing the map

Th e rise of Derridean deconstruction within geographic semiotics was doubtlessly eased by the fact that, despite their considerable graphic diff erences, maps and linguistic systems tend to be subject to similar representational crises. Just as writing gets regarded as a representational supplement to speech, geographers have oft en placed maps at a similar distance from the “ real ” spaces (or places) of embodied encounters and material processes. Th ese parallels are made explicit in the sense of artistry and artifi ce that haunts cartography and geographic work: geography, aft er all, is “ earth writing. ” 14 Th ough the grapheme may be sometimes displaced or replaced by the map ’ s “ carto-semiotic ” symbols, the representational eff ect remains much the same: the map-sign becomes a mimetic supplement to a “ corresponding ” area or place — a representation, a gesture toward a spatial presence that it echoes. Map-makers and -readers are invited to intuit and overlook the distance and anexactitude of these signs — to leap the gap and in this way to infer real, spatialized presence in absentia that those signs imperfectly invoke. Th e deconstructive relation to texts is one that recognizes map-signs as constitutive of multiple, circulating places and spatialities.

Despite their participation in the production of space, maps oft en ask to be regarded as presenting a transparent spatial perspective, the symbols-signs with which they are populated, and the circuits of representation they attempt to (en)close. However, recall that geography also played a crucial role and shares a deep complicity in the long history of Western colonialism. Critical geographers have argued that, rather than presenting an objective, “ bird ’ s eye ” view-from-nowhere, mapping builds hegemonic perspectives as much by what it names and places as by what it silences and erases. 15 Naming, placing, silencing, and erasing all record traces of the geographer ’ s participation in the



construction of the spatially infl ected distribution of not only master signifi ers, but also the master ’ s signifi ers. “ Geography was not something already possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth by an expanding, centralized imperial state, ” Ó Tuathail explains. “ It was not a noun, but a verb, a geo-graphing, an earth-writing by ambitious endo-colonizing and exo-colonizing states who sought to seize space and organize it to fi t their own cultural visions and material interests. ” 16

Th e foundational text for such discussions is unquestionably Harley ’ s “ Deconstructing the Map, ” which gives birth to critical cartography by espousing the “ search for metaphor and rhetoric in maps where previously scholars had found only measurement and topography. ” 17 A cartographer and co-founder of a massive “ History of Cartography Project ” that traces the social history of mapping, Harley reads the map as a text that, on the one hand, produces and is the product of imaginaries about truth and objectivity and, on the other, naturalizes exploitation and privilege. As texts, maps normalize diff erence and disempowerment by hiding both “ behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science. ” 18 However, calling attention to the bias of “ importance ” that guides the cartographic emphasis of certain features over others — for example, “ the estate of a landed gentleman is more worthy of emphasis than that of a plain farmer ” — Harley explains that cartography “ embodies a systematic social inequality. Th e distinctions of class and power are engineered, reifi ed and legitimated in the map by means of cartographic signs. ” 19 Th e signs, the normalization of their historic use when training cartographers, the employment of cartographers by specifi c agencies with certain interests — gentrifying rentiers, border-blazing capitalists, battle-hungry statists — all play into the making of mapping a normative power game. “ In the map itself, ” Harley explains, “ social structures are oft en disguised beneath an abstract, instrumental space, or incarcerated in the coordinates of computer mapping. ” 20 Th us, for example, we fi nd the carto-semiotic traces of capitalist desire in maps that privilege sites of consumption and production, and simultaneously mask sites of resistant or alternative economic relations. Similarly, mappings of tourist desire oft en erase indigenous spaces and populations, or, as Del Casino and Hanna have argued regarding sex tourism in Th ailand, reduce local populations to a symbolic catalogues of use value. 21 However, Derrida ’ s analysis of spacing reminds us that the sense of a site is not only constituted by its identifi cation within the matrix of the map ’ s graphic symbols. Carto-semiotics is as much a language of the spaces — left curiously unmarked — that surround the symbol: this vacuum is the absence that is introduced by the act of locating (i.e., marking ) a place on the map.

In addition to the social production of carto-semiotic perspectives, there is an extensive, abstract spatial logic at work in the distribution of signs across its surface. But no matter how “ blank ” the spaces between its marks, they do not reference an abstract emptiness waiting to be fi lled by “ real ” objects. Just as the edges of the map constitute an enclosure, the gridded, extensive space of the map produces its own eff ects, moving across the page, reducing spatial complexity, replacing contested spaces with absolute space, erasing minority and contingency (inevitably the town or village is sacrifi ced to the city), and amplifying the importance and the presence of the signs that remain. Th e active role that Derrida attributes to space — spacing — as a producer of sense in Western writing systems is a direct challenge to the notion that meaning



accomplished by the intuitive erasure of those spaces. Classically, the eff ectiveness of the mark comes to be measured in proportion to the ability of the reader to ignore it in favor of its referent. Spacing is sacrifi ced in the same synthetic gesture that overlooks the graphic components of writing (e.g., the letter) as arbitrary and contingent tools in the reproduction meaning. Th ere, the reader makes a leap of faith from sign to sign as the eyes move across the page, just as she makes a similar leap from page to idea as the intuition and imagination synthesize representation. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that geographic texts — carto-semiotics — seem to explicitly invoke space as one of the fundamental components of the map. But consider how maps, at the same time that they locate specifi c places or sites, also invite the eyes of the viewer — the explorer, the developer, the military strategist — to make similar leaps from site to site, to partake in the erasure of the material meanings and complexities that circulate within those blank or empty spaces between the map ’ s cartographic symbols. Th ough carto-semiotics lack the linearity of Western writing, they nonetheless occupy a closer relation to Derrida ’ s critique than we might expect: each sign on a map is constituted by its proximity to other signs, of which the spaces in-between are regularly subject to erasure. Th is erasure can only be compounded when we supplement and overlay further carto-logics such as scale, and the hegemony of symbolic biases in the form of governmentality, Western religiosity, capitalism, and so on. By “ paying attention to the absences and silences that structure, ” Willems-Braun highlights just such a challenge in circulating narratives about forest mapping and sustainability: “ What remains completely unmarked in the photographs, text, and fi gures is a subtle manoeuvre whereby the “ land, ” the “ forest, ” and a commodity, “ timber, ” are simultaneously abstracted and displaced from existing local cultural and political contexts, and resituated in the rhetorical space of the “ nation ” and its “ public. ” ” 22 Clinging to the crooked branches of nationalism, we become emboldened to swing from tree to tree, all the while dismissing the constitutive, shift ing ground below us. But it is precisely the specifi c spatio-centric orientation of one sign toward those within whose distribution it is located (and localized) that spacing in the particularly Derridean sense continues to be an important factor in the deconstruction of geographic semiotics. Barnett has noted that:

Aft er deconstruction, context might be best thought of as a distinctively spatial fi gure not of containment but, insofar as it refers to what precedes, follows and surrounds texts, of the relations of contiguity and proximity between elements. While deconstruction certainly acknowledges that texts cannot appear in places, it also provokes a rethinking of place in terms of diff erence, mobility, dislocation and openings, rather than in relation to that areal logic of consensus and enclosure. ” 23

At the same time, in many ways maps and mapping distinguish themselves from Derrida ’ s usual suspects — individual philosophers — because maps and cartography have generally been the products of several hands and can subtly accommodate many varying styles and circulating discourses in one text. Now, I grant that this description hits at the very heart of Derrida ’ s critical analytic: that is, that every text reveals itself to be written by many hands. However, the practice of map making, its actual production as a material object, off ers a multiplication, an amplifi cation, and an literalization



of such a notion by its dependence upon a labor force to assemble and produce its representational content. Not only is this the case for the classic forms of the map, but also cartographic representations that emerge from GIS science likewise draw upon sets of data assembled by diverse researchers working on diverse projects asking dissonant questions. Consider, then, that the map — as text — diff ers in what it seems to reference when it presents itself as a coherent totality. It is neither a great novel nor a total philosophical system — both of which, in the Western tradition, reference the ideational content of the thinker-genius (the subject). Th e map is the produce of an army of workers and references not novel vision of the mapper. Rather, by way of a scientized set of learned practices, it references a series spatio-cultural artifacts — places of commerce, churches, nature spaces, and so on — framing them from the perspective of no one and distributed across a nonspace (a planar fi eld). And yet, this impossible viewpoint that surveys this impossible space, generates constitutive eff ects within deliberations upon war, reifi cations of the nation-state, legitimations of private property, and so on.

Phenomenal space

Maintaining a certain hierarchical split in the constitutive force granted to representation, early deconstructive geography tended to make a distinction between: (1) graphic representation (the sign, i.e., mapping space), the inscription of artifi cial or mimetic marks upon a surface; and (2) psychic representation (or image, i.e., thinking space), the synthesis or assembly of experiential data as a cognitive or phenomenal image, particularly as it is formulated in Kant ’ s transcendental aesthetic and subsequently reworked by Husserl and Heidegger. 24 Broadly speaking, the languages of scientifi c and critical mastery tend to reinstall a metaphysics of presence where they rely upon presuppositions about both the privileged access to truth and the possibility of determining correlation and fi nitude. Th e utilitarian logics behind these notions distance the graphic sign from the psychic image and yet found their own legitimation upon the promise of future correspondence between those same terms. Concretizing the dichotomy between absence and presence, the metaphysics of presence invites us to read signs under conditions of being detached from and entwined with phenomenal reality. When we consider that scientifi c research oft en sustains itself through communication with and support from capitalist and governmental funding organizations — the motors of which are turned by promises of identifi able outcomes and bottom lines — it is easy to discern the traces that situate presence at the heart of scientifi c desire. Th e very act of signifying becomes a matter of perfecting correspondences that will be, in turn, subject to tests of empirical verifi cation: that is, where the scientifi c test delivers reproducible, confi rmable accuracy, its solution should be there for all to see and/or “ use. ” What else can such determinations by empiricism be if not a “ dream of presence, ” as Derrida might have put it? 25

Few scientifi c artifacts make a larger contribution toward the reifi cation of the possibility of such correspondences within the popular imaginary than the map. One of the most familiar iterations of modernity ’ s worldview, the map simultaneously



(1) pretends at being objective — though everyone knows it is not — and (2) masks a legion of signs that do constitutive work and that we take as our academic task to expose. While either of these might ground the criticism in projects such as Harley ’ s, the entire framework — both of these dimensions — is the proper target of Derridean deconstruction. Th ere is as much to be deconstructed in the expository criticism that reduces wandering traces to mere presences as there is in the more obviously fl awed (though no less dubious) pretense to totality. Not only does each question direct a hermeneutics of suspicion directed at the other, both are also anchored to the intuitive fi ction that demands a hard dichotomy/correlation between modes of representation. Deconstruction will not have come to completion once it has laid out a negative or expository critique of its object or/and concept. For negation stakes its claim upon the givenness of the absence-presence model that is fundamental to the metaphysics of presence. 26 Striking out the imaginaries employed within a text — highlighting, for example, that the map is neither total nor innocent — embraces the very test of presence that it struggles to eschew: the map, by virtue of being representational, is not representational. Attending to the presentational bias that lingers even in the enactment of its critique, deconstruction must eff ectively fall short of being tool for supplanting objective Being (just as it is ineff ective as means of subjecting texts to the politics of suspicion and ideology hunting): “ one can no more speak of an “ ontology ” with regard to the deconstruction that I try to put to work than one can speak, if one has read a little, of “ Heidegger ’ s ontology ” or even “ Heidegger ’ s philosophy. ” And “ deconstruction ” – which does not culminate – is certainly not a “ method. ” ” 27

Rather, deconstruction is “ about ” the exploration of diff é rance , a diff erence that is “ prior ” to Being. Language pitched in the present tense — and the stasis of map-symbols — rails against such a formulation and installs priority in Being: x is diff erent, it must be (as must its other) before it can be diff erent-from . Th is is an immanent diff erence, predicated upon dialectic relation. Diff er á nce, on the other hand, more closely resembles the subjunctive: some thing , insofar as it might-be, will have been diff erent than it was, which it is-not-yet . Barnett reads the spacing of diff er á nce as prior to both presence and the absences it stabilizes: “ a geography of texts must be premised upon movement, spacing and diff erence, rather than upon place, identity and containment. ” 28 Th us a subjunctive geography of diff erence might concern itself with something that will-have-been-in-motion and will-have-been-doing a certain bit of positive work within that movement. It may be true that such spacings wander through and crisscross the map, and thus become implicated in the progressions of the written text. But there are also broader contexts for intersection of space, spacing, and the text. One key contender in this regard has been cultural geography, which emerged, literally, out of wanderings and (dis)oriented engagements with landscapes as texts. Before turning to an example of one current line of thought whose theoretical trajectory suggests a possible turn into a richer Derridean geography, I briefl y recount the development and contexts of this subfi eld.

Th ough cultural geography resonates with several key interventions in deconstruction, two stand out in particular. On the one hand, the extension of texts and textuality beyond the enclosures of the speech/writing (language/sign) dichotomy plays well with the geographic eff orts to “ read ” the landscape. On the other hand, the



problematization of the constitution of text and meaning as matters of intuition bears directly upon the challenges that have accompanied the development of methodologies in cultural geography. Th ough geography draws upon an unusually broad range of scientifi c branches and philosophical roots, early work in cultural geography, particularly Carl Sauer ’ s (1963) early twentieth-century studies of the “ cultural landscape, ” displays a decided preference for ideographic and empirical treatments of the impacts and imprints of human life and activity in the transformation of physical spaces. Where modern science insisted upon generalization and reproducible observation, Sauer ’ s work attended to the specifi c, the localized, and the particular, rendering this through the situated, immersive, and embodied — present — search for the material-cultural composition of places. Still, though his studies concerned the constitution of spaces by localized phenomena, Sauer ’ s descriptions of the new fi eld were simultaneously marked by a certain descriptive inexactitude regarding the character of landscape and the researcher ’ s engagement with it. While Sauer was far from rejecting the era ’ s more standard scientifi co-geographic epistemology, he also tended to suggest that interpreting the landscape was at least in part a matter of innate and intuitive, and not wholly universal, capacities.

Signifi cantly in that regard, Sauer opens his key text, “ Th e Morphology of Landscape, ” with an invocation of Keyserling ’ s Prolegomena zur Naturphilosophie , declaring that “ All science may be regarded as phenomenology, the term science being used in the sense of organized process of acquiring knowledge. ” 29 Read as phenomena, “ cultural landscape ” highlights the manifestation of culture within the transformation of localized spaces — landscapes, places — and the presentation of cultural signifi cance to the embodied experience of the geographer. Of course, insofar as such studies are founded upon empirical experience, lay observers are equally capable of bearing witness to such phenomena. Th e specialism of this science, Sauer explains, arises paradoxically from the “ unspecialized ” perspective of the geographer as a kind of situated bricoleur : “ Th e individual worker must try to gain whatever he can of special insights and skills in whatever most absorbs his attention. ” 30 Training the classic cultural geographer was thus a matter of nurturing and honing an intuitive spatial awareness through the extensive and immersive study of a single site. Central to this pedagogy was the fi eld course, which Sauer suggests is not only highly textual in character, but unfolds in a manner reminiscent of Socratic dialogue, with movement constituting a series of embodied exchanges between landscape and geographer:

Locomotion should be slow, the slower the better, and be oft en interrupted by leisurely halts to sit on vantage points and stop at question marks. Being afoot, sleeping out, sitting about camp in the evening, seeing the land in all its seasons are proper ways to intensify the experience, of developing impression into larger appreciation and judgment. I know no prescription of method; avoid whatever increases routine and fatigue and decreases alertness. 31

Like eyes moving across the printed page, the slow progress of the cultural geographer ’ s engagement with landscape is one that has the coming-into-meaning — not unlike coming into a clearing — as its object. In many ways, it might be said that Sauer ’ s focus upon phenomena distributed in specifi c ways (and harboring specifi c traces)



across the surface of the earth — not to mention the literal mobility of the geographer-reader — predicts the key role that spacing will play in Derridian deconstruction. At the same time, considerable critique has been leveled against early cultural geography for envisioning culture to be a real, present, causal force and for tending mystify the methodologies for reading landscapes through gestures toward intuition. 32

Geography ’ s “ humanistic ” turn in the 1970s drew further upon the nuances of German phenomenology — particularly in the work of Heidegger but also, if to a lesser extent, Husserl — and in many ways set the stage for the arrival of deconstruction in the subsequent decade. 33 Resonant with the spatial and methodological perspectives introduced within cultural geography, humanistic geography is “ a form of criticism ” that “ helps to counter the overly objective and abstractive tendencies of some scientifi c geographers. ” 34 Following from, but also fi lling in, portions of the picture left blank in the cultural geography ’ s intuition-driven methodology, humanist space gets aligned with the phenomenal contents of subjective experience, and thus answers the former ’ s appealing-but-groundless intuitive understanding with a “ sense of place ” rooted in an individual ’ s phenomenologico-biographical experiences. 35 Likewise, where spatial description in earlier treatments had favored spatial extension and becoming, in which culture was the causal agent behind landscape change, humanist accounts turned toward intensive accounts that played upon the emotional and perceptual subtleties of embodied experience. Th e sense of place oft en highlighted the ways that individuals make identity and identifi cation a constitutive component of spatial encounters, a process oft en borne through intimate relations to, negotiations of, and connections with localized spaces and the others who traverse them.

Seizing upon the space-infl ected language that animates phenomenological notions such as “ dwelling ” and “ clearing, ” humanists answered the uncertainty that characterized the vague boundaries of cultural landscape by elucidating the sense of place on the basis of its contingency to the spatial intimacies of the experiencing subject. Th us, a place ’ s capacity to signify and “ mean ” was not the product of a superorganic force operating “ out there ” in the world — culture — but arose with the human, refl ective capacity to synthesize the phenomena of experience — to re present — in ways that are subjectively meaningful ( “ for-me, ” as Kant would put it). 36 Emotion, investment, the repetition of the encounter, familiarity, resentment, and countless orientations toward a place might inform or infl ect such spatial representation. Consider how dominance and aff ection give rise to psychic paradoxes within socio-social relations, particularly where power and care commingle, such as the weird love expressed by the powerful toward the powerless or between humans and nonhumans. 37 Elsewhere Tuan notes that such work — while it, like Sauer ’ s studies of cultural landscapes, describes the transformation of the earth — shift s the focus “ from economic to aesthetic exploitation ” : insofar as his “ point of departure is psychological rather than economic . . . its concern is more with human nature than with nature “ out there. ” ” 38 So doing multiplies the possibilities for interpreting the landscape/place at the same time that it hardens the constitutive tissue dividing the internal from the external world. Generations of cultural geographers following in Tuan ’ s footsteps will renegotiate this interface over and over again, and while doing so will oft en result in its being shaken and shift ed, it will just as oft en reconfi rm classic internal/external divisions. Th us, for example, the sense of place will



be written onto diff erence in terms of place and identity, producing — in one space — multiple overlapping places emerging out of identitarian relations: raced and gendered spaces, queer spaces, spaces of exploitation and extravagance, and so on.

Experience, embodiment, and nonrepresentation

While geography ’ s adventures in “ nonrepresentational theory ” fi nd many points of entry in the earlier cultural and humanistic traditions, they also attempt to push beyond them in several ways. Perhaps the most important of these is the endeavor to think spatial diff erence as something that arrives ahead of the representational limitations of a priori intuitionism and transcendental subjectivism inherent in modernist spatialities. Taking cues from deconstructive and poststructuralist criticism, recent geographies question the reduction of complex perceptive and aff ective spaces to categorical stasis, while problematizing the attendant epistemologies that enable such reductions, such as the reifi cation of abstractions (e.g., “ culture ” ) or the prioritization of ego-centered syntheses of experience (e.g., “ for-me ” ). In their place, geographers increasingly view space neither as a rationalistic/solipsistic capture of experience (Kantianism and phenomenology) nor as an emergent relation between two distinct beings/abstractions (spatial dialectics), but as the gathering of fragmented and transitory engagements, enactments, and encounters. Space is coming to be understood as something complex, multiple, dynamic; an articulation — not to mention the power that can both run through and constitute it — that concerns matters and orientations of “ becoming ” and that cannot be cleanly and clearly transposed onto tests of Being (i.e., presence).

Still, earlier geographic notions such as the “ sense of place ” — a formulation that describes the character of a place on the basis of its presence “ for-me ” — continue to fi gure prominently in nonrepresentational geographies. A sense of place off ers a representational overlay, mediating complex spatial experience by reducing it to identity and synthetic understanding. For example, insofar as I cognitively make or refl ectively have a sense of a place, I represent that phenomena to myself: it is not only ordered, organized, and spatialized, but conditioned by being the subject of my own experience. Th e resultant place is, always already, by-me and for-me. But this is to subject certain aspects of spatial experience to transcendent structure that contextualizes “ space ” or “ place ” in terms of my own supposedly relatively stable ego and its equally suppositional capacity to “ be-there, ” while simultaneously ignoring or displacing the noisy parts of that experience that do not make sense for-me. Such a procedure is akin to that famously employed by Descartes in his Meditations : throughout the deliberation, the presence of the Cogito — the “ I think ” — is always already given, being both assumed by and in-play in the very act of defi ning a specifi c sense of place. While this is systemically less problematic for the humanist, it does present a substantial diffi culty when it gets employed by nonrepresentational geographers who attempt to discern spatialities unfolding outside of representation while paradoxically being damned to describe those phenomena under the standard representational constraints of the social sciences (data, empirics, the academic article, and the like). In response to the givenness of the Cogito



and the implicit representationalism of the discipline, several thinkers have attempted to fi nd lexicons and methods for discerning the spatial experiences placed under erasure by cognitive representation, transcendent syntheses, ego-driven understandings for-me, and so on. Practically, these eff orts have manifested in studies of such complicated questions as the politics that linger in non/acts of stillness and passivity (Harrison 2008).

Th e most prominent of such nonrepresentational geographies are no doubt the recent engagements with landscape geography that arose alongside rereadings of phenomenological texts — in the wake of a long geographic romance with variants of structural and cultural Marxism — that sought to re-interrogate Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in particular from the emerging critical perspectives of Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze. 39 Perhaps even more so than it was for the humanists, sensation has played a central role in these studies. However, if the former set the conditions for the existence of sensation and the sensed upon presence, the latter endeavors to de-prioritize that phenomenological reduction in favor of considering the possibility that landscape and attendant geographic sensation is much more rich than that which avails itself of presence and representation. Drawing upon the Heidegger ’ s distinction between the ontic and the ontological (the thing-hood of an object vs. the thought of Being), Rose explains, “ an animated landscape . . . begins with the idea that we should not start our analyses of landscape from the position of what can be seen: that is, the landscape ’ s presence . . . landscape is not an object whose presence needs to be explained but a presence whose object-like appearance needs to be thought. ” 40 Th us, where cultural geography had projected something called culture onto the landscape as causal phenomenon and humanism tended to restrain itself to the post-Kantian synthetic-phenomena “ for-me, ” Rose asks how we might come to understand — to think — how the presence of whatever being animates the landscape in a manner that is oriented toward its Being rather than toward its ideational construction. “ Th e aim of the project, ” he continues:

is to reorient the study of landscapes from analysing landscapes as systems of presence to exploring them as dreams of presence; that is, as intimate collections of material sensations where other dreams of presence (dreams of who we are, or where we belong, and of how we get on with life) are consigned. Th inking about the relationship between culture and landscape in these terms not only avoids the tendency in cultural studies to be seduced by the landscape as an actual system of presence, but, more importantly, presents the landscape as an integral part of, rather than simply a refl ection of, our being-in and attached-to the world. 41

Here Rose maintains a connection to the metaphysics of presence, but he does so in order to expand the conceptualization of sensation as a constitutive surface across which the presentation of the world and the composition of the subject is extended. At the same time, the total manifestation of something called culture becomes an impossibility: “ Th e fact that . . . imaginations of everyday life never arrive in the form of a fully present culture is not the point. Th e central question, rather, is what attachments do they engender, how do they provide a sense of rhythm to everyday life and, thus, provide a bearing for becoming subjects. ” 42 Th e phenomenality of space — and spacing — is articulated in bits, fragments, and silences against which landscape and subject struggle. 43



Seeing for-the-other

Th e latent Heideggerian presence in Rose ’ s antiessentialist portrait of fragmentary-yet-constitutive sensation and, as he notes, the similar Merleau-Pontyean infl uence upon Wylie, trace subtle lines between phenomenal and deconstructive understandings of subjective and environmental relations. 44 Incorporating modes of stylized prose to communicate and interrogate embodied experience, Wylie ’ s post-phenomenological approach treats the movement of the researcher ’ s body a key site of inquiry in landscape studies. His research has involved, for example, ascending a tor in Glasonbury, walking a southwestern coastal path, and wandering amid coastal memorial benches. 45 Th e resonances are not hard to detect between these texts and key elements of Rose ’ s phenomenologically driven deconstruction. However, his most recent work has begun to question the tendency within the landscape literature to assess the spacing of landscape on the condition of presence. 46 I will discuss what this means for Wylie ’ s vision of landscape in a moment, but for the sake of comparison, I fi rst turn to an example from his earlier work — his walk along the coastal path — that repeats landscape studies ’ reliance upon presence-as-orientation.

Wylie ’ s landscape texts oft en dialogically stroll from section to section: rich descriptions of landscape are answered by explications of a resonant philosophical concept, followed by further empirical description, and so on. Th e continuity that supposedly runs between these modes of discussion is the movement of the researcher-observer, who endeavors to remain simultaneously aware of his embodied, aff ective engagements with the surrounding environment and the auto-aff ection of his ongoing refl ections. Th is departs from classic approaches to cultural geography that oft en limited their attention to transformations in external, surrounding spaces. But it diverges from humanistic geography, where the sense of place, for-me, would oft en turn upon a (transcendentally) stabilized site so as to explore the dynamic experience of a situated subject. Wylie ’ s treatment, by contrast, is an attempt to keep both in play, merging the morphology of landscapes with the immanently fragmented and mutable perceptions, aff ections, and thoughts of the researcher. His attention thus lingers not only upon the kernels of consistency that lend specifi city to a sense of place, but also — importantly — upon the inconsistencies of the encounter that slip away and recede before they have been grasped, cognized, or coded. Th us, he presents a changing researcher moving through a changing landscape, where neither are necessarily or entirely transforming in ways that can be consistently, clearly, or causally attributed to recognizable or present to hand causes. But despite considerable attention to that which is fl eeting, narratives of such encounters nevertheless remain anchored to the conditions of presence and presentation, both in their accounts of the manifestation of landscape and in their presentation of the researcher-subject as a changing, cognizing being.

Consider a scene from Wylie ’ s walk along the Costal Path that appears in a section appropriately entitled “ Th e Other. ” As he continues down a wooded portion of the path, “ Suddenly the morning silence of the forest was broken by a cry. A loud, undulating cry, one which perfectly mimicked, in every detail of pitch, variation and length, the cry of Tarzan, lord of the jungle. ” 47 Th ere is, however, no one to be seen. A bit further



down the path, coming upon a river in a clearing, “ emerging out into the open, ” he gradually situates the author — a presence — of the disembodied call:

a dog appeared, as if out of nowhere; a thin, greyhound-shaped dog with a grey coat, sniffl ing its way erratically shoreward, and pausing at one point to turn and gaze intently back into the trees on the other side. A moment later, from out of the trees the fi gure of a man appeared, striding steadily toward the sea. He walked erect, fi xedly, with a wooden staff in one hand. Th e crown of his head was smoothly bald, but a long and straggly beard hung down from his face. He was naked to the waist and his leathered, lean torso writhed with tattoos. A battered, earth-stained kilt was all he wore. Straightaway, I knew that he was the source of that Tarzan-like cry, and knew as well that . . . he had cried out like that all alone in the middle of the woods, at the very top of his voice. 48

Although he notes that he had pegged the individual “ straightaway ” as the source of the cry, Wylie entangles the suddenness of this intuition within the piecework of several emerging perceptions — the coming-into-presence of the encounter: features on the landscape, the cry, the woods, the clearing, the river, the dog, the Other, and so on. Th ese fragments appear partially and by fi ts and starts, synthesized by the presence of multiple, simultaneous durations juxtaposing the time of the gradual, unfolding presentation of the fi gure of the Other, his dog, his surroundings, his tattoos, against the narrator ’ s recognition that this individual is the source of the cry which, he assures the reader, has happened “ straightaway. ”

Reassembling the space of this encounter, Wylie ’ s narrative gaze guides the reader through a series of presences — from the dog, to the woods, to an Other emerging from the trees. As this retelling progresses through a series of manifestations, their comings-into-presence becomes all the more striking by their possible linkages to the absence signaled by the Tarzan call. Th e sense of expectation that this narrative ’ s absences will resolve themselves into presences (that we will fi nd the source of the cry) is oft en a product of narrative synthesis, its re-presentation. Note, for example, the narrative gesture in the placement of the cry at the opening of the section, a textual space that makes it the problem that the subsequent fragment must resolve. Th is is echoed even within the economy of small gestures: the dog gestures back toward the woods from which the Other then emerges. Th ese fast-moving maneuvers are important because they open up moments of narrative expectation, a seeming phenomenal suspension, that works itself out in the eventual presentation of the Other to the senses. Th at is, the narrative poses the problem of an absence (the disembodied cry) that it subsequently solves by signaling presence (the Other). When the fi gure emerges from the woods, he seems to arrive with the full weight of phenomenological manifestation, and Wylie knows — straightaway — that his has always been the source of the cry. In that moment, all of the dangling narrative threads get tied up and sorted. Th ere is a certain construction of narrativity at work here, where only those circuits where absence is resolved by presence fi nd a place in the text. Presence gets privileged in the landscape geographer ’ s selection of narrative content. Th e reader is never subject, for example, to absences as such , but only absences that function as signs for a presence that will eventually become manifest.



What does it mean for this sequence of the narrative to culminate in presence of an origin, source, or cause of the cry? What (diff erent) representational work is being performed Wylie the Walker and Wylie the Writer — not the same individual at all — intuitively jump the spatio-temporal gap between the cry and the passing body? Why is the disembodied cry rendered more present, more substantial, when it is tattooed to the body of the Other? Singing in concert with the eventual manifestation of the source of the Tarzan call is the familiar modern refrain linking phenomena to transcendent causes — Others, culture, whathaveyou. At that point of phenomenal-causal resolution, the landscape before him comes to resemble the representational theatre that Derrida challenges in his reading of Artaud:

Th e stage will no longer operate as the representation of a present, will no longer re-present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it, a present whose plenitude would be older than it, absent from it, and rightfully capable of doing without it: the being-present-to-itself of the absolute Logos, the living present of God. Nor will the stage be a representation, if representation means the surface of a spectacle displayed for spectators. It will not even off er the presentation of a present, if present signifi es that which is maintained in front of me . . . And nonrepresentation is, thus, original representation, if representation signifi es, also, the unfolding of a volume, a multidimensional milieu, an experience which produces its own space. Spacing [ espacement ], that is to say, the production of a space that no speech could condense or comprehend (since speech primarily presupposes this spacing) thereby appeals to a time that is no longer that of so-called phonic linearity, appeals to “ a new notion of space ” and “ a specifi c idea of time. ” 49

In subsequent research, Wylie draws closer to Derrida ’ s treatment of nonrepresentation by questioning the broad tendency in cultural geography to resolve the absences of narrative encounters by reducing them to signs of presence. He acknowledges that:

such writing works creatively and critically at the threshold of presence/absence. Th e shreds and patches of things, whether treasured possessions or soiled ephemera – handled, venerated or discarded – all the traces of those now absent are worked in such a way so as to show, synchronously, the absence of presence, the presence of absence , and so in the fi nal analysis the threshold assumes the status of an enlarged, uncannier zone of indiscernability and dislocation, disrupting all distinctions . . . [However,] it can also be argued that the accent of much of this recent work is still upon a certain bringing-to-presence – upon, in other words, bringing to light things previously hidden or lost, unearthing memory, making the invisible visible. 50

Turning to the memorial benches dotting the coasts of Southwestern England, Wylie gives “ instead an account of landscape, matter and perception couched more explicitly in terms of absence, distance, displacement and the non-coincidence of man and world. I want to think about absences as the heart of the point of view. ” 51 He accomplishes this by drawing dis/connections between those signaled-yet-absent fi gures memorialized by the benches, the orientations of the benches toward the surrounding landscape



(an orientation the memorialized may never have embodied), and the position of the geographer, who, while engaging the benches in terms of their contextualizations and attributions — their invocations — fi nds no manifested body (no Other, to recall the logic of Wylie ’ s encounter along the coastal path) to contextualize or locate the viewpoints that the benches present. Unlike the disembodied cry, these disembodied viewpoints do not resolve themselves in presence or manifestation, but rather hold presence-absence in an ongoing suspension. Sitting upon a bench, Wylie explains, “ you are at one and the same time looking with and looking at the person (or sometimes couple) being commemorated. ” 52 Although the benches invite the witness to take up a specifi c point of view, it is not a viewpoint witnessed by the absent memorialized (who may have never even visited that spot). Rather, the points of view themselves memorial ize : “ Th ey project the person commemorated outwards, and so they become the view itself. ” 53

Wylie explains that, by researching the benches, he hopes to contextualize and consider the intertwining of love and landscape as a projective vision that invites us to rethink the relationship between hospitality, embodiment and the Other. Where his earlier encounter with the Other off ered a tale of causality sparked by disembodied phenomena — a cry — here, Wylie develops a relationship with an Other whom he can never encounter: the perpetually absent, the memorialized. But what does it mean to project the memorialized onto the landscape? Does this not risk, again, reducing a complex absence to presence (ie, the absent is manifested in this view of the landscape)? Making the act of memorialization into a bearing witness to a perspective that the memorialized may have never experienced , the viewer, by viewing , does something more than look with or look at that absent. Does s/he not off er her/his percepts and aff ects to that point of view in memory of someone who may have never witnessed it? Th at is, the memorial benches invite Wylie to become host to certain perceptions and sensations that are less for-him than in-memory-of the absent, to become-haunted by the viewpoint of those who, in being absent, cannot be present to view it themselves. Such a phenomenal experience, — hosting presence for the absent — is to introduce the possibility — impossible though it may be — of a kind of perceptual hospitality, a sensing-for-the-other, where presentation gestures to an absent viewer.

By seeking to make bodily sensation a site of hospitality for an absent Other, Wylie peeks past the metaphysics of presence that have characterized landscape studies. However, the impact of such an intervention extends far beyond the Sauerian tendency to reduce perceptual phenomena to external causes/presences. More importantly, becoming host to the impossible perceptions of the Other substantially challenges the largely presentist and and spatially extensive conditions that guide the ethics of empathy that Husserl lays out in Ideas II . Th e experience of empathy is, for Husserl, an impossible possibility because it depends upon the “ appresence ” of the Other: a paradoxical presence whereby one fi nds oneself in the place of the Other by transcending the embodied, spatio-temporal isolation that is phenomenological life. Th at is, empathy with the Other is the experience of the Other ’ s space as simultaneously one ’ s own space: “ Because we grasp them in empathy as analogons of ourselves, their place is given to us as a “ here, ” in opposition to which everything else is a “ there. ” ” 54



Empathy concerns “ introjecting into the exterior ” by way of an intuition of the other that transcends the material impossibility of phenomenal simultaneity in space-time:

Each person has, from the same place in space and with the same lighting, the same view of, for example, a landscape. But never can the other, at exactly the same time as me (in the originary content of lived experience attributed to him) have the exact same appearance [experience] as I have. My appearances belong to me, his to him. Only in the manner of appresence can I have, co-given with his Body, his appearances and his “ here, ” to which they are related. 55

Here, time is the condition for the impossibility of phenomenal simultaneity. Husserl seems willing to allow for many experiences of same space, but never at the same time. Th is is a classic example of the privileging of time over space that receives such heavy deconstruction by Derrida. 56 And given that time is determinant in empathizing with the other, we see the correlation between temporality as the classic phenomenal force of “ life, ” subjectivity, and introspection. Th us, Husserlian empathy remains chained to logics of presence for-me: I empathize because I bring myself to experience the presence that I cannot possibly experience via sensation.

Wylie ’ s experience among the memorial benches is something else altogether. On the one hand, the Other ’ s absence makes Husserlian empathy a diff erent kind of impossibility, because s/he may never have encountered or witnessed this space or viewpoint. While the benches invoke the commemorated, this is not in itself suffi cient to constitute a “ there ” — in the phenomenal sense of the word — from which a “ here ” might be intuited. Th e memorialized — somewhere, anywhere, or nowhere else — introduce a rupture within the memory-phenomena relation, between which arises an unclosable non-distance, an unleapable gap. Th e views from the benches cannot create the conditions for Husserlian empathy because they cannot close the gap between the witness and the space and time of an absent Other. On the other hand, memory fairs no better for Derrida where it concerns an individual ’ s “ immediate ” experience. Consider this in relation to Derrida ’ s experiential ordering of memory and perception: “ When I hear myself speak the hearing is a repetition of the speaking that has already disappeared; representation . . . has intervened, and that intervention means, in a word, space. ” 57 For Husserl, phenomenal simultaneity with the time of other was impossible. Derrida answers this impossibility by extending it to the self-experience of inner-time, or dur é e . His deconstruction of Husserl ’ s privileged coupling of time and identity thus makes auto-aff ection a matter of spacing: to hear myself speaking is to be out of sinc, displaced. 58 It is to arrive late, to be — always already — somewhere, somewhen, some one else. Sitting on the bench, Wylie is aff ected by the landscape, but the experience is already second-hand, an echo, a repetition of the experience for-the-specter. Th us, the exterior, rather than being introjected, becomes a gesture to a something else, an absent presence. “ Spacing designates nothing, nothing that is, no presence at a distance; it is the index of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement , a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity. I do not see how one could dissociate the two concepts of spacing and alterity. ” 59 Th us, it is not spatio-temporal empathy but geographic love that Wylie claims to fi nd where his percepts become host to the presentation of phenomena that



are not (or not entirely) “ for-me. ” Th is radically revises Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of spatiality. Whereas the space of modernity was the immediate, intuitive product of the cognitive organization — synthesis — of sensory experience, here space is the movement of other spaces, other — possibly impossible — encounters. Rather than landscape ’ s coming-to-presence through the synthesis of fragments, it gestures to and recalls the absences prefi guring it and echoing throughout it.

Spacing politics

But you are right, I have never been, as you were saying, a “ militant or engaged philosopher in the sense of the Sartrean fi gure, or even the Foucauldian fi gure, of the intellectual. ” Why? But it ’ s already too late, isn ’ t it? 60

It is not uncommon to have encountered — within geography and without — representations of Derrida as an apolitical fi gure or, oft en amounting to the same thing, suggestions that deconstruction is a relativistic exercise. 61 But even if his playfully ambiguous observation is correct, if indeed it is “ too late ” for the “ militant or engaged philosopher, ” this has not caused Derrida to shrink from asking political questions or from viewing deconstruction as a mode of “ radicalization. ” 62 Given its devotion to the Other, to alterity, and to the loud silences of absence-presence, Derridean philosophy, far from being a conduit for blind nihilism, has opened spaces for formulating diff erent politics, political thoughts, and political lives. Proceeding by way of deconstructive questioning, it acknowledges its own inevitable lateness as an untimeliness , having arrived only to fi nd a multitude of politicalities already at play within and at work upon circulating texts, mass mobilizations, and capillary power refl exes. Th e ghosts of the Sartre of the French Resistance and the Foucault of May 1968, for example, put the “ present ” out of joint, haunted by their own specifi c questions. Any contemporary political fi eld, for this reason, constitutes at least a partial response “ to a spectral injunction: the order comes down from a place that can be identifi ed neither as a living present nor as the pure and simple absence of someone dead. ” 63 It is perhaps right that these restless ghosts should bemoan an unpayable debt; still, their sometimes-insistent reminders (their institutionalization, their naturalization) can also drown out the voices of the future. His observation of the complex relation between pasts and futures makes Derrida ’ s project something substantially more than a mere mode of theoretical abstraction or a simple exercise in philosophical expos é . Turning to sites where academic-activist imaginaries mask traces that nevertheless condition political questions (e.g., the metaphysics of presence), his texts discover supplements and counter-signs capable of recognizing the impossible possibility of a politics “ to come. ” Encounters with such realities make deconstruction an exploration of the radicalizing diff er á nce of politics, the spacing of politics between unglimpsed pasts and im/possible futures. Before turning to some brief concluding thoughts, I quickly explore three such encounters in Derridean politics.



It is April and May of 1968. Derrida, still living in France, is invited to speak at an Anthropology conference in New York. Prefacing his talk on “ Th e Ends of Man, ” he explains:

When I was invited to this meeting, my hesitation could end only when I was assured that I could bear witness here, now, to my agreement, and to a certain point my solidarity with those, in this country, who were fi ghting against what was then their country ’ s offi cial policy in certain parts of the world, notably in Vietnam . . . [I]t will be recalled that these were the weeks of the opening of the Vietnam peace talks and of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A bit later, when I was typing this text, the universities of Paris were invaded by the forces of order . . . and then reoccupied by the students in the upheaval you are familiar with. Th is historical and political horizon would call for a long analysis. I have simply found it necessary to mark, date, and make known to you the historical circumstances in which I prepared this communication. 64

Th e passage glimpses a politically-explicit Derrida posed in a gesture of solidarity. However, his statement is also conditional: it is solidarity — elliptically — “ to a certain point. ” Why limit such a gesture? Why not, impossibly possible though it may be, attempt a gesture of infi nite solidarity, as Critchley has recently suggested? 65 Derrida ’ s statement demarcates the limits to acts of solidarity by acknowledging the excesses and discontinuities at work between distant-yet-proximate politicalities. Although the writing of his text unfolded during the student uprisings of 1968 — and although he leverages his conference participation upon the allowance of expressing this “ certain solidarity ” with other activists — it (and its reading) remains at a distance, unable to appropriate or equate such politicalities with his itself. Derrida cites only a certain proximity that this act of writing has had to those events, but signaling this proximity does not enfold his talk into the historic force of unfolding events (e.g., the revolutionary telos of anti-war activists in the U.S. and les enrag é s in Nanterre). Neither does it opportunistically attempt to add political gravity to his text by painting it — or its author — and an agent or master-reader of such a history.

Limiting mention of the political horizon to a marking, a dating, within the preface, Derrida ’ s solidarity remains, like the historic events it references, irreducibly outside the text, and yet inevitably a part of it, a trace within it. Th e political act is not a presence in the text, but only a retelling. Unfolding in what he might regard, from his own writing desk, as a parallel universe, their events are aberrant traces. Th ey become resonant yet distant — rather than determinate and immediate — conditions for the text that he reads aft er the fact. Its political conditions, put another way, thus fi nd their proper site in the very spacing that introduces the inscription of historic events as proximate events: they are spaced-out, at a distance, and yet their traces are there. Accordingly, Derrida sutures to the text a diff ering and deferring relation to displaced political acts that are not of his text, but for which his text might some day be. Distinct from — but unfolding in relation to — political mobilization, the politics of deconstruction thus begin with spacing and a gesture.



A number of admirable thinkers in geography have shed light on what it might mean to approach politics — aft er Derrida — as a deconstructive spacing. 66 Perhaps the clearest of such contextualizations have been those set out in connection with post-colonial and counter-colonial development. In this regard, Wainwright ’ s recent intervention is particularly adept at reframing political problems in the context of carto-semiotics and the experiences of spacing within Derridean geographies. 67 Merging questions of geography ’ s complicity in the histories of colonialism and globalized capitalism with investments in political change and autonomy, he recognizes a (post)colonial present confronted by an impossible situation. Given the retention and amplifi cation of patterns of exploitation through the transition from colonialism to globalization, political life appears trapped in the paradox. It is desirable to subvert the spread of global capitalism by seeking to abolish globalization qua “ development. ” And yet, seeking to resolve the really-existing exploitation inherent in uneven development today means mobilizing for further development. Working with the Toledo Maya Cultural Council in southern Belize during the mid- ‘ 90s, Wainwright attempts to think through this defi nitive aporia of development by assisting in the production of the Mayan Atlas . Th e project culminated in a Mayan “ counter-mapping, ” an “ eff ort to decolonize space ” 68 by collecting representations of the lifeworld of the Mayan community: “ In their own words and with their own maps, the Maya describe their land and their life, the threats to their culture and rain forest, and their desire to protect and manage their own Homeland. ” 69 Wainwright explains, “ In short, the Atlas is a work of anticolonial geography that seeks to show the reader an other world that is not recognized — to bring before us a world that we have not been able to see. ” 70

Th e resonances between Wainwright ’ s description of the goals of Mayan counter-mapping and accounts of both critical cartography and Derridean landscapes are striking. 71 Here, Wainwright matches the strategy of bringing-to-presence with refl ections upon the Atlas ’ s absences and their connection to thinking a deconstructive politics. But this interplay of presences and absences does not simply replay or provide a reactionary anti-discourse to past constructions of alterity in colonialist logics. Instead, these are but a few of the many traces that fi nds their way into — or become obscured by — the Atlas ’ s mapping of the encounters with Mayan life. Wainwright notes, for example, that although gender plays a substantial role in everyday Mayan life, it get entirely erased from the Atlas . 72 Recognizing the proximities that the Atlas both presents and elides recognizes a kind of emergent and dynamic politics that are continuously transformed and supplemented by their own spacings:

Th is is why the complex politics of the worlding of “ the Maya world ” is so intensely political: the territorialization of the land through counter-mapping is sure to displace or map land claim disputes onto other confl icts. Because participation in the process of producing maps and control over the new forms of spatial information are certain to be uneven, there is no way to ensure that counter-maps could fully represent subaltern knowledge ’ s. ” 73

Following Spivak, Wainwright suggests that counter-mapping becomes “ a practice that we cannot say “ no ” to, and yet must call into question. ” 74 In this way, the deconstructive



political gesture is a gesture toward a spacing that a practice both constitutes and unfolds with.

Where Wainwright explores the aporias of development logics haunted by the legacies of colonialism, Gibson-Graham highlight the ways that the pervasiveness of the political discourse of anti-capitalism within the academy (and beyond) has given way to political visions that, ironically, cannot see beyond capitalism. In an earlier work, they spend a bit more time with Derrida by pursuing several ghosts that haunt capitalism. 75 However, it in their later attempts to envision alternatives to “ capitalocentrism ” that they articulate a deconstructive politics. Th ere, capitalism is rendered all the more inevitable because it makes any alternative appear impossible:

Alongside the hegemonic discourse of the economy as capitalist many counter-discourses of the economy have arisen from alternative strands of economic thinking – classical political economy, economic anthropology, sociology and geography, public sector economics, feminist economics and from working-class, third-world, and community activism – the socialist, cooperative, and local sustainability movements, for example. Diverse languages of economy already exist but are rendered ineff ectual by the hegemony of capitalocentrism. Th ey have become, in Santos ’ s terms, “ non-credible alternatives to what exists ” . . . subsisting in the shadows of mainstream economic thinking. To produce a potential dislocation of the hegemony of capitalocentric discourse, we need to identify and begin to liberate these alternative languages from their discursive subordination. 76

Gibson-Graham ’ s project acknowledges otherwise unrecognized or represented divisions of labor that capitalist discourses push to its own margins: reproductive labor, care-taking, service, and so on. At the same time, they reference any number of alternative economies that are completely erased by the logic of capitalism, particularly those that have appeared with the rise of the alter-globalization movement of the past couple decades, but also those that have in various ways resisted capitalism all along. Developing an anti-capitalocentric narrative in relation to these movements is important because, like Derrida ’ s solidarity above, it re-routes academic discourse to the acknowledgement of proximate events that challenge the hegemony of accepted political discourses in the academy. It highlights the possibility of other spaces of politics. Where Wainwright called upon the inevitable traces of the past, Gibson-Graham mark to alternatives to-come in the spirit of the declaration that “ Another world is possible. ” 77

Conclusion

If geography off ers a reconsideration or an amplifi cation of deconstruction as a political spacing , it does so by way of a simultaneous re-visioning of its own disciplinary imaginaries. Th at is, rather than lording over or off ering a supplement to Derridean philosophy, it has attempted, echoing Lawlor, “ to follow him. ” 78 Th e distinction is



crucial. Geographic deconstruction has not, for the most part, meant an eff ort to simply “ apply ” Derrida or to “ add space ” to what is presumed to be an otherwise complete philosophical system. On the contrary, it more oft en has been an eff ort to transform thinking from “ within ” by acknowledging its participation in logics from without. Th is has been perhaps most important with regard to re-exploring the taken-for-grantedness of spatiality, but given that this treatment of space appears throughout Kantian and phenomenological thought, it is little surprise that we fi nd its traces in our accounts of representation, politics, sensation, and embodiment. Accordingly, encounters with Derrida that read deconstruction as a kind of spacing should turn out thoughts to the geographies to come. By this we should mean neither further entrenching ourselves in the global capitalist imaginary nor simply planning and management. Rather, thinking the geographies to come should constitute eff orts to further explore the spacing of politics, to build complex solidarities that, instead of being subject to conditions of transcending space, work at constituting proximities, and, fi nally, to imagining the possibilities of worlds . . .

Notes

1 Carl O. Sauer (1941), “ Forward to historical geography, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 31, 6.

2 See: Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Matthew Sparke (1998), “ A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada, cartography, and the narration of nation, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, 463 – 95; Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing Development (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).

3 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 117.

4 See: Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena , trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Diff erence , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl ’ s Origin of Geometry : An Introduction , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

5 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 17. 6 Ibid. 7 See: Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations , Vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay

(New York: Routledge, 2001), 188 – 90. 8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak (Baltimore: Th e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 48 – 9. 9 Derrida, Of Grammatology , 48. 10 Ibid., 49. 11 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1981), 107. 12 Derrida, Of Grammatology , 49. 13 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a

Phenomenological Philosophy , Vol. 1, trans. F. Kersten (Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1982), 142.



14 Derek Gregory (1995), “ Imaginative geographies, ” Progress in Human Geography 19, 447 – 85.

15 See: Matthew Sparke (1994), “ Writing on patriarchal missiles: Th e chauvinism of the ‘ Gulf War ’ and the limits of critique, ” Environment and Planning A 26, 1061 – 89; Matthew Sparke (1998), “ A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada, cartography, and the narration of nation, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, 463 – 95; Gear ó id Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: Th e Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Bruce Willems-Braun (1997), “ Buried epistemologies: Th e politics of nature in (post) colonial British Columbia, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, 3 – 31; Clive Barnett (1998), “ Impure and worldly geography: Th e Africanist discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831 – 73, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, 239 – 51; and Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing Development (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).

16 Gear ó id Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: Th e Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2.

17 J. B. Harley (1989), “ Deconstructing the Map, ” Cartographica 26 (2), 3. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Ibid., 7. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr. and Stephen P. Hanna (2000), “ Representations and

identities in tourism map spaces, ” Progress in Human Geography 24, 32. 22 Bruce Willems-Braun (1997), “ Buried epistemologies: Th e politics of nature in (post)

colonial British Columbia, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, 10. 23 Clive Barnett (1999), “ Deconstructing context: Exposing Derrida, ” Transactions of

the Institute of British Geographers 24, 288. 24 See: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment , trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1987); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996); Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic , trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 2001); Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant ’ s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

25 Mitch Rose (2006), “ Gathering ‘ dreams of presence ’ : A project for the cultural landscape, ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 537 – 54.

26 John W. Wylie (2009), “ Landscape, absence and the geographies of love, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 275 – 89.

27 Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974 – 1994 , edited by Elizabeth Weber, trans Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 187.

28 Clive Barnett (1999), “ Deconstructing context: Exposing Derrida, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 290.

29 Carl O. Sauer, Land and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 315. 30 Ibid., 396. 31 Ibid., 400 – 1. 32 See: James S. Duncan (1980), “ Th e superorganic in American cultural geography, ”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, 181 – 98; Don Mitchell (1995), “ Th ere ’ s no such thing as culture: Towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 102 – 16.



33 For a key treatment of Heidegger, see: Anne Buttimer (1976), “ Grasping the dynamism of the lifeworld, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, 277 – 92; for Husserl, see: J. Nicholas Entrikin (1976), “ Contemporary humanism in geography, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, 615 – 32.

34 J. Nicholas Entrikin (1976), “ Contemporary humanism in geography, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, 616.

35 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: Th e Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

36 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

37 Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Aff ection: Th e Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 167.

38 Yi-Fu Tuan, Who Am I?: An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind, and Spirit (Madison: Th e University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 102.

39 See: Mitch Rose (2002), “ Landscapes and labyrinths, ” Geoforum 33, 455 – 67; Mitch Rose (2006), “ Gathering ‘ dreams of presence ’ : A project for the cultural landscape, ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 537 – 54; John W. Wylie (2002), “ An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor, ” Geoforum 33, 441 – 54; John W. Wylie (2005), “ A single day ’ s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30: 234 – 47; John W. Wylie (2009), “ Landscape, absence and the geographies of love, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 275 – 89.

40 Mitch Rose, “ Gathering ‘ dreams of presence, ’ ” 538. 41 Ibid., 539. 42 Ibid., 549. 43 Ibid., 547. 44 Ibid., 546 – 7. 45 See: John W. Wylie (2002), “ An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor, ” Geoforum 33,

441 – 54; John W. Wylie (2005), “ A single day ’ s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 234 – 47; John W. Wylie (2009), “ Landscape, absence and the geographies of love, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 275 – 89, respectively.

46 John W. Wylie (2009), “ Landscape, absence and the geographies of love, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 275 – 89.

47 John W. Wylie, “ A single day ’ s walking . . . ” , 238 – 9. 48 Ibid., 239. 49 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Diff erence , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1978), 237. 50 John W. Wylie, “ Landscape . . .,” 279. 51 Ibid., 279. 52 Ibid., 281. 53 Ibid., 281. 54 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a

Phenomenological Philosophy , Vol. 2, trans. F. Kersten (Th e Hague: Martinus Nijhoff , 1989), 176.

55 Ibid., 177. 56 See: Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena , trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 1973); Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida,



Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition , trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Th e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

57 Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: Th e Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 194.

58 Jacques Derrida, On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy , trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 34.

59 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , 81. 60 Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974 – 1994 , 190. 61 See: Michael J. Dear (1986), “ Postmodernism and planning, ” Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space 4, 367 – 84; Michael J. Dear (1988), “ Th e postmodern challenge: Reconstructing human geography, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 277 – 93; David Harvey, Th e Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); David Harvey (1999), “ On fatal fl aws and fatal distractions, ” Progress in Human Geography 23, 557 – 66; Frederick Jameson (1984), “ Postmodernism, Or, Th e logic of late capitalism, ” Th e New Left Review 146, 53 – 92; A. P. Lagopoulos (1993), “ Postmodernism, geography, and the social semiotics of space, ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11, 255 – 78; Peter Marden (1992), “ Th e deconstructionist tendencies of postmodern geographies: a compelling logic? ” Progress in Human Geography 16, 41 – 57; Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies: Th e Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Th eory (New York: Verso, 1989).

62 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx , trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92.

63 Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974 – 1994 , 213. 64 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy , 113 – 14. 65 Simon Critchley, Infi nitely Demanding (New York: Verso, 2007). 66 Most notably Clive Barnett (1993), “ Peddling postmodernism: A response to

Strohmayer and Hannah ’ s ‘ Domesticating postmodernism, ’ ” Antipode 25, 345 – 58; Clive Barnett (1998), “ Impure and worldly geography: Th e Africanist discourse of the Royal Geographical Society, 1831 – 73, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, 239 – 51; Clive Barnett (1999), “ Deconstructing context: Exposing Derrida, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 277 – 93; Clive Barnett (2004), “ Deconstructing radical democracy: Articulation, representation, and being-with-others, ” Political Geography 23, 503 – 28; Clive Barnett (2005), “ Life aft er Derrida, ” Antipode 37, 239 – 41; Barnett, C. (2005b) “ Temporality and the paradoxes of democracy, ” Political Geography 24, 641 – 7; Clive Barnett (2005), “ Ways of relating: Hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness, ” Progress in Human Geography 29, 5 – 21; Trevor J. Barnes (1994), “ Probable writing: Deconstruction, Derrida and quantitative revolution in human geography, ” Environment and Planning A 26, 1021 – 40; E. Jeff rey Popke (2003), “ Poststructuralist ethics: Subjectivity, responsibility and the space of community, ” Progress in Human Geography 27, 298 – 316; E. Jeff rey Popke (2007), “ Geography and ethics: Spaces of cosmopolitan responsibility, ” Progress in Human Geography 31, 509 – 18; Matthew Sparke (1994), “ Writing on patriarchal missiles: Th e chauvinism of the ‘ Gulf War ’ and the limits of critique, ” Environment and Planning A 26, 1061 – 89; Matthew Sparke (1998), “ A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada, cartography, and the narration of nation, ” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, 463 – 95; Matthew Sparke, In the Space of Th eory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

67 Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing Development (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 68 Ibid., 243.



69 Qtd in Wainwright, Decolonizing Development , 243. 70 Wainwright, Decolonizing Development , my italics. 71 Critical cartography (J. B. Harley (1989), Deconstructing the Map, Cartographica

26 (2), 1 – 20) and Derridean landscapes (John W. Wylie, “ A single day ’ s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path (2005), ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 234 – 47; John W. Wylie (2009), “ Landscape, absence and the geographies of love, ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, 275 – 89.)

72 Wainwright, Decolonizing Development , 257 – 9. 73 Ibid., 259. 74 Ibid., 269. 75 J. K. Gibson-Graham, Th e End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 243 – 8. 76 J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2006), 57. 77 Another World is Possible , edited by William F. Fisher and Th omas Ponniah (New

York: Zed Books, 2003). 78 Leonard Lawlor, Th is Is Not Suffi cient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in

Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1.


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