Earth Writing Academis Edu

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Earth Writing

Simon SpringerDepartment of Geography, University of Victoria

[email protected]

AbstractGeography means earth writing, and so it is perhaps fitting that writing itself has become a primaryintellectual battleground in contemporary geographical thought. This paper advocates for metaphoricalearth writing, arguing that it unchains our geographical imaginations from the shackles of ourdisciplinary past by boldly embracinggeopoetics. I hope to spark debate by promoting the un-discipliningof geography as a means to open up a theoretical space for voice, where a material space ofemancipation might follow. I am guided by the notion that our epistemological, ontological, andmethodological choices are not apolitical decisions without consequence. Accordingly I critique theaccusation of esotericism as a narrative that reifies the false dichotomy between academia and society.

Aversion to metaphor fails to recognize the epistemological challenge it raises and underestimates how

jargon combats commonsense notions that reinforce hierarchical power relations. How we write theearth constitutes a political choice, where disciplining others into a singular way of knowing, being, anddoing geography is an affront to the possibilities of space. When we make space for earth writing as abeautiful flourishing ofgeopoetics, we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the light andenergy of a more powerful geography.

Keywordscommonsense, esotericism, geography, geopoetics, metaphor, praxis

Introduction

[Geopoetics] is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation

of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially

integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a

poetics which places the planet Earth at the center of experience. It seeks a new or renewed sense of

world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our

knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world.

- Kenneth White (1989: np)

Geography means earth writing. Given this etymology it is both fitting and paradoxical that the issue of

writing has become one of the primary intellectual battlegrounds of contemporary geographical

thought. It was not too long ago that writing in the discipline proceeded through a naive realism and

was considered an entirely objective and unproblematic process wherein words were thought to link


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thoughts with objects in irrefutable ways (Peet 1994). Geography was accordingly a discipline

concerned with providing mirror representations of a predetermined, and already labeled earth. In this

sense, writing about the earth was envisioned as quite a straightforward process. The crisis of

representation and the cultural turn in geography changed the parameters of such positivist thinking

(Barnes 2001), and representation could no longer be seriously claimed as truth, but rather as

interpretation. Methodologically, positivist and scientific reliability of results necessarily gave way to

interpretive validity, and epistemologically writing can no longer be considered a factual endeavor,

since truth is now recognized as being made through texts, rather than outside of them. Writing, and

indeed earth writing, reveal as much about individual authors as they do about the ostensible real

world they serve to represent. Thus, Richard Peet (1994: 297) argues in writing worlds, rhetorical

devices such as metaphors, irony, and smiles are not merely decorative, but central for conveying

meaning. Metaphors play a pivotal role in shaping interpretive communities (Fish 1980), and thereby,

the facts that they emphasize. Moreover, a metaphors success or failure is based on whether it

identifies similarities between the thing investigated and the thing it is being compared with, and from

this we can recognize that knowledge is acquired via an inherently metaphorical process. In contrast,

naive realism results in a breakdown of communication because if two people perceive things

differently, particularly if they witness it with their own eyes, each can only conclude that the other is a

fool or a liar, and neither of these conclusions are conducive to fostering respectful conversation

(Wright 1994).

I want to explore some of the problematics of this divide between metaphorical earth writing and

the specter of naive realism that continues to haunt the discipline of geography, arguing that it is high

time, once and for all, to unchain our geographical imaginations from the shackles of our disciplinary

past and boldly embrace the immanence of geopoetics. Yet my purpose in this paper is not to engage a

polemic about what earth writing should look like in absolute terms. In fact, my objective is to do quite

the opposite, as I instead hope to open up debates about earth writing by advocating for the un-

disciplining of our discipline. The polemicist, Michel Foucault (1998) once noted,

proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle,


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whether religious or secular, where reality is a fixed parameter that we reveal through observing its true

nature, while the latter opens up an aperture on a more grounded and democratic basis of knowledge

by recognizing that perception defines reality, not the other way around. Our epistemological,

ontological, and methodological choices are accordingly not apolitical decisions without consequence.

They have resonant material effects that pulse throughout the integral whole of the universe, wherein

the closer we are to their epicenter of influence, the stronger the vibrations. The final section before the

conclusion accordingly highlights the implications of methods in relation to metaphor, wherein I argue

that how we write about the world accordingly constitutes a political choice, where disciplining others

into a singular way of knowing, being, and doing geography is a violent affront to the possibilities of

space (Massey 2005). When we make space for earth writing as a beautiful flourishing of geopoetics,

rather than as a constrained geoprose of tedious data, objective facts, and an ostensibly transcendent

researcher, we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the light and energy of a much more

powerful geography.

Dead Metaphors

metaphor connects abstract thought with embodied experience, providing a grounding we often fail to

see precisely because it is so pervasive and fundamental.

- N. Katherine Hayles (2001: 44)

Delicate words exhausted through overuse. Bawdy words made temperate by repetition. Enchanting and

enchanted words wand broken. Words of the spirit forced into flesh. Words of the flesh unlovely in a

white gown. Slang in a sling shot hurled and hurled and hurled. That is the legacy of the dead.

- Jeanette Winterson (1996: 65)

At the time of this writing I am less than five years into a career as a professional geographer, but

within this time span, like many other young scholars concerned with the pressures of securing a

position and attaining tenure in a context where PhD graduates are increasing while actual jobs are

decreasing, I operate with a certain degree of anxiety and have self-admittedly seen my own subject


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position transformed into a publish or perish mentality. What this adds up to is a fairly significant

amount of experience with peer review in a relatively short period of time. What stands out as most

notable in my negotiation of the peer review process to date are the ways in which the echoes of

geographys past continue to visit the present. While not often expressed in published work, although

there are exceptions (cf. Binns 2007), behind the scenes there seems to be somewhat of an aversion for

metaphorical or poetic writing, and a clear preference for empirical descriptions of material conditions.

I find this extremely troubling insofar as it risks taking us a step backwards to the colonial geography of

yesteryear. Description, Edward Said (1978/2003: 84) argued, was the first great collective

appropriation of one country by another. This revelation isnt surprising, since colonialism itself is

premised upon the power of representing Other peoples and their worlds as not like us, and thus in

need of salvationary gestures like the white mans burden. Nonetheless, I have encountered peer

reviewers who seem intent on pressing hang ups over metaphors as far as they can possibly take them

in suggesting that earth writing should forward material descriptions: is this scholarship as I would like

to see it in a flagship journal, a referee wrote of my essay (Author 2013), or simply a series of

rhetorical tropes (e.g., zombies, vampires) used to construct a polemic about a situation whose

materiality deserves far greater attention. My earth writing was, in the view of this anonymous

reviewer, not grounded enough to warrant publication as I was somehow doing injustice to my research

participants by employing metaphors in the presentation of my arguments. I was, as is to be expected,

upset by such commentary.

Even more concerning than any wound to my own ego is that such a method of critique

proceeds as an attempt to invalidate alternative epistemological positions, and literally seeks to discipline

others into one particular mode of earth writing, as though there is only one correct way to do

geography. The parallels with colonialism are hard to ignore, as its gaze constitutes a strategy of

embodying disciplinary mechanisms through which power is relayed through various nodes that

legitimize particular ways of seeing and doing (de Certeau 2000). Of course this could instead be a case

of my chosen metaphors ultimately failing to resonate, but given that they were all borrowed directly

from the particular interpretive community that I intended as my audience, I am inclined to think


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otherwise. Chris Harmans (2012) recent book Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx,

and a number of articles including ones by geographers such as Jamie Peck (2010) employ the

zombification metaphor, while the phrase vampiric state was popularized by J. H. Frimpong-Ansah

(1991) in The Vampire State in Africa: the Political Economy of Decline in Ghana, and taken up by geographers

like Barry Riddell (1997) to refer to the idea that the state saps individuals of their full potential, treating

human lives as expendable. In this particular instance, the metaphors usage actually extends back over

a century to Karl Marx (1867/1976), when he made an analogy to vampires in Capital Volume 1, stating

that Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more,

the more labour it sucks. So complaining about a metaphor that has been in circulation within the

realm of political economy for almost 150 years seemed quite misguided. Nonetheless, I was explicitly

told that this type of earth writing had no place in a leading disciplinary journal. This sort of critique

then fundamentally amounts to an imposition of what constitutes authentic geography, rather than

remaining open to the legitimacy of other epistemological and ontological views and making space for

the different senses of earth writing that might be productively employed.

The claim that language ought to have clarity or simplicity, which is a typical reactionary

response to poststructuralist writings see The Bad Writing Contest run by Denis Dutton (1998),

former editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, in which Judith Butler was awarded the top prize

cuts to the heart of the crisis of representation that continues to trouble geographical scholarship,

most overtly through the recent turn towards non-representational theory (Thrift 2007). The quest for

simplicity is linked to a problematic, modernist understanding of language that suggests language itself

conveys an already existing truth, as though we can ever say what we mean, or conversely mean what

we say. In other words, at the heart of the issue of writing style is actually an epistemological challenge,

as the notion of clarity in writing is premised upon a scientific/positivist positioning that posits

objective reality, which itself is the sine qua nonof the god-trick that Donna Haraway (1988) identifies.

Those who champion conservative views frequently scold those who advance a more radical

perspective, where the latter have accordingly long been the focus of polemics. As Herbert Marcuse

(1964/1991: 192) argued,


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The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say? Dont you conceal

something? You talk a language which is suspect. You dont talk like the rest of us, like the man in the

street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your

tricks, purge you.

Marcuse continues by suggesting that the only response to such an attack is to argue that if what the

intellectual says could be said in terms of ordinary language, she would probably have done so in the

first place. So the idea that earth writing can avoid what some might label as jargonistic or turgid

language and somehow still seriously challenge traditional, commonsense ideas is self-contradictory as

the epistemological position here is irreducibly linked to language. If we are to challenge existing

understandings, particularly when they are rooted in an unreflexive sense of tradition, it becomes

necessary to write very carefully and in terms that avoid everyday conventions. As Judith Butler (1999:

np) contends:

If commonsense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust

social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging

commonsense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just

world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt

School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an

important role in shaping and altering our common or natural understanding of social and political

realities.

Thus, while the anti-commonsense language of some earth writing might seem challenging, obscure, or

even esoteric, particularly to those who disagree with a poststructuralist interpretation of language, this

is actually an epistemological challenge, and not simply a matter of writing style.

Rather than being obtuse or conveyed with froth, as has been said of my own work, I would

instead like to think of my choice of metaphors and writing style as part of a poetic shift in earth

writing, particularly as regards violence, which has been the primary focus of my research to date

(Author 2011, 2013). Theodore Adorno (1981: 34) once argued that To write poetry after Auschwitz

is barbaric as he couldnt fathom how a humanity, capable of such bloodshed, could make sense of

and in turn relate this horrific tale. Yet Adorno, burdened by the emotional weight of violence, was


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wrong. It is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz, but ratherprose. As Slavoj Zizek (2008: 4-5)

writes Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp

succeeds. That is to say, when Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after Auschwitz,

this impossibility is an enabling impossibility: poetry is always about something that cannot be

addressed directly, only alluded to. Thus, in the wake of the crisis of representation, where earth

writing can no longer be considered as a straightforward process of conveying the real word, poetry

becomes an essential component of geographys recent affective turn, it becomes enabling, and

particularly so vis--vis the commonsense logics and structural violence of capitalism, law, and the state.

Consequently, my choice of language, that is, my style of earth writing and its inflection with metaphor,

is a purposeful tactic, one that I contend is necessary not only because of the philosophical nature of

the arguments I choose to make, but as a particular challenge to commonsense.What those who

advocate for a more empirical or scientific frame to geographical scholarship so often forget is that

these too are discursive fields laden with their own particular jargon, technobabble, and gobbledygook.

Yet because all researchers are immersed in a specific epistemic field, in the same way that a fish is not

aware of the water it swims in until it is pulled to the surface and can no longer breathe, we are not

appropriately cognizant of our surroundings until someone from outside that field attempts to

asphyxiate us. While fostering awareness of this field is a crucial measure of reflexivity that keeps

scholarship alive, meaning that we should be made aware of the fragile mortality of our limited

perspectives, stifling that which you dont understand to the point of promoting its cessation is a

reactionary and intensely oppressive undertaking that murders both philosophy and metaphor.

In Defence of Esotericism

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in

academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your

pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one,

surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

- Richard Dawkins (1999: 141)


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[Esotericism] has always been considered the domain of the Other. It has been imagined as a strange

country, whose inhabitants think differently from us and live by different laws: whether one felt that it

should be conquered and civilized, avoided and ignored, or emulated as a source of inspiration, it has

always presented a challenge to our very identity, for better or for worse.

- Wouter Hanegraaff (2012: 3)

The writing styles of a great many Continental philosophers, critical theorists, and poststructuralist

thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Jacques

Rancire, Emmanuel Levinas, and Pierre Bourdieu have been critiqued as being elitist, obscure, and

esoteric (Eagleton 1996; Epstein 1995; Sokal and Bricmont 1998). While I do not want to lend the

impression of self-importance that sees my own work as of the same caliber as these profound

thinkers, each of these authors has greatly inspired me. In spite of the ongoing critiques of their

particular styles of writing, the work of critical theory remains some of the most highly regarded, highly

read, and highly cited writings in the academy today, and in this regard, I do not worry that my writing

style will diminish how my work is received or how widely it might be read. If we are to be honest

about our practice, the work of professional geographers appears by and large in academic journals, not

popular magazines, so in most instances we are clearly not trying to speak to a general audience. My

expectation is that those who will chose to read my articles will already have some interest in the topic,

and some appreciation of the literature in which it is framed. I also believe the intellectual importance

of a contribution should exceed concerns for the number of citations or downloads it might receive in

the future. If that were the sole concern of any given academic journal, it would be a losing game akin

to playing the stock market or gambling, rather than an intellectual exercise. Nonetheless, I have

frequently encountered reviewers who have encouraged me to operate in a more realist frame of

reference so that I might gain a larger audience, as though we can ever interpret who might read our

work and for what means and ends it might be used after it is written up. In a review of Gayatri

Spivaks (1999)A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Terry Eagleton


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(1999) attacked the book as an exercise in being as obscurantist as you can decently get away with.

Yet Spivaks interrogations of political commonsense have reached thousands of scholars and have

resonated far beyond the academy, as her work is highly regarded in activist circles as well. Butler (1999:

np), whose work has been at the center of similar critiques, defends Spivak against Eagleton by

suggesting that, perhaps it is precisely her well-earned popularity, her ability to reach so many people,

and change their thinking so profoundly, that forms the basis of Eagletons ressentiment. Likewise, I

wonder how many contemporary earth writers would regard Gayatri Spivaks (1988) monumental Can

the Subaltern Speak? as an exercise in elitism simply because of its poetic quality. Does this character

of poetics in itself make academic work rarefied?

The accusation of esotericism is a difficult one to counteract. Yet we should recognize this

particular line of critique in academia as polemical and antagonistic precisely because it is meant to

discredit and silence those who are subjected to it, to render them as Other. Since so much of

contemporary academia is tied up in ego, which is an unfortunate repercussion of the neoliberalization

of the academy and the heightened individualism that comes with it (Canaan and Schuman 2008, Ginn

2013), when one achieves a certain level of notoriety, you can almost be certain that there will be a

groundswell of detractors vying for attention, where allegations of esotericism resound like a battle cry.

The accused is not supposed to be able to defend her position as the charge has been made, and in its

presentation, it is typically mounted as a truth claim. Of course one of the central concerns of critical

theory is challenging how truth claims are constructed, buttressed, and perpetuated, so it is both ironic

and somewhat unsurprising that critics would employ the very tactic that is being opposed as an

attempt to discredit poststructuralist authors as the message challenges the foundation of authority and

expertise from which so many scholars derive their identity. Yet beyond what I would consider a form

of self-conciliation, such charges of esotericism are divisive, particularly when conceivably we, as

geographers, are not nihilistic in our outlook and view our earth writing as collectively contributing

towards some modicum of greater good. This is where a union of scholarly activity and activism should

come into play (Fuller and Kitchen 2004; Hay 2001). Do any of us really expect that if we publish in

leading disciplinary journals our work will make any more of a political intervention simply by using


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straightforward language and keeping our studies firmly rooted in empirical concerns? To venture a

yes to this question seems like an ill-conceived, anti-reflexive leap of logic, which problematically

demonstrates a treatment of theoretical concerns in a pejorative sense and overlooks the possibility of

making meaningful changes by using a more hands-on approach of scholar-activism, where theory and

practice converge aspraxis (Chatteron 2008).

When academics, including geographers, are really honest to themselves about what the impact

of their published research might be, they soon start to realize that it is unlikely that one particular piece

of writing will singularly bring about any revolutionary change. To think otherwise about ones own

work is not only a delusion of grandeur, but it conveniently skirts around the asymmetrical power

involved in any research project, as though you can give back simply by writing your research up and

publishing it. An academic journal article is, after all, for an academic audience, where the targeted

readership most definitely isa particular interpretive community. How one gives back to a research

community in contrast, is an entirely different question from that of our written output and speaks to

the need for an activist orientation in our commitments as scholars (Autonomist Geographies

Collective 2010). We need the theory to engage a process of meaningful action, and we need the action

to refine our theories (Dempsey and Rowe 2004; Ward 1973/2001). Of course committing human

geography to a progressive, inclusive, and emancipatory agenda necessitates a negation of the ivory

tower syndrome and the false dichotomy it maintains between the academy as a space of knowledge

production on the one hand, and wider society as the domain of social struggle on the other. But

thinking that the means to achieve this is simply by making our metaphors more accessible, our writing

style more clear, and our theory more simplistic within academic forums is a naive assessment of how

this might actually be achieved. We need a dual approach that on the one hand maintains theoretical

sophistication in academic forums, and on the other hand attempts to build solidarities through activist

connections and by producing more accessible works for a public audience in non-academic forums.

There is also a distinct need, as Don Mitchell (2008) persuasively argues, for desk-bound radicals to

make space for activism by guarding an intellectual space that fosters dissent. The academy is not a

separate sphere of society, but an integral component of it, which can be used as a site to nurture


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activism through promoting greater community participation among students (Rouhani 2012). In short,

there is no such thing as theory-for theorys sake, which is an unhelpful derisive that gives license to a

dangerous sense of anti-intellectualism (cf. Best 2009). Even the most abstracted of concepts, like

neoliberalism, can be shown to have grounded material effects (Peck 2010).

Coupled with the perpetuation of the great man game, where winning means other scholars

turn your name into an adjective, it is at least partly owing to the competitive nature of contemporary

academia that scholars proceed on the facile hope that their next paper will receive thousands citations

and be regarded as a watershed moment. Yet a more honest appraisal of the intellectual milieu

recognizes that every brilliant idea is merely a snapshot, an incremental moment in time that is

relationally connected to the entire body of knowledge within which it engages, a corpus that emerges

from endless conversations occurring both inside and outside of the academy (Graeber 2007). Any

supposed stroke of genius is not separate from the ongoing processes in which that achievement is

rooted. All ideas grow as a rhizome, branching off in new directions, but nonetheless irrevocably

connected to a source that provides nourishment (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). So, for example,

although my name appears as the author of this paper, I did not conceive the ideas that compose it

anymore than a chef invents vegetable soup. She may decide on the ingredients in a methodical fashion,

or arrange them in new ways through experimentation and serendipity. She may even cultivate a garden

to grow the vegetables and spices herself, watering them and ensuring that they have enough sun, but

regardless of any of this activity that went into the eventual arrival at soup, she did not make the

vegetables, nor the water, nor the sun. All she really did was offer a new preparation of constituents

through trial, error, and fortuity. The building blocks were there for her to use, so her authorship of the

soup comes only through its poetic arrangement. We may enjoy her soup or despise it depending on

our own aesthetic taste, or we may even qualify it as chowder, potage, consomm, or bisque, but we

can hardly deny that it is soup. Earth writing is much the same. It is a symptom of ego that denies the

integrality of knowledge, and a wasted effort to dictate the correct way to do geography. If you dont

like the soup, dont eat it, but at least be willing to try new flavors instead of simply rejecting them as

esoteric, and appreciate that taste is always something that is acquired; making it is inseparable from


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power relations and cultural hegemony (Bourdieu 1979). To combat the dominance of the normative,

Antonio Gramsci (1971: 10) recognized that intellectuals play a key role insofar as they can either

reinforce or reject the status quo. He understood that clarity in writing was not enough to transform

society, and that we must embrace a more holistic praxis: The mode of being of the new intellectual

can no longer consist of eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and

passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, as permanent persuader,

not just simple orator.

The Method of Metaphor

mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal

metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success

of this metaphor.

- Norbert Weiner (1954: 95)

[N]ot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

- William Bruce Cameron (1963: 13)

The union of the mathematician with the poet this surely is the ideal.

- William James (1879/1987: 356-357)

Paul Feyerabend (1975/2010) has argued in favor of epistemological anarchism, which contends that

science is just one way of conceiving reality that cannot be shown to have any more validity than any

other world view or cosmology. Although Feyerabend insisted that his arguments were apolitical and

refused to see their potential beyond a theoretical implication, Hakim Bey (1991) has argued in favor of

an ontological anarchism, which extends this conversation outwards into the grounded experience of

being. Yet to sever epistemology from ontology is yet another in a long line of false dichotomies, and

indeed the political implications of Feyerabends version of anarchism are existential regardless of

whether he wanted to explore this avenue or not. The rise of modern science coincides with the


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suppression of non-Western peoples, and its historical and ongoing relationship to both the

justification for and the perpetuation of colonial rule should not be overlooked (Smith 1999). Given

that the modern state is a fractal of the colonial state, where a substantively post-colonial positionality is

necessarily also post-statist, or anarchic (Springer 2012), it is imperative to recognize the political

application of epistemological anarchism. Science still reigns supreme because, as Feyerabend

(1975/2010) argues its practitioners are unable to understand, and unwilling to condone, different ideologies,

because they have the power to enforce their wishes, and because they use this power just as their

ancestors used their power to force [their views] on the peoples they encountered during their

conquests. Yet science has no greater epistemological significance than any other way of knowing the

world. Its authority comes from its embeddedness in the authority of the state, both colonial and

nationalist, where it has replaced former religious epistemologies. The theme remains the same, except

that secularization has reconfigured the legitimizing cosmology. The reason for this special treatment

of science is, of course, our little fairy-tale Feyerabend (1975/2010) maintains, continuing that if

science has found a method that turns ideologically contaminated ideas into true and useful theories,

then it is indeed not mere ideology, but and objective measure of all ideologies. This is the hallmark of

polemics and the antagonism it is premised upon, as science refuses to accept or accommodate any

other position, claiming its results have arisen without any assistance from and in total independence

of non-scientific elements, where indigenous and Other knowledges are regarded as totally without

merit (Haraway 1988).

The fallacy of this dichotomy should be clear enough given, for example, the renewed interest

in the properties of herbal medicines and the innumerable tools humans manufactured prior to the

advent of scientific methodologies. Yet science alone is said to give us effective medicine and useful

technologies. This arrogant separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also

detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand both our physical

surroundings and human relations, then we must be willing to accept all epistemologies, all ontologies,

and all methods, and not just a small selection of them (Feyerabend 1975/2010). Such a view is also

more in tune with deconstructing the false dichotomy between the university as a space of knowledge


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production, and wider society as the domain of social struggle (Pickerill 2008). Indeed, when we view

the role of the intellectual as simply one of interrogating anew the evidence and the postulates, of

shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of taking a new

measure of rules and institutions it is a matter of participating in the formation of a political will

then the distinction between inside and outside of the academy becomes even more meaningless

(Foucault 1991: 12), as academics are simply engaging with and reflecting upon the world the same as

anyone else, only our task is to analyze the limits of our knowledge and write about it. Thus, it is not

the place of the earth writer to be prescriptive as to how society shouldbe organized, as imposing ones

own view in such a manner would simply recapitulate the essence of imperialist/state-making projects.

The task of (re)imagining society should rightfully be an ongoing, protean process, enacted through the

collective will and empowered by the solidarity of those communities concerned through the process of

radical democracy. Moreover, the insistence that (social) science possesses the only correct method

(empiricism) and the only acceptable results is mere ideology. As A. J. Baker (1960/2009: 240) argues,

There are various false theories, metaphysical views, overt and concealed moral and political

assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role of the critic is to expose these as illusions or

ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation to generation. So it

is for good reason that much of contemporary geographical scholarship is not rooted exclusively in

empiricism, as significant doubt has been cast on scientific methodologies and the ocular-centrism of a

mode of inquiry that privileges the observable as the foundation of certainty in knowledge.

I am purposefully an intellectual, and purposefully not a social scientist. What I mean by this is

that I am not committed to any one epistemological, ontological, or methodological understanding, but

am instead prone to continuously re-evaluating my own positionality through employing a certain

anarchism. To quote Foucault (1988: 10) once more, The main interest in life and work is to become

someone else that you were not in the beginning. So in response to Marxs famous thesis that

philosophers have only hitherto interpreted the world when the real point is to change it, Foucault

would have undoubtedly argued that our constant task must be to keep changing our minds. Changing

our minds is changing the world, and academic stasis and the refusal of other epistemological,


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ontological, and methodological positions is thus of the same chord that privileges entrenched

hierarchies. It is disciplinary in the most regressive sense of working alongside regulatory power

(biopower and governmentality) to control individual bodies, and specifically how those bodies think

and what they can do (Foucault 1976/2003). Rather than using disciplinary strategies to encourage

docile scholars with no sense of what it means to be political (K. Mitchell 2008), we should be

unleashing our epistemological and ontological precepts to encourage the wilding of our earth writing.

Within the methodical fashioning of a domesticated geography, there is a feral yearning for exploration

that cannot be repressed. The desire to open up the idea of method itself to critique is not akin to a

refusal of validity. Interpreting the validity of a particular work is a matter of positionality. This is not to

argue for relativism, which is as much of a disembodied god-trick as objectivity, but to locate validity

as a form of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). Positivists contend validity is interpreted exclusively

as the reliability of results, where personal bias is seen as destroying reliability. Yet validity can take

many forms including validity-as-culture, validity-as-ideology, validity-as-gender, validity-as-

language/text, and validity-as-relevance/advocacy. Rather than presenting one particular view of

validity as correct, Altheide and Johnson (2000: 290) acknowledge interpretive validity, which suggests

that, validity should be relevant and serviceable for some application of knowledge asking the

questions Is it useful? and most importantly Does it liberate, or empower?. This final question is

what drives my research, where I have sough to contribute to a discourse of non-violence and to

promote the furtherance of emancipatory ideas and liberatory politics, not to appeal to the

institutionalized channels of the status quo in putting forward formal (policy) proposals, or to offer

prescriptive overviews of what those groups who I have been researching should be doing. Such

articulations are bureaucratic at best and authoritarian at worst.

It should be fairly obvious that all of this is antithetical to a more emancipatory geography, where

individuals are self-empowered and collectively organized through voluntary associations to chart their

own future paths, rather than being coerced to accept the guidance of a state leader or cajoled by a

patronizing and misguided academic. I see the role of the intellectual, and hence the purpose of

scholarship, as precisely being the social conscience of society. Not speaking for society, but thinking


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critically within it as an integral component of the larger whole. Much of my work is accordingly

written in such a way that I intend for it to be read as diagnostic. Foucault (1990: 36), from whom I take

my cue, once said, I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the

nature of the present... any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual

fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e. of

possible transformation. Geography, when given methodological freedom, when attuned to

interpretive validity, and when positioned as a situated knowledge, can provide that space. It is only

through a radical, committed, and sustained critique of the violent institutions and practices that shape

our lives, including our own individual implication in them, that humanity might be able to cast off the

chains that we have made for ourselves in the form of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, statism,

militarism, classism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, genderism, ageism, ableism, speciesism,

homophobia, and transphobia. As such, I make no apologies for the diagnostic approach that I have

adopted in my earth writing, as its intention is to open up a potential space for emancipatory action.

Along these same lines, Colin Ward (1973/2001) argued that it should be obvious that a whole series

of partial and incomplete victories, of concessions won from the holders of power will not lead to a

free society, but it will widen the scope of free action and the potentiality for freedom in the society

we have. These sentiments hint at how achieving social justice is not actualized as a cut and dry

process of direct action, but rather through opening up a political and geographical imagination, out of

which the freedom of individuals might become more possible (Springer 2012). Action is not separate

from theory, where one is material and the other disengaged; rather there is an inescapable mathematics

that forms from the ongoing chain of being. Our collective endeavors are part of an earth that

constantly moves, where in our earth writing we get to decide what counts. This is of course a calculus,

but it is also undeniablygeopoetryin motion.

Conclusion

Wanting to lay down the law for each and every science is the project of positivism. Its up to you, who

are directly involved in what goes on in geography, faced with all the conflicts of power which traverse it,


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")

to confront them and construct the instruments which will enable you to fight on that terrain.

- Michel Foucault (1980: 64-65)

Visionaries are derided or despised, and practical men rule our lives. We no longer seek radical solutions

to the evils of society, but reforms.

- Marie Louise Berneri (1950/1982: 1)

A great deal of contemporary earth writing is still stymied by a quagmire of authority that claims a

truth about what constitutes social science (i.e., naive realism) and presents arguments about how that

geography is to be constructed (i.e., based on empiricism), where alternative constructions, most

notably poststructuralist, feminist, indigenous, and anarchist interpretations, are implied as invalid and

are accordingly marginalized or excluded. Clamoring for pragmatism, the goal of earth writing is

conceived as a mapping out of concretized, material answers to social problems. It is meant to be

prescriptive, or at least so we are told. Yet all of this is premised on the presumed expertise of the

social scientist as a producer of knowledge, the assumption that social science proceeds through the

straightforward collection of empirical data and the fallacious implication that every analysis will result

in the same or nearly the same conclusion, regardless of the positionality of the researcher. Arising

from this supposedly unvarying and systematic process, a definitive solution will be revealed. All of

this amounts to a detached gods eye positioning (Haraway 1988), as though the world can ever be

understood fully enough by a single individual to allow for definitive answers. Positivism lingers,

gnawing away at the gains made by feminist geographers in particular, who have repeatedly

demonstrated the importance of making space for other ways of thinking and being in the world as a

measure of decolonizing methods, ontologies, and epistemologies (Bondi 2002; Shaw et al. 2006; Smith

1999). Critique without solutions is derided again and again, where leaving pathways open for collective

exploration and reinterpretation by relevant communities and participants to the research is rarely

celebrated, and the authorial voice of the geographer becomes entrenched. For some, there is a hidden

anxiety that comes with claiming expert knowledge, whereby yet another solution is proposed: we are

told to simply dumb down our language, to make it more accessible and straight to the point.


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"*

Although such an argument may appear as an exercise that counters esotericism, it should be

recognized that it could only be taken seriously when articulated from above by an expert. Writing

and language are cultural artifacts that depend upon the value judgement of the reader or listener, and

what is rendered as academic jargon as opposed to colloquialisms is not simply a matter of fact, but

an aesthetic construction that is inseparably linked to class (Bourdieu 1979).What this suggestion to

dumb down problematically does then is entrench particular ways of knowing as elitist, as though they

can only be understood by the few rather than the many. The outcome is an anti-intellectualism that

produces the academic as an Other who lacks empathy for common folk and everyday concerns,

which is not only divisive, but also frequently gives license to the silencing of political dissent.

Language, and by extension writing, can be a powerful tool when aimed at dismantling

hegemonic ways of seeing and disrupting existing power constellations. The articulation of theory

accordingly allows anti-colonial discourse to permeate a broad spectrum of material interventions

(Jiwani 2011), while direct action similarly invigorates our systems of thought and the expression of

philosophy. As a consequence of acknowledging this reciprocating relationship of praxis, I am

anathema to the idea that an original contribution to geographical scholarship must only arise from

empirical research. As earth writers we need to be very cautious not to treat theoretical inquiry in a

pejorative sense, particularly considering the history of geography as a discipline and its intersections

with colonialism. Inordinate focus on empiricism risks bringing geography right back to its colonial

heritage of being a sternly practical pursuit, as the first president of the Royal Geographical Society,

David Livingstone (1992: 216), once vehemently claimed it should be, by which he meant practical in

the service of colonialism. As Derek Gregory (1993: 275) has argued, geographers have to work with

social theory we have little choice. Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the facts do

not (and never will) speak for themselves, no matter how closely we listen. Yet I also want to be

careful here not to suggest that empirics is tantamount to empire, as I do concede that a certain

baseline of empirical information has to be met in order to contextualize certain arguments, but

empiricism alone is never enough. We need theory. In order for our activist tactics to have any chance

of success, we need to breathe life into them by embracing an ongoing, iterative process of theory and


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#+

action. It is, quite ironically, impractical to think solely in terms of practicality, which actually closes

space for radical transformation by being too prescriptive and refusing the openness of a more poetic

approach that attempts to express reality in different ways [through] combinations of different art

forms (White 1998: np).

The future trajectory of any given society, community, or group is not for the academic to decide,

but rather for the relevant constituency to decide through their ongoing collective action, a process that

is never devoid of theory. Yet theory is not a carte blanche to imposition. I absolutely will not play the

part of one who prescribes solutions, Foucault (157, 159) declared,

the role of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws or proposing solutions or prophesying,

since by doing that one can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to

my mind must be criticized. ... I carefully guard against making the law. Rather, I concern myself with

determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the frameworks of such complexity as to

shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speakforothers and aboveothers.

Thus, for geographers to adopt the flawed logic of expert and position their earth writing in ways that

make it appear incontrovertible is to assume a position no different than the arrogance of politicians,

municipal planners, international financial institutions, and the entire project of colonialism, which all

presume to know whats best for people, instead of the people speaking, thinking, and acting for

themselves. In the end, we each have a deeply political choice to make. We can advocate for a reformist

geography that makes incremental changes by repeatedly shuffling the deck and rearranging the

furniture, yet ultimately reinforces existing power relations through a blinkered focus on pragmatism.

Or, in contrast, we can demand the impossible by fearlessly embracing a more visionary perspective

that encourages the collective exploration of the earth as the center of experience, liberated from

established ontologies, familiar epistemologies, and predetermined methods. The former continues to

discipline geography through a logic of separation that erects evermore boundaries around earth

writing, casting dark shadows of enclosure on a planet that is already being strangled by fences and

walls. The latter is an embrace of geopoetics, where integrality becomes our guide towards a more

inclusive and beautiful geography filled with energy and light (Reclus 1876-94). Let earth writing be a


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#"

metaphor for possibility and an aesthetic of immanence. What goes on in geography is, after all, up to

us.

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