Not a geography of what doesn’t exist,but a counter-geography of what does

I Introduction

The best way to get beyond the sterile opposition between a simplistic critique of representations and the banal determinism of geographical space as objective reality is to play along with normal geography, while keeping in mind that it is only a game, that is to say that the space spoken about is a metaphor. (Dematteis, 1985: 139) ¹

In 1980, an interview with Michel Foucault and position papers in response by Yves Lacoste and Giuseppe Dematteis appeared side by side in the pages of Hérodote, at a time of real ferment within the discipline. Yet, surprisingly, little came of this encounter within Francophone and Italian geographies (Crampton and Elden, 2006; Fall, 2006). The potential embedded in that intersection of people and ideas remained largely unexpressed, as in many other episodes that punctate the difficult travels of critical (and a-critical) thought among scholars and between national contexts. This paper is an invitation to consider the importance of some of these rendez-vous manqués; times when nothing came of what might have been a fertile dialogue. We argue that by reflecting on some key past moments, and not only on what had happened but also on what could have happened but did not, we may gain a better understanding of our practices as geographers, and of the projects we craft for geography. In this, we cautiously try to suggest a counterfactual history, using this to explore ‘the provisionality and transitoriness that has the potential to provoke discussion of specific cause and effect relations and contingencies’ (Gilbert and Lambert, 2010: 246). This is recognized to be a risky enterprise (Bunzl, 2004; Warf, 2002), yet since the shaping of a discipline results from a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, grand lessons gone lost, we suggest this might be productive. It is also unusual in historical geography, since ‘counterfactuals have hardly made an appearance in the history of historical geography’ (Gilbert and Lambert, 2010: 247), and rarely in terms of looking at the discipline of geography itself (yet see Raffestin, 1987). We use these alternatively rewritten geographies to help show how linear narratives of the discipline tell us an incomplete story. Our concern is similar to that of Claude Raffestin, who wrote the following when unearthing Eric Dardel:

my concern is to bring forward on one hand what we have lost and on the other what we did not see. In other words, I will try to lay out our blindness and our prejudice through the work of Dardel. In short, this would be a self-criticism (autocritique) of what we have become without Dardel. As to what we could have become, that can only be individually imagined and I do not think it useful to introduce myself into the unsettled consciences of geographers. (Raffestin, 1987: 474)

In order to do this, we examine Le Metafore della Terra by Giuseppe Dematteis, published in Italian in 1985, a book largely unknown in English-language geography. Giuseppe Dematteis, born in 1935, possibly ‘the most cited Italian geographer, both within and outside the discipline’ (Minca, 2005a: 930), ‘granted Italian geography new freedom from its past and from other disciplinary traditions (such as Anglo-Saxon, French and so on)’ (Guarrasi, 2009: 13) and produced ‘some of the most original contributions that Italy has given to geography more broadly’ (Minca, 2005a: 930). By engaging with one particular author, and one particular book, we reflect on what happened after it was published, specifically what did not happen and, cautiously, what might have happened. By extending the idea of counterfactual histories to look inwards to the discipline of geography itself, we choose to engage with what might have happened if one particular book had become better known, playfully, modestly, and cautious not to overestimate potential developments that are, indeed, counterfactual in nature. While it would be risky to take this proposal as anything more than a rhetorical tool, we find it useful to explore why the radical project for the discipline that it contained was somehow cast aside, including by the author himself. We believe this book deserves a wider audience, not only because of the impact it had in Italy, but because of the potential impact it could have had elsewhere. Reflecting on Le Metafore and on its author is key to our exploration of scholars located in so-called ‘peripheral’ places of production of geographical knowledge (in relation to those routinely perceived as central, or mainstream ² ) and helps to understand the circulation and non-circulation of certain ideas, in order to write a tangled, multiple history of the discipline. We build upon other attempts to write the history of geography not as a fixed and structured narrative, but instead as a fluid, multiple and disarticulated disciplinary scenario by tracing a series of (almost random) paths marked by people, books, events and episodes, emphasizing ‘the importance of institutional histories and of biography and memory in explaining the modern development of the subject, its political and intellectual context, defining practices and changing cognitive content’ (Johnston and Withers, 2008: 3; Withers, 2007). Writing about geography through geographers, rather than through national schools or concepts or narratives of progress, means no longer simply narrating tales of linear change in the subject’s traditions (Johnston and Withers, 2008; see also Taylor, 1976), but instead remaining open to the institutional sites of the making and reception of knowledge, specifically to ‘the fundamental importance of the spaces where reading literally takes place, for knowledge is produced in textual encounter’ (Livingstone, 2005: 392; see also Keighren, 2006). This also draws from the wider recognition of the importance of unearthing past narratives that has found a small niche within scientific journals. ³

II Spaces of debate

In order to produce such a convincing counterfactual geography, a ‘what if’ tale around the reception and response to Dematteis’ book, we build upon the many engagements with the spaces of knowledge production within geography (several of these are short interventions – Besse, 2004; Fall and Rosière, 2008; Kitchin, 2006; Minca, 2000; Samers and Sidaway, 2000; scholarly papers – Aalbers and Rossi, 2006; Chivallon, 2003; Claval and Staszak, 2004; Dupont, 2007; Fall, 2006, 2007; Garcia-Ramon, 2003, 2004; Hancock, 2010; Minca, 2005b; Paasi, 2005; Simonsen, 2004; Timár, 2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2010; Vaiou, 2004; or book chapters designed as general introductions – Fall, 2013; Samers, 2005; Sidaway, 2008; Staszak, 2001). Many of these authors present nuanced, well-argued cases for rejecting simple binaries between Anglo ⁴ /non-Anglo, all the while noting that there are very different ways of doing geography in different places, and that these are connected in non-straightforward ways. Despite these very stimulating debates in the last decade or so, we feel this debate is now going in circles. The recent exchange between Schuermans et al. (2010), Derudder (2011) and Meeus et al. (2011) on the problematic dominance of Web of Science journals is a case in point. Crying wolf (or denying any problems) ends up becoming an easy way of getting heard in the precise journals presented as vigilant gatekeepers. Our worry is that, despite cautious attempts to present nuance, such debates are never very far from recycling national clichés and enshrining national spaces as inevitable, a point first made by Bérubé (1988). We are very conscious that this paper itself is not immune to such a risk: by focusing on an Italian geographer, and positioning him explicitly as such by exploring his complex connections – or lack thereof – to Anglo geography and geographers, we risk renaturalizing such artificial divides. At the same time, we are writing this paper for an English-language journal, with an international audience, to whom it would be highly problematic to suggest that language, place and time of work and writing did not matter. The various contributions mentioned above thus provide a partial grounding for thinking about how academic spaces of debate function, and provide some pointers for our ‘what if’ history.

However, we are also aware that the contributions reviewed above only truly apply to the early 2000s, while the book we are interested in was published some 20 years earlier. This is crucial. It must not be forgotten that assuming that publishing in English is de rigueur for wider recognition was not a given at the time we are discussing – even if the issue of language of publication was a subject of debate – and therefore considering that not publishing in English was a specific choice or a well-designed strategy for an individual would be to apply the values of the present to the past. The current Anglo dominance, and particularly its conflation with ‘international’ geography, is clearly more recent and has become more acute in the past couple of decades, possibly made worse through the rise of electronic search engines and the growing importance given to rankings of journals (Fall, 2013; Kitchin, 2006).

Notwithstanding debated divides between national spaces of discussion within the discipline of geography, we might suggest that there is simultaneously a tendency in contemporary Anglo geography to combine a fascination with (past) European authors working beyond the bounds of geography – sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, among others, often enthusiastically picked up with scant reference to the context and debates they are/were working in – with an ignorance or even possible disdain for the contributions of non-Anglophone geographers. In shedding light on one specific Italian geographer, we aim to reclaim key geographical debates about the role of the discipline as political and intellectual practice. As two hybrid geographers, straddling different linguistic and institutional spaces, we cannot but think of geography as a complex landscape of multilingual debates, some of which are worth unearthing beyond the spaces and times in which they emerged. Instead of recycling binary readings of the landscape of geographical knowledge, we could draw here on recent historiographical studies of the book as a material artifact, in particular pertaining to issues of circulation, authorship, reading and textual reception (Keighren, 2006; Ogborn and Withers, 2010). This also means examining ‘not the passive ‘consumption’ of geographical ideas, but rather their interpretive making and remaking in different social and intellectual spaces’ (Withers, 2007: 69). Scientific knowledge is communicated and received variously, and this exposes cultural and national differences in the reception of science, but also in what local and individual responses to particular works say about the possibility of critical thinking having real impact. As Keighren (2006: 529) has noted, ‘in work of this kind on the reception of knowledge, the national has typically served as “natural unit of assessment” by which the acceptance and repudiation of scientific work is judged’. Here, we try to consider the varied yet concrete institutional contexts and disciplinary paradigms that facilitate or hamper the circulation of progressive ideas.

Written at a time of ferment in academic life in Italy and in Italian geography (Brusa and Corna Pellegrini, 1980), Le Metafore della Terra is vicious in its critique of geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes. It is a manifesto of critical geography ante litteram, with at its core a number of issues and topics that subsequently became mainstream in international English-speaking geography several years later (on this see Minca and Dear, 1997; and Dematteis’ reply, 2003), as discussed later on in the paper. Yet our glee in sharing this book is nuanced by cautious puzzlement: why is it that the subsequent career and bibliography of the author appear to show a more nuanced commitment to this radical project than might be expected? Furthermore, while this book was undoubtedly read, what happened to make the ideas it contained unworthy of, or unsuited to, further more sustained and radical engagements? Rather than a tale of circulation and translation of knowledge, this is a tale of relative non-circulation and lack of translation, a tale of ideas – good, important ideas – that, in our opinion, did not travel well. We are not suggesting replacing disciplinary tales with straightforward biographical ones, and we are conscious that this is a longstanding debate within historiography. This is more than a simple call for biographical approaches to writing the history of geography. We argue instead that the lost paths and unexamined opportunities within one life are just as tangled and contested as within the discipline as a whole, helping us to think through how geography as a situated individual and collective practice is shaped and performed in multiple places.

At a time when universities are undergoing extreme challenges in an uncertain direction (Collini, 2010; Head, 2011), resisting the pervasive erosion and restructuring of spaces for independent thought is essential. Radical upheavals in academic practices are certainly not unprecedented, and neither are proposals to change what is apparently broken, nor to save what is unique. Academics have a long history of stepping back from the system in which they work and off which they live, striving to improve it and maintain it as socially relevant. As the very fabric of such a world appears threatened in myriad neoliberal ways, it is instructive to step back and unearth these past critical projects. The latter can be used in at least two ways: first, for what they contain as critical projects for specific disciplines; and, second, strategically, as a way of seizing back the historical arena of self-criticism (from the fabled and feared ‘administrators’, ‘consultants’ or ‘governments’) and occupying the space of debate. The ideas contained within Le Metafore, in our view, are a useful contribution to the discipline that risks being lost and forgotten, while the fate of the book itself is also a valid example of how good ideas and projects can be muzzled by a set of disciplinary practices, as too by the workings of our own individual institutional arrangements and personal choices.

III Le Metafore della Terra: politicizing geographical knowledge

Giuseppe Dematteis ⁵ taught Economic Geography in the Economics Department at Turin University from 1968 to 1985 and Urban and Regional Geography in the Architecture School at Turin Polytechnic from 1985 to 2007. He was described as ‘a grand master of geography, beacon of the Turin School and national and international personality’ on the poster advertising his retirement lecture, his lectio magistralis, in the flowery language usual for such moments (www2.units.it/labgeo/lezioni10/Lectio%20magistralis.ppt). He was a leading member of the creative group of self-proclaimed heretical geographers who gathered together in the early 1980s around the two main trends of geographical work identified by Dematteis (2010) as ‘geografia critica e “civile”’ – led by scholars such as Lucio Gambi ⁶ (1964, 1973) and Francesco Compagna (1967) – and the radical group named Geografia Democratica, also associated with the journal Herodote-Italia ⁷ (see also Cavallo, 2007; Dell’Agnese, 2008; Dematteis, 1980a, 1980b; Geografia Democratica, 1981; Governa, 2007; Minca, 2012). Key interlocutors included Franco Farinelli, Christian Jacob, Gunnar Olsson, Claude Raffestin and Ola Söderström, and together they were often involved in idiosyncratic explorations in their meetings during the 1990s and the early 2000s (see De Spuches, 2002; Guarrasi, 2009). These individuals were not all radical geographers, but rather were working within what at the time would have been called social or cultural geography. While they could be considered ‘critical’ geographers in today’s terms, we are also conscious that this is a particularly Anglophone term with specific connotations that is not as relevant nowadays for non-Anglophone contexts. In this paper, however, we cautiously classify Dematteis as a critical geographer largely to make his stance intelligible to the readers who, we assume, are more likely to be familiar with such a label (see Berg, 2004), but also, crucially, because he used the term to describe his own position (geografia critica) (Dematteis, 1985: 165, endnote VII). This approach was attacking the foundations of the traditional descriptive geographies that were still considered mainstream in Italy and were strongly driven by an historical and in many ways genealogical approach to things geographical, but also by a clear commitment to rethink geographically some major social and political problems that were afflicting Italy, and in particular southern Italy, in those turbulent years (Dematteis, 1980a).

In a way that academics rarely are in the United Kingdom or North America – and notwithstanding the recent ‘public turn’ within geography – Dematteis, now retired, was also a public intellectual and practitioner in regional planning, such as in the Piano Territoriale della Regione Piemonte. His institutional nesting within a technical university – working side by side with architects and planners – and within a somewhat related community of policy-makers helps to uncover at least in part the first apparent mystery: what seems to be a disconnection between Le Metafore and most of his subsequent writing. Dematteis is still present in the minds of contemporary Italian geographers, and remains well known both within and beyond the discipline. However, his writings that continue to have an audience are his less controversial contributions on the concept of sviluppo locale (‘local development’ in a very specific understanding of the term associated with the Italian context) and on politiche territoriali (‘territorial planning and policy’) (see, for example, Dematteis and Governa, 2005; see also Governa, 1997, 1999). Dematteis’ subsequent rich body of publications ranges widely: from the theory and methods of geographic and territorial sciences, to urban and regional geography, via the links between planning and territorial policies in Italy and Europe (see, for example, his 1995 book Progetto Implicito, where this transition appears very clearly, or his more recent work on local territorial systems applied to the Italian context – Dematteis, 2001). Before returning further to the context within which this book was written and read, however, we explore its project more in detail.

It has been said on several occasions that Le Metafore had the potential to change the face of Italian geography, and some have argued that it partly did (Guarrasi, 2009; Minca, 2005a), yet on closer examination such a sweeping comment hides many rendez-vous manqués. For Le Metafore is a dense and complex book: an extraordinary inheritance for geography and geographers. It also contains many books in one: it works on different levels, directed at diverse audiences (popular in parts, but highbrow academic in others), driven by an argument at once tense and fluid, dense and intriguing, deconstructionist and systematic. The book is organized around six chapters that can be broadly translated as: (1) Geography’s ambiguity; (2) Geo-graphies of the past; (3) Land/Earth and Territory (in Italian Terra e Territorio); (4) ‘Normal’ geographical representations; (5) Geography as metaphor; (6) Geography as discovery. The first three chapters have an historical flavour – with no explicit pretentions at genealogical authority – and they are accessible and clearly geared to reach out to a non-geographical readership. The last three chapters are more intensively theoretical and address questions about the metaphorical nature of all geographical knowledge. This second part has been conceived as a sort of scientifically informed answer to all claims for a scientific understanding of geography, claims that Dematteis clearly dismisses with his exegesis on the metaphor in geography or, better, on geography as a metaphor. In the only contemporary review of the book, Franco Farinelli (1987: 211) defines it as ‘one of the most important books in Italian geography in the postwar period’, paralleled only by Lucio Gambi’s (1964, 1973) ground-breaking contributions. This is a book that once read is difficult to ignore, a book that every geographer in Italy has read, or at least claims to have read. Anecdotally, despite its well-known Anglophone bias and lack of many Italian references, Google Scholar reports 171 citations of Le Metafore. Tellingly, most of them are centred on questions of urban planning and governance, although references to broader issues concerning the meaning of geography and geographical thought also feature.

Dematteis writes the first part of Le Metafore like a manifesto. His writing in this part is clear and reads beautifully, drawing from an impressive diversity of sources nested within the wider humanities, the social sciences and the philosophies of science. In listing these, it is worth noting that in Italian geography the mode of engaging with sources quoted – as in French geography (see Fall, 2006) – is less explicit than in contemporary Anglo approaches, with many references left implicit rather than quoted directly. This makes it harder to trace key sources of inspiration. Despite this caveat, Dematteis does explicitly draw from a number of well-known thinkers from Herodotus (1996 [440 bc]) to Moore (2003 [1516]), to Barthes’ (1957) and Vernant’s (1974) mythologies, to Horkheimer’s (1978) and Koselleck’s (1988) critique of bourgeois modernities, touching upon Vico’s (1976 [1725]) speculations on science, to the work of Bateson (1980) and Serres (1980), to name just a few. As far as Dematteis’ take on the power and the functioning of metaphors in science is concerned, he recalls Ricoeur’s (1975) and Eco’s (1980) work, while engaging with the scientific metaphors as presented by Kuhn (1979) and with Prigogine’s and Stengers’ (1984) understanding of the new alliance between the human and nature.

But this is not just a nice book about epistemology: it is vicious in its critique of geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes, and delightfully subversive in its project for the future. This is a very personal project, as the list of sources above demonstrates little overlap with critical Anglophone geographers writing on similar themes at the time. Dematteis aims to demystify both the object and project of the discipline for a wider audience, beyond the narrow bounds of academia. It is this that makes reading it such a pleasure, as you can feel the subversive delight its writing must have given the author. We begin by highlighting a few points that appear particularly interesting in the opening chapters, an originality and stance that tends somewhat to fade away in the second part of the book, to return only in the concluding pages. This is a tension within the book worth thinking about, and that confirms how this is one of those works that can/should be read in many different ways and from many different angles.

Dematteis starts his book with a simple but powerful comment, in the context of Italy in the 1980s: geography’s strength and tragedy lies in its apparent uselessness and banality:

What do we remember of the geography we learned at school? Apparently nothing. Nothing problematic, no interpretation, no opening up of debate (Is Lisbon the capital of Portugal, or isn’t it?). The assigned role of geography in scholarship and in cultural debates makes us doubt that it could ever be the object of reflexive thinking. (Dematteis, 1985: 12)

If not the first book of critical geography, then it is at least a unique one. Dematteis is critical both of the work of geographers, and of the relations between space and power that geographers’ work supports while remaining seemingly oblivious to its deeper implications. He is also scathing of geographers’ attempts to respond to their feeling of disciplinary inferiority through a newly discovered love of calculators (p. 12), i.e. referring to the contemporary enthusiasm in the 1970s with quantitative approaches within geography (Taylor, 1976), offering an apparent, but he suggests illusory, new legitimacy. The apparent uselessness and banality of the discipline is in stark contrast to the popularity of lay geographical knowledge, and the continuing ambition to discover and explore the world that is transposed to travel and tourism, as demonstrated at the time by the huge circulation of magazines such as National Geographic. But this, says Dematteis, is not so much about curiosity, it is rather about possession, not about seeking surprise, but consumption (p. 13). Thus, distinct from what he describes as the putatively innocent ‘school geography’ – forgotten as soon as it is learnt – this popular geography of exploration, according to Dematteis, is nothing but illusion, desire, escapism and infantile regression. This is tragic for him, particularly in the context of the extraordinary resilience of descriptive accounts in Italian academic geography (see Brusa and Corna Pellegrini, 1980). If the world is presented as a wonder of marvels, simply listing them as the descriptive tradition did for too long, this reduces geography to an encyclopaedic registry, locating the discipline in a sort of anti-chamber of science, and precluding its real emancipatory potential (see also Dematteis, 1980a, 1980b, 1981).

Dematteis thus presents the workings of descriptive and popular geography, the geography of the media, of political jargon, as a geography that seems to speak to everybody’s common sense: it is never too problematic, remaining almost an exercise of restating the obvious, as a repetitive exercise of confirmation of the status quo. This also explains, he thinks, the deep and long-lasting crisis of identity for a discipline that, in Italy and beyond, has in many ways constrained itself within the narrow and immobile walls of a ‘politics of normality’ (see also Dematteis, 1981, 1986).

IV Geography as critical practice

Le Metafore touches upon several key topics in the recent history of the discipline, moving with a critical attitude between questions of historiography, the quantitative revolution, regional science, and all forms of isomorphism, travelling through geography with a touch of irony and a clear political agenda. Dematteis picks apart sacred tenets of the geographical tradition: the poorly problematized use of scale, the faith in the power of cartographic reason (see also Farinelli, 1992, 2003, 2009), the metaphysics of organicism, the magical belief in the power of the market, spatial theories driven by an objectivist perspective, and so on. He also suggests abandoning all causal explanations of things geographical, while hinting at hermeneutics and a sophisticated way of engaging with ‘re-description’ as fruitful paths to explore the workings of geographical metaphors – although he stops short of explaining how this should be done (for other key contributions on the role of metaphors in geography, see Livingstone and Harrison, 1981; Raffestin, 1979, 1987; Tuan, 1957, 1978). Dematteis argues, in many parts of the book, that we always deal with partial truths, while he insists on placing particular emphasis on the necessary links between geography, theory and philosophy, at a time when this was not really put into practice by what was considered the academic geographical establishment in Italy.

One would have expected that his harsh critique of what he defines as ‘the encyclopedic project of geography’ might have led him to a call for more science, more rigour, as many authors contemporary with Dematteis were doing at the time. Instead, he offers a much more powerful project: rather than taking at face value the apparent innocence of geography (scienza innocente), he suggests explicitly repolicitizing it, reintroducing ‘the critical’, precisely by putting his finger on the curious bedfellows that geographers and statesmen have become. Geography, like history, is too often written by victors, he claims: ‘the fact that geography appears useless makes people exclude that it can actually cause harm’ (Dematteis, 1985: 14). His argument is subtle: by appearing to collapse object and representation – the world with the description made of it – the material realities described by ‘normal’ geography are naturalized, and rendered inevitable, and therefore fundamentally depoliticized. If the description appears rational, then no other description is possible, no other interpretation is possible – and thus no other world is possible. This death of utopia, and death of alternatives, fundamentally serves the status quo:

if alternatives were presented, if doubts rather than certainties were proposed, its role would change, it would be a source of disorientation (in a literal as well as a figurative sense); it would betray the sacrifices made by so many heroic explorers. (Dematteis, 1985: 16)

Dematteis’ twist is that by limiting geography for too long to the simple discipline of discovery and exploring, its proponents have killed (or rather, neutralized) its revolutionary potential: if there is nowhere to discover, nothing left to describe, it must be a useless field of knowledge. It thus becomes no more than a docile instrument of power (Dematteis, 1985: 17; on this see also Farinelli, 1992, 2003, 2009). He offers a critique of all attempts to present geography as an objective science, lashing out at his contemporaries with carefully argued contempt: ‘one of the logical fallacies of modern geography lies precisely in the grounding of its own objectivity on the pretence of offering an objective and complete description of places’ (Dematteis, 1985: 19), an ambition doomed to failure as all representations imply choices and subjectivity. But his point is subtle: it is precisely because geography appears to list ‘what all can see’ that it has been neutralized in terms of astute readings of things-in-the-world. If all individuals can put their finger on facts of strategic importance, because they are by definition tangible, then it becomes easier to convince people that there is nothing out there to find (and criticize): ‘all you need to do is convince people that there is nothing to find, that everything has already been found and is already listed in book and atlases, in other words that geography is banal and almost useless’ (p. 22). Referring to Yves Lacoste – still at the time considered to be within the critical tradition (Fall, 2005) – he suggests that it is precisely in making geographical knowledge appear obvious that those in positions of power can keep their fingers on strategically useful information. Why bother with it if it is only common sense? For Dematteis, the normalized geografia borghese (bourgeois geography) or géographie des professeurs, to use Lacoste’s term, is nothing but a smokescreen to hide the real strategic potential of geographical knowledge, of any geographical knowledge. Thus, as Dell’Agnese explains, geographical representations that reproduce spaces according to existing power relations are ‘normal geographies’. These work by organizing three types of information: location, syntactic organization and ideology (for instance, defining a city as a ‘centre’ or a boundary as a ‘line’ is an ideological choice). By presenting themselves as normal, they are in fact normative (Dell’Agnese, 2008). This critical engagement with the question of power for/in all spatial metaphors, and in particular in the apparently reassuring ones produced by ‘normalized’ geographical knowledge, is a theme that, albeit presented in a rather different way and via different and somewhat distant academic routes, will become one of the main declared (and undeclared) tasks of the critical perspectives (and all critical theory) that will colonize the geographical production of the following two decades or so, particularly in Anglo geography.

The subversive potential of geography, writes Dematteis, is connected to its unique ability to combine material reality and utopian thought, what he calls its Janus-like quality. While this can end up as a simple collapse of existing things into their representations, it can also be turned to real benefit in imagining alternatives:

the real danger of such a geography rests in its ability to describe existing things (if only in latent form) and at the same time provide a critique of their very existence. This is a huge threat to the certainty of the geographical nature of things. (Dematteis, 1985: 25)

This critical and implicitly deconstructive stance, a powerful and seductive call to arms, dominates the opening chapters of Le Metafore. The second part of the book, however, is rather different and consists of an undeclared attempt to rewrite the history of the discipline or, better, the history of the performative nature of the production of geographical knowledge to be intended as a metaphor:

In the fine arts [metaphors] are used to communicate what cannot be made explicit in logical and rational language. In geography, however, metaphors have the opposite function: that of anticipating hypotheses, concepts and theoretical perspectives related to functions that are not analytically well developed as yet, but that would be better formulated in the future, precisely because the metaphor defines a research project of sorts, the result of which is indeed the translation of this very metaphor into rational language. (Dematteis, 2010: 37)

V Writing Le Metafore somewhere

Following this brief discussion of key points raised in this book, it is useful to mention a few other important academic moments internationally with which it could have been in dialogue at a time when geography was struggling with the crisis of modernity (Guarrasi, 2009). We are convinced that in many ways this is a history of missed conversations that allows for a wider reflection upon the workings of academic communication and the geographies of geographical production, not only in the 1980s but also today, 25 years later.

The mid-1980s were internationally a moment of great renewal in many fields and disciplines. Events, exchanges and intersections transformed mainstream debates in the social sciences in irreversible ways. For example, in 1986, James Clifford and George Marcus edited their enormously influential Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, a book that was decisive in opening up the social sciences to critical anthropology and to entirely different ways of doing ethnography. At about the same time, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham led by Stuart Hall was busy spreading the ‘cultural turn’, while postcolonial studies, and poststructuralism more generally, were radically influencing the work of many students of the humanities and the social sciences in different times and places. Frederic Jameson’s most cited paper on the postmodern appeared in 1984 in the New Left Review, and had a significant impact on the work of urban theorists and human geographers who were concerned with the postmodern and its implications. The list could continue. In the discipline more specifically, British new cultural geographies were preparing the ground for another revolutionary twist, while the so-called Los Angeles school was identifying in the journal Environment and Planning D the forum within which to express a fuller engagement with the postmodern and its relativist take on knowledge and authority, with a particular focus on philosophy and social/spatial theory. Geography in general was increasingly involved in mainstream theoretical debates in the social sciences, and with philosophy, especially with French poststructuralism and what has been labelled French Theory (Cusset, 2003).

Dematteis’ project appears to run parallel to all of those revolutionary changes, with no intersections or mention of them, including in subsequent work, and no merging, as the book remains almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. ⁹ This is a pity, of course, but it is not really our point. For this is a tale of relative solitudes: Dematteis seems to ignore in their entirety all the indications of a move towards critical social theory – and critical geography – that were emerging at about the same time and to which his book could have directly contributed. When explicitly asked to comment on this during a recent conversation between the authors of this paper and Dematteis held in Turin in November 2010, he admitted to not having perceived this as a problem when writing the book, since he was more preoccupied with the possibility of transforming Italian geography than with linking his work to those very debates. This isolation is even more intriguing if we accept that Le Metafore anticipates, in a very idiosyncratic way, many positions, perspectives and attitudes that became hegemonic elsewhere in the following years. This is an important point for our discussion of this book, but also for more general consideration about how ideas and perspectives indeed travel, or do not travel, between contexts and between disciplines. Perhaps a few considerations about the context that prepared and that followed Le Metafore may be of help here.

A few years before the book was published, the Associazione dei Geografi Italiani (AGEI) organized a conference in Varese on the state of geography in Italy – a large event seen as central to cultivating Italian geography’s sense of self. This led to a publication bringing together a selection of some of the 115 interventions, offering a state-of-the-art compendium (Brusa and Corna Pellegrini, 1980). The publication was reviewed in the French Annales de Géographie some time later by Etienne Dalmasso (1983), indicating at least basic links and exchanges between the two national contexts at the time. He notes that from 1960 to 1980 the number of geographers working within academic institutions quadrupled in Italy (to about 500 in 42 universities). Yet this was not a happy period in academia; jobs were precarious and internal debates vicious, in Italy as well as France. Individuals were forced to situate themselves clearly between classical approaches and the emerging ‘New Geography’ (read: quantitative geography) of which Dematteis was one of the earlier advocates (Dematteis, 1970), at that time perceived as a progressive and scientifically robust approach to spatial practice. Key figures have looked back at this time according to their own particular professional choices, and the harshness still rages. In France, Roger Brunet, a key figure in the discipline, felt the need in 2003 to write his own version of the history of geography in an explicit move to correct what he termed the ‘very curious “histories” of geography that seem to ignore completely the ABC of the historian’s craft: chauvinism rather than facts, no attempts to put things in perspective, no questions asked to still-living authors, a complete misunderstanding of the intellectual context and challenges’ (Brunet, 2003: 13), in particular lashing out at Paul Claval’s (2001) version of the history of geography. The opposition between the critical tradition and the positivistic slant of New Geography to which Dematteis refers in his opening chapter was widespread. The ubiquity of this divide in various national traditions is perhaps one clear, if rather depressing, indicator of European geography functioning as a shared scientific community: geographers were struggling, as Taylor (1976: 131) put it, ‘between integration and disintegration – between the forces of cooperation and the forces of conflict’, all across the Continent. Brunet was no less vicious at the time and particularly in his preface to Raffestin’s book Pour une Géographie du Pouvoir (1980). Brunet was writing in 2003 about France but his comments are equally applicable to Italy. He noted, rather uncharitably, that:

we lived through curious times, especially during the 1970s: geographers who no doubt thought themselves more orthodox than others but who were in my mind no more than narrow Catechumens, I have called them Stenomarxists, went to war against what they tried to stigmatize as neopositivism or quantitativism, or even Americanism, which was far from trivial in the context of the Cold War. (Brunet, 2003: 15)

VI Contested and situated histories

Did Dematteis lose his political project and revolutionary gusto, or did he explicitly seek to occupy a strategic terrain and influence it from the inside, bringing critical theory to the field of planning? Academics are often asked to write their own version of the landscape and history of a discipline, as Brunet does above. Dematteis (2010), in a collection of older ‘interventions’ entitled Antipasti e Contorni (literally ‘Starters and Side Dishes’), prepared to contextualize the workshop in Turin in 2010 (see note 5), provides a compelling and useful framework for understanding what preceded this book and the legacy that its author feels it has left. The collection is organized around four ‘antipasti’ (Dematteis, 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1984) and eight ‘contorni’ (Dematteis 1986, 1990, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005). This reconstruction, an autobiographical account of sorts, intends to show how Le Metafore is at one time the result of a longer-term project aimed at revolutionizing Italian geography and a milestone – although Dematteis never clearly claims that – in his own scientific production of the following decades.

Dematteis starts from the above-mentioned ‘Varese meeting’, from which he selected two of his interventions. That was the moment in which what he defines as the ‘heretical streams’ (le correnti eretiche) taking shape in those years in Italy were for the very first time officially recognized by the disciplinary institutions (Dematteis, 2010: 2). While it appears clear that all these ‘movements’ towards the production of a critical geography in Italy (see, for example, Copeta, 1986; Guarrasi, 1981; Pagnini, 1985; Quaini, 1974; Turco, 1984) prepared a fertile ground for a book like Le Metafore, the reconstruction of what came next by Dematteis is less convincing. It is not by chance that the eight ‘contorni’ sometimes simply restate the main tenets of the book, while reflecting a sort of fragmented field where the revolutionary and radically critical vein present in 1985 appears only partially, between the lines.

What did Italian geography learn from Le Metafore? Curiously, it is the final theoretical speculations about ‘policy’ developed in the last chapters, rather than the critical reflections on the practice of geography in Italy that seem to have really stuck. The sort of late structuralist approach that marks the speculations on the concept of metaphor in the last chapter relies heavily on Jean Piaget’s work and on cognitive science in general. This has travelled into mainstream Italian geography, largely dominated by descriptive work and still tragically isolated internationally. Italian geography was not revolutionized as one might have expected after these vibrant years and especially after a book of this kind was published. The critical moment was lost.

In a recent personal discussion, Dematteis partly resisted this reading of the impact of his work, understandably, for it could be perceived as a heavy responsibility to bear on a personal level. While admitting that despite Le Metafore no revolutionary change had happened in Italian geography, he claimed that its impact had been important for a particular group of Italian geographers. That is undoubtedly the case, but we would argue that this impact especially, if not exclusively, concerns the least critical and more ‘structuralist’ part of the book. A confirmation of the demise of critique within contemporary Italian geography can be illustrated by a paper by Giuliana Andreotti Giovannini – a professor of geography at the University of Trento – in the French journal Géographie et Cultures. This paper was commissioned to present and explain contemporary Italian cultural geography to a French audience. In what remains of one of the few such reviews published internationally, Andreotti Giovannini depicts a disciplinary scenario in which Le Metafore seems to have left no mark (for a different picture see Minca, 2009). Noticeably, despite quoting 63 different Italian as well as a scattering of French and Anglo geographers, she singularly omits even to mention Dematteis. She refers to the quantitative turn in geography as ‘a parenthesis’ (Andreotti Giovannini, 2007: 12) before geography returned to its true calling as the key discipline for uncovering ‘the deeper truths …, the eternal pillars that have upheld humanity … made not of marble, nor of granite, but of experience, tradition and therefore culture’ (p. 14), presented as the only possible posture for ‘real geographers’ (p. 15). It combines an apparent phenomenological and humanistic sensitivity with a curious search for incontrovertible truths, ‘focussed on man and his need for spirituality, … on our history and our traditions’ (p. 22). This, she argues, is the only way to grasp at ‘the secret nature, the essence of places, the architecture of landscape and the search for ethical and aesthetic meaning’ (p. 28).

This reading of the cultural within geography, within which cultural landscapes are granted iconic status as key objects of inquiry and rational markers of true local identity, is no doubt the Other geography against which Dematteis intended to work when writing the opening chapters of Le Metafore. His posture was not that of a critical geographer working against quantitative temptations, but rather precisely against this more perverse form of mystical rationality: a geography that adopts the clothes of culture and humanism to argue its own exclusionary, Eurocentric and reactionary positions, all the more dangerous for claiming to be apolitical. It is this that constitutes the real, still-living and seductive version of a geografia borghese about which Dematteis warned so clearly, a powerful remnant of a descriptive geography that naturalizes and renders ‘inevitable’ the status quo of hegemony.

How is it possible that, after and despite Le Metafore, Italian geography can still be mapped out in these terms to an international audience? What of the argument that geography is a unique and intrinsically subversive political practice? Why was there no reaction to this no doubt incomplete and biased but still internationally published account of Italian geography?

VII Lost ambitions and unclear readerships: reading Le Metafore somewhere

To try to answer these questions, we need to dig deeper into how and where the book was read, and what readership Dematteis had in mind. The book sold well in Italy, beyond the academy. So how is it that such an innovative and potentially path-breaking book, and the underlying intellectual project that sustained it, remained largely unknown outside Italy, when it could have indeed represented a fantastic opportunity to open up a new and exciting season of international collaboration and exchange for Italian geography? Was it just a question of language and translation? Would the book, had it been translated into English, have impacted the discipline more widely, as one might expect? Understanding the trajectories through which the disciplinary discussion incorporates or neglects ideas and people, as we know, is a complicated business led by a geography of gatekeeping that does not concede much speculation about lost opportunities for dialogue and contamination. In response, we suggest that a counterfactual approach can help us to identify important turning points.

If it is somewhat pointless to wonder why a book that was never translated had no impact outside Italy, so the largely unanswered question remains of what happened in Italy after this ambitious book was published by Feltrinelli, a major player in the Italian editorial market. Why did the author of such an ambitious project not reach out to international debates? As we mentioned earlier, while revisiting this kind of work and reconsidering its impact, we should not forget that at the time publishing in English was not a priority for a scholar working outside the Anglophone world. In many cases, it was simply not an option, both in terms of career and intellectual ambitions. Why did this book, albeit cited by many, not become the founding text of a deep and genuine revolution in the discipline, as happened with the other similarly revolutionary moves elsewhere (for example, David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, 1972, or Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 1984)? In a public debate discussing Le Metafore 25 years after its publication, Dematteis suggested that the book was intended to reach a non-academic audience and it had been an enjoyable diversion from his main academic preoccupations. In particular, he wished to reach out to new readerships that seemed oblivious to the nature and importance of geography and its use of metaphors.

We believe that this is a book that may still have currency in present debates, such as, for example, on the relationship between the nomos and the physis that has followed the renewed interest in Carl Schmitt’s work (see, for example, Legg, 2011), but also, more generally, on biopolitics and the concept of threshold as a spatial concept (Giaccaria and Minca, 2011). These discussions would find Dematteis’ reflections on the power of ‘the spatial’ metaphor of great use, yet Dematteis’ own recent public dismissal of this book as simply a personal challenge to write, and his sincerely modest lack of strategy in terms of audience, makes us cautious of making this sound like a grand project.

Is this simply, then, just another story of missed opportunities, of a lack of communication between language domains and their respective cognitive communities? Surprisingly, not even French-speaking geographers – who were in those years rather close to their Italian peers, or at least certainly more so than to English-speaking ones – acknowledged the appearance of such an innovative and far-ranging book, notwithstanding a number of engagements with it (Bérubé, 1988; Besse, 1988; Torricelli, 1987). Saying, retrospectively, that this was a prophetic book does not tell us much about what was happening then. Worse, it risks rewriting history in the light of the present in a rather self-serving way. Dematteis told us that he never considered publishing at least part of his work either in English or even in French because this was not his chosen audience. Twenty-five years later, it is clear that this choice was crucial in making the book remain only a national episode. It is difficult to say how this decision influenced the progressive marginalization of Italian geography over the following decades, but it certainly did not help to change its rather inward-looking inclination of the past decades. In any case, this is a story that remains to be written by contemporary Italian geographers to recover the important legacy of this book, but also to reflect on the putative absence of critical geography from its main fora (journals, institutional meetings, etc.) in the past decades. What we will try to do instead, in the few concluding paragraphs that follow, is to suggest a few possible readings of this missed opportunity, not so much to speculate on this specific case, but rather to reflect on the workings and travels of academic ideas and writings more generally. In particular, we would like to focus on the writing and argumentative style that is at the core of Le Metafore.

VIII Beyond counterfactual speculations

In this paper, we have argued that what makes reading this book fascinating, particularly its opening chapters, is its specific voice and tone, with the author somewhat floating between sources and historical hints, deliberately oblivious to the international literature of the day and of the direction that the social sciences (geography included) and the humanities were taking in that turbulent period outside Italy. It may be that this is a common pattern in many relevant Italian interventions in geography and well beyond (see, for instance, Fall, 2007, 2012, and Minca, 2012, for similar arguments concerning the Swiss geographer Claude Raffestin).

Our counterfactual explorations in which we have investigated an episode of geography’s tangled and multiple history have helped us to raise two issues of general relevance. The first concerns some of the most original contributions to what is a vibrant international disciplinary debate drawing from books written outside geography and in other languages. The list of these authors is long, including Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and more recently Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière and, of course, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. A detailed analysis of this trend was beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to our own main argument. We have suggested that Dematteis’ book is possibly so original and path-breaking precisely because it was produced in a context freed from the constraints of the publishing industry machinery. At the same time, the fact that Dematteis never submitted his ideas to an international refereeing process shows the limits and the problematic implications of this kind of product (lesser impact, no dialogue with other similar lines of thoughts, etc.). Our exploration of this book cannot answer the question of how to integrate good ideas and contributions into a broader and truly international debate while at the same limiting the constraints to creativity and originality that normally come as a constitutive part of that very process. But it can help us to think through what is needed to contribute to a rigorous but still international and creative intellectual process of certifying what passes for academic geography internationally, and it restates the continuing challenge thereby posed. Would we be able today to engage and incorporate a new Le Metafore produced in a relative academic periphery as was Italian geography in the 1980s? This is an important question, especially in the light of the increasing pressure to publish in some international fora – and not in others – as a result of the broader neo-liberalization of western universities. Would a new Le Metafore survive, or even have been produced, in the contemporary intellectual climate driven more and more by disturbingly standardized ideas of academic productivity?

We have tried to explore how good ideas and projects can be muzzled by a set of disciplinary practices and by the workings of our own individual institutional arrangements and personal choices. This paper is therefore an invitation to the readership of this journal to reconsider and incorporate into the international debate similar contributions that otherwise will remain unknown to most of us, and possibly forgotten. But it is also an invitation to reflect in more general terms on how our field of knowledge is certified, bounded and mapped out, and how creativity and originality could be better maintained and incorporated into mainstream debates. If anything, the history and the geographies of Le Metafore show how, even today, despite the effort of many in bridging different sites of geographical production, we are still dealing with distinct and often parallel geographical communities. This is a pity, especially if one reads Dematteis’ book after two decades and a half. We have suggested that this is a book that could have significantly influenced the international debate of the last decades, and could have changed the ways in which we do geography, informed by political and social theory and philosophy. We are left with the impression that this is not only a great book, but also an important lesson of critical geography, a lesson given when critical geography internationally was only embryonic. Dematteis indeed suggested that:

a critical (geografia critica) and free-spirited geography tries to multiply metaphors and conceptual categories. It does not try to look at the world from one point of view, instead it turns around it knowing full well that it cannot represent it all, once and for all, and that representation must not exclude discovery. … I think that a geography that could use metaphors as gentle deceptions to bring together human needs and the conditions the earth offers to us, that could bring words closer to things, would craft a dialogue that we could truly call poetic, in the sense of poiesis. (Dematteis, 1985: 165)