Cultural geography III

I Introduction

It is difficult to imagine anything more culturally-loaded, or more distinctly human, than thinking in epochal terms. Drawing rhetorical power from the wells of meaning invested in fixed points of time, breaks from the past, new ages, and even in notions of deep time framed in contrast to human historical temporalities, epochal thinking has been in play lately across the natural and social sciences and humanities, circulating widely around the contested geological categorization of the Anthropocene. The term has offered many a means of evoking the scale of humanity’s material impacts, even as the classification of the ‘recent age of Man’ has been embraced cautiously by some geographers, marked by reconsiderations of the categories of the anthropo, the human, and by extension, the cultural. ¹ As the authors of one recent set of essays entitled ‘After the Anthropocene’ have observed, the political and intellectual traction gained by the naming of the Anthropocene has also meant coming to terms with the term’s ostensibly unitary, gendered, and species-specific prefix (Johnson et al., 2014). For Yusoff (2014a: 454), if ‘anthropogenesis institutes a unitary human into the geologic record presupposing an understanding of humans as a singular population and genus’, then, confronted with both a destabilized subject and a threatened biological environment, ‘the challenge for geographers is to both trace and substantiate these differentiating and differentiated bodies politic through the strata and society, materially and discursively…to unearth the material and mythical bedrock of the Anthropocene as a political geology that constitutes the organization of power and the social conditions for life’. Making the Anthropocene, its conceptualization amidst what has been perceived as a widespread crisis of the human subject and of humanism, thus poses epochal time as a set of problems to be understood, among them how to productively consider the temporalities of human (and inhuman) existence through material objects which are endowed with capacities to move through the ages, matters of time as well as space. Cultural geographers, many trained in the close reading and analysis of discourses, and engaged across human geography’s sub-disciplines in mapping the relations between discursive and material transformations, have something important to offer these debates, including useful vantage points on epochal thinking itself along with (somewhat) more proximate temporalities, as recent contributions suggest.

II Making the ‘cene

Alongside (and in light of) Yusoff’s project of political geology (see also Yusoff, 2013, 2014b), ² it is worth (re)considering the relevance of questions of culture – another conceptual meeting ground between humans and the natural world, albeit one that emerged instead to distinguish humanity from nature – to the organization of life across the earth’s surface. Rooted, paradoxically, in the tending of natural growth, culture still refers in compelling ways to human projects of self-making, and to social processes of world-making that engender specific ‘ways of life’, with the concept finding a niche in its usage both as a general problematic of mediation, on one hand, and as a descriptor – and putative explanation – of differences among peoples, on the other (Williams, 1983; Grossberg, 2013). Where humanity evokes the universal, culture still tends to evoke the particular. But unlike the triumphalist intellectual contexts of 19th-century European modernity, in which models of culture as a means of differentiation took shape, the Anthropocene requires a bleaker subject position for grasping a world wherein, as Wakefield observes (2014: 451), humanity is elevated to the role of ‘geologic agent’ at the precise moment it is declared to be ‘in ruins both as orderer and ordered’, simultaneously ‘inundated by disasters it is helpless to control and exhausted by the imperative to hold its self together’. What sorts of cultural work have made this condition possible, and continue to hold the Anthropocene in place?

Among the ‘After the Anthropocene’ essays, several authors grapple with the peculiar temporalities of the Anthropocene as an age of crisis, centuries in the making, in which the long-term consequences of industrial capitalism have ‘committed us to unavoidable environmental changes’ (Lehman and Nelson, 2014: 444). Equating climate change and ecological carnage with industrialization, the Anthropocene has ‘been a disaster since its inception’; the name refers to the age ‘to call it a failure’ (Wakefield, 2014: 450). For some, even under the specter of sketchy geoengineering schemes, the conjuncture compels us to embark on a new, less cynical outlook toward experimentation (see also Lorimer and Driessen, 2014), highlighting the technological as a necessary terrain of struggle and arguing for widening the scope of the political via improved understandings of dynamic relationships between human and geophysical forces. ³ And yet, the Anthropocene also remains something that exists in the eyes of its beholders. As Rowan (2014: 447) concedes, the ‘recent popularity of the Anthropocene within the social sciences, humanities, and arts relies in part on the fact that it answers a certain subterranean yearning for a framework to address macro-scale concerns’.

For Anderson (2014), the Anthropocene problem of ‘decentring the human’ is one that can be approached historically, through materialist engagement with the history of ideas of human exceptionalism. While broadly in sympathy with critiques of humanism equating human agency to a directive, rational consciousness, Anderson questions the tacit acceptance among contemporary post-humanists and ‘new materialists’, including Bennett and Latour, of treating humanism itself as immaterial, as something existing only in Christian or Cartesian doctrine. The implications, Anderson argues (p. 6), have been far-reaching for the rethinking of the human in human and cultural geography, as evident, paradoxically,

in the tendency to turn away from those aspects of culture conventionally regarded as distinctly human, of, for example, intersubjective meaning, symbolizing, cognition and knowing. These tend now to be annexed from a geographic concern with humanity’s material existence, as if they somehow fall outside the domain of culture reconceived as a single plane of human/nonhuman entanglement. For how else, if not according to an ontological critique of meta-physical conceptions of the human, to apprehend the logic of the recent turn in Cultural Geography in which a supposedly unique ‘order of reason, mind, or consciousness’ … has been opposed – more or less term for term – by an affirmation of the ‘sensory, bodily and affective’ character of human existence?

Anderson traces instead the development of an anatomical humanism which understood humanity’s unique capacity for intelligence as less a philosophical than a technical matter, situated in the modern colonial practices of craniometry, and circulating widely in 19th-century theories of race. Anderson traces the work of early 19th-century comparative anatomists who set out to physically distinguish human beings from other animals by virtue of the ‘uniquely upright nature of the human body and, with it, the verticality of the human head’ (p. 6). Intelligence, the quality that distinguished humans from other animals, could also be used, it was believed, to distinguish Europeans from other ‘races’, as reflected in anatomical concepts of intelligence. What is fascinating in these supposed correlations between people’s measurable physical features and intelligence is the manner in which European superiority was taken as self-evident by anatomical theorists. In the work of Cuvier, for example,

the existence of a correlation between variations in the anatomical, and above all the cranial, structure of different groups of people and their ‘known’ level of intellectual inferiority, offered the possibility of a new biological basis for determining a hierarchy among living beings. The point of racial craniometry, then, was to establish this correlation. (Anderson, 2014: 9)

The efforts to develop a distinctly anatomical humanism, realized in the displacement of immaterialist conceptions of mind by anatomical and racial notions of intelligence, for Anderson (p. 14), in turn help us to gauge the ‘figure of the thinking human subject not as an otherworldly fantasy, but as a worldly always-fragile production’, shedding light on humanism’s materiality through a critical historical analysis of the doctrines of race and human exceptionalism.

By contrast, Robbins and Moore (2013) take a more diagnostic – almost clinical – approach to the Anthropocene condition, drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan to investigate a culture of anxious environmentalism at work in contemporary environmental sciences, particularly on the anthropocentric registers of invasion biology and restoration ecology. For Robbins and Moore (p. 5), ‘The debates in the pages of Nature and Science are the ones that express the emerging cultural component of the Anthropocene’, reflecting deeper, unresolved anxieties which may be expressed as phobia and dysfunction. They identify a condition of Ecological Anxiety Disorder (EAD), pervasive among contemporary biologists and ecologists, consisting of, on the one hand, anthrophobia, which is the fear of negative normative influence of humans on the earth, and which evokes a conjoined sense of urgency and tragedy; and autopobia, on the other, which is the fear of the unavoidable influence of normative human values within science. For the authors, these phobias are reflected in an Anthropocene literature ‘in the most formal sense’ that includes iconic maps of human presence and impacts. ‘Future archaeologists may wonder’, they suggest (p. 7), ‘why cartographers of our period chose not to portray images of the extent of the earth’s surface that have been impacted by other species or beings, making maps to determine how much of the earth had been impacted by microbes, for example’, or in pondering the earth’s recovery if fungus, rather than people, ceased to exist. Thus, while anthrophobia produces a political imperative – the urgent need to warn, and to intervene in aspects of environmental change – autophobia produces anxiety over whether one’s claims are overly normative and prescriptive, and indeed, such claims are always value-laden. Together the resulting dysfunction (EAD) brings paralysis and despair, rather than the curiosity and creativity that may be generated by scientists working under more normal conditions of anxiety.

While the tone of Robbins and Moore’s effort to put ecologists on the couch is humorous, their diagnosis is a serious one, I think, as is their remedy: to enunciate our desires ‘to alter the world even as we measure it, and to create new ecologies even as we fear them’ (p. 12), embracing models of gardens, monsters, and sites of struggle in particular as productive conceptual objects around which the fearful dysfunctions of Anthropocene science need not displace its productive tensions. Interestingly, here culture is treated as a disorder – the dysfunctional part of science – which can be treated through psychoanalytics, allowing the scientists to function in a personally and socially engaged manner. Though this does run against the grain of recent generations of science studies scholars who have been at pains to agree on the entangled ontology of science and culture, if it is the purpose of analysis to separate things into their component parts or constitutive elements in order to make them understandable, then this model of culture-as-pathology may offer a useful, and in this case, successful analytic. Like Anderson’s decentering of human subjectivity through materialist analysis, Robbins and Moore’s diagnostics offer a glimpse of the thinking subject as a worldly, fragile production. For both, it is a subjectivity in need of an epochal re-boot, one geared for living in a world of human artifice that is, in many basic ways, beyond human control. For others, as we will see in the next section, the remaking of human and cultural subjectivities is still being examined in historical rather than geological timeframes, but here, too, novel dynamics of ‘things’ through the ages have enlivened research in cultural geography, even around its most traditional object and analytic – the landscape.

III Re-‘thinging’ the landscape?

If it is true that an object may now be defined ‘as an autonomous unit of reality that exists independently of its relations’ (Shaw and Meehan, 2013: 218), or that things themselves may be considered active producers of spatio-temporal atmospheres (Ashe, 2013), then the persistence of interest in landscape as an ensemble of objects, and not (only) as a picturesque visual scene or scenic representation, stands as an interesting point of contrast to those works, influenced by the ANT-inspired metaphysics of Graham Harman, that are seeking explicitly to shift from a process- to an object-focused ontology (see also Meehan et al., 2013). While some object-oriented approaches have thus attempted to cleave ‘materialist’ from relational perspectives in this sense, renewed attention to landscape, along with attention to temporalities of attention (Hannah, 2013; Wilson, 2014) and expectation (Porter and Randalls, 2014), have provided key settings for engagements with the materiality of the ‘things’ that, in different ways, help to relationally constitute space and human subjectivities. But landscape remains a complex term, at once a setting and a staging ground for the momentary and the transient (Mels and Germundsson, 2013), and an illusion of unbroken horizontal space (Olwig, 2013), a kind of totality. Landscape provides both a material connection through the ages of past, present, and future, and a means of erasing those connections (Mitchell, 2012). It is also a kind of painting or photograph. ‘Landscape is boring’, gibed the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell (2002: 5), ‘we must not say so’. And yet, slippery as it is, landscape continues to enthrall, in part because of the work that it does ‘holding things together’.

Offering, in different ways, relational conceptions of landscape as a spatial form that assembles things – and different historical evidence of ‘things’ as intimately bound up with landscape and place – Olwig (2013) and della Dora (2013) both engage with non-modern pasts in the effort to recover usable parts from neglected landscape practices and traditions. Olwig (2013), using the history of language to interpellate the largely forgotten relationship between notions of thing and landscape, describes a ‘revolutionary inversion’ of meaning by which both terms went from indicating a particular kind of political community to signifying instead what we might now call the (material) thing ‘itself’. Following theorists from Heidegger to Latour who have been drawn to the etymological origins of thing as an ancient northern European political assembly, Olwig thus explores how things went ‘from being substantive judicially founded meetings in which knowing people assembled (as in parliaments) to discuss, and thereby constitute matters of common concern, or common things that matter, to becoming physical objects, or things as matter’ (p. 251, emphasis original). But landscape has been largely absent from this story, and Olwig offers fresh insights by illustrating how each term was reified, in some respects, in relation to the other. The political thing assemblies served to settle disputes, working to give meaning and identity to matters of shared concern through discourse and deliberation, and assigning value to things through such public ‘mootings’ (see also Latour, 2005). But Olwig insists that the purpose of the historic things was not, contra Latour, chiefly to generate a public around issues, but rather ‘to give substantive meaning to thing which were not yet clearly defined and objectified’ – a sense of thing meaning something undefined, or difficult to define, that, we are reminded, ‘is still common (What is this thing called love? How are things? …)’ (p. 254). These deliberations occurred in legal and political contexts rooted in customary law dealing mainly with the character and conditions of the land – and the organization of things in a land – that fell under the umbrella of the Old Norse concept of landscape (landskapr), which would also come to include formal political landscape districts (see also Olwig, 1996).

The politics of landscape, Olwig argues (after Holbraad), was hence not about representing things but about defining them. This distinction provides the basis for a juridical model of a landscape ‘defined from within by things according to cases involving people’s practices both between themselves and with regard to their physical surroundings’ (p. 255). So while the thing generated a political community around issues, Olwig argues, it also produced a characteristic physical environment or landscape, as the thing, which generated knowledge of issues such as grazing rights to common and individual resources, and also ‘gave the matters discussed substantive “independent” legal existence as things in law’, constituting things that matter as objective and real, and paving the way for the contemporary connotation of things as matter. As this occurred, representations of landscape in poetry, art, and other forms, typically used to represent an ostensibly natural state, were produced as emblems of something more abstract, ‘which is the character of a place and the polity shaping it’ (p. 256). And together with landscape, the meaning of things has been inverted and objectified: ‘spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, sealed and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity’ (p. 257). Might it still be possible, Olwig asks (turning to the contemporary context of the European Landscape Convention), for our landscapes to be defined from the inside by wise assemblies of people who ‘know their things’?

Like Olwig, della Dora (2013) problematizes landscape histories that take the European Renaissance – and linear perspective – as starting points for landscape studies, or even as strict points of departure from other landscape traditions. She turns instead to antiquity for consideration of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine tradition of topia (‘small places’), a related visual form encompassing landscape painting, vegetal structures and ‘memory gardens’, and decorative floor tiles. While non-linear landscape perspectives have for long been treated dismissively, for example, by von Humboldt, for their lack of compositional unity, della Dora (2013) attempts to recover from these practices, which were linked to classical mnemonic traditions, an aesthetic not structured by linear perspective, which made distant objects appear proportionally smaller, but rather by things and their ‘striking qualities’, thus favoring singular elements of landscape over their holistic integration. By drawing eyes to ‘things’ rather than into the totality of a natural or artificial world, topia focused on the singular characteristics that made places or landscapes memorable. Villas and gardens adorned with landscape paintings (topia) and vegetal topia, a term which extended to include the ropes used to shape the living objects of the garden, functioned as training spaces for memory and aesthetic contemplation. Memory was understood as an embodied practice that could be activated via sequential movement in gardens which promoted attention to constitutive elements as symbolic devices, and which, for della Dora, also serve to challenge false dichotomies between being in the world and representing it. The Roman topia would survive in the East into the Middle Ages via the Byzantine empire, at least after it was safe again (in the 6th century CE) to celebrate nature without fear of association with paganism, taking form as ‘topic’ floor mosaics, as the object form of the topia shifted from Hellenistic wall paintings to Roman gardens to the floors of Byzantine basilicas. Drawing from these pre-modern traditions, in which landscape works as ‘a persuasive rhetorical system and a container of symbolic memory places’, della Dora (2013: 705) reminds us that memory – among other forms of human experience – does not obey the rules of Euclidian space or linear perspective, offering an alternative of ‘embodied visual participation over Cartesian distancing’.

While singular elements were typically exalted in topia over the compositional totality of landscape, the goals of Mitchell’s (2013) recent work on landscape, returning to the terrain of mid-20th century industrial agriculture in California, are different, as he seeks to understand instead how landscape, as a particular arrangement of things on the land – the ‘relatively permanent endowment of infrastructures’ (p. 219) –has functioned, and been struggled over, in its necessary and complex relations with the larger totality of capitalism. For while landscapes may serve as repositories of cultural values, conventionally mobilized as an image of stability and permanence, tendencies toward declining rates of profit from fixed investments also drive capitalists to continually revolutionize landscapes, so that they might be reassembled in more profitable arrangements. Despite these tensions, as Mitchell argues, landscapes (and attachments to landscape) often remain deeply conservative, not least because ‘those who profit from the landscape will do all they can to preserve their values and prerogatives’ (p. 231). Hence if, after Lefebvre, capitalism persists only by producing the space of its own survival, then for Mitchell, the organization of things in the landscape – which may present practical barriers to change – also reflects the persistence of tensions between revolution and anti-revolution, as marked by the social contest between capitalists as well as between classes, that tend to undermine these set-ups over time. Or as Mitchell describes for the Second World War and post-war Bracero guest worker program that kept California agriculture profitable, sometimes the preservation of landscape was only possible by means of a revolution in labor relations.

IV Conclusion

In my first two reports, I emphasized in different ways the transformative, meaning-making capacities of cultural work, turning to processes of valuation and waste (Kirsch, 2013) and to the linked construction of nature, culture, and technology (Kirsch, 2014), to engage with clusters of geographic research exploring the materiality of cultural processes and their geographies, whether or not this work has, in the first instance, been called cultural geography. In the context of a highly porous sub-discipline within a wider field of human geography that is possibly still not as porous as we would like to think, my purpose has not been to draw boundaries but to emphasize the need to persistently rethink the cultural in cultural geography, and in doing so, to identify what I see as important confluences of conceptual and empirical proficiency taking shape around problems of culture and materialism. Here, I have continued to emphasize those processes conventionally regarded as distinctly human (universal) and cultural (differentiated), such as intersubjective meaning, iconography, cognition and knowing (Anderson, 2014), even as the ‘distinctly human’ can no longer be taken for granted, or for some, taking stock of the human condition in the ‘recent age of man’, even to make sense. Whether such long-term perspectives ultimately succeed in creating new post-humanist subjectivities remains to be seen, but in the meantime, the epochal and the historical still usefully remind us that objects – materials – invariably extend in time as well as space, at least until they fall apart and (as we all inevitably will do!) become other things. By calling attention to the material significance of cultural work in the world, along with the intermingled quality of materiality with immaterial ‘things’ and processes, I have tried to highlight the persistent need for cultural analysis of complex and contested social worlds, and the relevance and value of cultural geographic research in addressing some of these problems.