Locating contradictions in canonical geographies

Keighren et al. (2012) provide a thoughtful and thought provoking intervention under the rubric of canonical geographies. They bring together questions of disciplinary history, historiography, ‘founding figures’, and the problematic of hagiography, intellectual genealogy, presentism, and geographical practice through a focus upon canonical texts and the question of how we imagine and practice our discipline in the past, the present, and most importantly towards the future. While the practice of geography can (and should) take many forms in different venues (whether ‘professional’ and academic or otherwise), it still is a fact that texts are the currency of academic value and exchange. It ultimately is the written word that stands for intellectual and academic achievement as measured in the real-politics of the academy. Even those of our colleagues concerned to highlight the non-representational qualities of everyday life find themselves re-presenting such endeavors in the pages of journals such as Dialogues in Human Geography.

I would like to first (heuristically) challenge the distinction made in this paper between those texts that are deemed ‘classics’ and those that are perhaps ‘canonical’. We are told that classic texts are immortal, remaining intellectually or pedagogically important, and transcending their origins to look forward regardless of shifting fashions. Canonical texts, on the other hand, are dead to us now in their contemporary failure of dialogic function even though they are deemed (somehow) to have been central to shaping the discipline. This distinction raises four interrelated points. First, it begs the question of importance, specifically how intellectual and pedagogical importance are measured. Second, it suggests that texts speak for themselves, when in fact, it is our own actions (reading, citing, ignoring) that calls them into (continual) existence. Or not. Third, the idea that a text might transcend fashion is vaguely tautological as it might very well be intellectual fashion or disciplinary trends that keep it alive in the first place; and at the very least fails to ask how it is that ‘fashion’ is determined and how we might actually know if we are transcending it (even as I am not prepared personally to give up on the possibility of transcendent social values, like social justice, for instance). Fourth, it demands attention to disciplinary collective memory and how it is maintained, and here we tellingly are told that most texts deemed classic are from recent memory of only a few academic generations (and post-World War II (WWII) at most), while canonical ones are from the deep past (i.e. pre-WWII). Perhaps it is only a matter of time before all those classic texts become canonical. These points of distinction originate, perhaps, from the danger of fetishizing the text (of which the authors are fully aware, this is not an accusation). Yet, even in the midst of this angst over classic versus canon, we learn that ‘messiness’ still matters and that the geographies are not ‘immaculate conceptions’ and that they are produced through debate and contestation. Here is where our disciplinary attention to geographical imaginations may save us from the fixity of a universal canon that does seem to confound us.

Disciplinary foundations do not reside in placeless and timeless texts; that is, the (falsely) modernist idea of the canon that got our colleagues in the humanities in such trouble a couple of generations ago (remember culture wars in the US?). We are well beyond searching for the univocal origin myth that traditional canons suggested; our critical attention to power and the crisis of representation have ensured that. Our belief in the localized multiple and malleable constitutions of general ideas and principles (like ‘geography’) open us to particularity and challenge that is no longer reduced to the ‘idiographic’. We realize the importance of polyvocality, of multiple streams of geographic thought, sometimes braided, sometimes flowing as yazoo tributaries, sometimes, perhaps, from completely separate watersheds.

The texts are still important, of course, but only as they stand as moments in those streams of disciplinary historiographies and genealogies. To invoke the texts is not to be governed by them but to realize that no ideas (save perhaps those of the very few geniuses among us) emerge unprompted. They are born of the debates and disagreements that are central to disciplinary continuity and change. The texts that resonated or continue to resonate with us, whether canon or classic, did so because they found new ways to answer old questions, they found new questions, they showed us a familiar world in an unfamiliar light, they suggested a better way to think and do geography. This is not to claim some inexorable faith in progress, but is to realize that the texts can serve as reminders of often forgotten conversations and the fact that they always incorporated (and often attempted to subsume) disagreement and dissent. Our canonical/classical texts were (and are) interventions. This insistence upon genealogy or historiography is not merely a rhetorical displacement, a backing away from specific texts to simply broaden our perspective to streams of thought. The streams of thought are important for their eddies and currents and whirlpools and the rocks that someone threw into them. Texts lead to disciplinary historiographies and genealogies, and those in turn must focus upon the disagreements within our conversations and the incommensurabilities between them. If we have a canon, it must include a contextual understanding of the debates and power relationships that often are elided in individual texts, of the winners and losers and challengers, of the conversations that took place, and of the relationships between those things and the practice of geography. All of these ultimately reside in canonical and classical texts for our recovery, even as we may still find functional utility in those texts as texts.

This insistence on recovering disagreement and conflict is part of challenging a tendency to teleological disciplinary and sub-disciplinary histories, and I raise them as prelude to my second consideration of a geographical canon, which is a plea to focus on graduate education. This follows from the questions of collective memory and the manner in which we socially reproduce ourselves as geographers. These observations are (apologetically) US-centric, and come from two decades of serving graduate education: advising more than two dozen graduate students, serving on over 80 graduate committees, acting as director of graduate studies, and sitting on the graduate committee in my department, and all the while agonizing over the core seminars and courses and qualifying exam requirements we impose upon our students. In the US, in general, graduate students must undergo a sequence of core courses, generally in epistemology, broadly defined (concepts, disciplinary history, and methods), they have a committee of faculty members who themselves have undergone the same process, and they take ‘substantive seminars’ in areas of faculty expertise. Creating the reading lists for those courses and exams always entails the temptation to begin by making the students read everything that we did, sometimes, perhaps, as a matter of principle and a means to creating intellectual community, sometimes simply as the hubris of ego, and always with the concern to learn from the past so that we do not end up reinventing the wheel.

In my own program, the content of much of that activity is tailored to the student and her interests; except in the core ‘history and concepts’ classes (and last time I checked, every one of our ‘benchmark’ institutions also mandated courses under this general rubric). These are where the dominant disciplinary narratives are constructed. This is where students are socialized as a cohort. And as the authors noted: ‘communities designate canons, canons reproduce communities’ (Keighren et al., 2012: xxx). These are the seminars that Audrey Kobayashi has remarked upon, the ones that students love to hate, the ones where BL Turner apparently is concerned that geography becomes not a discipline but a way of knowing (but what is epistemology if not discipline?). Perhaps these things happen because we focus overly on texts (or hagiographies or simply on getting through the list; but that is a different topic). These seminars always entail a degree of suspending disbelief for the new students involved, and always key texts are introduced, are justified, and are the focus of classroom discussion. Part of the difficulty for students I suspect – and the need to suspend disbelief – is that many of the texts introduced are lacking in context (no matter how defined) at first. It is the seminar’s job to put those texts in context, to begin with an understanding of the issues, and ultimately (I argue) to realize the critical importance of seeing those ideas fixed in those particular texts as part of the many streams of thought that carry in their currents past arguments and debates and winners and losers and connections to the worlds of the academy and of the social and political and economic every day. Geography is a product of modernity, and modernity carries within its varied practices and ideas its own contradictions. If we have a canon and if we teach canonical and classic texts, we must focus on the contradictions as a matter of course. Our canonical texts have to be viewed as symptomatic of change, and we need to ask what that change entailed.

There is much more to be said of this paper, of course, beyond these two rather general points which really reaffirm with polemic intensity some of the ideas introduced by the authors. Much could be made, for instance, of the exciting claims in the paper’s concluding section ‘On possibilities and futures’, where there are some fantastic ideas, and I look forward to their fruition as the opening round of our next consideration of disciplinary directions and canonical geographies.