Dialogues in Human Geography

Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored the natural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a `humanist remain'. Here, we want to make a stronger claim for the value of the aesthetic as a stepping off point for thinking through post-human geographies. We begin by acknowledging a productive tension within Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of sense-making: that is, a series of questions that speak directly to the post-human have been raised by dwelling upon how the aesthetic can be related to bodily needs and desires, as well as a feeling that emerges from the exercise of judgement. Then, we make the argument that, as a means of developing our aesthetic sensibility, geography can usefully further its engagement with art theory and practice. This leads us to ground our own exploration of the post-human in a discussion of two projects created by artist Perdita Phillips. Moving from a consideration of bowerbirds in the savanna to thrombolites in a saline lake, and from evolutionary biology to a Deleuzo -Guattarian geophilosophy, we ask, where is the artistry?

This commentary argues that one of the strengths of Dixon et al.'s (2012) paper is the way that it pushes a concern with inhuman entities and processes far beyond any entanglement with human lives. This takes us on a turn – strangely rare in human geography – from life or vitality into the realms of minerality. It is suggested that what makes this possible is the authors' refreshing willingness to explore aesthetic and ontological questions without feeling obliged to immediately demonstrate the political valence of these explorations.

There has been a trend towards aestheticising geographical themes, which in crucial ways repeats humanistic geography's valorisation of poetics, sensuousness and spirituality. Although a philosophical relationship with art is certainly indispensable to human geography, especially as it attempts to break away from its past confinement to the human perspective, this should not impede its equally indispensable relationship to politics. Deleuze, for one, would find deficient any conception of art without consideration of its immanent critical potentials.

This commentary engages with the critical figurations of ‘human bird’ and ‘living rock’ in order to explore the imbrication of geography and aesthetics from an Antipodean perspective. The commentary takes up the invitation for creative encounters across disciplines and across differences of diverse kinds.

This short commentary briefly flags and develops three dimensions of an `aesthetics for post-human worlds', which are suggested by Dixon et al.'s (2012) paper. The first relates to questions of non-human difference – encouraging the authors to focus on what might be gained from comparing the different ontologies offered in their two case studies. The second examines questions of expertise, dwelling on the skills recounted in the paper under discussions and the epistemological politics that underpin science-art collaboration. The third observation explores the relationships between post-human aesthetics, ethics and politics. In short this commentary suggests that the authors have perhaps been a little humble about the import of their analysis. There are wider implications for geographical thought and practice after the relational turn raised here that are worthy of more extensive discussion.

The cental question explored is what kind of aesthetics strategies can be employed by artists for a post-human world. The growing field of synthetic biology reinforces the pervasive influence of the engineering mindset and aesthetics within the life science laboratories, at the very same historical moment that the artistic interventions have also entered into these spaces. The scientific laboratory, in which artists (as well as engineers) are located, thus cannot be viewed in isolation but is positioned within larger cultural networks that are organised around the maximisation of utility, efficiency and profit. The paper examines the tension between what can be referred to as the engineering aesthetics characterised by the desire and judgement of creation and control versus the aesthetics of vibrancy and agency of matter based on planned utilitarian futility excess and relinquishing of control.

In our response, below, we undertake a deeper engagement with one of the authors, Elizabeth Grosz, that a number of the respondents have evoked, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their response to our text and, in particular, Grosz's arguments on art as of the chaotic and of the animal. Whilst our comments on the bowerbird speak to the artistry involved in a sexuated mode of reproduction that increases biological difference, we emphasise an abyssal moment in our initial text wherein we move from a consideration of sexual selection to symbiosis and accretion as productive of diversity, terms that no longer sit quite so comfortably in the lexicon of the ‘animal’. Rather, we implicate aesthetics and an artistry across and down chemical concentration gradients.

Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.

Whilst in general welcoming the call to rethink the need for canons in human geography offered by Keighren et al. (2012), this paper suggests the need for a more nuanced argument in several respects. Physical geographers need to be brought on board and more clarity is required about the relationship between ‘canons’ and ‘classics’. Above all, the claim that geography is unusual in its historical superficiality and indifference to its earlier generations needs qualification. Only then can the call for canons in geography to create historical depth to our understanding and to aid in disciplinary identity formation, which the authors champion, prove successful.

The commentary addresses three related matters. Since canonicity is a textual matter, we need to pay greater attention to the making and editing of texts. Since canonicity is significant in geography’s pedagogy, we need to be clear as to the purposes of our teaching it. Since canonicity is a reflection both of text and authorship, we need to understand the context to both text and its readership.

As a field, geography has always been a prisoner of its times, no more obviously so than today. Texts from the past fail to speak to today's concerns. Now we are more interested in the fashionable than in the canonical.

This commentary highlights the importance of engagement with academic work in order for it to have impact within the histories and intellectual legacies of our discipline. Any canon or corpus of classics identifies excellence and impact, but like any archive is inevitably selective and indicative of contextual power-relations. The marginalisation of excellent work through lack of engagement has impoverished our disciplinary inheritance, notably through gendering our discipline's narrative and epistemology. Any emerging attempt to define even fluid and dynamic canons needs to be inclusive and reflexive.

In responding to reflections by Keighren et al. (2012) on the place of ‘classics’ within geographical literature and on the possibilities of identifying canonical works, I focus on the criteria for selection and how such works might be identified. As an example, I analyze the history of inclusion in the ‘Classics revisited’ series in the journal Progress in Human Geography, and pose questions to prompt reflection on the role of language of publication, national origins of authors, and interest in particular paradigms and subfields within the discipline as influences on selection. Additionally, I ask how the temporal and spatial contexts of readers and their motivations shape interpretations of works, what this implies in responses to ‘classics’, and for the possibilities of identifying a ‘canon’.

This response disputes the notion that geography has a collective amnesia about the contributions of its founding figures. Recent work in the discipline has indeed done much to explore the situated influence of key thinkers, encouraging re-engagement with both acknowledged ‘classics’ and lesser known texts. This response nonetheless concurs that geography could do more to explore the processes by which certain texts become identified as key influences on the trajectories of academic thought, particularly in an Anglo-American academy that remains dominated by linguistic and disciplinary traditions which can easily overlook the contributions of non-Anglophone authors and those who practised geography outside geography departments.

This response to Keighren et al. (2012) challenges the distinction made between texts as ‘canonical’ or ‘classic’ to call for interrogating texts as interventions in broader disciplinary conversations, highlighting their place in mediating disagreements, challenges, contradictions, and the power relationships of intellectual and disciplinary winners and losers. This is especially important for graduate education, as a critical site where we construct the discipline’s dominant narratives and socially reproduce ourselves.

This short commentary uses a recent question on an Undergraduate examination paper to put pedagogy at the heart of the canon debate. It argues that different teaching practices across various institutions teaching geography have influenced constructions of canonicity, and that this impacts on Keighren et al.’s (2012) argument about the relative status of the ‘canon’ versus the ‘classic’.

In responding to the commentaries on Keighren et al. (2012), we discuss in this paper the nature of memory and forgetfulness in geography and examine what the implications of active forgetting are for the stories we tell about geography and geographers. We explore the role which fashion plays in directing the course of the discipline and what this means for our engagement with the work of past geographers. Finally, we consider how notions of inheritance and bequest can inform the ways in which we value the texts through which the discipline has defined and represented itself.