John Wylie

On Geography and Materiality

In the context of human geographys encounter with the problematics that surround matter and materiality, this paper offers a principle that works towards a distinctive material imagination. This principle states that our image of matter should be multiplied, so that it can be attended to as taking place with the properties and capacities of any element or state. We elaborate this principle through three substantive discussions of materiality as turbulent, as interrogative, and as excessive. In doing so we draw upon, in turn, forms of relational materialism associated with actor-network theory, the postphenomenologies of Lingis, the animate or enchanted materialism developed by Bennett, and the figurative and affective (im)materialities of Deleuze. The conclusion clarifies why we do not call for geography to be ‘rematerialised’.

Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject

The aim of this paper is to take some steps towards a renewed understanding of landscape and the gazing subject. A first main section, ‘Depth, outlines Merleau-Pontys final visual philosophy and its attempts to replace a spectatorial conception of vision with an embodied ontology that accords transcendance to the depth of the visual world. A second section, ‘fold’, engages with Deleuzes rendition of Leibnizs philosophy as a means of both critiquing and supplementing Merleau-Pontys account. Through these analyses I seek to rewrite the visual gaze upon landscape by exploring the ontological processes (processes of depth, processes of folding) which afford its actualisation. I thus seek to produce an account of gazing as an eventful actualisation and distribution of selves and landscape, through attending to the depths and folds of an immanent plane, from which distinctive and durable selves and landscapes arise and with which they are always in relation. Here, landscape is not a way of seeing the world. Nor is it ‘something seen’, an external, inert surface. Rather, the term ‘landscape’ names the materialities and sensibilities with which we see.

Landscape, mobility, practice

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Landscape, Mobility and Practice’ which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to explore issues of mobility and how we encounter, apprehend, inhabit and move through landscapes. The contributors discuss the usefulness of conceptions of landscape vis-à-vis place and space, and different traditions of apprehending, practising and articulating the more-than-representational dimensions of landscapes. The panel discuss the entwining of issues of power and politics with different representations, practices and understandings of landscape/landscaping, and a number of the panellists position their thinking on the politics of landscape in relation to recent work on the politics of affect.

Becoming-icy: Scott and Amundsen’s South Polar voyages, 1910-1913

This paper presents a critical narration of the South Polar voyages of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. The argument which guides this narration is that it is through embodied, material practices - through relations of becoming anterior to a duality of discourse and world - that distinctive subjectivities and landscapes are produced. Within this conceptual frame, the paper focuses upon the differences between the expeditions led by Scott and Amundsen, and especially upon differences as regards styles of dwelling within and strategies for moving through the Antarctic landscape. Such differences, I argue, may be witnessed and narrated within the varying materialities, mobilities and corporealities enacted by the two expeditions. In analysing these via the format of a critical narrative, the aim is to foreground a sense of Scott and Amundsen’s voyages as concrete, sensuous contexts of practice and performance, and in this way the paper seeks to abet and inflect the interpretative strategies of current critical histories of European exploration.

LOOP (a geography)

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Dwelling and displacement: Tim Robinson and the questions of landscape

A study of the work of the writer Tim Robinson, this paper also presents a series of wider arguments regarding concepts of landscape, dwelling and writing. English-born, but resident in the far west of Ireland for nearly 40 years, Tim Robinson is the author of a series of increasingly féted books about the Aran Islands and Connemara. Erudite and dense, these texts present the Aran and Connemara landscape to the reader via a heady mix of cultural and natural history, and personal reflection and speculation. Two recurrent questions arguably frame these texts: what does it mean to dwell in a landscape? and What does it mean to write about landscape? In this paper, after contextualizing the writer, Aran and Connemara, I develop a contrast between Robinson’s work and some influential current understandings of landscape and dwelling, in particular the mobile and dynamic notions of dwelling developed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. The paper then hinges on an examination of a recurrent motif in Robinson’s work – ‘the good step’. In the image of ‘the good step’, I argue, we witness neither a nostalgic romanticism, nor a dynamic identification with landscape, nor more widely a fusion of land and life, but rather a displacement of land and life from each other – a displacement that is originary. The good step, the step that cannot be taken, is thus less the ideal goal, and more the aporetic possibility of writing through landscape per se – a conclusion offered here for both cultural geographers and landscape scholars and writers more generally.

New and Old Worlds: The Tempest and early colonial discourse

Although geographers have begun to critically re-examine the historical imbrication of their discipline within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial discourses and practices, few studies have focused specifically upon the many complex interconnections between colonial and geographical discourses during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this paper I attempt to address this deficit via a reading of one of Shakespeares final plays, The Tempest. Noting its textual and dramatic links to the nascent English colonization of Virginia, numerous literary critics and historians have characterized The Tempest as an instance of early colonial discourse. In resisting an overly simplistic coupling of text and context, however, this paper offers an alternative interpretative frame wherein the play may be situated. It argues that The Tempests uneasy geographies, its ambivalent mapping of both Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts, may be usefully related to the philosophical and moral problematics which the discovery of the New World occasioned for the imago mundi of Renaissance Europe. From within this context, The Tempest may be seen to mobilize images of elsewhere, of spaces distant from an English centre. What this reading reveals is that both colonial discourses and the colonization process were complex and even hesitant in their formation. Through The Tempest, they may be understood as both emerging from, and relying upon, a series of European theological and classical understandings of the morality of voyaging, and the nature of the geographically distant.

A landscape cannot be a homeland

Abstract What is the problem for which landscape is the answer? In this paper, I offer a response to this question, first posed at a meeting of landscape researchers in Brussels in 2011. I argue that the problem can be defined as ontopology, or what I call here homeland thinking, and I propose that a landscape cannot be a homeland. The salience of landscape as a critical term instead involves modes of thinking and feeling that chafe against invocations of homeland as a site of existential inhabitation, as a locus of sentiment and attachment, and a wellspring of identity. The paper explores the connections between ideas of landscape and homeland through discussions of the European Landscape Convention, phenomenology and the term homeland itself. I conclude by arguing that a landscape must be understood as a kind of dislocation or distancing from itself. There are, after all, no original inhabitants.

Forward cultural geographies

In this brief editorial, we chart the past and future of the journal cultural geographies as we launch our 25th volume. On a daring course, we seek to publish the most creative cultural work, and here suggest what that may include.

Comments on Derek McCormack’s Refrains for Moving Bodies:

to borrow from Manning and Massumi (2013), as an ‘enabling constraint’, a body does not come to these places as a blank slate, but inscribed in specific and shared histories, capacities – not as a limit or threshold, but point of reference, one which admits that our subjection is literally pinned to our flesh, admits the liberatory potential of particular gestures is always in relation to certain bodies, certain histories, certain places. If we take differentiation at its full value, one is never just the body one is always ‘a’ body in its becoming. In what ways might this thinking help to extricate us from the violence of those abstractions? What other bodies might this speak to and where? References