Cultural Geography

Together, Massey, Hetherington and Lee provide

important reminders of the limits to representa-

tional politics. Landscape politics cannot simply

be concerned with finding and drawing in the

missing masses, for there will always be an

unexpected component to the practical conduct

of ordering or making space. The difference is

that Massey draws us into this political realiza-

tion without recourse to a set of what mightbe

read as unworldly and politically indifferent

figures. As I argue in the final subsection, this

sense of practical contingency (even within the

most successful of ordering regimes) helps to

flesh out what might be involved in a politics of

landscape inhabitation.

Experiments and connections

I have now sketched examples of attempts to

maintain a sense of alterity in accounts of the

ordering of worlds. For a politics of inhabitation

and nature, this seems attractive. It is just that

sense of surprise and strangeness, even, as

Haraway has suggested, that ‘independent sense of

humour’ (1991: 199), which is required for a posi-

tiveinhabitation of landscape (see Figure 10.2).

And yet, to a certain extent, these reimaginings

of textualities remain in many cases concerned

with a particular style of inhabitation. They are

concerned with building. Indeed, from tectonics

(the study of how form is built), to semiotics (the

study of how meaning is built) – and then to

textualities of various kinds – the concern has

ostensibly been to accountfor the construction

of worlds. And even with the attempt to allow

room for alterity, and thereby to avoid a crude

representational politics, the building metaphor

remains.

The problem is that holding onto a building

metaphor runs the risk of returning to an admit-

tedly more elaborate, knowing, academic gaze.

Or to put this another way, whilst the figurations

and elements of landscape may be changing, the

form of knowing can seem to stay remarkably

constant (see Hinchliffe, 2000b). Perhaps this is

nothing more than a risk in Hetherington and

Lee’s work. Certainly they frequently remind

readers that the project is not one of representing

the formerly underrepresented. And there can be

little doubt that these geographies start to open

up possibilities for new connections and creati-

vity. However, there seems to be a difference

between building alterity into an account of the

world, and accepting alterity as part of ongoing

practice and changing our knowing practices to

‘INHABITING’ – LANDSCAPES AND NATURES 219

Figure 10.2 Gunnar Theel, Nature’s Laugh, New Jersey (author’s photo)

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