A ROUGH GUIDE 7attempts to nuance such accounts by appealing to different scales which allow for a similar
set of spatial registers, cultural geographers have increasingly looked askance at these kinds
of explanations, not only because they force pared-down narrative structures on to the geo-
graphy of history which are just too easy but because they thereby offer an illusion of control
over a perplexing world which is precisely what a spatial consciousness should be going
against. Thus other styles of thought have arisen which emphasize spatial context and con-
tingency to a much greater extent.
A second style of thought has therefore considered spaces of identity. Here the idea of a
fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and unambiguously expressed in
space has been replaced by notions of more fluid identities belonging to particular subject
positions which can vary in intensity and can be combined in many different ways, so
challenging homologous explanations. This emphasis on hybridity worked out in and
through space is perhaps best expressed in the highly influential work of Gilroy (1993)
which attempts to show how group identities were made through numerous circulations
across the Atlantic. Gilroy’s geographical imagination can be seen as an attempt to con-
struct an imaginative geography of resistance which both excavates the past in new ways
and can be used as a means of constructing more open and heterogeneous identities which
are able to interconnect in new ways. It is no surprise that ‘mobility’ and ‘hybridity’ in
numerous forms have become key tropes in recent work on identity, expressing new forms
of identification in which aspiration can be both more freely expressed and more easily
questioned.
This attack on the bounded spatial imagination is common to other styles of thinking culture
in cultural geography. Thus a third style of thought has been concerned with the apprehensions
of spatial surfaces. Arising originally out of a concern with ‘landscape’ and especially the
structuring of the act of seeing the land, incarnated in particular ‘scapes’, this style of thought
has now branched out to encompass many different means of sensing the land – not just vision
but other senses (like sound, as in the growing body of work in cultural geography on music),
not just landscapes but city and even earthscapes (Cosgrove, 2001). In part, this is simply an
attempt to understand how we make expressive places, so allowing the memory of the senses
to gain a foothold. In part, it is an attempt to destabilize surfaces so that, like in many new
architectures, they can bend and curve and thereby point up the temporary nature of so much
of what we regard as solid (for example, the trajectory of objects which, like habitual practice,
are so often apprehended without recourse to discourse or representation). And, in part, it
can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways and so give the earth voice.
‘Our houses are tumuli erected over the slaughtered body of the giant ground; only our nervous
decoration, our attention to monumental detail, or preoccupation with property, gives us away’
(Carter, 1996: 2).
A further and related style of thought is concerned with dwelling. In its original
phenomenological guise such work tended to be caught up with the human experience of place
which traded heavily on notions of authenticity within ‘nature’ or culture. However, more
recently these essentialist leanings towards fixed ways of life and definite embodiments have
melted into more general ethological misgivings concerning how different actors – many of
them non-human – can be related to one another through ‘political wills’ made in and from space.
Such ‘inhuman’ thinking about place, informed by developments in the sociology of science, actor
network and non-representational theory, has been seen by some commentators as simply3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 7