Cultural Geography

THE CULTURE OF EPISTEMOLOGY 521

reader has to be able to comprehend the terms of

the definition. We shall return to this analogy

shortly. Before we do so, it is fitting to acknowl-

edge that the circularity invoked here is not at all

unusual or itself problematic. Since ‘knowledge’

is part of the human condition, it will come as

little surprise to find the structures of knowledge

intimately linked with everyday experience,

thought processes and other forms of human

practice. The emerging intimate relationship

between experience, knowledge and practice is

thus not inherently problematic; it is made awk-

ward only because in the pursuit of ‘cultural

geography’ or ‘cultural studies’ one of the

elements – knowledge – is privileged over the

others. Then, the reflexive impulse that seeks

insights by asking ‘why’, ‘how’ or ‘why not dif-

ferently’ – whether it leads to something called

‘knowledge’ or not – is often led into cul-de-sac

of sorts: intellectually, starting anew would be

the rigorous course of action, one that is pursued

by only a handful of individuals. In short, the

circularity of thinking hinders neither action nor

the continuation of the reflexive impulse per se.

‘Culture’ is a way both of understanding this

situation and of epistemologically addressing the

issues it raises. Cultural geography and cultural

studies represent some of the more intricate ways

of addressing both the circularity of knowledge

and the everyday context of experience that

remains largely unhampered by epistemological

concerns.

THE ROLE OF CULTURE

To recognize the involvement of ‘culture’ in the

spaces of modern knowledge, we need to pry

open the association between knowledge and

everyday experience that we fashioned a moment

ago. We need to acknowledge that even the

reflexive variant of everyday experience hardly

ever confronts problems of prioritization. We

knowthat things exist because they play a role in

our lives. Even the time-honoured distinction

between subject and object that has long plagued

epistemology is of little consequence for the con-

tinuation of everyday practice, as is testified by

the hybrid etymology of the word ‘existence’.

Since the word ‘culture’ in a direct way captures

this entanglement of existence with and in the

world, rather than postulating some unattainable

‘outside’, it is tempting to rush to conclusions

and proclaim that every form of knowledge is

somehow ‘cultural’ and to render the ‘cultural

construction of reality’ the sine qua nonof each

and every attempt towards understanding. Yet

however tempting, such a move would merely

bypass, rather than address, the epistemological

issues raised by ‘the cultural problem’. Since

avoided issues have a tendency to resurface at

inopportune moments, this chapter centres its

argument on the relationship between ‘culture’

and ‘knowledge’ without according either term

an a priori, accepted status. In order for the

‘spaces of knowledge’ that are central to this

Handbook– the spaces of body, region, the local

and the nation, to mention but a few – to be

knowable entities, rather than circular postula-

tions of ‘a will to culture’, we have to justify the

explanatory power of ‘culture’ as an analytical

concept.

In other words, it is crucial to acknowledge

that the entanglement of knowledge and its

object is a fundamental dilemma for anyone

interested in delimiting knowledge and in assur-

ing the status of ‘cultural’ forms of learning as

valid forms of research. This dilemma is caused

by the standards adopted in the now dominant

western and modernist manner of conceptualiz-

ing knowledge as that which provides a secure

basis from which to understand the world. If pre-

modern and protomodern sceptics from Pyrrho to

Montaigne could afford freely to speculate about

the grounding of respective claims to knowledge,

such luxury was increasingly denied to their

modern heirs apparent. Indeed, it was Descartes

again who famously decreed the defeat of scepti-

cism as the primary undertaking of modern

philosophy. More than other words perhaps, it is

the word ‘fact’ that reflects the novelty of this

understanding of ‘knowledge’: the currently

dominant mode of thinking in western societies

dictates that once uncovered and determined,

‘facts’ become trustworthy points of departure for

the pursuit of future, as yet unknown forms of

knowledge. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1961)

early dictum, it is the totality of facts that consti-

tutes ‘the world’ for us. From its origin in the

world of commerce, the ‘modern fact’ and the

knowledges to which it led have created the sense

of confidence necessary for the sciences to be

conceptualized as progressive and mutually sup-

portive enterprises (Poovey, 1998). At bottom,

such trustworthiness has resulted in an implied

optimism that has been characteristic of modernity

in general and of modern science in particular

throughout most of the last two centuries.

Yet ‘facts’ are facts not because scientists have

recognized some innate quality residing within an

object but because some knowledge of ‘facticity’

in general, or the ‘factness’ of facts, has been

applied to an object. In short, we recognize some-

thing as a fact, because we were lookingfor facts –

and not because something revealed itself as a

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