Cultural Geography

Reformation in western Europe is of key

significance precisely because it shattered the cer-

tainties of old and replaced them with the imper-

sonal and accountable system most people in the

modern world recognize as ‘knowledge’ (Jardine,

1996). Since much has been written about these

key epochs in the history of the western world, I

take the liberty of assuming a shared horizon

with readers of this chapter – which allows me to

be succinct. What remains of crucial importance

from a cultural point of view is the close associ-

ation between knowledge and the rise of the

‘subject’ as an identifiable entity (Cosgrove,

1989) autonomously capable of interpreting the

world (Lambropoulos, 1993). The epistemologi-

cal subject capable of conquering doubt that

emerged in Descartes’ infamous cogito, ergo

sumthus has a practical complement in the legal

subject. What unites both the epistemological

and the legal subject is arguably the ability of

both to empower across geographic distances: a

reader need not guess but is invited to share the

presence of something beyond doubt; and what

could be less the subject of doubt than the

affirmed presence of someone? Historically, the

most significant example of this ‘witnessing ego’

can arguably be found in the figure of the

nineteenth-century heroic explorer using all the

financial muscle provided by western forms of

capital and modern technological means of

documentation to construct detached ‘knowledge’

about non-western societies (Driver, 2001; see

also Mattelart, 2000).

As a result, the new importance attached to

‘knowledge’ some five centuries ago is still

recognizably part of our contemporary intellectual

landscape, western style, with its overt emphasis

on individual freedom and responsibility, author-

ship and legal subjects – symbolically encapsu-

lated in the importance attributed to individual

signatures. But the link between the modern sub-

ject cum scientist and ‘knowledge’ is far from a

straightforward one: while on the one hand the

advances in knowledge have been closely asso-

ciated with the names of key individuals (the

‘canonical’ figures of modern science), ‘knowl-

edge’ as such is thought to exist independently of

individual achievements. The word ‘evidence’

only highlights this seeming paradox (Ginzburg,

1989) while at the same time leading us to the

key structural element uniting subject and

knowledge: the long-underestimated importance

of representationin the production of knowl-

edge. Simply put, it is the role of the modern sub-

ject to represent truths about the world that

subsequently – once they have been rendered

communicatively available – take on a life of

their own. The validity of this ‘life’ is thought

to rest entirely on extrinsic criteria and is

constructed around the notion, so aptly deployed

by Richard Rorty (1979), of the ‘mirroring’

capacity embodied by particular forms of

representation.

What we witness here is an important step:

although unthinkable without the originating

presence of modern subjects, ‘knowledge’ requires

these subjects – read: scientific authors – to

recede into the background, to blend into the rep-

resentations that empower knowledge. The book,

the scientific article, the slide-show, the anato-

mical chart or the geological map all embody

this key facet of knowledge: their ‘production’

virtually disappears behind their claim to validity

(Nelson, 2000; Rose, 2000). This step gives birth

to another and by no means less important dis-

tinction: the difference between ‘subjective’ and

‘objective’ forms of knowing the world. Although

born of the reflexive mode which this chapter ini-

tially examined under the rubric of ‘scepticism’,

‘knowledge’ requires the ‘tain’ or silvering behind

the mirror of nature not to be tainted by its con-

struction or (social) practice but to embody an

aspatial form of existence (Gasché, 1986).

The problem is that such a mirror does not

exist: irrespective of their usefulness or the status

they have acquired as ‘objective’ forms of

representations, none of the scientific means of

representation mentioned above can ever be dis-

associated from the context in which they arose.

In fact, the very notion of ‘objectivity’, by virtue

of being ‘useful’, can profitably be understood to

characterize a particular form of ‘practice’ (or

‘language game’) itself which is circular no less

for being called ‘knowledge’: its ‘success’ is

ascertained purely through internal consistency.

In this, ‘knowledge’ is no different from other

practices.

THE SPATIALIZATION OF

KNOWLEDGE

It is this train of thought that allows us to reveal

the relevance of the above historical detour for

the construction of ‘cultural’ knowledges. For

me, the key consequence lies in the epistemologi-

cal revaluation of the concept of ‘culture’ within

the human sciences during the latter half of the

nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.

This first significance of ‘the cultural’ and

‘culture’ is by now well documented, as is its intel-

lectuallineage from Matthew Arnold through

Max Weber and the Frankfurt School to

Raymond Williams and the birth and development

of ‘cultural studies’ and ‘cultural geography’ in

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