Cultural Geography

what it lacks in transferability, it makes up in

rigour and precision.

Crucially, ‘culture’ played a key role in the

construction of such knowledges, as well as

explaining the variations found in practices

around the globe. It did so through the invocation

of ‘everyday’ practices that have shaped and

continue to shape the various histories and geo-

graphies that form the body of our knowledges

(de Certeau, 1984). The fact that these latter now

often appear with a plural ‘s’ is indicative of this

response: where ‘knowledge’ becomes spatially

constructed – as it does once we allow for ‘the

local’ or ‘tacit knowledge’ to become legitimate

grounds for the construction of knowledge – a

researcher will more likely than not find himself

or herself confronting a plurality of ‘knowl-

edges’ or spaces of knowledge. What is more,

the fact that these ‘knowledges’ often compete

with one another is no longer seen as a threat to

the unity of the sciences but becomes part of

their dialogical construction. In other words,

where the traditional model of sciences, western

style, acknowledged at best (in say the works of

Karl Popper) the existence of temporal variations –

often read as ‘progressions’ – in the truth

content of scientific explanations, the ‘cultural’

sciences today accept the existence of spatial and

hence cultural differences: scientific paradigms

no longer merely succeed one another, they also

coexist (Kuhn, 1962).

CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

The acknowledgement of ‘the cultural’ over the

last two centuries would have been unthinkable,

however, without a realization that had its roots

in both of the developments mentioned above:

(1) the novel relevance being attributed to

phenomena of everyday significance, and (2) the

acknowledgement of ‘representation’ being a

key epistemological issue for any production of

knowledge. For me, both converge in what has

become known as ‘the linguistic turn’ (Rorty,

1967) – the realization that ‘language’ is (at) the

heart of knowledge and of cultural expressions,

as well as cultural change. Within the field of

epistemology, this insight was nothing new:

language had always been central to the many

and various theories of knowledge. What

changed during the reappraisal of ‘culture’ in the

1970s was a new centrality that was accorded to

discourse, a particular subcategory of linguistic

enquiry that makes sense of language as prac-

tice (Beneviste, 1971). It was in this form that

language entered into the cultural sciences and

into cultural geography (Barnett, 1998; Curry,

1996; Mills, 1997). Owing a great deal to

Wittgenstein’s (1953) designation of ‘language

games’, the notion of ‘discourse’ underlined the

need to understand knowledge as a particular,

highly contextualized form of communication.

In other words, ‘discourse’ signaled a turn to

‘practices’ in the human sciences and thus, albeit

implicitly, legitimized ‘culture’ as a key concept

within and beyond the human sciences.

The consequences of this development were

far-reaching indeed. Not only was a rather amor-

phous interest in matters cultural concretized

through the centrality accorded to language, but

the interest in ‘discourse’ furthermore opened up

whole new worlds to the epistemologically inter-

ested. These worlds included the novel interpre-

tations of modern history, science and culture

unearthed in the work of Michel Foucault (1979;

1989), the ‘deconstruction’ of the western philo-

sophical tradition advanced by Jacques Derrida

(1982; 1989), and the displacement of the subject

from the throne rightly or wrongly assumed in

the early modern period in the books of Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), Jacques

Lacan (1977) and Bruno Latour (1993).

This is emphatically not the place for an in-

depth review of all the trends mentioned above.

Some signposts will thus have to suffice to

clarify the connection between this kind of

discourse-driven research and the study of

culture. What is initially clear is that we are con-

fronted with a novel impulse: rather than turn its

attention to an allegedly ‘progressing’ march of

scientific achievements, science now increas-

ingly turned its attention onto itself and analysed

itself –to use Foucault’s term – as an archive.

In this already, we can manifest a ‘cultural’

impulse in the sense that the differences

between ‘knowledge’ and other forms of human

practice were gradually erased. In fact, ‘know-

ledge’ often became a byword for human prac-

tice in general, thus losing the privileged position

it had acquired since its inception some 500

years ago. We shall return to this theme later in

this chapter.

Among the concepts that have proven to be

fruitful within the culturally inspired human

sciences, Derrida’s notion of différanceneeds to

be singled out. Radicalizing the earlier insistence

upon difference that had already led to the

acknowledgement of the ‘local’ characteristics

of knowledge (as discussed above), différance

effectively localized ‘the local’. In denying

stability to the concepts employed to ground

epistemic differences in space and time, Derrida

refocused the question of power within the

human sciences. A similar argument emerged in

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