The Dictionary of Human Geography

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All of these issues can be studied critically,

as most of the references above testify. But

while Palka and Galgano (2000) suggest that

writings such as these have cast ‘a persistent

shadow on military geography as an academic

discipline’, critical interventions in military

geography, seeking to enlarge its compass

beyond military circles, have only become a sig-

nificant strand of work inhuman geographyin

recent years: and over that same period many

advanced militaries, particularly in Europe and

North America, have redoubled and rethought

their interventions in the production and appro-

priation of geographical knowledge. Signifi-

cantly, these have involved far more than the

directapplicationofgeographicalmethodologies

and knowledges to ‘kinetic’ (offensive) and now

‘non-kinetic’ operations: they have also involved

a deepening engagement with theideologyof

militarism. dg/sg

Suggested reading

Flint (2005); Woodward (2004).

mimesis Described in ancient aesthetics as

the ‘imitation of nature’, mimesis is generally

concerned with howrepresentationinart

is related to truth, or how effectively a copy

may mirror or make present an original scene

or perception. Can the image reproduce an

actual objectas it is? Or does it merely repro-

duce the appearance of the object as it

looks, assemblance? The question, famously

allegorized in Pliny’s tale of a contest staged

between two fifth-century painters, features

centrally in Plato’s analysis ofvisionandepis-

temology. Plato’s answer is that representa-

tion is not only antipathetic to reality, but that

the degree to which it aspires to lifelikeness is

the degree to which it is adulterated, or dis-

torted. While this remarkably ‘modern’ pos-

ition prefigures present-day debates – from

Marxian critiques ofcommodityfetishism to

the unmasking, withinpost-structuralism,

of ‘given meaning’ – the mimetic tradition

has been notably resilient. From the Italian

humanists onwards (seehumanism), it has

been thought of as the desire to bring nature

towards its specular perfection. As an aesthe-

tic formulation, mimesis also has applica-

tions within politicalphilosophy, especially

within enlightenment struggles between

custom and reason. Thus for Edmund Burke,

as for David Hume, the perpetual forging of

resemblances forms the condition for all

human sociality: ‘It is by imitation, far more

than precept, that we learn everything ...

It is one of the strongest links of society;

it is a species of mutual compliance’ (Burke,

1906).

If mimesis in aesthetic theory refers us to the

consensual and reproductive in social terms, it

is no surprise that the concept has been vari-

ously modified and attacked in contemporary

cultural and critical theory. Thus Adorno

(1977), Lacoue-Labarthe (1989) and Derrida

(1981) not only variously demonstrate how

mimetic imitation subtends all of our institu-

tions as well as our concepts of history and

language. They also argue the ways in which

a critique of mimesis requires us to rethink the

relation betweennatureand technology, and

to re-conceive the mediations between lived

experience and aesthetic expression. From a

different perspective, Homi Bhabha’s (1984)

deconstructive appropriation of the mimetic

principle has become a critical concept in post-

colonial analysis, in which the colonizedsub-

ject’s mimicry of colonial knowledge systems

serves to estrange the basis of an authoritative

discourse and so registers as a form of counter-

domination (seepost-colonialism). jd

minor theory A way of thinking that takes

off from and builds upon Deleuze and

Guattari’s (1986) notion of minor literature.

It offers a means of working with material that

self-consciously refuses ‘mastery’ in practices

and claims, striving instead for a self-reflexive

scholarship that subverts ‘major’theoryfrom

within. Minor theory is a different way of

‘doing theory;’ a way of reading, writing, and

talking that is insistently material – embodied,

sensual, positioned – and refuses to ignore the

different political–economic and social condi-

tions in which knowledge is produced and

shared. It recalls Adrienne Rich’s (1976)

anguished call to ‘think through thebody’in

the hopes of making a materialist knowledge

streaked with the peculiar temporality and

spatiality ofeveryday life(Katz, 1996).

Thissituated knowledgeis interstitial with

and inseparable from ‘major’ productions of

knowledge, and uses displacement to expose

and chafe their limits so that they crack. In

these cracks new knowledge and practice can

emerge, but the process itself is transforma-

tive. In dynamic relation major theory, minor

theory, and the relations that hold them in

tension are reworked.

Deleuze and Guattari (1986) focus on the

writings of Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew living

in Prague, who wrote in German. They argue

that Kafka was doubly displaced in this ‘major

language’, which was neither his mother

tongue nor the language of his community,

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 466 1.4.2009 3:19pm

MIMESIS