Writing

Writing is the means by which geographers have traditionally represented the physical, cultural, and social worlds as they perceive, measure, and understand them. It is a conventional tool, the use of which entails uncertainty and perceptual bias. The contingent nature of understanding conveyed through the written word is a bedrock tenet of poststructural academics, but the idea that all language is fundamentally metaphoric or “figurai” is an old one, with roots in the writings of both Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche. The recognition of writing's fraught nature in geography dates back to Immanuel Kant. Writing today is undertheorized by geographers and is largely used either unreflectively or to predictable political ends.

As Jacques Derrida indicated, writing as a tool is intrinsically imbricated in power-creating systems. Every system of symbols to represent concepts entails the embrace of a dialectical and recursive methodology that works to obscure its own mechanisms and the power relations that underlie them. While contemporary social scientists tend not to focus on the embedded nature of written understandings, the roots of the modern discipline of geography lie in a nuanced grasp of the necessarily metaphoric nature of description and depiction in conveying both measurable and perceptual aspects of particular places. Geography is crucially the expression and transmittal of understandings of places and spaces as much as it is those understandings per se.

Ralph Hall Brown played a central role in conveying the centrality to geography of not simply the physical realities of a given location but also the evolving human understanding of a place's significance and structure. That is, he was concerned with the context of knowledge about places and how it develops over time. Recognizing that character and culture were significant influences on both knowledge and action, Brown used fiction as a lens through which to assess the state of geographical knowledge in a particular time and place. His best-known work, Mirror for Americans, published in 1943, is an analysis of a fictional colonial-era protagonist, whom Brown used to both humanize colonial conceptions of American geography and stress their contingent and contextual nature.

With the quantitative turn, the literary and discursive treatment of geographic perception was often considered to be insufficiently rigorous. Geography began to purport to be one of the sciences that measured rather than one of the arts that perceived. Yet many geographers—including Brown, J. Wreford Watson, Douglas Pocock, Marwyn Samuels, and especially Yi-Fu Tuan and Donald Meinig—remained committed to a conception of geographic perception that required nothing short of a literary sensibility. Tuan particularly stressed the need for geographers to cultivate, among other qualities, the empathy and insight that any good writing exhibits. Similarly, Meinig held that geographic writing had to become overtly novelistic in order to cultivate relevance and an audience.

Tuan and others promoted a focus on experiential knowledge that had linguistic implications. Just as geography moved into the social world, writing itself came to be recognized as something that entails more than just transcription and analysis of books, maps, and surveys. Both the built environment and language are vectors for individual expression and emotion and can define and shape consciousness and sensibility. Neither is merely the by-product of macroeconomic priorities or microeconomic decisions. Geography's focus on “being in the world” led to its embrace of a necessary incompleteness—an eternally deferred final understanding that is intrinsic to writing as well. Language itself is an important power in constructing places (and, by implication, [Page 3140]in constructing the power that those places then exert). Spatial patterns can therefore be seen as not dependent on actual geography alone but rather as a product of the metaphors used to describe their parts.

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