Text and Textuality

Text and textuality, a metaphor commonly used in cultural geography that likens landscape interpretation to reading a written document, refer to a system of signs that are unstable and open to multiple understandings and repeated revisions. Such an expansive notion of text leading well beyond its traditional association with the written page to include a vast array of cultural productions—including landscapes but also maps, pictures, social institutions, political regimes, and even the world itself—is characteristic of the post-structuralist perspective at the heart of this concept. Arguably, the single feature most distinctive of poststructuralism is the linguistic turn toward text, discourse, reading, and interpretation and the accompanying close connection among language, power, and knowledge. In human geography, that turn is reflected most directly in the metaphor of landscape-as-text.

Some of geography's earliest advocates of cultural landscape study were interested in how the earth's surface was, in some sense, authored. Carl Sauer did not use this metaphor explicitly, but his intention was to read the landscape for signs of the culture that created it. Peirce Lewis, a geographer not formally associated with the Berkeley School but associated with theoretical and methodological sympathies for it, applied this metaphor more overtly in his 1979 essay, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape.” Lewis proposed that reading the cultural landscape was, in important ways, like reading a book but that, in two specific ways, it was more difficult. First, Lewis argued that cultural landscapes seem to be messy and disorganized, sort of like a book with missing, torn, and smudged pages; like books, landscapes can be read, but unlike books, landscapes were not meant to be read. Second, Lewis was convinced that Americans were not used to reading landscapes. Thus, driven by a concern to counter such geographic illiteracy and by the belief that such reading brought both pleasure and a deeper understanding of American culture, he offered guidelines—what he called self-evident axioms—designed to help students envision the landscape as a text to be read.

Lewis's essay proved to be quite influential and sparked the interest in several generations of human geographers to see the cultural landscape as our unwitting autobiography—as a cultural text that reflected our tastes, values, aspirations, and fears in a concrete and visible form. Curiously, given the text metaphor's obvious debt to the literary arts, Lewis derived his own inspiration not from literary theory but rather from what he called traditional geomorphology and traditional plant ecology, fields that encouraged scientists to use their eyes and think about what they saw. Perhaps as a result, some critics charge, Lewis was uninterested in how landscapes were written and read in actuality as well as in practice. By failing to investigate the specific relationship between authoring or writing the landscape and reading it, Lewis left unanswered many of the most interesting questions about how such texts were created and what it means to read them.

Over the past two decades, cultural geographer James Duncan has sought to address such questions[Page 483] by problematizing the very concept of reading. Working with several coauthors, including Nancy Duncan and Trevor Barnes, Duncan sought to show that both experts (geographers like himself and Lewis) and ordinary people read the landscape all of the time as part of everyday life. But rather than conceptualizing landscapes as mere reflections of culture—our unwitting autobiographies—he argued that such texts are constitutive of the world and its contents. Such an expanded view of text derives from a broadly post-modern view that sees texts as constituting reality rather than merely mimicking it. It also relies on the concept of intertextuality, that is, the idea that the context of any text is other texts. Such other texts include the sorts of things that we traditionally call texts—literary works, legal documents, letters, and so forth—as well as cultural productions such as botanical gardens and a country's legal system. Indeed, from this perspective, everything is a text—a signifying system ready to be read for meanings, decoded and deciphered for symbolic messages, and continually rewritten. Thus, we all are cultural readers whose very act of reading alters the text itself.

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