Economic Geography

Intoxicating textualism
Post-structuralism, at least as it has been most influentially imported 
into economic geography, elaborates Nietzsche’s insistence that since every state-
ment has a textual character, it’s a good idea to ask who is speaking. Reworked
in less authorial terms as a fixation on the problems of relating signifiers to signi-
fieds, and signifieds to anything non-textual, this not terribly radical century-old
observation has turned out to be extraordinarily intoxicating for geographers in
the neo-liberal age. Perhaps this is because geography is a synthetic discipline in
which theory-surfing and neo-orientalism are pathological tendencies.
The results vividly demonstrate the contradictions created by letting textual
strategies substitute for, rather than be a part of, investigating the world. Anthony
Easthope (2002: 4) argues that it’s just not possible: ‘for human beings, as speak-
ing subjects, to encounter ... a gap in signification without immediately trying to
close it’ and they usually do so under the influence of subconscious desire.
Economic geography certainly fits the description; its closures have typically
reflected the habitus of the 1960s generation now in authority, in the form 
of feminist, environmentalist, animal liberationist, anti-racist (etc.) conventions.
In the name of respecting difference these have installed one or other simplistic
category of sameness (an identity).
The more theoretically sophisticated, or perhaps less politically-driven,
thinkers have tried to avoid such contradictions by forever running ahead of
closure, chasing and abandoning this then that discourse in an attempt to avoid
any vocabulary of representation at all. But deferring meaning till the seminar is
over does not overcome the problem that unless geography is to say nothing,
some statements have to be made. And whichever the set of discursive conven-
tions you opt for, some statements will – for all their contingency – be more 
practically adequate than others. This is not because, a la Rorty, the speaker – or
‘the discourse’ – is on the side you fancy. But because, under the description
adopted, some will indeed ‘represent’ things – not perfectly – but better than
others (Sayer 2000). Economic geography’s textualist obsession has meant that
this unremarkable notion, good enough for other sciences to get on with and
produce ideas and technologies that work, has it spinning round in circles. It is
still said in many a geographical lecture room that to make any Truth claims is
to pretend to adopt an external Archimedian point of God-like objectivity – and
this from geographers who write numerous articles and books describing how
things are, i.e. make truth claims.
The 1960s originals were less inclined to lose the tune than their present day
tribute acts. Foucault or R. D. Laing, for example never assumed that their
passions for druggy peak experiences had any great significance for their analyti-
cal and political work. But the authorities of geography leading the empiricist,
relativist, revival today are more smart-casually dressed, are much more extreme,
endorsing a hazy blurring of the styles of myth, literature and science. This licenses
nice storms in academic–geographical teacups. Meanwhile, outside the window, the
property developers get on with building luxury flats all over the playing field. 

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If the Empire had a core of scheming magicians whose business it was to cook up
ways of thinking that would render alternatives, and critical political engagement,
unthinkable, they could hardly have done better.