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Harvey than a spectator. A n avowed interdisciplinarian, Deutsche writes widely on the connections between aesthetic practices and urban social conditions such as gentrification, redevelopment, and homelessness; the repression of feminism and sexuality in critical spatial theory; public art and public space; and radical democracy. She has taught in the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program and at the Cooper Union, Queens College of the City University of New York, The School of Visual Arts, and Rutgers University. Finally, thanks are due to Derek Gregory for his willingness to participate in this Forum and, more importantly, for his work over the past fifteen years to question entrenched disciplinary boundaries. It is partly through his efforts that there is a place where both humanistic and social scientific scholars can meet and reflect on the spatiality of social life.

I
tion of social theory (critical social theory, he would insist). His work is thus a dialogic invitation-not only for geographers, but also for theorists in other disciplines-to reflect on the relationships between knowledge, power, and space. The result is not the imposition of a foundationalist disciplinary terrain echoing an earlier history, but an engagement between critical social theory and human geography. It is in this spirit of interaction that the present Forum came to pass. Invited were two geographers, David Harvey and Cindi Katz, and one art historian and critic, Rosalyn Deutsche. Since much of Harveys o w n ground-breaking work is examined in Geographical Irnaginations, I am especially pleased by his participation in this project. Readers of this and other geography journals will also know Cindi Katz, whose research explores the boundaries between political economy, cultural forms, and the practices of everyday life. In these spheres, she has examined the construction of identity and the production of space and nature in such diverse contexts as the Sudan and Harlem. Rosalyn Deutsche, though perhaps new to some o f our readers, is one of those social theorists w e can count as a participant rather

Reference
Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. O x ford: Blackwell.

Evaluation Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power: Reflections on Derek Gregorys Geographical Imaginations
David Harvey
Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University

Gregory has written a marvelously forthcoming book. And it has a becoming cover, though I have yet to work out its full significance. But I did learn a lot from reading this most erudite and in at least one respect exemplary piece of critical writing.

D :: t

I ought, however, to declare my partiality. M y o w n work figures heavily in Gregorys concerns and I find his treatment of it eminently fair. He engages seriously with my arguments, tries to read what I have written as a whole, as part of an on-going project, and, while he appropriately maintains a critical distance (and

Annak ofthe Association of American Geographers, 8511), 1995, pp. 160-164 0 1995 by Association of American Geographers Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Mam Street, Cambridg, MA 02142, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lJF, UK

Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power thereby creates plenty of room for disagreement and debate) he refrains from that knockabout destructiveness that these days often passes for critical discussion. Gregory has struggled to be fair and faithful to the intentions of the authors he considers. We, the authors, are allowed to speak largely for ourselves, while he weaves an erudite thread of his own critical argument around the diverse things that some of us have been trying to say. If the book manages only to set a standard for the manner of critical discussion within geography, then this will be a major contribution. Gregorys concerns, however, reach far beyond the boundaries of our discipline. This is in part because the geographical imagination is far too pervasive and important a facet of intellectual life to be left alone to geographers. Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, Benjamin, Jameson, Lefebvre, Giddens, bell hooks, Haraway, Spivak, Said, and Geertz populate the text and here, too, Gregory has achieved something very special. For it is plainly his intention to take what he considers the very best of geographical work and treat it on a par with some of the very best writings from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and the like and to illustrate the major contributions that geographers have made, are making, and can make to social and literary theory. Time will tell how successful he has been in this, but I believe his erudition will generally carry the day. He often writes of both the possibilities and difficulties of folding in one kind of perspective, theory, or body of work with another and in so doing deploys the baroque concept of the fold to great effect (Deleuze 1993). The intricate traces he follows from within geography and across a multiplicity of other disciplines not only reveal hitherto hidden connections, but also serve to embed geographical work more firmly in a wider context of enquiry and debate. Gregory has rendered a very vital political service to geographers by producing a book that can act as a knowledgeable guide for social and literary theorists interested in certain aspects of our work. I am not, unfortunately, sanguine that professional geographers, with their obsession for CIS as saving grace, will take advantage of such an intellectual opening ( I note, for example, that the National Academy committee charged with rediscovering geography has no one who can speak well to the sorts of concerns that Gregory raises and that none of

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the geographers whose imagination he highlights are participants). Gregorys overwhelming concern for linkage with literary and social theory has, however, been bought at a certain cost. To begin with, his legendary skills as phraseur and the intricate (baroque) paths he sometimes follows often put the book out of reach of those unfamiliar with the terrain he is traversing. It will therefore appear to some as an ethereal conversation about and among a select group of the initiated ( I can imagine many of my ex-colleagues in Oxford protesting that they cannot understand what he is about and that it seems mere pretentious rambling to them). I think that would be an unfortunate reaction, but Gregory could have done more to counter it. Also, in his laudable concern to be fair, Gregory at times distances himself so far, politically and intellectually, from what is being said that it is hard to locate not only where he stands on certain crucial issues but what he himself is trying to do. Furthermore, the choice of geographical imaginations has largely been dictated by how well these mesh with external currents of thought-themselves to some degree trendy and even cultish-in social and literary theory. Many within geography will justifiably protest at the inherent bias in his choice. I begin with the most singular, and to me most shocking absence of all. No physical geographers, apparently, are endowed with a geographical imagination worthy of note. The gap between literary theory, certain branches of social theory such as critical anthropology, and science and technology is extraordinarily important these days and geography, with its peculiar tradition of trying to make physical, social scientific, and humanities approaches coexist, is an active site of such an intersection. The fact that the intersection is contentious, problematic, and frequently painful does not justify shying away from it. I think, for example, of the work of Bruno Latour (1993) or Emily Martins (1 994) ethnographic consideration of how scientists work in the field of immunology as exemplars of the kind of study that could well go on within the confines of geography if only sufficient imagination were brought to bear. Unfortunately, Gregorys particular concerns within literary and social theory here lead him away from considering a crucial point of contestation within the geographical imagina-

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Harvey ence to his work in a book that treats the whole question of the colonial encounter as fundamental! This absence, this erasure of two of the most fertile critical geographical imaginations of the latter half of the twentieth century has serious consequences. I am personally persuaded, for example, that the history of the geographical expeditions that Bunge launched is far more interesting and potentially significant than all the derives of the Situationists (now regarded as so trendy) conducted around the same time (on this point, see Merrifield n.d.). In any case, Saids argument, as he now recognizes, needs some nuancing. To begin with, the imperialist gaze was not homogeneous but extraordinarily heterogeneous, and those gazed upon were by no means passive, engaged as they were in a variety of practices of resistance, complicity, subversion, and involvement (sometimes to their own advantage), that made the whole colonial encounter a rather more complex affair than a simple imposition of the imperialist gaze upon the whole world. Yet, in certain circles, the tendency to excorciate the imperialist gaze and to wallow in post-colonial guilt has generated such a phobia against looking, against seeing, against visualizing that we are in danger of plucking our eyes out and trying to do without any kind of vision at all. But if memory is crucially dependent upon visualization (an equation that helps explain why memory can often play such extraordinary tricks), then to forego visualization is to condemn ourselves to oblivion. This plainly is not Gregorys aim, but in that case he is obliged to tell us more than he cares, not whether or not we should look and gaze, visualize, and picture (and in his awed wonder at Pierce Lewiss powers of description he plainly reinstates visceral reactions as fundamental to the geographical imagination), but exactly how and in what ways we should (or should not) use our powers of vision and our capacity to construct spatialized metaphors of deep meaning as we struggle to construct understandings of the world. Gregory sees the question, but he does not move towards any kind of answer. M y own view is that there is much that is unnecessarily constraining, guilt-laden and even arbitrary deriving from writing on the gaze (itself a rather dreadful term) these days and that an initially insightful and liberatory thought has come to the point where it de-

tion. The effect is not only to increase distances within the discipline but also to turn away from looking carefully and critically at all these discourses about ozone holes, global warming, desertification, environmental hazards, population problems, and the like that play such an important role in shaping not only geography but also popular geographical knowledge. We can, and ought, to do far better on topics of this sort than wait for someone like Andrew Ross (1 991 ) to tell us what to think. Gregory might reasonably claim that he could not possibly deal with everything of significance within geography. But I am personally convinced that neglect of this crucial problem of the physical-human geography intersection is more than just a casual absence. It is a tacit disavowal of and a polemical attack against a certain conception of the geographical imagination that is desperately in need of sustenance and critical appraisal. The second critical absence is one that lies internal to his textual strategy. In his first chapter, The World as Exhibition, Gregory takes up what is fast becoming a very conventional view of the encounter of the West with the rest of the world. It was an encounter that sought to subsume the world under the all-encompassing and dominating gaze of a supposedly dominant culture bent upon an imperialist project of colonization. The trend in literary theory, subsequent to Saids crucial writing on Orientalism, is to insist that as much damage has been done by this imperializing gaze as was done by the swords, bayonets, muskets, and administrative violence of the colonial powers, and that the decolonization process that ameliorated the latter has left behind the much more serious problem of what to do with the long-lasting and nefarious psychological effects of cultural imperialism. Gregorys approach here is to proceed as if Saids Orientalism-rightly a very influential book-first revealed the complicity of much of traditional geography in a culturally imperialist and colonizing project. But Bill Bunge had long before taken up the cudgels against what he called the view from Buckingham Palace and Jim Blaut, in article after article (and now book after book-see Blaut 1976; 1987; 1992; 1993) has engaged in a powerful critique of ethnocentrism in geographical writing. But BIaut has been erased from Gregorys map of the critical geographical imagination-not a singre refer-

Geographical Knowledge in the Eye of Power serves a far more powerful critique than Gregory is prepared to give. In part, this question turns on another: how to conceptualize that "other" which is always being visualized and how the play of power operates within the particular choice of visualization. Here, too, there has been a great deal written that is both liberatory and insightful and Gregory has quite properly taken pains to register it. I do not object to what he does say, but regret that the critical discussion stops short at the point where critical advance is desperately needed. M y own view, here, is that Western thought has in this regard fallen victim to one of its own most powerful conceits-that individuals are self-contained entities who, in their lust for economic advantage, power, or whatever, go out and create subservient others (be it workers, women, colonized subjects, racially marked bodies, or whomever). A more dialectical view would have it that the self-other relation is fundamental to all formations of self and identity and that the only interesting question concerns the various modalities of power within which relations between self and other unfold. Put another way, if the creation of any sense of self depends on a process of "othering" then the creation of "others" (made so much of in the literature) is a universal not partial facet of the human condition, and it necessarily has constructive as well as destructive aspects. This issue also relates, of course, to the question of positionality and power relations in the production of geographical understandings. It is fundamental to Gregory's thesis that knowledge is power and that its construction and use depends heavily upon the positionality, predispositions, projective needs (usually masked), and hidden desires of the enquirer. It is part of Gregory's project to reveal the hidden plays of power and positionalities operating within supposedly neutral depictions of the world as well as within the abstractions of theory. He is right in this, but again fails to take the argument further. For there is a pervasive sense that there is something so partial as to be wrong with positionality while power too often takes on some connotation of an evil eye of domination. Gregory too often forgets Giddens's injunction to think of power in a twosided way, as power to dominate others but also as power to do, to create, to emancipatewhy else do we talk so positively of empow-

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erment of women, post-colonial subjects, the oppressed, or the working class? Even John Major promotes empowerment by cutting taxes to encourage the shop-therefore-I-am identity politics of contemporary capitalism. The opposition I have chosen here is important because it points up the issue of what and for whom power is going to be used. If, for example, I can construct some eye of power that would make one jot of difference to the ravages wrought by corporate capitalism or upon the ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and the religious right, I would not hesitate one second to do it. Gregory is not wrong to insist that the two forms of power bear a very complex relation to each other but he fails to chart a way to think through such dilemmas in more sophisticated ways. This reluctance derives, I suspect, from Gregory's critical resistance to anything that smacks of transcendental argument on the grounds that to transcend (or even to try to transcend) what "others" say is in some sense arrogant and dismissive of their views and interests. But active deployment of knowledge as a form of power is always about transcending something. Gregory is extremely knowledgeable and insofar as he deploys that knowledge with all the force at his command (and I would submit that this is precisely what he does to great effect in Geographical Imaginations) then he is most certainly trying to transcend many of the qualities of the debate in contemporary geography and to impose his own voice upon them. I have no problem with that at all and personally welcome his efforts. But there is something odd about attacking notions of transcendence and the exercise of knowledge as power when others do it, while actually engaging in the practice himself in the text's construction. The effect is to allow Gregory to seem to be reasonably nice to &eryone. But it also amounts to a refusal to position himself politically with respect to the debates extant within geography in particular or society in general. He may well regard this as a harsh judgment because he again and again points out his own positionality (though usually in the form of a mea culpa) and goes out of his way to concede as much as he can to feminists and postcolonial subjects (and if the race question was more in the forefront of debate within the discipline I am sure he would have taken that up more

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Katz effect is to depoliticize rather than sensitize geographical work to the issues that Gregory seems to believe are important.

forcefully too, rather than leaving it barely visible and dangling at the end of the first chapter). How well those concessions satisfy I will leave others to examine (my impression is that, for both good and bad reasons, they do not and will not). But the sub-text is that he is not being as nice to everyone as he seems. Throughout much of the book he seems to be located in some hermetically sealed galactic AWACS surveying all below with troubled mein and gentle countenance, dispensing wisdom and learned judgments, much as the grand sage of Francis Bacons Solomons House presented himself t o the people in that wonderfully prescient utopian fable of N e w Atlantis (see Leiss 1974: chapter 3). The only other political framing I can discover is that given in his introduction and conclusion. The former alerts us to the importance of his transition from Cambridge, where he was apparently unaware that women and postcolonial subjects existed, to Vancouver, where he discovered both; the latter holds it a good idea to reach out and touch bodies, not in a mood of arrogance, aggression and conquest, but in a spirit of humility, understanding, and care (p. 416). I accept these sentiments as genuinely meant, but I worry how easy it will be to mock them. In any case, by his o w n lights, such sentiments ought never be taken at face value and deserve to be called to intellectual and political account. As it stands, the

References
Blaut, I. 1976. Where was Capitalism Born? Antipode 8(2):1-11. -. 1987. The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory o f Nationalism. London: Zed Books. -. 1992. 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism and History. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. . 1993. The Colonizers M o d e l o f the World. New York: The Guilford Press. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press. Latour, B. 1993. We have never been Modern. Heme1 Hemstead, England: Harvester W heatsheaf. Leiss, W. 1974. The Domination o f Nature. Boston: Beacon Press. Martin, E. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking fmmunity in American Culture from the Days o f Polio to the Age o f AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. Merrifield, A. n.d. Situated Knowledge through Exploration: Reflections on Bunges Geographical Expeditions. Forthcoming in Antipode. Ross, A. 1991. Strange Weather; Culture, Science and Technology in the Age o f Limits. London: Verso. Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Major/M inor: Theory, Nature, and Politics

Cindi Katz
The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York

eographical Imaginations is Derek Gregorys utopian gesture. It aspires to expose the present in a way that lets us glimpse the outlines of a better future. Like the angels in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire with which he closes the book, Gregorys project is to articulate the fragments of the everyday in a way which would reveal them . . . as

being structured by and within the same socio-historical situation. The angels wanderings and investigations textualize the otherwise radically invisible structure of a history [and geography] in which all the fragments share (Casarino 1990, cited in Gregory p. 415). In Geographical Imaginations, Gregory wanders through and investigates the texts of social

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85(1), 1995, pp. 164-1 68 Ql995 by Association of American Geographers Published by Blackwell Publishers. 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, and 108 Covvley Road, Oxford, OX4 lIF, UK