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“A way of seeing”: an intellectual biography of Denis Cosgrove

Introduction

The late Denis Cosgrove (1948-2008) was one of the “best-known” and “most highly
regarded” geographers of our time (Driver, 2008: p1779). Over the course of his career, spent
predominantly in his native England at the universities of Oxford, Oxford Polytechnic,
Loughborough and Royal Holloway, and culminating in a Professorship at UCLA1 (see
Delano Smith et al, 2008), Cosgrove established himself as a scholar whose influence
extended well beyond his chosen field of cultural geography. Whilst strongly committed to
the notion of geography as a coherent intellectual project (Freytag and Jöns, 2006),
Cosgrove‟s work lay at the interface of the humanities, social, and environmental sciences
(Duncan 2009a), and he was instrumental in the revival of the humanities tradition within
human geography (della Dora, 2008; Lilley, 2004). Cosgrove‟s work on landscape (1998
[1985], 1985; Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988) is often deemed his most influential, not least for
the catalytic role it played in fashioning the “new cultural geography” of the late 1980s (Berg,
2005). However, this work must be situated within a broader corpus of study primarily
concerned with “the role of spatial images and representations in the making and
communicating of knowledge” (Cosgrove, 2008a), which constitutes a largely cohesive
project characterised by a number of recurring motifs, and a consistent, yet evolving
approach to geographical thought.

This essay will trace Denis Cosgrove‟s intellectual trajectory in the context of human
geography through an engagement with his major written works. I will first examine
Cosgrove‟s earliest writings in order to excavate the formative influences on Cosgrove‟s
work, arguing that the humanist Marxist perspective he initially embraces provides a number
of foundational tenets for his subsequent work. Second I will consider Cosgrove‟s
groundbreaking work on landscape, suggesting that the strength of his Marxian rethinking of
the concept consequently enabled him to play a central role in the development of the “new
cultural geography”. I will then examine Cosgrove‟s more recent work on mapping and
representation, suggesting that it demonstrates considerable continuity with his work on
landscape, whilst also broadening his empirical and theoretical scope. Finally, I will employ

1
University of California, Los Angeles.
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Cosgrove‟s final publication, Geography and Vision (2008b), as a lens through which to view
his body of work as a whole, arguing that it concretises a number of the recurrent themes in
his academic corpus. In conclusion, I speculate on what the legacy of Cosgrove‟s life‟s work
might be, and the specific insights to be gained from viewing his body of work as a whole.

“A radical cultural geography”

While a number of influences are apparent in Cosgrove‟s early writing, from Carl Sauer‟s
cultural geography to the “geographical imagination” of John Ruskin (Cosgrove, 1979), two
currents of thought assume centre-stage: humanistic geography and cultural Marxism. The
positivist abstractions of spatial science held no appeal for Cosgrove (1989a: p231), and
during his time as a graduate student, he instead turned to the work of humanistic
geographers2 that retained an appreciation of the distinctive qualities of places and landscapes
(Freytag and Jöns, 2006: p77; Cosgrove, 1989a). However, while Cosgrove valued the
emphasis that humanistic geography placed on exploring the meaningful, aesthetic and
subjective dimensions of the human environment, he was also critical of its failure to
“explain the phenomena of place and landscape”(Cosgrove, 1978: p70, emphasis in original)
beyond the context of the individual. In line with many of his contemporaries, Cosgrove
turned to Marxism to address geography‟s shortcomings, promoting a synthesis between
humanism and Marxism; a “radical cultural geography” (1978; 1983). Conceived as part of
an overarching project of historical materialism, yet rejecting economic determinism, this
approach would seek to recognise that places and landscapes are always produced in the
context of social formations - historically and geographically specific variations in the mode
of production - and therefore are imbued with symbolic meaning and class power (Cosgrove,
1983). While Cosgrove‟s adherence to humanist Marxism weakened over time, this combined
attention to the aesthetic and subjective dimensions of the human environment, and the
necessity of historical, contextual analysis and an appreciation of the workings of power
resonates throughout his work.

“The advance of the cultural”

Cosgrove‟s humanist Marxist approach to cultural geography was made manifest in his
subsequent work on landscape, centred on his seminal text Social Formation and the

2 Cosgrove cites Yi-Fu Tuan’s 1961 paper Topophilia as particularly influential (Cosgrove, 1989; Freytag and Jöns, 2006)
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Symbolic Landscape3 (1998 [1985]; see also 1985; 1993; Daniels and Cosgrove 1988). Social
Formation is still cited as a “path-breaking text” (Wylie, 2007), that is deemed one of the
most important books published in Anglo-American cultural geography (Duncan, 2005). The
book was ground-breaking for its application of a cultural Marxist approach to the idea of
landscape. The key thesis, as Cosgrove reiterates in the second edition of the text, is that:

landscape constitutes a discourse through which identifiable social groups historically

have framed themselves, and their relations with both the land and other human
groups, and that this discourse is closely related epistemically and technically to ways
of seeing. (Cosgrove 1998: pxiv)

In other words, „landscape‟ is not a neutral term, but an ideologically charged, historically
and geographically contingent “way of seeing” (1998[1985]: p1) whose development
paralleled the transition to capitalism in Europe from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth
century. The “visual ideology” (1985: p47) of landscape is thus complicit with the gaze of the
powerful, representing space such that it could be appropriated and controlled by a detached
individual observer. From this perspective, landscapes can be read as always already
representations of the prevailing “social formations” of capitalism, and therefore are
embedded with symbolic meaning, a notion that Cosgrove extended through applying the
iconographic method to landscape interpretation (Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988). In short,
Cosgrove‟s work opened up material landscapes, their representations, and the idea of
landscape, to critical scrutiny in a manner unprecedented in cultural geography.

While Social Formation profoundly altered the course of landscape study within cultural
geography, the influence of Cosgrove‟s work extended further, playing a catalytic role in the
critical reorientation of the sub-discipline. Social Formation became a rallying point for those
geographers wishing to address culture from an explicitly critical perspective (Berg, 2005:
p476), and therefore cast Cosgrove as a central figure in the development of the “new cultural
geography”. While he was keen not to present these advances as a coherent “school” of
thought, preferring the phrase “the advance of the cultural in geography” (1992: p566;
1993a), Cosgrove played an integral role in the institutionalisation of this approach in the late
1980s4. The level of Cosgrove‟s influence is apparent in the extent to which the key facets of

3 Hereafter Social Formation

4 As reflected in his authorship of progress reports on cultural geography (Cosgrove 1989b; 1990a; 1992) and his role as founding editor in
1994 of the journal Ecumene (later Cultural Geographies) (Driver, 2009).
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this approach mirror concerns previously expressed in his own work. Cosgrove and Jackson
(1987: p1) argue that cultural geography should be “contextual and theoretically informed”,
and interested in “the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and forms of
resistance to them”, with an understanding of culture as “the very medium through which
social change is experienced, contested and constituted”. This approach thus directly attends
to Cosgrove's previously expressed concerns with the theoretical impoverishment of the
Berkeley School and the subjective idealism of humanistic geographies, whilst also closely
aligning with the cultural Marxism found in Social Formation. Although the field has since
mutated in many novel directions beyond the influence of any individual, it is clear that
Cosgrove‟s work remains an “important backdrop in front of which the play of critical
cultural geography continues to unfold” (Berg, 2005: p477).

“Imagining, seeing and representing”

From the 1990s onwards, Cosgrove logically extended the concern with geographical
representations found in his work on landscape to a wider scale (Olwig, 2003). Much of this
work centres around the study of “mapping”; “acts of visualizing, conceptualizing, recording,
representing and creating spaces graphically” (Cosgrove, 1999: p1; Cosgrove and Martins,
2000), reaching its apogee with Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the
Western Imagination (2001; see also 1994a; 2007). This rich text takes a long-run historical
approach to the analysis of representations of the whole earth, considering their role in
constituting knowledge and meaning, and their implication in discourses of both power and
humanity (Cosgrove, 2001). Apollo’s Eye epitomises Cosgrove‟s later work in not adhering to
the Marxist approach associated with his work on landscape, instead emphasising his
humanist influences, and engaging with postmodern sensibilities. However, whilst
recognising the fallibility of the master-narrative implied by Marxism (1998: pxv), Cosgrove
also eschewed any dogmatic postmodernist theoretical position, professing a wariness of the
relativist implications of “too tight an embrace of the postmodern” (1994b: p305), and was
keen to demonstrate the long-run genealogy of postmodern thought (1990b; 2008c). Thus
from the 1990s into the twenty-first century, Cosgrove‟s work carved out a distinctive, yet
consistently influential niche within human geography, untrammelled by theoretical fashions
and empirically focussed on the graphical representation of the world.
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Cosgrove‟s final book,5 the posthumously published Geography and Vision (2008b),
consolidates his key foci of landscape, mapping and other visual representations of the world,
thus highlighting the recurring themes that permeate his work. For Cosgrove, “vision” is as
much about the imaginative act of envisioning the world as it is the ocular act of registering
it. Thus the concept encapsulates Cosgrove‟s focus on the links between graphic
representations and the visions of the world and society that they reflect and constitute. If, as
Cosgrove argues, geography is “continuous dialogue between physical observation and
graphic representation” (p218), then his work can be understood as both underpinned by, and
a testament to, this claim. Geography and Vision also represents the culmination of the
distinctive approach to geographical study that Cosgrove developed throughout his career.
Traces of Marxism, and Cosgrove‟s guarded engagement with postmodernism, remain
evident in the close contextual analyses of various geographical visions presented in the text,
whilst the broad historical scope echoes the concern with “the history and evolution of ideas”
(Freytag and Jöns, 2006: p82) evident in his studies of landscape and globalism. However,
more prominent is Cosgrove‟s desire to locate the text explicitly within the humanities
tradition, as he attempts to demonstrate the value of cultural geography to the “goals of
knowing the world and understanding ourselves” (Cosgrove, 2008b: p15). Geography and
Vision can thus be read as both a comprehensive summary of Cosgrove‟s empirical interests
and an articulation of his distinctive approach to cultural geography, which enables an
appreciation of his work as a coherent whole.

“La vita contemplativa”

Denis Cosgrove was “one of the few geographers about whom it could be truthfully said that
cultural geography would look significantly different were it not for him” (Duncan, 2009b:
p556). As demonstrated above, Cosgrove‟s work throughout his career on the relationship
between geography, vision and representation has been consistently innovative and
influential. The disciplinary context into which his work on landscape was received rendered
it the most immediately significant, yet his work must be read as a holistic oeuvre that for
many geographers “changed the way we look at the world and at images” (Staszak et al,
2009: p557). While the strength of Cosgrove‟s work is such that it will resonate throughout
studies of landscape, cartography, and the geographical imagination for the foreseeable
future, his legacy extends beyond his empirical foci to the question of the nature of

5
Geography and Vision was Cosgrove’s final individually authored text. Recent collaborations have also been published (Cosgrove and della
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geography itself. From Cosgrove‟s humanist perspective, the intellectual task of human
geography remained as much about la vita contemplativa – the contemplative life – as it did
about la vita activa – the active life (Freytag and Jöns, 2006: p85). For Cosgrove, the role of
geographical knowledge was not merely instrumental, to facilitate various critiques of
society, but to contribute to the humanities‟ overarching goal of “moral self improvement”
(della Dora, 2008: p384) through providing a critical understanding of ourselves and our
participation in nature (Cosgrove, 2008b: p33). If the central questions of humanism: “who
are we in relation to the world? How should we live our lives in a way that is fulfilling and
proper?” (Freytag and Jöns, 2006: p88), remain as pertinent as ever, then perhaps Denis
Cosgrove‟s lasting legacy will be his ability to reconnect geographical scholarship to these
enduring concerns.

1998 words.

Dora, 2009; Cosgrove and Fox, 2008)

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