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Earth Writing

Simon Springer
Department of Geography, University of Victoria
simonspringer@gmail.com

Abstract
Geography means earth writing, and so it is perhaps fitting that writing itself has become a primary
intellectual battleground in contemporary geographical thought. This paper advocates for metaphorical
earth writing, arguing that it unchains our geographical imaginations from the shackles of our
disciplinary past by boldly embracing geopoetics. I hope to spark debate by promoting the un-disciplining
of geography as a means to open up a theoretical space for voice, where a material space of
emancipation might follow. The notion that our epistemological, ontological, and methodological
choices are not apolitical decisions without consequence guides my inquiry. Accordingly I critique the
accusation of esotericism as a narrative that reifies the false dichotomy between academia and society.
Aversion to metaphor fails to recognize the epistemological challenge it raises and underestimates how
jargon combats commonsense notions that reinforce hierarchical power relations. How we write the
earth constitutes a political choice, where disciplining others into a singular way of knowing, being, and
doing geography is an affront to the possibilities of space. When we make space for earth writing as a
beautiful flourishing of geopoetics, we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the light and
energy of a more powerful geography.


Keywords
commonsense, esotericism, geography, geopoetics, metaphor, praxis



Introduction
[Geopoetics] is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation
of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially
integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a
poetics which places the planet Earth at the center of experience. It seeks a new or renewed sense of
world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our
knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world.
- Kenneth White (1989: np)

Geography means earth writing. Given this etymology it is both fitting and paradoxical that the issue of
writing has become one of the primary intellectual battlegrounds of contemporary geographical
thought. It was not too long ago that writing in the discipline proceeded through a naive realism and
was considered an entirely objective and unproblematic process wherein words were thought to link
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thoughts with objects in irrefutable ways (Peet 1994). Geography was accordingly a discipline
concerned with providing mirror representations of a predetermined, and already labeled earth. In this
sense, writing about the earth was envisioned as a straightforward process. One boards and disembarks
a passenger train at the station of their choosing, gains an appreciation for the terrain as the journey
proceeds, but the tracks have been laid and the possible destinations remain constrained and
readymade. The crisis of representation and the cultural turn in geography changed the parameters of
such thinking (Barnes 2001, Strohmayer and Hannah 1992), and representation could no longer be
seriously claimed as truth, but rather as interpretation. Methodologically, the scientific reliability of
results necessarily gave way to interpretive validity and epistemologically, writing can no longer be
considered a factual endeavor since truth is now recognized as being made through texts, rather than
outside of them. Writing, and indeed earth writing reveal as much about individual authors as they do
about the ostensible real world they serve to represent. Thus, Richard Peet (1994: 297) argues in
writing worlds, rhetorical devices such as metaphors, irony, and smiles are not merely decorative, but
central for conveying meaning. Metaphors play a pivotal role in shaping interpretive communities
(Fish 1980), and thereby, the facts that they emphasize. Moreover, a metaphors success or failure is
based on whether it identifies similarities between the thing investigated and the thing it is being
compared with, and from this we can recognize that we acquire knowledge via an inherently
metaphorical process. In contrast, naive realism results in the breakdown of communication. If two
people perceive things differently, particularly if they witness it with their own eyes, each can only
conclude that the other is a fool or a liar, and neither of these conclusions is conducive to fostering
respectful conversation (Wright 1994).
I want to explore some of the problematics of this divide between metaphorical earth writing
and the specter of naive realism that continues to haunt the discipline of geography. I do so by situating
my argument against authors like Mark Billinge (1983) who deride metaphorical writing as
ostentatious, nonsensical, and artificial do[ing] nobody and nothing least of all the discipline any
good. My ideas are closely aligned with feminists and postmodernists who have argued against the
muscular masculinity of Orwell-style lucidity and for the metaphorical moments, motions, and
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montages of deconstructed maps and displaced meanings (Bondi and Domosh 1992). Specifically, I
argue that it is high time, once and for all, to unchain our geographical imaginations from the shackles
of our disciplinary past to boldly embrace the immanence of geopoetics. Yet my purpose is not to engage
a polemic about what earth writing should look like in absolute terms by prescribing solutions. In fact,
my objective is to do quite the opposite. I hope to open up debates about earth writing by advocating
the un-disciplining of our discipline. The polemicist, Michel Foucault (1998) once noted,
proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On
principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking;
the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is
wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not
consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as
interlocutor, from any possible dialogue.
As an advocate of an agnostic view of politics (Author 2011), maintaining a firm commitment to
egalitarianism, autonomy, and the presupposition of equality (Rancire 1999), far from seeking to be
polemical, my argument seeks to engage anti-polemics. I am not trying close doors and silence those
whose version of earth writing might differ from my own, but instead I want to open a theoretical
space for voice where a material space of emancipation might follow. My refusal to offer a prescriptive
view of how geographical thought should intervene in the world aligns with this emancipatory space
(Author 2012). Here, direct consensual decision-making and mutual respect are promoted rather than a
delegation of authority by positioning myself as a disciplinary gatekeeper.
I begin this paper by reflecting on some of my experiences as a geographer by exploring how
my use of metaphor has sometimes been treated with aversion. This reading of contemporary earth
writing is not unique to my encounters, and I critique it on the basis of its failure to give due
consideration to the epistemological challenge that such antipathy represents. I similarly contest the
derision of jargon. The importance of specialized language is that it allows us to combat
commonsense modes of thought that reinforce hierarchical power relations. Jargon is in fact common
to all earth writing, including the most positivist varieties (Cresswell 2013a). I then turn my attention
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towards the intended audience and the interpretive communities that we write for. Here I suggest that
the charge of esotericism is vacuous and problematically works to reify the false dichotomy between
the academy and the world at large. This discussion seeks to offer a more honest appraisal of how
knowledge is constructed and mapped onto the world. Knowledge is not a flashpoint of enlightenment
that is transmitted from heaven to earth through great men who have been touched by the divinity of
genius, but a situated and ongoing circuitous network of innumerable rhizomic connections that are
forever folding, unfolding and refolding (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). An authoritarian ethos informs
the former view by interpreting knowledge as the providence of the celestial, whether religious or
secular, wherein reality is a fixed parameter that we reveal through observing its true nature. In
contrast, the latter view opens up an aperture on a more grounded and democratic basis of knowledge
by recognizing that perception defines reality, not the other way around. Our epistemological,
ontological, and methodological choices are accordingly not apolitical decisions without consequence.
They have resonant material effects that pulse throughout the integral whole of the universe. The closer
we are to their epicenter of influence, the stronger the vibrations. The final section before the
conclusion accordingly highlights the implications of methods in relation to metaphor, seeking to
replace the former with the latter. Here I argue that how we write about the world constitutes a deeply
political choice. Disciplining others into a singular way of knowing, being, and doing geography is a
violent affront to the possibilities of space (Massey 2005), and it is a dangerous game that I refuse to
play. Instead, my inspiration is drawn from the geonautics of Gaston Bachelard (1994), who sailed
beautiful words as vessels of exploration. Equally I want to tip my hat to the zesty geographical
imaginations of Sarah de Leeuw (2012), Tim Cresswell (2013b), and Maleea Aker (2013) as they dance
and play along the poetic contours of lifes unremitting potential. When we make space for earth
writing as a beautiful flourishing of geopoetics we place the earth at the center of experience, releasing the
light and energy of a much more powerful geography.



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Dead Metaphors
metaphor connects abstract thought with embodied experience, providing a grounding we often fail to
see precisely because it is so pervasive and fundamental.
- N. Katherine Hayles (2001: 44)

Delicate words exhausted through overuse. Bawdy words made temperate by repetition. Enchanting and
enchanted words wand broken. Words of the spirit forced into flesh. Words of the flesh unlovely in a
white gown. Slang in a sling shot hurled and hurled and hurled. That is the legacy of the dead.
- Jeanette Winterson (1996: 65)

At the time of this writing, I am only five years into a career as a professional geographer. Within this
time span, like many other young scholars concerned with the pressures of securing a position and
attaining tenure in a context where Ph.D. graduates are increasing while actual jobs are decreasing, I
operate with a certain degree of anxiety. My subject position has self-admittedly transformed into a
publish or perish mentality, adding up to a fairly significant amount of experience with peer review in
a relatively short period. What stands out as most notable in my negotiation of the peer review process
to date are the echoes of geographys past that continue to visit us here in the present. While not often
expressed in published workalthough there are exceptions (cf. Binns 2007)behind the scenes there
seems to be somewhat of an aversion for metaphorical or poetic writing and a clear preference for
banal descriptions of material conditions. While a lot of this negative energy is focused on disdain for
the metaphoric terrain of critical theory, geopoetics extends beyond metaphor into texture, repetition,
shape and sound, where the scope of theory and the hope of creativity collide in kaleidoscope.
[N]othing corrupts the geographical literature of our time more than faddishness, verbal trickery, and
the uncritical employment of unnecessary literary conceit said Billinge (1983). Bah humbug! The
inclination for material description that continues to ripple across the discipline is extremely troubling
insofar as it risks taking us a step backwards to the colonial geography of yesteryear. Description,
Edward Said (1978/2003: 84) argued, was the first great collective appropriation of one country by
another. This revelation is not surprising, since colonialism itself is premised upon the power of
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representing Other peoples and their worlds as not like us, and thus in need of salvationary gestures
like the white mans burden. Nonetheless, I have encountered peer reviewers who seem intent on
pressing hang-ups over metaphor and language as far as they can take them: is this scholarship as I
would like to see it in a flagship journal, a referee wrote of my essay (Author 2013), or simply a series
of rhetorical tropes (e.g., zombies, vampires) used to construct a polemic about a situation whose
materiality deserves far greater attention. My earth writing was, in the view of this anonymous
reviewer, not grounded enough to warrant publication as I was somehow doing injustice to my research
participants by employing metaphors in the presentation of my arguments. I was expectedly upset by
such commentary.
Even more concerning than any wound to my ego is that such a method of critique proceeds as
an attempt to invalidate alternative epistemological positions, seeking to discipline others into one
particular mode of earth writing, as though there is only one correct way to do geography. The
parallels with colonialism are hard to ignore, as its gaze constitutes a strategy of embodying disciplinary
mechanisms wherein power is relayed through various nodes that legitimize particular ways of seeing
and doing (de Certeau 2000). Of course, this could instead be a case of my chosen metaphors ultimately
failing to resonate, but given that they were all borrowed directly from the particular interpretive
community that I intended as my audience, I am inclined to think otherwise. Chris Harmans (2012)
recent book Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, and a number of articles including
ones by geographers such as Jamie Peck (2010b) employ the zombification metaphor. The phrase
vampiric state was popularized by J. H. Frimpong-Ansah (1991) in The Vampire State in Africa: the
Political Economy of Decline in Ghana, and taken up by geographers like Barry Riddell (1997) to refer to the
idea that the state saps individuals of their full potential, treating human lives as expendable. In this
particular instance, the metaphors usage extends back over a century to Karl Marxs (1867/1976)
analogy to vampires in Capital Volume 1: Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by
sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. So complaining about a metaphor
that has been in circulation within the realm of political economy for almost 150 years seemed quite
misguided. Nonetheless, I was explicitly told that this type of earth writing had no place in a leading
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disciplinary journal. This sort of critique then fundamentally amounts to the imposition of what
constitutes authentic geography, rather than remaining open to the legitimacy of other epistemological
and ontological views and making space for the productive employment of different senses of earth
writing.
The claim that language ought to have clarity or simplicity is a typical reactionary response to
poststructuralist writings see The Bad Writing Contest run by Denis Dutton (1998), former editor
of Philosophy and Literature, who awarded Judith Butler top prize. This assertion cuts to the heart of the
crisis of representation that continues to trouble geographical scholarship, most overtly through the
recent turn towards non-representational theory (Thrift 2007). The quest for simplicity is linked to a
problematic, modernist understanding of language that suggests language itself conveys an already
existing truth, as though we can ever say what we mean, or conversely mean what we say. In other
words, at the heart of the issue of writing style is an epistemological challenge, as the notion of clarity
in writing posits an objective reality, wherein what is clear for one is clear for all. The phantom of
objectivity is of course the sine qua non of the god-trick that torments Donna Haraway (1988).
Champions of conservative views frequently scold those who advance more radical perspectives, where
the latter have long been the focus of polemics. As Herbert Marcuse (1964/1991: 192) argued,
The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say? Dont you conceal
something? You talk a language which is suspect. You dont talk like the rest of us, like the man in the
street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your
tricks, purge you.
Marcuse continues by suggesting that the only response to such an attack is to argue that if the
intellectual could convey her ideas in terms of ordinary language, she would probably have done so in
the first place. So the idea that earth writing can avoid what some might label as jargonistic or turgid
language and somehow still seriously challenge traditional, commonsense (Gramsci 1971) ideas is self-
contradictory as the epistemological position here is irreducibly linked to language. If we are to
challenge existing understandings, particularly when they are rooted in an unreflexive sense of tradition,
it becomes necessary to write very carefully and in terms that avoid everyday conventions. As Judith
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Butler (1999: np) contends:
If commonsense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust
social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging
commonsense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world.
The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of
German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in
shaping and altering our common or natural understanding of social and political realities.
Thus, while the anti-commonsense language of some earth writing might seem challenging, obscure, or
even esoteric, particularly to those who disagree with a poststructuralist interpretation of language, this
is an epistemological challenge, and not simply a matter of writing style.
Rather than being obtuse or conveyed with froth, as has been said of my work, I would instead
like to think of my choice of metaphors and writing style as part of a poetic shift in earth writing,
particularly with respect to my attempts to grapple with violence (Author 2011, 2013). Theodore
Adorno (1981: 34) once argued that To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric as he could not
fathom how a humanity, capable of such bloodshed, could make sense of and in turn relate this horrific
tale. Adorno, burdened by the emotional weight of violence, was wrong. It is not poetry that is
impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose. As Slavoj Zizek (2008: 4-5) writes Realistic prose fails,
where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds. That is to say, when
Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after Auschwitz, this impossibility is an
enabling impossibility: poetry is always about something that cannot be addressed directly, only
alluded to. Thus, in the wake of the crisis of representation earth writing can no longer be considered
as a straightforward process of conveying the real word. Poetry becomes an essential component of
geographys recent affective turn, it becomes enabling and particularly so vis--vis the commonsense
logics and structural violence of capitalism, law, and the state. Consequently, my choice of language,
that is, my style of earth writing and its inflection with metaphor, is a purposeful tactic, one that I
contend is necessary for the philosophical nature of the arguments I choose to make, but also as a
particular challenge to commonsense. What those who advocate more empirical, realist, or scientific
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frames for geographical scholarship often forget is that these too are discursive fields laden with jargon,
technobabble, and gobbledygook. All researchers are immersed in a specific epistemic field. In the same
way that a fish is not aware of the water until it is pulled to the surface and can no longer breathe, we
are not appropriately cognizant of our surroundings until someone from outside that field attempts to
asphyxiate us. While fostering awareness of this habitus is a crucial measure of reflexivity that keeps
scholarship alive (Bourdieu 1990) meaning that we should be made aware of the fragile mortality of
our limited perspectives stifling what you dont understand is a reactionary and intensely oppressive
undertaking that murders both philosophy and metaphor.

In Defence of Esotericism
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in
academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your
pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one,
surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
- Richard Dawkins (1999: 141)

[Esotericism] has always been considered the domain of the Other. It has been imagined as a strange
country, whose inhabitants think differently from us and live by different laws: whether one felt that it
should be conquered and civilized, avoided and ignored, or emulated as a source of inspiration, it has
always presented a challenge to our very identity, for better or for worse.
- Wouter Hanegraaff (2012: 3)

The writing styles of a great many Continental philosophers, critical theorists, and poststructuralist
thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Jacques
Rancire, Emmanuel Levinas, and Pierre Bourdieu have been critiqued as elitist, obscure, and esoteric
(Eagleton 1996; Epstein 1995; Sokal and Bricmont 1998). While I dont want to lend the impression of
self-importance that sees my work as of the same caliber as these profound thinkers, each of these
authors has greatly inspired me. Despite the ongoing critiques of their particular styles of writing, the
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work of critical theory remains some of the most highly regarded, highly read, and highly cited writings
in the academy today. In this regard, I dont worry that my writing style will diminish the reception of
my work or how widely it might be read. If we are to be honest about our practice, the work of
professional geographers appears primarily in academic journals, not popular magazines, so in most
instances we are clearly not trying to speak to a general audience. My expectation is that those who
choose to read my articles will already have some interest in the topic, and some appreciation of the
framing literature. I also believe the intellectual importance of a contribution should exceed concerns
for the number of citations or downloads it might receive in the future. If that were the sole concern of
any given academic journal, it would be a losing game akin to playing the stock market or gambling,
rather than an intellectual exercise. Nonetheless, I have frequently encountered reviewers who have
encouraged me to operate in a more realist frame. The idea is that in doing so I might gain a larger
audience, as though we can ever interpret who might read our work and for what means and ends it
might be used after it is written up. In a review of Gayatri Spivaks (1999) A Critique of Post-Colonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Terry Eagleton (1999) attacked the book as an exercise in
being as obscurantist as you can decently get away with. Yet Spivaks interrogations of political
commonsense have reached thousands of scholars and have resonated far beyond the academy as her
work is highly regarded in activist circles as well. Butler (1999: np) has been at the center of similar
critiques, and she similarly defends Spivak against Eagleton by suggesting that, perhaps it is precisely
her well-earned popularity, her ability to reach so many people, and change their thinking so
profoundly, that forms the basis of Eagletons ressentiment. Likewise, I wonder how many
contemporary earth writers would regard Gayatri Spivaks (1988) monumental Can the Subaltern
Speak? as an exercise in elitism simply because of its poetic quality? Does this character of poetics in
itself make academic work rarefied?
The accusation of esotericism is a difficult one to counteract. We should recognize this
particular line of critique in academia as polemical and antagonistic precisely because it is meant to
discredit and silence those subjected to it, to render them as Other. So much of contemporary
academia is tied up in ego, an unfortunate repercussion of the neoliberalization of the academy and the
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heightened individualism that comes with it (Canaan and Schuman 2008, Ginn 2014). When one
achieves a certain level of notoriety, you can almost be certain that there will be a groundswell of
detractors vying for attention, where allegations of esotericism resound like a battle cry. The accused is
not supposed to be able to defend her position as the charge has been made, and in its presentation, it
is typically mounted as a truth claim. Yet one of the central concerns of critical theory is challenging the
construction, buttressing, and perpetuation of truth claims, so it is both ironic and somewhat
unsurprising that critics would employ the very tactic that is being opposed as an attempt to discredit
poststructuralist authors as the message challenges the foundation of authority and expertise from
which so many scholars derive their identity. Beyond what I would consider a form of self-conciliation,
such charges of esotericism are divisive, particularly when conceivably we, as geographers, are not
nihilistic in our outlook and view our earth writing as collectively contributing towards some modicum
of greater good. This realization is where the union of scholarly activity and activism should come into
play (Fuller and Kitchen 2004; Hay 2001). Do any of us really expect that publishing in leading
disciplinary journals will make any more of a political intervention simply by using straightforward
language and keeping our studies firmly rooted in empirical rather than emotive concerns? To venture a
yes to this question seems like an ill-conceived, anti-reflexive leap of logic. This reasoning
problematically demonstrates a treatment of theoretical concerns in a pejorative sense and overlooks
the possibility of making meaningful changes by using a more hands-on approach of scholar-activism,
where theory and practice converge as praxis (Chatteron 2008).
When academics, including geographers, are honest to themselves about what the impact of
their published research might be, they soon start to realize that it is unlikely that one particular piece of
writing will singularly bring about any revolutionary change. To think otherwise about ones work is not
only a delusion of grandeur, but it conveniently skirts around the asymmetrical power involved in any
research project, as though you can give back simply by writing your research up and publishing it. An
academic journal article is, after all, for an academic audience, where the targeted readership is a
particular interpretive community. How one gives back to a research community in contrast, is an
entirely different question from that of our written output and speaks to the need for an activist
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orientation in our commitments as scholars (Autonomist Geographies Collective 2010). We need the
theory to engage a process of meaningful action, and we need the action to refine our theories
(Dempsey and Rowe 2004; Ward 1973/2001). Of course committing human geography to a
progressive, inclusive, and emancipatory agenda necessitates a negation of the ivory tower syndrome
and the false dichotomy it maintains between the academy as a space of knowledge production, on the
one hand, and wider society as the domain of social struggle on the other. But thinking that the means
to achieve this is simply by making our metaphors more accessible, our writing style clearer, and our
theory more simplistic within academic forums is a naive assessment. We need a dual approach that, on
the one hand, maintains theoretical sophistication in academic forums, and on the other hand attempts
to build solidarities through activist connections and by producing more accessible works for a public
audience in non-academic forums. There is also a distinct need, as Don Mitchell (2008) persuasively
argues, for desk-bound radicals to make space for activism by guarding an intellectual space that
fosters dissent. The academy is not a separate sphere of society, but an integral component of it.
Academia can be used as a site to nurture activism through promoting greater community participation
among students (Rouhani 2012). In short, there is no such thing as theory-for theorys sake, which is an
unhelpful derisive that gives license to a dangerous sense of anti-intellectualism. Even the most
abstracted of concepts, like neoliberalism, can be shown to have grounded material effects (Peck
2010b).
It is at least partly owing to the competitive nature of contemporary academia that scholars
proceed on the facile hope that their next paper will receive thousands of citations and be regarded as a
watershed moment. We participate in the perpetuation of the great man game, where winning means
other scholars turn your name into an adjective. A more honest appraisal of the intellectual milieu
recognizes every brilliant idea as merely a snapshot, an incremental moment relationally connected to
the entire body of knowledge within which it engages, a corpus that emerges from endless
conversations occurring both inside and outside of the academy (Graeber 2007). Any supposed stroke
of genius is not separate from the ongoing processes in which that achievement is rooted. All ideas
grow as a rhizome, branching off in new directions, but nonetheless irrevocably connected to a source
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that provides nourishment (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). So although my name appears as the author of
this paper, I did not conceive the ideas that compose it any more than a chef invents vegetable soup.
She may decide on the ingredients in a methodical fashion, or arrange them in new ways through
experimentation and serendipity. She may even cultivate a garden to grow the vegetables and spices
herself, watering them and ensuring that they have enough sun. Regardless of any of this activity that
went into the eventual arrival at soup, she did not make the vegetables, or the water, or the sun. All she
really did was offer a new preparation of constituents through trial, error, and fortuity. The building
blocks were there for her to use, so her authorship of the soup comes only through its poetic
arrangement. We may enjoy her soup or despise it depending on our aesthetic taste, or we may even
qualify it as chowder, potage, consomm, or bisque, but we can hardly deny that it is soup. Earth
writing is much the same. It is a symptom of ego that denies the integrality of knowledge, and wasted
effort to dictate the correct way to do geography. If you dont like the soup, dont eat it, but at least be
willing to try new flavors instead of simply rejecting them as esoteric, and appreciate that taste is always
something that is acquired, making it inseparable from power relations and cultural hegemony
(Bourdieu 1979). To combat the dominance of the normative, Antonio Gramsci recognized that
intellectuals play a key role insofar as they can either reinforce or reject the status quo, understanding
that clarity in writing was not enough to transform society. For Gramsci (1971: 10) we must embrace a
more holistic praxis: The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence,
which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in
practical life, as constructor, organizer, as permanent persuader, not just simple orator.

Counting on Metaphor
mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal
metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success
of this metaphor.
- Norbert Weiner (1954: 95)

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[N]ot everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- William Bruce Cameron (1963: 13)

The union of the mathematician with the poet this surely is the ideal.
- William James (1879/1987: 356-357)

There are noticeable instances where geographers have refused to be disciplined into geographys
longstanding scientific tradition, employing poetic flourishes that breathe life into their thinking and
writing about the earth. David Lowenthal (1985), Yi-Fu Tuan (1990), Gunnar Olson (1991), Marcus
Doel (1999), Alan Pred (2004), Geraldine Pratt (2004), Doreen Massey (2005), and Nigel Thrift (2007)
all stand out as having offered new, poetic visions for geographical inquiry, yet as bright as their stars
shine, they remain exceptions in the face of significant disciplinary inertia. In this light I am both
inevitably and purposefully engaging in an imagined dialogue with [my] critics as one of the referees
of this paper chided. Treating imagination in such a derisive light ignores that flight of imagination is
an indispensable element in geographical epistemology (Livingstone and Harrison 1981: 95). So if I
imagine my work as being of a slightly different shade than most geographers, it is owing to the
encounters Ive had on my academic travels from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand and back to
Canada. It is often easy to forget that the broad base of geography as a discipline doesnt warmly
welcome the specialized language of critical theory. Jargon is generally viewed in a pejorative light,
often to conceal a lack of understanding. Yet specialized language, which is all jargon is, penetrates and
pervades in all of geographys nooks and crannies (Cresswell 2013a). Small hills are called drumlins,
coordinates become geodetic datum, and the repetition and rehearsal of identity is streamlined as
performativity. Poststructuralism has taught us that truth is necessarily constructed and fungible,
where understanding arises as positioned, incomplete, relational, subjective, and disputed. There is no
direct compliance between an epistemology of understanding and a shift in material human conditions.
Achieving social justice is hard work and requires direct action, but I refuse to set out a program that
concretizes this process. My earth writing seeks to open windows so that the breeze of possibility may
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circulate, not to prescribe solutions, meaning to write for, or from late Middle English, confine within
bounds. Yet nearly twenty years later my experience matches that of Dixon and Jones (1996: 767),
where reactions from scientific colleagues typically range along a scale measured from scornful
derision at one end to bemused indifference at the other. Certainly it is the responsibility of the author
to make her point understandable, but there also exists an unwillingness to understand specialist
knowledge that does not match ones own.
Ridicule offers both a risk and an opportunity. The risk is reactionary, where we can come out
swinging at a fixed understanding of scientific geography and therein essentialize our target. The
opportunity is to advocate for a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious geography that is anti-essentialist and
moves beyond repudiation (Dixon and Jones 1996). So my purpose isnt about metaphor replacing
scientific method as much as it is advocating for metaphorical emancipation from epistemological,
ontological, and methodological constraints. I earth write as an act of trespass into a domain that has
erected barriers around possibility. There are both geographical and political implications lodged within
my desire to transgress, as metaphors are intimately woven into relations of power and should be seen
as ways of acting and not merely poetic flourishes (Cresswell 1997: 330). Spatial metaphors offer
rhetorical guides to possible worlds, allowing for the contestation of existing power relations. (Price-
Chalita 1994: 236). The stakes are high, and the citadel of scientific knowledge is well watched, but I
still want to crawl under the chain-link fence with a pocket full of fat caps, paint an aerosolic mural on
the wall, and then slip away, hoping that the sincerity of my expression will override any impulse to
paint over it with dull, grey tones. The vaunted place of scientific ways of knowing in contemporary
society is our little fairy-tale Paul Feyerabend (1975/2010) argued, continuing that if science has
found a method that turns ideologically contaminated ideas into true and useful theories, then it is
indeed not mere ideology, but an objective measure of all ideologies. This antagonism is the hallmark
of polemics as much of contemporary science refuses to accept or accommodate any other position,
claiming its results have arisen without any assistance from and in total independence of non-scientific
elements. Other knowledges are regarded as totally without merit (Haraway 1988). The separation of
science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge.
"'
If we want to understand both our physical surroundings and human relations, then we must be willing
to accept all epistemologies, all ontologies, and all methods, and not just a small selection of them
(Feyerabend 1975/2010). Such a view is also more in tune with deconstructing the false dichotomy
between the university as a space of knowledge production and wider society as the domain of social
struggle (Pickerill 2008).
When we view the role of the intellectual as one of interrogating anew the evidence and the
postulates, of shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of
taking a new measure of rules and institutions then the distinction between inside and outside of the
academy becomes even more meaningless (Foucault 1991: 12). Academics engage with and reflect upon
the world the same as anyone else; only our task is to analyze the limits of our knowledge and write
about it. Thus, it is not the place of the earth writer to be prescriptive as to how society should be
organized, as imposing ones view in such a manner would simply recapitulate the essence of
imperialist/state-making projects. The task of (re)imagining society should rightfully be an ongoing,
protean process, enacted through the collective will and empowered by the solidarity of those
communities concerned as a process of radical democracy. Moreover, the insistence that (social)
science possesses the only correct method (i.e., empiricism) is mere ideology. As A. J. Baker
(1960/2009: 240) argues, There are various false theories, metaphysical views, overt and concealed
moral and political assumptions that have wide influence in society; the role of the critic is to expose
these as illusions or ideologies, and this is a permanent job which has to be carried on from generation
to generation. It is for good reason that much of contemporary geographical scholarship is not rooted
exclusively in empiricism and casts significant doubt on scientific methodologies and the ocular-
centrism of a mode of inquiry that privileges the observable as the foundation of certainty in
knowledge. Geography is the suns warmth that catches you off guard when winters bitterness has
chased the last robin south. Never failing to surprise, to captivate, or inspire, geography is felt in ways
that our senses dont immediately recognize and often cannot explain. Empiricism remains, but
geography is more than the interpretation of experience, breaking the heart, awakening the beast,
touching the soul, inciting boredom, or exciting expectations. None of this is rational. Topophilia.
"(
Topophobia. The allure of the earth is found in dusty roads, sea breeze rhythm, and electric light.
Geography glides across the ballroom of life with passion, purpose, and paradox.
As a geographer I am not committed to any one epistemological, ontological, or
methodological understanding, but am instead prone to continuously re-evaluating my positionality
through employing a certain anarchism in my thinking (Author 2012). To quote Foucault (1988: 10)
once more, The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the
beginning. So in response to Marxs famous thesis that philosophers have only hitherto interpreted the
world when the real point is to change it, Foucault would have undoubtedly argued that our constant
task must be to keep changing our minds. Changing our minds is changing the world, and academic
stasis and the refusal of other epistemological, ontological, and methodological positions is thus of the
same chord that privileges entrenched hierarchies. It is disciplinary in the most regressive sense of
working alongside regulatory power (biopower and governmentality) to control individual bodies, and
specifically how those bodies think and what they can do (Foucault 1976/2003). Rather than using
disciplinary strategies to encourage docile scholars with no sense of what it means to be political (K.
Mitchell 2008), we should be unleashing our epistemological and ontological precepts to encourage the
wilding of our earth writing. Within the methodical fashioning of a domesticated geography, there is a
feral yearning for exploration that cannot be repressed. The desire to open up the idea of method itself
to critique is not akin to a refusal of validity. Interpreting the validity of a particular work is a matter of
positionality. Clearly relativism is as much of a disembodied god-trick as objectivity, so my intention is
to locate validity as a form of situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). Validity is all too often interpreted
exclusively as the reliability of results. Personal bias is seen as destroying reliability. Yet validity can
take many forms including validity-as-culture, validity-as-ideology, validity-as-gender, validity-as-
language/text, and validity-as-relevance/advocacy. Rather than presenting one particular view of
validity as correct, Altheide and Johnson (2000: 290) acknowledge interpretive validity as being
relevant and serviceable for some application of knowledge, asking the questions Is it useful? and
most importantly Does it liberate, or empower?. This final question is what drives my research. I
have sought to contribute to a discourse of non-violence and to promote the furtherance of
")
emancipatory ideas and liberatory politics. I refuse to appeal to the institutionalized channels of the
status quo in putting forward formal (policy) proposals, or to offer prescriptive overviews of what
those groups I do research with should be doing. Such articulations are bureaucratic at best and
authoritarian at worst.
It should be fairly obvious that all of this is antithetical to a more emancipatory geography,
where individuals are self-empowered and collectively organized through voluntary associations to
chart their future paths, rather than being coerced to accept the guidance of a state leader or cajoled by
a patronizing and misguided academic. I see the role of the intellectual, and hence the purpose of
scholarship, as precisely being the social conscience of society. Not speaking for society, but thinking
critically within it as an integral component of a larger whole. Accordingly I write in such a way that is
intended as diagnostic. Foucault (1990: 36), from whom I take my cue, once said, I would like to say
something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present... any description
must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of
freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e. of possible transformation. Geography, when
given methodological freedom, when attuned to interpretive validity, and when positioned as a situated
knowledge, can provide that space. It is only through a radical, committed, and sustained critique of the
violent institutions and practices that shape our lives, including our individual implication in them, that
humanity might be able to cast off the chains that we have made for ourselves in the form of
capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, statism, militarism, classism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism,
genderism, ageism, ableism, speciesism, homophobia, and transphobia. As such, I make no apologies
for the diagnostic approach that I have adopted in my earth writing, as its intention is to open up a
potential space for emancipatory action. Along these same lines, Colin Ward (1973/2001) argued that it
should be obvious that a whole series of partial and incomplete victories, of concessions won from
the holders of power will not lead to a free society, but it will widen the scope of free action and the
potentiality for freedom in the society we have. These sentiments hint at how achieving social justice
is not actualized as a cut and dry process of direct action, but rather through opening up political and
geographical imaginations, the freedom of individuals might become more possible (Author 2012).
"*
Action is not separate from theory, where one is material and the other disengaged. There is an
inescapable mathematics that forms from the ongoing chain of being. Our collective endeavors are part
of an earth that constantly moves, where in our earth writing we get to decide what counts. This praxis
is, of course, a calculus, but it is also undeniably geopoetry in motion.

Conclusion
Wanting to lay down the law for each and every science is the project of positivism. Its up to you, who
are directly involved in what goes on in geography, faced with all the conflicts of power which traverse it,
to confront them and construct the instruments which will enable you to fight on that terrain.
- Michel Foucault (1980: 64-65)

Visionaries are derided or despised, and practical men rule our lives. We no longer seek radical solutions
to the evils of society, but reforms.
- Marie Louise Berneri (1950/1982: 1)

Much of contemporary earth writing remains stymied by a quagmire of authority that claims a truth
about what constitutes social science and presents arguments about how that geography is to be
constructed. Alternatives, most notably poststructuralist, feminist, indigenous, and anarchist
interpretations, remain marginalized or excluded. Clamoring for pragmatism, the goal of earth writing is
conceived as a mapping of concretized, material answers to social problems. It is meant to be
prescriptive, or at least, so we are told. Naive realism lingers, gnawing away at the gains made by
feminists in particular, and their repeated demonstration of the importance of making space for other,
decolonizing ways of thinking and being in the world (Bondi 2002; Shaw et al. 2006; Smith 1999).
Leaving pathways open for collective exploration and reinterpretation by relevant communities and
participants to the research is rarely celebrated, and the authorial voice of the geographer becomes
entrenched. For some, there is a hidden anxiety that comes with claiming expert knowledge. Yet
another solution is proposed: we are told to simply dumb down our language, to make it more
accessible and straight to the point. Although such an argument may appear as an exercise that counters
#+
esotericism, it should be recognized that such a critique could only be taken seriously when articulated
from above by an expert. Writing and language are cultural artifacts that depend upon the value
judgement of the reader or listener, and what is rendered as jargon as opposed to colloquialisms is
not simply a matter of fact, but an aesthetic construction that is inseparably linked to class (Bourdieu
1979). What this suggestion to dumb down problematically does then is entrench particular ways of
knowing as elitist, as though they can only be understood by the few rather than the many. The
outcome is an anti-intellectualism that produces the academic as an Other who lacks empathy for
common folk and everyday concerns. Such sentiments are not only divisive, but also give license to the
silencing of political dissent.
More important than the quest for clarity is the notion of understanding. Complex ideas are
rarely obvious, and no matter how clear the writing the idea will remain difficult (Cresswell 2013a: 9).
More important then is asking what kind of understanding can change the world in meaningful and
liberating ways? Can metaphor mitigate the constant collapse of understanding? Can it escape the
reduction of understanding to a disciplined status quo? Are the answers to these questions to be found
at least partially in esotericism? These are inspiring thoughts, gifted to me by one of the anonymous
reviewers of this paper. I dont have a loud and commanding answer, only quiet, pensive
contemplation. Please dont ask me to lead you. Dear reader, this life is your journey! I dont want to
prescribe solutions to pre-scribe, to pre-write, to pre-determine, to confine within bounds. All I desire is to write
about the earth more metaphorically, more poetically, but always to the point, a point that needs to be
discursively created. Discourse is no less material than materiality itself. These are not separate
concepts, and so an epistemology of understanding is sufficient to change human conditions. As we
think, as we act, as we write, so we shall be, Springer (2014) muses, To write the earth with the pen
of our hopes and dreams is not merely to sketch an illustration without materiality. Its very
composition refracts against the world in which we live and therein transforms its character. In cutting
a path through the thorny thickets of misunderstanding, my point or my prickle is to open up my
earth writing to the possibility of metaphor to delight, to tickle. I want you to understand me just as
much as you want me to understand you, but I stumble, as do you, because Im not entirely sure that I
#"
always fully understand myself. Not for lack of trying, and not simply to obfuscate and appear clever in
having done so. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same Foucault (1972: 17)
once wrote, leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least
spare us their morality when we write. Im a work in progress and my ideas shift as I gather new
experiences. Things dont always fall perfectly into place. But I try. I enjoy trying. Replacing method
with metaphor suggests that its ok to live in our dreams, adding color inside the lines of life on the
hope that a bold palette will change our ways. The earth is choking, mapped into submission by our
collective social, economic, and political failures, and so I write to try to set things right.
Language, and by extension writing, can be a powerful tool when aimed at dismantling
hegemonic ways of seeing and disrupting existing power constellations. The articulation of theory
accordingly allows anti-colonial discourse to permeate the seemingly impermeable bedrock of a broad
spectrum of material interventions (Jiwani 2011). Direct action similarly revitalizes our systems of
thought and the expression of philosophy by opening all of lifes birthday presents at once and reveling
in the rapturous cacophony of ribbons, color, paper, and mirth that comes with the realization of
curiosity. As a consequence of acknowledging this reciprocating relationship of praxis, I am anathema
to the idea that an original contribution to geographical scholarship must only arise from empirical
interpretations of actual experience. As earth writers we need to be very cautious not to treat theoretical
and creative inquiry in a pejorative sense, particularly considering the history of geography as a
discipline and its intersections with colonialism. Inordinate focus on empiricism risks returning
geography to its colonial heritage as a sternly practical pursuit (Livingstone 1992: 216). As Derek
Gregory (1993: 275) has argued, geographers have to work with social theory we have little choice.
Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the facts do not (and never will) speak for
themselves, no matter how closely we listen. I want to be careful here not to suggest that
empiricism is tantamount to empire, as I do concede that the contextualization of an argument requires
a certain baseline of empirical information. After all, how could one deny an engagement with human
experience? The issue has to do with empirical interpretations of actual experience, when clearly there
are other epistemologies affective, spiritual, non-representational, moral, aesthetic, metaphysical, and
##
poetic that tell us something important about ontologies and ourselves. Empiricism alone is never
enough. We need theory. In order for our activist tactics to have any chance of success, we need to fill
their lungs with the fresh air of creativity by living and breathing the ongoing, iterative process of
theory and action. Remember the wonderment you felt the first time you made a baking soda and
vinegar volcano? Theory and action are not an acid-base reaction, they complement each other, and yet
when we experiment with both, the eruption of praxis is nonetheless joyful and surprising. Through
experimentation we might be left with a mess to clean up, but cant we accept a little impracticality into
our lives? It is impractical to think solely in terms of practicality. Doing so closes us off to possibility.
The paradox is that baking soda and vinegar can actually be used to clean, and so our point of view
matters. Allowing theory to mix with practice offers much the same. When we approach praxis with an
open, geopoetic mind that expresses reality in different ways [through] combinations of different art
forms (White 1998: np), a material space for radical transformation may follow. Possibility becomes
possible.
Theory decorates our thinking with the polychromatic glitter of reflection, but it is no panacea,
and nor is it a carte blanche to imposition. The future trajectory of any given society, community, or
group is not deducible by an academic immersed in theory, but rather the relevant constituency decides
what is producible through the their collective action, a crucible that is never reducible to theory. I
absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions, Foucault (157, 159) declared,
the role of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws or proposing solutions or prophesying,
since by doing that one can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to
my mind must be criticized. ... I carefully guard against making the law. Rather, I concern myself with
determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the frameworks of such complexity as to
shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speak for others and above others.
Thus, for geographers to adopt the flawed logic of expert and position their earth writing in ways that
make it appear incontrovertible is to assume a position no different from the arrogance of politicians,
municipal planners, international financial institutions, and the entire project of colonialism. All experts
prematurely close the curtain on the performance of praxis by presuming to know whats best for
#$
people, instead of the people speaking, thinking, and acting for themselves. In the end, we each have a
deeply political choice to make. We can advocate a reformist geography that makes incremental
changes by repeatedly shuffling the deck and rearranging the furniture, yet ultimately reinforces existing
power relations through a blinkered focus on pragmatism. Or, in contrast, we can demand the
impossible by fearlessly embracing a more visionary perspective that encourages the collective
exploration of the earth as the center of experience, liberated from established ontologies, familiar
epistemologies, and predetermined methods. The former continues to discipline geography through the
logic of separation, erecting evermore boundaries and casting dark shadows of enclosure on a planet
that is already being strangled by fences and walls. The latter is an embrace of geopoetics, where integrality
becomes our guide towards a more inclusive and beautiful geography filled with energy and light
(Reclus 1876-94). Let earth writing be a metaphor for possibility and an aesthetic of immanence. What
goes on in geography is, after all, up to us.

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