Cultural Geography of East Asia

Social & cultural GeoGraphy, 2016 Vol. 17, No. 6, 803–807 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1165859

Engaging climate change: cultural geography and worldly theory

George Revill

Faculty of arts and Social Sciences, Department of Geography, the open university, Milton Keynes, uK

ARTICLE HISTORY received 3 May 2015; accepted 25 February 2016

Introduction

This provocation proposes that cultural geographers should pay more attention to theory itself as geographically and historically located cultural material. The paper argues this opens up the possibilities for theorizing within the context of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research. It has particular relevance for cultural geography’s engagement with arts and cre- ative practice. The paper adopts the example of climate change to highlight some of the ways theories and concepts both connect and divide in interdisciplinary contexts. It argues for an historical and cultural approach to theory and theorizing able to both contextualize different approaches and open up theoretical spaces to informed creative thinking which might help us bridge disciplinary divides.

In this context, theoretical ‘worldliness’ means recognizing the situated nature of knowl- edge and developing sensitivity to the various ways in which theories circulate and act beyond the familiar territory of our own discipline. As used here, this notion foregrounds the way theories operate across a range of scales, from the global and universal to the local and particular. The climatologist Mike Hulme (e.g. Hulme, 2009) has done much to argue for the importance of culture in understanding climate change issues, engaging publics at a wide variety of levels from the personal to the global. Cultural geographers have certainly taken up this challenge, developing specific concerns with cultures of sci- ence and scientific understanding, collaborations with artist practitioners around issues of place making, environmental understandings and public engagement (e.g. Brace & Geoghegan, 2010; Daniels & Endfield, 2009; Endfield & Morris, 2012; Gabrys & Yusoff, 2012; Miles, 2010). If as Hulme argues, sensitivity to cultural specificity is central to effective environmental engagement, then theorizing relevant to issues such as climate change must also be recognized as having spatio-temporal cultural specificity. One might ask, how can we develop theory within such environmental debates which is modest enough to engage specific experience yet imaginative enough to speak creatively and construc- tively beyond its home territory?

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804 G. REvIll

Climate change and cultural geographies of theory

With a few very notable and high profile exceptions, it can be argued that human geography is a net importer of theory. Considering geography is such a vibrant and well-established discipline, it has been strongly argued that the discipline does not develop its own theory nearly often enough (Philo & Söderström, 2004, p. 106). Rather, geography tends to be a net importer of theory from elsewhere. As Massey (2005) argues in the context of theory drawn from both the human and physical sciences, geographers must disentangle their own par- ticular theoretical interests from the agendas and interests ‘provoked by their moments’ and ‘the debates of which they were a part’ (Massey, 2005, p. 19). Massey argues that geographers need to recognize that theories are worldly in the sense that they are the products of geo- graphically and historically specific sets of social, cultural and political relations. In order to use theory creatively, it needs to be critically situated rather than taken at face value.

Attention to situating and historicizing theory has a particular relevance to debates about climate change. Academic debate concerning climate change has distinctive ways of prob- lematizing the local and the global, in terms of general processes and particularly understand- ings of process and change. Fleming, Jankovic, and Coen (2006) show how issues of local and global, the specific and the universal have been a constant point of tension in the history and science of weather. Recognizing this, Hulme (2008) borrows the concept of cosmopolitanism from latour in order to provide a theoretical context for the plurality of climate change under- standings and discourses operating across a variety of spatial scales. However, the term cos- mopolitan is not without its critics, or its historical, cultural and geographical baggage. The term has been roundly critiqued within post-colonial theory as valorizing the privileged posi- tion of highly mobile, educated, urban westerners. Outside the metropolitan heartlands of the developed North, the concept does not necessarily have much purchase on the world, its effects may be both oppressive and reactionary (Jazeel & McFarlane, 2010).

Hulme’s use of the term cosmopolitanism highlights important issues raised by, for exam- ple, Edward Said and James Clifford, concerning how theories and concepts move, travel and translate from location to location and time to time. This sense of situated theory still does not seem to work often enough within the north as a driver for theorizing. The south, it seems, needs its situationally specific theory in order to gain purchase on the world, but northern theory remains all too often ‘universal’ and universalizing in its cultural and geo- graphical claims (Mignolo, 2002). It is all too easy for even relatively enlightened theorizing specific to issues such as climate change to fall into the trap of devising local solutions to a global problem defined around the theoretical framings of the global north.

Interdisciplinarity and engagement

Within present day cultural geography, issues of engagement and interdisciplinarity are very much on the agenda and it is very likely that these issues will be an increasing focus of attention in the future. Engagement and interdisciplinarity are particularly pressing issues for work concerning climate change. It is easy to pick out several reasons for this:

Firstly: the need to bring together a wide variety of disciplinary knowledges in order to study climate change in its physical and human complexity.

Secondly: the need to engage, consult, inform and converse with publics in terms of both under- standing the nature, trajectory and implications of the changes that might take place and pro- ducing viable and publicly agreeable futures in the knowledge of change.

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For cultural geographers, the concept of landscape is both a key interdisciplinary term and one which has considerable potential with regard to the study of climate change in terms of developing more modest and culturally specific theorizing (Brace & Geoghegan, 2010). But landscape itself is not an unproblematic or uncontested term even within cultural geography where it is variously a set of aesthetic codes and/or practices of living and dwelling. One then needs to add to this usage the very different ways in which the term is used as a group of techniques for planning and design in, for example, landscape architecture, planning and ecology. Terms such as ‘landscape’ can prove problematic when cultural geographers work in interdisciplinary contexts. The many different uses and applications of the term landscape, make it all too easy to talk past colleagues from other disciplines even where we appear to be using a shared vocabulary and conceptual framework. Given Hulme’s appeal for geographers to understand experiences of climate change as culturally and geographically specific. It seems evident that long-standing concepts such as ‘landscape’ like more recent ones such as ‘cosmo- politanism’ might offer universalizing false friends unless considered carefully in historically specific ways. Finding ways of understanding these and other concepts as themselves cultural materials with specific histories and usages is imperative if cultural geography’s expertise is to play a constructive part in debates around climate change.

Art engagement and worldly theory

Increasingly cultural geographers concerned with issues such as climate change are working with practicing artists. In turn, artists engaging with social scientists draw on theories, con- cepts and metaphors from social science and social and cultural theory. varieties of perfor- mance-based, socially engaged and publicly collaborative creativity have become important ways in which cultural geographers work with artists and others to engage publics with climate science and its consequences, see for example, the work of organizations such as Cape Farewell, Tipping Point or the well-known london-based arts collective Platform (Hawkins, 2013; Miles, 2010). This interaction is productive and encouraging; however, it also provides multiple opportunities for conceptual mismatch. In this context, I found a rather refreshing approach in a recent book by the composer, improviser and champion of dem- ocratic forms of music making, Sam Richards. Richards discusses how musicians can engage with issues of potentially cataclysmic change posed by the present including that of anthro- pogenically induced climate change. He says:

Zizek’s version of the present as ‘end times’ has inevitably caused controversy. Some critics have responded cautiously to his Slavic gloom, seeing it as apocalypse rather than analytic, and his method of argument – non sequential, irrational, uneven – has also attracted criticism. But these qualities are also those that can make him interesting to artists for whom metaphor, fragile connections can be prima material. As fact, and definitely as prediction, it is possible to question his idea of ‘end times’. As both image and text it has tone and texture to recommend it. (Richards, 2014, p. 37)

What I admire here is how Richards recognizes Zizek’s work as flawed, problematic and a contested way of understanding the world, yet at the same time is able to celebrate its sit- uatedness. Most telling of all, Richards is suggesting that the ‘flaws’ in Zizek’s theory, its worldliness, open up the potential of this theory conditionally and contingently in a creative and productive way. Rather than deploying theory in spite of its ‘faults’ and constrained by its limitations, Richards suggests we might actively cultivate its worldliness and invite its

806 G. REvIll

rough, ambiguous open edges to create spaces which encourage creative possibility. To this extent, his thinking has echoes of what Mignolo (2013) might call ‘thinking pluritopically’. This might be understood as a dwelling within the worldliness of theoretical entanglement, rather than observing theory from a fixed point outside its relationality. In this context, worldliness is at least partly a product of the borders which situate knowledge. Richards’ thoughts are both modest and expansive. An ethos of sympathetic elaboration can take Zizek’s ideas elsewhere and in the process interest, engage, constitute and potentially enrol new audiences and new publics.

To work constructively with concepts such as ‘end times’ or indeed, the cosmopolitan or landscape involves taking the cultural geography of theories and concepts seriously in order to work creatively with their limitations and possibilities. In this context, the alternative usages and definitions of terms and concepts, with their potential for mismatch and con- tradiction, become themselves poetic resources which engage and animate imaginations. This requires a cultural geography of theory which examines how theory is made, remade and operates in specific circumstances. It would be a cultural geography that explores the capacity of theories and concepts to animate, organize and engage particular constituencies, audiences and publics, whilst recognizing that such theories and concepts actualize and operate differently in various contexts. This would not so much be a strategy for gaining tighter control over the effects of theory operating on and in the world, but a tactic which might enable and encourage theory to flourish and elaborate freely within the contexts in which it is found and deployed. From this position, it might be possible to produce collab- orations between geographers, art practitioners and publics which, for example, maximize the opportunities for creative imaginings of climate change futures by recognizing theoret- ical situatedness whilst not defining or foreclosing possibility.

Conclusion

My wish is to see a greater sensitivity to the historical location of theory, concepts and met- aphors within cultural geography as rather more than critique in the sense of defining, regularizing and regulating meaning. Rather, I would like to see us critically evaluate the cultural-historical geographies of theory, its ‘worldliness’, as a means of creative and con- structive conceptual engagement. This might actually encourage geographers – particularly cultural geographers – to do more theorizing and perhaps produce more geographically sensitive theory for the discipline, particularly in relation to such pressing issues as anthro- pogenically induced climate change. In this context, theorizations, concepts and metaphors have to be cast upon the world as points of departure rather than as attempts to control, define and capture. This does not mean a relativistic free for all but a very careful thinking through of the ways in which the spatio-temporal specificity of particular theories, concepts and metaphors open up possibility, allowing them to resonate and elaborate in and through the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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