CREATING FUTURE GEOGRAPHIES

ABSTRACT

Pluralism in contemporary geography has gone beyond the creative liberty of variety and degenerated into license that threatens the future of the profession. A frame work for reintegration of our diverse pursuits is proposed to enable us to create future geographies consistent with our enduring values. environments that expand freedom and choice and opportunity, and organized fantasies containing new delights for the scholarly practitioners and the practical scholars who will succeed us as the geographers of the future.

Notes

Presidential Address delivered at the Seventy-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Louisville on April 15, 1980.

The human brain has an enormous “autopoietic” potential for mutation of images, or self-structure. The images which it creates need not have any correspondence to structures in the real world. The principal business of the human mind, indeed, is fantasy.…A widespread illusion about science is that its basic theoretical images and paradigms are the result of inductive reasoning from observations and experiments. It would be truer to say that science is the product of organized fantasy [italics added] about the real world, tested constantly by an internal logic of necessity and an external record of public expectations, both realized and disappointed. Theories are the mutations in this evolutionary ecosystem of mental species; testing by logic and by disappointed expectations is the selective process.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering a noble logical diagram once recorded will never die but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting with growing intesity.

1 In hindsight, what was highlighted in the debates more than anything else was the traditional distinction between American and German academic styles, albeit embellished by the trappings of the myth of pure science. In 1929, the Anglo-American sociologist robert MacIver delivered a lecture in which he contrasted the concerns of his American and German colleagues in a manner not unlike the distinction that emerged between the “old” and the “new” geographers at the University of Washington. MacIver said that one thing which American and German sociologists had in common was a preoccupation with method, but that method meant an entirely different thing to American and to German investigators. To the American, MacIver said, method meant preeminently devices for collecting, recording, sorting, classifying, tabulating or counting facts. To the German, method was a principle in terms of which he arranged facts in categories, determined the relation of the categories to one another, analyzed a social situation or a large-scale social movement into its essential factors, and offered a synthetic interpretation to the world. In a word, MacIver saw American scholars as eager for new facts, whereas the Germans sought new formulations and new thought-constructions. It is not that the Germans were careless of facts; it certainly was not that they were less thorough. It was that their main objective was different. Their voyages of exploration sought the far horizons of new principles whereas the Americans did coasting voyages from fact to fact. Consequently, the German was often more preoccupied with the interpretation of old facts than with the discovery of new ones, while the American was often so keen for new facts that he was apt to neglect the established ones. I am indebted for this summary of MacIver's comments to John Higham of Johns Hopkins University, who recorded it in a communication to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2 In Davis' words, “any statement is of geographical quality if it contains a reasonable relationship between some inorganic element of the earth on which we live, acting as a control, and some element of the existence or growth or behavior or distribution of the earth's organic inhabitants, serving as a response; more briefly, some relation between an element of inorganic control, and one of organic response. The geographical quality of such a relation is all the more marked if the statement is presented in explanatory form. There is, indeed, in this idea of a causal or expalanatory relationship the most definite, if not the only, unifying principle that I can find in geography. All the more reason, then, that the principle should be recognized and acted upon by those who have the fuller development of geographical science at heart,” William Morris Davis, “An Inductive Study of the Content of Geography,”Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 38 (1906), pp. 67–84.

3 Ludwik Fleck, Enstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftliche Tatsache (1935), available in translation as Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, eds., Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Fleck's ideas reinforced Thomas S. Kuhn's attempts to outline the social context in which shifts in thought style (i.e. scientific revolutions) occur.

4 Celso Furtado, El Dessarrollo Economico: Un Mito (Mexico, D. F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975).

5 E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 562 and 561.

6 J. Wreford Watson“Image Geography: The Myth of America in the American Scene,”The Advancement of Science, Vol. 27 (1970–71), pp. 1 9. Charles Lindblom has coined the term “polyarchy” to describe the U.S. private enterprise, market oriented democracy; C. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

7 John W. Bennett, “Anticipation, Adaptation, and the Concept of Culture in Anthropology,”Science, Vol. 192 (28 May 1976), pp. 847 53.

8 Kenneth E. Boulding, “Science: Our Common Heritage,”Science, Vol. 297 (22 February 1980), pp. 831 and 833. Boulding continues his discussion by arguing that “part of the structure of images is their labeling with out belief in their degree of reality. Some images we believe do correspond to the ‘real world'; others we believe do not. Our information input through the senses, plus internal information generated in the brain in the form of logic, operates as a powerful selective process that tests the labels on our images. Those which in the face of this input turn out to be less stable are eventally detected as error. Those which are stable are identified as true.”…“From our images we form expectations. When an expectation is fulfilled, it reinforces the image; when it is not fulfilled, and we cannot deny its nonfulfillment or deny the validity of the derivation of the expectation, we are forced to change the image.”…“The same process goes on in human valuations. The knowledge structure in the human brain consists not only of images of fact, but also of a complex structure of preferences and valuations at least at three levels: preferences, or first-order valuations; ethics, which is an evaluation of preferences, especially those of other people; and ethical critique, which is an evaluation of ethics. These valuations are subject to exactly the same process of selection by which we detect error in fact. There are ‘bad' valuations which are less stable than others, just as there are ‘erroneous' images of fact which are less stable than others. The fact that valuations are a property of the human mind in no sense deprives them of objectivity or deprives them of the privilege of being erroneous, for the human mind is also part of the real world and feeds back into itself.”

9 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1951), p. 204.

10 I am indebted to James Coleman for this insight.

11 To be sure, it also embodies more specialized ways of seeing and speaking. Many words used are not part of common speech. This special way of talking, the practitioner's cant, tells us something about how differently practitioners see the world. A distinctive jargon may grate on the ear, but it signifies a way of looking at things that sets its user apart from others.

12 Like the view of reality, the aspirations also are rooted in a complex causal network. Although this network is exceedingly hard to unravel, we do know that it ultimately relates back not simply to underlying cultural values, but also to shifts in values or in technique that alter the vision of the achievable. Some of the changes have been derived from new scholarly insights, but equally, the highlighting by socially concerned citizens of the plight of the underprivileged, to cite one example, has served not only to intensify attempts by practitioners to overcome the devastations of econmic, cultural, and social impoverishment, but also has highlighted the limitations of disciplinary theory about the tradeoffs necessary to achieve equity, and therefore has sparked new rounds of research. Each new advance in understanding has the potential for altering the practitioner's vision; each new puzzle that arises in practice has the potential for altering the scholarly research agenda.

13 Perhaps this is why applied geographers have tended to give know-how so much attention when seeking to understand what fundamental research in geography might contribute to them. If contributions do not take the form of telling them what to do, they seem to ask, what good are they? But this concern is excessively narrow, involving merely a myopic search for better ways of doing existing things. It ignores the interdependence of speculative research and the testing ground of disappointed expectations in reforming the view of reality and the vision of the achievable by challenging the thought styles of the thought collective.

14 This remark echoes that of Anne Buttimer in S. Gale and G. Olsson, eds., Philosophy in Geography (Holland: D. Reidel, 1979).

15 This also implies a continuing tension between accepted ideas within the mainstream and “outrageous hypotheses” that challenge its myths. The notion of an outrageous hypothesis is that of W. M. Davis. Speaking to the Geological Society of America in 1925, Davis said that: “We shall be fortunate indeed if geology is so marvelously enlarged in the next thirty years as physics has been in the last thirty. But to make such progress, violence must be done to many of our accepted principles.” Anticipating the plate tectonics revolution by forty years, he went on to suggest that geologists seriously consider “the Wegner outrage of wandering continents” not, he emphasized “merely a brief contemplation followed by an off-hand verdict of ‘impossible' or ‘absurd',” but a “contemplation deliberate enough to seek out just what conditions would make the outrage seem permissible and reasonable.” These remarks appeared in Science, Vol. 63 (1926), p. 463, and are summarized in Victor R. Baker, “The Spokane Flood Controversy and the Martian Overflow Channels,” Science, Vol. 202 (22 December 1978), pp. 1249–56. One cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. The scientific community has, for example, succumbed in its peer review system to the blandishments of big government's accountant mentality, favoring the safe bets and short-run gains of normal utilitarian science over the greater risks of speculative new ventures. Increasingly, the scientific enterprise is the victim of excessive and conflicting regulation, symptomatic of the adversary mentality that is now widespread, fearful of the costs and social consequences of scientific inquiry and technological change. There is an adversary relationship between science and society, with government an inept referee unwilling to make unpopular decisions and therefore constraining opportunities in areas of conflict by increasingly oppressive regulation. It is critically important that opportunities for new ventures be increased in a climate of freedom and flexibility. The opinion of the scientific establishment, the public's needs, and economic forces, all may influence how we traverse a trail of research once it has been charted; but they often have little or no effect in establishing the starting point. The first experiments must be done, and they must be sound and reproducible, for if they are not, the opening of new vistas may be delayed.

16 “Any social science should aim to acquire and to state in an orderly manner the understandings of society possessed by and an integral part of the pattern of action of the actors who make up the social life that is the subject of social science investigation” Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 83. for a related view refer to Elisabeth Lichtenberger, “The Impact of Political Systems Upon Geography: The Case of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic,”The Professional Geographer, Vol. 31 (1979), pp. 201 11.

17 Bennett, op. cit., footnote 7.

18 As Lewis Carroll remarked, our memories are poor if they only work backwards.

19 See also Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Human Mind as a Set of Epistemological Fields,”Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 33 (1980), pp. 14 30.

20 My first attempt to diagram this idea was ten years ago in my paper Deliberate Change in Spatial Systems: Goals, Strategies and Their Evaluation,”The South African Geographical Journal, Vol. 54 (1972), pp. 30 42. Also see Karl W. Butzer, “Cultural Adaptation: Exploration of an Idea,” paper presented at Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, Louisville, Kentucky, April 1980.

21 As Winch remarked, “A regularity or uniformity is the constant recurrence of the same kind of event on the same kind of occasion, hence statements of uniformities presuppose judgements of identity.…Criteria of identity are relative to some rule” Winch op. cit., footnote 16, p. 84.

22 The term is that of D. N. Parkes and N. J. Thrift in their admirable new book Times, Spaces, and Places. A Chronogeographic Perspective (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1980).

23 Tommy Carlstin, Don Parker, and Nigel Thrift, Timing Space and Spacing Time: Vol. 1, Making Sense of Time; Vol. 2, Human Activity and Time Geography; Vol. 3, Time and Regional Dynamics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978).

24 This description comes from David Harvey, “The Ideology of Science,” in Gale and Olsson, eds., op. cit., footnote 14, p. 107.

25 Prigogine's work won him a Nobel prize. His ideas are summarized in “The Evolution of Complexity and the Laws of Nature,” a paper prepared for the 3rd Generation Report to the Club of Rome: Goals for a Global Society. n.d.

26 Prigogine terms these “dissipative structures” noting that as they are driven further away from thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. the steady-state of maximum entropy) they can branch into several possible solutions and each of these in turn, may branch still further from equilibrium. This type of behavior is described by the mathematics of bifurcations, or catastrophe theory. See, for a fine exposition of one application of this notion, R. C. Lacher, Robert McArthur, and George Buznya, “Catastrophic Changes in Circulation Flow Patterns,”American Scientist, Vol. 65 (1977), pp. 614 21.

27 Interestingly, some sixty years ago S. M. Prince advanced the thesis that the most creative social changes come when routine coping is challenged by a major crisis, leading to innovative mutations. See S. M. Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920).