T(r)Opes: Geographicus Interruptus

Abstract

The title of the Association of American Geographers session that gave rise to this set of papers,`What Next?', immediately implies a telos. Even to pose the question suggests some kind of coherence to history, and some sense of progress through time. The only way I can make sense of such a question is to ask for its object, its metric.``What next'', in what sense? There is a definite sense of taking stock, and then moving on. But judged against what? There is also some sense of self-satisfied accomplishment ...`there, that's done, what next'? But what is done? What has been accomplished? And, in terms of moving on, how do we know where we are unless we have some set of goals or objectives against which to gauge our present position? How can we begin to think about what is next unless we know where we want to go? In addition to a sense of motion, the question`what next?' also implies a metric for evaluation, that moving from where we are to where we might go would constitute some improvement over present conditions. Again, determined and measured how, and by whom? And, of course, who is this`we'?Before turning to these matters in some detail, let me explain the origin and significance of the title. The idea for the paper actually began on a car trip from Oaxaca City out to Las Bahias de Huatulco (on the coast of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca; hardship, yes I know). As we tried making our way out of town (and elsewhere on the road system), we encountered inordinate (to my mind anyway) numbers of speed bumps, called in Spanish topes. They were ubiquitous, and became particularly thick in front of the innumerable roadside stands. They took on many forms, some familiar, some not soösuch as the variation called the vibrador, which consisted of a series of minitopes spaced closely together to produce a washboard (and moderate Magic Fingers 2 ) effect, and thus the name. Clearly, while the topes constituted impediments to our`progress', they were serving others' purposes.In The Prison Notebooks, and elsewhere, Gramsci (1995Gramsci ( [1971) termed structures that legitimate dominant practices and organize consent`hegemonic apparatuses'. The tope embodies such an apparatus in both metaphoric and material terms. As Artz and Ortega Murphy describe,``hegemonic apparatuses build consent by establishing accepted practices through sheer repetition (`this is the way we do things here'), then legitimizing them as valuable and natural (`this must be the best way to do things')'' (2000, page 40). Topes are (almost always) emplaced by authorized agents. Even when

Making molehills out of mountains: Keeping the tempest in the teapot

“…How much more understanding, then, do we need? I want to argue, here (and as I asserted earlier), that on virtually all of the major existential (and less dire, but nonetheless consequential) threats facing humanity and the planet, “we (the surplus army of intellectual social-theoretic laborers) have sufficiently precise diagnostics of how the world works and why, and have had them (with some crucial refinements) since Marx” (Waterstone, 2004: 484). The fact is that the present financialized, globalized system of late-stage industrial state capitalism is a manifest failure for so many, and yet persists.…”

“…Clearly, answers will vary depending on one's view of the circumstances themselves, as well as one's sense of the role of scholarship in elucidating the nature of the problems (if they are viewed as problems at all) and/or in proposing remedies or avenues to solutions. In my attempt to answer these questions, I intend to reprise a number of positions that I elaborated in sister publications almost 20 years ago (Waterstone, 2002(Waterstone, , 2004.…”

“…But, until such work is begun, the need for, let alone the acceptance of, radical critique will continue to appear ludicrous. (Waterstone, 2004: 487)…”

Modes of Engagement for Urban Research: Enacting a Politics of Possibility

“…A second point of debate that is closely linked to the first makes problematic the position of the academic as activist (Blomley, 1994;Kitchin and Hubbard, 1999;Maxey, 1999;Routledge, 2004) and seeks to identify viable and ethical routes through which they may effect social change. These discussions are themselves embedded in a broader dialogue concerning the relationship of academia to the nonacademic world, expressing geographers' frustration over the corporatization of universities and its impact on definitions of legitimate research and knowledge production (Castree and Sparke, 2000;Tickell, 1995;Waterstone, 2004). The third line of scholarly debate scrutinizes participatory research practices as methodological possibilities for critical and activist work (Mohan, 1999;Pain, 2003;Pain and Francis, 2003), engaging many issues that are being contested in methodological writings across the social sciences.…”

Smoke and Mirrors: Inverting the Discourse on Tobacco

“…I begin with a few intersecting points about the nature of critical work and the political commitments it entails. Some of these points have appeared in a couple of recent exhortations (Waterstone 2002, 2004; Henderson and Waterstone 2009), but I repeat them in abbreviated form here to contextualize the response I provide below.…”