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Culture,geography,andtheartsofgovernment

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Barnett,Clive(2001).Culture,geography,andtheartsofgovernment.EnvironmentandPlanningD:

SocietyandSpace,19(1),pp.7–24.

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CULTURE, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE ARTS OF GOVERNMENT

CLIVE BARNETT

Department of Geography

The University of Reading

Whiteknights, PO Box 227

Reading

RG6 2AB

England

Tel: (0118) 931 8733

Fax: (0118) 975 5865

e-mail: c.barnett@geog1.reading.ac.uk

Acknowledgments

A version of this argument was first presented at the 4 th Annual Mini-Conference on Critical

Geography at Cincinnati in October 1997, and I thank those who commented on that

occasion. The detailed critical comments of two anonymous referees were invaluable in

guiding the revision of earlier drafts. I would also like to acknowledge the hospitality of the

Department of Geography at Ohio State University for providing the space in which to finally

write down my thoughts on all this.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

ABSTRACT

This paper endeavors to prise open the theoretical closure of the conceptualization of

culture in contemporary human geography. FoucaultÓs later work on government provides

the basis for a useable definition of culture as an object of analysis which avoids problems

inherent in abstract, generalizing and expansive notions of culture. The emergence of this

Foucauldian approach in cultural studies is discussed, and the distinctive conceptualization

of the relations between culture and power that it implies are elaborated. This re-

conceptualization informs a critical project of tracking the institutional formation of the

cultural and the deployment of distinctively cultural forms of regulation into the fabric of

modern social life. It is argued that the culture-and-government approach needs to be

supplemented by a more sustained consideration of the spatiality and scale of power-

relations. It is also suggested that this approach might through into new perspective the

dynamics behind geographyÓs own cultural turn.

CULTURE, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE ARTS OF GOVERNMENT

Using culture

Since the mid-1980s, culture seems to have become an organizing theme in an increasingly

wide range of research in human geography. The cultural turn has even been championed

as heralding the re-invention of geography (see British Studies Now 1996). However,

ÒcultureÓ has been subjected to very little theoretical scrutiny. It tends to serve instead as a

shorthand reference to a diverse set of concerns including identity, ideas and

representations, social constructionism, context, positionality, difference, and institutional

embeddedness. In a sense, culture is a term that is mentioned a lot in a variety of strains of

research, but on closer inspection it turns out that it is not really used as an organizing

category of empirical inquiry or theoretical investigation. This perhaps helps to explain the

absence, identified by Mitchell (1995), of a coherent and workable conceptualization of

culture in human geography. He proposes that, rather than try to specify culture as a

general ontological category, the main task of a critical human geography of culture should

be to track the variable utilization of Òideas of cultureÓ in different contexts and by different

interests. I want to develop this suggestion further, by elaborating upon a particular

theoretical approach which can provide a useable definition of culture as an object of

analysis. I shall consider the potential for thinking of culture along the lines suggested by

FoucaultÓs discussions of ÒgovernmentalityÓ. As a concept, governmentality cuts across a

standard division between the history of ideas and a history of social institutions (Minson

1993, p. 60). It implies integrating a recognition of the institutional formation of cultureÓs

variable conceptualization and deployment into theoretical understandings. Acknowledging

the Ðextent to which ÒcultureÓ itself constitutes an historically determined, discursive

constructionÑ (Young 1996, p. 15) might enable critical human geography to be better

placed to address its own position in changing formations of culture, knowledge, and power.

Culture imperious

The turn to culture in geography has in part been animated by an imputed weakness of

positivist and political economy traditions, both of which are charged with doing violence to

the essential wholeness and fecundity of everyday life which should be the proper concern

of human geographers. In turn, there has been a strong attraction towards holistic

conceptions of culture drawn from literary studies and anthropology. The work that culture

does in a series of disciplinary reorientations is dependent upon a generalization of culture

as both a whole way of life and the particular signifying or symbolizing practices through

which social totalities are given meaning. This sort of definition tends to be generalizing in

so far as it involves the seemingly unimpeachable argument that all economic, political, and

social process contain a ÒculturalÓ or ÒsignifyingÓ element. And it tends to be totalizing in so

far as the methodological assumption that follows is that the work of cultural analysis can

reveal the truth of the whole complex of social processes. The flexibility of expansionary

definitions of culture is finally secured by the distinctively empty form of reference to

differentiation, particularity, and specificity implied by this term. As a result, culture now

seems at one and the same time to have no bounds or limits, in so far as it encompasses

art, literature, pop music, social life in general; and yet to be inherently about differences,

particularities, and specificities. The privileging of specificity, contingency, and differentiation

in understandings of culture elevates concepts which, in their highly general denotation of

particularity, actually resist further theorization or conceptual specification. Accordingly, the

Òde-limitation of cultureÓ in human geography (Philo 1991) has often led to the implicit

embrace of the cultural as that which exceeds determination by abstract and universalizing

forces and/or forms of understanding. When attached to an understanding of the

geographical, the idea that processes of meaning and signification are simultaneously

processes of differentiation privileges a research agenda which inquires into how general

processes map themselves out differently in different places. And so a culturally inflected

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