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Landscape and labyrinths

Mitch Rose

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 Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Landscape and labyrinths

Mitch Rose
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Received 9 August 2001; received in revised form 6 June 2002

Abstract
In the endeavour to reveal the politics behind landscape production, cultural geographers often neglect the most fundamental
question of landscape, namely the question of how: how does the landscape work as both a visual and material space? How does it
‘stick’ in the mind and in the world? By relying on concepts such as ideology, hegemony and naturalized discourse, cultural geo-
graphers have parried the question by assuming a structural connection between the landscape’s appearance in the world and
people’s everyday consciousness. The goal of this paper is to provide an alternative account of the landscape’s existence. I argue that
the landscape comes to appear in the world as it is put to task. This means that the landscape’s existence is not founded on its
capacity to inscribe or normalize consciousness through its appearance in the world but on the landscape’s capacity to be called
forth through practice. The argument is elaborated through the work of George Bataille whose concept of the labyrinth provides the
theoretical groundwork for an alternative understanding of what the landscape is as well as how it can be studied.
Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Landscape; Enactment; Cultural geography

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent
the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel
horror because we are threatened by the sphinx;
we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror
we feel.
Borges from Labyrinths (1964)
Place de la Concorde had provided a rallying point for
public demonstrations and political violence. For this
reason, Hittorff chose what was perceived as a politically
neutral monument to replace Louis’s royal statue: an
obelisk from the Karnak temple of Egypt. In a com-
mentary on the Place de la Concorde, Georges Bataille
(1985) explains:

There was some difficulty in finding an appropriate

1. Preface
In 1833 Jacques Ignace Hittorff was commissioned by
Louis-Philippe to embellish the area east of the Champs-
Elysees in order to establish a new focal point for the
expanding city of Paris. The site chosen was the Place de
la Concorde, a square originally constructed in 1754 to
hold a large equestrian statue of Louis XV. However,
the site was more vividly remembered as a place where
thousands of Parisians were guillotined in the reign of
terror following the revolution. Through the various
political upheavals of the early nineteenth century, the
E-mail address: mitchell.rose@nottingham.ac.uk (M. Rose).
symbol for the Place de la Concorde, where the im-
ages of royalty and the Revolution had proven
powerless. But it was contrary to the majesty of
the site to leave an empty space, and agreement
was reached on a monolith brought back from
Egypt. Seldom has a gesture of this type been more
successful; the apparently meaningless image im-
posed its calm grandeur and its pacifying power
on a location that always threatened to recall the
worst (221).
For Bataille, the obelisk is a fascinating paradox.
While Louis-Philippe’s commission activated a specific
political project (demonstrating the security of the new
government), the obelisk operated via an absence. It
signified emptiness and neutrality: a political void for a

0016-7185/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 7 1 8 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 3 0 - 1
456 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
super-politicised place. The coupe of the obelisk was not
that it stood for something but that it could stand for
anything. It spoke the politics of the state but in no
distinct voice. As a national symbol, it succeeded by not
defining the nation. Rather, the specificities of that de-
cision were left to others. It was a monument designed
to unfold. To weave through the streets and minds of
Paris and become absorbed in dreams of nationhood: an
imperial state reminiscent of Ancient Egypt; a world
civilization and culture; a centre of technology and en-
lightenment. The Place de la Concorde represented the
state in all its potential imaginings.
For Bataille, the Place de la Concorde is not an object
in the traditional Aristotelian sense. It does not exist
independently in the world, impinge upon our senses and
instil within our minds the idea of an object. Rather, it
is conceptualised as an empty centre. Its existence is
founded on the fact that it is incorporated into peoples’
diverse activities and projects: it is constituted not by
something inherent to itself (a meaning, a concept, a
value) but through the meanings and practices of others.
The interesting question for Bataille, therefore, is not
what the landscape means but, rather, how it comes to be
meaningful. In his study of the Place de la Concorde his
aim is to look beyond it as a place and toward the endless
network of practices and projects that invest in it and,
thus, cultivate its monumental presence. His examina-
tion focuses not on the landscape itself but on the various
activities that surround it. By exploring how people in-
terpret, use, practice and reference the landscape, Bata-
ille suggests we can understand how it exists in the world.
2. Introduction
The landscape is a unique spatial category in geo-
graphy. While on the one hand it defines a specific envi-
ronment, on the other it represents ‘‘the appearance of a
land as we perceive it’’ (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 150, also see
Olwig, 1996). From its inception the landscape’s status as
an object, its physical presence as an environment, has
been conceptualised in terms of how it appears. For J.B.
Jackson, the landscape is ‘‘a portion of the earth’s sur-
face that can be comprehended at a glance’’ (1984, p. 3);
for Lewis it is ‘‘our unwitting autobiography, reflecting
our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our
fears, in tangible, visible form’’ (1979, p. 12); for Tuan, it
‘‘appears to us through an effort of the imagination ex-
ercised over . . . sense data’’ (Tuan, 1979, p. 90); and, for
Cosgrove, the landscape ‘‘is a way of seeing, a compo-
sition and structuring of the world so that it may be
appropriated by a detached, individual spectator to
whom an illusion of order and control is offered through
the composition of space’’(Cosgrove, 1985, p. 55). In all
cases, there is an easy slippage from the material to the
aesthetic. Landscape is both the ‘‘the concrete unified
impression that an area gives us [and] the objects in the
area producing that impression––i.e. concrete material
objects’’ (Hartshorne, 1939, p. 150).
Understanding the landscape as both a physical en-
vironment and a visual image raises a series of socio-
logical and philosophical questions. In terms of the
former it raises questions about how landscape images
are organised and patterned. If we assume that the
landscape is partially a visual experience, then how that
experience is structured is most likely indicative of so-
ciological processes. In terms of the latter it raises issues
about how social imagery gets inscribed in the mental
and material world. How is it that a certain social image
of landscape ‘sticks’? What philosophical mechanism
secures a particular (socially and culturally informed)
‘vision’ of the environment in both the eye and the
world? Traditionally, cultural geography has paid at-
tention to the first of these questions. By exploring the
various intersections of identity and power, cultural
geographers have provided great insight into the issue of
‘why and for whom’ the landscape is produced. Yet,
they have neglected the more fundamental question of
‘how’: while it is true that people build environments
into various visual experiences, what then? How are
these built environments sustained in the mental and
material world? How is it that we imagine and ‘com-
prehend’ these snapshots as ‘a landscape’ and how are
those snapshots concretised in our everyday experience?
In an attempt to frame this question appropriately I
draw a cue from Schein (1997). Building on Massey’s
(1984) now famous declaration that geography matters,
Schein suggests a more involved interrogation of what
this means for landscape:
If it is accepted . . . that landscape matters––then it
is necessary to ask how it matters. In addition to
theorizing the place of the cultural landscape in
the social relations and spatial arrangements of dai-
ly life, this includes understanding how a particular
identifiable landscape in this place is related and
connected to landscapes and social processes in
other places (662 emphasis added).
Schein’s quote is relevant on two points: first, fol-
lowing Massey, he suggests that the landscape is a
consequential aspect of our daily lives. Second, in an-
swering ‘how’ it is consequential he suggests that the
landscape’s presence is intimately connected to how it
operates through other kinds of activities (other land-
scapes, other relations, other processes and forces).
Thus, how a landscape matters (how it has material ef-
fects on our lives), is directly connected to how it mat-
ters (how it comes to be significant within a network of
meanings and relations) (see Butler, 1993). Thus, the
physical being of landscape, its ongoing presence in the
world, is contingent upon what it initiates, activates and
 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
inspires elsewhere. As Bataille (1985) would suggest, the
landscape exists through a ‘satellite mode of existence.’
It is sustained not through something inherent within it
but through the everyday practices and activities that
surround it. I can now phrase my question a bit differ-
ently: my interest in how the landscape comes to appear,
is an interest in how the landscape ‘comes to matter’––
how it comes to be relevant through practice.
Although I argue that cultural geographers have
generally neglected philosophical questions about how
landscapes appear in the world, this is not to suggest
that they have ignored the issue completely. Despite the
routine use of poststructural concepts to explain how
the cultural landscape works, landscape studies continue
to rely on structural explanations to account for how
the landscape exists. In traditional landscape geogra-
phy (Sauer, 1925; Zelinsky, 1973; Lewis, 1979; Jackson,
1984) these structures were conceptualised as operating
above and beyond human consciousness. In ‘new’ cul-
tural geography (Cosgrove, 1984; Duncan and Dun-
can, 1988; Daniels, 1989; Jackson, 1989) they operate
through ideology, hegemony and dominant relations of
power. In both cases, they are the foundational props
that transform a potentially ephemeral spatial image
into the stable socially constructed environment we call
landscape. In attempting to conceptualise ‘how the
landscape comes to matter’ my goal is to theorize land-
scape production without relying on these theoretical
props. Instead, I argue that the engine for the land-
scape’s being is practice: everyday agents calling the
landscape into being as they make it relevant for their
own lives, strategies and projects. This argument is ex-
plained through the following three sections: part one
briefly reviews the history of landscape theory in order
to illustrate the limits of its current theoretical frame-
work. Part two uses Bataille’s (1985) concept of the
labyrinth, as well as the concept of overdetermination
(see Freud, 1936, 1958; Derrida, 1978a,b; Althusser,
1990) to provide an a-structuralist account of what the
landscape is. The final section discusses the method-
ological implications of this framework and briefly
draws upon my fieldwork on the Giza pyramids in
Egypt to illustrate this perspective.
3. Structuralism and the cultural landscape
Landscape interpretation is a practice that has gen-
erally been grounded in a structuralist understanding of
space. As a tradition founded on reading the material
world for cultural processes, it establishes culture as the
constitutive force structuring the landscape’s given
form. From this perspective, the central theoretical
question is, ‘how is culture (as the operative mechanism
structuring the landscape’s appearance) understood’? In
the landscape tradition introduced by Sauer (1925),
457
culture was conceptualised as a set of identifiable traits
or characteristics that could be read off the landscape
and matched to particular groups. In the mid-1980s this
conception of culture was revised by ‘new’ cultural geo-
graphy (Duncan, 1980; Jackson, 1980, 1989; Cosgrove,
1983, 1984; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Duncan and
Duncan, 1988). The point of this section is to illustrate
that while new cultural geography radically re-concep-
tualised culture and opened the landscape to an im-
portant set of questions, it did not move landscape
theory beyond a structuralist framework. Rather it
substituted one form of structuralism for another. The
following review discusses the development of new cul-
tural geography, explains its theoretical principles and
illustrates its philosophical and empirical shortcomings.
3.1. New cultural questions
Daniels (1989) illustrates quite well how the influ-
ences of new cultural geography can be found both
within and outside the discipline. From the outside, it
was inspired by the cultural studies movement of
Thompson (1968), Williams (1975), Berger (1972a,b,
1980) and Hall et al. (1996). Duncan’s (1980) critique of
super-organic culture 1 and Duncan and Ley’s (1982)
critique of structural Marxism are comparable to
Thompson’s (1978) critique of Althusser. In both cases
they emphasize the role of human agency in the making
of social systems and criticize the dependence on forces
operating above and beyond human consciousness. In
addition, cultural studies influenced how new cultural
geographers examined culture and cultural objects.
Berger (1980) in particular examined how art, literature
and landscapes were symbolic texts indicative of social
formations that, while ideological and unjust, were also
meaningful systems of identity and belonging (also see
Daniels, 1989). New cultural geographers were also in-
fluenced from within the discipline by the humanists
(e.g. Tuan, 1971; Buttimer, 1976; Entrikin, 1977; Relph,
1981). Although sceptical of humanist geography’s lack
of interest in how and why places are produced (Cos-
grove, 1983; Jackson, 1989), new cultural geographers
were attracted to their gravitation towards local ana-
lyses (see especially Ley, 1980; Daniels, 1985, 1989).
Throughout the field geographers were rejecting macro-
structural theory and embracing the importance of
context (e.g. see Soja’s (1980) and Smith’s (1981) rein-
vigoration of dialectics, the structure/agency work of
Gregory (1981) and Thrift (1983) and the time–space
1
A transcendental theory of culture popularised by the anthropol-
ogist Alfred Kroeber (1952) in the early twentieth century and
championed in geography by Sauer (1925) and the Berkeley school
of landscape interpretation. The theory conceptualises culture as a
super-structural system of fixed habits that operate above and beyond
human consciousness (see Duncan, 1980, 1998).
458 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
geography of Pred (1984)). Yet, it was cultural geogra-
phy that explicitly incorporated the humanist interest in
meaning and subjective experience into traditional ma-
terialist frameworks:
A humanist geography takes culture as central to its
aim: understanding the lived-world of human
groups. A Marxist geography must itself recognize
the lived world, although symbolically constituted,
is material and must not deny its objectivity . . . Sus-
taining the dialectic of culture and nature without
lapsing into idealism or reductionist materialism is
the central theoretical problem for historical mate-
rialism and thus for constructing a Marxist geogra-
phy. It is argued here that cultural geography has
traditionally recognized the dialectic but in its prac-
tice has failed to sustain it. A humanist tradition
within historical materialism offers the framework
within which to maintain and clarify the traditional
interests of cultural geography (Cosgrove, 1983, p. 1)
The cornerstone of this synthesis was a new theory of
culture. Rather than conceptualising culture as a tran-
scendental imperative force (as found in traditional
cultural geography), it was defined as a symbolic context
mediating materialist relations of power through inter-
pretative systems of meaning. In one of Duncan’s (1980)
earliest articles on the topic, the humanist/Marxist syn-
thesis is easily recognized:
The term culture could be saved if it were not trea-
ted as an explanatory variable in itself but used to
signify contexts for action or sets of arrangements
between people at various levels of aggregation . . .
Different individuals and groups, depending upon
how much access to power and other resources they
have, are differentially able to arrange and modify
these different contexts (197).
Duncan’s statement establishes the two basic tenets of
new cultural geography’s theory of culture: first that
culture represents a symbolic context for social action
and second it signifies an arena of social struggle.
By a context for social action, Duncan means that
culture is not a thing but a ‘web of significance’ that
gives life to various forms of practice. Drawing upon
the work of Geertz (1973), he argues that the system
of meanings which agents operate both in and through
should be the focus of cultural study (Duncan, 1990).
Yet, this system can only be grasped through the objects
and practices that emerge in day-to-day life (see Dun-
can, 1990, p. 14). These everyday material effects of
culture are what Duncan (pace Geertz) refers to as texts,
interdependent signifiers (symbols, narratives, practices,
rituals, etc.,) that relate to, and only make sense within,
an entwined system of social meaning. The second
theme of Duncan’s definition is that culture is defined
through social struggle. While culture is described as a
symbolic context, it is recognized that certain groups
have the power to manipulate that context over others.
Thus, as Jackson (1988) suggests, the signifying system
through which practices, rituals, objects and meanings
emanate ‘‘is not separable from or in opposition to the
political’’ (213). As different social forces vie for domi-
nance they endeavour to harness the open-ended system
of signification and institutionalise certain interpreta-
tions of the cultural order. Thus, while new cultural
geographers describe culture as a potentially open-ended
symbolic context, what makes it an actual entity––
something that can be identified, categorized and de-
scribed––is the fact that it is contained by ideologies
grounded in systems of cultural dominance.
The ‘new’ cultural framework for culture radically
reformulated how cultural geographers examined the
landscape. Rather than reflecting the logic of macro-
structural forces, the landscape was seen as the materi-
alization of the ongoing struggle to represent the norms,
values and meanings that define the community. Thus,
reading the landscape involved examining how domi-
nant agents inscribed the world as well as how those
inscriptions were regularly undermined. This process
is often described as a relationship between ‘authors,’
those agents that constructed the landscape (the state,
capitalists, city planning boards, etc.) and ‘readers,’
those who undermined, modified and re-inscribed the
landscape (Duncan and Duncan, 1988). The model
opened up a series of questions that the macro-struc-
tural theory of super-organicism shut down. By sug-
gesting that the cultural landscape comes to be through
the active construction of cultural signs, rather than the
theoretical logic of transcendental forces, it created a
framework of spatial production founded on the ongo-
ing process of human practice. In addition, by synthes-
ising humanist and materialist frameworks it illustrated
how a structured understanding of cultural systems
could still appreciate the individual’s subjective experi-
ence and, thus, their capacity to interpret, challenge and
resist.
3.2. Limits to culture
The point of this section is to illustrate how cultural
geography’s conception of culture and the cultural
landscape continues to be grounded in structuralist ex-
planation. The key to this critique is recognizing that
new cultural geography never dismissed traditional
cultural geography’s structuralist understanding of cul-
ture––it humanised it. Although structures no longer
operate beyond human consciousness, culture remains a
structured and structuring concept.
This perspective is best illustrated through new cul-
tural geography’s conception of landscape: the basis
 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
for which is founded on a particular understanding
of representation. Drawing upon the work of Berger
(1972a,b); Barthes (1957); Derrida (1976); Bakhtin
(1968); and others (see Williams, 1975; Said, 1979;
Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1996), cultural geographers view
cultural representations not as innocent reflections of
the world but as power-laden systematisations of
meaning: ‘‘a map, a picture, a word, a text––all of them
are forms of creation . . . we write to create a sense of the
world, but in so doing we authorise that sense at the
moment of conveying its importance to our reader’’
(Cosgrove and Domosh, 1993, p. 37). In the process of
authoring a representation we enter a peculiar political
matrix were the representational act takes on an affec-
tive authority: ‘‘representations influence the thought
and practices of socio-spatial subjects through the sto-
ries they tell about social space . . . through contingent,
temporary and contestable significations, such repre-
sentations nonetheless provide certainty about what
may or may not be practiced’’ (Jones and Natter, 1998).
In this sense, representations are seen to impose certain
beliefs, characterise various understandings and struc-
ture particular ways of seeing the world. In addition, the
cultural landscape is a particularly effective means of
imposing this representational authority. Because the
landscape is part of our everyday environment, it has
the potential to unknowingly ‘teach us’ about ‘‘the way
society is and should be organised’’ (Duncan and
Duncan, 1988, p. 123 original emphasis, also see Schein,
1999; Olwig, 2001). As Crump (1999) states: ‘‘those with
the political and economic power stamp their vision into
the landscape. Once the dominant class succeeds in
producing a particular landscape in which to embed its
version of social relations, that materialization becomes
a reality’’ (20). Similarly Moore (2000) suggests, ‘‘by
controlling . . . physical symbols . . . dominant classes are
able to reproduce their control over the ideology under
which people are socialised into society. Landscapes are
thus one means of regulating the social behaviour of the
people inhabiting them’’ (686). In the process of making
ideology visible through representation, authors have
the ability to inscribe certain ideas of the world onto the
consciousness of social subjects.
In making this point, however, it is necessary to ac-
knowledge that cultural geographers are at pains to
emphasize that social subjects are not the passive re-
cipients of representation or its inscriptive powers. On
the contrary, cultural geographers continually empha-
size that the landscape is a terrain of struggle were
various agents continually attempt to impose and/or
resist differing representational constructs (see Jackson,
1988; Routledge, 1993; Cresswell, 1996; Domosh, 1998;
Sharp et al., 2000). Yet, they are also at pains to point
out that these struggles have their limits. Despite the
flexibility that is ostensibly inherent in cultural systems,
some form of dominance must always be present for
459
culture and/or cultural landscapes to exist. Thus, we see
the positing of concepts such as ‘interpretative com-
munities’, ‘hegemonic discourses’, and ‘dominant ide-
ologies’ to explain the presence of culture and landscape
in the world (Duncan and Duncan, 1988, 2001; Cres-
swell, 1996; Mitchell, 1996; Moore, 1997; Waitt, 1997;
Crump, 1999). Thus, while struggle is always present in
the landscape, it is ultimately the forces of limitation and
control, rather than those of interpretation and resis-
tance, that define what culture or the cultural landscape
is. Jackson’s (1989) analogy of ‘culture as a map’ is
useful. Like a map, culture is conceptualised as an offi-
cial blueprint. While it is true that this blueprint is
constantly compromised and adapted by ambiguities
happening on the everyday street (people living on the
street, crossing over lawns, short-cutting through alley-
ways) it is the blueprint, rather than the reconfigura-
tions, that demarcates what culture is. Thus, while
agency is valorised in cultural geography, because it
destabilises and disrupts, it never itself makes the blue-
print––or if it does it is only when it becomes the
dominant. This is the dilemma at the heart of cultural
geography: on the one hand the landscape is a cultural
symbol that can be diversely interpreted and on the
other it is a stable image whose existence depends on
its interpretation being contained. Although struggles
in space affect, disrupt and even re-write the hege-
monic ideologies that produce the landscape, they do
not in themselves define the landscape. Rather, they re-
define it. Thus while the landscape is described in terms
of struggle it is defined in terms of structure. The land-
scape owes its existence to being read in a consistent
fashion.
The theoretical crossroad is indicative of what I take
to be a fundamental problem in cultural geography,
landscape studies and the structural humanist under-
standing of culture they both rely on: there is no account
of how representation works. How do the repeated
rules, values, norms and ideas that are signified through
the landscape themselves engender social consistency?
While cultural geographers make much of separating
themselves from traditional structuralism (Duncan and
Ley, 1982), there is something to be said for the coher-
ency of the arguments such theorists use. In Levi-
Strauss’s (1966) understanding of ‘deep structures’ or
Saussure’s (1966) conception of ‘language,’ discourses,
narratives, repeated rules etc., have no mechanistic or
affective qualities themselves. While they may be popu-
lar and even second nature, they do not constitute an
explanatory foundation. Just the opposite, for Levi-
Strauss and Saussure they would be the effect of a
structure––the consequence of deeper generative prin-
ciples. In traditional social theory there has always been
an analytical separation between socialised ideas, norms
and values (super-structures) and the structuring mech-
anisms that sustain them (deep structures). Thus,
460 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
patterns of collective thought, such as learned traditions,
social ideologies and cultural norms, are separated from
the mechanisms engendering their consistency, such
as relations of production or biological determinisms.
However, in attempting to conceptualise representations
as having the capacity to structure thought, these two
levels of analysis are collapsed. Instead of a generative
principle that engenders discursive consistency, repre-
sentation engenders consistency itself. As Mitchell
(1995) suggests: ‘‘culture is seen as a level, medium or
idiom but nowhere . . . is there a theoretical discussion of
what constitutes these spheres’’ (100).
The irony of new cultural geography is that it os-
tensibly embraces poststructuralism by forsaking the
transcendental structures so central to Marxists and
Sauerian cultural geographers. Yet, while cultural geo-
graphers abandon structural explanation, they do not
abandon the goal of elucidating the spatial patterns of a
structured society. Thus, cultural geographers are left
with an awkward amputation: a theoretical end severed
from its explanatory means. While it believes that soci-
ety and space are structured entities, it rejects the
theoretical premise that explains the structuring
process––that is, a theoretical account of what struc-
tures are and how they operate. At the heart of cultural
geography, therefore, is a theoretical ambivalence, which
as Mitchell (1995) points out, is ultimately a contradic-
tion (also see Strohmayer, 1996). One cannot derive
highly interpretative social agents from a society that is
fundamentally structured. Neither can one derive fun-
damental structures from a highly interpretive society.
Derrida’s (1976, 1978a,b) discussion of Levi-Strauss
illustrates this point. Like cultural geographers, Levi-
Strauss recognized the material power of symbolism and
symbolic practice. In his analysis of Bororo myth sys-
tems in the Raw and the Cooked (1969), Levi-Strauss
admired the capacity of myths to continually break
apart and expand into an ever-receding array of con-
texts. Yet, like cultural geographers, Levi-Strauss also
sought reference points and patterns among myths in
order to ‘add them up’ into something coherent. An
endeavour that, by Levi-Strauss’s own admission, was
not only reductive but mythic:
The study [of myth] . . . cannot be carried out ac-
cording to the Cartesian principle of breaking down
the difficulty into as many parts as may be neces-
sary for finding the solution. There is no real end
to . . . [the] analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped
once the breaking-down process has been com-
pleted. Themes can be split up ad infinitum. Just
when you think you have disentangled and sepa-
rated them, you realize that they are knitting
together again in response to the operation of unex-
pected affinities. Consequently the unity of myth is
never more than tangential and projective and can-
not reflect a state or a particular moment of the
myth. It is a phenomenon of the imagination, re-
sulting from the attempt at interpretation; and its
function is to endow the myth with synthetic form
and to prevent its disintegration into a confusion
of opposites . . . In seeking to imitate the spontane-
ous movement of mythological thought, this es-
say . . . has had to conform to the requirements of
that thought and to respect its rhythm. It follows
that this book on myth is itself a kind of myth
(Levi-Strauss, 1969, p. 14 quoted from Derrida,
1978a,b, p. 287)
In trying to circumscribe the bounds of myths––in
trying to capture its ‘unity’ or give it ‘synthetic form’––
Levi-Strauss struggles with his own empirical insights:
the recognition that his desire to structure, ground and
categorize myth is ‘tangential and projective.’ As Der-
rida (1978a,b) suggests, ‘‘he must ‘set aside all the facts’
at the moment when he wishes to recapture the speci-
ficity of a structure’’ (292). Cultural geographers are
guilty of the same. In their endeavour to hold onto some
sense of pattern they ‘sets aside’ the ontological signifi-
cance of new cultural geography’s original insight: that
the will to produce, interpret and create, has its own un-
containable agency.
4. The enacted landscape
The desire to theorize structured systems in a fashion
that does not rely on structural explanation, is one that
lies deep in social theory. In the structuration work of
Giddens (1984), the habitus of Bourdieu (1977) and in
the various forms of dialectics that circulate in the dis-
cipline (Cosgrove, 1978; Soja, 1980; Smith, 1981; Oll-
man, 1993; Cresswell, 1996; Mitchell, 1996; Harvey,
1997), there is a desire to add up events to some over-
arching system that can explain (such as capitalism,
society or culture). Nietzsche et al. (1968) referred to
such frameworks as ‘slave theory’ since they enslave
every social event to the workings of the system under-
neath. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to a
different gesture. Rather than situating culture, and the
structured system it invokes, at the centre of landscape,
it draws upon the work of Bataille (1989) to argue that
the source of the landscape’s presence is excess: the
overabundance of life in general.
4.1. Living matter in general: plateaus
‘‘Men [sic] act in order to be,’’ Bataille proclaims
(1985, p. 171). In the opening line of his essay on The
Labyrinth, Bataille declares that one constitutes one’s
being through practice. The experience of being itself
 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
(being a subject, an agent, an identity), takes shape
through the operation of some effort. What is ambigu-
ous for Bataille, is the more fundamental question of
where these efforts come from. Where does the com-
pulsion to strive originate? Where does the desire ‘to
act’ and ‘to be’ take shape? Bataille suggests two
possible explanations. The first is provided by the so-
cial theorist who believes that the forces behind our
actions can be found within a strict economy of prac-
tice. In this framework, acting is always a response.
Thus, all practice can be explained in relation to other
practices. The problem with this answer is that it con-
tains practice within its own systems of reason and ex-
planation:
Activity . . . is conceived in terms of particular oper-
ations with limited ends. The mind generalises by
composing the aggregate of these operations. . . .sci-
ence merely generalises the isolated situation; it re-
stricts its object to operations carried out with a
view to a limited end . . . It does not take into con-
sideration a play of energy that no particular end
limits (1989, p. 23).
In response, Bataille suggests that the compulsion to act
is not a function or response but an unexplainable
calling. Men act in order to be because they do. The
compulsion ‘to act’ and ‘to be’ cannot be boiled down. It
is simply a calling––a call to live.
Bataille’s perspective is indicative of what he calls
‘understanding the economy of practice in general’, ra-
ther than ‘restricted,’ terms (1989). In the restricted
sense practice is always responsive, that is, how one ‘acts
to be’ is conceptualised as always purposeful and stra-
tegic. The landscape, for example, is produced because it
inscribes consciousness or disciplines society. While it
may do other things as well, such as initiate practices of
resistance, such practices are just other forms of re-
sponse (see Rose, 2002). Thus, practice, in the restricted
sense, is always reactive. It operates within an enclosed
system of functionality. Understanding the economy in
general, however, considers ‘‘the play of living matter in
general’’ (Bataille, 1989, p. 23). Rather than limiting
practice to a series of functional responses (that can be
easily sorted and explained), it considers the influence of
forces operating outside what can be productively ac-
counted for. Forces such as loss, chance, sacrifice, faith
and emotion (see Bataille, 1985, 1989, 1992). If the re-
strictive economy describes the vertical dimension of our
being––that which strives, creates, endeavours, risks––
the general economy describes the horizontal, a plane
that Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘plane of immanence’
or ‘a plateau’: ‘‘a region of intensities whose develop-
ment avoids any orientation toward a culmination point
or external end’’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 22).
The general economy includes that which is always
461
emergent within practice. It accounts for what econo-
mies of explanation exclude and acknowledges the ex-
cess that is perpetually present.
For Bataille, understanding practice in general rather
than restricted terms, gives practice life (also see Thrift
and Dewsbury, 2000). Rather than just being a response,
practice is a living of life itself. While there may be a
reactive element to practice, it is also more than that.
There is always an excess that cannot be explained. The
overabundance of ‘life in general’ intrudes, taunts and
undermines practice, so does it compel, stir and inspire
it:
The uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and
reverberates, since at each detour, with a kind of
nausea, men discover their solitude in empty night.
The universal night in which everything finds it-
self––and soon loses itself––would appear to be ex-
istence for nothing, without influence, equivalent to
the absence of being, were it not for human nature
that emerges within it to give dramatic importance
to being and life (1985, p. 172).
The practices of giving ‘dramatic importance to being
and life’ can only operate within the ‘empty night’ of the
excess, the overwhelming potential, that ‘living matter in
general’ always presents. For Bataille, acting and being
only make sense when nestled in the excess of life: the
plateau of immanent possibilities inspiring things to
happen.
4.2. The world that is nurtured: pyramids
While Bataille is often sardonic and taunting of the
edifices of explanation and reason that emerge in a re-
stricted understanding of practice, this is not to say that
he sees them as ‘false’ structures. His point is that they
cannot be understood within the confines of their own
closed systems of circulation. One cannot understand
the edifices of verticality, without recognizing the hori-
zontal plane upon which they rest. Yet, he nonetheless
recognizes a poetry and logic to the practice of restric-
tion. He finds beauty in the way people attempt to cul-
tivate, nurture, believe in and, in the process, hold onto,
a world that does not stop being excessive. Such struc-
tures are, in their own right, monuments. What Bataille
calls pyramids: Babel-like summits designed to lift us out
of the ongoingness of life (173). ‘‘The pyramid . . . is the
very structure of vision, of theory that has at its summit
the divine eye of being. But it is all conditional . . .’’
(Hollier, 1989, p. 73). Pyramids are the devices humans
invent to hold onto a world that always overwhelms
their grasp.
The question is how to theorize these monu-
ments without losing sight of the excess. How to detail
the restricted economy, talk about its contours of
462 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
representation, its points of reference, its systems of
investment, without displacing the undermining tow of
exuberance that keeps them alive. In other words, how
to mediate (in words and/or speech) systems of repre-
sentation without trusting them. How to acknowledge
the functionality of certain acts without believing that
the work of such acts is attributable to the act itself.
How to tour the confines of the restrictive economy (its
systems of representation, its exchange of meanings, its
operations of functionality) without forgetting the entire
system’s embeddedness in the intrusions of excess. In the
language of Bataille, it is a question of how to consider
pyramids (and the systems of care, identity and belief
they sustain) without forgetting the plateau. In an at-
tempt to configure this way of writing I draw upon the
theory of overdetermination.
Overdetermination is a concept that has come to
centre a wide range of poststructural projects in geo-
graphy and elsewhere. Originally developed in psy-
choanalysis (see Freud, 1936, 1958; also see Derrida,
1978a,b) and commonly associated with Althusser
(1990), Gibson-Graham (1996) have used it to provide a
powerful alternative to traditional Marxian analyses of
the capital economy. Their endeavour begins by con-
ceptualising the process of world making as never con-
clusively determined or foreclosed: ‘‘overdetermination
can be variously (though not exhaustively) understood
as signalling . . . the openness or incompleteness of every
identity; the ultimate unfixity of every meaning; and the
correlate possibility of conceiving an acentric . . . social
totality that is not structured by the primacy of any
social element or location’’ (27). In an overdetermined
world, the objects and identities we engage with are
never defined by inherent properties. Rather, as Gibson-
Graham suggest, they are determined by the contexts
within which they are used. They are what Bataille
(1985) calls formless: signs that have no meaning but
only tasks. ‘‘formless is . . . a term that serves to bring
things down in the world, generally requiring that each
thing have its form. What it designates has no rights
in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere’’ (31
original emphasis). The key to overdetermination is
recognizing that the determination of an object, concept,
norm, etc., does not move sequentially from one context
to the next but is always defined by multiple operations
at the same time. This is the critical insight of an over-
determined framework: things are not just undetermined
but literally overly determined––that is, determined by
the multiplicity of overlapping contexts. Thus, the py-
ramidal edifices (the systems of representation human
beings care for, nurture and hold onto) that Bataille
describes come to exist not through the effects of a pre-
established systemising force (a hegemonic ideology or a
dominant discourse) but through the active process of
being given form, that is, because they are constantly,
though not consistently, put to task.
Overdetermination is useful for illustrating how sys-
tems of investment and care are sustained through ex-
cess. If we understand practice as overdetermined, then
the pyramidal edifices that are repeated and nurtured in
the world, are never a repetition of the same. Rather
they are always taking shape as they are expressed dif-
ferently through different practices. This is the difference
between a landscape established through representation
and a landscape established through excess: the nurtured
pyramidal systems of meaning that engender landscape
appear as dominant discourses not because they are
contained but precisely because they are overdeter-
mined––that is, because they are perpetually made to
‘mean’ and ‘do’ more. As the things we care for are
extended through various contexts, they appear in the
world as stable: seemingly sturdy edifices held onto
against a life that always overwhelms.
4.3. Landscape and labyrinths
In recognizing the plateau underneath the pyramid
we recognize the operations of the labyrinth: the circu-
lation of practice were the world and its objects are
continually stretched and pulled in multiple directions
at once. As the various edifices that stand against the
world’s abundance are cultivated and nurtured––as they
are put towards greater and greater use, wider and wider
tasks, further and further functions––they create en-
twined circuits of space. The labyrinth is the space we
extend, from the world which we care for, towards the
directions we want to go. In this sense the labyrinth is
dimensionless. It is a space that can never be fully ac-
counted for because we are always creating it. As Hollier
(1989) suggests, the labyrinth is both an opening (an
expansion) and a passage (a continuing): ‘‘through the
labyrinth one never enter or leaves. Door, arch . . . one
never knows in which direction one is crossing it.
Above its pediment let us inscribe the two faces of
Janus . . . simultaneously the god who presided over be-
ginnings and the one who watched over passages’’ (62).
As an expression of the desire for constancy, the laby-
rinth protects they pyramidal edifices that are cared for
from the abundance through which it exists.
I can now provide an answer to my initial question:
how does the landscape come to matter (as a system of
care, as a meaningful object of existence, as an edifice we
nurture)? It comes to matter as it proliferates through
the operations of the labyrinth. Between the pyramid
and the plateau there is a labyrinth: a set of incongruent
practices invested in the landscape and making it matter.
In suggesting that the landscape exists through the
labyrinth, I am suggesting that the landscape’s being is
constituted through the unfolding practices that sur-
round it. Its presence is not engendered by features in
the landscape itself but by the various ways it is called
forth and put to task. In this sense the only thing that
 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
the landscape ever is is the practices that make it rele-
vant. While it appears as a definable material space, its
materiality is constituted by the totality of possible
performances immanent within it: the constitutive po-
tential of the unfolding labyrinth.
5. Methods
In this final section I discuss how this understanding
of landscape challenges what we read the landscape for.
Indeed, it asks whether reading is still a desired or even
possible exercise. During the last 20 years, landscape
study has endeavoured to reveal the hegemonic systems
composing the landscape’s form. As Mitchell (1996)
suggests (borrowing from Mitchell (1994)) interpreting
the landscape involves asking hard questions about
‘‘how landscape works . . . why does the landscape look
like it does (because it has a clear function in its present
form), and who made it look that way?’’ (original em-
phasis 6). As previously stated, new cultural geography
imagines culture at the centre of landscape encouraging
certain normative ideas through its represented image.
Suggesting that the landscape does not sustain such a
system introduces an interesting challenge to its inter-
pretation. If there is no-thing sustaining the landscape
(no single function, no isolated author) then what ex-
actly is there to be read?
5.1. Tracing Ariadne’s thread
As previously stated, the landscape exists as it is
continually though not consistently, put to task through
the labyrinth. Thus, exploring how the landscape comes
to matter involves attending to the practices that sur-
round the landscape: the activities that call it forth, ac-
cess its excess and engender it as present. Examining the
labyrinthine nature of landscape involves a re-orienta-
tion. It means not interpreting the landscape as a place
with an endemic or constructed meaning but as some-
thing that is both cared for and put to task (the laby-
rinth is both an opening and a passage). Yet, how does
one attempt to witness (even modestly) the actualisation
of life as it happens through the labyrinth (see Dews-
bury, in press)? When Theseus entered the labyrinth, he
used a thread given to him by Ariadne to find his way
back. In the endeavour to mediate the labyrinths of the
landscape, can we hold onto something similar? Is there
a thread to guide us through the turns and blind alleys
of practice emanating from the landscape?
The labyrinth is an idiosyncratic space. As it folds the
excess of life into various systems of investment and
care, it follows unique pathways, as Hollier (1989) sug-
gests, ‘‘one cannot adjust one’s gait to that of any guide
in labyrinthine space; one goes there alone; one enters it
at the same time one enters a certain solitude’’ (58). Yet,
463
at the same time it is not an isolated or insular space. In
the complexity of the labyrinth one finds threads to pick
up and follow: remnants of thought, learning, history,
memory, things left behind by others that can guide
and give direction. In and of themselves these threads
are only ever potential lines. Often they are themselves
labyrinths already on their way towards some direction
or desire. To trace therefore is to trace these threads. As
Latour (1988) suggests, it involves following the
‘‘translations, drifts and diversions’’ in practice ‘‘as they
are made’’ (10).
Doing this involves facing two directions at one. On
the one hand it means tracing the movement of the
labyrinth. What directions does it take? How does it
open to various projects and events? The second direc-
tion attends to the pyramidal systems nurtured within it.
How are these edifices cared for? How is the idiosyn-
cratic-ness of the everyday transformed into something
seemingly collective and timeless? The intention is to
recognize how practice is always both immanent and
yet, through systems of care, folded back into pyramids.
It is an attempt to follow the bi-directionality of the
labyrinth. In order to illustrate how such a tracing might
be done, I provide one story taken from my fieldwork in
Egypt studying the preservation and management of the
Giza plateau––the site of the three largest Egyptian
pyramids and the Sphinx. The story relates my own
endeavour to engage with the concept of heritage as it
operated in Giza and illustrate how a movement from
reading to tracing potentially provides what Bataille
calls a general understanding of the economy of prac-
tice.
5.2. Heritage and the pyramids of Giza
It was early morning in July and the sun was already
making me irritable as I trenched up the steep driveway
leading up to the Giza plateau. My appointment was
with Dr. Zahi Hawas, the chief inspector of the Giza
pyramids. While I had visited here many times over the
last year it was always unpredictable whether I would
actually have time to talk to Dr. Hawas. Despite my
many meetings, I had precious few conversations. While
I sat in the small bamboo chair across his desk people
came in to shake hands, give messages, leave messages
and drink tea. And during the snatches in between Dr.
Hawas talked to me about the significance of his charge
as a protector of Egypt’s heritage: ‘‘Heritage is your life.
Its my past. If I do not care about my past there is no
future . . . your children you cannot sell them? Of course
you cannot, because your children are a part of you.
Heritage is part of you. Its inside you.’’
Heritage was a word I encountered repeatedly in
Egypt. In almost every conversation I had concerning
the Giza plateau, heritage provided the referential
touchstone that made various practices seemingly make
464 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
sense. Heritage set the terms of debate, it set the inter-
view agenda, it turned conversations around and it
made conversations turn. It was a word whose definition
never needed explaining and was never questioned. And
when I asked about its meaning nonetheless, answers
were often returned in exasperation, confusion and even
anger. In this sense, heritage appeared to me as a domi-
nant discourse, a hegemonic ideology, as something that
was fully formed and stable in the mind. It was, in every
sense of the term, restrictive.
On this particular day in Dr. Hawas’s office, I decided
I wanted to try and escape from heritage. I wanted to get
out from under its oppressive shadow and stop it from
dominating my every conversation. I wanted to stop it
from dominating me. Out of (frustration, fear, irritation,
anxiety, panic) I decided to be provocative:
Me: Dr. Hawas . . . I have talked to you already
about how you were willing to take a road that
has been planned for ten years and get rid of it,
how you have been successful in stopping the en-
croachment of a village and all in the name of her-
itage . . . The pyramids are amazing, when I look at
them they are amazing but at the same time, they
are just big stones.
Hawas: I think (pause). You are writing your doc-
toral degree? I think the doctorate degree should be
taken from you. Someone like you who says the
pyramids are a pile of stones should go and educate
himself more to understand what means heritage . . .
This is the first time in my life I met someone edu-
cated who really asks a question like this. I cannot
really accept this at all. Because this is supposed to
be a question from an intellectual and I do not
think that any intellectual can say that the pyramids
are just a pile of stones––who cares. Just shit on
them! . . . Fuck them! That is not good and I do
not accept this and please I do not want to answer
any more questions from you because I cannot
imagine that you ask a question like this.
I was not sure what to do. Emotionally I was stunned
and silenced by the intensity of the response. Intellec-
tually I knew that if Hawas refused to talk to me from
now on my ability to do research in Giza, and possibly
Egypt, would be severely hampered. I sat mouth gaping.
He was staring at me. I looked at my feet and mumbled
something about a desire to understand. The phone
rang. Hawas answered it and begins yelling down the
phone:
Salmana . . . I am having a serious conversation
with a student who is writing his doctorate degree
and he is asking me this question that I would like
you to listen to. He is telling me that the pyramids
are pile of stones. It means they are nothing. He
said that really . . . He is in front of me now and I
told him I really cannot understand that a man
who is writing his doctorate degree can say a ques-
tion like this. Please talk to him.
Luckily I knew Salmana and knew that she knew that I
was trying to be provocative and did not mean to offend
or upset. She helped clarify the matter (not without a
few choice words directed at me first) and afterwards
Hawas and I, with a few apologies, continued our con-
versation.
Bataille of course would have known better. He
would have caught on sooner how words are formless.
How heritage only had meaning as it was rolled into
other things: cultural identity, national pride, relations
with the West, etc. He would not have felt the need to
ask such a provocative question since heritage would
not appear to him as a nut that needed to be cracked, a
system of meaning that could be interpreted and/or
understood: ‘‘a dictionary’’ Bataille states, ‘‘would start
from the moment in which it no longer provides the
meaning of words but their tasks’’ (1985, p. 31). It un-
fortunately took me some time (and some abuse) before
I was open to the possibilities of words. It took time to
see heritage as a creator and transformer rather than a
reflector of something else. While the incident with
Hawas shocked me, in the aftermath I decided to stop
running from heritage. I made my stand with it and
it emerged unscathed, while I, on the contrary, felt
somewhat bruised. Only after the event did I realize how
instinctively I always sought a critical distance, even
when talking to friends. How easy it was for me to de-
tach and silently step back, sort words, and attempt to
understand what they mean. In the end not even Hawas
could tell me what heritage meant. But he did let me
feel what it could do.
The strategic use of heritage and history to recon-
figure the landscape is a well established theme in cul-
tural geography (Stewart, 1988; Till, 1993, 2001; also see
Lewis, 1995; Trouillot, 1995; Boyer, 1996; Al-Hindi and
Staddon, 1997; Schein, 1997; Dwyer, 2000; Moore,
2000; Delyser, 2001; Duncan and Duncan, 2001) and it
was something I often encountered in Egypt. As tour
companies, conservation groups, archaeologists, devel-
opers and local villagers endeavoured to fulfil their
myriad interests on the plateau, debates over what gets
excavated, what gets developed, what gets renovated
and what gets ignored continually circulated creating an
array of conflicts and tensions. In all the conflicts I ex-
plored, the concept of heritage figured prominently. In
one example, the Egyptian government’s antiquity office
represented the pyramids as a monument to ‘world’
heritage in order to gather international support against
a road being built across the Giza plateau. Interestingly
this rendering of heritage contradicted the antiquity
 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
office’s long history of representing Egyptian monu-
ments in strongly nationalist terms (evidenced by their
continuing claims for the return of the Sphinx’s beard
from the British Museum as well as by the tight control
they impose on foreign Egyptologists). In another ex-
ample opposition parties attempted to block the mil-
lennium celebration at the pyramids on the grounds that
it emphasized Ancient heritage at the expense of Islamic
heritage. While most the time these different conceptions
of heritage co-exist peacefully, emerging and receding
depending on the context, because the millennium con-
cert appealed to both locals and foreign tourists, it
brought both versions of history into confrontation.
The question, of course, is how to conceptualise these
practices and the different ways heritage is put to task. In
cultural geography’s restrictive understanding of prac-
tice, conflicting articulations of heritage are indicative of
the landscape’s contested nature. Thus, history is one
of the means through which agents attempt to represent
the already present landscape differently. The problem
with this framework is that the landscape pre-exists the
practices. While analysing how various representational
practices interact, engage and contest (and accounting
for the various outcomes of these engagements) remains
an integral part of a labyrinthine study of landscape, the
landscape itself is not a result of these activities. Rather,
the landscape emerges from the process of struggle itself.
As various systems of care surround the landscape they
call it forth differently. Thus conflict is simply the
working out of the landscape’s being in the world. It is
in this sense that this paper attempts a different kind of
landscape study. Rather than attempting to understand
how the landscape works, it searches out the various
practices that surround the landscape and make it
matter. The thread of heritage is only one small strand,
one thin line of text, circulating in the web of references
that constitute Giza. In my attempts to follow this
thread it was necessary to stop trying to understand
what heritage meant and pay attention to what it did.
This meant allowing the analysis to roam. As Bataille
suggests, in the labyrinth we are headless: we must fol-
low the thread of being aimless (Bataille, 1945). In this
sense there is no hidden order to find, only labyrinths to
get lost in.
6. Conclusions
It has been a common criticism of poststructural
thought that its incessant orientation towards instabil-
ity, dissemination and play undermines the geographer’s
ability to represent the appearance of coherence in our
everyday spatial world. While this paper is certainly a
critique of cultural geography’s latent structuralism, it is
not a critique of the idea of landscape or of spatial co-
herence itself. More accurately, it is an attempt to pro-
465
vide an account of coherence that relies on excess. In
Heidegger, interpretative practice is the mechanism
through which the world takes shape. The world itself is
what Heidegger calls ‘ready to hand’: ready to be in-
terpreted and elaborated. What the world is, therefore,
is dependant on how we bring it to bear on life. The
labyrinth provides a similar framework. While it affirms
the contextual and contingent within, it also establishes
this process as a way of making the world appear. While
Derrida reminds us that every attempt at sense is in-
herently nominal, Heidegger replies that such practices
are also fundamentally meaningful. That the way we use
the world is the way we constitute the world and our
place within it. This is not to critique Derridean post-
structuralism but to stress that interpretative practice is
not only the way the world falls apart but also the means
through which it takes shape. It is through indetermi-
nation and contingency that the world comes to matter.
This paper is an attempt to extend this insight into
questions about the production of space in general and
landscapes in particular. My argument is that the
landscape’s existence depends upon being put to task.
Thus, the interesting question for landscape is not what
(i.e. what is it? what is its nature?) as much as what for
(i.e. what is it used for?). Like Bataille, my interest is in
the vastness of human practices invested in landscape:
the diverse forms of practice that the landscape engen-
ders. In terms of analysing the landscape, this means
moving away from unveiling the landscape’s meaning
(as seemingly encoded by powerful agents) in order to
better grasp its meaningfulness. Like Schein, I want to
illustrate that the landscape is not just related to, but is
reliant on, other social processes. This involves eluci-
dating the various ways it is called forth from the pla-
teau. It is a study that aims to demonstrate that the
landscape’s being is not grounded in fastened imperial
forces but in the dynamic process of the labyrinth. As
Bataille writes, ‘‘life must be examined in its empty and
peripheral forms, rather than in the monuments and the
monumental vistas that are its centre’’ (1985, p. 214–
215).
Acknowledgements
I would primarily like to thank the department of
geography at the University of Kentucky where the
ideas for this paper first took shape. In addition, I would
like to thank a few of the people who contributed sig-
nificant thought to earlier drafts. These include Deborah
Dixon, Jim Duncan, Elizabeth Gagen, John Paul Jones,
Rich Schein and two anonymous reviewers. I would also
like to thank J.D. Dewsbury, Paul Harrison and John
Wylie for their engaging conversation and for pushing
my thinking on enactment and performativity. Finally
special thanks to Carl Dahlman, Matt McCourt and
466 M. Rose / Geoforum 33 (2002) 455–467
Owen Dwyer (and his persistent ‘bee in bonnet’) for the
various forms of inspiration they gave this paper.
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