current research. . .

Geographies of Discourse

This is a book project arose out of the footprints web-essay.  There I was trying to map my way outward from the concrete objects and their placements of our home in Haines to the world.  You could say I was trying to find concrete, material pathways (routes for itineraries) between the two photos above, the Gutenberg Dump in Haines and the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

These projects have arisen from two related irritations.  The first of these is simply my own sense of frustration whenever I hear or read the word ‘context’.  Too often it is a way of dismissing analytical embarrassments.  It is a way of disregarding what we don’t know and haven’t got the time or energy to learn.   

The second is more important.  What are the existing entities in the world with which an analysis can work?  Perhaps a chemist works with the range from sub-atomic particles – where the chemist begins to invade the territory of the physicist – to the behavior of vast quantities of molecules in solutions.  It is not a matter of chemistry to analyze how that chemist’s university struggles as an organization with other universities over the resources necessary to maintain a good chemistry lab.  That is a different field – perhaps public and social administration – in which the primary ontological entities are organizational structures like chemistry departments, universities, and university grants committees. 

The Geographies of Discourse project and the book I am trying to write hope to bring particularistic, concrete perspectives together with global and universalistic ones onto the same theoretical ground so we can think usefully about both individual agency and issues of global importance.  It is a project I have worked on in several books before this one.  I realize that I have not been overly successful so far.  I am writing this book from the point of view that we must insist on the material ontological existence of individual humans (and dogs and cats and all other living things) and of objects (tables, chocolate bars, chairs, busses, and electrical wiring as products of human design and artifice) but question the a priori assertion of any other abstract ontological entities.  In this view a national parliament or the chamber of commerce in a small, rural town like ours are ontological entities just and only to the extent they can be mapped as a geography of discourse consisting of people, objects, and places with material connections among them and boundary objects between those geographies and others.  Of course this statement leaves much to be explicated.  I’m trying to write the book to do just that.

So far I have a rough manuscript which says some of this but isn't entirely satisfactory yet.  If you'd like to see it you can download it here.  (It's about 1 MB in case you're using a slow telephone modem connection like I am.)