Ulf Strohmayer

Urban design and civic spaces: nature at the Parc des Buttes

Transcending the dualism between 'nature' and 'culture' has been one of the central aims of geographical knowledge during the last decade or so. The present paper adds to this growing body of literature by focusing on the construction of a key space of the French Second Empire (1852 Á 1870), the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the newly created 19th arrondissement in Paris. The paper argues that the nexus between culture and nature Á what has been described most fittingly as 'social nature' in the literature Á can profitably be approached through the lenses afforded by a reformulated concept of labour. Taking cues from Don Mitchell's conceptual notion of 'dead labour', the paper explores the impact of both technology and design on an emerging urban nature that was to be centrally implicated in the naturalization of many values within an emerging bourgeois, Western world with its emphasis on the commodification of increasing parts of everyday life. Ostensibly non-commodified urban park landscapes were implicated in this process precisely because they embodied a notion of 'labour' that was Á and continues to be Á both necessary and homogeneous and thus akin to the sense of labour developing in the world of commerce at the same time.

'U rban nature' long appeared to be little more than an oxymoron within the popular imagination: cities, after all, were defined by their metaphorical distance from all things natural. Not so any more. The rise of ecological urbanism within architecture, 1 astute historical analyses of the debt owed to nature by urban planners, 2 a number of smaller-scale studies by historians, geographers and other spatially minded scholars 3 and of course seminal studies like John Barrell's The dark side of the landscape and Denis Cosgrove's Social formation and symbolic landscape have all but obliterated what was at best a counterproductive dichotomy. 4 'Urban' material landscapes now emerge as contested concepts with fluid boundaries, as 'social' or 'produced' nature. 5 This essay adds to the growing literature by shifting the focus onto the technologies involved in naturalizing a crucial part of the urban landscape, the park. It argues that the process of naturalization involves both original and continuous deployments of labour that never become visible as such. The labour necessary for a park's creation and maintenance, I will argue, is structurally akin to the 'dead labour' theorized successfully by Don Mitchell 6 Á and yet, in the absence of a clearly definable product, it

may well be apt to talk about 'labour' in a more abstract sense as the condition of possibility for nature to become urban.

In short, the present essay attempts to situate 'labour' at the nexus between wider debates attaching to the materiality of constructed nature. Epistemologically, as David Demeritt has pointed out, the status of that which is constructed, and which thus becomes a reality that is independent from its construction, has plagued discourse since the coining of the term 'social nature'. [START_REF] Demeritt | Being constructive about nature[END_REF] The notion of 'labour' offers a way forward in that it involves the continuous working of reality in a context that is materially stable at any given point in time while remaining open to future reworkings Á and to the inclusion of new forms of materiality. [START_REF]On the question of what to include amongst those materialities that appear in an urban context[END_REF] It is in this precise context that the present paper places the construction of one particular urban space, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the Parisian 19th arrondissement, at the nexus of a host of different discourses: technological, memorializing and moral ones in particular. Its modest aim is to explore how viewing the construction of nature as technologically inspired work may help future analyses of urban natures.

Implicitly, the focus of this essay thus complements the one adopted in Bernard Debarbieux's paper published in the pages of this journal some years ago. [START_REF] Debarbieux | The mountain in the city: social uses and transformations of a natural landform in urban space[END_REF] Where Debarbieux's paper focused on the connotations surrounding and actively attributed to a large urban park in Montreal, and thus adopted an implicitly phenomenological approach, the present essay is less concerned with symbolic meanings or even contestations. Instead, it focuses on the conditioning Á not determining Á aspects of park design that are no less crucial for not being accessible in the form of experiences.

Contextualizing nature in nineteenth-century France

It was destined to be remembered as yet another splendid day in the annals of Second Empire Paris. With the grand opening of the 1867 World's Fair just hours away, the newly concocted and carved up 19th arrondissement witnessed the inauguration of a park quite unlike any other within the city bounds. It was on the first day of April 1867 that an already sickly Emperor Napoleon III and his wife Euge ´nie travelled the length of Paris from the Champ de Mars to the heights of Belleville, from the site of that year's Exposition Universelle to the newly created Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a journey which in many ways was the swansong of the re ´gime. But what a park was awaiting the royal couple at the end of their trip: mountains, waterfalls, restaurants, splendid vistas all added up to what the inaugural guidebook simply called a 'paradise', a 'delicious oasis . . . [which] in and of itself would be enough to illustrate a reign'. [START_REF]Parc des Buttes Saint-Chaumont, Guide du promeneur[END_REF] In what follows, I shall describe the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as a historically constructed space that manifests many of the core elements now seen to be characteristic of nineteenth-century French society. However, this manifestation is not a simple and straightforward reflection of otherwise independent social, cultural or political factors; rather, it creates and simultaneously alters the conditions of possibility for these factors to operate.

The construction of the Buttes-Chaumont was arguably one of the crowning accomplishments of the Second Empire, and as such is an integral component of the transformation of Paris under the authoritarian control of both the Emperor Napoleon III and the Prefect for the Department of the Seine between 1853 and 1869, Baron Georges-Euge `ne Haussmann. 11 Since the impact of Haussmann on both the morphology and the social geography of Paris counts among the more profoundly studied episodes in modern history, some brief reminders will suffice for the creation of an initial context. During the 19 years of its existence, the Second Empire transformed its capital from a (largely) medieval city into a modern metropolis, chiefly by facilitating flows of various kinds to improve the circulation of goods, people and capital. This was achieved by broadening avenues into boulevards, constructing new railway stations, tearing down slum quarters and displacing a large segment of the working population of Paris, and through the implementation of modern technologies including gas lighting, sewage works and the realization of mass transport systems. 12 It was as part of this transformation of Paris that the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont came into being. It was not the only 'green' space to be incorporated into the makeover of the city: both the (existing) Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes underwent extensive regenerations during this period, the Parc Monceau in the 17th arrondissement was altered dramatically, and the Parc Montsouris, now adjacent to the RER (light railway) station 'Cite ´Universitaire', was built from scratch. [START_REF] Schenker | Parks and politics during the Second Empire in Paris[END_REF] Although an integral component of the metamorphosis of Paris between 1851 and 1870, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Á alongside most of the other parks just mentioned Á occupied a peripheral position within the French capital. It did so first of all in an obvious sense: the 19th arrondissement, whose heart the Buttes-Chaumont forms to this present day, was only incorporated into the city of Paris proper in 1860, together with eight other newly created arrondissements. Here the workings of Haussmann's capital machine, so aptly described by David Harvey and others, [START_REF] See Esp | The urbanisation of capital[END_REF] could not function in quite the same manner as it did in the more centrally located areas of Paris: only state intervention pure and simple Á as opposed to a more refined public Á private partnership Á was capable of transforming a perceived medieval quality of urban life into a more modern form of urban experience. 15 But the site of the Buttes-Chaumont was peripheral also in more symbolic ways, and it is to these aspects that I shall now turn my attention.

Park histories

Surveying the history of the construction of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, what strikes the contemporary onlooker most is the sheer speed with which the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III transformed this space. The Park was conceived and decreed by Haussmann in 1862, construction began in the spring of 1864, and the inauguration, as we have seen, took place a mere three years later. The sheer scale of accomplishment surprises still: at 62 acres, '[o]nly a twentieth of the size of the Bois de Boulogne, the park cost the city nearly twice as much'. [START_REF] Frascina | Modernity and modernism[END_REF] The park itself was constructed by Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817Á 91), the engineer in charge of the technical realization of so many of Haussmann's dreams and aspirations. [START_REF]Alphand was not alone: Haussmann surrounded himself with technocrats like Euge `ne Belgrand, Jacques Hittorf and E ´mile Deschamps throughout his reign as Prefect[END_REF] Memorialized a mere seven years after his death through a monument erected at the Avenue Foch Á 'Haussmann himself had to wait eighty years for the same honour' 18 Á Alphand is one of those figures unduly relegated to the sidelines in present-day histories of modernity. A technocrat with considerable engineering expertise, as Inge´nieur des Ponts et des Chausse´es he was officially put in charge of transforming Paris's bridges, streets and promenades by Haussmann in 1854, and as such he was also largely responsible for the fortification of the city during the siege of 1870. Contrary to other, more overtly political figures, Alphand survived the reign of the Emperor. He was later to be put in charge of the levelling of a small hill to the west of the Champ de Mars for the construction of the Palais de Trocade ´ro at the 1878 World's Fair, and become the director of the same event in 1889, finally being buried in a remarkably prominent plot in the Cimetie `re du Pe `re-Lachaise. Arguably, Alphand represents the rising importance and simultaneous redefinition of the role of experts in matters technical, indicative of an overall depoliticization of public life during this period. The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Alphand's 'tour de force' [START_REF] Chadwick | The town and the park: public landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries[END_REF] as we shall see, is a particularly striking outcome of this process, not least because it deployed modern means to materialize, within a growing and increasingly 'machine-like' urban landscape, the aesthetic impulse so dear to the Romantics' critique of modernity. [START_REF]Alphand's memorial on the Avenue Foch reinforces this view of the role of experts in modern societies. Surrounded by clearly subordinate colleagues, Alphand here is a suitable two steps removed from a bas-relief of workers[END_REF] When first contemplated as a site for a future park, the area that was to become the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont had little to recommend it as an obvious or 'natural' choice for such a purpose. The name it then bore Á Mont chauve , meaning 'bald mount' Á is indicative. [START_REF]As a number of memos from within Alphand's staff demonstrate, the 'poor ground' present[END_REF] Indeed, the absence of water and anything green in what was a gypsumand-limestone environment was compounded by a series of historical presences that must have weighed heavily on the minds of those living in the area. Until their recent incorporation into Paris proper, the area was directly adjacent to the ancient gallows operative, with interruptions, from 1233 until 1792. Clearly visible on a number of ancient maps [START_REF]Examples include Truschet and Hoyeau's 'Plan de Ba ˆle' of 1552, Pigafetta's 'Plan de Parigi[END_REF] as the gibets de Montfaucon , these gallows were capable of executing up to 80 condemned men and women simultaneously Á only to let their bodies hang until disintegration had run its natural cause. So prominently was this site ingrained into the collective psyche of Paris that The ´ophile Gautier, the famous nineteenth-century critic and aesthete, saw 'Babylon' Á his chosen expression for Paris Á being devoured by the rats of Montfaucon. [START_REF]Das Passagen-Werk[END_REF] Until 1848 the area commonly referred to as the Buttes was also one of the depositories of the city's sanitary sewage. With Haussmann's alteration of Paris, and the associated boom in the construction economy, this function was supplanted by the extension of existing but, till then, small-scale quarries ('Carrie `res du Centre' and the 'Pla ˆtrie `re Ame ´rique', named after the urban quarter in which they were located). 24 This use of urban geology brought too the presence of 'unruly elements', those who sought refuge in caves and tunnels and who added to a perception of danger and the eerie quality of the area. [START_REF] Prendergast | Alone among the villages newly incorporated into the city of Paris, Belleville was literally[END_REF] It comes as no surprise, then, that most of the pre-Haussmannian maps of Paris strategically place their index somewhere or another in close proximity to the area that was to become the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

In all of this it is imperative to remember that the adjacent communes of La Villette and Belleville were incorporated into the city of Paris only in 1860. 26 Any analysis of nineteenth-century maps of Paris (see Figure 2) clearly conveys the impression of a city engulfing the area that is the Buttes-Chaumont, spilling over its previous ramparts. By 1862, the space between the two villages has been all but filled, separated only by the 'empty' space that is the Buttes-Chaumont, which increasingly is seen as a dangerous void, a 'desert'. 27 Small wonder, then, that although we can document some 85 expropriations necessary for the construction of the park, relatively few buildings Á mostly in the south-eastern corner of the area Á needed to be destroyed to clear space for the roads bordering upon the park. [START_REF]The quarries in turn had already been bought by the city of Paris in 1862, after a new law had prohibited any underground exploitation within the (altered) bounds of Paris after 1860; see the files contained in 'Expropriations 610'[END_REF] Occupying these newly created spaces at the now incorporated periphery of Paris were those segments of the population that were no longer able to afford the everincreasing rents of the centre, as well as newly migrant labour from the countryside and from abroad. The area surrounding the Buttes in particular appears to have attracted German-speaking surplus labour, and became the neighbourhood 'from [w]here are coming out those swarms of sweepers cleaning up the streets of Paris'. 29 With this in mind, the decision to centralize most of the slaughterhouses of Paris in the abattoirs of La Villette Á which opened four months before, and a mere 600 metres to the north of, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont Á appears to represent a more 'site-based' choice than the construction of the park itself. However, it was precisely the desire to counterbalance these histories, and to eliminate their influence on the spread of goods and capital, that made the choice of the Buttes for the construction of a park such a compelling and rational one. Before we can investigate the concrete workings of these motifs more fully, however, we need to place the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont within a more particular context: the history of public gardens and 'green' spaces in France.

Constructing nature, reconfiguring people

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont engages with a long tradition of public parks in France and in the west more generally. [START_REF] Debie | Jardins de capitales : une ge´ographie des parcs et jardins publics de Paris[END_REF] At its most basic, it forms part of the nineteenthcentury critique of symmetrically organized gardens Á embodied in France in the parks of the Ancien Regime and of Andre ´Le No ˆtre in particular Á through the incorporation of the Victorian model of urban 'landscape' gardens, or public parks, into the French canon from the 1830s onward. [START_REF] Chadwick | The town and the park. We need to note that this renaissance in the construction of urban parks was not restricted to France, but took place almost everywhere in Western, industrialized societies[END_REF] Where the former, exemplified within the Parisian context by the Jardin des Tuileries (Figure 3), combined structural rigidity with a love for ornament, the latter sought to imitate nature as closely as possible. Where the former appreciated 'green' spaces primarily for their ability to embellish, the latter saw fit to interpret them in functional terms. Technological labour, I shall argue, played a crucial role in harmonizing these two elements of the critique of symmetrical gardens Á and thus was centrally involved in the shaping of a particularly 'French' path into the reconciliation of 'nature' with 'culture'. Napoleon's love of all things British, and of English gardens in particular, [START_REF] Haussmann | [END_REF] helped to facilitate the design of the Second Empire parks of Paris, but the trend towards the creation of more 'natural' urban and 'green' environments was not restricted to the French capital. Nor were the parks the only enduring legacy of the Second Empire within the French capital, as the 'green' transformation of the Champs-Elyse ´es into an organized leisure space under J.-I. Hittorf during the 1830s Á accommodating inter alia one of the first Panoramas in Paris Á demonstrates. [START_REF] Joest | Haussmann's Paris: a green metropolis?[END_REF] As such, this development was part of a wider transformation in society at large, and reflects the rise of an increasingly leisure-conscious bourgeoisie in the move away from the use of parks for representational purposes to a more inclusive and (crucially) edifying purpose. [START_REF]Inclusive' in the present context does not merely signal the gradual access of more and different classes into the space that is the park; it also implies the admission of different age groups such as (crucially) children. On the changing social role of parks in Paris, see M. Conan and I. Marghieri[END_REF] In the ideologically charged words of a contemporary surveyor of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: 'Liberty for all peoples under the sun has settled many social problems.' [START_REF] Boue | The squares and gardens of Paris: the Buttes-Chaumont, p. 1. The term 'moral geographies' was popularized particularly in the work of F. Driver; see his 'Moral geography: social science and the urban environment in nineteenth century England[END_REF] As recent writings have taught us, there is nothing accidental about these aspects of garden designs in the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the deployment of nature as a pedagogical vehicle aimed at undermining class conflicts went hand in hand with a nominally 'progressive' conceptualization of the relationship between nature and culture. As Alphand himself noted: 'It is imperative to listen to nature, to consult it and thus to be its courtesan, not its master'. [START_REF] Alphand | quoted in Marie-Blanche d'Arneville's article on gardens[END_REF] In the context of Paris, the park thus becomes a habitual counter-space to the guinguettes or cabarets with their morally suspect qualities. It operates as a 'moral landscape', [START_REF] Debie | Jardins des capitales p. 180. The nexus between habitus and 'moral' qualities embedded in particular landscapes has been analysed for contemporary spaces in G. Setten, 'The habitus, the rule and the moral landscape[END_REF] in forms ranging from the ideological desire that the dangerous classes should learn from nature while being provided with 'fresh air', to direct indoctrination through the use of the park as a political theatre, [START_REF] Bayard | On the latter aspects[END_REF] to the mundane if important creation of a space that could shape new identities for a newly annexed population. Improving the living conditions of those living in proximity to the Buttes was thus as important as improving the populace as such. [START_REF] Matless | Moral geographies of the English landscape[END_REF] Crucially, this 'moral landscape' did not require the kind of top-down legislation and normative meddling with deviant forms of behaviour that had characterized interventions in sexual forms of immorality and the spaces in which they were practiced; [START_REF] Howell | A private contagious diseases act: prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge[END_REF] rather, the design of the Buttes subtly encourages those stereotypical forms of behaviour so beloved by the bourgeosie. [START_REF]This encouragement thus arguably becomes akin to the moral guidance provided in a more mediated environment by late nineteenth-century melodramas, with their similar insistence on dramatic contrasts and moral choices. See H. M. Schenker, 'Central Park and the melodramatic imagination[END_REF] Chief amongst these was perhaps the act of 'strolling' through a landscape at once non-threatening and full of contrasts, which could thus be argued to become the moral and functional counterpart to the development of the fla ˆneur. And similarly to the fla ˆneur, the promeneur emerges as a clearly gendered urban character: 'Around 1855, about 90% of those frequenting the Jardin des Tuileries were reputed to be women and children'. [START_REF] Oxenius | Indicatively for the history of the Buttes-Chaumont, Baudelaire himself planned to include a prose poem entitled 'Du haut des Buttes-Chaumont' in his Le Spleen de Paris. On Baudelaire and Paris[END_REF] However, for this development to work, one crucial aspect of the criticized ancient tradition of constructing public gardens had to be technically amplified and thereby naturalized into the landscape: the new parks had to provide visual stimuli while remaining functionally organic. Nature, in other words, had to be made naturally dramatic. In parks like the Buttes-Chaumont, nature never simply is ; rather, it is a reinvention of itself as contrast Á with culture, with symmetry, with aristocracy, with some other form of itself.

In this manner, the park marks the difference between a potentially unorganized nature and a harmonious nature where everything, including 'wilderness' or 'irregularity', has its place. In short, not only is 'the lesson of the Buttes-Chaumont . . . that the only true nature is the false one' but also it is futile from now on to differentiate between what is artificial and what is not. 43 The geometrical figure so centrally implicated in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the ellipse, is emblematic of this organized nature. A guiding principle of the park, the ellipse represents the perfect compromise between the two conflicting goals envisaged in its construction, being at once 'natural' and technically controllable. [START_REF] Asendorf | Parabeln und Hyperbeln. U ¨ber die Kodierung von Kurven[END_REF] As such, it became the guiding principle of all the parks erected or renovated in Paris under the Second Empire, and reigned supreme over both general park morphology and the detailed layout of paths and flower beds. Through the ellipse, the construction of parks like the Buttes-Chaumont was transformed from an act of engineering to a work of art and scenographic practice, facilitating as it did performances of landscape and environment. A walk along an elliptical path combines elements of anticipation and enticement with a pleasantly unthreatening sense of order, leading to a 'progressive' experience of landscapes. 45 Tied into an elliptical discourse structured by Alphand, this is 'walking' in an everyday space where '[t]o walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper'. [START_REF] De Certeau | The practice of everyday life[END_REF] But the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is furthermore original in the degree to which technology is both absent and functional in its construction. Its most prominent feature, a central mountain surrounded by a lake, was not simply a remnant from previous quarrying days; it was technically transformed with the help of recently perfected concrete to appear not as the coupled product of labour that it was but as the natural landform that it was not [START_REF]und Strom. Propyla ¨en Technikgeschichte[END_REF] (Figure 4).

The same rationale applies to the most often noted Á and indeed formulaic Á landform in the park: a limestone cum concrete grotto with replicas of stalagmites and stalactites. The lake itself, as well as possessing an imposing waterfall ending in the aforementioned grotto, was (and continues to be) fed artificially by waters pumped to the heights of the Buttes-Chaumont from the Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th and 11th arrondissements. [START_REF]A most thought-provoking study of the role of water in urban environments is I. Illich, H 2 O and the waters of forgetfulness[END_REF] Stairways and railings throughout the park were made from standardized, reinforced concrete which sought to imitate nature. Even the early connection of this place to the emerging network of Metro lines within the French capital Á the Buttes-Chaumont were linked with the Opera as early as 1911, when the construction of line 7 came to a successful conclusion Á remained invisible within the confines of the park proper. The same 'invisibility' of technology and labour rendered the now derelict chemin de fer de ceinture, the Paris ring railway, organically integrated into the park, cutting through the north-eastern portion of the Buttes and at one time providing another means of accessing the area. [START_REF]The connection between an older Parisian underground made of 'grottoes' and 'catacombs' and the Metro Á where the latter de-demonizes the former Á has been drawn by Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk , C 2, 1; importantly at the Buttes-Chaumont, the absence of technological support in the perfectionionizing of 'nature' makes this link an even[END_REF] However, the absence of labour and technology from the emerging landscape was not absolute but dialectically structured. Embedded within a teleological structure of sorts, technology is rendered visible, but in a form such that an implied celebration of progress does not diminish the illusions of naturalness created. In the Buttes, such a spatial logic can be seen in one of the first suspension bridges in France (Figure 5). Utilizing prefabricated steel cables, and linking the central mountain across the lake to the surrounding landscape, [START_REF] Lefresne | La construction de la passerelle suspendue du Parc des Buttes-Chaumont a `Paris[END_REF] this suspension bridge celebrated its construction not as a product of labour but as a technological advance, an innovation. As such, the disruption of the park's illusions (of naturalness) was seamlessly replaced by another illusion (of national grandeur); crucially, both illusions require neither maintenance nor any other human input for them to become real. The same motif applies to the second, and 'merely' functional, bridge to be found in the park, which was originally constructed by Gustave Eiffel and 'where, before it was furnished with a guardrail, people who had not come with the intention of killing themselves suddenly found the abyss irresistible'. [START_REF] Aragon | The history of this particular bridge is documented in many official documents preserved in the AdP[END_REF] The 'absence' of technology is accordingly not so much an act of concealment but of acceleration; rather than being hidden, it is resolved, not unlike a Hegelian Aufhebung, into its products Á which can thus celebrate both nature and human ingenuity. [START_REF]This motif is arguably one of the defining characteristics of modernity at large: a complex interweaving of 'presences' and 'absences' which can only ever be rendered as a 'now' through the use of ideologies. See U. Strohmayer, 'Technology, modernity and the restructuring of the present in historical geographies[END_REF] The resulting, highly constructed space thus contrasts only in appearance with the wider regulated space of Paris established under Haussmann Á which not coincidentally is described by many contemporary commentators in biological metaphors. [START_REF] Fournel | who likens boulevards to 'arteries' (p. 12) and compares an ancient Paris that is no[END_REF] It is these 'naturalized' ways of conceptualizing a new park which arguably helped its conceptualization as a labour-less space. Despite the fact that the Parc des Buttes- Chaumont required 'continuous reparations', as one of Alphand's engineers stressed a mere six months after the inauguration, 54 such effort never becomes labour but remains a biological necessity instead. Just as food sustains a living organism, so a park requires some kind of sustenance. Not surprisingly, contestations were therefore mainly restricted to questions of taste and style. Since too much work had gone into the construction of the park, noted one columnist at the time, 'the primitive, wild and pittoresque aspects had been sacrificed'. [START_REF] Joanne | Si le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont m'e ´tait conte ´[END_REF] However, the majority of guidebooks remained oblivious to the many forms of labour, technology and maintenance that made the Buttes what they were: a feast for the eye and a celebration of modernity through its absence. The dual inauguration of both the park and the 1867 World's Fair thus makes sense: both events presented the products of labour as entertainment, without any detectable trace of exertion. This, I would argue, together with the linked emphasis on the spectacular character of both nature and culture, is little less than the key condition of possibility for subsequent processes of commodification. No surprise, therefore, that it is only when potential park activities have been fully commercialized that they re-enter the canon of possibilities; until that time, grass is for looking at. [START_REF]On the 'spectacular' nature of public gardens, see Green, The spectacle of nature ; the complex, and often contradictory, involvement of 'spectacular' elements on the sites of various industrial fairs has been analysed in A. Pred, 'Spectacular articulations of modernity: the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897[END_REF] Here is the link between . . . metropolitan ideology and natura naturans . Nature in this sense was produced not merely as a set of objects to be admired and enjoyed, nor even a repertoire of social values. Rather, it described a structured mode of apprehension, both of the world and of oneself. 57 The 'dream' or 'wish image', evoked by Walter Benjamin as a functional prerequisite for commodity capitalism to reign supreme, is but another approximation of this 'structured mode of apprehension' which is characteristic of both nature and produced goods insofar as labour has been absented from both. Here the 'natural' aspect of something entirely constructed guarantees its visual attractiveness, in much the same way, the guidebook noted, as 'the de ´cor of an opera' best succeeds where illusions are naturalized. [START_REF]At the Buttes-Chaumont, we do not find rural nature in the city but a form of ''hyper park'', arguably a forerunner to the contemporary theme park': 'Landscape architecture: the dialogue between society and ideological vision[END_REF] Labour, in other words, is only successful within the urban context if and where it erases itself through its own products. [START_REF]'Dead labour and the political economy of landscape'. 60[END_REF] The Buttes-Chaumont and society at large If the history of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, or rather, the construction of nature in the park, allows insights into the relationship between the social and the cultural, such insights would remain sterile without a consideration of those people who have used, and continue to use, the spaces provided for them in such an elaborate manner. As such, the Buttes illuminate rather well a general change undergone by the majority of urban parks in the West. Initially a chosen space for public representations by a minority class in the early nineteenth century, urban green spaces have become a traffic-calmed enclave for children and pensioners in today's world. 60 The construction of parks during the Second Empire in Paris occupies a key position in this transition: although the net result of Alphand's activities in the French capital was a loss of overall 'green' spaces, more of these were now publicly accessible in one form or another. 61 Access to some form of 'nature' was hence democratized considerably.

Of the Second Empire Parisian parks, only the Bois de Boulogne attracted, and continues to attract, a public from beyond its immediate neighbourhood; 'all the other parks', as a sympathetic commentator writes some 60 years later, 'belong to their quartier '. [START_REF] Espezel | Sur les Buttes-Chaumont[END_REF] What this implied for the Buttes is rather obvious. Where the parks in the west of Paris were Á and to some extent continue to be Á parks frequented by the haute bourgeoisie , the Buttes were an enclave of the petite bourgeoisie , despite the rather expensive real estate that now border the park.

It is in this role that the park acts as one of the main protagonists in Louis Aragon's 1926 novel Le Paysan de Paris . Writing during a time strangely reminiscent of ours Á witness the introductory 'Preface to a modern mythology' Á Aragon's protagonist finds solace in, among other places, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Seeking liberation from an 'oppressive system' built upon the 'sophism of evidence', 63 he turns to what is arguably one of the most constructed manifestations of modernity, but crucially does so initially at night-time, when everything is 'utterly abandoned to space'. 64 The reasons for this choice are only partly explained by a certain melancholy that attaches to the materiality of a perfected, frozen nature. Writing some three generations earlier, Baudelaire had already sought to capture a similarly 'frozen' state when writing about the Buttes using the image of the 'widow' Á which he contrasts with those of happy families strolling in the park. [START_REF]As discussed in Prendergast[END_REF] In Aragon's poetic language, the park furthermore becomes a nightly landscape full of simulacra, which precisely because it is modelled upon repetition can liberate the fla ˆnerie it invites from consciously seeking new sensations: 'Park, park and park. Here is the apartment of dreams: in a defile of artificial rocks, a passage at the bottom of the vale, near a brook bounding Á the cascade lies ahead Á to its downfall'. 66 Dead nature, or rather arrested nature, is allowed to mimic its own state in the absence of labour ; thrown back upon him-or herself, the stroller in the park is free to daydream and thus to transcend, rather than deny, labour as such. The reader thus encounters in Aragon's daydreams another, decidedly private, Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Escaping the dichotomy between private and public spaces, which itself developed as an accompaniment to, and functional element of, modernity, [START_REF] Bondi | On the historical and modern nature of the relationship between private and public spaces, see in particular[END_REF] Aragon's protagonist is free to be distracted by surreal and 'narcotic images', each of which, 'whenever it strikes, forces you to revise the entire universe': Splendid ravages: the principle of utility will become foreign to all who practice this superior vice. For them the mind will at last cease to be 'applied'. They will see its limits recede; they will make whatever on earth is ardent and unsatisfied partake in this inebriation. [START_REF] Aragon | threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called ''meaning[END_REF] In other words, even an ordered space such as the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont functions in a heterotopic manner, if only by encouraging daydreaming and other forms of 'absenting' from bourgeois norms. One can still detect these qualities embedded in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont today. A 'phantasmagoric landscape,' [START_REF] Combes | Le voyageur du metro ae ´rien: expe ´dition aux Buttes Chaumont[END_REF] which needs to be appreciated through the eyes of a child to reveal its labyrinthine qualities, the park is both more and less than we can apprehend.

What can we learn from the construction, and subsequent uses, of a space like the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont? The fact that, like other human constructs, the park partakes in, as well as alters, the social and cultural context of the Second Empire is itself almost a truism; more interesting by far is the attempt to render the park contemporary, to read it as part of an ongoing, partly complex, partly straightforward, process of modernization of the material urban environment. The fact that today the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is used largely for recreational sports like jogging or Tai Chi, for instance, does not just reflect a different appreciation of urban parks; it is also indicative of a changing social structure which now surrounds the park.

Just as interesting, however, are developments nearby. The redesignation of what used to be the slaughterhouses or abattoirs of La Vilette first as the new central markets for the city of Paris Á replacing the demolished Les Halles in the 1st arrondissement Á and, since the early 1980s, as a new Parc de la Vilette, is indicative in more than one respect. Once again the city of Paris turned an industrial left-over space into a park for the education and amusement of the people of Paris; once again this creation of a park formed part of a re-evaluation of peripheral spaces within Paris (a process that has also included the Parc Andre ´Citroe ¨n in the 15th, the makeover of Bercy in the 12th and the Rive Gauche project in the 13th arrondissement); and once again a park reflected its own period, this time through an attempted deconstruction of many of the formulaic elements so prevalent within nineteenth-century parks. B. Tschumi's folies Á empty, colourful cages spattered across the Parc de la Vilette as conditions of possibility that aspire not to prescribe Á thus reinscribe into another historical landscape the same structural logic that reigned supreme in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Like the crowning folie of the Buttes, a replica of the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, Tschumi's empty folies are but quotes, some form of 'nature' reproduced, if now with a postmodern twist: what purports to be empty should easily be adaptable to anything. Similarly fitting is the fact that the Parc de la Villette houses pure technology, simply historicized in the form of a newly constructed museum of science, the Cite ´des Sciences et Industries, which is placed alongside a newly centralized college of music. How better to symbolize the changing nature of 'modernity' than to compare the hidden with the overt celebration of technology at the two parks? [START_REF] Mayer | The public park as avant-garde (landscape) architecture: a comparative interpretation of two Parisian parks, Parc de la Villette (1983 Á 1990) and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (1864 Á 1867)[END_REF] The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, despite the overt lack of openly commodified nature, in fact resembles its commodified counterpart in the simultaneously developing grands magasins or department stores of central Paris. Both render invisible what supports them: labour and technology. 71 Both spaces embody the promise of leisure and pleasure untainted by the myriad forms of labour that are required for their construction and maintenance. In this obviously false and ideologically charged illusion, the Buttes do not differ fundamentally from older parks. Rather, the novelty resides in how technology becomes centrally involved in the ideologically constructed dissolving of labour into nature, where the invisibility of the former becomes a factor conditioning the social uses of the latter. It may be helpful in this context to remember the eighteenth century differentiation between 'first' and 'second' nature invented by the French scientist Count Buffon. 72 In this tradition, the transition towards 'second' nature marks the space of labour only insofar as it is capable of naturalizing social meanings. By the nineteenth century, the most potent of mechanisms implicated in this process was the commodification of ever larger parts of an increasingly bourgeois everyday life. Crucially, this transition did not merely affect both 'nature' and 'culture', but cut a clear passage within the ongoing history of modernity. It is in this form that the present essay adopts as a final vanishing point the notion of entertainment. For the defining hallmark of entertainment since the days of the construction of the Buttes has been the implication of technology in the creation of labour-less illusions. Cinema, Nike and Disney World thus become the twenty-first-century extensions of the act of 'strolling' we saw emerge in the technologically created space that was Á and still is Á the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, hiding their conditions of possibility rather effectively indeed. The landscapes of naturalized entertainment, of simulated nature, 73 are landscapes of consumption. Whether they are consumed as reality or as simulacra, what matters is the functional masking of their fabricated nature. Unmasking this labour, making it visible, is one of the crucial tasks in studies of nature, technology and the modern city.

Notes

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in its final state. (By permission of Bibliothe `que Historique de la Ville de Paris.)

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Belleville (left) 1842, (right (1862). (By permission of Bibliothe `que Historique de la Ville de Paris.)

FIGURE 3

 3 FIGURE 3 Layout of the Jardins des Tuileries, c. 1660. (By permission of Bibliothe `que Historique de la Ville de Paris.)

FIGURE 4

 4 FIGURE 4 The central 'mountain' within the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and the suicide bridge, 1880. (By permission of Bibliothe `que Historique de la Ville de Paris.)

FIGURE 5

 5 FIGURE 5 Turn-of-the century postcard of the suspension bridge. (Author's collection.)

FIGURE 6

 6 FIGURE 6 Present-day use of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. (Author's photograph.)


Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world

Sarah Whatmore

Oxford University Centre for the Environment, School of Geography This paper surveys the return to materialist concerns in the work of a new generation of cultural geographers informed by their engagements with science and technology studies and performance studies, on the one hand, and by their worldly involvements in the politically charged climate of relations between science and society on the other. It argues that these efforts centre on new ways of approaching the vital nexus between the bio (life) and the geo (earth), or the 'livingness' of the world, in a context in which the modality of life is politically and technologically molten. It identifies some of the major innovations in theory, style and application associated with this work and some of the key challenges that it poses for the practice of cultural geography.

Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth . . . involving a gradual but thorough displacement from text to territory. 1 Something/happening I t seems pertinent, even unavoidable, to begin by confessing that I still feel something of an outsider in the 'cultural geography' camp Á at least as it came to be configured in the formative years of my research career in the late 1980s as the rise of 'cultural studies' in the UK gained disciplinary purchase in the guise of 'the new cultural geography'. 2 That project's signature concerns with the politics of representation and identity cast my obdurately earthy interests in cultivation and property, growing and eating, in a very unfashionable light. At that time such interests found a more convenient if not very permissive home in political economy Á where the 'matter of nature', as Margaret Fitzsimmons so memorably put it, was marginally less marginalized. 3 So, in a small but not insignificant way, my being invited to present the cultural geographies annual lecture 4 is testament to some kind of realignment of intellectual energies underway; that moment of fabulation that Deleuze conjures 5 in which cultural forces regroup and start to generate their own stories: stories which enter the world as envoys of 'something happening' Á giving that something/happening both shape and momentum.

This paper might best be thought of as just such a self-conscious act of storying Á an envoy of the recuperation of 'materiality' that is gathering force in this something/ happening through energies as diverse as postcolonial, feminist, landscape, urban, legal and performance studies. 6 Through these diverse currents, cultural geographers have found their way (back) to the material in very different ways that variously resonate with what I take to be amongst the most enduring of geographical concerns Á the vital connections between the geo (earth) and the bio (life). 7 The durability of these concerns bears the hallmark of geography's history, which (like anthropology and archaeology) took shape before the division of academic labours into social and natural sciences became entrenched. It is a division with which these disciplines have never been entirely comfortable, and with which they continue to wrestle more selfconsciously, and sometimes productively, than others. With the advent of the 'new cultural geography', this earthlife nexus was written out of, or more accurately, into the ancestral past of cultural geography Á at least in the Anglophone research community. 8 I argue here that this nexus is currently being recharged and taken in unfamiliar directions by a new generation of cultural geographers, not least through multiple engagements with the 'geo/bio-philosophy' of Deleuze and Guattari 9 from which this intervention pushes off. Such engagements have been direct, through close readings of their work and the philosophical industry that it has spawned, and indirect, through the twin intermediaries of science and technology studies and performance studies in which it is differently, and variously, inflected. [START_REF] Hence E.G | Latour's famous quip that the acronym ANT (Actant Network Theory) could just as easily have been ART (Actant Rhizome Theory). See T. Crawford[END_REF] A common commitment in such work is a view of science and philosophy as projects in which theory does not take on a representational function, but rather an active and practical one, such that every theory acts as a 'mechanics' Á simultaneously a technology of practice and an intervention in the world. [START_REF] Murphy | Quantum ontology: a virtual mechanics of becoming[END_REF] But this storying of cultural geography's recuperation of the material works against forging 'it' into the latest in a weary and wearying succession of 'new turns' that have been written into the intellectual history of cultural geography, still less one that is uniformly or exclusively Deleuzian.

Instead, I want to emphasize that this recuperation manifests a rich variety of analytical impulses; philosophical resources and political projects that don't 'add up' to a singular 'new' approach, let alone one that has a monopoly of insight or value. To this end, I use the language of re turns to suggest that what is new (as in different) about the something/happening in cultural geography is a product of repetition Á turning seemingly familiar matters over and over, like the pebbles on a beach Á rather than a product of sudden encounter or violent rupture. Just as importantly, what is different or innovatory about these materialist returns is generated as much by the technologically and politically molten climate that informs cultural geographers' intellectual investments and worldly involvements as by any academic repositioning. In this case, I think there can be little doubt that the materialist returns of cultural geography today are bound up with the proliferation of what Bruno Latour calls 'matters of concern' [START_REF]A term he uses in contrast to 'matters of fact' and as shorthand for refusing the distinction between what is controvertible (e.g. values) and what is not[END_REF] and Michel Callon calls 'hot situations' [START_REF]A term he uses to describe situations in which 'everything becomes controversial[END_REF] associated with the intensification of the interface between 'life' and 'informatic' sciences and politics. This intensification has been witnessed in serial public controversies since the 1990s, from GM to nanotechnology, [START_REF] Nowotny | Rethinking science: knowledge, and the public in an age of uncertainty[END_REF] in which the practices of social, as well as natural, scientists have been caught up.

These involvements are reflected in cultural geography's reworking of substantive topics (like domestication and sensory perception) in unfamiliar, and sometimes unsettling, directions such as the burgeoning interest in animal cultures, [START_REF] Philo | Animal spaces: beastly places[END_REF] 'posthumanism' [START_REF] Castree | Mapping posthumanism', theme issue of Environment and planning A[END_REF] and geographies of 'affect'. [START_REF] Mccormack | An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect[END_REF] I want to start by articulating the broadest sense of this claim that a new generation of cultural geographers is returning to the rich conjunction of the bio and the geo Á or, for want of a more felicitous expression, to what the writer Jeanette Winterson calls the 'livingness' of the world. [START_REF] Winterson | Gut symmetries[END_REF] My argument is that the most important difference (a big claim, I know) in the 'something/happening' in cultural geography's materialist recuperations is that this return to the livingness of the world shifts the register of materiality from the indifferent stuff of a world 'out there', articulated through notions of 'land', 'nature' or 'environment', to the intimate fabric of corporeality that includes and redistributes the 'in here' of human being. [START_REF] Sheehan | Becoming human: new perspectives on the inhuman condition[END_REF] In this it shares the same impulse as Derrida's frequently articulated insistence on addressing philosophical enquiry to 'the entire field of the living, or rather to the life/death relation, beyond the anthropological limits of ''spoken language'''. [START_REF] Derrida | Violence against animals[END_REF] Importantly, however, this redirection of materialist concerns through the bodily enjoins the technologies of life and ecology, on the one hand, and of prehension and feeling, on the other, in refiguring the ontological disposition of research Á drawing cultural geographers into new conversational associations; research practices and modes of address that collectively mark what I have called 'more-than-human' approaches to the world. [START_REF] Whatmore | Hybrid geographies: natures cultures spaces[END_REF] I will tease out this rather bold claim by sketching some of the key facets of the materialist returns now in play, as I see them, and the kinds of challenges that they pose.

Materialist recuperations

In the last edition of the Dictionary of human geography , Denis Cosgrove in his entry on cultural geography distinguishes 'classical' from 'new' styles of cultural geography by reference to their approaches to the study of landscape. [START_REF] Cosgrove | Cultural geography[END_REF] The former, associated with the work of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley school that he inspired, has as its reference point his iconic essay 'The morphology of landscape' in which cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. [START_REF] Sauer | The morphology of landscape[END_REF] By contrast, 'new' cultural geography is associated with the flowering of cultural studies in Britain, as signalled by the no less totemic essay of Daniels and Cosgrove introducing their book Iconography and landscape , in which landscape is defined as a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing . . . surroundings. This is not to say that landscapes are immaterial. They may be represented in a variety of materials . . . in paint on canvas, in writing on paper, in earth, stone, water and vegetation on the ground. [START_REF] Daniels | Iconography and landscape[END_REF] The point I want to draw from these exemplary quotations is rather different from that for which they have come to stand in demarcating a 'new' from a 'classical' regime.

Despite the significant differences they articulate, what I find most striking about them is that they share an overriding common currency, namely that they both cast the making of landscapes (whether worked or represented) as an exclusively human achievement in which the stuff of the world is so much putty in our hands. On these accounts, as I have suggested elsewhere, 'the world remains untroubled and untroubling, waiting impassively for us to make up our minds and making no difference' to the landscape (or knowledge, or environment . . .) in the making. [START_REF] Whatmore | Generating materials[END_REF] By the same token, cultural geography's investments in questions of identity and culture have remained largely wedded to that most vociferously silent and self-evident subject of the social sciences, the 'in-here' of human being. So it is that recent contributions have sought to do (at least) three things. The first has been to re-animate the missing 'matter' of landscape, focusing attention on bodily involvements in the world in which landscapes are co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a lively earth. 26 The second has been to interrogate 'the human' as no less a subject of ongoing cofabrication than any other socio-material assemblage. [START_REF] Anderson | White natures: Sydney's Royal Agricultural Show in post-humanist perspective[END_REF] The third in my list has been the redistribution of subjectivity as something that 'does not live inside, in the cellar of the soul, but outside in the dappled world'. [START_REF] Latour | Body, cyborgs and the politics of incarnation[END_REF] This redistribution of energies puts the onus on 'livingness' as a modality of connection between bodies (including human bodies) and (geo-physical) worlds. In turn, that acts as a rallying point for geographers (and others) working against the lexical cast of the 'new' cultural geography and the humanist commitments of cultural geography more broadly, bringing all manner of philosophical resources to bear on their efforts. These include the corporeal materialisms inspired by Foucault's biocultures, Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh and the feminist corporeal ethics of Diprose [START_REF] Diprose | Corporeal generosity[END_REF] and others; and the energetic materialisms inspired by the relational ontologies of Spinoza, Whitehead and Deleuze (amongst others), such as Stengers' co-fabrication or 'working together'. [START_REF] Stengers | Power and invention: situating science[END_REF] In conjunction with the molten question of what 'livingness' means in a life science era, [START_REF] Doyle | Wetwares: experiments in postvital living[END_REF] such resources and energies redirect materialist concerns in ways that have profound ethical and political, as well as analytical, consequences. As the political theorist Jane Bennett recently put it, they attempt to hold onto the relational and emergent imperatives of material force in which the 'thing-ness of things' Á bodies, objects, arrangements Á are always in-the-making and 'humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky web of connections or an ecology [of matter]'. [START_REF] Bennett | The force of things: steps to an ecology of matter[END_REF] If these are some of the lineaments of the differences/innovations wrought by the materialist returns of a cultural geography attentive to the livingness of the world, how is this attentiveness playing out in terms of more specific research directions and impulses? I want to outline four commitments being taken forward in diverse ways in such work that strike me as being of particular importance.

The first is a shift in analytic focus from discourse to practice . Inspired by numerous and non-additive efforts to work against the grain of the logocentric conception of social agency Á 'I think therefore I act' Á that is a familiar mantra of orthodox social science. This shift is associated by some with the so-called 'practice turn' [START_REF]The practice turn in contemporary theory[END_REF] and a variety of approaches which relocates social agency in practice or performance rather than discourse Á thinking and acting through the body Á and reworks discourse itself as a specific kind of practice.

The second is a shift from an onus on meaning to an onus on affect . The bodily register of current work reopens the interval between sense and sense-making, and multiplies the sensory dimensions of acting in the world and the milieux of intercorporeal movement. Affect refers to the force of intensive relationality Á intensities that are felt but not personal; visceral but not confined to an individuated body. This shift of concern from what things mean to what they do has methodological consequences for how we train our apprehensions of 'what subjects us, what affects and effects us' or 'learn to be affected'. [START_REF] Latour | Bodies, cyborgs and the politics of incarnation[END_REF] The third redirection of effort is towards more-than-human modes of enquiry. Such modes of enquiry neither presume that socio-material change is an exclusively human achievement nor exclude the 'human' from the stuff of fabrication. Animals and technological devices have variously been used as 'agents provocateurs' in tackling the question of difference and rigorously working it through the specific materialities and multiplicities of subjectivity and agency. [START_REF] Wolfe | Animal rites: American culture, the discourse of species and posthumanist theory[END_REF] Such modes of enquiry attend closely to the rich array of the senses, dispositions, capabilities and potentialities of all manner of social objects and forces assembled through, and involved in, the co-fabrication of socio-material worlds.

The fourth shift is from a focus on the politics of identity to the politics of knowledge . Here two currents come together in addressing concerns with the ways in which knowledge is produced, hardwired into the social fabric and contested in a variety of public forums. One of these concerns the redistribution of expertise attendant on the recognition of multiple knowledge practices and communities that bear on the framing of inherently uncertain socio-technical problems. [START_REF] Nowotny | Re-thinking science . 37 Stengers, Power and invention[END_REF] The other concerns the practice of science (including social science) in constituting the phenomena that it studies as 'reliable witnesses' where that reliability is guaranteed by allowing phenomena to work against, or to exceed, our experimental expectations. 37 Practising more-than-human geographies For if the look purchases the transcendence of the human only at the expense of repressing the other senses (and more broadly the material and the bodily with which they are traditionally associated), then one way to recast the figure of vision (and therefore that with which it is ineluctably associated) is to resituate it as only one sense among many in a more general Á and not necessarily human Á bodily sensorium. 38 I have sought to argue that the creativity of cultural geography is generated not by a succession of 'new' turns but by the gathering force of constant re-turns to enduring preoccupations with the processes and excesses of 'livingness' in a more-than-human world. Trying not to solidify the heterogeneity of ideas and practices at work in the recuperation of materiality in cultural geography into the latest such 'turn', I have outlined some of what I see as the most important aspects of an ongoing realignment of intellectual energies. It is a realignment that promises much in terms of equipping geography in the life science era, but one that brings real and pressing methodological and political challenges in its wake. Before one gets carried away with their claims to novelty, it is worth recalling earlier efforts to marry the 'bio' and 'geo' in cultural geography. Thus, for example, buried in his 'morphology of landscape' essay is an appeal by Carl Sauer (following Vidal de la Blache) that Geographers should avoid considering the earth as the scene on which the activity of man (sic) unfolds itself, without reflecting that this scene is itself living. 39 In similar vein, current interests in performativity are anticipated in J.B. Jackson's concerns with the 'vernacular landscapes' generated by what he saw as the inexhaustible capacity for improvisation in people's everyday ways of making themselves at home in the world with and against the grain of 'aristrocratic' or political designs. [START_REF] Jackson | Discovering the vernacular landscape[END_REF] That said, the differences are profound, as these preoccupations with the intersection between the 'bio' and the 'geo' become charged with the sociotechnological possibilities, political registers, cultural sensibilities, and intellectual enthusiasms of a new generation of geographers. The next edition of the Dictionary of human geography is a few years off, but some glimpse of the ways in which the treatment of landscape in the updated entry on cultural geography might be recharged by this work are signalled in Cary Wolfe's observations on the bodily sensorium, quoted at the start of this final section.

So what difference do the materialist recuperations and research directions in cultural geography that I have sketched above make to the question of how, as Karen Barad puts it, 'matter comes to matter'? [START_REF] Barad | Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter[END_REF] On the one hand, such work is clearly marked by the distinctive axes of academic exchange that inform it, notably the burgeoning fields of study emerging between disciplines Á such as science and technology studies, performance studies, and feminist studies. On the other, it is their engagement in matters of public controversy and everyday concern taking place in a proliferation of other cultural and political forums that most stands out. Here, what makes the question of materiality matter is the molten climate of relations between science and society, technology and democracy [START_REF] Callon | Agir dans un monde incertain: essai sur la de ´mocratie technique[END_REF] in which the knowledge practices of social and natural scientists, civil servants and corporate lawyers, NGOs and direct action groups, citizens and consumers rub up against one another in the event of all manner of knowledge controversies. Such controversies (around genetic engineering, MMR injections, pharmaceutical patenting, stem-cell harvesting, reproductive cloning, for example) are at once about the most mundane and intimate aspects of social life Á food, health and kinship Á and the sites of prolific inventiveness in the life sciences. Taking the working example of what we might call 'bio-geographies', a field set to explode in the cultural geography literature, it seems, 43 I want finally to illustrate some of the differences in the ways in which cultural geographers are currently recuperating the material, and to signal some of the major challenges that they pose.

The first major difference is that 'life' itself has changed, to become the latest addition to that peculiar socio-material assemblage called 'natural resources'. The treatment of animals and plants as biological resources is hardly new, but with the rise of genetic and, more particularly, post-genomic biotechnologies any vestige of difference between the ability to manipulate and commodify their bodies and human bodies has been removed. This disturbing levelling of biological differences, reinforced by the re-materialization of biological entities in the guise of machine-readable informatic codes, 44 has profound effects on what bodies count and what counts as bodily in the work of cultural geographers today. [START_REF]Semiotic flesh: information and the human body[END_REF] Not least are the considerable additional skills required to study the detailed knowledge practices involved in the production and circulation of such bio-technological artefacts, if cultural geographers are to get to grips with the specificity (as against the originality) of knowledge objects like artificial life forms. The cultural potency of 'artificial life' suggests that it might be possible to learn from the repertoire of techniques employed in artistic work that engages science and/or scientists to stage public experiments in the possibilities of reworking hum/ani/ machine interfaces through robotic, neurological and genomic amplifications or extensions of bodily competences and temporalities. [START_REF] Dyens | Metal and flesh[END_REF] For example, the Australian performance artist Sterlarc, who has worked with robotics scientists at Sussex University in devising an 'exoskeleton', seeks to produce a choreography of movements in which instead of seeing the human body as the choreographer and the robot as the instrument, I really see the two working together. That is how it becomes an artistic performance. I have no desire to control the machine . . . . I am open to its doing the unexpected. In this sense the human body has always been a kind of cyborg. . . . . I am not satisfied with just theorising about it. I want to experience what actually happens and then try to articulate what that means. 47 A second major difference is the changed relationship between science and society in which new scientific knowledge claims and/or artefacts, particularly in those fields that touch the visceral vernacular of social anxiety relating to food or health, have become routinely controversial matters. Such controversies take cultural geographers to unfamiliar forums. At one end of the spectrum stand the law courts in which the artefacts themselves are called upon as material witnesses [START_REF] Strathern | Property, substance and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things[END_REF] in the determination of competing claims to the 'intellectual property' in new biological artefacts. [START_REF] Delaney | Making nature/marking humans[END_REF] At the other are the proliferation of impromptu 'hybrid' forums that swell in the face of new technologies Á like GM or mobile phone masts Á gathering to them all manner of concerned citizens and/or consumers; seasoned advocacy groups; scientific dissidents and the like that can change the commercial and regulatory fabric of such technologies in unpredictable ways. How do social scientists, including cultural geographers, position themselves in these forums? As the clamour grows for greater 'interdisciplinarity' as a way of addressing such knowledge controversies, cultural geography's rich tradition of experimentation provides a valuable resource for resisting the pressures on us (from within and outside the discipline) to assume the position of 'interpreters' between concerned publics and natural scientists.

As I see it, perhaps the greatest challenge presented by these 'more-than-human' styles of working is the onus they place on experimentation and, by implication, on taking (and being allowed to take) risks. Let me dwell momentarily on just two aspects of this experimental imperative. First is the urgent need to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject. [START_REF] For An Example | Living cities: making space for urban nature[END_REF] Second, the experimental demands of 'more-than-human' styles of working place an onus on actively redistributing expertise beyond engaging with other disciplines or research fields to engaging knowledge practices and vernaculars beyond the academy in experimental research/politics such as the 'deliberative mapping' exercise pioneered by Gail Davies and her collaborators in relation to xeno-transplantation. [START_REF] Davies | Deliberative mapping: appraising options for addressing the kidney gap[END_REF] I hope and trust that cultural geographies will continue to play its part as a leading journal in which scholars can take risks and experiment; in which the worldliness that has been the hallmark of geographical endeavours is reinvigorated; and in which conversations and politics proliferate in generative ways rather than hardening into orthodoxy.

Acknowledgements

I should like to acknowledge the valuable feedback I received from audiences on versions/parts of this paper presented at the 'Envisioning geographies' symposium at UCL; the Lennart Andersson Lecture at Karlstadt University; and the 'Exhibition of British geography' plenary session at the IGU conference in Glasgow.


Caron Lipman

The emotional self

N ever has the study of emotions appeared so, well, emotive. At least, that was my response to reading the introduction to a new volume of essays, Emotional geographies, in which geographers are condemned for having 'trouble expressing feelings', their discipline perhaps an 'emotionally barren terrain, a world devoid of passion, spaces ordered solely by rational principles and demarcated according to political, economic or technical logics'. 1 This condemnation may seem rather extreme Á not all geographers will recognise their own work as falling into such a category. Nonetheless, such a state of affairs is being corrected, it seems, by geography's current emotional 'turn'. This move to focus on emotion appears to be an outgrowth of a number of well-established ideas and practices: humanism, phenomenology, performativity, feminism, psychoanalysis, non-representational theory, to name some obvious signposts. It is interesting to note that these geographers are not alone. Outside the discipline an agenda has been set through, for example, interest in exploring emotional language in public life or models of personal development. This might in part explain why two important cultural theorists Á Teresa Brennan and Sara Ahmed Á have also recently waded into the emotion fray, and their fascinating works are reviewed here. These different interventions on emotion, for me, beg these questions in particular: How best do we conceptualize the self in cultural work? And are emotional selves always 'socially' configured: will this work herald the final end to interest in 'interior' or private experience?

The first challenge in putting emotions centre stage is how they are to be described. A problem for readers is delineating 'emotion' from 'affect', given that Brennan uses the

latter, Ahmed and the editors of Emotional geographies (as is explicit from the title, although vaguely defined), the former. However, some of the contributors to Emotional geographies also prefer to use the word 'affect', dismissing 'emotion' as too individualistic. They utilise Deleuze's description of 'intersubjective fields of affective intensity that emerge between individuals'. [START_REF] Conradson | Freedom, space and perspective: moving encounters with other ecologies[END_REF] This shift in focus onto 'affect' reflects other geographical interventions. [START_REF] Thrift | Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect[END_REF] In a recent commentary, however, such a move is antagonistically deemed by Deborah Thein as 'masculinist, technocratic and distancing'. [START_REF] Thien | After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography[END_REF] Elsewhere, Eric Shouse clarifies: 'Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.' [START_REF] Shouse | Feeling, emotion, affect[END_REF] An affect, he explains, is a 'nonconscious experience of intensity' which cannot be fully realized in language, and, unlike emotions and feelings, is 'unformed and unstructured'. 6 Whichever way they are to be distinguished, emotions and affects need to be positioned within the periodical table of their other close affinities Á thoughts and sensations Á and this becomes complex work, with both Ahmed and Brennan suggesting that these cannot easily be separated. For Brennan, affects are physiological shifts 'accompanying a judgement'. [START_REF] Brennan | The transmission of affect[END_REF] Drawing on a legacy emphasizing bodily changes as indicative of affects, she argues against a tendency towards a 'reductionism in understanding them'. 8 For Ahmed, whether something feels good or bad 'already involves a process of reading, in the very attribution of significance'; [START_REF] Ahmed | The cultural politics of emotion[END_REF] and contact with an object generates feeling, so emotion and sensation are also closely connected. Ahmed prefers the word 'impression' because it allows her to 'avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought as if they could be ''experienced'' as distinct realms of human ''experience'''. 10 All three books are steered by different motivations, but there are clear points of contact. First, all these writers wish to reclaim emotion or affect for academic study. The editors of Emotional geographies believe that geographers have sidelined emotions because they are difficult to deal with. Ahmed points out how emotion has been 'viewed as ''beneath'' the faculties of thought and reason', adding: 'Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body.' 11 Brennan is interested in how affects are 'transmitted' between people. Because no one is quite sure how this happens there is a reluctance to acknowledge that it actually does. Once 'common knowledge', this concept of transmission 'faded from the history of scientific explanation'. 12 These writers describe emotions in relation to bodies (Brennan); the interplay between bodies and texts (Ahmed); and between bodies and places (contributors to Emotional geographies ). Ahmed describes the way sensual experiences allow us to 'have a sense of our skin as bodily surface', 13 whilst Brennan is interested in how affects change the body at a deep physical level. These different approaches pose a question: where should we 'look' for emotions or affects, or how best do we subject them to analysis? For Brennan, the key question is to figure out how affects work, which leads to an engagement in the intersection between biology and culture. She argues that affects come 'via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact.' 14 Transmission, then, is social in origin but is responsible for bodily changes: 'some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room's atmosphere, some longer . . . [Transmission] alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The ''atmosphere'' literally gets into the individual.' 15 Brennan perhaps romanticizes the 'other cultures and times' where there are 'different, more permeable, ways of being'. 16 And her take on the 'environment' is social rather than place-specific: beyond noting that visitors to New York or Delhi talk about feelings of 'energy' or 'peace', 17 she stops short at further analysis. Given Brennan's untimely death during the book's completion, her ideas will have to be extended by others. But her work is useful for those looking beyond the visual, as she focuses on how other senses, especially smell, are at play. For Ahmed, in contrast, the task is to describe what emotions do as they circulate and shape social life. Her model modifies ideas from Marx and Freud to track how emotions 'circulate between bodies': she coins the term 'affective economies' and the notion of the 'sociality' of emotions. 18 Her task is to track how 'words for feelings, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects'. 19 Emotions Á which for Ahmed are always witnessed Á 'produce the . . . surfaces . . . that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects', 20 and the work of emotion 'involves the ''sticking'' of signs to bodies: for example, when others become ''hateful'', then actions of ''hate'' are directed against them '. 21 Following this, a second point of contact uniting these books Á and a standard move in recent cultural work on emotion Á is a concern to go beyond, as Ahmed puts it, an 'assumption of interiority', 22 to place emotions in social or political context. For Brennan, denying transmission creates a particular understanding of individual identity based on 'forming ''boundaries'' by projection'. 23 The self-contained Western identity has to be constructed, and this 'depends on projecting outside of ourselves unwanted affects such as anxiety and depression in a process commonly known as ''othering'''. There is just 'too much affective stuff to dispose of, too much that is directed away from the self with no place to go'. 24 The increase of affects 'makes the Western individual especially more concerned with securing a private fortress, personal boundaries, against the unsolicited emotional intrusions of the other'. 25 In contrast, Ahmed questions the assumption that we have feelings which 'then move outwards towards objects and others'. 26 Rather, emotions 'should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices'. 27 Ahmed's concern is to understand why power relations endure despite forms of resistance, and the way emotions are embroiled in social injustice, especially racism and homophobia. There is a need, she argues, to 'respond to injustice in a way that shows rather than erases the complexity of the relation between violence, power and emotion'. 28 Similarly, the editors of Emotional geographies attempt to position emotion work as maintaining geography's 'critical edge', emulating the work of Sibley, who argued that 'attending to feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, envy and hatred is essential if we are to understand the insidious power and tenacity of racism'. [START_REF] Bondi | Introduction[END_REF] Studying emotion, then, 'offers a promising avenue through which to advance understandings of dynamic geographies of difference, exclusion and oppression'. But their manifesto is wider, including work on 'connection, pleasure, desire, love and attachment'. 30 Thus, emotional geographies are offered two directions Á one examining relationships of power, and one emphasizing a more positive receptivity. This breadth of scope is useful because it avoids emotion work being enlisted purely for a narrow political project. It raises a question, however, about the different ways emotion is formulated as 'critical' and 'social'.

The relational self

A further move is implied by this work: all three books emphasize the 'relational' nature of emotion. As Davidson, Bondi and Smith put it: 'We argue for a non-objectifying view of emotions as relational flows, fluxes and currents, in-between people and places rather than ''things'' or ''objects'' to be studied or measured'. 31 For Ahmed, emotions 'create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place . . . the ''I'' and the ''we'' are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others'. 32 In a similar vein, the editors of Emotional geographies argue that emotions 'help to construct, maintain as well as sometimes to disrupt the very distinction between bodily interiors and exteriors'. [START_REF] Bondi | Introduction[END_REF] Relationality appears to grow out of a concern to distance emotion work from humanism, and ideas about the nature of the individual this assumes. For Ahmed, the 'personal is complicated, and mediated by relations that make any person embody more than the personal, and the personal embody more than the person'. 34 But how we feel sensations might be tied to a 'past history of readings, in the sense that the process of recognition . . . is bound up with what we already know'. 35 Brennan is more explicit about this. A person's 'particular emotional experience' is relevant, she writes, because we might 'influence the registration of the transmitted affect in a variety of ways . . . Even if I am picking up on your affect, the linguistic and visual content, meaning the thoughts I attach to that affect, remain my own; they remain the particular historical conjunction of words and experiences I represent.' 36 In his contribution to Emotional geographies , Owain Jones also points to the 'stunningly complex' interplay between different processes, including memory. Emotions are 'systemic and interact constantly with our conscious and unconscious selves, memories and environment'. [START_REF] Jones | An ecology of emotion, memory, self and landscape[END_REF] Some contributors to Emotional geographies concentrate on allowing research subjects' voices to be heard, assuming emotions to be both 'individually experienced' as well as 'shared'. [START_REF] Milligan | Healing and feeling: the place of emotions in later life[END_REF] There is a tension between exploring the embodied and intimate practices of emotion Á placing a spotlight on individual selves and bodies Á and a desire to transcend individualism without becoming too abstracted from situated experience. [START_REF] Bondi | Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy[END_REF] This tension is negotiated in different ways. In part, it is played out as one between emotions' relationship to intimacy and distance. For John Urry, for example, the 'pleasures' of place are derived from emotions involved in its visual consumption. All these emotions, he concludes, are 'judgements from afar, abstract and mobile'. [START_REF] Urry | The place of emotions within place[END_REF] But many contributors focus on emotion's suggestion of intimacy. A growing interest in therapeutic models raises a question about how far some emotion work might uncritically take up aspects of self-help culture, and thus reinforce a form of individualism. Thien, however, questions an assumption that intimacy is the 'coming together of selves that are constant, stable, self-enclosed', [START_REF] Thien | Intimate distances: considering questions of ''Us[END_REF] and argues that 'distance and proximity can co-exist and may be configured in complex ways as we engage in our lives'. 42 In their contributions to Emotional geographies , both Conradson and Paterson prefer to use the word 'affect', as discussed above. Paterson utilises Deleuze's notion of the body as a series of intensities for his essay on therapeutic touch, which opens up a 'non-verbal communicative pathway or channel between bodies'. [START_REF] Paterson | Affecting touch: towards a ''felt'' phenomenology of therapeutic touch[END_REF] But he also highlights Spinoza's resolution of the mind/body dualism which allows the 'feminist reclamation of the situated, concrete particularity of the body'. 44 He reconciles these two approaches by emphasizing that the body's 'particularity is . . . not limited, but mutable'. 45 In his study of experiences of a rural respite care centre in Dorset, Conradson asks how we might conceptualize the 'felt dimensions of encounters with place', [START_REF] Conradson | Freedom, space and perspective: moving encounters with other ecologies[END_REF] and how certain places 'shape a person's subjectivity'. 47 Like others, he maintains a notion of the self as a 'malleable and somewhat porous entity, able to be affected by others', 48 but acknowledges that this could lead to a form of social constructionism where the person 'becomes merely an effect of external discourses and practices'. At this point, he manoeuvres towards a different notion of the self, from psychotherapy, which allows it 'a degree of centring and consistency within the relations that shape it'. 49 Whether this 'core' of the self is biological, psychological or spiritual, he does not know. But the point is that the self becomes a 'somewhat centred entity that emerges through a reflexive and relational interplay with other people and events'. 50 Other contributors focus on the social nature of emotion. These writers contribute to the question of how far the immaterial aspects of cultural life Á such as its emotional content Á can be represented. Hubbard, for example, in his study of emotions in the evening economy, simply argues that as emotions are 'felt and sensed reactions' that 'arise in the midst of the (inter)corporal exchange between self and world', [START_REF] Hubbard | The geographies of ''Going Out'': emotion and embodiment in the evening economy[END_REF] they can be made knowable through language. This does not require a return to humanism, he stresses, but an extension of material culture to 'encompass the emotions'. 52 Elsewhere, Parr, Philo and Burns use their study of emotional restraint in the experiences of people with mental health problems living in the remote Scottish Highlands to argue for a description of emotional selves which are geographically located. An understanding of how constraint is 'collectively produced and experienced' can be grasped through scrutinizing the 'distinctive regional norms, expectations and cultures of emotional sociality'. [START_REF] Parr | Not a display of emotions'': emotional geographies in the Scottish Highlands[END_REF] Nigel Thrift's non-representational theory suggests that words cannot adequately represent interior states. But it is possible to think of 'different peoples in different places being more or less successful in their attempts to convey emotional states using ordinary language'. 54 In this way, the 'unsayability' of emotions can be traced to the 'workings of local power relations', rather than 'some distant philosophical impasse'. They call for an emotional geography of 'everyday emotional terrains, regions, places', which must 'listen to what situated individuals within these places do manage consciously to ''say'' about what they think is occurring'. 55 All these contributors, then, suggest the diversity of cultural work on emotions Á the title Emotional geographies is self-consciously rendered in the plural Á as well as its potential to crystallize some important theoretical debates. The writers in the books reviewed offer different approaches that might form the basis of future exploration. But they also raise important issues. For example, does the focus on relationality allow us to transcend the age-old binary between society and self, or self and other? Are such tensions reworked or retained? And how far can a focus on emotion help mediate between texts and bodies, the visual and the non-visual? This work also raises fascinating questions about the nature of the emotional self. By emphasizing that it is not just our thoughts but also emotions and affects that are not our 'own', there is a risk that this reinforces a sense of passivity; but it does reframe the question of how far individual resistance is possible. It also suggests that the space for 'interior' experience Á including religious, spiritual or intangible kinds of events, privately felt Á is becoming, in cultural terms, narrower. Ahmed, for example, attempts to circumvent binaries such as 'interior' and 'exterior', but by doing so perhaps overplays the importance of surfaces and plays down the complexity and singularity of our biographies and biologies. She cannot imagine the experience of sensations such as pain in isolation from others. But people continue to have, and to be shaped by, private experiences, or by events or affects to which they ascribe personal meanings; and, as most writers concede, the way these are accumulated, expressed and described through a lifetime create a complex distinctiveness. The emotional self may be socially responsive, even socially created, but remnants of individuality remain.

Lastly, this review begs the question: where best should we focus future research on emotional geographies, and what is distinctive about it? How far, for example, should the study of emotions fixate on extremes Á intensities, passions, intimacies? What about the so-called mundane, ambiguous or subtle emotions? What about beliefs? Equally, does the emotional 'turn' in geography bring together existing work already deemed to have an 'emotional' content? A number of the essays in Emotional geographies assume such a central role for emotions because of the type of enquiry undertaken Á people's responses to bodies in different contexts, including geographies of sexuality, illness, therapies and old age. What would it mean to place emotion more centrally within a wider focus of enquiry? These and other questions raised by the books highlight the complexity and challenges inherent in offering emotions and affects a greater place within cultural work.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Alison Blunt and Catherine Nash for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes


The colonial present

Tim Bunnell

To cite this version: The colonial present extends and deepens our understanding of contemporary geopolitics in ways that speak to the key concerns of this journal. For Derek Gregory as for Edward Said, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose intellectual legacy runs through its pages -issues of culture and of geography are central to understanding how colonial 'pasts' bleed into contemporary Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Drawing upon Said, Gregory details colonialism as a cultural process: 'Culture involves the production, circulation, and legitimation of meanings through representations, practices, and performances that enter fully into the constitution of the world' (p. 8). Since none of us is 'outside' or 'above' culture, we are all in one way or another bound up in ongoing processes of colonization, 'the performance of the colonial present' (p. 10). For me, much of the power ofthe book is derived from this recognition. While the empirical detail ofthe The colonial present draws our critical attention to the interconnected geopolitics and geo-economics ofviolence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, the book also compels us to look critically at ourselves, the ways in which we 'continue to think and to act in ways that are dyed in the colors of colonial power' (p. xv).

Gregory shows how geography is implicated in (our) cultural judgements and evaluations that underlie the ongoing exercise of colonial power. Intertwined constructions of difference and distance continue to 'licence the unleashing of exemplary violence' (p. 16) against 'other' people and places. Importantly, Gregory insists that 'imaginative geographies' are 'performances of space' (p. 19). It is in part for this reason that The colonialpresent, unlike many other postcolonial studies, provides a welcome extension of Said's (imaginative) geographies to analysis of 'real' spaces. The main body of the book is a series of chapters which detail the lived, human geographies of Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq as well as the geopolitical entanglement of these spaces. My chief concern with this important book is the way in which it can be read as mapping this complexity into a (singular) colonial present. While Said's imaginative geographies have been extended brilliantly to analysis of Euro-American colonial power in the Middle East, there are other colonialisms which are perhaps not so clearly centred in Washington, DC. Nonetheless, 7he colonial present is an exemplary performance of critical cultural geographies that can -indeed, surely mustbe extended to diverse colonial presents.

National Univeersity of

  Singapore TIM BUNNELL I-2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10. 1 191/1474474006eu348xx