Aaron Bobrow-Strain

White bread bio-politics: purity, health, and the triumph of industrial baking

Keywords: Bio-politics, bread, commodification, food politics, food safety, Foucault, industrialization

This article traces the massive commodification and industrialization of the USA's single most important food: bread. It argues that bakers overcame serious obstacles to capitalist development during this period thanks to the construction of contingent and contested associations between industrial bread and larger discourses of purity, hygiene, and progress circulating through turn-of-the-century America. It explores two arenas in which this articulation operated: the re-making of baking as a techno-science of expert control and the visual spectacle of streamlined, white loaves. This story, in turn, offers larger lessons about the contradictory politics of food safety in our own time. Building on Michel Foucault's work on bio-politics, it shows how notions of food safety dependent on discourses of purity, contagion, hygiene, and vitality inevitably constitute lines of exclusion and social hierarchy, even as they are used to mobilize 'progressive' social change.

the baking industry overcame a series of potentially crippling economic and social obstacles to the commodification and industrialization of bread because of the ways in which the new, modern loaves materialized concerns about purity, hygiene, and sanitation. In theoretical terms, what we see is a contingent articulation between bio-political discourses of social purity and the trajectories of capitalist industrialization in the baking industry. This articulation of baking and social purity did not determine the trajectories of bread commodification or singlehandedly cause the triumph of industrial bread -this was a highly overdetermined process of capitalist development -but it did give a particular shape to that process. It also meant that struggles over the staff of life were irrevocably entangled with larger anxieties about racial purity, unprecedented immigration rates, rapid urbanization, and women's changing roles in society that defined this period. [START_REF] Cogdell | Eugenic design: streamlining America in the 1930s[END_REF] More specifically, this article argues that U.S. bakers overcame a serious problem at the turn of the century: thanks to innovations in bakery technology and science, bakers could produce bread faster and cheaper than ever before, but, at the same time, the increasing accessibility of non-grain foods (e.g. fresh fruits, canned meats) [START_REF] Levenstein | Revolution at the table: the transformation of the American diet[END_REF] combined with a deep association of store-bought bread with contamination, adulteration, and poverty threatened to depress overall bread consumption. Bakers needed to convince consumers that bread had a place on the modern American table. By the 1930s, despite lingering unease and criticisms of bakers' bread, that case had been made successfully: industrial white bread was widely associated with purity, health, and progress. This article illuminates two arenas in which this re-making of the symbolic-material life of bread operated:

First, as Section 3 ('Control for Sale') contends, the professionalization of baking and the adoption of specific new technologies (i.e. automatic bread wrapping) repositioned the muchmaligned baking industry as a site of techno-scientific control. This process, emerging in conversation with larger discourses of food safety, national stamina, and social hygiene helped establish bakery bread as a symbol of purity, health, and responsible citizenship.

Second, Section 4 ('The Spectacle of Clean') argues that the highly engineered visual spectacle of industrial bread -its internal and external uniformity, its streamlined shape, and sparkling whiteness -gave the new bread a modern aura. In particular, industrial bread's unprecedented whiteness resonated with newly emerging associations between the color white and purity, cleanliness and social progress.

These are, by no means, the only arenas in which the cultural and economic refiguring of baking played out -indeed, untangling these two themes from the many other intertwined processes at work in early 20th-century baking is almost impossible. It is, however, useful to single out these two themes because, as I discuss at length in Section 2 ('The Bio-politics of Food') and the conclusion, they draw our attention to the bio-political dynamics of diet and food safety debates. This not only adds a critical piece to our knowledge of the political processes through which the U.S. food system became what it is today, [START_REF]Although Americans consumed more bread than any other single food well into the 20th century, the massive commodification and industrialization of bread has received almost no attention in scholarly work on the history and cultural politics of food; e.g. H. Levenstein, Revolution at the table; Paradox of plenty: a social history of eating in modern America[END_REF] it also places a growing geographical literature that shines a critical light on contemporary food-related activism [START_REF] For Example | The urban creative-food economy: producing food for the urban elite or social inclusion opportunity?[END_REF] into conversation with an important historical literature tracing the bio-politics of public health activism in the early 20th century. [START_REF] Markel | The foreignness of germs: the persistent association of immigrants and disease in American society[END_REF] In making this link between the concerns of past and present dietary politics, it offers a cautionary tale for contemporary food safety activism; a warning about the dangers inherent in framing food politics in terms of health, hygiene, and purity. Watershed improvements in food safety were not to be scoffed at in a time when food-borne illnesses ranked as leading causes of death in the USA, and even a commodity as innocuous and quotidian as the loaf of bread could cause tremendous anxiety, [START_REF] Bobrow-Strain | Kills a body twelve ways: bread fear and the politics of "what to eat?[END_REF] but food purity discourses often authorized quiet coercions and reinforced exclusionary politics.

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this article shows how discourses of food safety constitute a form of bio-politics aimed at safeguarding and improving the conditions of life for a defined population. [START_REF] Foucault | The politics of health in the eighteenth century[END_REF] While bio-political interventions have produced many important reforms -landmark food safety laws, for example -Foucault argues that bio-politics are also inherently bound up in forms of exclusion, hierarchy, and racism aimed at 'fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.' [START_REF] Foucault | [END_REF] Through its language of health, purity, and hygiene, biopolitics constructs society as a biological domain and takes as its highest goal the identification and elimination of internal and external contagions to that living body. Thus, this article suggests that, when framed in these bio-political terms, food safety activism is ill-suited, and perhaps counterproductive, to the challenges of creating a radically democratic food system. [START_REF]narrative: a Latourian fascination with the ways 'scientific baking' wrestled with the unruly, living nature of yeast bread; questions about the relationship between technology, capitalist development, and cultural politics in the realm of baking (an ensemble I call 'carbohydrate capitalism'); and a puzzle about the effective relation between the discourses of public health experts and housewives' actual consumption practices[END_REF] It also suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the alimentary or dietetic workings of biopolitics; something that Foucault and most subsequent Foucault scholars have overlooked.

The bio-politics of food

This section provides a general historical-theoretical framing for the specific argument about bread that follows in Sections 3 and 4, showing how Foucault's concept of bio-politics can illuminate the high-stakes nature of struggles over purity and hygiene in early 20th-century America.

Discourses of hygiene, health, and food purity permeated early 20th-century American life. Promoted by temperance advocates, suffragist activists, government officials, advertisers, nativists, and business groups, these discourses emerged from no single point and belonged to no one political perspective. Articulated through advertising, product design, government programs, and school curricula, meticulous attention to the purity and safety of food was constructed as the duty, desire, and moral responsibility of all. This imperative of health and purity produced powerful results ranging from historic food safety legislation, including the watershed 1906 Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Act, to desperately needed sanitary reforms in milk, meat processing, and other food industries. [START_REF] Goodwin | The pure food, drink, and drug crusaders[END_REF] The baking industry was no different. There, food-purity discourses and activism generated important sanitary reforms -often in the face of organized resistance from bakers themselves. Michel Foucault's concept of bio-politics allows us to place the story of early 20th-century U.S. food safety concerns in the context of broad processes of social change that saw, 'the emergence of the health and physical well-being of the population in general as one of the essential objectives of political power,' and made 'the imperative of health-at once the duty of each and the objective of all.' 21 For Foucault, bio-politics was a logical extension of power in disciplinary society. While disciplinary technologies could train useful habits into the bodies of docile subjects and distribute those bodies in space to promote maximum efficiency, they could not ensure stamina. Even a population of meticulously disciplined bodies could not sustain its productivity in a state of perpetual sickness. Contagion, disease, and impurity, 'sapped the population's strength, shortened the working week, wasted energy … cost money,' and, in the words of Progressive era pure foods reformer Alfred McCann, augured moral collapse and '[white] race suicide on a colossal scale.' [START_REF] Foucault | [END_REF] Thus, as statistics and other scientific measures developed during the 18th and 19th centuries allowed the population to be conceived of as a whole, that population increasingly found itself the target of interventions designed to create positive improvements in life and eliminate threats to the health of the population. 'In a word, security mechanisms [had] to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize the state of life.' 23 In this context, the health and well-being of the general population increasingly became one of the most important objects of political power. The new imperative of health operated in several key arenas including: (1) the medicalization of home life with the goal of producing, 'healthy, clean, fit bodi[ies and] purified, cleansed, aerated, domestic space[s]'; (2) the elevation of hygiene to levels of paramount importance; and (3) the close articulation between hygiene and social control. Connections between hygiene and social control appeared particularly evident to Foucault in efforts to rationalize and order urban space against the threat of disease: 'The needs of hygiene demand an authoritarian medical intervention in what are regarded as the privileged breeding grounds of disease: prisons, ships, harbor installations, the hopiteaux generaux where vagabonds, beggars, and invalids mingle together.' 24 Yet, despite the centrality of diet to population vigor and the salience of food production and distribution as potential vector of disease, Foucault does not generally acknowledge food and nutrition as pivotal elements of bio-politics. The one exception to this seems to be a section of The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure from which this article's epigram was drawn. In that section, Foucault reflects on the Greek conception of dietetics -a mode of caring for the body; of managing existence through the careful regulation food, sleep, sex, and hygiene. This is not the place for a long exegesis of dietetics' relation to other modes of regulating bodily conduct. 25 Instead, I simply want to take up and work with Foucault's insight that diet is a mode of managing one's existence that 'enable[s] a set of rules to be affixed to conduct' and, even more, allows those rules to be 'indexed to a nature which had to be preserved and to which it was right to conform.' 26 In sum, Foucault helps us see diet as way of forming oneself as a responsible, ethical subject in relation to a larger social formation.

Characteristically, Foucault does not linger long on food, rushing instead to explore dietetics' relation to the bio-politics of sex and disease. For U.S. Progressive era reformers, however, alimentary dietetics lay at the heart of national stamina and the formation of responsible subjects. In this sense, early 20th-century food reformers draw our attention to a whole current of Foucaultian bio-politics that Foucault himself was slow to acknowledge. Addressing a convention of Milwaukee master bakers with her desire to see more widespread study of scientific baking, for example, home economist Elizabeth Smith, argued, 'if the proper study of mankind is man, then the study of that which makes him a capable efficient member of society and not a wretched dyspeptic, or a shell of walking contagion, is worthy of a place in any curriculum.' [START_REF] Bakers | Proceedings of the Milwaukee Bakers' Institute, second season[END_REF] Yet, Smith need hardly have spoken. Perhaps no other time in history saw as great a proliferation of research, education, theorizing, and speculation aimed at scientifically determining the proper relation among bodies, food, and the nation.

Throughout the early 20th century, scores of pure foods crusaders, nutritionists, 'New Nutritionists', food faddists, and advice columnists weighed in on the health of the U.S. population, and their outlook was dismal. [START_REF] Dupuis ; Mccann | Angels and vegetables: a brief history of food advice in America[END_REF] 'In twenty-million homes in the United States to-day,'

McCann wrote, 'there is a complacent toleration for food abuses that sap the stamina of the race.' 29 While many food researchers questioned McCann's prescriptions for this problem, none challenged his diagnosis, and dozens of groups launched campaigns to improve 'national virility' or 'the stamina of the race'. 30 By the turn of the 20th century, the hypothesis that invisible microscopic organisms caused many illnesses had gained widespread scientific acceptance, and the new bio-politics of diet articulated closely with this novel understanding of disease. In the 1900s, diverse groups ranging from the Boy Scouts to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union worked to preach this 'gospel of germs' to the masses. [START_REF] Tomes | The gospel of germs; S. Hoy, Chasing dirt: the American pursuit of cleanliness[END_REF] School curricula impressed the 'laws of scientific hygiene' on young minds and public signage warned of the dangers of kissing and spitting. Public health had been entirely reconceived. It was no longer the solitary concern of the state, but rather the duty of all. Public health was not an activity focused on restricting abuses, but rather a positive science aimed at shaping souls, creating new habits, and producing hygienic citizens. As The American Magazine explained, praising the work of a progressive official in 1914, an old style public health official may, Look upon his duties as chiefly repressive: he entertains the old idea that people may be punished into good behavior. He is forever shutting things up, ordering people out, arresting and prosecuting! But Doctor Evans brought to his work a new idea … [H]e saw that the only sound basis for public health was a wide understanding by the people themselves of the common rules of health. He had the soundly democratic idea that it is better to convince and educate people than it is to fine them). [START_REF]The new Chicago and its progressive people[END_REF] It is not hard to comprehend the material roots of the fervor -verging on obsession -with which the USA approached the new sciences of hygiene and sanitation. In 1899, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid, and other communicable diseases killed in large numbers across class and race lines. Tuberculosis alone accounted for a quarter of all deaths of 20-40-year-olds. 33 By the 1920s (thanks to food safety reforms, new technologies, and rising incomes) cancer, heart and kidney diseases, and other ailments of affluence had replaced communicable diseases as the country's leading killers, but the specter of catastrophic threat remained ever present.

At the same time, the material effects of America's fixation on hygiene far surpassed its immediate impact on the way the country suffered and died. Hygiene concerns shaped fashion, raising women's hemlines and shaving away men's beards. It profoundly transformed architecture and interior design with the sleek, cleanable forms of art deco replacing the drape-heavy nooks and crannies of Victorian design. [START_REF] Tomes | The gospel of germs; T. Smith, Making modern America: industry, art, and design in America[END_REF] Although the spare visual hygiene of modernism is frequently associated with the allure of industrial machinery, it was also a biopolitical statement. LeCorbusier's 1923 'manual of dwelling' urged home designers to adopt clean visual lines that both showcased the homeowner's commitment to hygiene and, in turn, facilitated the maintenance of hygienic conditions. 35 These changes permeated the pores of society, but women saw the most significant impact on their lives. Women's lives, habits, and desires represented the most important battlefield in what was increasingly understood as a desperate, no-holds barred war against disease. Women were simultaneously the greatest enemy in this war and its secret weapon. As Minnesota public health official Hibbert Winslow Hill wrote in his book, The New Public Health, 'Infectious diseases in general radiate from and are kept going by women.' 36 Legions of experts led the fight to rationalize and professionalize women's work in the home with the goal of defusing deadly ignorance and enlisting housewives in the battle against contagion. Championing the newly minted fields of home economics, 'scientific motherhood', and 'household bacteriology', these experts reconceived housework as a science of control. [START_REF] Murphy | Expertise and forms of knowledge in the government of families[END_REF] In the words of home economics pioneer Ellen Richards, women's work in the home should properly be conceived as 'the science of a controllable environment.' 38 As Augusta Moll Weiss wrote in her 1906 treatise on household management, 'The desire for material order must end up becoming a sort of reflex action, and even more the desire for cleanliness must end up becoming a real need. Disorder and lack of cleanliness should cause a sort of suffering in the mistress of the house.' 39 It was not enough to simply mount a guard against contagion; the soul must come to be defined by this vigilance. 'The slightest deviation from perfect cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety, since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk.' 40 Since homes could not be hermetically sealed, and since total public health was beyond the capacity of the state, women were also entreated to extend their surveying gaze into the street. 41 Famously, for middle class social reformers this meant careful monitoring of the poor and their habits. In Ladies Home Journal, for example, Dr Dwight Chapin urged middle class women interested in preventing calamitous social problems to channel their 'surplus of unused mother love' toward the poor by helping to provide 'continuous oversight as to the diet and hygiene' of immigrant children. [START_REF] Chapin | We can have a new world in two generations[END_REF] Critically, however, the new norm of hygiene also meant casting a web of female eyes on the external world of commerce -particularly the world of food production and distribution since few other arenas of life could be so clearly linked to the wellbeing of the household and the nation.

Thus, while self-styled 'professional sanitarians' like Caroline Bartlett Crane toured the country cleaning up butcher shops, public markets, and bakeries, ordinary women took upon themselves the task of everyday scrutiny. Women's vigilance and activism in the area of food sanitation achieved dramatic successes in food safety legislation that are well beyond the scope of this article, but in this conception women were to be both shapers of the conduct of others (i.e. through activism) and internally focused on regulating their own conduct (i.e. through the discipline of scientific housekeeping).

Women would have to be shaped and molded, and, since expert discourses almost always justified themselves by summoning specters of looming danger, the task was urgent. [START_REF] Bledstein | The culture of professionalism[END_REF] Following expert advice became not just a matter of good practice, but a requirement of competent citizenship. [START_REF] Cf | Powers of freedom[END_REF] As Dr Woods Hutchinson menaced, in society's all out war with contagion, 'high standards of housekeeping' were 'well worth it at all costs'. [START_REF] Hutchinson | Health and horsepower[END_REF] In this context, meticulous attention to food purity became deeply laden with a tenor of imperative action in the face of looming danger that cross-pollinated easily with discourses of racial purity and nativist politics. It is not surprising, for example, that in July 1925's Scientific American a review of current scientific thinking on the question, 'Which Races Are Best?' and its implications for immigration policy appeared sandwiched between articles on sanitary baking and methods for the safe handling of fruit juices. In an era when white Americans were exposed as never before to immigrants and their strange new foods, urgent questions of diet were never far from racial anxieties. Indeed, as germ theories of disease gained increasing popular acceptance, it often became difficult to distinguish between descriptions of food-borne contagion and the terrifying prospects of racial contamination. In a 1922 Ladies Home Journal article for example, Dr Royal Copeland, public health commissioner for New York City, pointed to, 'an alarming decrease in American babies' and warned that the country's racial makeup had begun to lean dangerously toward, 'black hair, black eyes, and … swarthy complexion'. While, for Copeland, jazz music and the automobile played a pivotal role in declining white birth rates, impure milk also threatened the survival and vigor of white babies. [START_REF] Copeland | Nature's perfect food. 47 Markel and Stern, 'Foreignness'; Shah, 'Contagious divides'; King, 'Making Americans[END_REF] Not surprisingly, for public health officials like Copeland, food-borne diseases were often associated with eastern Europeans, Mexicans, and other 'dirty' groups. 47 Thus, the dangers of racial and dietary contamination demanded authoritarian interventions. As eugenicist Michael Williams argued ominously in Good Housekeeping, it was in society's better interest that, 'the dregs and waifs of our population, the people of the underworld' who simply could not 'maintain true economy in nutrition' should be 'purified and made healthful.' [START_REF] Williams | Fletcherizing with Fletcher[END_REF] As never before, individual choices in matters of diet, hygiene, sex, child care, dress, work, and recreation were closely linked to the health of the nation. Thus, subjects falling outside established norms in anything from food consumption to bathing habits could be constituted not just as a threat to themselves, but to society as a whole. During the first decades of the 20th century (as now) this burden fell especially heavily on the shoulders of mothers making choices about how to feed their families. 49 In this context, the choice of bakery bread over homemade bread can be understood as something more than just a question of preference or convenience. As the next two sections show, bakers' struggle for the hearts and minds of housewives implicitly and explicitly drew on and helped reproduce this high-stakes association between food choice and competent citizenship.

Control for sale: purity, hygiene, and the professionalization of baking

Did store-bought or home-baked bread offer a safer, easier, and more hygienic way to feed a family? Through the early 20th century, professional bakers mobilized to convince housewives that the unarguable answer to this question was that, 'Bakers' Bread is Better'. 'For every master baker there are a thousand housewives, and every housewife is either a competitor or a customer,' George Haffner, president of the National Association of Master Bakers, warned at the group's 1915 meetings. Winning over housewives, he argued, would require a full-scale mobilization, and that mobilization could not wait. 50 During this period of rapid industrial innovation, the baking industry faced three potentially crippling obstacles to expansion: (1) a widespread sense that bakery bread was inferior to its homemade counterpart; (2) the historical tendency for grain food consumption to decline relative to the consumption of meat, vegetables, and fruits as incomes rose in society; [START_REF]Often called the rule of the limited stomach, Engle's Law is foundational to food economics[END_REF] and (3) the fact that technological innovation in baking, spurred on by competition, easily outpaced the growth of demand (leading to a classic crisis of overproduction, in the Marxist sense, and producing massive concentration and centralization in the baking industry). 52 Yet, despite the dire predictions of industry experts and food economists, per capita consumption bread actually rose between the Jazz Age and the Post War from 75.5 pounds per person in 1923 to 94.1 pounds in 1947. 53 And, as we have seen, by the 1930s, nearly all of that bread was store bought. Bakers had not only convinced the country that, 'Bakers' Bread is Better,' but also that bread itself still had a place in the sleek world of modern eating. This success turned on many factors, but as I argue later, it turned in part on the ways in which sliced white bread articulated with discourses of hygiene, purity, and control.

Re-positioning baking

The articulation between hygiene and bakery bread would have appeared somewhat outrageous at the turn of the century. Bakery bread was one of the few industrially processed foods widely associated with poverty rather than affluence. [START_REF] Strasser | Never done: a history of American housework[END_REF] Early industrial bakeries were more 'dark satanic mills' than 'model palaces,' and their owners were among the first groups of businesspeople in the country to face the ire of food purity campaigners. 55 Household management experts at Good Housekeeping, in turn, reinforced this negative connotation, warning readers that 'the conflict of the [bakery] loaf with dirt and danger is not exaggerated.' [START_REF] Barnard | The one objection to baker's bread[END_REF] Food crusaders accused bakeries of whitening bread with plaster of Paris, sulfate of lime, borax, bone, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds, while fierce debates raged from the pages of women's magazines the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court over whether bleaching flour with chlorine gas constituted a criminal act. Dr Harvey Wiley, leading food purity campaigner, urged consumers to 'Save the bread of the nation!' from 'further adulteration.' [START_REF] Wiley | Fooling with flour: the nation's bread is in danger[END_REF] Meanwhile, Caroline Bartlett Crane singled out bakeries, along with meat markets, as a central focus of professional sanitation. A reporter who accompanied Crane on one of her urban atrocity tours described the interior of Montgomery, Alabama's bake shops, 'The front room of these fairly glistened with cleanliness … but hardly had the women crossed the dividing line between the shops and work rooms than they stopped in horror. Grime, cobwebs, and dirt were everywhere'. After Crane's Alabama visit, progressive women's groups drew up a 'white list' of acceptable establishments and launched a boycott of offending bakeries that caused an immediate 25 per cent drop in sales. [START_REF] Bennet | Cleaning up the American city[END_REF] Bakery bread was not just seen as more expensive and of lower quality than home-baked, it was a potential biohazard. In an age when the existence of microorganisms was increasingly recognized, but poorly understood, even bread's living origins raised fears, as this evocative and unsavory 1905 description of bread biology suggests: 'Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog or any other animal.' 59 Worries circulated through society about 'bread diseases' -molds and bacteria growth that infected bread with 'sticky masses' and blood-colored clots. 60 Bread must be made with great care, experts warned, or consumers faced the risk of 'acidosis' and other physical menaces. In this context, could bread made by distant and unfamiliar bakers be trusted?

Speaking, in her words, 'For one million organized housewives,' Ethel Rahbar of the National Housewives League confronted bakers with this question directly at their 1916 annual meeting in Salt Lake City:

The housewife today is availing herself of the full knowledge of foods and their value in order to develop and conserve the mental and physical well-being of the individual … If we do not put the proper food values into the stomachs of our families, what do we get out of it? A condition physically and mentally that is a menace to society. Intelligent bakers understand that if they want to compete successfully with the home kitchen they must use equally good materials, and it you wish to win the housewife let your trump card be cleanliness and good materials … Enlightened housewives not only demand good bread, but they demand bread that is handled respectably; that is, in a cleanly manner. 61 Bakers quickly internalized many aspects of this advice. At the Salt Lake City meeting one baker rose to offer his comments on Rahbar's talk, I found as I appeared before the different women's clubs in Montana that they object not so much to the idea of baker's bread, but to the fact that it may not be clean … The consumer not only demands that the bakeshop be clean, but that the baker himself be clean in person, in morals, and in his conduct in the street. I believe that the baker should see that the people in his employ are clean in their habits as far as possible, and that will go a long way to eliminate the prejudice which exists against baker's bread. If you can get a class of men to handle it that the women have confidence in, there will be no trouble in converting them to the use of baker's bread. 62 The Association president responded to great applause, 'I want to compliment Mrs Rahbar on her selection of the term "respectable" applied to bread. I hope that designation will sink into the minds of all the bakers in the land, that the question of clean bread is a question of respectability.' 63 The NAMB had already adopted a code of Sanitary Standards at their 1912 meetings in response to a spate of newspaper reports that year on dirty bakeries, but enormous challenges in overcoming widespread perceptions of 'the conflict of the [bakery] loaf with dirt and danger' still faced the industry.

In this milieu of pure foods activism and industrial innovation, the most miraculous invention of early 20th-century baking was not sliced bread (despite the latter's immortalization as America's 'best thing'). It was wrapped bread. Bread wrapping emerged as a sanitary practice as early as 1895, but no reliable wrapping machine existed until 1913. By then consumer demand for wrapped bread had mounted, and, according to Wiley, 'increasing interest in hygienic bread wrapping' made this a central arena of pure food struggle. 64 Bakers, for their part, fiercely resisted consumer pressures. Citing the increased cost of wrapping, quicker staling, effects on bread flavor, and problems with mold, bakers fought tooth and nail against calls for wrapping levied by 'zealous inspectors', 'pure foods magazines', and consumers lured by the novelty of 'sealed package food preparations … without any reference to or consideration of what it is that is to be wrapped and handled in this way.' [START_REF]Proceedings of the seventeenth convention[END_REF] Debates over wrapping consumed the 1912 and 1913 NAMB meetings to such an extent that, in 1913, the Association commissioned a firm of consulting and analytical chemists to make a definitive report on the scientific effects of bread wrapping. After a year of intensive studies on mold formation, 'water fixation', chemical compositions, bread bacteriology, and different wrapping materials, the firm concluded that bread should be wrapped as a matter of sanitation -but not indiscriminately. The chemists endorsed permeable materials over waxed paper and warned against wrapping certain breads. 66 These expert findings did little to assuage most bakers' fears however, and in 1915, when Houston area food safety crusaders placed a bread wrapping referendum on the ballot, local bakers mobilized to defeat the issue with strong national support.

Nevertheless, consumer pressures and food safety advocacy eventually wore away bakers' resistance, and by the 1920s commercial bread was almost universally wrapped. Indeed, when, after much resistance, bakers gave in to the notion of food purity, they did so with abandon, making sanitation their number one selling point. Sidelining taste, aroma, freshness, and even price, bread advertising touted purity and hygiene. Scientific baking promised to deliver perfectly hygienic bread -untouched by human hands from dough to dinner table. In doing this, the baking industry turned the binary of purity and contagion on its head: thanks to the techno-scientific control they exercised over bread, industrial bakers argued, it was homemade (read: dirty and dangerously inconsistent) bread that posed a safety threat. In order to credibly make this claim, baking had to be entirely repositioned in the minds of consumers, and this repositioning can only be understood by examining the professionalization of baking.

Experts agree -mother's bread is deadly

The professionalization of baking was bio-political from the start. The first formal academy of bread baking was founded in 1780s France by Antoine Auguste Parmentier, an army apothecary. 'If there are schools for veterinaries who study the feeding of animals,' he wrote, 'why should there not be a school for bakers, to whom the health of the nation is entrusted.' [START_REF] Rumsey | Progress of education in baking[END_REF] Unfortunately for Parmentier -who also introduced fruit sugar and widespread cultivation of the potato to France -his efforts to ensure national security through the rationalization of baking were too little, too late: the school collapsed a just few years after opening when hungry mobs stormed the Bastille. By the late 19th century, however, baking institutes had spread across Europe and the USA, and were slowly eroding baking's traditional apprenticeship model of education. In the expert-infatuated USA, the Wahl-Henius Institute of Fermentology, the Wahl Efficiency Institute, the Chidlow Institute, and the Siebel Institute of Technology championed the scientific study of bread chemistry, biology, and technology. The National Association of Master Bakers -despite its name's association not an age of master artisan production -offered its members an endless stream of scientific educational opportunities. Plenary sessions at its annual meetings, for example, informed bakers of the latest scientific thinking on wheat chemistry, rational cost accounting, the effects of salts on fermentation, accurate weighing and measuring, efficient movement, the physiology of taste, bacteriology, and bakeshop etomology, among other topics. Bakery research targeted the unruly, living nature of bread, seeking to enable control over every aspect of the baking process. The industry introduced new controls over weights, measurements, and quality of ingredients. Electricity allowed unprecedented control over temperature at every stage of what was quickly becoming an assembly line. Dough was mixed in refrigerated conditions to prevent overheating, transferred to temperature-controlled proofing and fermentation chambers, and then baked using the most accurate ovens in human history. By 1930, only fermentation defied absolute control, with the living nature of yeast setting strict limits on the quantity of dough that could rise at one time. Over the next few years, the industry mobilized to face this last challenge, investigating chemical dough conditioners and production processes that would soon break through the yeast ceiling. In the end, as William Panschar wrote, 'as engineers rather than craftsmen, bakers were able to produce consistently a high quality, uniform loaf of bread. The degree of control exacted over formulas, ingredients and production processes were now far beyond the skills of the housewife to match.' 68 Not surprisingly, this legion of scientific baking was almost exclusively male. Indeed, in 1924, there were twice as many more women working as physicians, dentists, and surgeons in the USA than women professional bakers. In fact, professional baking was one of the least feminized occupations in the nation, with only law enforcement, chemistry, clergy, and the legal profession reporting fewer women in their ranks. [START_REF]Women's News Service, Women of today[END_REF] Thus, a cadre of male professional bakers, armed with the magic of science, squared off against a country of home-baking housewives. Bakers argued that,

The average housewife of today who bakes bread is living in the dark; she is ignorant of what the up-to-date method of baking consists; She has to be educated, the same as a child is educated to eat from a plate -the only difference being that our task is far harder than teaching a child, whose mind is receptive to instruction and learning. [START_REF]Modern bread-making[END_REF] Scientific American critiqued housewives' use of, 'uncertain ferments which cause sour and otherwise undesirable fermentation,' and Ellen Richards compared home baked loaves with 'laboratory bread' and found the former lacking. 71 For Richards, tradition and lack of control meant that home-baked bread was not just inferior, but also potentially dangerous. 'The custom of some housewives of wrapping the hot loaf in thick cloth that the steam may soften the crust is entirely wrong from a bacteriological standpoint,' she argued, and extra care was needed for coarse breads which contained particularly resistant bacteria. 72 She urged housewives to follow strict sanitary procedures, and educate themselves by conducting yeast gas experiments in test tubes and Petri dishes. To drive home the weight of her warning she stressed that 'Every case of typhoid fever is due to somebody's criminal carelessness.' 73 Faced with these risks, why experiment or chance the criminal carelessness of untamed bread when the scientific bakery was near? Moreover, as the next section contends, this aura of scientific control surrounding industrial baking was reinforced by the visual spectacle of the loaf itself.

The spectacle of clean

In an age obsessed with the streamlined aesthetics of scientific progress and the visual spectacle of purity, hygiene, and progress, the new loaves were also clearly engineered to appear as small objects of arte moderne: sleek, sparkling clean, whiter than white, and uniformly sliced.

As John Varty argues, it should come as no surprise that industrial white bread looks like Bauhaus furniture. [START_REF] Varty | On wonder'. 75 Cogdell[END_REF] We can speak of a clear and weighty traffic between modern design and the cultural politics of purity, health, and progress during the period when industrial bread emerged. As Christine Cogdell suggests, by the 1930s, the design of everyday objects reflected and advanced the ideology of social eugenics, with the visual ideals of streamlined objects, dirt-free environments, and racial hygiene continually overlapping and reinforcing each other. 75 Numerous features of the sleek new industrial loaf could be examined in this light, but this section focuses on connections between bread's whiteness and larger discourses of purity and progress.

During the second half of the 19th century, flour millers in Europe and then the USA replaced ancient millstones with porcelain, and later steel, rollers. These new roller mills proved particularly adept at turning unwieldy hard wheats into fine white bread flours. [START_REF] Varty ; Levenstein | First the loaf '; 'On protein', on wheat improvement and the industrialization of flour milling. 77 See Bobrow-Strain, 'Kills a body twelve ways[END_REF] By the 1880s, the new mill technology ground out thousands of barrels of low-cost white bread flour and a steady stream of controversy. Then, as now, antagonism toward white flour came heavily dusted with populist fears of industrialization and its unnatural colonization of life. Then, as now, critics resoundingly attacked white flour as industrial abomination and threat to the health of the population. But this was a two-sided debate, and in the early 20th century both white and dark flour supporters articulated their positions in bio-political terms. As the debate grew in intensity, eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, critics and supporters alike framed the debate in terms of national health: Was white flour a food deprived of its vital essence and a drain on national stamina, or a modern miracle of grain finally freed from dangerous dirt and contamination? By the 1930s, although still subject to constant challenge from whole wheat backers, white bread would emerge as the clear victor in this struggle. Even as they grounded their claims in scientific research, white bread critics were forced to pose their concerns in anti-modern terms, often romanticizing the dark bread of 'savage' Others. 77 White bread had become a clear visual icon of modern progress. This association of white bread with progress operated in multiple arenas, including the dynamics of scientific expertise discussed earlier. Here, I focus on one small arena: the contingent connection between industrial white bread and an emerging symbolics of whiteness, where the color white was closely associated with norms of cleanliness and purity.

Early 20th-century attacks on white flour built on the late 19th-century religious-inflected 'food faddism' of William H. Kellogg and William Graham. 78 White flour, as Alfred McCann suggested, was a product of greedy industrialists that violated, 'the provisions of the Creator' and produced delinquency. America must defy these 'Moneybags', he argued, and return its eating practices to the basic laws of God. 79 In a cascade of popular publications experts like Henry Sherman, Elmer McCollum, and Harvey Wiley joined the fray, attacking America's 'rage for whiteness'. [START_REF] Wiley | Returns from the good housekeeping food and drug ballot[END_REF] They pointed to the threat of malnutrition and 'white bread acidosis', a lethal condition brought on by eating too much white bread. Only 'undenatured or unrobbed wheat … is a true nerve, blood and bone food … rich in the life-giving principles.' [START_REF] Cogswell | Bread and how to make it[END_REF] In the heat of these debates, one key innovation asserted itself as the central target of ire for the pure foods movement: chemical bleaching. All flour whitens as it ages, but until the 20th-century desire for whiteness had to be weighed against the deteriorating quality of older flour. In 1904, however, millers overcame this natural obstacle with the invention of the Alsop Process of chemical bleaching. As Scientific American argued, 'The uncontrollable and time-consuming aging and maturing of flour by nature … has been superseded by a safe, rapid, and far more effective process based on scientific principles.' [START_REF]Peroxide also bleaches cereals[END_REF] By 1930, when Scientific American introduced readers to the latest whitening agent ('Do-White … a finely-ground powder with a pleasing leguminous taste') chlorine gas, nitrogen trichloride, and nitrogen peroxide were already widely used as flour bleaching agents.

Chemical bleaching was immediately accepted as standard practice in the milling industry, but pure foods advocates like Harvey Wiley and Alfred McCann formed ranks against artificial whitening, charging millers with adulteration. In 1914, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of millers, Wiley raged against the decision warning that flour would forever more be, 'as white and waxy as the face of a corpse.' 83 Anti-white flour efforts achieved some success, 84 but Wiley's sepulchral vision of whiteness vied with an increasingly dominant and luminous sense of the color.

At least since the early medieval period whiteness has had a Janus-faced social and religious symbolism in the west; the color could equally stand for life or death, purity or pallor. In the early 20th century, however, the meaning of white was increasingly stabilized around notions of purity and hygiene. At a time when white America's collective sense of the ambiguous shades of racial whiteness was more unstable and fractious than at any other time in its history, the simple color white provided a safe and reassuring haven. [START_REF] King | Whiteness of a different color[END_REF] Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with purity, and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production. 86 Whether in clothing, kitchens, appliances, or water closets, everything was white. Dark Victorian home interiors gave way to smooth white surfaces and schools, women's magazines, advertisers, and home economists implored women to keep their laundry, aprons, and towels bleached to the whitest of white. 87 The color white had been normalized as a field of clean, something that would help it stand its ground against the health food arguments of dark bread proponents.

In the anxious, early decades of germ theory home economists had to convince housewives that such improbable particles really existed. Ellen Richards, for example, encouraged women to see for themselves by capturing airborne bacteria in Petri dish 'dust gardens'. If done properly this experiment in 'household bacteriology' would soon reveal, 'minute lightcolored specks … on the surface of the jelly. These will be seen to grow larger, to become of different colors -pink, yellow, orange, green, blue, possibly a deep red'. 88 Women were encouraged to 'write down an accurate and full account as to the time, appearance, conditions of temperature, light, etc.' and then experiment with different conditions using a microscope to observe the results if possible. Once armed with this basic scientific understanding of the invisible world, women could turn their gaze on even deadlier foes: bread molds, spoiled milk, and stealthy colonies teaming on the surface of meat.

While home economists encouraged the average housewife to visualize germs through scientific experiments, there were easier ways to help women identity danger in their midst. Dust, in particular, offered a straightforward way to communicate the presence of tiny threats. Thus, during the early 20th century, dust had become intrinsically connected to disease; a fear fanned by T. Mitchell Prudden's Dust and its Dangers, which spread the idea of 'dust-poisoning' through U.S. society. The color white in turn -normalized as a pure and uncontaminated visual field -allowed society to constantly police surfaces for dust and dirt. [START_REF] Prudden | Dust and its dangers[END_REF] Despite the fact -admitted by Richards, Prudden, and others -that not all dust carried germs and not all dirt was dark, pure fields of white were increasingly touted as a way to visualize the invisible world of contagion. Woods Hutchinson, for example, wrote in general praise of the color white in an ironic American Magazine article: The prevalence of 'smoke and grime' in urban America he wrote, has 'been of definite and direct benefit' to the country because its overpowering visibility forced even swarthy immigrants to adopt higher standards of cleanliness, making them 'scrub not just once a day, but thrice'. The color white -particularly from white wash and white paint -was central to this visibility he argued, because, 'Anything in the way of dirt or garbage which showed up against this shiny background was so conspicuous that shame alone compelled the Polacks and Hungarians in the district to get rid of it in some way.' [START_REF] Hutchinson ; Mccann | The science of eating[END_REF] If, as early 20th-century experts loved to repeat, 'dirt was matter out of place,' white had been normalized as the defining measure of whether something was in or out of place. The color white had become a disciplinary technology closely associated with medical science and sanitation.

This proved true with bread as well. Even Alfred McCann -one of the country's fiercest anti-white bread crusaders -understood the visual discipline of the white loaf. He wholeheartedly supported dark bread, but attacked adulterers who took advantage of the 'dusky color' of their loaves to conceal impurities. If this did not happen, he argued, 'The white bread maker would not then point to his immaculate loaf, free from the faintest tint of color. He would not contrast the "chastity" of that white loaf with the "defilement" of the dark one.' 91 Charles Briggs writing in Science, summed up the connection consumers had made between white bread and sanitation: 'To all appearances … the general public is continuing in its belief (justified both by the bacteriological count and the microscopic examination) that whiteness or creamy whiteness is a sign of cleanness.' [START_REF] Briggs | Nutritional value of pure white flour and products[END_REF] In a time when bread production was increasingly taking place outside the home and out of consumers' sight, the whiteness of loaves increasingly substituted for the direct ability to monitor the baking process and reassured consumers of bread's compatibility with modern conceptions of purity, health, and progress.

Conclusions

In a 1916 article entitled, 'Modern bread-baking: the loaf untouched by human hands in the process of making,' Scientific American predicted that bakery bread would grow in popularity thanks to, 'the baker's better knowledge of fermentation, better knowledge of all the ingredients entering the loaf, more sanitary methods of production, and because of the absolute cleanliness in the handling of the baked loaf.' [START_REF]Modern bread-baking[END_REF] The magazine's predictions proved correct. Conceived as a techno-science of cleanliness and control, modern baking found a place for its bread in modern diets. This path to modern bread did not follow a straight line of technological advance, but rather took detours and short-cuts through the emotionally and politically charged world of purity and hygiene. In tracing the entanglements of bread, Progressive era activism, and deep social anxieties, the article expands our understanding of a critical juncture in the making of the American diet, while placing historical studies of food safety into conversation with Foucaultian bio-politics.

While food commodification and industrialization are often glossed as forces of cultural disenchantment and destruction, this article has shown that 'the making of modern bread' turned on a more productive form of power -one that shaped new subjects and gave rise to new emotional attachments to food. Critically, in the case of bread, this productive power operated by connecting consumer choices to larger constructions of purity, hygiene, and responsible citizenship. Thanks to widely circulating discourses of scientific control and the visual spectacle of cleanly whiteness, bread consumption choices became a way in which people positioned themselves and were positioned within social hierarchies.

Of course food choices are always about positioning oneself and being positioned within social hierarchies -there is nothing new about this claim. [START_REF] For Example | Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste[END_REF] What is interesting about studying the case of early 20th-century bread consumption in the USA is the way it illuminates the specific implications of having this process of positioning-being positioned play out in relation to a particular bio-political formation of social hierarchy. In other words, this is not just about distinction or social stratification in general, but rather a specific form of social difference constructed around the very lines of life and death. Focusing on difference in this way, in turn, illuminates a number of more general insights into what happens when social constructions of food safety get cast in bio-political terms -a process that is still very much a part of early 21st-century food politics. One of these implications, drawn from the early 20th century and applicable to the early 21st century, merits the final word in this article.

Food safety struggles articulated as bio-political struggles nearly always hinge on organic notions of natural and social purity that pose a homogenous organic society against external threats. [START_REF] Enticott | Lay immunology, local foods, and rural identity: defending unpasteurised milk in England[END_REF] As we saw, early 20th-century discussions of bread consistently placed how one eats in relation to threats against individual bodies and the larger social body. Defining good eating in relation to impending threat meant that one's response must be swift and decisive. There is not much room for creative engagement here: you do not try to 'work with' or 'transform' a threat like this; you build up the barricades and batten down the hatches.

There is nothing particularly wrong with this on a certain level: Who mourns the isolation and elimination of typhus? But, what becomes clear from the story of bread is that understandings of threat to the social body do not remain neatly moored in 'benevolent' binaries. They overflow and reinforce other kinds of exclusion, indexing them to 'a nature that had to be preserved' and giving them the urgent aura of life and death. 96 Indeed, as we saw, early 20thcentury discourses of food and racial purity reinforced one another to such an extent that even the most radical reforms achieved by pure foods campaigners were tainted with subtle (and not so subtle) racism. Food and diet clearly served as central means through which exclusionary categories of race and nation were understood and produced in early 20th-century America.

Tracing this dark side of food purity takes us to the heart of Foucault's critique of biopolitics. Bio-politics is the positive power to establish the health and security of a population by creating new, responsible subjects ('at all costs', as Woods Hutchinson might have urged). Yet bio-politics' protective measures require a carefully defended architecture of boundaries, divisions, and hierarchies among and within populations aimed at defining and eliminating 'the biological threat to … the species or race.' 97 Thus, as Foucault contends, social improvement couched in a language of bio-politics must, 'introduce a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die.'

In most cases this politics of life and death takes benevolent forms; indeed, food purity discourses may achieve wide-ranging improvements in the health and security of a defined population (typically wealthy, white consumers), but they are not innocent. They structure the world of life into comparable ranks and actionable hierarchies, safeguarding privileged spheres of life while targeting outliers as enemies. Critically, as both the story of white bread and the contemporary examples briefly presented earlier suggest, purity and hygiene are privileged and politically powerful notions in a bio-political society, but this efficacy comes with a cost.

FIGURE 1 A

 1 FIGURE 1 A lab-coated scientist explains the benefits of Wonder Bread to a gathering of well-dressed women in this ad from 1929. The title reads: 'Mothers here adopt new bread. Widely urged for school children.' New York Times 14 April 1929, p. 104.

FIGURE 2 '

 2 FIGURE 2 'Snow-white temples of cleanliness', Ward Bakeries advertisement, 1911.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges valuable critical input from Mona Domosh, Melanie DuPuis, Julie Guthman, Susanne Freidberg, two anonymous reviewers for Cultural Geographies, and members of the University of California, Irvine Humanities Research Institute's 'Eating Cultures: Race and Food' program. Much earlier


Glyn Williams

The Politics of the Governed is a rich collection of essays drawn from lectures in the USA and India in which Partha Chatterjee addresses subjects that include nationalism, the transformation of contemporary Kolkata and America's hegemoaanic role before and after 9/11. The essays are as theoretically engaging as they are varied, providing intelligent and accessible commentaries on the work of Anderson (1998) and Negri and Hardt (2000), as well as a broader engagement with concepts of governmentality as these play out in the contemporary global South.

The theme around which many of these different strands coalesce is the relationship between political participation and forms of governance, in particular, the role the postcolonial state plays in shaping its subjects. Here, Chatterjee draws a distinction between two ways in which the modern state views people: as citizens, or rights-bearing members of a national political fraternity and as populations, or subjects who are constantly divided and re-arranged by government as targets of policy. He argues that the post-colonial state deals with its people primarily as governed populations, and that this mode of operation has been reinforced in part through its expanded interventions conducted in the name of 'development'.

Lacking full citizenship, the vast majority of India's population -and by extension their counterparts across the global South -are left to make claims on the state from the murky field of political brokerage that Chatterjee calls political society. It is here that the needs of this excluded populace are voiced and are sometimes met, but always as conditional claims rather than formal rights. Political society emerges as both an important moment in state-society relationships, and as a space of possibility where new forms of democratic representation can be created by working through the contradictions of post-colonial governance.

Throughout the book, these central arguments are fleshed out through a diverse collection of illustrations that includes Ambedkar's drafting of the Indian Constitution, the death of a leader of a Hindu sect, and contemporary attempts to regulate madrasah schooling. Again and again, seemingly esoteric or mundane events are cleverly used to open up debates of global significance. There may be questions as to whether these primarily Indian (and particularly Bengali) examples can ever speak for 'popular politics in most of the world', but this is one of India's foremost public intellectuals writing at the top of his form. As such, Politics of the Governed deserves a wide audience in geography.


cultural geographies in practice

Between landscape and blindness: some paintings of an artist with macular degeneration

Hannah Macpherson

Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London I n the painting 'Morning sight' (Figure 1) Ann Roughton paints a garden landscape which includes the sight of her own macular degeneration. The affects of this degenerative sight condition are represented as a grey cloud area in the centre of the painting, while the rest of the garden is painted in an impressionistic style using flecks of coloured paint. The painting is one in a series which Ann produced over the course of a month in order to represent what she sees with age related macular degeneration (AMD). 1 The painting and her accompanying commentary are of interest because they render sight itself visible and help to draw our attention to the fact that sight cannot necessarily be assumed to be a constant or predictable source of information about the world. For example, there are around 155,000 on the register of partially sighted people and 157,000 on the register of blind people in England. 2 With age our colour values are also likely to change and we are increasingly likely to need spectacles.

In the United Kingdom AMD is the most common cause of visual impairment in people over 60. In AMD the cells of the macular area (see Figure 2) become damaged and stop working, central vision may become blurred or distorted and gradually a 'hole' in the central vision is likely to develop, while peripheral vision tends to be retained. Ann, 3 now aged 85, began to develop AMD ten years ago, first in her right eye and later in her left. In a comment on the painting on the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) website which promotes the work of visually impaired artists, Ann explains how she 'sees' and 'sees with' her 'macular cloud', how it affects her vision and how her vision changes during the day: My eye condition is age related macular degeneration and it affects me early in the morning because when I look up at the ceiling of the bedroom I get a black cloud with sort of frilly edges, sort of fringed and it looks rather like Australia in shape very often. And then as the day wears on my cloud, which obscures my central vision takes on the general tone of what I am looking at so I can always see round about the edges in full colour I am glad to say because I really am very colour conscious. 4 cultural geographies 2008 15: 261-269 © 2008 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1474474007087502 I first came across Ann's work through the RNIB publication Painting from a new perspective. [START_REF] Rnib | Painting from a new perspective: six artists and their experience of sight loss[END_REF] This book was produced to demonstrate to people with visual impairments how they can still enjoy painting and produce work of merit. While there are a number of conventional landscape paintings in this book, as a geographer, interested in ideas of landscape and embodiment, I was particularly struck that Ann's painting was not simply trying to reproduce a conventional example of a particular artistic genre, but rather, it conveyed visually the particular nature of her vision and her impairment. In Ann's painting macular degeneration becomes a positive addition -it is treated as something to be represented as 'a cloud with frilly edges' not just a negative to be ignored or 'overcome'. Ann's paintings 'Morning sight' and 'Afternoon sight' (Figures 1 and3) also lack a formal sense of perspective, instead remaining faithful to her 'lived perspective' which comes about through her remaining, hazy, peripheral vision. For Ann this was simply a way of painting with and representing her macular degeneration and the RNIB publication containing her painting was targeted at a limited readership of other artists and aspiring artists who had developed visual impairment or blindness. However, I think her work deserves wider discussion and recognition, for Ann's paintings not only have a pleasurable aesthetic value, or serve individual therapeutic purposes; rather her approach to painting contributes to a contemporary politics of disability arts that is concerned with valuing embodied diversity rather than simply proving equivalence. [START_REF] Kuppers | Disability and contemporary performance: bodies on edge[END_REF] Her work also ties into a set of debates within cultural geography concerning how we might go about representing embodied and socio-cultural diversity in our research accounts of landscape. Her approach to painting in the 'macular series' also shares interesting continuities with the work of the early impressionists, some of whom experienced visual impairments themselves. I hope that by using Ann's paintings here the paintings will enter into visual histories and geographical imaginations of landscape in ways which perhaps verbal description of the paintings alone might fail to do. [START_REF] Compare | Participatory art: capturing spatial vocabularies in a collaborative visual methodology with Melanie Carvalho and South Asian women in London, UK[END_REF] Research on landscape in cultural geography of the past three decades has shown how representations of landscape can work to produce powerful ideological affects, and how people's historical, gendered and ethnic positioning can structure how they see, experience and represent landscape. [START_REF] Cosgrove | Social formation and symbolic landscape[END_REF] However, disabled perspectives on landscape have been relatively overlooked. Recent research on landscape inspired by non-representational theory has also had a tendency to unwittingly perpetuate 'ablist' perspectives through a prioritization of the perspective of the fit and able body. [START_REF] Lorimer | Performing facts: finding a way over Scotland's mountains[END_REF] Therefore, by reproducing Ann's work in a journal of cultural geography I hope to begin to redress a relative neglect of disabled perspectives on landscape. This discussion of her paintings also builds on a tradition in geographical thought of looking at the work of landscape artists in order to improve our understanding of human-environment relationships. [START_REF] Daniels | The picturesque landscape (Nottingham/Hereford[END_REF] Ann trained as an artist at the West of England School in Bristol, she has painted for recreational purposes intermittently through her life and also taught painting professionally during her working life. Ten years ago she began to paint her progressive and increasingly visible macular degeneration at different times of day and in different settings in order to communicate to sighted audiences something of what it is like to experience the condition. She also wanted to reveal to other people suffering visual impairments that they can still produce paintings of merit. 11 After seeing Ann's painting 'Morning sight' in the RNIB book Painting from a new perspective, I phoned Ann and asked if I could visit her because I was interested in photographing some of her other paintings in the macular degeneration series and developing a better sense of her work. Ann's landscape paintings were initially of interest to me because they related to my doctoral research which explored the experiences of people with blindness and visual impairment who visit the countryside with sighted guides. In this research context her paintings helped to illustrate one part of a tension, that blind and visually impaired people seemed to have in their rural landscape encounters, between remaining faithful to their current lived perspective and wanting (or feeling obliged) to participate in collective, predominantly sighted, regimes of truth about what landscape is. [START_REF] Macpherson | Landscapes of sight and blindness: vision, touch and laughter in the English Countryside[END_REF] When I visited Ann she explained to me how when she had full sight she favoured painting realistic portraits and still life with a formal sense of linear perspective. However, since developing macular degeneration she shifted her painting style and subjects and began to paint impressionistic landscapes and abstracts in order to accommodate her changing sight. Her approach to landscape painting (Figures 1 and3) is interesting for it echoes the style of early impressionists, some of whom are thought to have deliberately employed their peripheral vision in order to get the blurred affects of mass, line and colour. [START_REF] Trevor-Roper | The world through blunted sight[END_REF] Ann's faithfulness to her lived perspective also shares continuities with Renoir and Cezanne who are among a number of myopic impressionists who capitalized on the blurred affect induced by their nearsightedness; interestingly Monet also developed cataracts and painted with this hazy vision in later life. [START_REF] Coldham | Art vision and the disordered eye, Vision and Aging Lab[END_REF] So while some painters would have attempted to overcome any such 'distortions' of vision and remain faithful to the principles of linear perspective established in the Italian Renaissance, Ann, like the early impressionists attempts to remain faithful to how she sees rather than how things are 'supposed' to look. This results in representations of landscape which render the process of seeing itself visible. There is an intertwining of sight and landscape. For Ann her sight of landscape and the sight of her impairment vary depending on the time of day, weather and light conditions. Ann's experience of macular degeneration is thus bound up with conditions in the external world and as she puts it, her macular degeneration 'takes on the general tone of what I am looking at'. The titles of each of the paintings 'Morning sight' and 'Afternoon sight' reflect this changing apprehension and have a double meaning, referring to both what Ann sees and the state of her vision at that time. While in the morning, her 'macular cloud' is dark and there is a sharp transition to colour outside of the grey area, as the day wears on the cloud becomes a lighter grey and her vision becomes steadily more blurred. This is illustrated in the painting above 'Afternoon sight' (Figure 3) which has a much lighter grey cloud to represent the affects of macular degeneration and is a lighter tone from the 'Morning sight' painting, with flecks of grey and light green representing the colour of the trees.

While all landscape paintings are dependent on the light conditions in the external world and are limited by the field of vision of the artist (there is a relative blindness in every painting) Ann's paintings render her sight and its specific limits clearly visible. In fact by painting her own macular degeneration, we might even say that her visual impairment becomes a landscape of sorts, for it becomes a phenomenon to be objectified and studied and which changes according to the light conditions, just like the external landscape in front of her. Thus Ann's paintings are doubled, for we see in them both the nature of her macular degeneration and her sight of the landscape beyond; two landscapes (macular cloud and garden) in one painting, each affecting how the other is seen. Therefore, the paintings contain body and landscape, and like the impressionists whose style she follows in the footsteps of, they blur boundaries between the visible and the invisible, external and internal, the body and the landscape; it is an optics of immersion. This blurring of boundaries and immersive sense of sight chimes with interpretations of vision found in Merleau-Ponty's writing on Cezanne and in his unfinished work 'The visible and the invisible'. [START_REF] Johnson | The Merleau Ponty aesthetics reader[END_REF] In his later work Merleau-Ponty develops a conception of vision as having touching immersive qualities; describing vision as a 'chiasm' or crossing-over between subjective and objective existence. [START_REF] Merleau-Ponty | The intertwining -the chiasm[END_REF] These paintings appear to illustrate this 'chiasm' or crossing over between body and landscape; the seer is caught up in the midst of the seen and the unseen.

So for Ann, like for all of us who see something, seeing is not limited to the physical organ of sight but is also dependent on light conditions in the external world. We never see alone, rather we see with the light and the landscape. This is a point which other geographers have made; for example, Cosgrove and Thornes, via the writing of Ruskin, discuss how the sky and clouds condition our landscape experience, while Yusoff has drawn attention to how the temporary snow blindness of Antarctic explorers forms part of their embodied landscape experience. 17 However, it is important that this intertwined nature of sight and landscape continues to be restated and illustrated because it has significant implications for how we understand the subject's embodied relationship with the landscape. For if sight and blindness is partly actualized and dependent on light and landscape this means that sight is not only possessed -'our own' -but is also dependant upon and constituted by the surrounding environment. Rather than isolated, contained subjects staring out on an independent, external world, we are extensive and involved. We see in and with the landscape and are coconstituted by it. This is a point which has been explored in more depth by Wylie in his writing on landscape and the gaze; 18 however, the ethical implications of this understanding of landscape, sight and subjectivity, and the range of different gazes which people with partial sight bring into being in conjunction with the landscape and sighted others requires further exploration (a task beyond the remit of this short article).

At 85, Ann has lost almost all her sight. Three years ago she lost her husband Sam. The final painting below is her last attempt at painting. This abstract painting from her imagination was motivated by her bereavement. The painting is in the form of an 'S' after her husbands name 'Sam'. The 'S' is painted in a blue swirl and Ann is represented by red dots in the centre of the painting. She explained to me she wanted to represent their own intertwining as they were a very close couple. In 'Sam' there is a change in style, reflecting Ann's almost complete absence of sight. In a conversation with Ann she told me that since developing macular degeneration her growing blindness had brought her 'a kind of peace as an artist' for she increasingly chose to paint abstracts 'freed of the need for realism which so many other artists are driven by'. So no longer able to adequately see around the edges of her macular cloud, Ann, with her failing sight painted abstracts instead, projecting an inner world outward for others to see.

Conclusions

The paintings and discussion of visually impaired artist Ann Roughton have three important implications for geographical scholarship which engages with issues of landscape, embodiment and disability. First, Ann's paintings add to an expanding literature in geography on ways of seeing and representing landscape. Previous research has shown how the visible landscape that we may register and reflect upon each day depends upon the coming together of our socio-historical and economic positioning; our practices and personal biographies. taken for granted. As our sight changes over the life course from an infant unable to focus, to the potentially hazy vision of cataracts or other age related sight conditions, the ways in which we see in and with the landscape will also vary. Therefore any theorization of how 'we' see landscape must take into account these diverse ways in which individuals may see.

Second, recent writing in geography based on research with people who have visual impairment or blindness has tended to focus on tactile perception. [START_REF] Hetherington | The unsightly: touching the Parthenon frieze[END_REF] However, we must be wary of associating people with blindness and visual impairment solely with the sense of touch and proximal forms of knowledge. Even those registered blind often have some useful residual vision and some important features of sight itself can be revealed through reference to the 'visual' experiences of people with blindness. [START_REF] Heller | Introduction[END_REF] Ann's paintings are important for they render sight itself visible and help to show how people with visual impairments may see and relate to sightedness, abstraction and other visual modes of representation. Third, Ann's paintings may be viewed as a contemporary example of a little acknowledged history of painters who have experienced forms of visual impairment and I hope that her paintings will help to give visual disability a positive and provocative place in geographical imaginaries. Ann's paintings challenge simplistic equations of sight and knowledge and reveal some of the complex and contingent qualities of vision. Specifically, the changing nature of Ann's 'macular cloud' helps to illustrate the important point that seeing resides neither entirely in the subjective observer at a particular point in time, nor in the external world; rather, there is an intertwining of sight and landscape. While her final painting 'Sam' shows that, when sight itself fails almost completely, we can continue to project an inner visual world outward for others to see.

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Morning sight, Ann Roughton. (Permission courtesy of the artist.)

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Eye diagram showing the macula. ( Image courtesy of the national eye institute, United States national institute of health.)

  FIGURE 4 'Sam', Ann Roughton. (Permission courtesy of the artist.)

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the artist Ann Roughton for giving permission to use her art work and comments. I would also like to thank Tim Cresswell, Mark Paterson, David Matless and George Henderson for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Biographical note

Hannah Macpherson is currently an ESRC post-doctoral fellow based in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University of London. In 2007 she completed a PhD thesis entitled 'Landscapes of blindness and visual impairment: sight, touch and laughter in the English countryside' at the University of Newcastle-upon-tyne.. She can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham Hill, Egham TW20 0EX, UK; email: hannah.macpherson@rhul.ac.uk