Environment and Planning A 2002, volume 34, pages 487 ^ 512

DOI:10.1068/a3440 Performing economic : two men, two books, and a cast of thousands

Trevor J Barnes Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada; e-mail: [email protected] Received 12 February 2001; in revised form 6 August 2001

Abstract. In this paper I use the notion of performance, especially as it has been theorized within the science studies literature, to begin to make sense of the history and continuing practices of economic geography. I argue that not only humans perform, but also objects. In this paper, I focus on the performance of books, and in particular, textbooks, or as Bruno Latour calls them, `immutable mobiles'. I argue that textbooks bring four attributes to their performance: they travel easily over distance, thereby bringing their message to a geographically diffuse audience; they allow for `an optical and semiotic homogeneity', that is, they take quite different pieces of the world, and bring them together, manipulating them and controlling them, on the same page; they represent an obligatory passage point in the sense that once they are accepted as the standard summary of a field they are necessarily acknowledged by successors; and finally, their effectiveness is in part a conse- quence of their rhetoricödefined as the ability to draw together and integrate within the text a wide range of sources and authors. These arguments about the performance of textbooks are illustrated by two case studies. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography, published in 1889, which helps launch economic geography as an academic discipline within Anglo-America. The second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in , published in 1965, which in many ways codifies the quantitative and theoretical revolution that first emerged in the United States in the late 1950s.

``All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players'' William Shakespeare, As You Like It ``My strong point is performance ... I always do more than I say.'' Richard M Nixon `` ... [a] textbook is a performance of reality ... '' John Law and Vicky Singleton (2000, page 1) ``A cultural geography of economics and economists? Now that's a thought.'' Nigel Thrift (2000a, page 701) Introduction At a recent conference, I witnessed two events that I had never seen before. The first was the equivalent of performance art. It was during a session in which I also presented. The first three presenters, which included me, did the standard conference routine. In a slightly disheveled state, you bring a sheaf of notes, some murky over- heads, and try to cram a forty-page paper into fifteen minutes, expressing complete shock when told that there is only one minute remaining. In contrast, the last pre- senter, dressed in a black t-shirt and denim jeans, with closely cut blonde hair, brought no notes and only two overheads that he then used as props in what was a brilliant, and exactly fifteen-minute performance. Arguing against the violence committed by quantitative forms of inquiry, and especially by the number oneöyou wondered what it ever did to him?öhe buzzed, stuttered, and acted out at the front of the room the cruelty and fiendishness of stopping the geographical world in its tracks by rendering it in numerical form. 488 T J Barnes

The second event was notable for the lack of performance. The presenter simply stopped dead in the middle of his paper. Until then he was clear and engaging. But he reached a certain point, and forgot his lines. He shuffled at the podium, rustled his papers, and said, ``I'm sorry'', hesitantly restarted, but within a couple of minutes he succumbed to silence again, and sheepishly returned to his seat. Everyone felt terrible for him and a bit embarrassed. He broke the golden rule about academic performance. It would have been acceptable to give a bad paper, but not to finish was beyond the pale. Both stories bear centrally on the theme of my paper. I will argue that the history of economic geography is a series of compelling and persuasive performances carried out by a variety of different actors, both human and nonhuman. When performances work, such as the first one, they can change a discipline's trajectory. But when they do not, as represented in extreme form by the second, they leave no residue. It is as if they had never happened. Over the last decade, an enormous amount of literature has been published on performance, some of it even in economic geography [see the special issues of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000 18 (4), (5)]. Now a component of the discipline's `cultural turn', performance is used to understand how culture inflects all kinds of economic activities and their spaces, whether that be in the context of female merchant bankers in the City of London (McDowell, 1997), or restaurant

Figure 1. Outrageous femininity (reprinted from McDowell, 1997, page 196; original photograph from The Guardian, photograph by Lionel Cironneau). Performing economic geography 489

workers in southeast England (Crang, 1994), or buyers and sellers at car-boot sales in England's northeast (Gregson and Rose, 2000). Whereas the notion of performance that underlies such works is often theoretically complex, my use of the term is comparatively simple. It is the idea that reality is brought into being by the very act of performance itself. As Nigel Thrift (2000b, page 577) writes, performance ``is the art of producing the now''. For example, when two young French women are photo- graphed by The Guardian newspaper in 1993 (reprinted in McDowell, 1997, page 196) on one of London's trading floors shouting down the phone and gesticulating, they are not just representing how financial trading is done, but are engaged in the act, the performance itself (figure 1). They are making reality, producing the now. When deployed in economic geography, then, performance, as illustrated by this photograph, has been applied to specific kinds of `real' economic activities in the `outside world'. What I would like to do in this paper, going back to my opening two stories, is to apply the notion of performance to the discipline of economic geography itself; that is, to examine the discipline as a performance. At the same time, I want to contend that economic geography is no less `real', and no less part of the `outside world' than, say, those animated and determined young French financial traders. Doing economic geography and doing financial trading both involve performance, and are therefore analyzable in similar ways. At least, this is an argument recently made for the discipline of economics (Callon, 1998; McKenzie, 2000). Performances by economists produce effects not just internally within their own discipline, but ones which spiral out into the world, transforming inside into outside. The outside world comes to mirror the economist's inside world of models and theories. For example, Donald McKenzie (2000) writes about the mathematical theorems of the Nobel-prize-winning economists, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, and the late Fischer Black, on option pricing, which in part led to the development of derivative financial markets. McKenzie's argument is that such theorems were not an external description of the reality of financial markets, but they actively created them, they performed them. As he puts it, ``Finance theory describes a world of human institu- tions, human beliefs and human actions. To the extent to which that theory is believed and acted upon, it becomes part of the world it describes'' (McKenzie, 2000, page 4). That is, in their theoretical performances as economistsöwriting equations on black- boards, publishing papers in journals, speaking to the financial pressöMerton, Scholes, and Black created a new type of financial world, one that would make the fortunes of some, and send others to prison. For this reason there is no dividing line between the performances of academics such as Merton, Scholes, and Black in their campus lecture theatres, and the performances of nonacademics such as Nick Leeson on the Singapore stock exchange. They all just do it, albeit with different consequences. Making use of recent writings on actor-network theory (ANT), I intend in this paper to present two historical vignettes of Anglo-American economic geographers just doing it, that is, performing economic geography. Partly for reasons of brevity, but also partly to make a theoretical point, I make the bases of each of the two vignettes a key textbook. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography, published in 1889, which as I will argue initiates the discipline within Anglo-America; and the second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography, published in 1965, which is associated with both an explicitly theoretical and a quantitative approach to the discipline. The theoretical point, which is emphasized by ANT, is that performances are put on not only by humans, but also by objects, including books. John Law and Vicky Singleton (2000, page 1) write, a ``textbook is a performance of reality, that it makes 490 T J Barnes

present a representation of reality, and at the same time makes that reality.'' The same argument is made for the two books considered here: that is, albeit by different means, they make present a presentation of an economic geographical reality, and at the same time make that reality. Clearly, however, other books could have been chosen to make the same argument. That these two were selected is partly because of their importance in altering the trajectory of the discipline [a point substantively argued later in the paper, and also recognized in the admittedly few histories written of Anglo-American economic geography; Barnes (2000), Berry et al (1987, chapter 2), Scott (2000)]. And partly, because there exists good primary and secondary literature around the authors of the books, and the books themselves, which allow for the kind of historical analysis of disciplinary performance that I want to undertake. My contention is that, if the argument about performance presented here is credible for these two books, it is extendable to other volumes. A final qualifier is that in the paper I focus exclusively on the Anglo-American economic geographical tradition, saying nothing about the traditions of economic geography elsewhere (for reviews of other traditions see Liu and Lu, 2000; Mizuoka, 2000; Scott, 1976). Of course, the long shadow of the Anglo-American tradition falls on these other places too, in part because of various forms of Anglo-American imperial- ism, both direct and indirect, and in part because performances themselves travel. This was true right at the very beginning of the institutionalization of economic geography in Anglo-America at the turn of the last century, and it is even more true now a hundred years later, as witnessed by the 2000 Singapore Global Conference on Economic Geographyöthe origin of this paper and the others appearing in this theme issue.

Actors, networks, books, and performances Not only do performances travel, so does the very idea of performance. Its origin is in theatre, but, as a metaphor, it has been used as the basis of theoretical redescription in a number of different fields (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). The idea of performance is found in the philosopher John Langshaw Austin's (1975) writings, which make a distinction between performative utterances, such as `I baptize you', where the words perform the act, and constantive utterances, such as `the cat sat on the mat', which describe a state of affairs that is either true or false. It is found in Harold Garfinkle's (1967) sociological work in ethnomethodology on identifying the various ways in which social order is performed on the street and even in the laboratory. And it is found in Judith Butler's (1990) theorizations around the performativity of gender and sexuality. My use of the term performance, though, comes from yet another field: science studies and especially ANT. Reviews of ANT are already numerous, including those in economic geography (Barnes, 2001a; Pinch and Henry, 1999; Leyshon and Thrift, 1997, chapters 9, 10; Murdoch, 1995; and outside of economic geography see the actor-network resource site run by John Law at the Sociology Department of Lancaster University, http:// www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/antres.html). Best associated with Bruno Latour's writings in France, and John Law's in Britain, ANT begins with the semiotic insight that ``entities take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other entities'' (Law, 1999, page 3). In semiotics those entities are intangible signs, but in ANT they can be anythingöhuman and nonhuman, tangible and nontangible, ideas and machines. Such entities possess no essential meaning. Rather, their meaning is an effect or an outcome of the wider system of relations of which the entity is part. That wider set of relations is called a `network'. Performing economic geography 491

To treat an academic discipline such as economic geography as a network, then, is to treat it as the effect of a whole set of relationships among many different kinds of entities, both material and nonmaterial, `social' and `natural'. It is not just an abstract body of knowledge but a product drawn together from heterogeneous sources. The entities that take on meaning within a network are actors or actants. In the vocabulary of ANT, they are `enrolled' into a network through a process called `translation'. Translation involves bringing together seemingly quite different entities, say, Newton's 17th-century theory of gravity, and the American economic geographer William Warntz's empirical measurements of incomes and agricultural prices in mid- 20th-century United States (Warntz, 1959), and then showing that they are able to work together, that they have similar interests, and can be allies. As Michel Callon (1980, page 211) writes, ``Translation involves creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different.'' In that process of translation, those heterogeneous actors are collectively engaged in performance: that is, they perform a new set of relations resulting in novel effects. To use the previous example, Warntz (1959, appendix) painstakingly toiled over US Department of Agriculture bulletins, statistical tables, and miscellaneous publica- tions to collect income and price data organized by state, which he then neatly copied onto yellow pads of legal-sized paper (Warntz, 1955 ^ 85, Boxes 5, 6). He then just as painstakingly calculated the centre point of every state, and worked out its distance from every other. Using the mechanical Friden calculator, he inserted those numbers into Newtonian potential equations, and produced another set of numbers that could be plotted onto a map (figure 2). To produce a successful performance required Warntz to line up a set of very different actors: numbers collected from the US Department of Agriculture, and reordered and reinscribed on pads of paper, a mechanical calculator, base maps of

Figure 2. United States annual wheat-supply space potential (from Warntz, 1959, page 68; reprinted by kind permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press). 492 T J Barnes

the United States, cartographic skills and equipment, equations about gravity, mass, and distance, and time and money to allow him to undertake such tasks. It was hard work, and certainly there was no guarantee of achievement. In this case, however, it was successful, and created both a new piece of knowledge, and a new piece of reality. It was new knowledge because hitherto no one had applied the theoretical logic of Newtonian cosmic formulations of gravity potential to terrestrial space. And it was a new piece of reality because no one before had drawn, or even conceived of, such maps of price and income potential (figure 2). They simply never existed, but, because of the performance, they were now out in the world jostling and circulating with other bits of reality. More generally, as Law and Singleton (2000, page 2) argue, ``the epistemolog- ical problem (what is true) and the ontological question (what is) are both resolved (or not) at the same moment in performance.'' As their bracketed ``(or not)'' signals, Law and Singleton also recognize that many performances will be unsuccessful because claims about knowledge and reality are never resolved, and, as a result, no one takes up such claims and passes them on. For example, there was a long-promised textbook by William Warntz and William Bunge to be called Geography: The Innocent Science, a contract for which was signed with John Wiley, in New York, on 18 July 1963 (Warntz, 1955 ^ 85, Box 5). Including physical props for practicing Warntz and Bunge's brand of economic geography, such as a miniaturized Varignon frame, and an inflatable beach ball to experiment with map projections, the book never materialized in final form, although there were many drafts and mock-ups of their props. There was too much interference, to use Law's (2000) term, in lining up the different agents and persuading them to work together as allies. As a result, only incomplete versions of the book emerged, which are found now in such places as Cornell Library's special collection (Warntz, 1955 ^ 85, Box 45), rather than in faculty and student offices and on university library shelves. As a result, Geography: The Innocent Science possesses only antiquarian interest. Its potential to make a difference, to perform and create a new reality, was lost in 1971 when Warntz and Bunge declined to take up their editor's increasingly plaintive pleas to finish the book (Warntz, 1955 ^ 85, Box 45). The broader point is that to convince networks, and the actors that constitute them, to perform is difficult, making their effects fragile, precarious, and unpredict- able. Such fragility and precariousness, argue proponents of ANT, can at least for a period be kept at bay by various strategies, one of which is to have powerful repre- sentatives that speak for the network, and in doing so persuade existing allies to stay in place, and to sway new actors to enrol. One such representative is the textbook, which

An extensive geographical network

Figure 3. Immutable mobiles extend networks. Performing economic geography 493

in the vocabulary of ANT represents an `immutable mobile' or an `inscription device' (Latour, 1987). Actors in their own right, textbooks are mobile in that they easily travelöthey can be taken off a bookshelf and given to a student, sent long distances in the mail, or stuffed in hand baggage for transatlantic or transpacific journeysöand are immutable in that the distance travelled does not physically corrupt the inscrip- tionsöthe same words appear in this paper when printed in Vancouver, or first read in Singapore, or copy edited in London. More generally, textbooks bring with them a series of advantages in the performative task of maintaining and extending networks. First, their very immutability and mobi- lity allow for their geographical diffusion, permitting connections to be forged between quite different and geographically separated local communities (figure 3). In turn, those connections increase the power of the performance. If those connections are not made, performances are limited, and remain so many ``queer particularities'', as Latour (1997, page 2) says. In contrast, when those connections are made through devices such as textbooks, those ``irreducible, incommensurable, [and] unconnected localities'' that are the origin of new knowledge may produce ``provisional commensu- rable connections'', creating lengthy, geographically extensive networks (Latour, 1997, page 2). For example, J Russell Smith at the turn of the 20th century at the University of Pennsylvania reads the Scottish geographer George G Chisholm's (1889) A Hand- book of Commercial Geography, and plans an American version of the same book, Industrial and Commercial Geography (Smith, 1913), which helps launch the discipline of economic geography in the United States (Rowley, 1964, pages 49 ^ 50). Or just over forty years later, (1993) packs a copy of August Lo« sch's (1954) book, The Economics of Location, into his luggage and reads it on the Queen Mary, and later on the transcontinental train, the Empire Builder, as he journeys from London to Seattle to begin graduate school. Quickly, that book becomes critical in Berry's own work on central place theory, and, in turn, becomes an important component in the quantitative revolution in Anglo-American geography. The point is that textbooks are critical actors in expanding the reach of the network: whether of bringing the embryonic discipline of economic geography from Britain to America, or of bring- ing the prewar Germany formalist economics of Lo« sch to the postwar studies of William Garrison's `space cadets' in the US Pacific Northwest (Barnes, 2000, page 22). Second, there are a set of qualities about the very nature of a book as a physical artefact that render it a powerful actor in a network, with the potential to maintain and enlist allies. As an artefact it is easily reproduced, and so possesses the potential to influence large numbers of people. Perhaps even more importantly, and even more basic, the very flatness of a book's pages permits domination of the phenomena described. Latour (1990, page 45) writes that once inscribed on a page phenomena can be `` ... dominated with the eyes and held by the hands, no matter when and where they come from or what their original size.'' Furthermore, once dominated the phenomena are then easily manipulated, shuffled, and recombined to create new patterns and structures. Latour (1990, page 46) gives the example of the French anthropologist ``Levi-Strauss' theories of savages'', which he says are a conse- quence of shuffling card indexes ``at the College de France''. The broader point is that academics only `` ... start seeing something when they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions'' (page 39). The advantage is that on a flat page everything is reduced to the same form, and hence easily controlled and manipulated. As Latour (page 46) again puts it, once inscribed on a page phenomena and events possess the ``same optical consistency and semiotic homogeneity''.We see this with Warntz's map of wheat-supply space potential (figure 2). A set of diverse events around the production of wheatöplanting in Nebraska, 494 T J Barnes

Figure 4. Books permit `optical consistency and semiotic homogeneity'. irrigating in South Dakota, crop spraying in Iowa, harvesting in Oklahomaöare translated and enrolled into the network that Warntz calls `macrogeography', one product of which is a map of wheat-supply potential (figure 4). Through numbers, equations, machines, and many late nights, these specific agricultural events in differ- ent places are made to appear on an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch piece of paper, and bound between the covers of a book called Toward a Geography of Price (1959). As an artefact the book is so powerful because even at long range it is able to order and control, shuffle and manipulate, varied events and things, thereby also imbuing both writers and readers with `an extraordinary degree of certainty' about the phenomena that are inscribed. Third, textbooks can represent what Latour (1987, page 159) calls ``obligatory passage points'', by which he means that anyone wanting to do anything in the discipline needs to make some reference to such points if they are both to be taken seriously, and to do the things that they claim to do. He gives the example of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, first published in 1830 (Latour, 1987, pages 146 ^ 150). Before Lyell's book, a variety of people from amateurs, to clerics, to Oxbridge dons claimed to speak about the history of the earth, and about its geological form. After Lyell's book, however, and following a good deal of work by him and his supporters, only those who referred to Principles of Geology were taken seriously when they spoke about geology. The book tied together a series of networks such that wherever one begins one was always obliged to make reference to the Principles. You find fossils in the cliffs at Lyme Regis on Dorset's south coastölook it up in Lyell. You are prospecting for copper in Howe Sound on British Columbia's Inside Passageöread Lyell. You want to dispute Bishop Usher's sermon that the world is 6000 years oldöstudy Lyell. Establishing obligatory passage points is the culmination of the process of establishing alliesö amateur geologists, prospectors, and anticreationists are all eventually wooed into recognizing Lyell's book as the mouthpiece of geology. Of course, it takes concerted effort, is difficult, and is prone to failure, but if successful some textbooks will stand for the whole discipline, connecting all the pieces, and acting as the definitive Performing economic geography 495

So you want to do economic geography? Then read this.

Professor Obligatory passage point Figure 5. Books can become obligatory passage points. disciplinary representative. `You want to be an economic geographer? Well, read Chisholm, ... or Hagget, ... or Lee and Wills' (figure 5). Fourth, and this is related, the textbook possesses tremendous power because of its rhetoric. The usual definition of rhetoric is that it takes the form of compelling speeches, or persuasive live performances of the kind represented by my first story. But rhetoric is broader, and links to a more general argument about networks. Superior rhetoric is found in those performances that are able ``to mobilise on one spot more resources'' (Latour, 1987, page 61), that is, more allies or more actors, than any other competing presentation (figure 6). To use Latour's (1990) phrase, the best rhetoric `draws things together', tightly binding them. It is good rhetoric because it is very difficult to argue against. One is not only going up against a single author, but against all their allies that they have assembled in their book. As a result, it becomes very time-consuming, very resource costly, and very difficult to unpick all the relations established. It is in this sense that textbooks are so difficult to argue against. For example, consider all the connections that Haggett (1965) forges in Locational Analysis in Human Geography. Trying to undo all those connections on which he draws, which are based on a decade or more of work by a variety of economic geographers in different placesöGarrison and Berry in Snohomish County, Edward Taaffe, Richard Morrill, and in Ghana and Nigeria, and Torsten Ha« gerstrand

People Research Machines Numbers Diagrams Places Figure 6. Good rhetoric draws things together making connections difficult to sever. 496 T J Barnes

in Swedenö would be a Herculean. As a result, it is uncontested, and becomes what Latour (1987; 1999) calls `a black box'. That is, Haggett's book ``is made invisible by its own success'' (Latour, 1999, page 304). It becomes the last word, the definitive state- ment, the way things are. It only seems that way, however, because of its superior rhetoric that helps produce a compelling performance. It is in these four sensesöas an immutable mobile, as providing `optical consistency and semiotic homogeneity', as an obligatory passage point, and as a piece of rhetoricö that a textbook is an actor that puts on a performance. Clearly, though, it is not a solo performance but is only one part of a wider ensemble of elements that also perform. As Law and Singleton (2000, page 3) put it, ``the textbook can be imagined as a network of elements which extend through its pages, but then moves out and beyond its covers into an endlessly ramifying set of [relations with other actors and perfor- mances].'' In the remaining part of the paper I intend to take Chisholm's and Haggett's economic geography textbooks and trace through ``a network of elements which extend through [their] pages''. In doing so I show the importance of performance within this discipline, and, as a result, the importance of the social and cultural in economic geographical knowledge. Thrift (2000a, page 701) recently raised the possibility of a ``cultural geography of economics and economists''. What I would like to offer here by examining the performances of these two textbooks is the possibility of a cultural geography of economic geography and economic geographers.

George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography (1889) The performance of Anglo-American economic geography's first textbook was the discipline's most significant. Without a successful performance here, there would have been no economic geography, and hence no first economic geography textbook either. This performance is found in Chisholm's (1850 ^ 1930) textbook, Handbook of Commercial Geography. Admittedly, on opening night the signs were not especially propitious. Although Chisholm (1889, pages iii ^ iv) claims in the preface ``to import an intellectual interest [to his inquiry] ... and not to encumber the book with a multitude of minute facts,'' that interest is difficult to find, whereas minute facts litter every page. The Handbook contains neither an explicit theoretical statement nor a disciplinary justification, but does display a ``marvellously meticulous mastery of detail'' (quoted in MacLean, 1988, page 25). Indeed, Chisholm once said, ``if ... there is some drudgery in the learning of geography, I see no harm in it'' (quoted in MacLean, 1988, page 25). Nevertheless, it was precisely out of this performance of meticulous detail and drudgery that both new knowledgeöan economic geographical epistemologyöand a new realityöthe pristine discipline of economic geographyöwere born and made manifest. Chisholm was born in Scotland in 1850, and attended Edinburgh University before later moving to London to become a member of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1884, and the Royal Statistical Society in 1886 (figure 7). Primarily making a living from writing and editing geographical textbooks, gazetteers, and atlasesöhe previously worked for the Edinburgh publisher W G Blaikie & Son on such projects as the Imperial Dictionary before going down to Londonöhe later supplemented his income by lecturing on commercial geography from 1896 onwards at the University of London's Birkbeck College (MacLean, 1988; Wise, 1975). At age fifty eight, he came home. Appointed as lecturer at the newly formed Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh in 1908, he later became Reader in 1920. The Handbook was written while Chisholm was still in London, and used by him for his Birkbeck College extension course. The network of elements that most strongly extends through its pages is that of British imperialism. The year 1889 is at the heyday Performing economic geography 497

Figure 7. George G Chisholm, 1908 (reprinted by kind permission of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society). of British imperial commerce, and elements of that wider project are found on every page. Imperial commerce, particularly centred around the commodity, frames the kinds of questions Chisholm poses around the geography of production and exchange, the kinds of answers he gives in terms of place-specific factors and technology, the kinds of statistical tables he compiles of imports and exports, and the kinds of maps he displays of trade routes and regional specialization. It also enters the very physical organization of the book, which is divided into three substantive sections: how com- modities are produced, where commodities are produced, and the physical and social infrastructure required for the geographical exchange of commodities (for more details see Barnes, 2001a). But also extending through the pages of Chisholm's book is another imperial project, a disciplinary one. It is to colonize a disciplinary space for the new academic subject of economic geography. Here the Handbook was to prove vital, becoming the Anglo-American unravelling point for the new discipline. Karl Go« tz, a German geog- rapher and former student of Friedrich Ratzel, distinguished economic geography 498 T J Barnes

from commercial geography seven years earlier in 1882 (Sapper, 1931). But Chisholm was the first to codify the discipline in English, and to solidify it within Anglo-America. For anyone who now doubted the new discipline one could literally show its substance by pointing to Chisholm's book (it is over five hundred pages long and weighs over a kilogram). Economic geography was no longer a mere idea, or intellectual distinction, but in the form of Chisholm's volume it was something tangible that could be held in the hand. Once published and in circulation it was a means to gather new allies, whether they be students, or university academic boards, or politicians. It became a point of passage offering the possibility of translations, of drawing together entities that formerly seemed irreconcilable. Specifically, as an immutable mobile, it satisfied the four features I discussed earlier, producing an original performance, and resulting in both new knowledge and a new reality. First, there were the Handbook's travels. Initially they were local, and helped to define, maintain, and extend the nascent discipline of geography in Britain. But subsequently they became more distant. Emory R Johnson (1906), a transportation economist at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, cites the book in 1906. And in the same year, a former doctoral student of his, J Russell Smith, uses the Handbook to argue for the importance of establishing a separate Department of Geography and Industry at the Wharton School, and later still, in 1913, uses it as a template for his own textbook, Industrial and Commercial Geography. In 1928, in its tenth edition, Chisholm passes over the reigns of authorship to Dudley Stamp, who is responsible for it until he himself dies in 1966. But, like Banquo's ghost, it is still not put to rest. The twentieth edition is published in 1980. It is a book that keeps on going, and going, and going.(1) The important point, at least initially, is that where the book goes, so goes economic geography. Second, the large number of tables, maps, and figures spread through Chisholm's book exemplify exactly Latour's point about domination. In this case the whole world is dominated, or, at the very least, whole continents (figure 8). For example, all of South Asia is made to fit on a piece of paper less than the size of a Kleenex. And once dominated, through shuffling more paper and tables of numbers, such maps can be literally written on. Tea in the northeast, coffee in the southwest, and wheat, millet, cotton, and oil seeds in the centre. In so doing, South Asia is given an ``optical consistency and semiotic homogeneity'', which produces confidence and certainty in the final product. Indeed, as a product, the map becomes more interesting than the world, which in contrast seems so messy, fractured, and diverse. Of course, as postcolonial science study critics, such as Donna Haraway (1997), point out, the logic of consistency and homogeneity also hides much, in this case the untold miseries of colonialism, plantation agriculture, and the terrible exploitation and oppression of workers, which all disappear under the map's shading and words. But that logic is very powerful. Chisholm championed the rights of colonial labour throughout his whole life (MacLean, 1988, page 29), but even he was unable to resist an optical and semiotic logic that literally obscured some of his mostly deeply held moral convictions. Third, necessarily the Handbook also became an obligatory passage point for the discipline. At first there was nothing else. But Chisholm also helped his cause by becoming involved in the educational wing of the Royal Geographical Society. That wing was especially active from the mid-1880s, after the appointment of a Royal Commission headed by Scott Keltie to examine the poor state of geographical

(1) One of the referees pointed out that the success of Chisholm's book was in part because it met the needs of commercial and banking exams in the United Kingdom, where one could take a paper in economic geography. In this manner, the book had a continuing market long after its direct influence on geography had waned. Performing economic geography 499

Figure 8. India (reprinted from Chisholm, 1889, between pages 322 and 323). education in England and Wales, and was prompted by the perceived commercial geographical failings of Britain in relation to its international competitors, especially Germany. In particular, as an educational field, geography in England and Wales lacked qualified teachers, suitable textbooks, and even a curriculum (MacLean, 1988, page 23). It is here that Chisholm came to the fore: he corresponded with Keltie, helped write the RGS Syllabus of Instruction (1903), and, most significantly, produced the Handbook. That book was exactly the right one for the right time and place, providing a curricular template, a source of detailed information, and something to be displayed both to students and to school governors and inspectors. But Chisholm was speaking not only to schoolchildren in his text. His audience also included business 500 T J Barnes

people, colonial civil servants, and an emerging community of academic geographers. His work became part of the broader process of institutionalizing geography as a discipline, especially after his appointment at Edinburgh University. In part through his tireless promotion of the discipline, his book became his mouthpiece. Doing economic geography obliged school children, extension commerce students, colonial bureaucrats, and geography undergraduates and lecturers to file through the passage point of the Handbook. Fourth, the Handbook is good rhetoric. On the surface, this may appear an out- landish claim. Apart from the weight of its `meticulous detail', there is the density of its long, circuitous sentences. But it shines in bringing together a tight-knit set of different actors that are difficult both to prise apart, and collectively to contest. There are the various institutions that have a vested interest in the book's success, from school boards, to a Royal Commission, to the Royal Geographical Society, to univer- sity examining boards. There are the various national statistical collection agencies which provide the numbers that Chisholm copiously cites, and on which basis he draws the book's pull-out maps (albeit drafted not by Chisholm but by another Fellow of the RGS, F S Weller). There are the many scholarly sources on which Chisholm (1889, page vi) relies, from articles in the Scottish Geographical Magazine through to multi- volume treatises in various foreign languages, for example, the German Karl Andree's three volume, Geographie des Welthandels [Geography of World Trade] (1867 ^ 77). And he speaks to many British merchants and manufacturers and reads their trade journals and special reports (Chisholm, 1889, page vi). All of these different actors are brought together, and made to work with one another in the book. What do you mean you disagree with the statement that ``there is no part of the world better marked off by nature ... than India'' (page 317, original emphasis)? Have you not examined the Colonial Office statistics, or read the Bombay and Lancashire Cotton Spinning Inquiry instituted by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or looked at the map by the noted cartographer and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Mr F S Weller (Chisholm, 1889, page vi)? Isn't this enough? What more do you want? In sum, Chisholm, from accounts of his lectures, was not much of a performer at the lectern [E M Gorrie, a former student, said his ``dry-as-dust methods do not appeal to the young'' (quoted in MacLean, 1988, page 30)]. What stole the show was his book: it had better legs than he. Specifically, as a performance, the Handbook raised the curtain on the discipline. Extending through its pages were certainly various forms of the British imperial project. But that was not the only mode of ordering at work. Chisholm was also trying to bring into being a new academic discipline. The Handbook performed economic geography: it not only made present a representation of economic geographical reality, but made the reality itself. After the Handbook was published, the very terms in which at least some people saw the world altered in conformance with those in the book (just as traders in derivative markets made their world conform to the equations of Scholes et al). It is in this sense that a new reality was made. Furthermore, because of the various properties of the book, it was a performance that drew a large audience with a long run. No actor could ask for anything more.

Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1965) Many actors and networks, brilliant performances and dreary ones, pass under the span of economic geography between Chisholm's Handbook and the publication of the second of my textbooks, Peter Haggett's (1933 ^ ) Locational Analysis in Human Geography, appearing in 1965 (for reviews of the intervening period see Barnes, 2000; Berry et al, 1987; Scott, 2000). Its importance was that it offered for the first time within an economic geographical textbook a `theoretical vision' of the discipline: Performing economic geography 501

Figure 9. Peter Haggett, 1984 (reprinted by kind permission of Blackwell Press). `theoretical' in the sense that it deployed an explicitly abstract, formal, and rationalist vocabulary, that, in turn, could be directly connected to the empirical world through a set of statistical and numerical procedures; and `vision' in the sense that it took up the neglected `geometrical tradition', the focus of which was spatial distribution and location. Although Haggett (figure 9) spent the bulkof his academic career at Bristol University where he was Professor of Urban and Regional Geography from 1966, Locational Analysis was conceived and written when he taught at Cambridge during the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s [he says he first began writing the book in the winter of 1960 (Haggett, 1991, page 301)]. He also attended Cambridge as an undergraduate during the early 1950s, and was part of an illustrious student cohort that included Michael Chisholm, Gerald Manners, and Ken Warren, and was slightly behind an earlier cohort that included and Mike Morgan. After briefly teaching at University College London, he was hired back at Cambridge in 1957 as a demonstrator, and joined by Richard Chorley a year later. The two were responsible for first-year laboratory teaching, and they immediately introduced quantitative analysis``to do with statistical methods, matrices, set theory, trend surface analysis, and network analysis'' (Chorley, 1995, page 361). In 1960 Haggett began giving eight lectures a 502 T J Barnes

year to second-year students on ``Economic geographyöstudies in location'', which was expanded in 1963 to sixteen lectures, and offered at 9 am on Saturday mornings to third-years as ``Locational analysis'' (Chorley, 1995, pages 364 ^ 365). It was the ``much-thumbed and much-revised lecture notes used for the course'' (Haggett, 1965, page v) that became Locational Analysis in Human Geography. The success of Locational Analysis, however, involved more than simply binding a set of lecture notes originally written and performed at Cambridge. Other networks extend through those notes, and later through the printed pages of Locational Analysis, and resonate with their audience whether of yawning third-year students, or secondary school teachers attending lectures at Maddingly Hall (discussed further below), or lecturers and professors of economic geography around the world. I will briefly note four that seem especially germane. The first is around science and technology, and runs through the book in a variety of registers, from background cultural and political conditions (for example, Harold Wilson's ``white heat of the technological revolution'') to ``high-speed [IBM] computers'' (Haggett, 1965, page 248), and is used to derive specific maps and numer- ical results reported by Haggett. Morrill (1991, page 300), for example, says about the book that it `` ... stands as a revelation and as a statement of faith in geography as a science.'' One specific connection that Haggett has to science, which in many ways animates Locational Analysis, is his interest, training, and expertise in , especially geomorphology. It is important to note here that geomorphology itself, during the 1950s, went through a methodological transformation, a consequence of work such as Arthur Strahler's at Columbia. It increasingly moved away from description and historical explanation towards a thoroughgoing scientific approach emphasizing a rigorous quantitative and model-based inquiry. Of course, it was exactly the same kind of move that Haggett envisaged for economic geography. That he could do so was in part because he thought of economic geography analogously in morphological terms. As he later reflected: ``I looked at the socioeconomic landscape in terms of its morphology, trying to see what its structural components were. In a sense, although I had done a consid- erable amount of reading in economics, I was much more interested in looking at parallel developments in physical geography'' (Browning, 1982, page 47). The parallel developments, as I suggested, were those numerical methods and forms of rigorous theoretical explanation. Also important, as I will discuss more fully below, are Haggett's collaborations with Chorley, a physical geographer who had contact as a graduate student with Strahler, and was also eager to connect to the new developments in his discipline (for a discussion of the intellectual contributions of Chorley's life see, Beckinsale, 1997; and Stoddart, 1997). An argument can be made, then, that the model for economic geography in Loca- tional Analysis is physical geography: the economic geographical landscape is like the physical geographical landscape, and is therefore approachable by using similar natural scientific methods couched in terms of abstract theoretical principles and rigorous numerical methods of verification. This point should not be overplayed, but, clearly, part of the success of Locational Analysis was in making an alliance with the wider network of science and technology, which was revered during the mid-1960s. Locational Analysis was not quite rocket science, but, for an economic geography mired in a descriptive geography since its inception, it came close. The second is Haggett's connection with geography in the United States, and the quantitative revolution underway there from the mid-1950s. Initially centred at the Universities of Iowa and Washington, this quantitative revolution later spread to a number of other sites including Chicago, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, and Performing economic geography 503

the University of Pennsylvania, home to Walter Isard's complementary Regional Science programme. In fact, it was a Regional Science conference at Berkeley in July 1962 that Haggett ``gate crashed'' (Haggett, 1965, page vi) which proved catalytic for his own work, preparing the way for those expanded lectures in Cambridge on `Locational Analysis'. As he later reflected, much of Locational Analysis was a summary and creative reordering of the work carried out in the United States. He says, ``There was very little of my own research reported [in Locational Analysis in Human Geography]...It is rather like a kind of Alistair Cooke commenting on the American scene'' (Browning, 1982, page 47). In particular, Haggett along with Ha« gerstrand in Sweden became the European nodes in an otherwise North American network of theoretical and quantitative economic geography. As that kind of economic geography increasingly came to dominanceöIan Burton (1963) said the quantitative revolution was over in North America as early as 1963öso the conditions were ever more ripe for the success of Haggett's book, which performed it. Third, there is Haggett's gender. Economic geography when Haggett was writing, and many will argue now as well, was an overwhelmingly masculinist discipline.(2) This is reflected in his cohort of fellow students at Cambridge (Chisholm, Manners, and Warren were all to become economic geographers); in the economic geographers he mentions in Locational Analysis (of the nearly 500 references, there is only one female Anglo-American economic geographer cited, Hildergaard Binder Johnson); in the subject matter that he discusses (there is no separate treatment of women as economic geographical agents, their spatial behaviour, or the particular problems that they encounter); and in the systematic masculinist performance that he provides based upon dominating and controlling the economic geographical world using numbers and disembodied geometric figures that offer a `view from nowhere' [the masculinist lineage of such an approach is discussed by Donna Haraway (1991; 1997)]. In contrast, the book far from being the view from nowhere is definitely the view from somewhere. In this case, it emerges from a highly gendered context that then in so many different ways enters the very words and figures of Haggett's text. Fourth, there is Haggett's membership of a social network that, at least according to Thrift (1995, page 380), made it easier for him ``to mount an assault on the then geographic establishment in part because he was so firmly located within it''. The argument is that Haggett was at the centre ``of a web of contacts ... He was a member of a group of Cambridge undergraduates, many of who went on to outstanding academic careers. He was part of a generation of Cambridge postgraduates who go on to colonize British and North American geography. Finally, he became a member of a group of academic staff at UCL and Cambridge who were, or who would become, the cream of British geography. It is this membership of a multiple geographical elite that accounts for the success ... of Haggett's ideas. ... This meant that the geographical establishment could less easily identify him as a foe and, in turn, its younger members acted as willing conductors for his ideas.'' That said, there were bumps along the road. After a 1964 RGS meeting that featured a presentation by Haggett in which he showed a multiple-regression equation, and

(2) Certainly there have been changes in the gender composition among Anglo-American economic geographers since Haggett wrote his book, and in the nature of the subject matter studied, and the methodology deployed. For example, since the mid-1990s the works of women economic geographers such as Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt (1995), J K Gibson-Graham (1996), Linda McDowell (1997), and Erica Schoenberger (1997) have been critical in changing what eco- nomic geographers do and how they do it.That said, the discipline remains numerically dominated by men, as was certainly evident at the Global Conference in Economic Geography in Singapore. 504 T J Barnes

Washington Bristol Lund

Michigan Iowa

Chicago Figure 10. Quantgeog Airline Flight Plan (redrawn from Taylor, 1977, page 15; reprinted by kind permission of Houghton Mifflin). that included among the audience Dudley Stamp, of the revived Handbook fame, and Alfred Steers, the Cambridge Geography Department Head, Haggett was summoned to Steers's office the next morning. Steers told him, ``This kind of thing has got to stop. You are bringing the subject into disrepute'' (Thrift, 1995, pages 381 ^ 382). But, of course, it did not stop, nor could it have been stopped. Haggett had already established an insurmountable position of strength through his network within both British and North American economic geography. He had sufficient allies to win any `trial of strength', to use Latour's (1987) vocabulary, even against the imposing figures of Steers and Stamp [see Stoddart's (1997) essay for just how imposing they were]. Although Haggett may have been given a dressing down in Steers's office, Locational Analysis, which appeared the following year, literally solidified those disreputable views. Further, as an immutable mobile, Locational Analysis performed them to an increasingly appreciative audience. Like Chisholm's Handbook, Locational Analysis created both new economic geographical knowledge (now framed in terms of equations and models), and a new economic geography reality [now framed in terms of a hidden locational order, the ontological solidity of which was revealed when apprehended through the right theoretical lens (see also Morrill's 1991 comments)]. That Locational Analysis could produce such a performance was first a conse- quence of its travels. Although it may have been written, and then given orally, at an ``irreducible'', ``incommensurable'', ``locality'', (Latour, 1997, page 2)öHaggett's home base of Fitzwilliam Collegeöonce it became an immutable immobile it precipitated a chain of translations that unfurled from Cambridge, transforming the wider discipline. In particular, a set of `provisional commensurable connections' began to emerge among a series of localities, creating a geographically extensive network, and illustrated, for example, by Peter Taylor's `QuantGeog Airline Flight Plan' (figure 10). The diffusion of Locational Analysis in Human Geographyöits first edition sold more than 40 000 copies (Thrift, 1995, page 383)öwas in part a consequence of the recognition of the book's importance as a mouthpiece of the new economic geography by members of the social network to which Haggett himself belonged. Peter Hall writing in New Society, for example, described it as, ``the most original and important book from a British geographer for many years'' (quoted in Thrift, 1995, page 383). Another measure of its ability to travel is in its citations. Neil Wrigley and Stephen Mathews (1986) pronounced it a citation classic in 1986. Examining the social science citation index between 1966, when it first begins, and 1984, which is the end date for their tabulations, Wrigley and Mathews tally 378 citations for Locational Analysis, making it the third most cited Performing economic geography 505

book in geography for that period after Luna Leopold et al's (1964) Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, and 's (1973) Social Justice in the City [for a continuation of the story after 1984, during which period Haggett's publications lose favour as human geography turns away from `analysis' to political economy, see Bodman (1991)]. Second, perhaps the most striking feature of Locational Analysis in Human Geography is its semiotic and optical consistency. On virtually every page there is at least one diagram, including graphs, maps, schematic illustrations, bar charts, and polygons of various forms (there are 162 numbered diagrams in 310 pages of text). On some pages (figure 11) the figures occupy more space than the words. Although Haggett's figures tend to be highly stylized they continue to do what Warntz's or Chisholm's maps were doing earlier, that is, permitting dominance, control, and manipulation of pieces of the world ``no matter where they come from or what their original size'' (Latour, 1990, page 45). For example, the diagram on page 118 of Haggett's book (figure 11) is taken from Berry's (1967) work on the settlement hierarchy of Southwest Iowa. Here all the various processesösocial, historical, economic, dem- ographicöthat bear upon different forms of urban settlement in one corner of that state have been translated and enrolled into three two-centimetre long regression lines, which have now been further enrolled by Haggett in his case for locational analysis. The other page, page 119 (figure 11), is even more interesting because the figures represent purely geometrical configurations, in this case different levels of Lo« sch's hexagonal central place hierarchy. One might think that such abstract formulations would be the weakest points in Haggett's argument because they are the remotest from any application. But for Haggett it is the reverse. He claims that ``the most exciting geographical work'' stems precisely from ``applications of higher order geometries'' (Haggett, 1965, page 15), which are represented by Lo« sch's figures.

Figure 11.The rhetoric of Locational Analysis in Human Geography (reprinted by kind permis- sion of Arnold from Haggett, 1965, pages 118 ^ 119). 506 T J Barnes

As Latour (1987, pages 241 ^ 297) argues, such geometries represent a process of abstraction carried out through inscription. An abstraction is the form of an entity without the entity itself, for example, Chisholm's map of India (figure 8). But once abstractions are inscribed on paper, they can be accumulated, combined, and reshuffled with other abstractions, producing unexpected results. As Latour (1987, page 243) puts it, ``there is no limit to the cascade or rewriting and re-representation, you may obtain nth order forms that are combined with other nth order forms coming from completely different regions''. This occurs in Lo« sch's diagram that Haggett reprints, and which he urges economic geographers to emulate. One set of abstrac- tionsöfor example, descriptions of consumers and producers in Cedar County, Iowa, or around Stuttgart and Heilbronn in Germanyöhave been rewritten and rerepre- sented by Lo« sch in the form of stylized maps (Lo« sch, 1954, pages 418, 454), which are then combined with another set of abstract inscriptionsöa set of geometrical axioms and theorems. Although the superimposition of these two sets of paperöone of maps, the other of geometrical axiomsöis not a mysterious event, it is nevertheless a significant achievement producing control and power. As Latour (1987, page 245) writes, ``once every trace of an entity has been not only written on paper, but rewritten in geo- metrical form, and rewritten in equation form, there is no wonder that those who control geometry and mathematics will be able to intervene almost everywhere.'' Further, the result is only another version of optical and semiotic consistency. The only difference between drawings of hexagons and, say, Chisholm's or Warntz's maps is that the hexagons represent greater rewriting and rerepresentation. Third, the book became an obligatory passage point. This was partly a consequence of the book's quality, and was partly because there was no real competitor. Bunge's (1962) earlier Theoretical Geography, although compelling and passionate, was too quirky to serve as a textbook (Morrill, 1991, page 300, calls it ``more specialized'' when comparing it to Locational Analysis). And when Bunge turned with Warntz to write a more conventional text, their project foundered. It was not only the lack of competitors that made Locational Analysis an obligatory passage point, however. There was considerable preparatory work by Haggett and Chorley ahead of time in convincing the British geographical educational establishment of the merits of the new economic geography. As a result, when Haggett's book appeared, the way was already paved for its success. This is the importance of the Maddingly Hall lectures (1963 ^ 65). Maddingly Hall, an Elizabethan mansion just outside of Cambridge, was the venue in July 1963 of a special course for secondary school teachers on `Modern Geography' taught by Chorley and Haggett (Haggett and Chorley, 1989). Two more conferences followed, and in each case an attempt was made to influence especially sixth-form teachers into taking up the new methods and approach. Chorley (1995, page 367) is very explicit on this issue: ``[we] were convinced ... that the correct strategy was to attack points of critical vulnerability [within the British geographical establishment] and by pass the strong points. Accordingly, we identified a core of intellectually dissatisfied, very active and highly influential sixth-form teachers as our critical point of incursion into the existing system. It was clear that these teachers could be extremely influential in syllabus reform, that their pent up professionalism could be rapidly unleashed in terms of their teaching and the changes in sixth-form teaching could rapidly diffuse up into the universities and down into the younger pupils.'' It was a tactic that worked. One school teacher said after the first conference, ``Mad- dingly was a revelation of `Road to Damascus' proportions'' (quoted in Chorley, 1995, page 371). And another example, attesting to the effectiveness of the strategy, comes from Tony Gatrell (quoted in Thrift, 1995, page 383). He recalls, ``When I was 17 in the Performing economic geography 507

lower sixth, my teacher at Haberdasher's, Brian Fitzgerald, was enthusing about this guy called Peter Haggett (I think he must have met him at the Maddingly Hall conference) and mentioned a book that we might look at. When I next went into London I bought from Dillons, Locational Analysis in Human Geography. ... [I]t was my pride and joy.'' Of course, it wasn't only Gatrell's pride and joy, but a whole generation's: Locational Analysis became an obligatory passage point. Fourth, the book is strong rhetorically. Unlike Chisholm, Haggett writes simply, and in well-crafted, lucid sentences. But there are more than his words at work. There are also his diagrams. With a few well-aimed lines on a page, he persuasively makes the most complex issues appear simple and resolvable. Want to know about the Iowan urban system? Draw three straight lines. Want to know about urban systems? Draw nine hexagons. They are all part of the performance of making a new geographical reality. Instead of seeing the urban landscape of southeast Iowa as messy, see it as clean-cut and reducible to three straight lines, and instead of seeing the complexities of Swabia, see it as neatly drafted hexagons. But there is also more to Haggett's rhetoric, which turns on his ability to draw together so many resources at one place. Such a force is implicitly recognized by Gould (1995, page 34) who says that in rereading Locational Analysis, ``I can still feel the surge of excitement [Haggett] gave us by pulling together what were then a plethora of apparently disconnected examples, so showing us a coherence and structure that few of us saw at the time.'' In other words, what Haggett does so well is draw things together; he assembles and translates on the page many different resources, demonstrating the strong alliances among them. To use the previous example, on pages 118 ^ 119 (figure 11) he draws together: empirical studies of the Iowan urban system by Berry; theoretical studies of economic location completed by Lo« sch; the statistical techniques of correlation and regression invented in late-19th- century Britain by the eugenicist Francis Galton; and elementary packing theory initially devised by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in the 17th century. All are brought to the blank page, and made to work together. This means that if you want to make an argument you need to take on not only Haggett, but also his allies: Berry, Lo« sch, Galton, and Kepler. As individuals, each is impressive. As a group, they are daunting. Haggett along with Chorley wrote a book published in 1969 called Network Anal- ysis in Geography (Haggett and Chorley, 1969). It is an apt title, because it describes perfectly what Haggett was doing during the 1960s: that is, enrolling all manner of different agents into a new network within specifically economic geography that then performed `analysis'. By analysis, I mean the deployment of an explicitly abstract rational theoretical vocabulary and set of statistical techniques to assess those theories empirically. As an approach, it did not exist before. It needed to be brought into being, to be performed. That is the significance of Locational Analysis. It produced new economic geographical knowledge, and a new economic geographical reality. The new economic geographical knowledge was contingent on a series of new practi- cesöusing mechanical calculators, programming early mainframe computers, writing and solving equations, carrying out statistical tests, plotting points on graph paper, and speaking a new vocabulary of k-functions, isotims, and bid-rent curves. All required practice and training, and often involved various kinds of machines and equipment. It is in this sense that Locational Analysis draws things together in producing new knowledge. But it also creates a new reality. After Haggett's book is published, the world is seen differently: as ruled by distance-decay effects, erected around nested hexagonal settlement hierarchies, or divided by location triangles. These new realities are just as solid as Chisholm's tables of international commodity flows, or descriptions of contemporary performances by consumers at car-boot sales (Gregson and Rose, 2000). 508 T J Barnes

Conclusion There is something disconcerting in talking about economic geography as performance. For one of the connotations is of inauthenticity, of superficiality, or, more deviously, of covering up the real for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and gain. When someone like Richard Nixon says that his ``strong point is performance'', one's inclination is to duck and to take cover. I argued in this paper that we should resist such an inclination. My contention is that the history of Anglo-American economic geography is a history of compelling performances, where performance means that the very act itself creates the reality that it describes. As Marcus Doel (1999, page 128) puts it, performance ``aspires to become an event in the universe it inscribes''. Specifically, the emphasis on performance focuses attention, first, on practice, that is, what people do rather than what they say they do. Berry may say ``that central place theory constitutes a deductive base from which to understand the regularities over space and through time of retail and service business'' (1967, page vii). But what he actually does is sit in his office in Smith Hall on the University of Washington campus, Seattle, in the summer of 1956, and rearrange and reinscribe in the form of tables, maps, and statistical calculations and coefficients questionnaires originally taken by Duane Marble the year before documenting the number of businesses in the towns and cities of Snohomish County, Washington (Barnes, 2001b). Second, it stresses, as my example just did, that performance occurs at specific sites and at specific times, and that both matter. Performances travel, but it takes hard work and effort, and the mobilization of resources and allies. Central place theory travels in economic geography during the 1960s not because its deductive logic is universally and instantly recognized, but in part because immutable mobiles like Haggett's book argue for its importance, and are then read by sixth-form teachers, and university students and their professors. Third, performance highlights the role of objects like books, but also calculators and computers, blackboards and overhead projectors, typewriters and laptops, boats and trains, and maps and physical models. That is, performances are not just discursive, but involve the interaction of an ensem- ble of elements some of which have no explicit discursive formulation. Fourth, per- formance calls for a particular theoretical sensibility. Thrift (2000c, page 596) calls this nonrepresentational theory, and defines it as ``a theory of mobile practices''. He means by this, theories that emphasize the centrality of practice in shaping knowledge, rather than abstract, contemplative philosophical schemes (discussed further in Thrift, 1996, chapter 1). For example, Wittgenstein's later work is a theory of practice because he stresses that meaning is determined by use. To understand the meaning of, say, the number one, you must establish how it is used, what you do with it. It is not helpful to examine a distant scheme for inspiration such as Platonic idealism, or Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead's rarefied logic (Barnes, 1996, pages 172 ^ 174). This said, there were aspects of the performances that I did not review, or that I glossed over. The discussion of gender was at best thin, and I made little of my authors' national or class origins. Likewise, I did not make much of the fact that the history I tell is primarily of Anglo-America, the most central of the ``centres of calculation'' for the period, to use Latour's (1987, chapter 6) term. But equally as important are histories of places that were never such centres. For example, Taylor's diagram (figure 10) is interesting for all the places that are not includedönot only those in Anglo-America, but also outside. Why are places in Africa not on there, or Asia, or Australasia? In this sense, this paper's performance is at best partial. And raising these omissions points to another issue conspicuous by its absence: an explicit analysis of power. For networks are not self-organizing entities, their elements happily coming together for the good of the collective. Rather, they are sodden by Performing economic geography 509

power. As Steve Brown and Rose Capdevila write: ``Power is what makes [networks] what they are ... '' (Brown and Capdevila, 1999, page 38). However, that power is not sovereign power, that is, power which a particular institution or individual possesses and holds over others, ruling and directing them, but a decentred power, capillary- like and diffuse. It is exercised as much by nonhumans as humans, even by textbooks and their various qualities. Finally, this leads to the two textbooks themselves, one of which is well over a hundred years old, and the other more than thirty-five years old. Their age raises at least two questions. The first is: does the kind of analysis I presented still hold in contemporary economic geography? It is hard to think of a comparable contemporary text to either Chisholm's or Haggett's in Anglo-American economic geography. Admittedly, North American undergraduate economic geography courses typically assign a textbook. But they tend to be comprehensive surveys [such as my own with Eric Sheppard (Sheppard and Barnes, 2000)], and not arguments or constructions of the field. I suspect that the absence of a canonical text for the present discipline is a consequence of the increased size of economic geography, its consequent splintering, its culture of intellectual pluralism, and recent developments in electronic and custom- ized publishing that mitigate against the need for one textbook to serve all. That said, clearly written texts remain fundamentally important to the practice of economic geography, and so at least two of the four features remain pertinent: their rhetoric, and `optical consistency and semiotic homogeneity'. But potentially changed is their mobility, and mobility may no longer be the right word with on-line discussion papers, journals, and books that are instantly available everywhere provided one has access to a computer, a modem, and a credit card. Also, there may no longer be a single `obligatory passage point'. But even here there are at least a set of core texts that still perform that function, for example, Harvey (1989), Lee and Wills (1997), and Massey (1984). They are obligatory in the sense that they provide the starting point from which discussion in contemporary economic geography begins; without having read them, one would be lost or at least marginalized in any ensuing conversations. The second question, partly prompted precisely by the developments in publishing I described, is, given that the shelf life of publications is falling by the second, what warrant is there for lavishing any attention on either Chisholm's and Haggett's respective books, and more generally in pursuing the history of economic geography? Clive Barnett (1995, page 419) argues that focusing on past works is wrongheaded because they shackle us only to what has gone before. As he puts it, ``we would be better served if we simply let the dead bury the dead.'' Only then might we enter the wide-open freedom of the future. But the future is never wide open. The paradox of performance is that `now' is produced in large part by actors, scripts, props, ensembles, and scenes from the past. There can be no going back and imagining what economic geography would be like without such texts. They are a done deal. Furthermore, the problem with Barnett's internment metaphor is that the dead, even if they are dead, and in the case of a lot of the economic geographers I cite they are not (including me!), they do not always permanently stay underground. Chisholm's and Haggett's books may be figuratively buried in university library storage facilities or in second-hand bookshops, but when they are recalled or serendipitously found, and their covers opened, they are alive again having the potential to make a difference to the present, the potential to make the now. Furthermore, when we read those old books it is not necessarily because we want to know about the size of raw cotton trade between India and England for 1872 ^ 75, or the nature of Walter Christaller's k-principles, but because they might be creative spurs to thinking about our own present condition. Old books never die. They are always in the wings waiting their chance for one more 510 T J Barnes

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