The Antinomies of Antipode[1]

Noel Castree

[Au: need contact information.] School of Geography, Manchester University, Manchester, M13 9PL

First Cut: The Critic’s Friend

Euan Hague’s intervention raises some troubling questions about the nature and aims of Antipode—and, by implication, other “radical” journals in the human sciences—in the present disciplinary and social conjuncture. As I read his short analysis of the changing content, editorial policy and look of Antipode over its 30-plus year history, I found myself nodding and agreeing with the thrust of the argument: namely, that Antipode has been drawn into “the increasingly corporate world of academia”. I use the word “argument” deliberately. Notwithstanding his careful attempt to avoid offering definite answers to the candid questions he raises, Hague has a particular case to make. Levelling a charge that many radical geographers doubtless concur with but few have had the courage to articulate, Hague argues that Antipode has bought its current prominence within the discipline at the expense of its radicalism. This last word is loaded and ambiguous, of course. For Hague, Antipode’s progressive “de-radicalisation” can be measured in three principal ways: firstly, by its increasing academicisation—that is to say, its progressive detachment from those struggling for change beyond the walls of the academy; secondly, by the journal’s professionalization—that is to say, its now complete conformity to the normal and normalising standards of peer-review publication; and thirdly, by its corporatisation—that is to say, its transformation from a fringe journal to an yet another commodity lining the pockets of a large academic publisher (in this case, Blackwell). Hague’s terse title captures these concerns about the journal’s declension neatly, concerns which resonate with those I expressed in a recent special edition of Environment and Planning A (Castree, 2000) on the past, present and future of radical (or is it critical?) geography.

In his intervention, Hague mentions in passing a recent themed issue of Antipode edited by myself and Matt Sparke, entitled “Professional Geography and the Corporatisation of the University” (Castree and Sparke, 2000). In that issue, the question of Antipode’s own implication in the processes the contributors were diagnosing and criticising was deliberately avoided. As editors, the irony of us anatomising the corporatisation of academia in an increasingly corporatised journal seemed too obvious to warrant mention. Or were we just a little too worried about drawing attention to our own possible complicity with the very things we were seeking to criticise? Maybe. In any event, Hague’s arguments, as he states, are not intended to be personalised. Rather, he’s asking radical geographers to reflect very carefully on the academic field they now operate in, and he’s posing the question: can this field be changed? The importance of this question should be obvious. As Hague implies, it’s precisely the ground rules now organising this field (in the Anglophone world, at least) that mitigate against the sort of radicalism he would like to see a return to. Contesting these ground rules should therefore arguably be a priority for radical geographers today. Though less glamorous or heroic than the kind of “real-world” political activism that originally inspired Antipode’s founders, this kind of institutional struggle over the nature and aims of universities and colleges is vital if radical geography is not to remain immured in the academy. Perhaps the editors and editorial board of Antipode should, as a matter of urgency, do something remarkable and brave: redefine or even reinvent the format and function of the journal. This, in effect, is what Hague is enjoining us to do.

Ultimately, as Hague intimates, it’s a question of taking responsibility. Most of Antipode’s board members—and indeed its editors—were either very young or not even born when David Stea penned Antipode’s inaugural editorial. Having been socialised into tertiary education systems where academic value is measured in terms of papers published and research grants won, we’ve perhaps failed to see, and to properly question, the substantive shifts in the journal we’re supposedly responsible for. In reminding us that Antipode was once otherwise, Hague rightly encourages the editors and the board to think very hard about how we can make Antipode different once again.

Second Cut: The Critic’s Critic

Euan Hague’s provocative intervention is sure to ring true with many readers of Antipode and perhaps those actively involved with the journal, like myself. Indeed, upon reading it for the first time I found myself agreeing with his principal charges against the journal and admiring him for having the courage to print them. However, upon closer inspection it’s clear that his argument proceeds by sleight of hand while resting simultaneously upon some very dubious assumptions. Though Hague raises some important questions, his diagnosis of Antipode and his implied cure conform to a well-worn genre of academic criticism whose intuitive appeal is belied by its substantive confusions.

The genre of criticism has been especially prominent in the US. Its most famous exponents are (on the left) Russell Jacoby (1987) and (on the not-so-left) Roger Kimball (1998). It’s a type of criticism that laments the disappearance of the “true radicals” of the 1960s and traces a path of decline to today’s “tenured radicals”. Its normative viewpoint is firmly backward-looking, urging us to recapture that which has been eroded by the professionalisation of academia. As Hague takes us through Antipode’s successive editorial statements and cosmetic alterations, his rhetoric gathers momentum: Antipode is no longer radical but “mainstream”, no longer earthy and raw but “sleek”, no longer on the margins but “institutionalised”. Trading on such good/bad distinctions, Hague invites us to see the journal—and, by implication, those who’ve been involved in running it—as the metaphorical T-shirt-wearing young revolutionary who’s become the sharp-suited, middle-aged executive.

The sleight of hand at work in Hague’s intervention is at times gratuitous. The most egregious case is his loaded periodisation of Antipode’s life-course. Though he refrains from actually mentioning “good” names like Martin Luther King from the 1960s—the decade when Antipode was born—he later correlates the “watershed year” of the journal’s first publication by Blackwell with “the height of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations”. This crude attempt to code Antipode’s 1960s origins as positive and its 1980s transformations as negative is not helped by his opening gambit. It is, Hague implies in his first paragraph, rather “unradical” for Antipode to be published by a company that also produces “mainstream” journals like the Transactions and Area. Again, an association is offered in place of an explanation. Finally, Hague ends his intervention with a rousing but ultimately glib call to arms. Let us break away from all this buttoned-up, normalizing professionalism, he intones. If we draw our strength from recent events in Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere, we can “shake geography to its foundations in an effort to change the world”. Call me a cynic, but I don’t see how rousing words of this sort can substitute for a sober analysis of the very real barriers separating highly educated radical academics from grass-roots struggles.

This brings me to the dubious assumptions underpinning Hague’s story of Antipode’s supposed decline. I say dubious because Hague takes these assumptions to be self-evidently “right” when they are, in fact, anything but that. First, there’s the assumption that the benchmark for measuring Antipode’s radicalism was established by its founders. Hague is quick to cite David Stea and Dick Peet, casting them as father figures whose words have not been heeded by their wayward editorial sons and daughters. But, as Hague himself acknowledges, the meaning of “radicalism” is precisely what should be in question here. Simply assuming that a “proper” radicalism existed in the early years of Antipode but has since lapsed is both arbitrary and insufficient. Secondly, this links with Hague’s assumption that Antipode’s “incorporation” is, inter alia, antithetical to any “real” radicalism. Again, what’s required here is an exploration of what radicalism can and might mean within the current conditions prevailing in mass higher education in the countries where we work. It’s too easy to accuse self-styled radical academics of having been co-opted into a supposedly corrupting system. Instead, we might ask: what kind of room does the current system offer for what kinds of radical thought and practice? Thirdly, Hague takes it as self-evident that Antipode’s ultimate ambition must be to break down barriers between the academy and the wider world. Many others do as well, if the ongoing debates about “activism and the academy” are anything to go by (Routledge 1996; Storper 2000). But why should we assume that our radicalism (however we define it) is best directed outside the precincts of the university? Why does this seem such an “obvious” thing to do if we’re to be “relevant”? Why don’t we take seriously the myriad responsibilities we have within the university sector—to each other, to students, to nonacademic colleagues like cleaners or departmental secretaries—and think about focussing our radical energies closer to home (Castree, 2000, 2001)?

I mentioned at the start of this reply that, my reservations about his answers notwithstanding, Hague raises some important questions. They are, though he could not have known it, questions the current editors and editorial board of Antipode have been asking themselves over the last 15 months. In March 2001, those involved in Antipode began discussing the possible structure and format of an Antipode Companion to Radical Geography. Hague might see such a book project as a further capitulation to big publishing. But the editors and the board were, for example, aware of the seeming contradiction of conjoining the words “radical” and “companion” in the same title. The latter word, of course, is inherited from Blackwell, which has a series of companions covering major areas of geographical thinking and research. The rather cosy, packaged connotations of the term do not, it seems, sit very well with a journal purporting to be outside the mainstream. One of the first prospectuses for the book did indeed strike the editors and the board as too codified and unradical. Over the course of 2001, an interesting and sometimes heated series of email exchanges between board members ensued that opened up not just the complex question of what the word “radical” might mean in the present academic context, but whether radical thought was compromised when disseminated via a large commercial press. Interestingly, though, the debate about the proposed companion never spilled over into a debate about the journal. Hague’s intervention will perhaps be the impetus for extending the debate in this way, though I fear his answers to the tough questions he raises will not get us very far.

Final Cut: “Contradictions Are Us”

Euan Hague’s intervention will doubtless provoke two types of response. On the one side, many will concur with his pointed critique of Antipode’s corporatisation, and secretly thank him for having the guts to challenge the journal’s “unradical” trajectory; on the other, many will see his assessment of Antipode’s supposed “incorporation” as both overstated and simplistic. Neither response is adequate. To say that Antipode’s radicalism is but a pale shadow of its former self—as Hague does—is to miss the point as much as does the counterargument that the journal is in rude good health, what with a new fifth issue per annum and a new book series. The crux of the issue, as Hague implies but never quite says, is twofold. First, what do those involved with Antipode mean when they use the appellation “radical” (or, if one prefers, “critical”)? Second, because this question cannot be answered in the abstract, any proper response to it must reckon with the peculiar conditions that today structure the work of university academics (of whatever political persuasion). To say that Antipode has “de-radicalised” is as question-begging as the counterclaim that its radicalism has been successfully redefined to suit the current conditions prevailing within and without the tertiary sector.

Like many self-styled radicals in geography, Hague is very uncomfortable with how the academic left has progressively become part of “business as usual” in contemporary higher education. His critique of Antipode can be seen as emblematic of this wider concern. However, though he’s right to raise the question of whether this “incorporation” is compatible with radical academic thought and practice, he’s wrong to imply that radicalism cannot find meaningful expression in the current context. It’s too easy to charge Antipode—and presumably, by extension, other “glossy” left journals like New Left Review[2]—with having sold out. But it’s also too easy to offer the defence that Antipode is supping with the devil (in Hague’s view, Blackwell, the peer review process, glossy publicity, etc) cleverly and knowingly, using the resources of “mainstream” journal-publishing in order to spread radical geographical ideas more widely than was possible in the journal’s early years. This defence—which, I readily confess, few would offer without further qualification—fails to confront some of the discomforting realities that Hague highlights. One of these is the fact the journal and those who publish in it are often highly distanced from the “real-world” geographies of oppression and resistance that Antipode purports to want to understand and alter. Another is the fact that for those who publish in Antipode, their peer-reviewed essays can be seen as an accumulation strategy in attempts to get tenure and build a career.

Hague’s analysis of Antipode indicates a real unease with contradictions of this kind. But surely, if his intervention is to have any lasting impact, the point is to address the questions he raises in full recognition that these contradictions cannot be done away with. Only those wishing for some “pure” definition of radicalism will feel uncomfortable with the fact that Antipode, like the academic leftists who publish in it, is located in a field of tensions. In his book Secular Vocations, Bruce Robbins (1993: 59) urged those on the academic left to allow “the theme of professionalisation…[to] be brought up as a real political question, rather than a…complete political judgement…, the endpoint of a teleological narrative of…degeneration”. This is, I think, sound advice. Nancy Fraser (1989:1) has similarly insisted that “The real contradictions of our lives notwithstanding, the radical academic is not an oxymoron”. If this is so, then the appropriate response to Hague’s intervention is to ask: what contradictions are in play in the academic field structuring the labour of radical geographers?; and what sorts of radicalism do they allow us to pursue? In answering these questions we may, like Hague, find that we don’t like what we see. But we will at least recognise that there is not, and never has been, any “proper” radicalism that we have departed from or should aspire to. All there is are decisions for us to make about what kind/s of radicalism make sense and are achievable given the conflicted positions we occupy.

References

Castree, N. (2001) ‘Border geography’, Area, 34, 1: 103-12.

Castree, N. (2000) ‘Professionalisation, activism and the university: whither ‘critical geography’?’ Environment and Planning A 32, 6: 955-70.

Castree, N. and Sparke, m. (2000) ‘Professional geography in an age of corporatisation and accountability’, Antipode 32, 3: 222-29.

Fraser, N (1989) Unruly practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. London: Routledge

Jacoby, R (1987) The last intellectuals. New York: Basic Books

Kimball, R (1998) Tenured radicals. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks.

Robbins, B (1993) Secular vocations: intellectuals, professionalism, culture. London: Verso

Routledge, P. (1996) ‘Third space as critical engagement’, Antipode 28, 3: 398-419.

Storper, M. (2001) ‘The poverty of radical theory today’, International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 25, 2: 155-79.

Endnotes

1

[1] This piece was written before Marvin Waterstone’s intervention was submitted to Antipode and focuses on Euan Hague’s “Antipode, Inc.?”. However, it should not be hard to see how my discussion of Hague’s arguments can be extended to Waterstone’s.

[2] Though is one to suppose that more “earthy” left journals like Capital and Class might escape Hague’s censure?!