Marston 2004 - Space, Culture, State

8/13/2019 Marston 2004 - Space, Culture, State

1/16

Political Geography 23 (2004) 116

www.politicalgeography.com

The 2003 Annual Political Geography Lecture

Space, culture, state: uneven developmentsin political geography

Sallie A. Marston

Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

Abstract

In this lecture I explore the ways cultural questions relating to identity and meaning-mak-ing are fundamentally connected to political questions about power and the adjudicatingrole of the state. In the first part of the lecture I show how political geography has largelyfailed to substantively engage cultural questions in its theorizations of the state. I review agrowing body of literature outside the discipline that is attempting to examine the process ofstate formation in response to the ongoing cultural turn in the social sciences. I then

explore the theoretical relevance of culture to political geography by using the South BostonSt. Patricks Day parade conflict as a way of exposing how the state is responding to thedemands for inclusion of newly emerging identity groups. I analyze this case through a closereading of a 1995 Supreme Court decision in order to reveal the judiciarys understanding ofthe relationship between culture, space, and speech. Of particular importance to my argu-ment is the centrality of the First Amendment to the Courts unanimous decision whichgranted parade organizers the right to exclude groups whose message is disagreeable tothem; a decision premised on the separation of discursive and physical space in the makingof cultural meaning and practice.# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

How are cultural questions relating to identity and meaning fundamentally con-

nected to political geographical questions about space and the adjudicating role

of the state? Within political geography, the pairing of culture and the state is an

unusual one. For example, in a quasi-scientific accounting of Political Geography,

the flagship journal of the subdiscipline, my research assistant Carolina Safar

Tel.: +1-520-621-3903; fax: +1-520-621-2889.

E-mail address:[email protected] (S.A. Marston).

0962-6298/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.09.006


2/16

found only 15 of the 580 articles published since the journal first appeared in 1982devoted to directly exploring some aspect of the interaction of politics and cultureand none to the interaction of the state and culture. Further, in the description of

the aims of the journal on the inside cover, the word culture never appearsamong the keywords of the subfield which include the state, electoral geogra-phy, world-systems, and political economy. It would seem that in main-stream political geography, studies of state processes and practicesstatistapproachesremain relatively aloof from culturalist approaches. I suppose thisshould come as no surprise on at least two counts: one from outside the discipline andone from within. First, state theorists generally and marxist theorists in particular, whe-ther as political geographers, political scientists, or political sociologists, haveseldom seriously considered the relevance of culture to the state beyond the roleof nationalism and citizenship in state building. While studies such as these go

some way toward supporting the importance of culture to state theory, they toopossess certain significant limitations. Studies of nationalism and state formationtend to treat nationalism largely as a derivative of the state and seldom as acentral determinant. Moreover, nationalism is too often accepted as a stablemeaning system, i.e. a cultural unity within a spatial unit such that nationalism,as a cultural phenomenon, is often seen as on the periphery of state theory.Research on citizenship formations, though promising too in its attention to cul-tural differences along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, andage possesses a different sort of weaknessmy own work includedas it toofrequently, either explicitly or implicitly, conceptualizes citizenship as subordinate

to the state. In these studies, it is the state that constructs citizens and not viceversa.

The second reason that culture and the state have not been given equal statusheretofore within political geography (or for that matter in cultural geography) isthat political geographers and cultural geographers too seldom speak substantivelyto each other. The good news is that those subdisciplinary divides are beginning tobe repaired and fruitful trans-subdisciplinary synergies have begun to producesome compelling theoretical insights. Witness, for example, the fruitful collabora-tions that have produced political ecology. In addition, a handful of political geo-

graphers have begun to wrestle with the conjunction of culture and the state withinteresting results. I will discuss this work later.In my lecture I exhort political geographers to take the socially constitutive role

of culture more seriously by addressing the question with which I began. For therecord, I understand culture as the mediating moment, the world view, the mean-ing system that shapes the relationship between society and the construction ofsubjectivities in a particular space and time. And I concur with Charles Tillys defi-nition of states as coercion wielding organizations that are distinct from house-holds and kinship groups and usually exercising clear priority over all otherorganizations within a territory (1990). And for the relationship between the state

and culture I rely on Timothy Mitchell who argues that a cultural state effect isproduced through various symbolic and ideological techniques (1999). I also arguethat political geographys continued failure to seriously engage with current

S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 1162


3/16

debates about the relationship between culture and the state will leave it impover-ished both theoretically and empirically.

In the first part of this lecture I review a body of literature outside the discipline,

as well as several innovative pieces within political geography, all of which theorizeand empirically investigate the relationship between culture and the state. In theremainder of the lecture I explore the attempts by lesbian, gay, and transgendered(LGBT) groups to enter the annual St. Patricks Day parade in US cities like NewYork, Boston and Chicago see also (Marston, 2002). I do this as a way of exposinghow the US state is responding to the rights-based demands of newly emergingidentity groups. I support this theoretical argument through an assessment of a1995 Supreme Court decision that was a response to attempts by the IrishAmerican Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) to participate inthe parades conducted annually in South Boston.

State formation and the cultural turn

Although in the social sciences sustained interest in the interaction of state andculture began to occur in the early 1990s, it could be argued that the origins of thismovement can be traced toPhilip Abramss 1977 address to the British Sociologi-cal Association entitled: The difficulty of studying the state (published in 1988).By contending that the state is an ideological construction, Abrams launched a vig-orous broadside at mid-twentieth century state theory undermining its reification

as a theoretical and empirical object. This detailed critique, directed at both Britishpolitical sociology and western marxism, insisted that theories of the state hadnaively assumed its existence when it was instead a spurious object of sociologicalconcern (p. 63). For Abrams the state operated as an ideological manifestation ofpolitically organized subjection (p. 69), by which he meant that the state was amanaged construction of belief that legitimated subjects to their own subordi-nation. Abrams insisted that theorists of the state should abandon it as a materialobject and approach it as social fact; that the political was a matter of process andthe state was a practice not an apparatus. Reacting particularly against RalphMiliband (1969) and Nicos Poulantzas (1973), Abrams argued that as the idea ofthe state has a significant realitypolitical, social and otherwiseit is the responsi-bility of state theorists to show how this idea is constituted, communicated andimposed.1 And Abrams believed that the only way to accomplish such an analysiswas to comprehend the idea of the state as historically constructed.2

While Abrams central contribution to the debates in state theory was to unmaskthe state and reveal it to be a unified symbol of actual disunity (p. 79), his piece isstill decidedly absent of any sense of human agency or of human symbolic practices

1 For a contemporary treatment of the MilibandPoulantzas debate, see Aronowitz and Bratsis (2002).2 I should point out that although Abrams never cites Louis Althusser in his exegesis on the state, his

position is somewhat similar to Althussers. In brief, both Abrams and Althusser view the state as anideological construction and therefore not a material object in its own right.

3S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 116


4/16

and identity formation processes and their relevance to understanding the power ofthe state. In short, although he argues for understanding the idea of the state in itshistorical context, he fails to acknowledge that it is critical to understand how his-

torically situated subjects of the state participate in its ideological construction andits possible transformation or how our own willing and unwilling participation inthe idea of the state is accomplished. Although Abrams lacked a comprehensiveconceptualization of human agency and its relationship to the state, other scholarshave not and have instead tried to tease out the role of subjects and meaning mak-ing in state practices and formation.

Writing in France during the same period, for instance, Michel Foucault wasalso at work decentering the state, though he aimed his focus at power (state andother).3 He argued that the state was not the source of the intensified regulation ofmodern societies, but that the governmentalization of modern societies, which res-

ted on an array of institutional forms, enabled the state to be perceivedas a centerof power (1991). In short, Foucaults point was that the state is not the source ofpower but its effect. TimothyMitchell pushes this notion of the state as a structuraleffect even further by arguing that the state is the paramount structural effect ofthe modern social world (1991: 94). And this structural effecta kind of frame-work that appears to stand apart from the social worldis enabled by dispersedforms of disciplinary powerhuman practices as discourses of knowledge, regu-lation and disciplinethat allow the state to appear as a structure that standsapart and above society (Mitchell, 1999).

It is probably helpful at this point to refer briefly to the work of AntonioGramsci (1971), as well as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), theorists ofpower and the state who most heavily influence cultural studies scholars. I raisethis point because it would seem that while social scientists were learning about theimportance of culture to the state through arguments advanced by cultural studiestheorists, cultural studies theorists appear to have derived their understandings ofthe state and power from a different set of theorists than their social science collea-gues. And while it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore why this was thecase or the implications of these different theoretical sources, I feel it is importantto at least introduce these additional theorists as their contemporary influence has

migrated beyond the field of cultural studies and into the social sciences.Cultural studies theorists seem to have derived a great deal of their insights

about the state and power from Antonio Gramsci (1971). Gramscis most impor-tant contribution to conceptualizing the state was to argue for its instability bydemonstrating that support for it was attained through the concept of hegemony: acomplex form of class domination realized in the form of the state. In effect,Gramsci understood the state as a political accomplishment that was alwayspartial and always tending toward unravelling. Gramsci argued for penetrating thehegemonic strategies and practicesconscious and unconsciousthat conditioned

3 Throughout his work, Michel Foucault was concerned with the question of power. Power/knowl-edge provides a helpful distallation. SeeFoucault, 1980.



5/16

subaltern groups to accept their subordination. For him, any struggle againsthegemonic configurations of power and domination involves a cultural struggle; acontest over the way in which the state comes to be constructed and represented.

Deleuze and Guattari, particularly through their important book, A Thousand Pla-teaus, argue for the existence of the state as a permanent feature of human society,as well as political agency (1987). They see the state as the site of self-reproducingpower, and like Foucault, as a form of knowledge from which it derives its unques-tioned existence and universality across all societies.

Following the refigurations of the state advanced by these theorists, socialscience approaches to the state have begun to interrogate subjectivity and meaning,and the relevance of culture to all things political has become a common sense formany. In short, it seems that the radical reconfiguration of 1960/1970s statetheory, early on cleared a space for the relevance of culture to all issues of power,

state or otherwise. And certainly by the late 1980s and 1990s very thoughtfulattempts to work through the conjunction of culture and state were being pro-duced in the social sciences. For example, writing in the early 1990s, political soci-ologist Philip Corrigan argued that the key question for theorists interested in stateformation was not, who rules but how rule is accomplished and how patriarchy,racism, nationalism, homophobia, and classism become visible as constitutive fea-tures of rule (Corrigan, 1994).

Corrigan was calling for nothing less than a fundamental reconsideration of howwe understand the state theoretically and methodologically. He entreated state the-orists to comprehend state and society as mutually constitutive so that the state

could be confronted less as an abstraction with autonomy from the rest of societyand more as a manifestation of the materialized social practices of human agents.For him, as well as for dozens of other state theoristsin anthropology, politicalscience, political sociologywho have since heeded his call, the state has increas-ingly come to be understood as the restless outcome of human agency producedand negotiated through the social and cultural meanings of the complex normativeenvironment of contemporary capitalism. As editor George Steinmetz insists in thepreface of the volume, State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn:The conjoining of the terms state and culture . . . is meant to signal their recipro-

cal influence and constitution and to break with earlier imageries in which cultureis either shaped by the state or ignored altogether (1999; i).For a range of scholars representing not only a range of disciplinary perspectives

but also a range of theoretical and methodological ones, a recognition of the nexusbetween culture and the state requires conceptualizing the latter as the contestedproduct of the formal and informal practices of multiply situated subjects. Such aconceptualization renders subjectivity and meaning as causally important not sim-ply epiphenomenal. A comprehensive and insightful contribution to this growingmovement is the volume just mentioned, State/Culture. With 14 contributorsrepresenting anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, this collection

explores state and culture in tension always recognizing that culture must be seenas more than a dependent variable or as a product of the state. In the substantiveintroduction to the volume, Steimetz explores the key terms of culture, state and



6/16

state formation, as well as the tendency for most state theorizing to assume thathuman subjectivity can be understood outside of its social and historical contextbased on such foundational assumptions as instrumental rationality, a propensity

to violence or territoriality. He provides a thorough and convincing argumentfor how taking culture seriously forces us to reckon with the fact that social prac-tices and objects such as states or state officials have to be situated in specific his-torical and cultural settings (p. 8) and understood as relevant through theirdiscursive and meaning-making construction.

The contributions to the collection are grouped under four headings that dealwith theory, culture and early modern state formation, culture and modernization/westernization of non-European states, and culture and modern western states.Some of the writers represented in this collection make powerful claims for theshaping of states by culture, whereas others emphasize causal flows running in

both directionsand some reject the analytical distinction between culture andnonculture altogether (Steinmetz, 1999: 3). All, however, treat culture and state asequally powerful conceptual categories that must be explained interactively.

The last thing to mention about the emerging literature on the conjunction ofculture and state is its methodological diversity. From ethnography to rationalchoice, a wide range of methodological approaches characterizes attempts to com-prehend the many ways that state and culture are mutually constitutive. What havebeen most provocative and revealing are the ethnographic investigations of stateinstitutions and bureaucrats as they reveal the ways the state is produced and

reproduced in everyday life through the embodied practices of social agents withinand outside the state. Ethnographic accounts of the stateamong them the ninechapters in Joe Heymans edited collection States and Illegal Practices (1999)insist that there is no panoptical vantage point from which to view the state, onlyembodied knowledge derived from historically and geographically situated agentssee also (Heyman, 1995). A highly-cited illustration of such an ethnography of thestate is Akhil Guptas work on north Indian villagers everyday encounters withlocal government institutions (1995). Through an investigation of the discursiveconstruction of the state in public culture, Gupta reveals how the discourse of cor-ruption and accountability is a critical mechanism through which diversely situated

agents come to imagine the state and through which the state is constructed andrepresented. Not only, however, does Gupta show how the discourse of corruptionhelps construct the state, he also shows how understanding this construction canpotentially empower citizens by marking those activities that infringe on theirrights (p. 394) [emphasis added].

Political geographers approach state and culture

As the previous review illustrates, since Corrigans clarion call to investigate howpatriarchy, racism, nationalism, homophobia, and classism become visible as

constitutive features of rule, scholars across the social sciences have begun torespond. Taken together, this emerging body of literature offers a compelling casefor political geographers to make a unique contribution to the accompanying



7/16

theoretical debates. The most obvious way to do this is by interrogating the chan-ging spaces of rule and ruling and how those spaces are made, remade, or alteredby the subjects whose everyday practices constitute their production, where state

and society converge. Several political geographers have begun to rise to this chal-lenge and provide an important foundation upon which my own work and thework of others might build.4

In political geography, the most theoretically promising work aimed at reconfi-guring conceptualizations of the state in order to incorporate the central relevanceof social practice is Joe Painters 1995 book Politics, Geography and Political Geo-graphy. In his insightful definition of the state, Painter makes a clear case for theways political geographers are uniquely placed to contribute to the exciting bodyof work that is conjoining state and culture. He writes: States are constitutedthrough spatialized social practices which are to a greater or lesser extent institutio-

nalized (in a state apparatus) and which involve claims to authority which aregeneral in social scope and which secure at least partial compliance through eitherconsent, or coercion, or both (1995: 34). He also recognizes the importance ofculture to state formation in his attention to Corrigan and Sayers book, The GreatArch (1985). There are three ways, Painter proposes, in which state formation iscultural. The first is through a recognition that state processes are symbolic, as wellas material and organizational. The second is through a recognition that the pro-duction of meaning is central to the progress of state development. The third isthe sense in which state activities are performed by the actors involved be they

bureaucrats, politicians, soldiers or citizens. (p. 4748).Taking the lead from Painter, as well as from political anthropologists, AlisonMountz uses her work on human smuggling into Canada to explore the bureau-cratic actors and arrangements that constitute the nation-state. Based on an eth-nography of the Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) inVancouver, British Columbia, Mountz makes a case for dissolving the conceptualboundaries that produce abstract epistemologies of the state. She argues insteadthat: The state is powerful, but not all-powerful and knowing. . . [and] it isthrough the feminist strategy of embodiment that the actual power of the statematerializes in daily practice. Mountzs approach to understanding the discursive

practices and representations behind the first instance of the mass detention ofrefugee claimants in Canadian history is to place cultural logics at the center of dis-cussions about the state as institutionalized through the CIC. Her ethnographyexposes the CIC as a material manifestation of the state with the power to recog-nize, adjudicate, and invest authority and give legitimacy to certain subjects and

4 Beyond the handful of political geographers mentioned here who have dealt directly with the nexusbetween culture and the state, scholars of critical geopolitics have also moved toward recognizing thatthe state must be understood as an ideological construction. Critical geopolitics and its focus on politicaldiscourse is an example of this. I do not explore critical geopolitics in any depth, however, because while

it does decenter the nation-state and deconstruct the narratives of power that underlay geopolitical prac-tices and nation-state sovereignty, it has not provided much insight into how to theorize a state/culturenexus that incorporates the relevance of cultural geographies to that conjunction.



8/16

not others. Most importantly, however, she exposes the CIC not as an abstractentity operating outside of or above everyday life, but rather as enmeshed in andconflicted over its authority and purpose. To return to Timothy Mitchell here:

Mountz was able to reveal the state as the effect of practices; practices that areat one level authoritative, but at another open to emotion, desire, interpretationand conflict, such that enforcement or non-enforcement is informed by the subjec-tivity and biography of bureaucrats and migrant claimants.

Another piece that aims at exploring the cultural sources of state formation andtransformation is Farhang Rouhanis work on the Islamic Republic of Iran,(2001a). Intending to show how the slow transition of the Iranian state from astrict theocratic orientation towards a more neoliberal democratic one, Rouhanilooks to the everyday space of the middle-class Tehrani home. He conceptualizesthe home as a site where local, national, and transnational processes are experi-

enced and translated, through popular media consumption, into new political dis-courses that have contributed to the current changes in the national state and therestive nature of a large part of the population to push for those changes. Becauseof the severe restrictions and excessive official monitoring of public space in Teh-ran, Rouhani conceptualizes the middle-class home as a complex political, cultural,and social spacepossibly the only spacewhere tactics of resistance to the statessurveillance can occur. This resistance has formed most prominently throughaccess to satellite television and the internet, where new sources of knowledge arereadily available for consumption and discussion.

Through ethnography, Tehrani respondents revealed toRouhanihow the home,

as a place of refuge from public regulation and police intrusion, allowed the con-sumption of transnational information flows that have been critical in shaping newcultural and political identities. Rouhanis work illustrates one of the ways theconstitutive features of religio-political rule in a particular time and placerulewith explicit spatial manifestations and implicationscan be resisted and trans-formed. As such, this study of the Iranian state conceptualizes it as a processinvolving domination and resistance through the complex cultural content ofeveryday middle class urban life(2001b).

Adrian Mulligans workon the US roots of Irish nationalism and the contested

emergence of an Irish state, is yet another example of new work in political geogra-phy that seeks to argue for the relevance of culture to conceptualizations of thestate and state formation (2003). Mulligan, through careful documentary analysisof newspapers, criminal records, and resistance organization files, shows thatnationalism is not necessarily a stable category neatly bounded by national terri-tory. Indeed, the roots of nineteenth century Irish nationalism were very much co-mingled with changing identities and meaning-making among Irish immigrantsin the United States who struggled valiantly and contributed significantly to thediscourse and material practices of an independent Ireland. For Mulligan, the statemust be understood as a product of complex cultural practices that are shaped by

the place and the period in which they occur.The four contributions from political geographers I have cited here provide avery helpful foundation for further work on the conjunction of space, culture and



9/16

state. They all very clearly illustrate that understanding the state as the outcome ofstruggles over meaning and identity has specific and important geographical rel-evance not only for state theorizing, but also for resistance and change. Indeed,

what is so obviously missing from the growing body of work on culture and thestate is any sense of the geography of this complex relationship and the implica-tions of thinking through how the various constitutive features of hegemonic ruleare geographically produced (and possibly resisted) in complex and sometimes evenin contradictory ways.

In the next section I turn to my case study to explore in finer detail the questionraised at the beginning of this lecture: how cultural questions related to identityand meaning are fundamentally connected to political geographical questionsabout space and the adjudicating role of the state. I do this by exploring how staterepresentations have worked to exclude certain identities and relegate them to the

margins of dominant cultural practices. Cultural comprehensions of the state forceus to acknowledge how the state, through the particular framings it imposes uponsocial practices, establishes and inculcates translations that come to have a kind oftranscendental meaning beyond the cultural context that produces them. In short,and mindful of Corrigans call, I want to explore how rule is accomplished andhow it can be shown to be a constitutive feature of judicial practice through anexamination of a 1995 Supreme Court decision that was based on an interpretationof the First Amendment that dismisses the importance of space to cultural pro-duction and practice.

The St. Patricks Day parade conflict and state response

Beginning in 1990, the St. Patricks Day parades in large US cities like NewYork, Boston and Chicago became highly charged, politically volatile culturalevents as LGBT Irish and Irish-Americans petitioned to enter, and eventuallystrenuously protested against their exclusion from, the annual ritual.5 The attemptby GLIB to participate in the South Boston parade lead to US Supreme Court jus-tices deliberating over whether parade organizers could legally exclude certaingroups from joining in the privately-organized use of the public thoroughfares.

In South Boston, March 17 is a significant and widely popular festival day setaside for two celebrations. On that day in 1737, the first St. Patricks Day paradewas held in the city honoring the patron saint of the Irish. By 1776, however,March 17 took on additional significance as the day that British troops and Loyal-ists were evacuated from the city, symbolically ending the Revolutionary War. For265 years, South Boston, a neighborhood within the city of Boston and hometo one of the largest concentrations of Irish-American and Irish immigrants inthe United States, has been the site for the combined celebrations. During its first

5 As I have argued in my previous work,Marston (1991), the significance of parades to ethnic identityand meaning systems should not be underestimated. The parades as annual rituals are instrumental tothe public performance and projection of a particular Irish national identity in the US.



10/16

hundred or so years, it seems the parade was a privately sponsored event. It isunclear exactly when the city of Boston became its official sponsor. What is knownis that in 1947, the city relinquished its control and awarded the permit to the

South Boston Allied War Veterans Council (the Council). Eventually control ofthe parade devolved to one man, the president of the Council, John J. WackoHurley, who continues to organize the joint celebration.

In 1992, GLIBan organization formed for the purpose of marching in theparade in order to express its members pride in their Irish heritage as openly gay,lesbian and bisexual individuals, to show that there are such individuals in thecommunity, and to support the like men and women who sought to march in theNew York [City] St. Patricks Day parade (Supreme Court of the United States,1995, 2)submitted an application to the Council to participate in the parade, arequirement for all aspiring contingents (Davis, 1995). The Council denied the

application. In response, GLIB obtained a state court-order mandating that theCouncil accept their group. Members of GLIB, along with some 10,000 otherparticipants, marched in the 1992 event. A year later, GLIB submitted anotherapplication to be included in the 1993 parade and the Council again denied theirapplication. This time, GLIB filed a lawsuit against the Council, Wacko Hurley,and the City of Boston, alleging violations of the state and federal Constitutionsand the states public accommodations law which prohibits: any distinction, dis-crimination, or restriction on account of . . . sexual orientation . . . [among otheridentities] relative to the admission of a person to, or treatment in any place ofpublic accommodation, resort or amusement (Hurley vs GLIB, 1995: 5, originally

quoted from Massachusetts General Laws, 272: 98). The state court again foundin favor of GLIB arguing that the Council had no written criteria and employedno particular procedure for admission, voted on new applications in batches, hadoccasionally admitted groups who simply showed up at the parade without havingsubmitted an application and did not generally inquire into the specific messagesor views of each applicant (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 5). The state court rejected allof the Councils arguments and concluded that the parade is not an exercise of[the Councils] constitutionally protected right of expressive association, butinstead an open recreational event that is subject to the public accommodations

law (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 6) and is therefore not entitled to First Amendmentprotection. The Council appealed the case to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massa-chusetts which upheld the lower courts ruling. The State Supreme Court, agreeingwith the lower court that it was not possible to detect a specific expressive purposefor the parade, established the public accommodations law as the relevant statuteand not the First Amendment. In total, there were nine Massachusetts courtactions, all of them decided on the public accommodations law and all in favor ofGLIB. Yet, in June 1995, Justice David Souter, delivering the opinion of a unani-mous US Supreme Court, struck down the decisions of the Massachusetts courtsand found in favor of Hurley and the Council citing the First Amendment as the

basis for their decision.The Supreme Court held that application of the public accommodation law wasa misunderstanding of what a parade is. Citing the work of Susan Davis in Parades



11/16

and Power, Justice Souter contended that: . . .we use the word parade to indicatemarchers who are making some sort of collective point, not just to each other butto bystanders along the way. . . Parades are thus a form of expression, not just

motion (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 6).6

Justice Souter wrote: The issue in this caseis whether Massachusetts may require private citizens who organize a parade toinclude among the marchers a group imparting a message that the organizers donot wish to convey. We hold that such a mandate violates the First Amendment(Hurley v. GLIB, 1995: 2). In short, while the Massachusetts state courts under-stood a parade as public accommodation and not as expressive conduct, theSupreme Courts opinion was that a parade is a form of speech and thereforedeserving of protection under the First Amendment.

Before proceeding to a discussion of the implications of judiciary practices forunderstanding the relationship between space, state and culture, I want to point

out what I see to be the fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship betweensociety and space that informs the Supreme Court decision. To some extent theMassachusetts courts decisions suffer from a similar failure, though in the oppositedirection. In both decisions, society and space are seen to exist in isolation not asmutually constitutive processes.

Lets look at the Supreme Court case first: because the parade is a form ofspeech, it is entitled to protection under the First Amendment including the selec-tion of contingents to make a parade (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 6). This opinionseems reasonable, but I would argue, only to a point. And that point is that the

decision fails to acknowledge that speech happens somewhere and that somewhere,in the case of the St. Patricks Day/Evacuation Day parade as well as in all par-ades, is by definition, on a street, and nearly always on public streets. The Massa-chusetts court decisions are also similarly reasonable, yet partial. The parades areconducted on city streets and the public accommodation law requires these eventsnot be discriminatory. The Council sought to exclude; it sought to discriminate.Such action is unlawful. And yet, the Massachusetts courts failed to appreciatethat parades are indeed moving forms of speech; they understood them only asmobile assemblages that use the public streets for recreational purposes. The Mas-sachusetts courts sidestepped the issue of speech altogether and constructed the

parades narrowly, and I would argue incorrectly. In short, the Massachusettscourts failed to appreciate that speech is multifaceted in its performance. The clas-sic free speech paradigm of the lone orator remonstrating to the crowd at HydePark Speakers Corner in London does not exhaust the genre. Indeed, parades arenot only a moving assemblage but a manifestation of speech that expresses theclaims and identity of the group who is parading. And like the classic paradigm offree speech, dissenting opinions and positions must be protected, if not actuallyencouraged.

6 InParades and Power, S. Davischaracterizes parades as public dramas of social relations, and inthem performers define who can be a social actor and what subjects and ideas are available for com-munication and consideration (p. 6).



12/16

Thus, if we conjoin the two sets of decisions we realize a more complete under-standing of what a parade is and how social, cultural, political, and economicpractices are embodied as well as spatially (and, of course, temporally) situated.

Separately the two decisions divorce discursive space from material space thussevering the integral link between meaning-making and identity and place/space.And, by failing to grasp the indivisible relationship between society and space,what the Supreme Court decision produces is the legal marginalization of subjectswhose representations already operate on the periphery of dominant cultural prac-tices. In short, what the Supreme Court decision causes is just the sort of discri-mination that the Massachusetts public accommodation law was designed toeliminate. As a result, the law has worked in such a way as to authorize somegroups while delegitimating others.

While this is a highly problematic legal and social outcome and troubling, to say

the least, with respect to free speech rights in a liberal democracy, I do not want topursue this aspect of the case any further here. There are a large number of legalopinions on the case that are available in the law literature that do an excellent jobof analyzing various aspects of the Supreme Courts decision.7 What I want to doinstead is to return to my original question and provide a more concise answer toit as well as suggest how political geography might benefit from a deeper appreci-ation of the culture/state nexus.

Courting culture

The state has once again emerged as an exciting topic of intellectual and politicalinterest. While globalization experts disagree about whether the nation-state iswaxing or waning in importance, noone doubts that new state forms are leadingto new manifestations of governance and authority. At the international level, theglobalization of capital and neoliberal policy reforms have accelerated labormigration and other flows at the same time that new and changing supranationalorganizations have stepped into a governing gap that nation-states have beenunable to fill. Simultaneously from below, a world-wide discourse of rights andproliferating demands for new sorts of entitlements has emerged and put increasing

pressure on nation-states to respond in often unprecedented ways. As the state isfaced with new challenges from above and below; as its core functions and histori-cal tasks seem increasingly archaic, the time is ripe for recasting our conceptualiza-tions of it, and for thinking about new ways for interrogating its institutions andpractices.

In this time of intellectual ferment and dramatic social, political, economic, andcultural change, why should contemporary theorists of the stateand especiallypolitical geographerstake culture seriously in their conceptualizations? Wah-neema Lubiano provides for me the simplest and most baldly convincing answer

7 I have identified 42 law review articles focusing on Hurley vs. GLIB published between 1995 and1999, the period immediately following the decision.



13/16

when she expresses her interest in understanding under what circumstances thepolitical subject is constructed (1996: 65). Because, she argues, the state thinks thesubject too. And what Lubiano means by this wonderfully trenchant declaration is

that what we imagine ourselves and others to be in relation to the world isabsorbed into, refracted through and reproduced by state practices; practices thatreflect hegemonic notions and beliefs that end up sustaining racism, sexism, homo-phobia and other forms of oppression. And if we accept this explanation as areasonable one, then we must think about how, in all its myriad ways, the stateaccomplishes this and how we might locate within the states constructions of sub-jectivities the opportunities and obstacles for their radical reworking.

One way we might do this is to explore how the state creates authoritative frame-works within which subjects are required to operate. Akhil Gupta, whom I men-tioned previously, has approached this challenge by examining how citizens and

local bureaucrats interact around the presence of bribes as a way of accomplishingstate action in areas of everyday lifequalifying for a loan, getting a water pipeextended into a neighborhood, receiving permission to build something. Local stateauthoritative frameworks, in the Indian village case, revolve around the client andthe bureaucrat understanding and enacting the language of corruption and using itdelicately and correctly to get things done. Language is one way of comprehendingthe states construction of authoritative frameworks.

In States of the Imagination, Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, suggest thatwe approach the state as a historically specific configuration of a range of lan-guages of stateness, some practical, others symbolic and performative. . .(2001: 7).

They contend that the production of states as centers of authoritative power occursthrough the languages of authority, one of which is the institutionalization of lawand legal discourse. Law and legal discourse are the practical languages the stateuses and the means through which it acquires discursive presence and its auth-ority to authorize (2001: 8). In effect the courts generation of legal decisions ispart of the production of the language of stateness. To return to Lubiano, legallanguage is one manifestation of the material practice through which the statethinks subjects.

Let me turn back briefly to the Hurley case to exercise this argument about legal

language. Conflicts over the St. Patricks Day parade demonstrate a significant cul-tural transformation in the polity. In the politicized emergence of organizationslike GLIB, ILGO or other LGBT groups, we have a movement that is appealing tothe state for the conference of fully-fledged rights. The Hurley decision by theSupreme Court represents the states efforts to balance the recognition of thesegroups with the demands of statecraft in order to protect its legitimacy and thecontemporary neoliberal institutional infrastructure of civil society. How the stateaccomplishes this balance reveals how it understands the constellation of socialrelations that exist in a complex society and how it sets social limits and determina-tions. Jon Cruz argues that identity politics under late capitalism refracts the

field in which antagonistic relations orbit around struggles over social andculturalhence politicalclassifications . . . (2001: 26). I would add that the statefunctions to hardens those classifications by setting the terrainliterally and



14/16

figurativelyupon which those struggles can occur. And this is the point wherepolitical geographers can make important theoretical and practical interventions:by insisting on the relevance of space to the states social practices.

For instance, it is clear that the Hurley decision authorizes both the conditionsand the spaces of belonging and participating in the complex and chaotic inter-course of a liberal democracy. By analyzing the language of stateness contained inHurley it is possible to recognize quite clearly its ideological construction and toappreciate the state as something that does not sit above the contingencies ofeveryday life incarnating a certain collective justice, but establishes its own under-standing of what culture is. The state, in this case through the Supreme Court,establishes the socio-spatial parameters around which cultural meanings can bemade and contested. As critical legal scholar Madhavi Sunder argues, in the Hur-ley case the Supreme Court is directly negotiating the issue of cultural represen-

tation and what culture is (1996). She interprets the Supreme Courts decision astransferring to the Counciland any other dominant cultural group that sponsorsa paradeexclusive intellectual property rights by granting absolute power to cre-ate and maintain meaning to some groups at the exclusion of others (1996: 2).The Court accomplishes this establishment of authorial property rights by shearingdiscursive space from physical space, legally protecting speech as private spacethrough property-like ownership of its use. By issuing such a decision, the Courtimplicitly renders a legal understanding of what culture issomething immanentand belonging to one group for safekeepingrather than something that is con-stantly negotiated and transformed through the public give and take of changing

ideas and meaning systems in a changing world. Through this decision, the stateconstructs its own (cultural) narrative about how the world should work and it is anarrative that empowers one group and oppresses another. The narrative, con-structed as it is on an aspatial and static understanding of culture, excludes otherunderstandings and reveals who gets left out of liberalisms universal we.

A dramatic reconceptualization of the state is occurring across and within theintersection of disciplines as new projects of political and cultural hegemonyemerge from the multifaceted processes of globalization. A growing aspect of statereconceptualization is how to think through the centrality of civil rights struggles

which increasingly center on cultural identity, discourse and spaceto this project.Political geography is uniquely poised to participate in this reframing through itssophisticated understanding of the social production of space. Yet its continuedfailure to seriously engage with current debates about the relationship between cul-ture and the state will leave it ill equipped to contribute to some of the most excit-ing areas of new research and intellectual activism.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carolina Safar for her research assistance and Miranda

Joseph, Geraldine Pratt, Neil Smith and John Paul Jones for their very helpfulcomments on various drafts of this lecture. I would also like to acknowledge fac-ulty and students in the Geography Departments at the University of Kentucky



15/16


16/16

Poulantzas, N. (1973). Political power and social classes. London: New Left Books.Rouhani, F. (2001a) Transnationalization and state formation from below: the politics of media

consumption in Tehran, PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, Department of Geography.Rouhani, F. (2001b). Riding the waves of globalization: New media technologies and political

transformation in Tehran. Chanteh,23(SpringSummer), 4851.Steinmetz, G. (Ed.) (1999), State/culture: state formation after the cultural turn. Ithaca and London:

Cornell University Press.Sunder, M. (1996). Author and autonomy as rites of exclusion: the intellectual propertization of free

speech in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual group of Boston. Stanford LawReview,49, 143.

Tilly, C. (1990).Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 9901990. Cambridge: Blackwell.


Documents

Marston 2004 - Space, Culture, State