Richard Rorty on Feminism and Pragmatism

In the context of my research into positive examples of postmodernist historical writing, I stumbled into Richard Rorty's 1990 Tanner lecture, Feminism and Pragmatism, published in 1992, now accessible in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge 1998.

In Feminism and Pragmatism, Rorty looks at the question of what could be meant by a feminist view of the world.

Only if somebody || had a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy—even to themselves—if they describe themselves as oppressed. (p.4f)

Feminists are trying to get people to feel indifference or satisfaction where they once recoiled, and revulsion and rage where they once felt indifference or resignation. (p.5)

Rorty reminds reader in (p.5 Fn 6) that in the 1920s, the Canadian Supreme Court in the context of the eligibility of women to becoming senators denied that "person" could refer to women as well, since it never had, until overruled by the privy council. The satisfaction or revulsion toward language use changes, and thus new language can be constructed through new uses (p.6). Rorty discusses the issue in the analysis of universalist (e.g. Kant) versus historicist (e.g. Hegel) philosophies of morals; the former requires a realist stance toward morals, which the latter does not (p.6), assuming (p.7) instead that only the actualized is known at the present.

By dropping a representationalist account of knowledge, we pragmatists drop the appearance-reality distinction in favor of a distinction between beliefs which serve some purposes and beliefs which serve other purposes—for example, the purposes of one group and those of another group. (p.8)

Memes are things like || turns of speech, terms of aesthetic or moral praise, political slogans, proverbs, musical phrases, stereotypical icons, and the like. Memes compete with one another for the available cultural space as genes compete for the available lebensraum. (pp.8-9) 

But this leads to a somewhat weak statement; and who would want to fall behind the negative examples given by Rorty (p.6).

So the moral world does not divide into the intrinsically decent and the intrinsically abominable, but rather into the goods of different groups and different epochs. (p.9) 

[When Rorty wonders with Michael Gross and Mary Beth Averill about the use of the male-connotated "struggle" for evolution, in preference over the bountiful aspects of nature (p.9 Fn 10), one wonders whether they are not aware of the way in which, say, bird chicks toss their siblings from the nest, or shark mothers eat their own young.]

Rorty's point is that (p.10) feminism is much easier to accommodate pragmatically, because under the guiding oppressors the claims just sound crazy. Thus any language suggesting realism should be avoided.

Arguments for the rights of the oppressed will fail just insofar as the only language in which to state relevant premises is one in which the relevant emancipatory premises sound crazy. (p.10)

A rhetoric of “unmasking hegemony” presupposes the reality-appearance distinction which opponents of phallogocentrism claim to have set aside. Many self-consciously “postmodern” writes seem to me to as trying to have it both ways — to view masks as going all the way down while still making invidious comparisons between other people’s masks and the way things will look when all the masks have been stripped off. ... || … I agree with Stanley Fish that much of what goes under the heading of “postmodernism” exemplifies internally inconsistent “antifoundationalist theory hope”. … (p.12 Fn 17)

I have argued in the past that Deweyan pragmatism, when linguistified along the lines suggested by Hilary Putnam and David Davidson, gives you all that is politically useful in the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida-Foucault tradition. Pragmatism, I claim, offers all the dialectical advantages of postmodernism while avoiding the self-contradictory postmodernist rhetoric of unmasking. (p.14)

We pragmatists are often told that we reduce moral disagreement to a mere struggle for power by denying the existence of reason, or human nature, conceived as something which provides a neutral court of appeal. We often rejoin that the need for such a court, the need for something ahistorical which will ratify one’s claims, is itself a symptom of power worship — of the conviction that unless something large and powerful is on one’s side, one shouldn’t bother trying. (p.14 Fn 21)

An adoption of the pragmatist stance would free feminism for having to develop a general theory of oppression (p.14). Instead, women are encouraged to create and experience themselves through language, tradition and identity (p.16), since there is no reality behind these things that they could be 

describing more accurately. Rorty distinguishes his stance from radicals, who are trying to hunt down a mistake somewhere at the root. For pragmatism, a community that is imagined to think and treat and speak differently is the solution (p.18). 

This mean that one will praise movement of liberation not for the accuracy of their diagnoses but for the imagination and courage of their proposals (p.18).

… do not charge a current social practice or a currently spoken language with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong. (p.22)

Drop the appeal to neutral criteria, and the claim that something large like Nature or Reason or History or the Moral Law is on the side of the oppressed. (p.23)

For us pragmatists, … we see personhood as a matter of degree, …. We see it as something that slaves typically have less of than their masters. This is not because there are such things as “natural slaves” but because of the masters’ control over the language spoken by the slaves—their ability to make the slave think of his or her pain as fated and even somehow deserved, something to be borne rather than resisted. (p.25) 

I am suggesting that we see the contemporary feminist movement as playing the same role in intellectual and moral progress as was played by, for example, Plato’s academy, …. For groups build their moral strength by achieving increasing semantic authority over their members, thereby increasing the ability of || those members to find their moral identities in their membership in such groups. (pp.30-31)

Rorty leaves the outcome open, of whether the group remains separate or gets assimilated, because the masters wish membership for their own children, and woven into the language of the dominant (p.31).

For to be a full-fledged person in a given society is a matter of double negation: it is not to think of oneself as belonging to a group which powerful people in that society thank God they do not belong to. (p.31)

We say that the latter groups [such as Galilean scientists or romantic poets, RCK] invented new moral identities for themselves by getting semantic authority over themselves. As time went by, they succeeded in having the language they developed become part of the language everybody spoke. (p.33) 

 “Truth" is not the name of a power which eventually wins through, it is just the normalization of an approbative adjective. (p.34)

To sum up for the last time: prophetic feminists like MacKinnon and Frye foresee a new being not only for women but for society. They foresee a society in which the male-female distinction is no longer of much interest. Feminists who are also pragmatists will not see the formation of such a society as the removal of social constructs and the restoration of the way things were always meant to be. They will see it as the production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available, and thus as the creation of a new and better sort of human being. (p.35)

Bibliographic Record

Richard Rorty, Feminism and Pragmatism, [published in 1992], in: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge 1998, pp.202-227. 

A New Plan of Attack (Part 1)

In the mid-1820s, when Joseph Smith Jr grew up, the United States found itself in a period of convulsive change. The Revolutionary War and its aftermath, the war of 1812, had severed the cords to what had been the cultural place of origin of the majority of the settlers: Western Europe. Issues were complicated by the remaining large groups of Native Americans and the rising number of African American slaves.

The rapid expansion in productive land use, the wealth to be obtained in these areas, and the potential for living comfortably was an impetus that did not always fulfill itself. It was part of the Puritan inheritance of New England and its settlers, that questions of economic success translated almost directly into questions of identity. Thus, any reversals, be they of the meteorological or the financial type (market saturation in Ginseng, for example), caught the young Nation on shaky ideological feet.

This drama of identity played out at multiple levels, including the scientific, where efforts like the expeditions of Lewis and Clark, the scientific description of the American fauna and flora, or the mapping of the local antiquities, as well as the founding of museums for both artistic and scientific purposes were attempts to connect with the European establishment in these disciplines.

Equally, this state of socio-economic flux was mirrored at the level of the religious. The Puritan consensus of the majority of the early New England settlers had disintegrated during the Revolutionary War, where the Colonies could not afford to deny voice to compatriots, however different their religious convictions might be. Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists on the established side of the spectrum, and a bewildering variety of millennial, revival and socially-utopian communities on the radical side of the spectrum, vied for the role of explaining what everyone was experiencing. This exasperated the situation instead of providing balm for the bruised identities.

One classical Protestant move was to go back to the Scriptures, widely and continuously read by the majority of the target audiences of these religious efforts, and to separate, once again, the unsoiled core of Christianity from the dung of accretion over the centuries.  One cannot underestimate how little was certain and how much was up for discussion at that point in time. Reformers like Alexander Campbell had no qualms of ditching the inherited religious symbols, including the creeds that had formed the common understanding of diverse denominations such as the Catholic, the Protestant and the autocephalous churches.

Though the critical analysis of the Scriptures, in the style of a Spinoza or the English Deists, had not yet made much impact on the American continent, the Scriptures themselves raised enough puzzles: How complete was the Bible? After all, there were over a dozen books mentioned in the Bible that were not in the canon.  Which in turn raised the disturbing question: Had it been handed down accurately? Why were there so many translations of it? If the Bible was God's definitive word, why was it insufficient to settle the theological questions of the day, such as the appropriate form or phase of life for baptism? And how were the citizens of the young republic supposed to find themselves in these stories of kings and priests of the ancient Fertile Crescent? The very fact that the Indian mounds and artefacts, which the prominent antiquarians were busily chronicling, found no mention in the Bible, must have given pause.

It was in this time of identity ferment that Joseph Smith Jr reached his religious maturation. The son of a family of once comfortable religious seekers, who had been demoted through speculation, family sickness and the agricultural catastrophe of 1816 to the level of day laborers, grew up in Palmyra, NY, where he witnessed the religious commotion and the economic upheavals in the boom and bust cycle of the Erie canal construction first-hand. Smith Jr's personal response to this situation was the Book of Mormon.

At this point, an aside is necessary. Like many other endeavors, the history of early Mormonism has a couple of tar pits that can consume all of a researcher's resources. The first amongst these is whether Joseph Smith Jr was sincere or a scoundrel. The next is the exact relationship between the Golden Plates and the translation of the Book of Mormon. The third is the question of the reasons behind the introduction of polygamy. All of these are questions of the form "what actually happened" and therefore belong in the realm of fiction rather than history. Hercules Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, within their worlds created by Dame Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, will tell us what actually happened. Historians as scientists can only definitively say what did not happen, and then tell stories that stay within these limits of the impossible, knowing full well that there are other stories, bounded by the same limits, equally good or perhaps even better.

In the case of the Book of Mormon, whose mention sparked the aside in the first place, the solution is to invert the question.  In order to settle the issues that needed settling in the minds of Joseph Smith Jr and his contemporaries, any addition to the canon had to satisfy a number of criteria.

First of all, as Jan Shipps has pointed out, it had to be about the New World, that is, it had to describe the Antiquities of the New World and thus show the continuity of the Salvation Narrative of the ancient Fertile Crescent with the new republic. One way to achieve that was to hook the Native Americans, whose identity with respect to the Israelite tribes had been a long-standing issue of research in the Americas, into the genealogy of Jacob. Structurally, this was accomplished via the obscure prophecy of the House of Joseph being a fruitful bough, a branch that reaches over the wall (Gen 49:22-26). This passage dominates the biblical references in the Book of Mormon with over ten references.

Furthermore, the extension to the canon had to sidestep all of the issues of translation that had proven to be such fountains of confusion, insecurity and dissent. Thus, the Book of Mormon was translated in a spiritual fashion, using divinatory devices, thereby guaranteeing the correctness of the translation, as Wunderli pointed out (An Imperfect Book). It was translated from sources that, though witnessed to exist, were not accessible to anyone else, thereby eliminating the possibility of revision. These sources were necessary, because they formed the material arc of continuity between the American antiquities and the beginning 19th century. And finally, the sources were authored in an unknown language, which eliminated the possibility of any alternate expert witness arising from, say, the academic world, to so much as challenge the wording. Reconstructed in this way, we can now understand the terror of the lost one hundred and sixteen pages better: Now there were two translations where there should have been only one. Never was there a book more intended to be unambiguous than the Book of Mormon.

In addition, the extension of the canon had to be in a shape that satisfied the expectations of its Bible-saturated recipients. 2 Kings 22 gave the expectation that covenants and laws of the Lord with his people could be rediscovered. Daniel (Dan 12) had been instructed to seal up his visions in books. Such books were expected to be inaccessible to the learned, e.g. Isaiah 29:11. And Habakkuk (Hab 2) had been instructed to write his vision onto tablets, so plates of metal (gold or brass) was within the range of possibility. Equally, the sticks of Judah and Ephraim (leading Israel) from Ezechiel seemed in support of such a canonic extension.  In general, the Bible was used to shape expectations of interactions with the divine that are remote to present day Bible readers, because the expectations for the contributions of the Biblical books differ. (Even the inclusion of Joseph Smith Jr himself into the book of Genesis, during the Bible revision project, as a prophecy for a son of a Joseph, has a weak precedent in the prophecy of King Josiah of the House of David in 1 Kings 13,  where the name of the predicted child is given.)

With a book structured to settle disputes and reconnect the American churches to the salvation history of Abraham and the early Church of Acts, in a manifestation of the then rampant Primitivism, it would have been folly not to settle other doctrinal issues. As Alexander Campbell pointed out in his famously dismissive pamphlet, this dated the Book of Mormon more than anything else; but again that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. From the point of view of the Mormon converts, it reinforced the sensation that God was concerned about their questions and had authoritative answers for them that would settle the issues. Campbell, who campaigned so hard for Christian unity, should have appreciated the underlying sentiment more.

Among the primitivist movements, the Mormons were unique in including the Native Americans, in however unflattering a form, into their salvation history. The inclusion of the New World and the explanation for the American antiquities however came at the price of going much farther into the Old Testament than many other Christian denominations and sects had found necessary. This resulted in the importation of theologoumena that set the Mormons at variance with the other Christian denominations, such as temples, priesthoods (whether of Melchizedek or Abraham), and eventually even polygamy. It also imported attitudes that corresponded to the clan- and tribe-centric ethics of the Old Testament, which found expression in notions such as the avenging angels or Danites, and in the expectation for the spoils of the Gentiles. Admittedly, that flame was fanned by the generally retributive stance of the apocalyptic literature, no matter which part of the Bible the specific text came from. As a result, it may not be possible to draw the line between the millennial expectations and the Old Testament matrix correctly for any individual point at hand. But the overall spirit is decidedly less meek and more combative than the majority of the New Testament texts. And this drawing upon Old Testament models is not, as Jan Shipps had assumed, because the Mormons saw themselves as Israel; they always knew that some of the Lamanites and the hidden tribes behind the ice and stone of the poles were the lost tribes of Israel. It was because the Old Testament was part of their inheritance as well, and more helpful in the fights of rejection with the local communities than the pacifist stances of the Gospel.

In setting up his solution in this fashion, Joseph Smith Jr created several problems for himself and his movement, both at the level of the theory and the level of the contents. The monolithic salvation history worked fine for the context of its discovery, and is only problematic now, where great narratives that span the centuries are suspicious in general, because of our increased understanding of how they limit voices within the experience. We prefer our histories, and especially our salvation histories, pluralistic.

The theoretical problems that plagued Joseph Smith Jr during his life-time already were related to his insufficiently developed theory of revelation. His notion of the "burning of the heart" was effectively a popularized form of Spener's pia desideria. Spener had developed that notion precisely to reject the grasp of the governmentally controlled orthodoxy of 17th century Germany, emphasizing the role of the individual over the establishment. Unlike Spener, Smith Jr was not trying to make a free space for personal piety in a socially controlled space, but was trying to externalize and validate a personal experience for the social space. For this, the burning of the heart was an ill-suited tool, leading to continuous charges, even from within the ranks of the converts, that Smith Jr's revelation were too damn convenient to be external to himself.

Furthermore, the reduction to the "burning of the heart" meant that there were no external checks and balances on the contents of revelations. This in turn undermined the monolithic nature of the Book of Mormon that had been built up so carefully. The Mormon convert of 1843, who looked at the condemnation of the concubines of David and Solomon in the Book of Mormon (Jacob 2:24) and the revelation given for the Shakers, to have a wife and to cleave unto her (D&C 42:22) on the one hand,  and then at the revelation regarding Plural Marriage (D&C 132), was once again reduced to trying to sort out the contradictory indications without the help of a canonical scripture. It is not surprising that some of the critics were willing to accept the Book of Mormon as true, while taking a decidedly more critical stance with respect to Joseph Smith Jr's claim to continuous prophecy.

For the continued success of early Mormonism, though, Joseph Smith Jr's ability to reshape the kerygma continuously was unavoidable and possibly a source of its success. Because of the lack of development and penetration of historical criticism, Joseph Smith Jr could not know that he had laden himself with theological models that were not tried and true patterns of action. The description of the early apostolic church in Jerusalem in Acts was an ideal type, constructed by the author as a foil for self-evaluation of the early Christian congregations; not a recipe for running a church qua organization. Joseph Smith Jr learned that early when faced with the charismata of the Campbellite converts in Kirtland, Ohio, and even more so when trying to develop the law of consecration into a funding model for the church.

(See Part 2 for the remainder of this text.)

Alexander J. Campbell on the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has quite a number of writings by and on Alexander J. Campbell. It makes sense to look at Campbell, since he was a contemporary of Joseph Smith Jr, against whom he pamphleteered, and since he was in the same business of rectifying the sorry state of Christian disunity (albeit with a Scottish background, thus obviating the need for historical surgery that Jan Shipps has identified in Joseph Smith Jr's approach).

There are first of all his own writings:

• --, Infant Sprinkling Proved to be a Human Tradition: Being the Substance of a Debate on Christian Baptism, between Mr. John Walker, a Minister of the Secession, and Alexander Campbell, a regular Baptist Minister, Steubenville, Ohio (James Wilson) 1820. 
• --, The Christian-preacher, intended to detect error, and to exhibit and defend truth, on the difficult and disputed doctrines, connected with the controversy between Arminianism and Calvinism, Dover, DL (Schee), 1827-8.
• --, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, Boston (Green),1832.
• -- (ed), The Christian Baptist, 7 vols, revised edition, Cincinnati (D.S. Burnet) 1835.
• --, John Purcell, A Debate on the Roman-Catholic Religion, Cincinnati (James & Co)1837.
• 2nd copy
• 3rd copy
• Reprint from 1875 with Gladstone's The Vatican Decrees.
• -- (ed), Debate on the evidences of Christianity, held between R. Owen and A. Campbell, Bethany, Virginia (Alexander Campbell) 1839.
• --, The sacred writings of Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ, 
• --, An Address to the Members of the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Ohio, Bethany, Virginia (Alexander Campbell), 1840.
• --, The Christian System, in Reference to the Unity of Christians and the Restoration of Primitive Christianity, as pleased in the Current Reformation, London -- Edinburgh -- Nottingham, 1843.
• 4th edition of 1867.
• Reprint from 1871.
• --, Campbell-Rice debate on the Holy Spirit : being the fifth proposition in the great debate ... between Alexander Campbell, christian, and N. L. Rice, Presbyterian, Cincinnati (Rowe), 1901 [debate held in 1843, RCK].
• --, An Essay on the Remission of Sins, 3d edition, London -- Edinburgh -- Nottingham, 1846.
• --, Christian baptism : with its antecedents and consequents, Bethany, Virginia (Alexander Campbell), 1852.
• Edition from 1851.
• 2nd Copy from 1851.
• Reprint London, 1853.
• --, Life and Death, (= a reprint from the Millenial Harbringer), Cincinnati (Bosworth) 1860.
• --, Popular Lectures and Addresses, Philadelphia (Challen) 1863.

Finally, some of them, especially ones gathered from the Millenial Harbringer that Campbell published, were re-issued by W.A. Morris, MD, in Austin, TX, in 1896.

Then there are various reminiscences. There is the one of Dr Robert Richardson, who had been requested to provide a Memoirs of Alexander Campbell (Volume I 1868, Volume II 1870) in Philadelphia (J.B. Lippincott & Co). Then there is Selina Huntington Campbell's Home Life and Reminiscences of Alexander Campbell by his Wife, St Louis (John Burns) of 1882. This was followed in 1892 by the work of Thomas Chalmers, a Church of Christ pastor from Brooklyn, NY, on the impact of Campbell's journey in Scotland, entitled Alexander Campbell's Tour in Scotland: How he is remembered by those who saw him there, Louisville, Kentucky (Guide Printing & Publishing Co).

Then there are theological assessments of his work, some of which refer back to the earlier publications, especially Richardson's two-volume maior opus. There is Thomas W. Graftons' Alexander Campbell: Leader of the Great Reformation of the Nineteenth Century,  published in St. Louis in 1897 by the Christian Publishing Company. Then there is Winfried Earnest Garrison's Church History dissertation, submitted at the University of Chicago, entitled The Sources of Alexander Campbell's Theology, also published by the Christian Publishing Company in St. Louis in 1900.

Campbell's work had already raised criticism during his own lifetime, and the detractors sound suspiciously like those that attacked Joseph Smith Jr.

• Obadiah Jennings published a work entitled Debate on Campbellism; held at Nashville, Tennessee. In which the principles of Alexander Campbell are confuted, and his conduct examined,  published in Pittsburgh (D. & M. MacLean), 1832.
• William Phillips, former assistant editor of the Western Christian Advocate, one of many early Methodist newspapers, wrote Campbellism Exposed: Strictures on the Peculiar Tenets of Alexander Campbell, Cincinnati (Wright & Swormstedt), 1837, for the Methodist Church. 

Of course, additional criticism was levied against Campbell after his death, for example:

• T. McK. Stuart, another Episcopalian minister, who published Errors of Campbellism : being a review of all the fundamental errors of the system of faith and church polity of the denomination founded by Alexander Campbell, published in Cincinnati (Cranston & Stowe) --- New York (Hunt & Eaton), 1890.

Keep in mind that this is not all that's available from Campbell on the web; for example, the Alexander Campbell Page has a list of articles, esp to the inside of Richardson's biography.

PS: Most likely the two-volume Journey from Edinburgh Through Parts of North Britain from 1802 (Volume I, Volume II) is by a different Alexander Campbell, a Scottish writer and musician, who also authored the long poem The Grampians Desolate of 1804.

Restoration Movement online resources

Via my search for Joseph Smith Jr - contemporary commentaries, I stumbled upon Walter Scott, a Scottish clergyman that worked for Alexander Campbell in the Restoration Movement. Scott wrote a commentary on Revelation (whose date of publication I could not determine), among other things. Many of his writings are available in the Restoration Movement documentation project, which is currently undergoing redesign and only available via the Wayback machine. They have quite a bit on Alexander Campbell as well.

Maps of Meaning and Peter Jackson

Right out of the box let me note that I did not read even the majority of Peter Jackson's often intricate arguments and review of other people's research in his book Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography, New York (Routledge) 1989. But here are a couple of thoughts that stuck with me when leafing through the book. 

There were successful combinations of spatial and sociological arguments, such as David Ley's analysis in The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost (= Monograph Series no. 7), Washington, DC (Association of American Geographers), 1974, of inter-gang violence in Philadelphia, that marked out the territories of the gangs, overlaid them on a map, and then showed with lines of various thickness where the hotspots of violence occurred (chapter Culture and Ideology, section Territorial Struggles, pp.68-70; map on p.71); or the collaboration between Ley and R. Cybriwski, Urban graffiti as territorial markers, in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol 64 (1974), pp.491-505, which argued that graffitis are used as markers in contested border areas (pp.70; map on p.73), previously identified by the gang-violence analysis. 

Thus, arguments of spatial correlation of events are possible that would be hard to spot in other representations. The problem is that the objects that are identified in the environment are configurations of physicality, but the mere mapping of the physical is insufficient. As Jackson puts it in his summary,

Too often in the past, cultural geography has degenerated into the an inventory of 'culture traits', mapping physical artifacts like barns and fences that are visible in the landscape. (p.180)

I take Jackson to mean that, unlike the graffiti investigations, the objects are so noticeable that they force themselves upon the attention of the geographer without any theory to make them stand out or have the geographer go looking for them. The graffiti themselves, while physical configurations, are only meaningful for the mapping process if they are related back to the gang that produced them, and if temporal qualifications, such as order of application or inter-graffiti relationships, are gathered as well. They require a background-theory that allows the association of the tag back to the gang, which is external to the signs.

The alternative approach adopted here is to view culture as the medium or idiom through which meanings are expressed. If one accepts the preceding arguments for a plurality of cultures, then 'culture' is the domain in which these meanings are contested. (p.180)

The situation is even cleared in the case of the mapping of gang violence; though these events and their properties can be localized in space, they no longer persist in space; they are ephemeral and thus require a theory to find them and a GIS to put them into spatial relations. The configuration of the neighborhood, however, which provides the relations of proximity for the analysis of the events, is a separate mapping. Equally separate is the territorial claims of the gangs and their associations. This association may be even more meaningful in situations of collaboration; the Philadelphia setting seems more of a all-against-all configuration, where alliances are not present. Thus the argument is based on a four-way mashup of independent data that is unified across time and space.

1. The incidents of violence, coded as localized gang vs gang expression with a specific severity.
2. The spatial configuration of the neighborhood.
3. The territorial claims of the gangs.
4. The inter-gang alliances (which may be the empty set).

The punchline of Jackson's observation is that, since it is only the models that suggest what data needs to be gathered and thrown onto the maps, the connection to the cultural theories is tantamount for the relevance of cultural geography (p.180).  

This suggests that a model palette is a key resource for the cultural geographer, using distinctions sussed out by cultural theorists in other settings to at least start out from. Here are some of the more interesting models that Jackson depicts in his book.

There is the model of social closure by Frank Parkin, a Weberian redevelopment of Marxist class theory (cf. Frank Parkin, Marxism and class theory: A bourgeois critique, London (Tavistock) 1979) (cf. Jackson's exposition pp.53f; graphic Figure 3.1 on p.55), which is concerned with understanding the way in which dominant groups express their power (hegemony) over subordinate groups. Given the two units, and the uni-directional arrow of dominance, there is either the scenario where the dominant group manages to dominate and project its power over the subordinate group (Parkin terms this exclusionary closure), or the subordinate group manages to exert power over the dominant group (Parkin terms this usurpationary power) [the London Dock Strike of 1889 comes to mind, RCK]. Furthermore, the exclusionary closure can be coupled into a kind of "pecking order" called dual closure, when an intermediate group is identified, which is both dominated by the dominant group but dominates itself over the subordinate group. Jackson gives the example of the Upper and Middle Class dominating the white male working class, which in turn dominates the black & female working class (cf. Figure 3.1 on p.55).

There is also the model of linguistic structuration, as developed by Anthony Giddens (cf. Central Problems in Social Theory, London (Macmillan), 1979; The Constitution of Society, Cambridge (Polity Press) 1985) (p.157). As Peter Jackson explains,

Systems of grammar have no independent existence; they represent the outcome of many individual acts of speech, sedimented through time into rules and conventions. Language is a structure of signification that is reproduced in social practice. Like other practices, however, it does not exist outside social relations of power. Grammatical rules and other linguistic conventions provide a system of sanctions through which certain practices are legitimized and social norms enforced (see Figure 7.1). (p.157)

The cited Figure 7.1 depicts a tabular structure of boxes, where each box is connected to its surrounding neighbors by lines (not arrows). The contents of these boxes runs as follows:

• INTERACTION --- communication --- power --- sanction
• (MODALITY) --- interpretative scheme --- facility --- norm
• STRUCTURE --- signification --- domination --- legitimation 

Unfortunately, Jackson provides no example application, as he had done with the other models or research results that he describes, leaving this schematic somewhat abstract and a mere grab-bag of distinctions that might be employed.

In conclusion, there is an important caveat to raise regarding mapping with respect to the relationship between time and space. In the context of discussing the micro-geography of prostitution (cf. Figure 5.3, p.119), Jackson warns of the danger of the reduction or exclusion of the temporal dimension in the map making static---"freezing" in Jackson's terminology, with scare-quotes in the original---an inherently dynamic process, as "prostitutes themselves adapt their spatial behaviour to prevailing circumstances, constantly moving between and within cities" (p.118). 

For the mapping of graffiti and gang violence, I believe, this would mean that different temporal slices might give different indications of contestedness; furthermore, as gang territories shift or gangs are absorbed, the data has to be adjusted or culled accordingly.