Rethinking Politics, Rethinking Theory

To begin with the basics, A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound edited by Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw, is an excellent book.¹ Contributors include William Chaloupka, Thom Kuehls, Timothy W. Luke, R.B.J. Walker, and Sharon Zukin. The book will be of particular interest to political geographers, political ecologists, and environmental thinkers of all kind. Political theorists, however, are the editors’ target audience, even if they “find it hardest to see that this book is for them.”² A Political Space may remain illegible, or unwelcome, to political theorists for the simple reason that its primary aim is to radically rethink both the ‘political’ and ‘theory.’ More particularly, the collection explores how putatively peripheral sites of political activity — both out-of-the-way places like Clayoquot Sound, and more micro-sites apparently secondary to the state apparatus (the logging road, the activist meeting, the corporate board room. . .) — are more determinative and ‘central’ than our current analyses allow.

But what does such a pluralized conception of politics mean for the practice of political theory? This question is barely novel, but A Political Space is one of the most sustained and interesting meditations on the subject yet to appear in print. The general conclusion drawn is that a pluralized political demands a more open approach to theory. This means attending more to ‘peripheral’ and extra-statist sites of political activity. It also means rethinking the theorist’s attachment to texts. While the editors acknowledge that political theorists have pluralized their canon to include various cultural, linguistic, and psychoanalytic thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, they question the discipline’s obsession with The Book. “The extent to which political theory still consists of meditations on texts,” writes Warren Magnusson in his introduction to the volume, “even if they are the texts of Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler, rather than Plato or John Locke, is remarkable. . .We seek to do political theory in a different way, by beginning from a site rather than a text.”³

Magnusson and Shaw are not naively proposing pure objective encounter with the empirical world. They recognize the empirical only becomes meaningful textually, or through interpretive frames. Indeed most contributors to this volume agree with Derrida that ‘there is nothing outside of the text.’⁴ Their contention, however, is that simply because the world is always encountered textually needn’t mean limiting our study to literal texts! There is a world to interpret too!

Magnusson and Shaw’s argument is that well-chosen sites like Clayoquot Sound often have more to teach about the world and political possibility than meditations on literal texts about texts. “We are advocating” the editors write “a particular method of inquiry, a method that privileges the site itself rather than the interpretive frame that we bring to it.”⁵ Sites, for the editors, are only known to the analyst through interpretation, but also always exceed interpretation, are more than text, even if that ‘more’ can only be known textually.⁶ We thus need to open our interpretations and ourselves to be challenged and changed by the world we encounter — we must let the site speak. We can never purely know the world without interpretative mediation, but neither is it contained by the interpretive frames we bring to it. To borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway, the world is a “coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse.”⁷ For Magnusson and Shaw and the contributors to this volume, Clayoquot codes alternative forms of politics and thus demands new ways of thinking politically. The remainder of this review will unpack and assess the contributors’ ambition to unsettle conventional accounts of politics and theory through their conversations with Clayoquot Sound.

Before doing so, however, I’d like to quickly answer two simple questions: where the hell and what the hell is Clayoquot Sound? As A Political Space details, these are actually dizzyingly difficult questions to answer. But I’d still...