Political Geography 23 (2004) 1–16
www.politicalgeography.com
The 2003 Annual Political Geography Lecture
Space, culture, state: uneven developments
in 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-making are fundamentally connected to political questions about power and the adjudicating
role of the state. In the first part of the lecture I show how political geography has largely
failed to substantively engage cultural questions in its theorizations of the state. I review a
growing body of literature outside the discipline that is attempting to examine the process of
state 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 Boston
St. Patrick’s Day parade conflict as a way of exposing how the state is responding to the
demands for inclusion of newly emerging identity groups. I analyze this case through a close
reading of a 1995 Supreme Court decision in order to reveal the judiciary’s understanding of
the relationship between culture, space, and speech. Of particular importance to my argument is the centrality of the First Amendment to the Court’s unanimous decision which
granted parade organizers the right to exclude groups whose message is disagreeable to
them; a decision premised on the separation of discursive and physical space in the making
of cultural meaning and practice.
# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
How are cultural questions relating to identity and meaning fundamentally connected 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: marston@email.arizona.edu (S.A. Marston).
0962-6298/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.09.006
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 1–16
found only 15 of the 580 articles published since the journal first appeared in 1982
devoted to directly exploring some aspect of the interaction of politics and culture
and 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 appears
among the keywords of the subfield which include ‘‘the state’’, ‘‘electoral geography’’, ‘‘world-systems’’, and ‘‘political economy’’. It would seem that in mainstream political geography, studies of state processes and practices—statist
approaches—remain relatively aloof from culturalist approaches. I suppose this
should come as no surprise on at least two counts: one from outside the discipline and
one from within. First, state theorists generally and marxist theorists in particular, whether as political geographers, political scientists, or political sociologists, have
seldom seriously considered the relevance of culture to the state beyond the role
of nationalism and citizenship in state building. While studies such as these go
some way toward supporting the importance of culture to state theory, they too
possess certain significant limitations. Studies of nationalism and state formation
tend to treat nationalism largely as a derivative of the state and seldom as a
central determinant. Moreover, nationalism is too often accepted as a stable
meaning 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 cultural differences along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and
age possesses a different sort of weakness—my own work included—as it too
frequently, either explicitly or implicitly, conceptualizes citizenship as subordinate
to the state. In these studies, it is the state that constructs citizens and not vice
versa.
The second reason that culture and the state have not been given equal status
heretofore within political geography (or for that matter in cultural geography) is
that political geographers and cultural geographers too seldom speak substantively
to each other. The good news is that those subdisciplinary divides are beginning to
be repaired and fruitful trans-subdisciplinary synergies have begun to produce
some compelling theoretical insights. Witness, for example, the fruitful collaborations that have produced political ecology. In addition, a handful of political geographers have begun to wrestle with the conjunction of culture and the state with
interesting 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 the
record, I understand culture as the mediating moment, the world view, the meaning system that shapes the relationship between society and the construction of
subjectivities in a particular space and time. And I concur with Charles Tilly’s definition of states as coercion wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and usually exercising clear priority over all other
organizations 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’’ is
produced through various symbolic and ideological techniques (1999). I also argue
that political geography’s continued failure to seriously engage with current
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3
debates about the relationship between culture and the state will leave it impoverished 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 theorize
and empirically investigate the relationship between culture and the state. In the
remainder of the lecture I explore the attempts by lesbian, gay, and transgendered
(LGBT) groups to enter the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in US cities like New
York, Boston and Chicago see also (Marston, 2002). I do this as a way of exposing
how the US state is responding to the rights-based demands of newly emerging
identity groups. I support this theoretical argument through an assessment of a
1995 Supreme Court decision that was a response to attempts by the Irish–
American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) to participate in
the parades conducted annually in South Boston.
State formation and the cultural turn
Although in the social sciences sustained interest in the interaction of state and
culture began to occur in the early 1990s, it could be argued that the origins of this
movement can be traced to Philip Abrams’s 1977 address to the British Sociological Association entitled: ‘‘The difficulty of studying the state’’ (published in 1988).
By contending that the state is an ideological construction, Abrams launched a vigorous broadside at mid-twentieth century state theory undermining its reification
as a theoretical and empirical object. This detailed critique, directed at both British
political sociology and western marxism, insisted that theories of the state had
naively assumed its existence when it was instead ‘‘a spurious object of sociological
concern’’ (p. 63). For Abrams the state operated as an ideological manifestation of
‘‘politically organized subjection’’ (p. 69), by which he meant that the state was a
managed construction of belief that legitimated subjects to their own subordination. Abrams insisted that theorists of the state should abandon it as a material
object and approach it as social fact; that the political was a matter of process and
the state was a practice not an apparatus. Reacting particularly against Ralph
Miliband (1969) and Nicos Poulantzas (1973), Abrams argued that as the idea of
the state has a significant reality—political, social and otherwise—it is the responsibility of state theorists to show how this idea is constituted, communicated and
imposed.1 And Abrams believed that the only way to accomplish such an analysis
was to comprehend the idea of the state as historically constructed.2
While Abrams central contribution to the debates in state theory was to unmask
the state and reveal it to be ‘‘a unified symbol of actual disunity’’ (p. 79), his piece is
still decidedly absent of any sense of human agency or of human symbolic practices
1
For a contemporary treatment of the Miliband–Poulantzas debate, see Aronowitz and Bratsis (2002).
I should point out that although Abrams never cites Louis Althusser in his exegesis on the state, his
position is somewhat similar to Althusser’s. In brief, both Abrams and Althusser view the state as an
ideological construction and therefore not a material object in its own right.
2
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4
and identity formation processes and their relevance to understanding the power of
the state. In short, although he argues for understanding the idea of the state in its
historical context, he fails to acknowledge that it is critical to understand how historically situated subjects of the state participate in its ideological construction and
its possible transformation or how our own willing and unwilling participation in
the idea of the state is accomplished. Although Abrams lacked a comprehensive
conceptualization of human agency and its relationship to the state, other scholars
have not and have instead tried to tease out the role of subjects and meaning making in state practices and formation.
Writing in France during the same period, for instance, Michel Foucault was
also at work decentering the state, though he aimed his focus at power (state and
other).3 He argued that the state was not the source of the intensified regulation of
modern societies, but that the governmentalization of modern societies, which rested on an array of institutional forms, enabled the state to be perceived as a center
of power (1991). In short, Foucault’s point was that the state is not the source of
power but its effect. Timothy Mitchell pushes this notion of the state as a structural
effect even further by arguing that the state is ‘‘the paramount structural effect of
the modern social world (1991: 94)’’. And this structural effect—a kind of framework that appears to stand apart from the social world—is enabled by dispersed
forms of disciplinary power—human practices as discourses of knowledge, regulation and discipline—that allow the state to appear as a structure that stands
apart and above society (Mitchell, 1999).
It is probably helpful at this point to refer briefly to the work of Antonio
Gramsci (1971), as well as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), theorists of
power and the state who most heavily influence cultural studies scholars. I raise
this point because it would seem that while social scientists were learning about the
importance of culture to the state through arguments advanced by cultural studies
theorists, cultural studies theorists appear to have derived their understandings of
the state and power from a different set of theorists than their social science colleagues. And while it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore why this was the
case or the implications of these different theoretical sources, I feel it is important
to 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). Gramsci’s most important contribution to conceptualizing the state was to argue for its instability by
demonstrating that support for it was attained through the concept of hegemony: a
complex form of class domination realized in the form of the state. In effect,
Gramsci understood the state as a political accomplishment that was always
partial and always tending toward unravelling. Gramsci argued for penetrating the
hegemonic strategies and practices—conscious and unconscious—that conditioned
3
Throughout his work, Michel Foucault was concerned with the question of power. Power/knowledge provides a helpful distallation. See Foucault, 1980.
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subaltern groups to accept their subordination. For him, any struggle against
hegemonic configurations of power and domination involves a cultural struggle; a
contest over the way in which the state comes to be constructed and represented.
Deleuze and Guattari, particularly through their important book, A Thousand Plateaus, 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-reproducing
power, and like Foucault, as a form of knowledge from which it derives its unquestioned existence and universality across all societies.
Following the refigurations of the state advanced by these theorists, social
science 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 for
many. In short, it seems that the radical reconfiguration of 1960/1970s state
theory, 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 thoughtful
attempts to work through the conjunction of culture and state were being produced in the social sciences. For example, writing in the early 1990s, political sociologist Philip Corrigan argued that the key question for theorists interested in state
formation was not, who rules but how rule is accomplished and how patriarchy,
racism, nationalism, homophobia, and classism become visible as constitutive features of rule (Corrigan, 1994).
Corrigan was calling for nothing less than a fundamental reconsideration of how
we understand the state theoretically and methodologically. He entreated state theorists 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 society
and more as a manifestation of the materialized social practices of human agents.
For him, as well as for dozens of other state theorists—in anthropology, political
science, political sociology—who have since heeded his call, the state has increasingly come to be understood as the restless outcome of human agency produced
and negotiated through the social and cultural meanings of the complex normative
environment of contemporary capitalism. As editor George Steinmetz insists in the
preface of the volume, State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn:
‘‘The conjoining of the terms state and culture . . . is meant to signal their reciprocal influence and constitution and to break with earlier imageries in which culture
is 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 nexus
between culture and the state requires conceptualizing the latter as the contested
product of the formal and informal practices of multiply situated subjects. Such a
conceptualization renders subjectivity and meaning as causally important not simply epiphenomenal. A comprehensive and insightful contribution to this growing
movement is the volume just mentioned, State/Culture. With 14 contributors
representing anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, this collection
explores state and culture in tension always recognizing that culture must be seen
as more than a ‘dependent variable’ or as a product of the state. In the substantive
introduction to the volume, Steimetz explores the key terms of culture, state and
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state formation, as well as the tendency for most state theorizing to assume that
human subjectivity can be understood outside of its social and historical context
based on such foundational assumptions as instrumental rationality, a propensity
to violence or territoriality. He provides a thorough and convincing argument
for how taking culture seriously forces us to reckon with the fact that ‘‘social practices and objects such as states or state officials have to be situated in specific historical and cultural settings’’ (p. 8) and understood as relevant through their
discursive and meaning-making construction.
The contributions to the collection are grouped under four headings that deal
with 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 the
shaping of states by culture, whereas others emphasize causal flows running in
both directions—and some reject the analytical distinction between culture and
nonculture altogether’’ (Steinmetz, 1999: 3). All, however, treat culture and state as
equally powerful conceptual categories that must be explained interactively.
The last thing to mention about the emerging literature on the conjunction of
culture and state is its methodological diversity. From ethnography to rational
choice, a wide range of methodological approaches characterizes attempts to comprehend the many ways that state and culture are mutually constitutive. What have
been most provocative and revealing are the ethnographic investigations of state
institutions and bureaucrats as they reveal the ways the state is produced and
reproduced in everyday life through the embodied practices of social agents within
and outside the state. Ethnographic accounts of the state—among them the nine
chapters in Joe Heyman’s edited collection States and Illegal Practices (1999)—
insist that there is no panoptical vantage point from which to view the state, only
embodied knowledge derived from historically and geographically situated agents
see also (Heyman, 1995). A highly-cited illustration of such an ethnography of the
state is Akhil Gupta’s work on north Indian villagers’ everyday encounters with
local government institutions (1995). Through an investigation of the discursive
construction of the state in public culture, Gupta reveals how the discourse of corruption and accountability is a critical mechanism through which diversely situated
agents come to imagine the state and through which the state is constructed and
represented. Not only, however, does Gupta show how the discourse of corruption
helps construct the state, he also shows how understanding this construction can
‘‘potentially empower citizens by marking those activities that infringe on their
rights’’ (p. 394) [emphasis added].
Political geographers approach state and culture
As the previous review illustrates, since Corrigan’s clarion call to investigate how
patriarchy, racism, nationalism, homophobia, and classism become visible as
constitutive features of rule, scholars across the social sciences have begun to
respond. Taken together, this emerging body of literature offers a compelling case
for political geographers to make a unique contribution to the accompanying
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theoretical debates. The most obvious way to do this is by interrogating the changing spaces of rule and ruling and how those spaces are made, remade, or altered
by the subjects whose everyday practices constitute their production, where state
and society converge. Several political geographers have begun to rise to this challenge and provide an important foundation upon which my own work and the
work of others might build.4
In political geography, the most theoretically promising work aimed at reconfiguring conceptualizations of the state in order to incorporate the central relevance
of social practice is Joe Painter’s 1995 book Politics, Geography and Political Geography. In his insightful definition of the state, Painter makes a clear case for the
ways political geographers are uniquely placed to contribute to the exciting body
of work that is conjoining state and culture. He writes: ‘‘States are constituted
through spatialized social practices which are to a greater or lesser extent institutionalized (in a ‘state apparatus’) and which involve claims to authority which are
general in social scope and which secure at least partial compliance through either
consent, or coercion, or both’’ (1995: 34). He also recognizes the importance of
culture to state formation in his attention to Corrigan and Sayer’s book, The Great
Arch (1985). There are three ways, Painter proposes, in which state formation is
cultural. The first is through a recognition that state processes are symbolic, as well
as material and organizational. The second is through a recognition that ‘‘the production of meaning is central to the progress of state development’’. The third is
the ‘‘sense in which state activities are performed by the actors involved’’ be they
bureaucrats, politicians, soldiers or citizens. (p. 47–48).
Taking the lead from Painter, as well as from political anthropologists, Alison
Mountz uses her work on human smuggling into Canada to explore the bureaucratic actors and arrangements that constitute the nation-state. Based on an ethnography of the Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Mountz makes a case for dissolving the conceptual
boundaries that produce abstract epistemologies of the state. She argues instead
that: ‘‘The state is powerful, but not all-powerful and knowing. . . [and] it is
through the feminist strategy of embodiment that the actual power of the state
materializes in daily practice.’’ Mountz’s approach to understanding the discursive
practices and representations behind the first instance of the mass detention of
refugee claimants in Canadian history is to place cultural logics at the center of discussions about the state as institutionalized through the CIC. Her ethnography
exposes the CIC as a material manifestation of the state with the power to recognize, 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 nexus
between culture and the state, scholars of critical geopolitics have also moved toward recognizing that
the state must be understood as an ideological construction. Critical geopolitics and its focus on political
discourse 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 practices and nation-state sovereignty, it has not provided much insight into how to theorize a state/culture
nexus that incorporates the relevance of cultural geographies to that conjunction.
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not others. Most importantly, however, she exposes the CIC not as an abstract
entity operating outside of or above everyday life, but rather as enmeshed in and
conflicted 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 are
at one level authoritative, but at another open to emotion, desire, interpretation
and conflict, such that enforcement or non-enforcement is informed by the subjectivity and biography of bureaucrats and migrant claimants.
Another piece that aims at exploring the cultural sources of state formation and
transformation is Farhang Rouhani’s work on the Islamic Republic of Iran,
(2001a). Intending to show how the slow transition of the Iranian state from a
strict theocratic orientation towards a more neoliberal democratic one, Rouhani
looks to the everyday space of the middle-class Tehrani home. He conceptualizes
the home as a site where local, national, and transnational processes are experienced and translated, through popular media consumption, into new political discourses that have contributed to the current changes in the national state and the
restive nature of a large part of the population to push for those changes. Because
of the severe restrictions and excessive official monitoring of public space in Tehran, Rouhani conceptualizes the middle-class home as a complex political, cultural,
and social space—possibly the only space—where tactics of resistance to the state’s
surveillance can occur. This resistance has formed most prominently through
access to satellite television and the internet, where new sources of knowledge are
readily available for consumption and discussion.
Through ethnography, Tehrani respondents revealed to Rouhani how the home,
as a place of refuge from public regulation and police intrusion, allowed the consumption of transnational information flows that have been critical in shaping new
cultural and political identities. Rouhani’s work illustrates one of the ways the
constitutive features of religio-political rule in a particular time and place—rule
with explicit spatial manifestations and implications—can be resisted and transformed. As such, this study of the Iranian state conceptualizes it as a process
involving domination and resistance through the complex cultural content of
everyday middle class urban life (2001b).
Adrian Mulligan’s work on the US roots of Irish nationalism and the contested
emergence of an Irish state, is yet another example of new work in political geography that seeks to argue for the relevance of culture to conceptualizations of the
state and state formation (2003). Mulligan, through careful documentary analysis
of newspapers, criminal records, and resistance organization files, shows that
nationalism is not necessarily a stable category neatly bounded by national territory. Indeed, the roots of nineteenth century Irish nationalism were very much comingled with changing identities and meaning-making among Irish immigrants
in the United States who struggled valiantly and contributed significantly to the
discourse and material practices of an independent Ireland. For Mulligan, the state
must 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 a
very helpful foundation for further work on the conjunction of space, culture and
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state. They all very clearly illustrate that understanding the state as the outcome of
struggles over meaning and identity has specific and important geographical relevance 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 the
state is any sense of the geography of this complex relationship and the implications of thinking through how the various constitutive features of hegemonic rule
are geographically produced (and possibly resisted) in complex and sometimes even
in contradictory ways.
In the next section I turn to my case study to explore in finer detail the question
raised at the beginning of this lecture: how cultural questions related to identity
and meaning are fundamentally connected to political geographical questions
about space and the adjudicating role of the state. I do this by exploring how state
representations have worked to exclude certain identities and relegate them to the
margins of dominant cultural practices. Cultural comprehensions of the state force
us to acknowledge how the state, through the particular framings it imposes upon
social practices, establishes and inculcates translations that come to have a kind of
transcendental meaning beyond the cultural context that produces them. In short,
and mindful of Corrigan’s call, I want to explore how rule is accomplished and
how it can be shown to be a constitutive feature of judicial practice through an
examination of a 1995 Supreme Court decision that was based on an interpretation
of the First Amendment that dismisses the importance of space to cultural production and practice.
The St. Patrick’s Day parade conflict and state response
Beginning in 1990, the St. Patrick’s Day parades in large US cities like New
York, Boston and Chicago became highly charged, politically volatile cultural
events as LGBT Irish and Irish-Americans petitioned to enter, and eventually
strenuously protested against their exclusion from, the annual ritual.5 The attempt
by GLIB to participate in the South Boston parade lead to US Supreme Court justices deliberating over whether parade organizers could legally exclude certain
groups from joining in the privately-organized use of the public thoroughfares.
In South Boston, March 17 is a significant and widely popular festival day set
aside for two celebrations. On that day in 1737, the first St. Patrick’s Day parade
was 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 Loyalists were evacuated from the city, symbolically ending the Revolutionary War. For
265 years, South Boston, a neighborhood within the city of Boston and home
to one of the largest concentrations of Irish-American and Irish immigrants in
the 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 identity
and meaning systems should not be underestimated. The parades as annual rituals are instrumental to
the public performance and projection of a particular Irish national identity in the US.
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hundred or so years, it seems the parade was a privately sponsored event. It is
unclear exactly when the city of Boston became its official sponsor. What is known
is that in 1947, the city relinquished its control and awarded the permit to the
South Boston Allied War Veteran’s Council (the Council). Eventually control of
the parade devolved to one man, the president of the Council, John J. ‘‘Wacko’’
Hurley, who continues to organize the joint celebration.
In 1992, GLIB—‘‘an organization formed for the purpose of marching in the
parade 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 the
community, and to support the like men and women who sought to march in the
New York [City] St. Patrick’s Day parade (Supreme Court of the United States,
1995, 2)’’—submitted an application to the Council to participate in the parade, a
requirement for all aspiring contingents (Davis, 1995). The Council denied the
application. In response, GLIB obtained a state court-order mandating that the
Council accept their group. Members of GLIB, along with some 10,000 other
participants, marched in the 1992 event. A year later, GLIB submitted another
application to be included in the 1993 parade and the Council again denied their
application. This time, GLIB filed a lawsuit against the Council, Wacko Hurley,
and the City of Boston, alleging violations of the state and federal Constitutions
and the state’s public accommodations law which prohibits: ‘‘any distinction, discrimination, or restriction on account of . . . sexual orientation . . . [among other
identities] relative to the admission of a person to, or treatment in any place of
public accommodation, resort or amusement (Hurley vs GLIB, 1995: 5, originally
quoted from Massachusetts General Laws, 272: 98).’’ The state court again found
in favor of GLIB arguing ‘‘that the Council had no written criteria and employed
no particular procedure for admission, voted on new applications in batches, had
occasionally admitted groups who simply showed up at the parade without having
submitted an application ‘and did not generally inquire into the specific messages
or views of each applicant’ (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 5).’’ The state court rejected all
of the Council’s arguments and ‘‘concluded that the parade is ‘not an exercise of
[the Council’s] constitutionally protected right of expressive association’, but
instead ‘an open recreational event that is subject to the public accommodations
law’ ’’ (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 6) and is therefore not entitled to First Amendment
protection. The Council appealed the case to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts which upheld the lower court’s ruling. The State Supreme Court, agreeing
with the lower court that it was not possible to detect a specific expressive purpose
for the parade, established the public accommodations law as the relevant statute
and not the First Amendment. In total, there were nine Massachusetts court
actions, all of them decided on the public accommodations law and all in favor of
GLIB. Yet, in June 1995, Justice David Souter, delivering the opinion of a unanimous US Supreme Court, struck down the decisions of the Massachusetts courts
and 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 was
a misunderstanding of what a parade is. Citing the work of Susan Davis in Parades
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11
and Power, Justice Souter contended that: ‘‘. . . we use the word ‘parade’ to indicate
marchers who are making some sort of collective point, not just to each other but
to 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 case
is whether Massachusetts may require private citizens who organize a parade to
include among the marchers a group imparting a message that the organizers do
not 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 understood a parade as public accommodation and not as expressive conduct, the
Supreme Court’s opinion was that a parade is a form of speech and therefore
deserving of protection under the First Amendment.
Before proceeding to a discussion of the implications of judiciary practices for
understanding the relationship between space, state and culture, I want to point
out what I see to be the fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between
society and space that informs the Supreme Court decision. To some extent the
Massachusetts courts’ decisions suffer from a similar failure, though in the opposite
direction. In both decisions, society and space are seen to exist in isolation not as
mutually constitutive processes.
Let’s look at the Supreme Court case first: because the parade is a form of
speech, it is entitled to protection under the First Amendment including the ‘‘selection of contingents to make a parade (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 6).’’ This opinion
seems 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. Patrick’s Day/Evacuation Day parade as well as in all parades, is by definition, on a street, and nearly always on public streets. The Massachusetts court decisions are also similarly reasonable, yet partial. The parades are
conducted on city streets and the public accommodation law requires these events
not be discriminatory. The Council sought to exclude; it sought to discriminate.
Such action is unlawful. And yet, the Massachusetts courts failed to appreciate
that parades are indeed moving forms of speech; they understood them only as
mobile assemblages that use the public streets for recreational purposes. The Massachusetts courts sidestepped the issue of speech altogether and constructed the
parades narrowly, and I would argue incorrectly. In short, the Massachusetts
courts failed to appreciate that speech is multifaceted in its performance. The classic free speech paradigm of the lone orator remonstrating to the crowd at Hyde
Park Speaker’s Corner in London does not exhaust the genre. Indeed, parades are
not only a moving assemblage but a manifestation of speech that expresses the
claims and identity of the group who is parading. And like the classic paradigm of
free speech, dissenting opinions and positions must be protected, if not actually
encouraged.
6
In Parades and Power, S. Davis characterizes ‘‘parades as public dramas of social relations, and in
them performers define who can be a social actor and what subjects and ideas are available for communication and consideration (p. 6)’’.
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Thus, if we conjoin the two sets of decisions we realize a more complete understanding of what a parade is and how social, cultural, political, and economic
practices are embodied as well as spatially (and, of course, temporally) situated.
Separately the two decisions divorce discursive space from material space thus
severing 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 subjects
whose representations already operate on the periphery of dominant cultural practices. In short, what the Supreme Court decision causes is just the sort of discrimination that the Massachusetts public accommodation law was designed to
eliminate. As a result, the law has worked in such a way as to authorize some
groups 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 to
pursue this aspect of the case any further here. There are a large number of legal
opinions on the case that are available in the law literature that do an excellent job
of analyzing various aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision.7 What I want to do
instead is to return to my original question and provide a more concise answer to
it as well as suggest how political geography might benefit from a deeper appreciation of the culture/state nexus.
Courting culture
The state has once again emerged as an exciting topic of intellectual and political
interest. While globalization experts disagree about whether the nation-state is
waxing or waning in importance, noone doubts that new state forms are leading
to new manifestations of governance and authority. At the international level, the
globalization of capital and neoliberal policy reforms have accelerated labor
migration and other flows at the same time that new and changing supranational
organizations have stepped into a governing gap that nation-states have been
unable to fill. Simultaneously from below, a world-wide discourse of rights and
proliferating demands for new sorts of entitlements has emerged and put increasing
pressure on nation-states to respond in often unprecedented ways. As the state is
faced with new challenges from above and below; as its core functions and historical tasks seem increasingly archaic, the time is ripe for recasting our conceptualizations of it, and for thinking about new ways for interrogating its institutions and
practices.
In this time of intellectual ferment and dramatic social, political, economic, and
cultural change, why should contemporary theorists of the state—and especially
political geographers—take culture seriously in their conceptualizations? Wahneema 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 and
1999, the period immediately following the decision.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 1–16
13
when she expresses her interest in understanding under what circumstances the
political subject is constructed (1996: 65). Because, she argues, the state thinks the
subject 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 is
absorbed into, refracted through and reproduced by state practices; practices that
reflect hegemonic notions and beliefs that end up sustaining racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. And if we accept this explanation as a
reasonable one, then we must think about how, in all its myriad ways, the state
accomplishes this and how we might locate within the state’s constructions of subjectivities the opportunities and obstacles for their radical reworking.
One way we might do this is to explore how the state creates authoritative frameworks within which subjects are required to operate. Akhil Gupta, whom I mentioned previously, has approached this challenge by examining how citizens and
local bureaucrats interact around the presence of bribes as a way of accomplishing
state action in areas of everyday life—qualifying for a loan, getting a water pipe
extended into a neighborhood, receiving permission to build something. Local state
authoritative frameworks, in the Indian village case, revolve around the client and
the bureaucrat understanding and enacting the language of corruption and using it
delicately and correctly to get things done. Language is one way of comprehending
the state’s construction of authoritative frameworks.
In States of the Imagination, Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, suggest that
we approach the state ‘‘as a historically specific configuration of a range of languages of stateness, some practical, others symbolic and performative . . . (2001: 7).’’
They contend that the production of states as centers of authoritative power occurs
through the languages of authority, one of which is the institutionalization of law
and legal discourse. Law and legal discourse are the practical languages the state
uses and the means ‘‘through which it acquires discursive presence and its authority to authorize (2001: 8).’’ In effect the courts’ generation of legal decisions is
part of the production of the language of stateness. To return to Lubiano, legal
language is one manifestation of the material practice through which the state
thinks subjects.
Let me turn back briefly to the Hurley case to exercise this argument about legal
language. Conflicts over the St. Patrick’s Day parade demonstrate a significant cultural transformation in the polity. In the politicized emergence of organizations
like GLIB, ILGO or other LGBT groups, we have a movement that is appealing to
the state for the conference of fully-fledged rights. The Hurley decision by the
Supreme Court represents the state’s efforts to balance the recognition of these
groups with the demands of statecraft in order to protect its legitimacy and the
contemporary neoliberal institutional infrastructure of civil society. How the state
accomplishes this balance reveals how it understands the constellation of social
relations that exist in a complex society and how it sets social limits and determinations. Jon Cruz argues that ‘‘identity politics under late capitalism refracts the
field in which antagonistic relations orbit around struggles over social and
cultural—hence political—classifications . . . (2001: 26).’’ I would add that the state
functions to hardens those classifications by setting the terrain—literally and
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 1–16
figuratively—upon which those struggles can occur. And this is the point where
political geographers can make important theoretical and practical interventions:
by insisting on the relevance of space to the state’s social practices.
For instance, it is clear that the Hurley decision authorizes both the conditions
and the spaces of belonging and participating in the complex and chaotic intercourse of a liberal democracy. By analyzing the language of stateness contained in
Hurley it is possible to recognize quite clearly its ideological construction and to
appreciate the state as something that does not sit above the contingencies of
everyday life incarnating a certain collective justice, but establishes its own understanding of what culture is. The state, in this case through the Supreme Court,
establishes the socio-spatial parameters around which cultural meanings can be
made and contested. As critical legal scholar Madhavi Sunder argues, in the Hurley case the Supreme Court is directly negotiating the issue of cultural representation and what culture is (1996). She interprets the Supreme Court’s decision as
transferring to the Council—and any other dominant cultural group that sponsors
a parade—exclusive intellectual property rights ‘‘by granting absolute power to create and maintain meaning to some groups at the exclusion of others (1996: 2)’’.
The Court accomplishes this establishment of authorial property rights by shearing
discursive space from physical space, ‘‘legally protecting speech as private space
through property-like ownership’’ of its use. By issuing such a decision, the Court
implicitly renders a legal understanding of what culture is—something immanent
and belonging to one group for safekeeping—rather than something that is constantly negotiated and transformed through the public give and take of changing
ideas and meaning systems in a changing world. Through this decision, the state
constructs its own (cultural) narrative about how the world should work and it is a
narrative that empowers one group and oppresses another. The narrative, constructed as it is on an aspatial and static understanding of culture, excludes other
understandings and reveals who gets left out of liberalism’s universal ‘‘we.’’
A dramatic reconceptualization of the state is occurring across and within the
intersection of disciplines as new projects of political and cultural hegemony
emerge from the multifaceted processes of globalization. A growing aspect of state
reconceptualization is how to think through the centrality of civil rights struggles—
which increasingly center on cultural identity, discourse and space—to this project.
Political geography is uniquely poised to participate in this reframing through its
sophisticated understanding of the social production of space. Yet its continued
failure to seriously engage with current debates about the relationship between culture and the state will leave it ill equipped to contribute to some of the most exciting 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 helpful
comments on various drafts of this lecture. I would also like to acknowledge faculty and students in the Geography Departments at the University of Kentucky
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 23 (2004) 1–16
15
and the University of California, Los Angeles—additional audiences for this lecture—who prompted me to rethink aspects of the paper through their provocative
questions and observations.
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