Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371

www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Is a critical geopolitics possible? Foucault, class

and the vision thing
Neil Smith
Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
NJ 08903, USA

Introduction

The classic critique of Friedrich Ratzel’s proto-geopolitics points to the yawning

epistemological hiatus between, on the one side, the earth and its spatial configuration
and on the other the state as a living organism. As Wittfogel early pointed out, the
process of social production connecting the earth to the state via the generation of
surplus was elided by Ratzel, and indeed, hidden in the depths of this hiatus are
the geographically and historically specific social relations of production, and social
practices more broadly, responsible for the construction of nation states in and as
definite territories. Between nature and nation, between geography and politics, social
labor, transformation and creativity forge the vital connections.
Critical Geopolitics represents the most fertile and adventurous critique of a geo-
political tradition which, while it predates Ratzel, came into its own as a distinctly
twentieth-century discourse of what O’Tuathail labels “geo-power.” Via a series of
analytical vignettes, the book succeeds in connecting the work of theorists and prac-
titioners such as Ratzel, Mackinder and Mahan with a later generation, including
Haushofer and Wittfogel, Bowman and Spykman, with more recent 1970s and 1980s
theorists such as Lacoste, Ashley and Dalby, and finally with the United States script-
ing of Bosnia in the early 1990s. At one level, the substance of O’Tuathail’s book
is the method. Each chapter involves a symptomatic reading of geopolitical texts as
scripts of global vision, revealing variously partisan amalgams of power, geography,
and knowledge claims. If this method owes first and foremost to Foucault (and sec-
ondarily to other poststructuralists), O’Tuathail conversely acknowledges the influ-
ence of radical geographies, emphasizing critical and contextual approaches. He
seeks to deploy geopolitics as a means of revealing the politics of the very ways in
which geographical discourse scripts politics. A larger ‘geo-politics’ encapsulates
geopolitics (more narrowly understood). Picking up on the cues provided by Dalby
(1991), O’Tuathail argues that it is the purpose of a “critical geopolitics” to “docu-

0962-6298/00/$ - see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 6 2 - 6 2 9 8 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 6 9 - 4
366 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371

ment and deconstruct” the “forms of these new congealments of geo-power” and to
“problematize how global space is incessantly reimagined and rewritten by centers
of power and authority” (p. 249).
Until the last decade or so, geopolitics was either closeted away by geographers
as an historical embarrassment or else protected as the privileged domain of ‘realist’
foreign policy intellectuals. Rendered powerful between the 1920s and 1940s and
especially in the German prosecution of World War II — and reactions thereto —
‘geopolitics’ became in the postwar world a disembodied sign, a floating signifier,
O’Tuathail suggests. The power of his text is the political replacement of ‘geopoli-
tics’ into the present-day ferment of politicized geographical theory and practice; he
repoliticizes global and personal geographies even as he spatializes global politics.
He brings a swath of tools to this project but none is more important than his deploy-
ment of Martin Jay’s notion of “Cartesian perspectivalism” (p. 70). Cartesian per-
spectivalism accomplishes the separation of the seeing eye/I from the object seen,
and for Jay forms the dominant scopic regime of modernity. Geopolitics expresses
a specific case of the hegemony of visualization, O’Tuathail argues, and indeed much
of his symptomatic reading of geopolitical texts culminates in the revelation of this
‘visualism,’ as we might call it, whether specifically Cartesian or otherwise. O’Tua-
thail is especially adept at reading out the gender and racial exclusivity of this vis-
ualism of geopolitical texts and the implications of its panoptic practices; the imperial
assumption of Halford Mackinder atop Mount Kenya is only the most vivid of his
indictments.

Is a critical geopolitics possible?

In its richness and historical detail, as well as the deliberate genealogical com-
plexity he gives to geopolitics, it is impossible to summarize O’Tuathail’s decon-
struction of geopolitics in any succinct way. Let me instead move directly to the
central argument that I think I have regarding a critical geopolitics. In making this
move I want to make absolutely clear that my own critical intent is broadly consistent
with O’Tuathail’s and that in my own work in the history of geographical theory
and practice, I have been considerably influenced by his historical take on geopoli-
tics. But in the end, I am not entirely convinced that a critical geopolitics is possible,
or indeed desirable. I want to be deliberately provocative here because O’Tuathail’s
book is itself a deliberate provocation not just of geopolitics but of the politics of
geographical discourse, but also because the book is such a powerful statement that
it deserves such a treatment.
There are three critical or evidential strands to this argument, drawing from O’Tua-
thail’s work. The first concerns symptomatic silences and occlusions, the second the
question of visualization, Descartes and panopticism in O’Tuathail’s argument, and
the third addresses the broader arguments of poststructuralism and Foucault vis-à-
vis geography and politics.
The first critical thread examines the symptomatic silences in O’Tuathail’s text,
a tactic that he himself uses to good effect. How and why do certain arguments and
 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371 367

certain political fault lines get read into the interstices and out of the valences of
his authors’ texts when others never appear? What are the exclusions amid the
inclusions; what social codes lurk in the arguments O’Tuathail himself makes? One
of the strengths of Critical Geopolitics is the able divination of gender and racial
assumptions in the ideas and actions of the ‘master’ geopoliticians. He is especially
rich on gender. Mackinder’s “mounting of Mount Kenya” (p. 82) put him among
those “who had ventured forth and disseminated British science on virgin territory”
(p. 83). If at times the result is a somewhat predictable gender-read, nonetheless
O’Tuathail is paving the way for a social critique of geopolitics that is novel and
theoretically rooted. It is striking, however, that his text is at first glance almost
completely silent about other forms of social oppression and exploitation; class in
particular is a gaping hole in the account of the interests that geopolitics stood for.
Geopolitics was and is a text for national leaders, and its major afficionados were
hardly thus unmarked.
Whether born to upper class assumption like Mackinder or Haushofer, or simply
drawn toward it like Ratzel and Bowman, the geopoliticians were every bit as class-
marked as they were white and male. Yet O’Tuathail chooses neither to see nor read
this critical avenue for the deconstruction of geopolitics. Why?
Let me give a concrete example. The poignancy of class is nowhere more loudly
insinuated than in the discussion of Edward Luttwak, a recent proponent of the super-
session of geopolitics by geo-economics. Luttwak bemoans the fact that the United
States is itself becoming a Third World country and cites as evidence the contrast
between the postindustrial swank of DuPont Circle in Washington, DC and the day-
time Third World-like denizens of the same streets — “a knot of unkempt vagrants
who actually live” in the Metro, “which they occasionally befoul in full view of
passersby” and use as a place to beg. Criticizing Luttwak, O’Tuathail sees only that
these “visual shock scenes” assault the “sensibilities of the... white male... Luttwak”
(p. 238). But in this passage, and indeed more widely in his work, Luttwak’s disgust
is more often ambivalent about race and gender while its class antagonism is visceral.
Yet this is precisely the dimension that O’Tuathail’s critique elides with the assump-
tion that it is his vision as “white male” — not any class perspective — that is
the problem.
Reading race and gender into the texts of geopolitics is simultaneously here a way
of reading class out. This antagonism to class is as unnecessary as it is common in
poststructuralist writing. It is presumably of a piece with the glaringly crude carica-
ture of marxism in an otherwise generous and insightful text; marxism is given voice
as such only through an anxious reading into Wittfogel’s 1929 critique of Ratzel.
The point here is not simply to complain about the omission of class. Even less is
it to occlude race and gender and other forms of social difference in favor of class.
Rather, it is to ask why race and gender become privileged while class is excluded.
Since geopolitical discourses of national power are heavily laden with class assump-
tion, what is the rationale for reading this dimension out of the story? What is the
rationale for such a radical forgetting of geneaology? How does a critical geopolitics
choose the social fault lines it admits, and those it banishes?
Second is the ‘vision thing.’ Through a series of insightful readings, most of O’Tu-
368 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371

athail’s geopolitical subjects stand unmasked as ‘ocularcentric.’ In simpler language,

they are ‘visionist’ — they privilege vision over the other senses. More specifically,
they assume a ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ via which a supposedly neutral and disem-
bodied gaze captures a supposedly separate visual objectivity. Mackinder on Mount
Kenya is only the most striking example of a more widespread geopolitical attitude.
But there are some troubling questions here. First, although O’Tuathail says he is
unsure about following Jay’s claim that Cartesian perspectivalism is the “dominant
scopic regime of modernism,” it does this work in practice in his text, lurking in
the gaze of every geopolitician. And, it takes on a somewhat ahistorical aura. If the
details of this perspectivalism may differ — from Mount Kenya to the grand detach-
ment of the CIA’s global geopolitical survey — no geopolitical gaze or practice
escapes its influence. But what might take the place of this ‘visionism’? Reading and
writing are periodically juxtaposed to visualism, but not always in a clear fashion. No
straightforward answer emerges. In the first place, therefore, it is not clear precisely
what the problem is with vision per se. The critique of visualism has itself become
a floating signifier, dislodged from its context and rationale. The issue, surely, is
less visualism as such than the socially imbued substance of that vision.
But in the second place, it is not clear that Critical Geopolitics is not itself the
result of a certain Cartesian perspectivalism. The object of sight here is not so much
the landscape or the globe but the array of pre-existing geopolitical texts viewed and
read by the detached theoretical eye/I. In the reading, this detachment disappears,
of course. O’Tuathail intrudes deliberately and boldly in the texts he discusses pre-
cisely as a means of establishing his own ‘intertextuality’ with the texts he decon-
structs — so much so that in places the argument seems to have more to do with
buttressing the claims of a linguistic poststructuralism than with the details of Spyk-
man’s or Haushofer’s geopolitics. But this is hardly different from precisely the
‘intertextuality’ that he finds his geopolitical subjects intruding into their texts and
which it is his very purpose to reveal and deconstruct. Whether a read or visualized
intertextuality is less the point than who gets to do the reading and viewing, who
gets to fill in the substance. In this sense, critical geopolitics embraces its own panop-
ticism, a Cartesian perspectivalism displaced toward text rather than landscape or
globe.
This leads to the third thread of critique. Reduced to formulaic proportions, it is
ironic that poststructuralism actually tempts a reformed positivism. Insofar as the
critical edge of poststructuralism highlights the inevitable mediation of reality in and
through discourse, it generally also leads to the claim that in lieu of an inaccessible
reality, truth claims are instead concerned with ‘objects’ of discourse. Whatever the
intent, the methodological result of this move is a linguistic abstraction thoroughly
homologous with the construction of ‘facts’ in realist and scientific discourse. Discur-
sive ‘objects’ and ‘sites’ are the new poststructuralist ‘facts,’ supposedly cocooned
from the abyss of reality-speak. But just as with the equally Kantian phenomena-
as-facts of logical positivism, a lot of effort is expended in the insistence that these
factualized ‘objects’ and ‘sites’ of discourse not be confused with reality. A critical
geopolitics rooted in this kind of poststructuralism does not resolve the problem of
how to talk about reality but potentially compounds it. If O’Tuathail’s arguments at
 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371 369

times push in this direction, it is important to point out again that his sensitivity to
the historical material generally wins out. Not everyone writing a critical geopolitics
avoids this trap (see, e.g. Campbell, 1992).

The specter of Michel Foucault

This then brings us to the figure — one might say specter — of Michel Foucault.
The intellectual historical critique of social darwinism is widely known, namely that
the social darwinists appropriated the scientific authority of Darwin to make suppos-
edly scientific claims about social relations while, in fact, Darwin’s own arguments
were already modeled on political economic visions of social competition. I have
always felt that a parallel critique can and must be made of geographical appropri-
ations of Foucault.
Geopolitics has indeed, as O’Tuathail says, become a floating signifier. But
nowhere was this more so that in the postwar France in which Michel Foucault came
of age politically and intellectually. There and then, the violence of geopolitical
practice was a fresh memory and the anxiety of France’s position in the postwar
world was acute. A defeated power with a Vichy hangover, the French state found
itself triangulated globally between Washington and Moscow and regionally between
Britain and Germany. The eventual explosion in Algeria put it squarely in the sights
of decolonization. (Little wonder that the idea of the Third World was an early 1950s
French invention, itself rapidly deconstructed and appropriate by resistors of colonial
oppression.) In any event, I think a good case can be made that this floating signifier
of geopolitics was liberally appropriated by Foucault and that the theoretical architec-
ture of his work on power, knowledge and resistance is thoroughly geopolitical in
genealogy. This is precisely what he signals when he tells us in seeming innocence
that spatial metaphors were an ‘obsession’ for him, and equally what he admits in
the oft-quoted response (never acted on) that “geography must indeed lie at the heart
of my concerns” (Foucault, 1980, p. 77). As free floating signifier, ‘geopolitics’ was
the dominant spatial metaphor of Foucault’s intellectual maturation, readily available
for deconstructive deployment. A widely floating and powerful discourse about
national power was reworked at the scale of the individual and the institution (Katz &
Smith, 1992).
To the extent that such a claim can be sustained — textually, historically, politi-
cally — the appeal to Foucault’s authority concerning spatial relations should give
us real pause insofar as the danger is always there that specific geographical impli-
cations result less from Foucault than from some pre-given geopolitical template.
Yet they are less than critically examined. As such, they risk the same combination
of tautology and back-door universalism that characterized social darwinism. Indeed,
precisely this critique has already been made of Foucault. Spivak, in probably her
most widely read work, noted not only the geopolitical flavor of Foucault’s rendition
of power and knowledge, but also added that his “vision of geographical disconti-
nuity is geopolitically specific to the First World” and quite blind to the plight of
the oppressed and exploited elsewhere. Acutely aware of the power-politics aimed
370 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371

at the insane, incarcerated and inculcated, Spivak is blunt in concluding that the
asylum, the prison and the university are for Foucault, “screen-allegories that fore-
shadow a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism” (Spivak, 1988, pp. 289–
91). Although this observation has not been developed, even by geographers, I think
its implication is that Foucault is a slippery inspiration for building a critical geopoli-
tics. To crib the famous aphorism of one geopolitical practitioner: we should ask
not what Foucault can do for geography, but rather, what geopolitics has already
done for Foucault.
O’Tuathail’s project of combating contemporary realist geopolitical discourses is
one with which I have considerable intellectual and political empathy. We must find
a way of constructing an alternative comprehension of what he calls ‘geo-power,’
at every scale from the individual to the planetary. Who ‘we’ are is of course a large
part of the political question but a question that accentuates rather than evaporates
the concern with collectivity. Eager to avoid simply replacing one geopolitics with
another, regardless of how ‘critical,’ O’Tuathail studiously avoids constructing a
generalized or ‘total’ alternative, preferring instead a ‘tactical’ rather than strategic
response to hegemonic geopolitics. But this is where the limits of the project become
evident insofar as a ‘tactical’ geopolitics is largely if not entirely reactive in addition
to being text-centered. The supposed passivity of Cartesian perspectivalism is again
in danger of being replicated as it is displaced. Critical geopolitics risks being intel-
lectually unsatisfying in a formal, theoretical sense, and at the same time risks
becoming a politically detached textualism. The point here is not that the critique
of ideology is unimportant; it is absolutely vital, a never-ending process, but it is
also insufficient on its own.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the critique of Ratzel bears some rep-
etition today. The hiatus between state and place remains only partly filled in this
proposal for critical geopolitics insofar as specific social relations make an appear-
ance only where parachuted in from the outside. Along with the statesmen, nation-
states are accepted as the central actors in every geopolitics, traditional or critical.
While this is undoubtedly a realistic assumption, one might have expected that a
critical geopolitics would interrogate both the historical construction and contempor-
ary reproduction of nation-states. In fact, whether traditional or critical, geopolitics
as a discourse draws its power from the retention of the nation-state as a certain
kind of black box on the global scene. The construction of the nation-state itself
remains unilluminated in critical geopolitics.
For all its stalinist crudity, Wittfogel’s critique of Ratzel is virtually alone in con-
necting geopolitics to political economy; while imperialism is a major textual pres-
ence in critical geopolitics, the social relations giving rise to imperialism (as opposed
to the social scripting that imperialism does) are largely absent. ‘Economics’ is con-
sidered by O’Tuathail in the context of the contemporary work of Luttwak and Hunt-
ington but there too only as text; there is little more than a page examining the
shifting political economic relations and forces that have put Luttwak’s ‘geo-econom-
ics’ on the agenda. But geo-politics — and geo-economics — is also a crucible
wherein social relations are continually fought out, forged and reforged, and a critical
geopolitics can only succeed to the extent that it simultaneously engages in a dis-
 N. Smith / Political Geography 19 (2000) 365–371 371

cussion and theorization of changing social relations in specific places at specific

times. There is today a prejudice against analyzing and invoking social ‘production’
as a central process of daily experience and change, but precisely the rationale for
a strong focus on social production, broadly conceived, is that in addition to the
economism in which it is shrouded in bourgeois narratives of society, social pro-
duction is the focus of social creation and invention. Eschewing the theorization of
social production may facilitate the avoidance of economism but the cost in terms
of blindness to human creativity and inventiveness is tremendous.

Conclusion

Here I suspect O’Tuathail and I would begin to find agreement again. For regard-
less of whether the specific architecture of his critical geopolitics is viable, the ques-
tions he raises, especially toward the end of the book, are pivotal. Just as geopolitics
changed with the advent of air power and again with nuclear weaponry, how do we
theorize geo-politics after the cold war? How do the altered “lines of geo-power in
the age of virtual geography” — very unevenly experienced — rewrite geo-politics?
What are the material implications of the shift from a geopolitical to geo-economic
world? While I remain less convinced by other aspects of his argument, I think that
if we can connect this work to political economic analyses of global and local change
and steer a different course from Ratzel, the larger questions which O’Tuathail raises
in this book will help to set an agenda for a rethinking of geopolitics as geo-politics
that will go well beyond geography, International Relations and political science.

References

Campbell, D. (1992). Writing security. United States foreign policy and the politics of identity. Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dalby, S. (1991). Critical geopolitics: discourse, difference, and dissent. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, 9, 261–283.
Foucault, M. (1980). Questions on geography. In C. Gordon, Power/knowledge: selected interviews and
other writings, 1972–1977 (pp. 63–77). New York: Pantheon.
Katz, C., & Smith, N. (1992). Grounding metaphor. In M. Keith, & S. Pile, Place and the politics of
identity (pp. 67–83). London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In L. Grossberg, & C. Nelson, Marxism and the interpret-
ation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.