Escaping the Herbarium: A Critique of Gunnar Olsson's “Chiasm of Thought-and-Action”

Abstract

Olsson's recent paper “Chiasm of thought-and-action” represents a patriarchal form of ‘thought-and-action’. It provides a clear illustration of Rose's argument that masculinist geographical knowledge remains held in tension between voyeurism and narcissism. Although it would seem to cast itself as a bold Nietschzean struggle against the norms of bourgeois culture, Olsson's writing effectively reaffirms the masculinist imperialism upon which such culture is predicated. It exemplifies how the libertine's rebellion remains limited within certain phallogocentric battlements that it only succeeds to further entrench. This critical argument—borrowed in part from the critique of Lacan by the French feminist Irigaray—introduces other questions about Lacan also applicable to Olsson's writing concerning the work of the French psychoanalyst. In particular, the way in which Lacan's account of subjectivity seems to dehistoricise and fix the fate of a universalised ‘subject’ within a world stilled by symbolicism would appear to find a reflection jubilantly seized and extended in the insubstantial shape of Olsson's diagrams of human action. These reified spatial abstractions are nonetheless open to critical receding as recent feminist, lesbian and gay theories have shown. Such recoding indicates how critical theory—despite a widespread antitheoreticism that is vindicated by papers like Olsson's—might still assist any project to escape the dessicated and dead ends collected together in something like the herbarium dreamt as the “Chiasm of thought-and-action”.