Go figural: crop circle research and the extraordinary rifts of landscape

Abstract

In recent years, cultural geographers have begun to scrutinize the relationships between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. These studies assert that the ordinary and extraordinary are not fixed and discrete, but rather, mutable and connected. The main goal of this article is to explore how landscape can combine the ordinary and the extraordinary by reflecting on my participation in the 2017 Summer Lectures Crop Circle Conference in Devizes, England, and drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s work, Discourse, Figure (1971). My argument is that crop circles and the conference participants’ research practices landscape the ordinary and extraordinary by magnifying disruptive yet alluring rifts ( écarts) between textual acts of reading and visual acts of seeing. I illustrate how such rifts, which Lyotard aligns with ‘figural space’ ( l’espace figurai), occur on and off the conference site as follows: first, through an awkward slowness demanded by drawing crop circles in a sacred geometry workshop; second, as a result of the opaque thickness of the local countryside wherein researchers struggled to locate crop circles in fields and navigate country lanes; and third, in the operations of desire in group consciousness workshops that propelled disagreements over how to access the sacred. The article concludes by acknowledging some of the limitations of my reading of figural space, as well as some reasons why we should ‘go figural’ in cultural geography.