Political Geography 23 (2004) 116 www.politicalgeography.

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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 rst 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. Patricks Day parade conict 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 judiciarys understanding of the relationship between culture, space, and speech. Of particular importance to my argument is the centrality of the First Amendment to the Courts 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-scientic accounting of Political Geography, the agship 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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found only 15 of the 580 articles published since the journal rst 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 subeld which include the state, electoral geography, world-systems, and political economy. It would seem that in mainstream political geography, studies of state processes and practicesstatist approachesremain 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 signicant 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 dierences along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age possesses a dierent sort of weaknessmy own work includedas 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 Tillys denition 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 eect is produced through various symbolic and ideological techniques (1999). I also argue that political geographys continued failure to seriously engage with current

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debates about the relationship between culture and the state will leave it impoverished both theoretically and empirically. In the rst 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. Patricks 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 Abramss 1977 address to the British Sociological Association entitled: The diculty 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 reication 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 signicant realitypolitical, social and otherwiseit 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 unied symbol of actual disunity (p. 79), his piece is still decidedly absent of any sense of human agency or of human symbolic practices
For a contemporary treatment of the MilibandPoulantzas 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 Althussers. In brief, both Abrams and Althusser view the state as an ideological construction and therefore not a material object in its own right.
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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 intensied 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, Foucaults point was that the state is not the source of power but its eect. Timothy Mitchell pushes this notion of the state as a structural eect even further by arguing that the state is the paramount structural eect of the modern social world (1991: 94). And this structural eecta kind of framework that appears to stand apart from the social worldis enabled by dispersed forms of disciplinary powerhuman practices as discourses of knowledge, regulation and disciplinethat 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 briey 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 inuence 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 dierent 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 dierent theoretical sources, I feel it is important to at least introduce these additional theorists as their contemporary inuence has migrated beyond the eld 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). Gramscis 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 eect, 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 practicesconscious and unconsciousthat conditioned
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 congurations 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 regurations 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 reconguration 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 theoristsin anthropology, political science, political sociologywho 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 inuence 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 ocials have to be situated in specic 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 ows running in both directionsand 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 stateamong them the nine chapters in Joe Heymans 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 Guptas 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 Corrigans 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 oers 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 reconguring conceptualizations of the state in order to incorporate the central relevance of social practice is Joe Painters 1995 book Politics, Geography and Political Geography. In his insightful denition 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 Sayers book, The Great Arch (1985). There are three ways, Painter proposes, in which state formation is cultural. The rst 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. 4748). 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. Mountzs approach to understanding the discursive practices and representations behind the rst 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 conicted over its authority and purpose. To return to Timothy Mitchell here: Mountz was able to reveal the state as the eect of practices; practices that are at one level authoritative, but at another open to emotion, desire, interpretation and conict, 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 Rouhanis 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 ocial monitoring of public space in Tehran, Rouhani conceptualizes the middle-class home as a complex political, cultural, and social spacepossibly the only spacewhere tactics of resistance to the states 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 ows that have been critical in shaping new cultural and political identities. Rouhanis work illustrates one of the ways the constitutive features of religio-political rule in a particular time and placerule with explicit spatial manifestations and implicationscan 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 Mulligans 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 les, 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 signicantly 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 specic 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 ner 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 Corrigans 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. Patricks Day parade conict and state response Beginning in 1990, the St. Patricks 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 signicant and widely popular festival day set aside for two celebrations. On that day in 1737, the rst St. Patricks Day parade was held in the city honoring the patron saint of the Irish. By 1776, however, March 17 took on additional signicance 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 rst
5 As I have argued in my previous work, Marston (1991), the signicance 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 ocial sponsor. What is known is that in 1947, the city relinquished its control and awarded the permit to the South Boston Allied War Veterans 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, GLIBan 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. Patricks 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 led a lawsuit against the Council, Wacko Hurley, and the City of Boston, alleging violations of the state and federal Constitutions and the states 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 specic messages or views of each applicant (Hurley vs. GLIB, 1995: 5). The state court rejected all of the Councils arguments and concluded that the parade is not an exercise of [the Councils] 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 courts ruling. The State Supreme Court, agreeing with the lower court that it was not possible to detect a specic 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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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 Courts 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 suer 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. Lets look at the Supreme Court case rst: 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. Patricks Day/Evacuation Day parade as well as in all parades, is by denition, 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 Speakers 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 dene 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 Courts 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 benet 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 ows at the same time that new and changing supranational organizations have stepped into a governing gap that nation-states have been unable to ll. 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 stateand especially political geographerstake culture seriously in their conceptualizations? Wahneema Lubiano provides for me the simplest and most baldly convincing answer
I have identied 42 law review articles focusing on Hurley vs. GLIB published between 1995 and 1999, the period immediately following the decision.
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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 reect 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 states 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 lifequalifying 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 states construction of authoritative frameworks. In States of the Imagination, Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, suggest that we approach the state as a historically specic conguration 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 eect 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 briey to the Hurley case to exercise this argument about legal language. Conicts over the St. Patricks Day parade demonstrate a signicant 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-edged rights. The Hurley decision by the Supreme Court represents the states eorts 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 eld in which antagonistic relations orbit around struggles over social and culturalhence politicalclassications . . . (2001: 26). I would add that the state functions to hardens those classications by setting the terrainliterally and

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gurativelyupon 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 states 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 Courts decision as transferring to the Counciland any other dominant cultural group that sponsors a paradeexclusive 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 issomething immanent and belonging to one group for safekeepingrather 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 liberalisms 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 spaceto 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

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and the University of California, Los Angelesadditional audiences for this lecturewho prompted me to rethink aspects of the paper through their provocative questions and observations.

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