REVIEW ARTICLE SECTION
A BYSMAL : IN THE “B AR DE S AUSSURE ,
THE N IETZSCHEAN HANGOUT WHERE NOT
A MEMBER IS SOBER ”
by
J.-D.C. Dewsbury
Dewsbury, J.-D.C., 2007: Abysmal: in the “Bar de Saussure, the
Nietzschean hangout where not a member is sober”. Geogr. Ann.,
89 B (4): 389–393.
Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographical Reason.
Gunnar Olsson. University of Chicago Press, Chi-
cago 2007. 553+xii pp. ISBN 0-226-62930-0
(cloth).
Confession, mappings, instruments, imaginations,
collation, atlases, requiem and memorials – who
would have a contents page with these headings? A
priest? An artist? A cartographer (and of what cen-
tury, with what tools)? The list as a whole, in its per-
plexing juxtapositions and style, suggests a philos-
opher. What we have is a description of a geogra-
pher. We could leave it there as an instruction for all
us geographers (and how I wish people would read
that). In addition, however, this is a book being pub-
lished in 2007 by an emeritus professor with past
roots and affections for Danish, Italian and Swed-
ish academic communities with as many individual
ties to west coast US geography departments and
colleagues. It could only be by one man, but you
guessed that by the first three of those headings.
Confession
First off, the author of Abysmal, Gunnar Olsson, is
far too modest, having a confession even before the
prelude! Think about it: if you don’t like the con-
fession, or even just its pretension, you might not
read on; by which I mean accept the honesty by
which Olsson reveals his crimes and the implica-
tions these have for the thoughts that are about to
ensue. Believe me, some will not absolve him. We
are though all forewarned: this is a ‘minimalist
guide to the landscape of western culture’ im-
pressed by the ‘tablets of Babylonia’, ‘the Old Tes-
tament, the re-enacted dramas of Homer, So-
phocles, Shakespeare’ (p. xi) where insinuated, in
what is at times beguiling prose, is ‘how the space
cadet eventually turned into a cartographer of the
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © 2007 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
taken-for-granted’ because ‘the most common pur-
pose of human action is to topple truth, not to pre-
serve it’, as ‘it is not enough to render the world as
it is’ given that you ‘must also be believed when’
you do it (p. x). This is about power then, as heady
as the tragedy of King Lear, and a power that rests
in those representations by which the experience of
being, of our standing in awe of being in this world,
is reductively suppressed. Sin not, let go of the re-
pression by thinking seriously for a moment, or 553
pages worth of your time, about how you know. I
fear we are impressionistic creatures – and hence
this is how power works, we are so easily seduced
not to think. Olsson knows this, and he is not al-
ways so kind with us: utilizing the same power of
rhetoric targeted by his academic project. But this
is about how we know. Full stop. How we know.
And how we know shows us who we are. As philo-
sophical as it gets.
I am intoxicated. How do I review this? I don’t
want to review this book. I am drawn to keep on re-
viewing it though; and this keeps me from stopping
to write something about it. It is unique, and I feel
that it will be like that, ready to hand, on my book-
shelf for quite some time. An encounter with
thought, the memory of which draws me back to it
only to be animated again by other perspectives not
seen before – and I have read the Bible, Macbeth
and Mason & Dixon, and more than once. Show me
your compass, and I will tell you who you are, he
says.
So, in what follows I will try to lay out sufficient
presentations of my affections of/for/from it, the
way my encounter with it has infected my thoughts,
to seduce you to come to hold it in your own hands.
Think about your fingers being on the verge of slip-
ping in between the leaves of paper towards the
philosophical aesthetic imaginations of the Abys-
mal held within and on top of its pages (Rothko,
Bacon, Malevich, Caravaggio, Duchamp and Ver-
meer lie in wait). There are hints of Swedish exis-
tentialism here too, only hints though, the fade to
389
 J.-D.C. DEWSBURY
grey of Bergman-esque images; and no Sartre
(thank God (I can say that)), for Olsson is still a
child as Deleuze would have us all. Seduction then:
there is a great new bar in town run by perhaps the
most auteur geographer of them all.
Warning Label, my confession: others will cri-
tique this book for its highbrow content and artistic
taste, its reverence for old masters, for the man in
the author, for its abstraction and pleasure in the
aesthetic over the explicative and for its humour in
place of guidelines for immediate action; whereas
I celebrate this book for what it is. In some ways I
am letting Olsson down, I am not listening to him,
for the foundations of critique are what the book ex-
amines – after all, the film blurb for this epic book
would signal its themes on ‘The most pivotal bat-
tles in the unending struggle over ontological fix-
points, epistemological sightlines and metaphysi-
cal projection screens’. Is it enough to just celebrate
these battles as being the very heart of what makes
us human? For now, yes, and I accept that I am here
a romantic – I am never much of a soldier for more
immediate political enterprises. But what this book
does do is drive you to ruminate, and ruminate I
will. The politics of rumination (might be a damned
one).
Prelude
Above all, Olsson presents in this book his inter-
est in the tragedy of the human condition. In this,
he offers his wisdom as and through a politics of
humour rather than in an ideological fervour; he
is interested in the individual rather than the sub-
ject, in what it is to be human rather than the ques-
tion of identity politics. And in focusing in on
homo sapiens, what concerns Olsson more is the
making of the sapiens rather than the material of
the homo. Further, this also means he is not, like
many contemporary conceptual geographers, in-
terested in the biopolitical; rather his concern is
still the cultural practices which together make us
sapiens, that make us human, that make us know.
And it is this knowing that he cites as cartographic
reason. And it is abysmal. For me, we can dia-
grammatically math this up as s/S, but instead let
us stick to words: how is thinking different from
knowing? Tick-tock, another encounter, life goes
on, hand to mouth, living just like a tick in its
Umwelt; except for the stories we tell. So, the in-
cessant delivery of those fleshy encounters of the
visceral being-there true to all animal life is com-
plicated by a semiotic intelligibility: sense and in-
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Journal compilation © 2007 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
telligence folded in a more intricate manner pro-
ducing the human animal as thought in action
takes place. Semiotic intelligibility creates the
battlefield, the/,the limit, that sets the opposition
between s and S (signified and Signifier), giving
us the possibility to doubt, to argue and to fight as
the simplicity and certainty of a = a is replaced by
a = b; all of which makes the human being abys-
mal and the attempt to map it treacherous for the
sanity of those who venture along its path. Per-
haps, here, we have the grandest of all thought ex-
periments, that of the Bar de Saussure; almost too
grand in that it forgets the modesty of its experi-
ment and becomes a belief system itself. The
maps of this cartographer are those that map the
switch from just thinking to knowing: from the
practical earth to pure reason. To stand at the edge
of the abyss is to really question “how do we
know?” How do we know?
The overall presentation of this knowing is his
alter ego, the Roman God Janus: a figure on the
edge of reason that literally guards the borders of
our conceptual mapping, our knowing, of being
able to know – an ability that makes us the semi-
otic animal. Janus/Olsson as a tightrope walker
who is able to walk the line, the limit of the Bar
de Saussure, where the safety cord is Kierke-
gaard’s edict that ‘we live forwards and under-
stand backwards’; that the unknown of the en-
counter that makes us think becomes a form of
knowing as one is pulled back from the abyss. Ja-
nus then, as the perfect figure for the thought be-
hind the code, behind the thinking, behind the
minimal orientation. Olsson is not then interested
in the material forces of our brain’s synapses but
in the thoughts of imagination, and not necessar-
ily our imagination, as in individually, but in the
relation of that sixth-sense culture which tethers
the vertigo of our immediate orientation as ren-
dered by our five senses.
Although we are seemingly scripted by the
grand stories (so much more than narratives), Ols-
son does not adhere to a fixing in this condition,
and he does not see the conjunctive nature of cul-
ture as something that connects things together,
but rather celebrates the quick of the conjunction
for always adding to an expanding limit. Like De-
leuze indeed, and … and … and …; no boundaries
as such, rather open limits. This is the requiem he
leaves us, the ‘of and in’ of Marcel Duchamp’s
work (p. 367). The (lands)scapes of this open lim-
it are rhetorically bound by the seduction of the
stories we tell. The conjunctive is pre-positional,
© The author 2007
 REVIEW ARTICLE SECTION
an ontological quality of the human as understood
as the semiotic animal, forever inventing ways of
going on. That is not to say that anything goes in
the world Olsson presents here. For sure, you see,
Olsson is interested in memory as the interaction
of mind and matter where it is the aesthetic, the
screen, that presents the “and” here; that makes
the incredible credible, the invisible visible. For it
is not so much in finding another language or vo-
cabulary (a rather stupid, thoughtless enterprise in
any case) but rather in being believed – language
as technique, as an instrument for convincing, not
something existing as an endgame in itself. Is
Abysmal convincing? If not what is its purpose?
How to answer those questions: All this sounds
cerebral, and reasonable, perhaps too Reasonable
(too Kantian), except there is also an impulse be-
hind Olsson’s writings: ‘When one cannot speak,
one must be quiet’, a mission impossible for Ols-
son, and thus it is inverted to ‘When one cannot be
quiet, one must speak’; and speak and write is what
he has done (Olsson 2007, p. 239). That man lying
on his bed staring at the ceiling with thoughts flying
to the cosmos. An impulse and a passion creating a
book quite likely to produce a salty beard in at least
one man (p. xi), although only his tears will have
that extra progenitorial quality and feeling: what
emotion and what a gift lies behind the covers of
this book. It is peculiarly autobiographical
throughout. I am convinced by the man, and there-
fore by his compass.
Mappings
“What” are we trying to map? This is the wrong
question (‘the questions furnish the answers’, Ols-
son 2007, p. 58) – What is mapping? Why map?
Humans map. What is at stake then in critiquing
cartographic reason is the taken-for-granted rela-
tion of the sensible and the intelligible. Overcom-
ing this difference is to move away from meta-
physics, thus overcoming the difference between
the sensible and the intelligible by the mutual im-
plication of the one in the other. This mutual im-
plication is quite literally “going on” – ‘something
in the world forces us to think’ (Deleuze 1994, p.
139). Such implication does not, however, know
how to go on for if it did there would be no phi-
losophy. So Olsson starts the section on Instru-
ments, the chapter entitled the Saussurean Bar,
with Wittgenstein: ‘A philosophical problem has
the form: “I don’t know my way about”’. So in the
Saussurean Bar we have the Signifier (S), the ob-
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © 2007 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
jective world of the material, helixed together with
the signified, the subjective world of the mind – or
as Olsson puts it:
While our immediate contact with the S goes
through the five senses of the body – sight,
hearing, touch, smell, and taste – the s belongs
to the sixth sense of culture … and of course I
want to know the meaning of what I see and
hear, of course I want to find the proper ex-
pressions of my emotions.
(Olsson 2007, p. 80)
Instruments
How do we judge what is proper? How do we move
from different ontological positionings to the em-
pirical realm of politics and political judgement?
How can we judge when we don’t have a shared ba-
sis for judgement? Or what if we do have a shared
basis, just that it is a fiction and it is more our dis-
position to believe in each other that keeps us to-
gether? We are back on/in the Saussurean Bar
where we ask ourselves:
When I legitimate a certain statement by call-
ing it “common sense”, so I then tie myself pri-
marily to the commonalities of the sensibility
of our bodies or to the shared intelligibilities of
our minds? Is it inevitable that once I cut loose
from one scheme, I am caught by another? Can
there even be a sign undressed, a representation
which itself is not a representation?’
(Olsson 2007, pp. 83–84)
It is quite simple: ‘when another human approaches
you – when the measureless remoteness of the un-
known, the unreachableness of the Other, comes up
close to you – you face one bleak choice, either
speak or kill: do what you cannot do, do it without
any ability, or else go right to the extreme farthest
limit of what you can do’ (Smock 2003, p. viii). It
is a question of love and hate rather than judgement
– and an answer is we communicate, and it is the
Saussurean Bar that acts as our prime instrument
for community.
But with fiction at its heart, isn’t it great what the
world can deliver us to? Between pure being and
being there there is the passage; what one might
otherwise site as an ontological fissure, a tear in the
ontological fabric of the world, a cosmological
breath, a Derridean, Deleuzian or Badiouian Event.
Or here the Saussurian Bar: ‘an iconostasis; a sym-
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 J.-D.C. DEWSBURY
bol of categorical change; a name for the unname-
able; the signification of the transition from child to
adult, from clean to unclean, from friend to foe’
(Olsson 2007, p. 85); and in this gap, this tear, ‘it is
our ability to learn to live with difference that
makes the semiotic animal the remarkable creature
we actually are’. So, for me, between ontology and
topoi, there is indeed ‘the interesting abyss be-
tween categories, in the taboo-laden cleft of the ex-
cluded middle’ but how we think it comes about,
how we become ourselves in the thought of it, is of
course different. Now Olsson goes on in this writ-
ing birth to himself, to speak of the horror vacui, the
horror not of the abyss, the wonderful world that is
a bottomless abyss of the excluded middle, but of
the absence of markings, thus to warn: ‘the truth is
that without distinctions our thoughts-and-actions
would have nothing to stick to, our lives nothing to
share’; that without the movement to topoi life
would be literally unthinkable. But somehow we
deal with visible and invisible things, with phe-
nomena sure but also with noumena. And it is for
this that, at the AAG conference in San Francisco
2007, Olsson urged: ‘Our inability to be abstract
enough is our biggest threat – for how else will we
create the new maps of the world given the way
power and meaning is changing today?’
Imaginations
In answer to Olsson’s (2007, p. 213) call to be ab-
stract, use your imagination: ‘The question keeps
returning: how do I find my way in the unknown?
The answer echoes back: By map and compass,
picture and story’. And to expand our abilities here,
Olsson attends directly to the void between the five
senses of the body and the sixth sense of culture; a
maelstrom of forces kept in check in this book by
cartographic orientations of Abr(ah)am, Moses,
Plato and Kant. Such orientations represent the in-
visible maps and internalized compasses construct-
ing the indiscernible taken for granted all angled as
the architecture of human reasoning, an edifice of
geometric coordinations of meaning and identity,
rhetoric and, hence, communication compiling
“thought in action”. It is here that the subtitle of car-
tographic reason gets aired and attributed (to Fran-
co Farinelli). What is at stake, then, is a way of giv-
ing an image of that which is not manifest but none
the less real. This for me is to play up the impor-
tance of philosophy in social scientific enterprise;
to think through the ontological, to have a sense of
what being as such is and that this is different from
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Journal compilation © 2007 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
our actual existence in the world. In other words,
cartographic reason is that which separates, makes
distinct, ontology (pure being) and topoi (being
theres), and what this book does is catalogue in or-
der to untie the various topologies of substance, to
rethink the giving of being in terms of singularity
and spacing. This is the chiasm of thought and ac-
tion (Olsson 1993).
Collation
At the heart of the book, and at the heart of its argu-
ment (especially for those who wish it to have a po-
litical purchase), is a discussion of power in all its ab-
stract purity (Olsson 2007, p. 244). However, the
book is not as abstract as one might think, taking care
to place such abstractions in the historical period of
today (p. 247). Hence the contextualization of his
philosophy: ‘we are even beginning to suspect that
the excluded middle of the excluded middle might
have escaped from the Renaissance lines of modern-
ism and taken refuge in the Baroque folds of post-
modernism.’ No surprise really, his career lived
through those postmodern debates in the 1980s and
1990s. Perhaps within the clamour of these debates
he was able to get his esoteric voice heard; however,
that would be doing a disservice to the grandeur, plan
and sweep of his aesthetic, intellect and passion:
when this avuncular uncle speaks it pays to listen.
Atlas: Nicaea
Let us go right back to the beginning: ‘What does it
mean to be human?’ – out of the chaosmos “we”
come. The world appears in so many ways though
and there is a broader spectrum between animal and
human, and I wonder whether Abysmal is the geo-
graphy book of the twentieth century, where in the
twenty-first century the edge that draws us closer to
our animality is much sharper than rendered here.
But equally, that is unfair – damn perspectives right
‘What I happen to see depends on where I happen to
stand’ (Olsson 2007, p. 131); and Olsson says his
book does not discuss ‘the biological evolution
through which homo became sapiens, a knowing
man, but rather explores those cultural practices
which together make us sapiens’ (p. 5). But I just
want to pause on bodies, our physical location in the
world. A body in a topos. More explicitly, an exis-
tential, fleshy perishable matter that desires – exis-
tential because appearing in a topos, fleshy because
it is biological, perishable because phenomenologi-
cally we are framed by death, matter because we are
© The author 2007
 REVIEW ARTICLE SECTION
forcefully present, of desires because we are ani-
mals. But then, performatively, we need to think
back to the tear, the coming into being of the world,
the excluded middle: flesh, incarnated. For me, I am
thinking Olsson in relation to someone who is absent
from the book, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)
and to this site of the body, of a fundamental ambiv-
alence in our Western, Christian culture whereby,
the desire to see, touch, eat, and thus partici-
pate in or in a certain sense be the body of
Christ, is predicated on the anguish inspired
by the Holy Body’s invisibility, intangibility,
and absence. What is taken as a rendering
present in the “here” of spirit and of the abso-
lute, in fact emerges as something like a pres-
ence which is at the same time an absence, a
proximity which implies distance, a touch
which implies infinite separation.
(James 2006, p. 134)
As bodies we are always exposed, exposed in the be-
ing-to of sense, the sensible, we never return to our-
selves because of this exposure in its open-ended re-
lational spacing or sharing. Equally, in this Christian
tradition, there is the obsession of naming, of mak-
ing something present, here and now, that which is
none the less something that cannot be seen or
touched elsewhere. Diagrammatically, incarnation,
or more prosaically everyday touch, is the passage
between the ontology of spirit, thought, mind, soul
if you will, and topoi, the spacings of bodies and
flesh – and of course the event, the overcoming of
metaphysics, word made flesh. Nancy’s and Ols-
son’s work share the politics of irredentism drawing
more of the ontological (spirit) into the topoi by
pushing the limits of signification further: present-
ing a praxis and ethics for geography in their style of
thinking. As such part of the problem is overcome,
for we now question the direction in which sens(e)
runs, from the sensible to the intelligible or the in-
telligible to the sensible, or in both directions at once
(as Deleuze (1990) would have it). Olsson’s book is
heretic in pointing out that the Christian power fix-
ing is equally prevalent in modernity having ‘Rein-
carnation run backwards. Flesh turned to word, mat-
ter to meaning’ (Olsson 2007, p. 138).
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © 2007 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
Memorials (from/to Olsson)
In conclusion, I want to site the importance of the
point Olsson makes when urging us to think pre-
cisely on the fact that we are animals with life that
code our relationships with other life in becoming
human. Our failure to think the ways in which we
code these relationships is the single point that cries
out for politics: that is why I want us to witness the
tears emanating from this great book, and conclude
by reiterating six key steps to the abyss – come
dance, swagger, with us!
1. Think seriously for a moment about how you
know.
2. We are working with expanding limits not fixed
boundaries.
3. What is at stake is the fiction we tell of the re-
lation between the sensible and the intelligible.
4. The abyss between categories is why we com-
municate.
5. It is human to need a way of giving an image of
that which is not manifest but nonetheless real.
6. Sense works in both directions: flesh to mean-
ing, meaning to flesh.
J.-D.C. Dewsbury
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, BS8 1SS
United Kingdom
E-mail: jd.dewsbury@bristol.ac.uk
References
DELEUZE, G. (1990): The Logic of Sense. The Athlone Press,
London.
DELEUZE, G. (1994): Difference and Repetition. The Athlone
Press, London.
JAMES, I. (2006): The Fragmentary Demand. Stanford Univer-
sity Press, Stanford, CA.
NANCY, J.-L. (2000): Corpus. Éditions Métailié, Paris.
OLSSON, G. (1993): ‘Chiasm of thought-and-action’, Environ-
ment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 (3): 279–294.
OLSSON, G. (2007): Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographical
Reason. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.
SMOCK, A. (2003): What is There to Say? University of Nebras-
ka Press, Lincoln, NE.
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