Dreams of Presence

Throughout the twentieth century, the question of culture was a central pillar of social scientific thought. Today, however, the concept has disappeared from the academic landscape. Despite pressing political debates about culture wars, identity politics, cultural appropriation, and nativism, the concept of culture is no longer seen as a credible explanatory tool.

Dreams of Presence provides a novel theoretical approach to the question of culture and will be of use to geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and social theorists grappling to understand why culture continues to be a dominant political force in our contemporary world. Drawing on Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Žižek, Mitch Rose provides an existential, rather than sociological, account of culture, conceptualizing it as a refuge where subjects endeavour to establish ownership over a life that perpetually eludes them. The book argues that culture is a claim; not something subjects ever have but something they desire; not something properly present but a dream of presence: an imagination of identity we cultivate, care for, and materially build in order to assure ourselves that we are sovereign, self-standing beings.

Drawing on contemporary debates in philosophy and cultural theory, Dreams of Presence revives the concept of culture as an existential phenomenon and explores geography's role in making it present as an abiding force in everyday social life.

• Imprint: University of Toronto Press
• Published: December 2024
• Pages: 254

• epub: 9781487569679
• pdf: 9781487569372
• hardcover: 9781487566173

Mitch Rose is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences and a reader in the Graduate School at Aberystwyth University.

“Dreams of Presence is a rare gift – an inspiring and provocative book that invites you to wonder again about a concept at the heart of the social sciences and humanities. Through generous, careful engagement with a wide range of cultural traditions, Rose brilliantly reformulates the problem of culture – asking how and why people care for the worlds they build. His novel answer – that culture is a claim that responds to existential problems of living – makes Dreams of Presence essential reading.”

“With modesty and circumspection, Mitch Rose ambitiously advances a geographical theory of culture in a volume that will attract admirers as well as critics. What will not be the case, I wager, is that it will be ignored. Anyone with an interest in cultural geography – how human and environmental geography address matters of culture and landscape – should be reading (and debating) this book. Dreams of Presence is a significant advance in state-of-the-art research and critical scholarship. It is a brave statement in many ways, and is arguably the first major restatement of cultural geography or, better, culture in geography, for some time.”

“If W.B. Yeats cautions ‘in dreams begin responsibility,’ then Mitch Rose reveals why these inceptions are real, precarious, and fundamental to how we desire, build, and navigate a world we cannot possess. Dreams of Presence gifts us with a remarkable new theory of culture – more a question about claiming than difference – that will not only reawaken geographical debates about subjectivity, meaning, identity, and material practice, but also rouse the stakes of theory itself.”

“If culture as an analytical concept has fallen out of fashion, how then to address the increasing salience of culture wars and identity politics? Mitch Rose brilliantly poses this problem and urges by way of solution that culture be theorized in terms not of essential differences but rather of existential claims, cares and concerns. This book challenges us to consider how dreams and desires—elusive though they must be—enable people to make distinct worlds and thereby manage universal struggles.”