Envisioning Human Geographies

Paul Cloke, Philip Crang, Mark Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780340720127
• eBook ISBN: 9781134664931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Bringing together many of the leading human geographers from around the English-speaking world, Envisioning Human Geographies offers a series of personal visions for the future of human geography. The result is a vigorous and far-sighted debate about what human geography could and should be concerned with in the twenty-first century.The individual contributors develop their arguments to address the shape and direction of human geographies, with each chapter looking forward and envisioning an intellectual future for the subject. The result is a set of powerful statements written around the themes of: ·space·nature ·enclosure ·political-economy·non-representation ·post-colonialism ·feminism·post-structuralism ·computation·morality·spirituality ·activism. The statements are tied via an introduction that discusses the ideological, academic and aesthetic prompts that fire the human geographical imagination.Envisioning Human Geographies maps out important new territories of enquiry for human geography, and is essential reading for all students studying the nature and philosophy of the subject.

1
Space and substance in geography

Neil Smith

‘The “fetishism of space,”’ wrote James Anderson (1973, p3) in a highly influential argument, ‘is the geographer’s particular conceit’. The critique was aimed at a scientific geographical tradition that drew increasingly sophisticated and abstract depictions of spatial forms and relationships, but that often confused spatial form for social cause. It explicitly adapted Marx’s critique of ideology embodied in the notion of the fetishism of commodities. According to Marx, the substantive social relations between different groups of people working under different conditions to make specific commodities is obscured in the purely quantitative relationship between the different prices of the commodities; the relationship between people comes to appear as a relationship between the things themselves. That is, the commodities themselves, material or otherwise, are fetishised. According to the spatial corollary, the social relations between people come to be represented as the relations between places; here, the places become fetishised. A popular illustration might involve poverty: to the extent that social analysts explain poverty as resulting from where people live – ghettoes reproduce poverty – rather than focusing on its social causes in terms of class, race, gender and other social and political relations, spatial fetishism disguises social causes. A related if more contemporary example is the so-called spatial mismatch thesis. According to this argument, concentrations of unemployment are explained in terms of a ‘spatial mismatch’ between the location of jobs and the location of able workers, rather than as a result of social differences. Not least because of Anderson’s critique, emerging radical geographies have long conceived their task as an exploration of the dialectics of space and society in a way that would simultaneously respatialise social theory (and in the process reveal much about social and political relations) and, at the same time, socialise the spatial discourse of geography. The point was to recentre geographical space politically without, at the same time, falling foul of the fetishism of space.

In this chapter I want to reflect on the success of that project and, by so doing, to think about the direction spatial theory has taken in recent decades, and to reflect on some key emerging problematics in the treatment of space. In part, the argument will be historical: it is important to understand the origins of the so-called spatial turn wherein the entire language of social theory has been spatialised, but it is also vital to understand the limits to that shift. This will involve some reflection on different philosophical conceptions of space, but will also lead to a consideration of the seminal work of French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, who stands as a central figure in the spatial turn. A critical take on one aspect of Lefebvre’s treatment of space, and especially a treatment of space vis-à-vis nature, will highlight the incompleteness of the spatial turn and suggest directions for future analysis by geographers. In particular, it strikes me that some deployments of spatial concepts in recent social and cultural theory risk replicating a certain spatial fetishism, and that an insistence on the connections between space and nature – space and the substance that fills it – will help to fulfil the promise of a respatialisation of social theory.

There is little doubt, in retrospect, that the respatialisation of social theory has enjoyed tremendous success in the last three decades. True, the mainstream discipline of geography at the beginning of the twenty-first century seems oddly drawn into a self-fulfilling spiral of mutually re-enforcing conservatism and self-doubt: while British geographers have reclaimed the ‘royal’ as part of their professional identity, in the United States, the purported ‘shame’ of ‘being a geographer’ dominates the century’s earliest presidential pronouncements about the prospects for geography (Golledge, 2000). The much vaunted successes of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in helping to realise the dream of a positivist revolution in geography seems to have exacerbated more than abated the disciplinary angst, especially in US geography. Yet all of this takes place light years away from the pursuit of social theory in geography. Our various concerns with space as socially produced have become a pervasive and powerful theme throughout the social sciences and humanities. The success of social theory and the disorienting angst of mainstream geography are not unconnected, of course, and this is well illustrated in signs of an emerging backlash against social theory. By contrast, however, the sense of optimism among social theorists in geography – and, it has to be said, among many physical geographers too – is quite divergent from any institutional malaise and is rooted in real successes. Our intellectual experience with geography and space comes from a dramatically different world from the one that re-echoes disciplinary insecurities of past decades. When Oxford literary critic Terry Eagleton (1997) argues that geography ‘now looks set to become the sexiest academic subject of all’, he is referring to social and cultural theory and the effects that 30 years of vibrant theoretical exploration vis-à-vis space have had in the social sciences and humanities. More to the point, Eagleton seems more in touch with the discipline’s place in the intellectual world than many of the discipline’s own institutional leaders.

The situation today is remarkably similar to that of a century ago. Then, too, expressions of angst about the imminent ‘end of geography’ mixed with signs of its recrudescence. The end of geography was thought by many to follow logically from the results of economic expansion – the supposed closure of colonial and polar exploration, along with continental frontiers – while the subsequent conflagration of World War I and the remaking of the world map that ensued gave geography considerable urgency and topicality. Fears of the end of geography today are usually linked with a more abstract, if equally real, ‘globalisation’, this time financial rather than immediately territorial. But they come at a time when, in social and cultural theory circles at least, geography is increasingly fashionable (Smith, 2003).

Spatial concepts increasingly provide the grammar of the most innovative social and cultural theory today, from many threads of historical research to French social theory, postmodernism to literary criticism, and there are many interconnected reasons for this. Deep-seated critiques of historicism (the belief that history is the unchallenged determinant of social form), the shattering of a twentieth-century geo-economic order and its constitutive geographical assumptions, the restructuring of spatial scale, the promise of a new globalism and local responses to it, a rediscovery of spatial language as a highly fertile source domain for metaphor and a distinctly spatial interpretation of newly fashionable issues of representation have all contributed to this recrudescence of a spatialised reading of social change and form. The renaissance in critical geography is a part of this dramatic shift, both fuelling and fuelled by it. The pervasiveness and wide public appeal of GIS is traditionally explained as resulting from the enhanced possibilities for representing spatial data attendant upon widespread computerisation technologies, and important as this technical revolution has been, the public embrace of GIS is aesthetic and cultural as well as instrumental, equally an expression of this new spatial imaginary.

While geographers have an obvious self-interest in promoting space as a vital language of social and political power, the spatialisation of social theory nevertheless provokes a number of questions. In the first place, while fashionability is obviously preferable to obscurity, the new focus on space is not without its own dangers. There is a crucial question of the extent to which this ‘spatial turn’ has been more than skin deep. How thoroughly has the spatial turn ploughed up the roots of a centuries-old historicism? How firmly is the new spatialism implanted? Put most crudely, perhaps, why space? Why should our analysis of social difference and political possibility be rewritten in the language of space? It is time, in short, to re-examine with a critical eye the history of the spatialisation of social theory, and perhaps to do so while keeping in mind the possibility that despite the roots of this project in an explicit critique of fetishism, we may yet have reached a point where that same social theory tempts its own, more sophisticated spatial fetish. These are questions that centrally involve those of us trained as geographers, but they are also, as I want to argue here, of such profound significance that they cannot be boxed in by narrow disciplinary interests and claims.

A spatial turn?

In 1973, the prospect that a so-called spatial turn would take hold of late-century social and cultural theory would have been dismissed as idle disciplinary fantasy or simply treated with derisive laughter (see Soja, 1989). Such a shift has taken place nonetheless, and it is nothing short of remarkable. The influence of spatial and geographical ideas throughout wide spectra of the intellectual landscape is unmistakable. Eagleton’s exuberant assessment is one expression of this. More broadly, scholars are recasting their work in explicitly spatial terms. From numerous disciplines – anthropology and architecture, comparative literature and communications, environmental science and art history, diplomatic history and music, sociology and international relations – young scholars especially are retooling their projects in more explicitly spatial terms. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that in many fields space has become the ‘next big thing’.

It is tempting to see this as part of a larger intellectual movement; certainly it is contributing to the institutional restructuring of various disciplines (even as institutionalised geography itself remains strangely impervious or deliberately resistant). But it is not simply an academic phenomenon either. Just as campus feminism and identity politics, to take two obvious examples, have significantly affected popular culture since the 1980s – even as they themselves were products of the revolts of earlier decades – the spatialisation of popular cultural discourse also expresses a much more thoroughgoing shift. There are many signs of this. The debates on the public sphere and cosmopolitanism that have galvanised the public intellectual wing of the humanities since the 1990s are heavily undergirded by a renewed spatial vision of the world, although this is not always made explicit. The journals Public Culture and Social Text increasingly mobilise a geographical nitty-gritty as the fabric of theory. Andrew Ross, one of the most prominent of a new generation of public intellectuals in the 1990s, has published a series of books rooted in a highly geographical if not always acknowledged sensibility: Strange Weather (1991), The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (1994) and No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997). David Harvey’s (1989) Condition of Postmodernity was nominated as one of the top 25 books of 1989 by the Village Voice, and a few years later listed by the British magazine New Statesman and New Society, as one of the top 100 books of the second half of the twentieth century.

The point here is not to rehearse the historical fact, or contribute to some self-satisfied celebration of the emerging success of a broadly geographical vision of the world. Rather, we are now at the point where a little critical reflection on the success of the spatial turn is important. In some ways, the importance of this critical distance from our own success is placed in sharpest relief by certain popular books that mobilise this new geographical sensibility. David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1998) have been two of the most prominent bestsellers in this genre. Each book in its own way gives a wide historical explanation to geographical difference, the reasons why different societies experience such different economic fates, why some places grow rich while others stagnate. Their answers are couched very much in terms of geography, to the point where they indulge a certain geographical determinism – old-style spatial fetishism. To these works we might also add the rather ill-informed work of economist Paul Krugman (1997), who at least deserves credit, in the context of his chosen profession, for recognising however dimly that the spatiality of markets may actually have some relevance in terms of how they work.¹

Thirty years ago, such books would not have been written, or if they were they would not have received notice. Geography was dead: progressive US global leadership had eliminated geography (except as expressed in the aberrant, trivial binaries of cold war geopolitics) as a determinant of global fates; world geography was the product of markets and markets know no geography. Arguments such as Landes’ and Diamond’s would have been written off as un-modern. To be modern was to be beyond geography. But to paraphrase historian of science Bruno Latour from a quite different context, if aspatiality is modernity, we are not and have never been modern. Geography today is very much alive, and the resurgence of geographical sensibilities has opened the door not just for the more sophisticated analyses of geographical space, but for more deterministic readings that hark back to absolutist notions of space.

If the popularity of these and other books bespeaks a ‘geography redux’, it also expresses a potentially more troubling development. One can imagine, for example, that as the spatial turn becomes established, a new generation of critics will use the gaping logical and conceptual holes in such determinist works to challenge not only the veracity of specific texts but the advisability of the whole spatial turn itself. Geographers will be held up as having become inexplicably influential if dramatically wrongheaded, while the carousel of fashionable academic topics moves rapidly on to the next ‘next big thing’.

There are already signs of this. Literary critic Kristin Ross (1996) has argued that the spatial turn is already, to all intents and purposes, over. Been there done that. Further, she warns, for all that a new spatiality heralded a progressive critique of social and literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and was instrumental in the establishment of a broadly left-oriented academic culture in this period, there is no necessary link between a spatial language and progressive politics. She cites the case of late nineteenth-century France where, following ignominious defeat to the Prussian army in 1870, a revanchist nationalism instantiated a geographical grammar for reconstructing a sense of French national pride and superiority. This was, not coincidentally, a period of major institution building for geography, an era in which the modern university discipline of geography was largely established, not just in vanquished France but in Bismarckian Germany, where the utility of geography for the new imperial ambition was all too obvious.

Ross is correct to remind us about the easy affiliation of a spatialised lexicon with quite varied political positions, and the case of late nineteenth-century France is an important corrective to some contemporary assumptions about the politics of space. More generally, whether in their modern disciplinary form or otherwise, geographical knowledges, whatever else they have been, have generally operated as handmaidens of state power. Viewed this way, therefore, the assumption of a broadly progressive shift allied with a turn to spatial concerns is an historical oddity to say the least, and we might do well to appreciate Ross’s scepticism.

And yet there is more to the question than that. Current declarations of the end of the spatial turn can hardly be referring to a successful rewriting of all social science to incorporate a hitherto missing spatial purview. That project has only just begun, and whole continents of academic and non-academic knowledge remain closed to anything other than trivial spatial interpretation. Political science, for example, is rooted in a largely fixed vision of different territorial states which divide the world, but this basic spatial structure to the discipline and its objects of analysis does not then guarantee a sophisticated spatial approach. Quite the opposite: the fixing of space in the form of the taken-for-grantedness of national states is a means of assuming space away; spatial relations are reduced to relatively obvious questions of a ‘geopolitics’ that is not only conceptually trivial but historically superceded. New departures in international relations theory seek to renovate this elementary conceptual framework, but the fierce resistance from within political science suggests precisely how far the spatial turn has yet to go. Likewise, the spatialised language of much urban sociology is under institutional attack on the one hand, and on the other rests on a too simple assumption of spatiality into the notion of community.

Rather, it seems that declarations of the end of the spatial turn are responding to the pervasiveness of the language of space and, with a keen eye on the short life of fashionable ideas in cultural theory today, and an equally keen sense of the ‘endism’ (the end of everything) that accompanies it, they may simply be getting a jump on the ‘next new thing’. If we leave aside the more euphoric and hubristic claims for the spatial turn, and especially those that confuse spatial metaphor and materiality, it is surely evident that while this turn has been greeted with far greater support and success than could have been dreamed of in the 1970s, it has only just begun to scratch the conceptual surface of how we think about the world. Yet such overblown claims for the spatial turn, if taken seriously, have the self-defeating effect of suggesting that ‘everything is over before it has hardly begun’ (Agnew, 1995, p380).

There is also a disciplinary dimension to the question of the spatial turn. It is perhaps not surprising that initial signs of disquiet over claims for the spatial turn are coming from literary criticism, comparative literature, humanities p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Space and substance in geography
• Chapter 2 Engaging ecologies
• Chapter 3 Enclosure: a modern spatiality of nature
• Chapter 4 Recovering the future: a post-disciplinary perspective on geography and political economy
• Chapter 5 Summoning life
• Chapter 6 Postcolonial geographies: spatial narratives of inequality and interconnection
• Chapter 7 Feminist geographies: spatialising feminist politics
• Chapter 8 Poststructuralist geographies: the essential selection
• Chapter 9 Computing geographical futures
• Chapter 10 Morality, ethics and social justice
• Chapter 11 Deliver us from evil? Prospects for living ethically and acting politically in human geography
• Chapter 12 Activist geographies: building possible worlds
• Index