Geography as Social Theory

Geography is the study of relations between society and nature, space being the surface expanse of natural environment worked up by social forces into humanized landscapes. It became apparent that this relation is part of a broader and even more fundamental relation between mind and matter, or culture and nature, and that issues of some significance, like the natural or spiritual origins of consciousness, and the character of representations of people and earth, are involved in geographical understanding. To conceptualize space and nature, two main philosophical approaches were explored: idealism and realism.

Moving further, there is concern on how space is remade by human action, how it is represented in mind, discourse and culture, and how representations relate to human actions in space. The primary sense of space is not abstract and geometric but embodied - there is a fundamental spatiality embedded in existence. The hermeneutic of space searches for an ontological, existential understanding of the universal structural characteristics of human spatiality as the precondition for understanding more exact places and spaces.

Space is transformed by social forces acting under the influence of social relations, so that socialized space is a class phenomenon, a gendered phenomenon in socialist feminism. Structuralist theories, such as that of the early Castells, specify the component parts of the production of space using the organizing concept of mode of production: hence, there are economic, political, and ideological spaces articulated differentially. Here the tendency is towards an increased emphasis on ideas, ideologies, discourses, and concepts a s forces in the transformation of natural expanse into social space.

What came to be known as humanistic geography derived much of its considerable critical power from existentialism and phenomenology. Both had long histories of criticism, both were reconstructive in the philosophical and social theoretical senses. The existential phenomenological critique rejects the Cartesian dualism between mind and body underlying Enlightenment rationality and its most famous offspring, positivist science. For existential phenomenologist, Cartesian dualism misinterprets the subject by emphasizing rational consciousness at the expense of emotional subjectivity and bodily presence, reduces objects to the measurable qualities of things, and mischaracterizes subject-object relations by careless removal from everyday experience into a never-never-land of abstract observation. Existential phenomenology wants to return people, including scientists, to the study of the life world, the historical field of lived experience, in a cathartic spasm of rebirth and renewal - in two senses: as a kind of democratization of the objects and processes of study, and in the sense of life world as primary constituent of thought world. Here, ‘Scientific Methods’ becomes ‘Hermeneutics‘, a science of ‘Interpretation‘, source of understanding rather than abstract knowledge, a science of possibilities at its best.

Humanistic geography interprets life world as the contextualization of experience in place, with place conceptualized not as point in space, nor even landscape, but as community, field of care, centre of significance, all linked formatively and reflexively to human identity. Such a reconceptualization transforms space into a mosaic of places, an entirely different surface than the abstract space of positivist geography -indeed, nowhere can we see more clearly the effects of beginning from a different philosophical viewpoint than in the differences between existential place and positivistic space. Yet also there are problems with a humanistic geography of places, problems which have their origins exactly in existential phenomenology. For the human relation to place is phrased far too frequently in the ghostly terms of ’deep spiritual and psychological attachment’, while the literature resounds with a lexicon of experience, meaning, intention, and sense, all terms easier to use than to say what they mean (except that hey sound nice). Particularly difficult is the notion of an inherent intentionality, not as struggle to survive, nor even as vitalist dynamic essence, but as a spiritual urge to bestow meaning - here, medieval mysticism survives in the modern theory of the subject, again, for all its talk of intersubjectivity and community, humanistic geography has little conception of social relations and therefore little idea of spatial relations.

Some social practices and relations are fundamental in the sense that they allow existence to take place and change. These are the basic activities of social reproduction, practices which enable the material production of life, those physically producing bodies, necessary objects, places to live. Yet this statement of position does not reduce life to its direct production; it is merely a starting point from which analysis proceeds. During material activity, within the confrontations and contradictions of the making of social life, meanings emerge and ideologies are constructed, all under conditions of domination: hence, consciousness comes to express domination in multiple, ideological ways. Thus are societies interpreted through the lens of social reproduction. Nature is seen as origin and source of the production of existence, space is the medium in which reproductive relations occur, life elements an practices happen in places bound together through social relations. In this way, geography is integrated into critical social theory - indeed, placed at the heart of a materialist understanding of the world and its peoples; with this too, geography matured as a discipline.

A view postmodern emerges in its incredulity towards met narratives of any kind, but especially those central beliefs of critical modernism - universal truth, justice, rationality, liberation, causality, aand even coherence. Instead, postmodernism looks to the margins, to forgotten or subjugated narratives, to difference rather than similarity - thus in the extreme, intensities, and becomings. Yet even this proposes still the possibility of a creative critical response to the modern world. With other theorists, postmodernity is a universe of nihilism, where meaning of any kind has long since disappeared, and people float in a void of prescribed sign pleasure and dominating sign objects. The reaction of Anglo-American intellectuals to t his wild beast of a post-modern philosophy is to tame it by rephrasing the postmodern as an historical period, or condition of late capitalism and therefore explainable in economic terms.

If geography is about difference in contexts of similarity then it has much to learn from feminist thought. For the notion of difference is debated fiercely by feminists originally in terms of differences with men, increasingly in terms of differences within the different. And if contemporary human geography is involved in a search for different epistemologies, then again it has much to learn, for t he critique of conventional science - this time as masculinity scarcely disguised, or as false universality - again has a long, contentious history in feminist thought. Feminist geography begins to construct an alternative paradoxical space, proposing to use critical methods. In this developing feminist conception, place identities are unfixed, contested, multiple and places open and porous, far different from the places of humanism, the space of positivism. Yet such notions, contested, multiple are yet to be specified, ideas whose evolution is often retarded by too stifling a political correctness.

Thus, geography exits modern knowledge in a form which resembles its entry, interest in difference if not in differentialtion, but with thinking at a level which demonstrates the influence of a succession of philosphies, at a level which shows its entry into modern, and now post modern social theory.

The ghost of Kant haunts the geographical imagination as a spectre rising from the intellectual graveyard. As a careful review of the social construction of nature by Judith Gerber (1997:3) concludes, overcoming the original Cartesian dualism between nature and society entails not only changes in language and categories but requires investigation of the ‘complex processes at work when the physical, the mental and the social interact.’ Soja (1996) argues that mainstream geography has a dual mode of thinking: first space, fixed on the concrete materiality of spatial forms; and secondspace , conceived in ideas about space (cognitive representations). Another form of spatial awareness emerging, a thirding of the spatial imagination simultaneously real, imagined, and more : hence, the notion of thirdspace. Including paradoxical spaces which dissolve divisions between mind and body, metaphorical and real, and space as ‘dynamic simultaneity’ (Massey 1994), the lived world as simultaneous multiplicity of intersecting spaces held precariously together by relations of paradox or antagonism.

Thus there is two current positions: a poststructural discursive idealist conception of space, in which imaginaries structure multiple spaces; and a radical humanist discursive materialist view, in which imaginaries arise from prior real spaces to help structure the practices currently altering contemporary spaces. While both schools have conceptions of absolute, relative, and relational spaces, the tendency is for absolute space to recede from the geographical memory, and relative a and relative and relational spaces (represented, representational, and materially altered) to fascinate this area of social thought. Geography is changed almost beyond recognition in style and sophistication, yet it is dominated still by ancient themes.

Derived from:
Modern Geographical Thought, Richard Peet, 1998, Blackwell Publishers
T.Putnam, G. Robertson, and L. Tickner, Mapping the futures. London: Routledge, 59-69
Massey, D. and J. Allen 1984. Geography matters, A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press
Merton, R.K. 1968 Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press
Lyons, J. 1973. Structuralism and linguistics. In D. Robey, Structuralism: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5-19
Livingstone, D. 1992, The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell
Mackenzie, S. and D. Rose 1983. Industrial change, the domestic economy and home life. In J. Anderson, S. Duncan, and R. Hudson, Redundant Spaces: Industrial Decline in Cities and Regions. London: Academic Press, 155-99
Johnston, R.J. 1983 Philosophy and Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold
Kierkegaard, S. 1936, Philosphical Fragments. Princeton: Princeton Univ Press
Harvey D. 1969, Explanation in Geography. London: Arnold
Macmillan, B. Remodelling Geography. Oxford: Basil Blackwell