Andrew's Wiki
Postmodern Geogrphies

Annotated Bib

In this book, human geographer Edward Soja takes as his central theme �the reassertion of a critical spatial perspective in contemporary social theory and analysis� (1), a reversal of the tendency of the last century of social theory (particularly Marxist-inflected theories) to emphasize history, that is, time, as the most fruitful way to assess cultural phenomena. Taking cues from Foucault, Lefebvre, Berger, Giddens, and Jameson, he means to create a critical methodology that �flowers from the resonant interplay of temporal succession and spatial simultaneity� (3). Notably, Soja attempts to disrupt social science�s common privileging of temporality even at the level of form by disrupting the sequence of the typical narrative (and therefore temporal) arrangement of text in order to avoid the �linguistic despair� (2) of describing space through words. For example, by beginning his book with a �Preface and Postscript,� and by ending it with the free-form essay that holds the key to his methodology, Soja attempts to show what geography-minded philosophers really mean by asserting that a text is spatially, rather than temporally, arranged. As for content, Soja first reinterprets the history of social theory as split into fifty-year increments that echo the development of consumer capitalism and involve a dialectics of history, geography, and society, with a radical break occurring in the 1960s due to a revaluation, as a response to the fracturing of social science fields, of the importance of geography as a field determined by ideology and distributions of political power. Theory-heavy investigations of urbanity and of the geographical mapping of the uneven development of capitalism give way to Nicos Poulantzas- and Anthony Giddens-inspired discussions of space at the level of ontology, which he argues is perhaps the central project for the reassertion of space in social theory. These discussions emphasize the materiality of space and assert that space is simultaneously a product of and a contributor to social organization. One of his most important assertions, then, is that we must avoid seeing space as a dead, fixed, concrete physical entity or as a merely an abstract fiction entirely the product of social forms.
Furthermore, the existential element of this argument resituates the place of the human within space, positing a �topos attached to being-in-the-world�a multi-layered geography� (8) that takes account of both the space of the human body and the space of local human community. This account, then, helpfully stretches our idea of the space-to-be-theorized as not just the postmodern urban spaces, but as a complex combination of bodies and minds, local spaces, and regional/national/international spaces. Extended discussions of Los Angeles append these theoretical investigations, yet these essays look so much like current human geography essays and postmodern investigations of urban landscape that Soja does not actually take full advantage of the ontological insights of the earlier chapters.

Soja, Postmodern Geographies

Preface and Postscript

• We must tamper w/time to make “lateral” connex
  • Relations and meanings tied together spatially require us to end tyranny of time
  • “discipline imprinted in a sequentially unfolding narrative…mak[es] it difficult to see the text as a map, a geography of simultaneous relations”
• “the reassertion of a critical spatial perspective in contemporary social theory and analysis”
  • against last century’s time-ophilia (esp in Western Marxism and social sciences): time and emancipation, they say, work in history
    • root of it in 19th c historicism
  • soja: “the ‘making of geography’...provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world”
    • so that you “break out from the temporal prisonhouse of language” b/c it’s successive
• Method: “resonant interplay of temporal succession and spatial simultaneity” 3
  • history, “long waves” model of Ernest Mandel, Eric Hobsbawm
• Influences: Foucault, Berger, Jameson, Mandel, Lefebvre, but what he’s doing is “recomposing the intellectual history of critical social theory around the evolving dialectics of space, time, and social being”
  • “interlocking sequences of ‘regimes’ of critical thought that follows in roughly the same half-century blocks that have phased the changing political economy of capitalism since the age of revolution”
    • middle half of 19th c w/hinge around 1848-51: “classic era of competitive industrial capitalism” 5
      • emancipatory thought is balanced between spatial and temporal: French socialism, English political economy, German idealist philosophy
      • the critiques and movements happen here by “challenging the specific geography of industrial capitalism” (as bourgeois use geography to consolidate power)
      • end: fall of Commune…spatial critiques recede
    • last decades of 19th c (after fall of the Commune) to 1917 (Russian Rev)
      • historically this is second era of capital modernization: empire, corporate oligopoly, which devalues, depoliticizes space successfully, so space as potential social praxis area disappears
      • critical social thought = rising historicism
      • Marx, Comte, and neo-Kantian influences create new “social sciences” that analyze historical devpt of capitalism
    • third period: Russian Rev to 1960s
      • history reigns over geography still
      • third modernization: Fordism, “bureaucratic state-management”
      • Foucault on this period: “Did it start with Bergson or before? Space was treated as dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” 4
    • fourth period: late 1960s to now
      • fourth modernization period of capitalism: we need to revise our critical tools to begin to understand it, to adapt them; “flexible capitalism”
      • Western Marxism and social sciences “explode into more heterogeneous fragments, losing much of their separate cohesiveness” 5
      • he says this is what postmodernity is: the reassertion of space as a “restructuring” of culture, politics, theory
      • “another deep and broad restructuring of modernity rather than as a complete break”
      • he says postmodernity not all reactionary even tho’ it may seem so on the surface
• Soja still wants to have “politics of resistance and demystification” away from “reifying” veils etc
  • “We must be insistently aware how space can be made to hide consequences from us” 6
    • power and discipline written on to spatial life
  • human geography itself has been “filled” w/ideology
    • his first four essays will show “evolving encounter” between geography and Western Marxism to show how space is submerged and then reappears
• chapters 3-4 about “the vital role of geographically uneven development in the survival of capitalism”
• Doesn’t want a mere “metaphorical recomposition of social theory…that makes geography appear to matter theoretically as much as history”
  • Instead, “deeper deconstruction and reconstitution of critical thought and analysis…including ontology”
• Nicos Poulantzas: “spatial ‘matrix’ of the state and society as simultaneously the presupposition and embodiment of the relations of production, a ‘primary material framework’ rather than merely a mode of ‘representation.’” 7
  • This is what Soja takes from him: “spatiality as simultaneously…a social product…and a shaping force (or medium) in social life” 7
• Two of our Illusions
  • Illusion 1: Opacity and the Subject on the Object
    • “The ‘illusion of opaqueness’ reifies space, inducing a myopia that sees only a superficial materiality, concretized forms susceptible to little else but measurement and phenomenal description: fixed, dead, and undialectical: the Cartesian cartography of spatial science.”
  • Illusion 2: transparency
    • “the ‘illusion of transparency’ dematerializes space into pure ideation and representation”
  • Why are these bad? Both “prevents us from seeing the social construction of affective geographies, the concretization of social relations embedded in spatiality”
    • compares it to Marx’s ideas about commodity
  • People “bounce” back and forth between the two, erasing power relations in there
• We Must Restore “the meaningful existential spatiality of being and human consciousness”
  • “to compose a social ontology in which space matters from the very beginning” 7
  • who do we have to talk about in order to do this? Sartre, Heidegger, Giddens with his “time-space structuration”
• Alright, tell me what this ontology is
  • “Building on Giddens, one can see more clearly an existentially structured spatial topology and topos attached to being-in-the-world, a primordial contextualization of social being in a multi-layered geography of socially created and differentiated nodal regions nesting at many different scales around the mobile personal spaces of the human body and the more fixed communal locales of human settlements.”
  • “This ontological spatiality situates the human subject in a formative geography once and for all…” 7

“History: Geography: Modernity”

• we’ve been blind to the “spatiality of social life” and haven’t theorized space as well as we have time
• Foucault began calling for the change in the sixties, but wasn’t really visible until eighties: now there is a new “agitating polemic” tho’ of course overall still prioritizing space over time
• but some degenerate into anti-history and that’s silly, we need both: entwine history and geography 11, and do so w/social being
  • so Soja has a grand triple dialectic: geograpy, history, social being, or history, geography, modernity
• he sees the periodized moment also corresponding to specific types of critical consciousness
• This Chapter: the “Hidden Narrative” of Critical Social Theory
  • Which Reveals The Source of the Contemporary Reassertion
• His method: takes Terry Eagleton’s understanding of deconstruction found in his Against the Grain: reversing the “imposing tapestry” of visible meaning to reveal the “unglamorously dishevelled tangle” that’s behind the pretty image
• First, let’s talk about what we’re up against
  • C. Wright Mills, 1959, The Sociological Imagination describes how social sciences are entrenched around historicism
    • Soja takes Mills’ description of sociology to say it applies to all social scientists and W Marxists at the time
    • depends on “historical rationality” “to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on” in the world and inside people
    • sociological imagination mixes history and biography and their relations
    • assumption below this is “the idea that the individual can only understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period” (these are all in Mills’ terms)
    • Soja says this is truly “the alluring logic of historicism, the rational reduction of meaning and action to the temporal construction and experience of a social being” 14
      • while social historians and geographers might mention spaces, primarily they’re basing work off history
      • where you’ve got “an already-made geography” aside “the wilful making of history”
  • critical social theory used this (and by critical he means that you’ve exploring means of emancipation instead of keeping status quo)
    • critical he defines against instrumental, normative, mechanical, scientific
    • it’s why they like history: it is key to emancipation, they think, we can change the world 14
      • it needs to say world is mutable! and thus it’s against universalizations and transhistorical concepts, and against naturalism, empiricism, positivism (too physical/material deterministic), against “religious and ideological fatalisms” and anything that will keep you from changing history
    • thus critical social theory has been historicist, which he defines as “the overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges the peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination” 15
      • hence “the creation of a critical silence” (Soja says Hey maybe we can change the world via space)
• First Stage of Reassertion of Space
  • begins late 60s but ignored by Western Marxism and liberal social science
    • in the form of postmodern critical human geography (distinct from Modenr Geography which was “theoretically inert” at that time)
  • Michel Foucault’s “ambivalent spatiality”
    • Foucault “buried” his spatial stuff in his historical flourishes, but he was a geographer in 60s and 70s
    • Des Espaces Autres, and some interviews are his most interesting space works, “Questions on Geography” and “Space, Knowledge, and Power”
    • Other Spaces was 1967 lecture; ignored till published 1984, translated 1986 in Diacritics
      • ”’heterotopias’ as the characteristic spaces of the modern world, superseding the hierarchic ‘ensemble of splaces’ of the Middle Ages and the envelopig ‘space of emplacement’ opened up by Galileo into an early-modern, infinitely unfolding, ‘space of extension’ and measurement.” 17
      • Spatiality in general: “The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. On other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things…we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another”
      • compensatory heterotopia presents a perfected version of your society; while the illusory heterotopia which is an illusion that reveals the real life as illusion too
      • here he says that structuralism provides diff way to relate things other than via time
      • he calls it “configuration” and does say it’s not anti-history
      • what matters for Foucault: “the opening up of history to an interpretive geography” 18
    • for Foucault, space isn’t to be filled with your intuitive cognitions or filled with your phenomenological descriptions (sorry Bachelard)
      • Soja: see, space is experienced, not a mere visual illusion or inert physical matter
    • “Space Knowledge and Power:” says space “fundamental” to community relations, to power
      • he notes that the heterotopias stuff was received initially w/criticism but now (ie this interview 1984) he says he’s taken seriously about space being significant
    • Soja on Foucault: what F called “the fatal intersection of time and space” was in F’s whole career, and his work “infused” w/the new critical human geography (“post-historicist and postmodern”)
      • yet “to be labelled a geographer was an intellectual curse, a demeaning assocation” far from “grand houses of modern social theory” 19 (he’s talkin about the 70s)
    • “Questions on Geography” 1980, which was dicey for awhile b/c he didn’t want to admit his signif of space
      • “I’ve changed my mind since we started… Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. Where geography itself was concerned, I either left the question hanging or established a series of arbitrary connections…. Geography must indeed lie at the heart of my concerns” qtd 20
    • “The Eye of Power:” “A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” qtd 21
      • So, says Soja, he gets close to critiquing historicism as devaluing space but won’t quite make the commitment, recommits to historicism: “History will protect us from historicism” is the conclusion F makes
    • Foucault thus was an invisible geographer, “a career hidden from explicit recognition as geographical by the persistent hegemony of historicism.”
  • art critic John Berger: also a hidden geographer inside a public historian
    • “intersection of time and space in virtually all his writings” 21
    • book of poetry And our faces, my heart, as brief as photos half about space, half about time (two sections)
    • play A Question of Geography
    • The Look of Things 1974
      • “crisis of the modern novel…scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time…instead of being aware of a point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines”
      • we’re constantly having to take account of “simultaneity and extension”
      • “Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical project,” how something I do affects someone half the globe away, two feet away
      • my point: isn’t modernist novel where this happens first; I think Berger actually says this, but have we considered that this might teach us about modernism not postmodernity? we hear that they’re talking about changes during modernism but then they turn around and talk about postmodernity ANYWAY, and I’d like to fix that
      • he’s talking about portraiture and sees an analogous moment happening in portraiture (ie apposite to modern novel)
      • Soja says Berger demands “an explicitly spatialized narrative” from us
      • “too much is happening against the grain of time” in Soja’s words 23
    • Soja links up Berger’s stuff w/”consciousness of geographically uneven development” a horizontally shaped pattern of “power, indivisibility, exploitation, and inequality”
      • me: I’d say uneven development begins at home.
      • Soja sees this as begging “personal political responsibility” 23
      • Berger: “it is space not time that hides consequences”
  • Berger and Foucualt are “pushing us towards a significant and necessarily restructuring of critical social thought, a recomposition which enables us to see more clearly the long-hidden instrumentality of human geographies, in particular the encompassing and encaging spatializations of social life that have been assocaiated with the historical development of capitalism”
    • sounds like a militant goal I could get behind
    • Foucault: microspaces
    • Berger: art and aesthetics
  • Soja: remember this ain’t anti-history: not a replacement or subordination but rather “interpretive balance” b/c we don’t want to avoid history just avoid the domination of history for interpretation
• Structuralism was important for reassertion of space

Continuing this Same Chapter

• Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air 1982
  • Berman’s “concatenation of modernities” gives him a context for writing his “history of historicism”
  • Berman, modernity: “a mode of vital experience’ where you collectively share your snese of ‘the self and others’ and ‘life’s possibilities and perils’
    • as a “vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity” 25
  • reflecting changes in time, space, and being (which Soja likes b/c he says the three basic human categories of existence are space, time, and being)
    • each one is an abstraction that sorta “comes alive” in a particular social body: “a social construct which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it”
    • so each society turns “time” into its own type of “history;” “space” into its own particular “human geography” 25, the being in the world as the “constitution of society”
      • and how the three all work together creates the type of critical social thought that the society will generate (Stephen Kern: “culture of time and space”)
  • transformative, rather than revolutionary, “socio-spatial processes” during fin de siecle
    • and what is neat is that Berman sees it as happening in THIS fin de siecle too, for both of them have a restructuring of capitalism “sparked by the system-wide crises affecting contemporary capitalist societies” along w/”responsible cultural and political modernism aimed at making sense of the material changes…and gaining control over their future direction”
      • that’s where the contradictions come from, he says, modernization and modernism are interacting and THAT’S what creates the feeling of conflicting social context (I don’t like this b/c it assumes that the “base” of the development wasn’t contradictory in and of itself) (it’s in Calinescu too)
  • modernization “the many different ‘objective’ processes of structural change that have been associated with the ability to capitalism to develop and survive” 27 “despite endogenous tendencies towards debilitating crisis”
    • but Soja says that modernization is a little more than just a determinism of capitalism, an automatic unfolding
    • “Modernization is not entirely the product of some determinative inner logic of capitalism, but neither is it a rootless and ineluctable idealization of history”
• Soja’s modernization
  • “a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a significant recomposition of space-time-being in their concrete forms, a change in the nature and experience of modernity that arises primarily from the historical and geographical dynamics of modes of production”
    • hmmm I don’t like this sporadic gettin’ faster stuff…
  • “unevenly developed across space and time” but there are periodict restructurings and crises that will happen across diff capitalist societies “systematically synchronic” a “macro-rhythm”
    • ex of one of these periods of global crisis, 1830-48 and/or through 1851, which is Hobsbawm’s “age of revolution”
      • so, crisis peaks 1830-51; then growth; then crisis 1870s-90s
    • ex. 2 the Great Depression as crisis; then the postwar boom; then crisis of 70s-80s
      • what happened is a wave of expansion after this time, followed by three decades of depression 1870s-90s, spawning another explosive time
    • hmmm I’m doubtful of this too and think that maybe he’s confusing representation with actuality
• Soja: how did capitalism survive the turbulence of early 20th c? by intensifying (mergers, monopolies) and extending (imperialism)
  • Amid all of this change and the new culture that comes from it, you also have a new type of geography “taking shape from the shattered remains of an older order and infused with ambitious new visions and designs for the future as the very nature and experience of modernity…was significantly reconstituted”
  • and in social theory too
• Ernest Mandel
  • theorized periodization of moments of intensified modernization as parallel to the periodic geographical reshapings done to secure continued capitalist accumulation
    • Soja refers to it as “regionalization of the modernization process”
  • during late 70s
• Soja: these moments of restructuring and intensified modernization are linked to changes in critical social theory
• Soja’s Modernism
  • “modernism is the cultural, ideological, reflective…and theory-forming response to modernization. It encompasses a heterogeneous array of subjective visions and strategic action programmes in art, literature, science, philosophy, and political practice which are unleashed by the disintegration of an inherited, established order and the awareness of the projected possibilities nad perils of a restructured contemporary moment or conjecture.”
  • so for him it’s “a ‘reaction formation,’ a conjectural social movement” 29 “mobilized” by “the question of what is to be done” in the midst of all these changes
  • new modernisms happen each time modernization intensifies, esp. the “two ‘modern movements’ that emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century to define separate and competitive realms of critical social theorization, one centred in the Marxist tradition, the other in more naturalist and positivist social science.”
    • “arose initially as rebelliously creative avant-garde movement challenging their own inherited orthodoxies…To traditionalists of the time…the avant-garde movements appeared to dwell in a different world, in an alternative modernity” 29
    • 1) Leninist Marxism “one of the most successful modern movements through the turn of the century” “a modernized Marxism that significantly changed the world”
      • by 1950 so “entrenched” no longer seems like an avant-garde “the new became the old…hegemonic, rigid, and establishmentarian” ... which made Marxism split, the conservative “Eastern” Marxism (anti-theory) and the peripheral Western Marxism
• Western Marxism
  • where the critique of historicism and the reassertion of space eventually happens
• Along with Western Marxism, the modern social sciences are developing
  • they are “more fragmented” than W Marxism
  • but have similarities to W Marxism: developed from same context, the “intellectual, political, and institutional struggle” during late 19th c of how best to theorize and control changes over modernity
    • (just like Marx and Comte had tried to do for their own particular intense moment of mid 19th c revolution
  • and both W Marxism and bourgeois social sciences are divided in some way, w/a conservative core tending towards positivism w/a bunch of outlying movements “pressing against disciplinary rigidification, fragmentation, and scientism” 30
  • and both have “emancipatory interest in the power of human consciousness and social will”
    • as well as putting this kind of process as the engine of history, so that social power and human consciousness create revolutions that drive history
• Hence by the fin de siecle critical social theory is entrenched around historicism: “an annihilation of space by time in critical social theory and discourse” 31 it’s a “quiet triumph” and lasts another century

History of Geography

• 1880-1920, during fin de siecle restructuring of capital
  • The changes in conceptions of space, time, and social being erase spatial imagination, and geography looks anachronistic for critical social science
  • The bourgeois modern social sciences:
    • “geographical analysis and explanation was reduced to little more than describing the stage-setting where the real social actors were deeply involved in making history
    • “streamlined historical materialism, stripped of its more geographically sensitive variants (such as the utopian and anarchist socialisms of Fourier, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin, as well as the pragmatic territorialism of social democracy)” 31
    • social sciences are compartmentalized, becoming positivist and instrumental (pro capitalism)
      • ex: neo-classical economics (Alfred Marshal, Pigou) “a fantasy world with virtually no spatial dimensions:
    • “natural science model of antecedent cause/ subsequent effect” “mechanistic temporalism” 32
  • The two streams of critical social theory: also historicist, “history was the emotive variable container” an “unnecessary complication” (in Marx’s words)
    • Marxist political economy: where Marx’s model of transition from feudalism to capitalism has to be supplemented by ideas that specifically address this new phase of capitalism, “protracted rise of monopoly capital, corporate power, and the imperialist state” 32
      • this is done by Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Trotsky: the early 20th c modernized Marxism
      • they do set the stage for theories of geographically uneven development by their critique of imperialism (as a new form of finance capital), based on Marx’s country v city (“the syncretizing and synchronic antagonism between them, the “agglomerative center and hte dissipative periphery”
      • but still historicist in general, “the making of history through the unfettering struggle of social classes” and any geograpy is just incidental
      • so, Soja notes, not only capitalism by its critique works by annihilating space via time
    • The critical social sciences
      • they see modernization as historical rhythm, w/beginning at Industrial Revolution
      • Kant, Hegel, and even Marx help them see the diff between Traditional and Modern 33
      • Gemeinschaft, Geselleschaft
      • modernity becomes a topic of theorizing
      • they see the “time-lagged diffusion of development…to the undeveloped, traditional, and not yet fully modernized parts of the world” w/”primarily Eurocentric vision”
      • modernization attached to industrial capitalism
      • incl. Weber’s “methodological individualism,” Durkheim’s “sociology of collective consciousness,” Simmel’s “neo-Kantian skepticism” and Husserl’s phenomenology
      • any geography is immediately hooked up to temporal narratives
  • Both streams create “social programs” to ensure progress, which were influential during 20th c
    • revolutionary strategy and class struggle; or “the possibilities of scientifically planned reform primarily under the aegis of the liberal capitalist state, a visible hand of social guidance” 34 and incl. liberal socialism w/in nation-states
    • Great Depression and WWII shake them up, but they reappear in 1950s strong
  • People are forgetting how instrumental space is…no discussion of in poliitcs or ideology, so “social construction of human geographies” and their job of manipulation to help early 20th c capitalism to grow
    • space’s complicity: “the spatial fix” so that whenever you’ve got a crisis you restructure the organization of capital spatially: for more profits, more control, more production and consumption
    • Although he says that artistic avant-garde and some architects and regional planners are intuitively sensing and reacting against what’s going on
    • but in the social sciences, all is quiet about space: why? reject environmental causation, esp for human consciousness 34: space is seen as a natural given
      • “relative autonomy of the social from the spatial” is believed in, forgetting social production of space; human geography trated as if natural
      • “thrown away with the dirty bathwater of a rejected environmental determinism” 25
  • Another reason why they’re rejecting geography
    • “tended to see in spatial consciousness and identity – in localisms or regionalisms or nationalisms – a dangerous fetter on the rise of a united world proletariat, a false consciousness”
    • also that regionalism or localism will limit the power of the liberal state
    • and the paranoid interpretation that it would cut off empire
    • or national or regional identity is explained as rooted in SOMETHING ELSE, like culture
    • me: this avoidance is reminding me instead of people who want to avoid looking like a fascist for caring about the motherland if they say anything about spatial causation
  • Modern Geography: begins late nineteenth century
• 1920-1950s
  • Modern Geography is thus completely isolated, separated from critical social theory
  • until the 70s it will continue to ignore social theory, except for Kant (who said geography waqs with history what creates “the entire circumference of our perception”), whose association with geography legitimized the field
  • “Geography settled into a position within the modern academic division of labor that distinguished it…from both the specialized and substantive disciplines of the natural and human sciences (where theory was presumed to originate) and from its history” 36
    • people still see temporal arrangement (Kant: nacheinander) more than spatial arrangement (Kant’s nebeneinander)
      • history takes on the interpretive role for all the social sciences; seen as having “cross-disciplinary responsibility”
      • geographers are left to “describe the outcomes:” in Hartshorne’s words, “areal differentiation of phenomena” 36
  • “disciplinary involution:” isolated contributions by geographers to social theory, but it “turned inwards, abstaining from the great theoretical debates as if a high wall had been raised around it” -7
    • geography: “reduced primarily to the accumulation, classification, and theoretically innocent representation of factural material describing the areal differentiation of the earth’s surface – to the study of outcomes, the end products of dynamic processes best understood by others” 36-7
• Geography “treated space as the domain of the dead…a world of passivity and measurement rather than action and meaning”
  • “accurate packages of information” used by the state, military, economic planning, imperialism: “applied geography”
  • so most geographers are tied to government projects “intelligence-gathering activities”
• Political Geography is thus the only one to approach being theorized
  • Sir Halford Mackinder’s “Eurasian ‘Heartland’” thesis (it’s the “pivot of history) and helps to redwar map of Europe in 1918
  • Hence geography is seen as just political geography mostly…through interwar period
• After WWII b/c of German geopolitik the geographers sank into the background, embarrassed, the “moribund backwater” of geography
  • Goes back to mere description, esp describing effects of land on culture and the effects of civilization on earth
• Splits into compartments roughly analogous to existing social science departments: economic geography, political geography, social geography, cultural geography
  • later on, behavioral geography, psychological geography
  • but never a political-economic geography
• The third kind of geography (that is, after the diciplinary shards of geography and after the man-land relational approach)
  • is the synthesis of all phenomena by region
• The fourth kind is a historical geography that is more like a method that “roams” the other three types of geography
  • looking at the past of human geography as a sequence of differentiation, development
• No explanation of why they’re doing it outside of geography itself: “the explanation of geographies by geography” instead of by the social organization
  • So geography splits w/Western Marxism and w/critical social theory
    • Exceptions: interwar regional planning, Chicago School’s “evolutionary urban ecology,” French Annales school (regional historiography), “frontier theorists” following Frederick Jackson Turner, Gramsci (local social movements, the capitalist state, “the regional question” 38
  • By the 1930s most of it’s pretty much already there
• As the postwar boom occurs in 50s, geography is “theoretically asleep” and “despatialization of social theory” at its peak
  • 1950s: the “quantitative-theoretical revolution” makes geography more technical and mathematized: still within neo-Kantian tradish of geography b/c it’s so isolated; positivist and empirical
  • 1960s: some geographers “wandered into every disciplinary location they could find” 52 as universities radicalize and turn against positivism
    • new journal, Antipode a leftward anglophone journal
    • David Harvey shifts: from his early empiricist Explanations in Geography 1969 to Marxist Social Justice and the City 1973
      • Harvey v influential, spearheads Marxist geographers in America, connecting space to the social via hist mat: human geography plus class analysis really
    • thus, Modern Geography’s main themes get Marxified: land rent, industry location, settlement hieararchies, mental maps, geographical inequalities of wealth
    • Meanwhile in Britain, a historicist Marxist geography still empiricist; French Marxism that’s ebbing but still fruitful; lots of stuff on urban political economy (Harvey, Castells); as well as Third World underdevelopment and global division of labor (Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin) (also in Latin America academia)
• late 1960s: “spatiality of social life began to be rediscovered” 39 but mostly w/in hist mat. It takes the 70s and Lefebvre to discover geographical materialism
• Perry Anderson: 1918-68 “post-classical” Marxist theory crystallizes
  • mostly in France, Italy, Germany
  • Lukacs, Gramsci, Korsch were first generation
  • Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse next
  • And some Italians
  • Marxism gets rooted in the university and in research centers
  • talking about art, aesthetics, ideology, philosophy, method; that is, “superstructure” type stuff more attention than “infrastructure”
    • as well as the state, the world economy, national identity (rather than labor, capitalism itself)
    • Anderson: they’re moving backwards, reversing Marx’s movement from philosophy to labor and capitalism
  • and then in 70s, this type of Marxism is over, and another one back to economy, society, politics, and usually Anglophone now
• Soja sees in Anderson another hidden spatial theorist
  • In the Tracks of HIstorical Materialism 1983 on the recent history of marxism
  • Soja sees in it a way not to reject Marxism, by creating “materialist interpretation of spatiality” that will be the match for hist mat
  • what Anderson is describing, Soja asserts, is an “initial assertion of a postmodern critical human geography” 40
    • it’s in French Marxist tradition
• the French Marxist tradition as first bit of critical human geography
  • prepared for by Sartre (“political culture of everyday life in modern capitalist society”) and Althusser (structuralism)
    • along w/Foucault, these three are “ontological struggles iwth the spatiality of existential being, modernity, and power”
    • these two types make for interest in subject and structuralism, which is getting ready for geography…
  • Anderson sees at this time a splintering of French Marxism that’s awful, but Soja focuses on something Anderson notices: Henri Lefebvre, who was “isolated” b/c he made original work
    • Lefebvre as a figure of 20th century Marxism…as geographical materialist…as the “primary source for the assault against historicism and the reassertion of space in critical social theory”
• Lefebvre paves way for Poulantzas, Giddens, Harvey, Jameson (mostly Anglophone, but prompted by the French)
  • what’s the date? Soja mentions 1968…gee…
  • Anderson’s narrative of declining Marxism, Soja suggests, can only be conceived if you ignore the reassertion of space
• Lefebvre 1976 “The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity and historical time…To recognise space, to recognise what ‘takes place’ there and what it is used for, is to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of space”
• Prehistory: Marxist geography prompted by 60s social turbulence that created a “radical fringe” in every social science 45
• 1970s: Marxist Geography Takes Shape when western marxism invades modern geography
  • “a victal part of a nascent critical human geography which arose in response to the increasingly presumptive and theoretically reductionist positivism of mainstream geographical analysis” 43
  • it shook up geography and made it rethink its bases
  • David Harvey is here from the very beginning (1973 Social Justice and the City; 1975 “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation”)
    • Harvey: “The historical geography of capitalism has to be the object of our theorizing, historico-geographical materialism the method of inquiry” which won’t just show changes in space or show how space constrains action, but instead a rethinking completely of whow space, time, and social being relate
• 1980s: geography now begins to give back to Marxism too: a two way street now
  • Where now Western Marxism has to deal with the spatiality of social life: it gives Marxism a geographical materialism
  • and geography rethinking itself too
• 1980s: it’s spreading beyond Marxists and geographers
  • “unprecedented generalization of the debate on the theorization of space and time, geography and history, not only in social theory” but also in “art, architecture, film, popular culture, and contemporary politics” 44
  • Soja himself starts getting into the roots of this injection b/c of people’s critiques of his history of Africa’s “Geography of modernization”
• It’s Not Just a New Variable We Need
  • It’s been so long we’ve been ignoring space that we may need to “shatter..many well-established interpretive assumptions and approaches” esp the ones that assume primacy of time over space
  • Geography too must reconstruct itself 45

Lefebvre

• 30s-50s the most influential French Marxist
• after 50s, leading Marxist geographer (but not really recognized till 80s)
• did lots of translations of Marx into French (and Lenin)
• wants “a strand of ‘objective idealism’ within the materialist dialectic” 47
  • conscious thought primarily grow out of material life but not in a mechanical, deterministic fashion 48
  • in general he objects against reductionist interps of Marx: “flexible, open, and cautiously eclectic Marxism” 48 (hence a loud anti-Stalinist)
    • he critiques Sartre and Althusser for such things “totalizations”
• trying to strengthen Marxism, and in the process goes spatial
• obsessed w/his birthplace, visited it and saw it being changed under state planning
• early thesis: “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” that’s administered by spatial planning
• later topics: urbanization of consciousness, struggle over power over the city, homogenizing tendency of capitalism
• “urbanization:” “well beyond the immediate confines of the cities…a summative metaphor for the spatialization of modernity and the strategic ‘planning’ of everyday life that has allowed capitalism to survive” 50
  • capitalism requires “the creation of an increasingly embracing, instrumental, and socially mystified spatiality, hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion and ideology”
  • capitalism has a “percular production and reproduction of geographically uneven development via simultaneous tendencies toward homogenization, fragmentation, and hierarchization” La Survie du Capitalisme 1973
    • “This dialecticised, conflicted space is where the reproduction of the relations of production is achieved. It is this space that produces reproduction, by introducing into it its multiple contradictions”
• Lefebvre himself teaching where the 68 uprisings began (Nanterre, Paris)
• Lefebvre’s “reconfigured dialectic” from early 70s directs Marxist geographers
  • This is the key moment for Soja…Lefebvre
    • for example “areal differentiation” revealed as strategic uneven development

Notes

• Am I being unhistorical if I apply space to modernism when everyone says that postmodernism is the era of space and not modernism?
  • Perhaps not: hiding space is still a way of dealing with space
  • Soja 12 “to open up and recompose the territory of the historical imagination through a critical spatialization” (it looks like I’m okay)
• When he quotes Stephen Kern, Kern is giving a list…the list that I’m finding to be kind of funny b/c it’s a reification that doesn’t LOOK like a reification merely because it comes in the form of a damn list
  • “Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, cicyle, automobile and airplane” and “stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity” which both affect the culture of time and space qtd 26
    • supposed to be from 1880s to outbreak of WWI