GEOGRAPHICAL THEORY AND THE RUSES OF GEOGRAPHICAL REASON
We are now in a position to return to the question that Martha Nussbaum left open: what kind of geographical, anthropological, and ecological knowledge would be required to adequately ground a liberatory cosmopolitan politics? W. Pattison’s definition of the different traditions of geographical inquiry opened up the way to a critical engagement with three foundational concepts that underpin all forms of geographical knowledge—space, place, and environment. Within the discipline of geography, the tendency has been to treat these three conceptual realms separately. The spatial is generally viewed as systematic, mathematical (geometrical), and amenable to the scientific study of spatial order (with time relegated to the study of comparative statics); the regional (place) as nomothetic, unique, time-deepened, and more susceptible to humanistic and hermeneutical treatments; and the environmental, while susceptible to hermeneutic and literary treatments, as the scientific study of temporal dynamics of climatic, geomorphological, and other changes on the land in the evolutionary tradition of the earth sciences. Such conventional geographical knowledge structures, even when not openly deployed (as they all too frequently are) in support of state power, capital accumulation, and imperialistic and military practices, plainly cannot ground the critical perspectives required for a liberatory cosmopolitan education, let alone confront the innumerable ruses of geographical reason that from Kant onward have permitted noble universal principles to be paralleled by devilishly distressing geographical details and disruptions. Pattison’s suggestion that all three perspectives might come together in practical work was more a hopeful gesture than a systemic conclusion.
In chapters 7, 8, and 9, however, we frequently encountered situations where, once the Kantian and positivist frames were abandoned, it was both possible and necessary to see these three conceptual fields of space, place, and environment not only as interrelated but also as potentially integral to each other. If Alfred North Whitehead is only partially correct to say, for example, that “the determination of the meaning of nature reduces itself principally to the discussion of the character of time and the character of space,” and if it is also impossible, as A. Dirlik and C. Katz insist, to specify the meaning, definition, and qualities of place outside of an understanding of space and time, then unification of the three conceptual fields is not only possible but unavoidable. This conceptual unification, I claim, defines a proper core for a geographical theory that can work as a “condition of possibility” for all other forms of knowing, at the same time as it sheds critical light on the dangerous but hidden ruses of geographical reason. The question is: by what means might a unification of these three conceptual fields be achieved?
The three conceptual fields are, recall:
The intersecting forces perpetually reshaping the historical geography of social life on earth can be reduced theoretically to processes of production of spaces, places, and environments. This reduction requires deployment of a process-based philosophy and the application of dialectical methods of both representation and inquiry. Only then can a unified field of knowledge called “geographical theory” be articulated.
Most of the hegemonic social theories (including historical materialism) that have shaped dominant interpretations and political practices (at the popular as well as at the academic level) over the last three hundred years, in the advanced capitalist world and beyond, have paid little or no critical attention to how the production of spaces, places, and environments might impinge upon thought and action. In practice, we almost everywhere find tacit assumptions about the nature of space and time, the cohesion of places (the nation-state), and the idea of what is or is not given by nature. The problem is that these geographical concepts are deployed uncritically and in an ad hoc manner, without any consideration of the importance of the geographical assumptions in shaping modes of thought and action. The effect is like trying to navigate the world with any old map, no matter how arbitrary or erroneous it may be.1 Serious errors of interpretation (of the sort that Jared Diamond commits) and equally serious mistakes in policy and politics (of the sort that Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Friedman continue to be responsible for) owe a lot, I suggest, to this failure to acknowledge, let alone understand the significance of, the geographical knowledge deployed. The ruses of geographical reason operate unchallenged.
The geographical theory I am here advocating permits critical examination of how notions of space-time, place, and socio-ecological relations play out in all fields of endeavor. It explicates what happens, for example, to economic theory, to Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism, to communist internationalism, and to neoliberalism, as well as to abstract theories of biopolitics, feminism, and the various forms of identity politics, when the full force of geographical theory is explicitly applied to examine their hidden geographical presuppositions. When the claims to universal truths incorporated into such theorizations are held up to geographical scrutiny, they are, as we have seen, invariably found wanting. Since the main objections to these theories and their claims to universality focus on their lack of material grounding and the “deracinated” nature of their founding concepts, the incorporation of geographical theory should provide an antidote to such objections. But the result of such an encounter is often to so transform these theories as to render them unrecognizable. I shall illustrate this through consideration of two foundational but contested terms in the history of the social sciences as well as in liberal, neoliberal, and cosmopolitan theories: the “individual” and the “state.” The selection of these two terms is particularly significant, given their interconnectedness and Foucault’s compelling account of how “the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual [have codetermined] each other’s emergence.”2 In what follows it will become clear that the “co-determination” of which Foucault speaks can best if not uniquely be understood in terms of geographical theory.
The Individual
The practice of “individuation” has long been a topic of philosophical reflection and of argumentation. Applied to human populations, this practice defines a concept of the individual that plays an important role, not only in the formulation of social and socio-ecological theories and administrative practices, but also in ideologies and perceptions that ground personal behaviors and actions. How I think of my individuality has important implications for my actions in and expectations of the world. In recent years, the topic of individuation has become more contentious, as poststructural engagements with identity politics, an increasing concern with fluidity and indeterminacy (in queer theory, for example), and a shift of focus from structures to processes and narratives have become more common. These shifts have had demonstrable practical effects in everyday life and in the making of political claims. For example, what were once considered clear census categories in the United States concerning race and ethnicity have increasingly come to be seen as unanswerable questions. Even economics has increasingly turned to behavioral theories and psychology in order to understand more clearly what individuals actually do (as opposed to what fictional economically rational individuals are supposed to do). Individuation is not, therefore, a stable practice, and its historical geography needs to be investigated and elucidated. My narrower concern here, however, is with how the individual might be understood in the light of geographical theory.
Imagine that a conquering force takes control of a well-defined territory (like an island) and exercises power over an indigenous population. The conqueror wants to have a full and adequate inventory of the lands and an account of the people under his control in order to impose a system of taxation upon them, based upon their landholding, to pay for maintenance of his army and the expenses of his royal household and his numerous retainers. To what representation of space and time would he appeal in order to complete such a task? The answer is obvious: the absolute theory of space and time permits the clear identification of landholdings and provides unambiguous locational addresses to which inhabitants can be assigned. This is the tacit theory that underlay the production of the famous Doomsday Survey that William the Conqueror imposed upon Britain after the Norman Conquest of 1066. This is what the British state later systematized in the seventeenth-century land-mapping exercises, and this theoretical spatial framework underpinned the birth of the science of political economy through the work of William Petty in the land survey of Ireland around that time. Understandably, colonial administrations (such as the British in India) and settler regimes (such as that of the United States with its various forms of Homestead Acts) have appealed to this particular aspect of spatial theory ever since. The political institutions of a property-owning democracy, with its associated practices of individuation that underpin everything from citizenship and voting to taxation, depend exclusively upon this way of understanding space and time. To have “no fixed address” in such a system is, for example, a serious problem.
There is, we see from this example, a strong connection between the exercise of a certain kind of political power and practices of individuation that rest upon a particular way of understanding space and time. Those of us who live under such a regime of political power tend to think that the absolute theory of space and time is natural, foundational, and perhaps the only theory of space and time there is. Placing these specific practices of individuation within the matrix of spatio-temporal possibilities outlined in chapter 7, however, suggests that this is only one out of several possibilities. The definition of the individual looks quite different when the dialectic of absolute, relative, and relational spatio-temporalities is invoked. Whereas my unique identity is firmly located in absolute space and time, my changing positionality relative to, say, flows of money and commodities, production systems and labor processes, or the basic metabolic biological processes that sustain life produces a relativized individual identity that is tangible but not unique. Identities are multiple, shifting, and insecure (I can be a rich man today and a poor one tomorrow; today I bask in the sun, and tomorrow I catch cold in the freezing rain). My movements in relative space-time (movements that actually help to construct, albeit only in a minor way, relative space-time configurations) make it hard to fix my address in any clear and unambiguous way. My life is not confined to a fixed address. Why should I not have some sorts of citizen’s rights while moving or wherever I happen to be? The immaterial spatial relationalities that I internalize from, say, some sense of solidarity or empathy with the victims of the Iraq War, some tragedy such as the Asian tsunami, or more vaguely from a sense of belonging to something (a nation, the category of “woman” or “worker,” the whole of humanity, the whole of nature, or a deity) provides an entirely different relational way of defining who I am. Though immaterial, these allegiances have objective consequences for how I act and think in the world, as well as for how others view me. How I respond to abstract invocations, furthermore, such as a triumphal nationalism, a fatwah from Iranian mullahs, or threats such as those of climate change or terrorism is a relational problem, and these relationalities are fluid, multiple, and indeterminate. They are nonetheless important and powerful for all that, since the individual identities constructed around these relationalities have objective, even if unstable, consequences (look at how the Bush administration mobilized a relational fear of an abstract terror to its own advantage for several years). We here encounter also the politics of moments when, as W. Benjamin puts it, memories can flash up unpredictably at moments of danger.3 Only in this way can we understand the madness of crowds, the spectacle of revolution, emotive surges of public opinion (sometimes sparked by a single event, such as Rosa Parks’s refusal to go to the back of the bus or that astonishing manifestation of global public opinion in the worldwide marches of February 15, 2003, to try to stop the Iraq War), or the actions of individuals who live next door to each other for many years in a mutually helpful and friendly mode and then suddenly kill each other in a frenzy of ethnic or religious hatred. Only in the relational mode can moral cosmopolitan perspectives of the Nussbaum sort take root and immaterial demands for cosmopolitan governance become objective.
Geographical theory insists that the individual does not exist outside the complex dimensionalities of space and time. The neighbors who suddenly kill each other may do so in absolute space and time, but they act out of immaterial relational motivations in the relative spaces of their spatio-temporal encounters.
Now consider the other dimension to the matrix of spatio-temporalities. The political battles fought over representations and conceptualizations, as well as over how space and time are lived, are just as important, as Lefebvre insists, as those waged in the fields of material social practices. Relationally, individuals may live their lives affirmatively and happily as patriotic citizens, as secure members of some “imagined community” (of the sort that Benedict Anderson attributes to the idea of nation), and they may represent themselves to the world as law-abiding and obedient subjects owing fealty to some greater socio-spatial power (such as state or nation).4 Or they may represent themselves (or find themselves represented) as classical liberal subjects, independent and autonomous agents supposedly endowed (sometimes against their will, as happened to Iraqis under the occupation) with legal and juridical status and rights in ways that supersede all other forms of authority even as they recognize their interdependency with others through market exchange. They may then represent themselves in relative space-time as freely mobile geographical agents both willing and able to take advantage of or even promote new patterns of commodity and money flows. Or they may see themselves as passive victims of recession, deindustrialization, and the predatory activities of the financiers as capital flows away from the space where they are located.
Who individuals are is contingent not only upon how space and time are understood, both by themselves and by everyone else, but also upon how spatio-temporal relations are themselves being shaped and perpetually reshaped by macro-processes, such as the spread of cartographic techniques of representation from the Renaissance onward, the contemporary evolution of capital flows within the global financial trading system, or the socio-ecological metabolic processes that facilitate human reproduction more generally. If these latter processes internalize and rest upon, as they invariably do, social distinctions of some sort—as, for example, those of gender and race—then it follows that the spatio-temporality produced is itself gendered and racialized. This elemental and obvious fact explains why so many feminist theorists appeal so often to relational theories of spatio-temporality to substantiate their arguments, and why those who seek to understand the oppressions of racialized immigrant populations find themselves forced to question the spatio-temporal framing of legal concepts such as citizenship. The danger, however, is that by rendering the relational approach to spatio-temporality hegemonic and reducing the absolute to an epiphenomenon, the practical aspects of liberatory politics get diminished or even lost. P. Bourdieu’s approach to spatio-temporality in his Outline of a Theory of Practice is so helpful because he manages to put relational meanings among the Berbers into a dialectical relation with the absolute spaces of fields, houses, and even rooms in houses across phases of absolute time as defined by the calendar.5
Nor can individuals be considered as isolated from and outside of the socio-ecological dialectic and ongoing activities of place formation and re-formation. Their positionality in relation to nature, production systems, social relations, technologies, and mental conceptions, as these impinge upon everyday life, is perpetually shifting, as are the contexts of their feelings, sensitivities, and practical engagements. If, in short, the geographical theory I am proposing is correct, then the whole question of what constitutes an “individual” has to be reconceptualized in radically different ways from those typically set out in the simple Kantian/Cartesian logic that undergirds liberal, neoliberal, and most of the legalistic versions of cosmopolitan theory (such as those that treat individual human rights and citizenship as central).
Geographical theory unravels the spatio-temporal integument, and therefore the place-based and environmental constructions of how the “individual” might best be understood. It sheds detailed light on how, as Kant quaintly put it, temperament becomes character and with what consequences. The dialectics of geographical situatedness within the spatio-temporal matrix frames who individuals are and how, where, and when they can act. Furthermore, this situatedness is not a constant but something that is itself always shifting, sometimes rapidly so, with the ongoing production of space, place, and nature. This is the sort of systematic frame that geographical theory places around how to understand individual identity and agency. Instead of being presupposed abstractly, the individual has to be discovered, defined, and elucidated from all these angles through the application of appropriate research protocols.
Some may argue that to conceptualize the individual as always geographically situated in this way is to so confine individual action that real freedom and liberty become meaningless prospects. To this I say that the abstracted, isolated, and deracinated individual presupposed in liberal and neoliberal political theory and in Kantian cosmopolitanism is a chimera that is bound to lead to disillusionment and despair. It leads directly, for example, into all the contradictions that characterize Bush’s rhetoric on liberty and freedom in relation to Guantanamo Bay and to the shocking oddity of J. S. Mill’s liberal defense of imperial rule over India. Consider, for example, Locke’s definition of the individual that prefaces Robert Nozick’s approving argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia.6 Individuals in the state of nature are construed to be in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or dependency upon the will of any other man.” Note here how the concept of the isolated individual is ineluctably connected to distinctively and exclusively bourgeois ideals of liberty and freedom of the sort that ground much political debate in our own times (see Bush’s speeches that we examined in the prologue)—a connection that Marx, for one, spotted right away and subjected to a powerful critique when he noted that Robinson Crusoe, even when displaced to a desert island, organized his life around the principles of a “true-born Briton.” Civil society evolves, according to Locke, only because some people transgress the rule that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions,” and this leads those offended against to exact retribution. The state is necessary to modulate such retribution and to prevent the descent into the perpetual violence of revenge killings. Behind this formulation lies the idea of the individual as an entirely autonomous being in absolute space and time. From the standpoint of geographical theory, this is both a ludicrous conception and a dangerous illusion, since it conveys an idea of individual autonomy and absolute individual agency that cannot possibly exist. Even Adam Smith recognized the illusory qualities of this formulation, but he then went on to justify acting on it on the equally dangerous and illusory grounds that it redounded to the benefit of society as a whole if everyone acted as if they were free, autonomous, and unencumbered individual agents, even when they clearly were not.
One of Foucault’s great achievements in his theory of governmentality is to show the nefarious consequences that follow when individuals internalize such illusions. The political practices that evolved mainly in Europe from the sixteenth century onward and which have become even more deeply inscribed in many of our psyches ever since, systematically deny real freedoms, while leaving the illusion of their existence intact. In so doing, Foucault in effect elaborates upon Marx’s key insight in On the Jewish Question: “Where the political state has attained its true development, man—not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life—leads a twofold life . . . life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. . . . Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species being, he is the imaginary member of an illusionary sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.”7
Geographical theory goes even further than Foucault and Marx, however, and exposes how one of the key repressive characteristics of governmentality and its associated political economy is to confine our understanding of space and time to its absolute dimensions, since only through such a diminished theory of space and time can “free” liberal individuals (and the properties they own) be clearly and unambiguously defined, demarcated, numbered, located, taxed, and, of course, governed and controlled. The production of individualized and atomized citizens is constitutive with the rise of a certain form of state power. A strong correlation exists between the hegemony of the absolute theory of space and time and the assumption of absolute bourgeois administrative power. The contemporary United States is an exemplary case of what happens to that power when individuals increasingly take the Lockean fictions to heart, only then to find themselves defending the absoluteness of their spaces (their bodies, their properties, and even collectively, as all the gated communities and the contemporary surge of anti-immigrant fervor so clearly illustrate). Foucault’s failure to liberate himself from the Kantian absolute conception of space (as embodied in his concept of heterotopia) unfortunately kept him imprisoned within the very governmentality he sought to overthrow. The absolute theory of space and time has, therefore, been dominant in our thinking ever since the Enlightenment for a very good reason. The rise of the modern state and the modern form of capitalism depended crucially upon the hegemony of this absolute theory of space and time for the proper functioning of their disciplinary apparatuses. The doctrine of progress, which separates Kant’s cosmopolitanism from that of the Stoics, likewise depends upon an absolute conception of time. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that relative and relational understandings of space and time (a common feature of premodern cosmologies and epistemologies) have, until recently, been treated either as special issues or as oddities, particularly in the realm of a social theory that is complicit with bourgeois power. The inability of most economists and political scientists to think outside the box of absolute space and time distorts their understandings of the world in debilitating ways.
The geographical theory of the individual allows us to critique and break with this hegemony. It envisages a person burdened and materially bound by the shackles of his or her geographical integuments and social and relational position. Read almost any ethnography, and you are likely to encounter a concept of individuation radically at odds with the Lockean vision. These ethnographies build up a conception of individuals through a careful reconstruction of social practices, representations, and the ways lives are lived in particular historical and geographical situations in tacit or sometimes explicit opposition to the liberal, neoliberal, and cosmopolitical fictions. These individuals are already initiated into and geographically enlightened by their own experience of making and being made by changing space and spatio-temporal relations, place building, and active involvement in environmental transformations. As Michel de Certeau points out, we even make space by walking in the city.8 But, sadly, many of these ethnographic works fail to theorize their own conclusions to the point of founding an alternative social scientific approach to knowledge, to bring the propaedeutics of geography, anthropology, and ecology into their proper position within the overall schema of our understandings. From this follows a failure to recognize that our task is not simply to understand our geography, our anthropology, and our ecology, but also to change them in constructive and emancipatory ways. We have to recognize that individuals are inherently endowed with the capacity to break out of the confines of their own geographical, anthropological, and ecological constraints. Real politics is always, in short, about “people out of place.” The production of alternative geographies is not only a necessary precondition but also a privileged constructive means for radical social change.
Relationalities can never be controlled (which is why state and capitalist power abhors them). But relationalities are always problematic. To whom we are loyal, for example, is not an easy determination (an issue that Raymond Williams frequently addressed in novel form, particularly in his book Loyalties).9 Once agreed upon, strong loyalties can be politically decisive. Relationalities, though immaterial, are therefore far from free-floating. When they crystallize out into fixed patterns of belief and political alignment, they constitute power nexuses of enormous significance. Accepted dogmas (such as the hierarchical views of racial superiorities of the sort that Kant relayed or the paternalism that Mill presumed) can be both dangerous and damaging in their objective consequences. Interestingly, the postcolonial theorists took up Burke’s appeal to the facts of geography to counter the invidious consequences of applying the universals of liberalism in a paternalistic way to the Indian case, but unfortunately they turned for answers toward Heidegger’s unduly exclusionary (and equally universalistic) theory of place (on the false Aristotelian principle that “place is the first of all things”).10 The problem for cosmopolitanism of the sort envisaged by Held, Beck, Appiah, Nussbaum, and others is that it is still grounded in the abstracted liberal and Kantian concept of the individual person as an actor (even when, as in Nussbaum’s case, the animating cosmopolitan principle takes relational form).
Freedom and liberatory politics cannot be pursued, we may conclude, without active human agents individually or collectively producing new spaces and spatio-temporalities, making and remaking places materially as well as in a different image, and producing a new second nature and thereby revolutionizing their socio-ecological and environmental relations.11 The production of space here means not only making things in absolute space and time, but building and using relative spaces—as well as struggling to internalize (either individually or collectively) the immaterial and relational connections and solidarities in space-time that can liberate us as well as others. Clearly, the starting point of this is some sense of what the individual must be liberated from (and Marx’s comment that human freedom begins when the realm of material necessity and physical dependency is left behind is a suggestive beginning). But this liberatory process can never take place outside of space and time, outside of place making, and without engagement with the dialectics of socio-natural relations.
The geographical theory of the “individual” exposes the fictional mistakes of other theoretical systems, and this is no minor achievement for, as Marx once pointed out, often the only answer to an erroneous question is to question the question. It is helpful to reveal, for example, the constraining effect of assuming that the absolute theory of space and time is all there is on a wide range of social issues (such as immigration law). But geographical theory cannot by itself answer any grand questions (analytical or political) as to preferred forms of liberatory politics (for example, what migration policies are desirable). It does, however, lay out the “conditions of possibility” for finding adequate answers. In particular, it insists upon the banal point that the concept of a deracinated, placeless, and environmentally unconstrained individual generates profoundly misleading theoretical propositions that put a seemingly insurmountable practical barrier to the formulation of an active democratic politics. The abstracted concept of the individual (or of any cognate concept, such as the body) leaves us, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, with no alternative to neoliberal politics. But at this point the question of the relation between the individual and the state moves center stage in the analysis.
State Theories
The concept of the state, like that of the individual, always has been and continues to be problematic and contentious in social theory. An approach to understanding the state through geographical theory sheds some light on how and why. Some social scientists have in recent times become so impatient with the concept that they propose to dispense with it. In other instances, intense and rancorous debates—such as that which took place among Marxists in the 1970s over the relations between class, state, and economy—peter out from sheer exhaustion, leaving behind, in that particular case, the seemingly unsatisfactory conclusion that the state is both a fetish illusion (a mask for class power) and an organized political force in its own right. In more recent times the debate has shifted onto somewhat different terrain. Consider, for example, two major contributions from Philip Abrams and Timothy Mitchell.
“The state,” writes Abrams, “conceived of as a substantial entity separate from society has proved a remarkably elusive object of analysis.”12 We have, he suggests, been trapped “by a reification which in itself seriously obstructs the effective study of a number of problems about political power.” This reification locates the state as an entity in absolute space and time, to the exclusion of any other kind of spatio-temporality. Behind all the inadmissible reifications (particularly those that view the state as an entity endowed with active causal powers), Abrams notes, lies “a managed construction of belief about the state,” such that the “idea of the state has a significant political reality.” He therefore proposes that we “abandon the state as a material object of study, whether concrete or abstract, while continuing to take the idea of the state extremely seriously.” The state may be an illusion or a misrepresentation, but it is nevertheless a social fact. In effect, Abrams here invokes relational understandings. The state is a myth that “makes the abstract concrete” and makes “the non-existent exist.” It “starts its life as an implicit construct, it is then reified—as the res publica, the public reification, no less—and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice.” Here a dialectical relation is tacitly invoked between relational and absolute understandings. The state is, therefore, “not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.” It is “an ideological project,” and “an exercise in legitimation” that “seeks to elicit support or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely legitimate, disinterested domination.” It is a way of binding subjects “into their own subjection.” As such it is, as Marx said of the commodity, a “fetish construct.” It masks and fixes the fluidity and instabilities in socio-spatial relations in hard-edged territorialized institutional forms.
The task of the social theorist is to demystify that fetish. This entails a study of how the “state-idea” has been “projected, purveyed and variously believed in, in different societies at different times.” It also entails, and Abrams regrettably buries the point, establishing the nature of the conflictual social relations and material social practices that lie behind the production of this state-idea. Abrams does accept, however, Ralph Miliband’s view of the “state system” defined as “a cluster of institutions of political and executive control and their key personnel, the ‘state elite’: the government, the administration, the military and police, the judicial branch, sub-central governments and parliamentary assemblies.” But he has nothing to say about the geographical configurations assumed by such institutional arrangements (such as the military in their barracks or even the construction of territorial jurisdictions). He also finds “promising” Nicos Poulantzas’s view of the state as a “site” or “place” where a certain contradictory unity can be achieved, but misses out on the opportunity to apply any theory of place construction to the argument, even though he does ask the key question: “what sort of place is it?” (Yet another example of major thinkers invoking a key geographical concept—place—without interrogating its meaning or considering its possibilities as they move on to examine supposedly more important problems.) Abrams then concedes the possibility (having urged us earlier to abandon the study of the state as a material object) that “an empirically accessible object of study is brought into being which, if studied aright, will reveal to us the modalities of domination within given social systems.” The state can exist as a reified entity in absolute space and time, but—and here I put my own gloss on Abrams’s account—it must be considered as a fetish object in much the same way Marx treats of the commodity. It really exists (it becomes reified), but as “a material relation between persons and a social relation between things.” Abrams almost certainly refrained from invoking the idea of fetishism, since that was one aspect of the Marxist debate on the state that Abrams was clearly concerned to leave behind.
What Abrams implicitly ends up with, however, is a shadowy and partial version of what a geographical theory of the state reveals directly. If we take the spatio-temporal being of the state as crucial to its definition (and what state can claim to be outside of space and time?), then it must be construed as the outcome of a distinctive process of place formation. And place formation, as we have seen, cannot be understood without examining how the dialectical unity of absolute, relative, and relational spatio-temporalities gets constructed (internalizing, as Poulantzas correctly surmises, all manner of contradictions). Nor can we consider it as outside the ongoing dynamics of socio-ecological transformations. The problem with Abrams’s formulation then becomes apparent. His presumption that the materiality of the state arises out of the reification of a social relation and an idea may have it the wrong way round. Perhaps the concrete material practices of bounding and place making led human beings to construct the state as a representation, as an idea, and then to live that idea in a certain way and consolidate their practices of state reification around that idea. Geographical theory suggests that it the dialectical movement of concrete practices in absolute space and time in relation to relative and relational space-times almost certainly was and continues to be involved in state formation and maintenance.
Timothy Mitchell takes Abrams’s argument even further (though in some respects from the opposite direction), and in so doing he comes closer to touching on the dialectics of state formation seen from a more geographical perspective. To begin with, he merges “the state idea and the state system” as “two aspects of the same process.”13 Like Abrams, he considers that our analytic task is not “to clarify such distinctions but to historicize them.” In particular, we need to know how the boundaries between state, society, and economy have been conceptualized historically (and, I would add, geographically across the space of the globe). The state is not only a subjective belief, but “a representation reproduced in everyday visible forms, such as the language of legal practice, the architecture of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking or policing of frontiers.” So while the state may be a “ghost-like abstraction” endowed with “disciplinary powers” (in the way Foucault envisaged), it is “continually reproduced” (and thereby reified) in tangible materialist ways. We need therefore to discover the historical process whereby “disciplinary powers are somehow consolidated into the territorially-based institutionally structured order of the modern state.” Like Abrams, Mitchell sees the state as a fetish object, as “a screen (that of sovereignty and right) superimposed on the real power of discipline.” So although the state, in Foucault’s words, “is no more than a composite reality and mythicized abstraction,” it “takes on the appearance of a structure.” The state, in Mitchell’s gloss, is “an effect produced by the organized partitioning of space, the regular distribution of bodies, exact timing, the coordination of movement, the combining of elements, the endless repetition, all of which are particular practices.” These practices make the state real. They reify it. We should therefore examine the state “not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, apparently metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.”
One of the state’s chief characteristics, for example, is the physical frontier. “By establishing a territorial boundary to enclose a population and exercise an absolute control of movement across it, governmental powers define and help constitute a national entity.” But “setting up and policing a frontier involves a variety of fairly modern social practices—continuous barbed wire fencing, passports, immigration laws, inspections, currency control, and so on.” Through such mundane and banal practices, “most of them unknown two hundred or even one hundred years ago,” the nation-state is manufactured as “an almost transcendental entity,” as a “non-material totality that seems to exist apart from the material world of society.” The state, in other words, achieves a presence in relational spacet-ime by way of its material effects. Mitchell goes on to argue (citing both Poulantzas and Foucault in support) that “both the factory regime and the power of the state are aspects of the modern reordering of space, time, and personhood and the production of the new effects of abstraction and subjectivity.” In short, the restructuring of space and time that occurred during the rise of capitalism (though for some reason Mitchell avoids putting things this way) produced both the factory and the state as distinctive entities. “Rather than deriving the forms of the state from the logic of capital accumulation and the organization of production relations”—as the Marxists had tried to do in the 1970s—Mitchell prefers to see both capital and the state “as aspects of a common process of abstraction.”14
Exactly what this process of abstraction is, where it came from, and why it occurred remains as elusive in Mitchell’s account (lest it be simply the imposition of absolute conceptions of space and time as a condition of state governmentality and the unambiguous construction of notions of territoriality) as does the question of the social relations and processes that underlie the creation of the state-idea in the first place. But the content of the state-idea has not remained constant over time. And much of the contemporary debate—and an important ingredient in cosmopolitics—concerns precisely whether the process has gone so far as to render the concept of the state otiose (as in Ulrich Beck’s formulations) if not entirely irrelevant. Mitchell does not go this far, but he does point to past transformations. He claims—erroneously, in my view—that “the idea of an economy as a self-contained dynamic totality, separate from other economies and subject to intervention, adjustment and management by an externally situated state could not have been imagined within the terms of nineteenth century political economy” (an odd statement given the formulations of List and the German Historical School) and that “the economy” came to refer to “the structure or totality of relations of production, circulation and consumption within a given geographical space” only in the 1920s and 1930s. What was new, he says, “was the notion that the interrelation of these processes formed a space or object that was self-contained, subject to its own internal dynamics, and liable to ‘external’ impulses or interventions that created reverberations throughout the self-contained object.”
The state became the basis of data collection, and both the state and the national economy were brought into existence by virtue of statistical representation. But this mutual identification occurred far earlier than Mitchell allows (indeed, elements of such a representation go back at least to the mercantilist period, as evidenced in Thomas Mun’s tract “England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade,” published in 1664, and William Petty’s statistical inquiry into Ireland’s economy around the same time that defined the emerging field of national—and it was national—political economy). The state also emerged as a crucial regulator of national currencies (the quality of the national coinage being so crucial that Isaac Newton was called upon to preside over the King’s Mint for a while, where hewould send those found guilty of clipping the coinage to the Tyburn gallows) from the seventeenth century onward. The only heresy worthy of capital punishment was no longer defined by God but by Mammon. But Mitchell’s general point is surely correct: “the most important thing imagined to stand outside the economy was the one considered most capable of affecting or altering it—the state.” There was a coevolution between the conception of the state and that of the national economy, in exactly the same way as the conceptions of the individual and the state arose integrally with each other.
The malleability of the social practices that reify both the state as a tangible object and our sense of it as a container of power is also worthy of note. Passports, first introduced during the Napoleonic Wars, gradually disappeared during the nineteenth century. Before 1914, Stefan Zweig recalled of his pre–World War I global travels, “the frontiers were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as when one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.”15 The analogy is telling, however, since the establishment of a spatial organization of time zones was of crucial significance to the organized efficiency of capitalism and the interstate system at the beginning of the twentieth century. After the 1914–18 war, the passport requirement tightened to the point where we now would find the idea of open frontiers impossibly strange if not appallingly dangerous, even as we cross them with increasing frequency. Yet, curiously, as new distinctions between state and economy emerged in the world of representations, “so-called economic processes and institutions became increasingly difficult to distinguish in practice from those of government or the state.”16 Central banks and state agencies came to straddle the supposed divide between state and economy just as, say, state educational activities and welfare provision straddle the divide between state and civil society. While the state appears as an abstraction, Mitchell concludes, we must nevertheless address it “as an effect of mundane processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, supervision and surveillance and representation that create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society or state and economy.” In my view, of course, it is the circulation of capital that is the hidden driver behind the “mundane processes” that Mitchell identifies, precisely because, as I have shown elsewhere, if the state did not already exist in some form or other the circulation of capital in space and time would have to create some kind of territorial organization very much like one.17
Mitchell’s presentation—as might be expected of someone who has long experience of testing Foucauldian ways of thinking against colonial practices in Egypt—is sensitive to spatial determinations. The immaterial but objective qualities of the state are frequently invoked. This places the state firmly in relational spacetime, with all sorts of lines of possibility of analysis in terms of the linkage to the absolute domains of space and time. To begin with, we need to know the dominant social processes and social relations (of gender and class, for example) that set up the relationalities of the state-idea and set the stage for specific forms of reification in absolute space and time. Consider, furthermore, the role of the relation to nature, of environmental (both built and so-called natural) imagery, and of history and collective memory in providing substance to the idea of national solidarities within reified state forms. What is the role of wilderness, the frontier, Mount Rushmore, or the Lincoln Memorial, for example, in defining that exceptionalist sense of the U.S. state and nation to which all U.S. statesmen so frequently appeal (with all manner of objective consequences)? The image of a nation is heavily dependent on how the socio-ecological dialectic has been reworked, conceptually as well as physically, within a state’s borders over a long period of time (the German forests, the French pays, the Scottish glens, and so on). Mitchell is also very attentive to how the immaterial but objective qualities of the state are tangibly materialized in absolute space and time as barriers, borders, and a variety of other material social practices (often of a ritualistic and symbolic nature). These practices reify the state as a real material entity and give it the appearance, as Abrams would put it, of a coherent structure. The Lefebvrian dimension also creeps in, because the sheer power of representational practices clearly affects material social practices and how we live the relationality of the state.
The dialectical nature of the relations between these different aspects of spatio-temporality is lightly hinted at in Mitchell’s work, but it is not hard to expand upon it. In the domain of representation, for example, the long history of cartographic practices has played a central role in reifying the state.18 It is hard to take seriously Abrams’s proposition that states do not exist as material entities, when every map of the world clearly defines and names them so. The militarized fence that separates much of Mexico from the United States or, even more heinously, the wall being built to separate Israeli from Palestinian territory, are very tangible things that exist in absolute space, as are the barriers and booths we encounter at every international airport, through which we may or may not pass at the discretion of some immigration authority. Borders are, to be sure, social constructions, but when turned into elaborate physical fortifications, they render moot the dismissal of the materiality of the state as an inadmissible reification. We cannot, of course, understand these reifications without also unpacking the relationality of the state as an idea, but this is precisely the point about insisting upon the dialectical relations within the matrix of spatio-temporalities and the practice of place making that provides one crucial anchor to geographical theory. But the point on which Abrams, Mitchell, and I agree is that the specific historical geography of all this has to be recounted and that the presumption that the state either embodies some universal and unchanging essence or truth (that can be empirically uncovered or acted upon) or is a simple and unproblematic empirical object of observation has to be discarded. In retrospect, it is astonishing to note how much of conventional social theory as well as political practice was corralled within the unexamined territorial frame of the nation-state (this was true of even progressive formulations, such as that of C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination).
So how, then, does geographical theory look upon the state? Consider the following fictional tale. A king rules his kingdom in a benevolent style. One day invading colonial powers present themselves at his court and ask him to define where his kingdom begins and ends. The king says he has no idea. The astonished colonialists say that cannot be so. How can he tell who his subjects are if he cannot define the territoriality of his kingdom? The king explains that his subjects are defined not by residency in a fixed territory but by fealty to him. They can be located anywhere. Sometimes when he does things of which some of his subjects disapprove, they shift their loyalty to someone else. The number of his subjects willing to pay taxes to him increases with his reputation for good works and his image as a charismatic, wise, and benevolent ruler. And he is not above asserting mythological origins of his power and a privileged relationship to deities whom he alone can persuade to smile fondly on the fates of his believing loyal subjects. The kingdom works very well without any fixed territorial boundaries. It is relationally and relatively defined, but has no clear definition in absolute space and time. The colonial powers, in conflict with one another, insist upon drawing maps to delineate their spheres of influence and insist that the king do likewise. The king’s subjects are now defined by residence in a territory defined by Cartesian mapmakers in absolute space and time. The king no longer has to persuade his subjects by good works and wise rule, because the borders are sealed. He can set up systems of control and surveillance within his territory and extract taxes by force of arms (kindly supplied, at a price, by the colonial powers). Completely different powers of domination arise out of the shift from a relational to an absolute definition. This may sound somewhat farfetched but it is not too far from what happened to the kingdom once called Siam (now Thailand).19
Viewed from the standpoint of “subjects” of the state, however, this sort of scenario takes on a far more serious tone. N. De Genova, for example, in his study of Mexican migrants in Chicago, found it necessary to deploy “a critical transnational perspective in order to dislodge some of the dominant spatial ideologies that undergird a prevalent common sense about the naturalized difference between the United States and Mexico, as well as between the United States and Latin America more generally.” Through the lens of what he calls “Mexican Chicago,” he seeks “to render an orthodox spatial knowledge about the relation of Mexican migrants to the U.S. national-state more accountable to a regime of spatial power and inequality.” He insists, for example, in situating Mexicans in Chicago in relative space-time as “migrants” in motion rather than as “immigrants” in place. He furthermore accepts their own sense of spatial relationality to “a spatial topography of the Americas” that is “intrinsically racialized” and continuously reracialized to produce “the unequal social relations through which global capital, nation-states, and transnational labor, together in the contradictions of struggle, unevenly produce the particular localities where ‘globalization’ takes place.” The effect is to undermine “the epistemological stability of the U.S. nation-state as a presupposition,” at the same time as the very meaning of the Mexicanness of Mexican Chicago signifies a permanent disruption of the space of the U.S. nation-state and embodies the vital possibility of something truly new, a radically different social formation.” What happens, he asks, when Chicago is seen as a place produced by Mexicans? These relationalities exist in a deep conflict with the absolute frame of space and time and the “irreducible spatial discontinuity between the United State and Mexico” imposed as a racialized and increasingly impenetrable border to a migrant stream that more and more confronts the border in terms of illegality. The place called Mexican Chicago “is better understood as a spatial conjuncture of social relations that thus comprises innumerable places. It is a conjuncture, furthermore, constituted through the everyday social relations and meaningful practices that comprise the intersection of a transnational labor migration, capitalist enterprises, and the U.S. nation-state.” The fields of knowledge production called Latin American and Chicano studies are themselves organized, De Genova insists, so as to occlude rather than to illuminate the complexities of the situation and the radical possibilities for creating any kind of new social formation.20
I have, in this account, superimposed some of my own geographical theoretical categories of space-time onto De Genova’s work, in order to illustrate how solidly researched and decolonized ethnographic accounts typically produce a knowledge structure akin to that which I am here seeking to establish directly. That this can be so easily done derives, of course, from De Genova’s indebtedness to Lefebvre’s formulations on the production of space. But that Latin American and Chicano studies—two fields in which anti-imperialist and emancipatory politicsis deeply embedded—are judged by an otherwise sympathetic researcher to be lacking in conceptual precision because of their erroneous spatial specifications says a great deal about the problem of getting the Kantian propaedeutic right.
Accounts of this sort pose the question as to what the world might be like were the spatiality of the state constructed along relational lines rather than according to Cartesian/Kantian spatial rationality. That the emergence of the latter as hegemonic had something to do with the rise of the joint disciplinary powers of capital and the state, as Mitchell suggests (though then denies), is in itself an important proposition. But even here there are some oddities illustrative of a broader issue. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court, faced with the challenge that capitalists might not have full-fledged rights to trade in Puerto Rico unless Puerto Ricans had equivalent rights to live in the United States, decided in 1904 that “while in an international sense Puerto Rico was not a foreign country, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” And it is, of course, from this kind of reasoning that another and even more sinister liminal space, such as Guantanamo Bay (outside of any U.S. court jurisdiction but inside the U.S. state for other purposes), could be brought into being.21
The parallel between the geographical theory of state formation and the disciplinary apparatus imposed upon individual identities through the hegemony of the absolute theory of space and time here becomes crucial. The modern state could not be what it is without having at hand a simple principle to identify and individuate the population over which control, surveillance, and dominance are going to be exercised, for it was, as Foucault points out, population rather than territory that became the primary focus of state formation and administration. “Seeing like a state,” as James Scott notes, entails in the first instance imagining an absolute grid of territorial identifications of places, people, and property rights that can be surveyed, surveilled, and controlled. And it was, furthermore, through the aggregate of atomized individuals that the national economy was in turn defined, sparking all manner of economic theories—liberalism being the prime example—of state management and intervention. That the dominance of an absolute theory of spatio-temporality is a “condition of possibility” for the perpetuation of capitalist and state powers is undeniable. Such domination does not entail the erasure of other forms of spatio-temporality (it never can). To say that the absolute form is hegemonic is to indicate a situation in which relational meanings, such as nationalism, are for the most part confined within the container of a singular absolute territorial definition. Sovereignty, as S. Benhabib points out, is a relational concept, but it takes on much of its specific meaning by the way it is corralled within an increasing dysfunctional notion of the nation-state as a distinctive entity in absolute space and time. The problem is that the “terrain we are traveling on—the world society of states—has changed,” but “our normative map has not.”22 What is so interesting about Abrams’s, Mitchell’s, De Genova’s, and Benhabib’s writings is that they signal a breakdown of the Cartesian/Kantian hegemony and a reversal in which relative and relational conceptions come to the fore. Interestingly, within Europe, as the absolute boundaries disappear and barriers to personal mobility are reduced, so relational meanings and loyalties reemerge as more salient to personal identifications. That so many people prefer to stay in place even with open borders says a great deal about the power of certain relational attachments and meanings over people’s choices. That nationalist antagonisms continue to flourish within the open space of the European Union testifies to the power and significance of relational definitions.
This poses the problem of what happens when we recognize the state as a contingent concept, which has no meaning over and above the diverse processes (in relative and relational space-time) that produce and reproduce it. On the one hand, this liberates us to rethink the relation between space and power (which Foucault identifies but cannot unpack) in all its plenitude. But on the other hand, this poses a signal danger because, as we have seen in earlier chapters, geographical concepts, such as territory or location, often stand in for something else and in so doing occlude rather than illuminate the contradictory socio-ecological functioning of our world. There is, as M. Sparke points out, no point in displacing deracinated universal concepts by what he calls an “anemic geography” of gross simplifications (such as the effect of coastlines or axes of evil). This is why it became so important to construct a geographical theory that is itself rigorous and complete enough to capture the complexities of contemporary life. Sparke illustrates through his careful critique how far and how deep such “anemic geographies” have penetrated into social and literary thought. “Geographical concept-metaphors,” he writes, “such as Bhabha’s ‘location,’ Appadurai’s ‘scapes,’ Hardt and Negri’s ‘smooth space,’ and Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘terrains,’ ‘fields,’ ‘areas,’ ‘frontiers,’ ‘boundaries,’ ‘planes,’ ‘positions,’ ‘regions,’ and so on,” are nothing more than “so many anemic geographies that cover over the palimpsest of unfinished and worldly geographical struggles.”23 Mitchell’s consolidation of the territorial nation-state as an “almost transcendent entity” is likewise a manifestation of an “anemic geography” because it presupposes a preexisting territorial bond between state and nation (a bond that both Sparke and De Genova destabilize). With such luminaries as Bhabha, Appadurai, Hardt and Negri, Laclau and Mouffe, and Mitchell held to critical account for their “anemic geographies,” it becomes even more urgent to define that geographical theory which can get behind the innumerable ruses of geographical reason that flow so uninhibitedly in their otherwise learned analyses. The point, as Sparke and I would agree, is not to suggest that we geographers are in some unique position to exercise judgment (for geographers are just as likely to produce “anemic geographies” as anyone else). A collective endeavor of critical inquiry from all manner of perspectives is needed to get the geographical propaedeutic right. Even then, it should be absolutely clear that an adequate knowledge of geographical theory, of how spaces, places, and environments get produced and with what consequences, is only ever a necessary and never a sufficient condition for political emancipation and that even then lopsided forms of theorizing can be just as problematic as no theory at all.
There is, for example, a danger of casting our spatial conceptions in purely or even predominantly relational terms. If the state is first and foremost construed as an immaterial social relation and therefore only a political idea, then it is all too easy to succumb to the fantasy that the state can be disappeared in spite of all its ugly reifications on the ground, merely by refraining from thinking it. This way of “conceptualizing the state into oblivion” (as R. Trouillot calls it) is longstanding but has undergone a singular revival in recent years.24 Hardt and Negri abolish the state by conceptual fiat as irrelevant in their best-selling book Empire. This procedure is not confined to the state, either. Thomas Friedman likewise flattens the world to promote his neoliberal vision. Margaret Thatcher thought to rid herself of all the recalcitrant forms of civil society by brazenly asserting that there is “no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families.” Conversely, some of the more ardent advocates of civil society politics deny the relevance of the state simply by a wave of their discursive wands. In recent years even “capitalism” has been disappeared by discursive fiat (is this what Mitchell is doing?), leaving many workers around the world mystified as to the primary source of their oppression.25
But there is one further crucial insight to be had from exploring a geographical theory of the state. If we view the state as a specific kind of place construction, as Abrams (following Poulantzas) suggests we should, then everything that is involved in the theory of place—in relation to the production of space and of nature—needs to be brought to bear on understanding what the state not only has been and now is but what it might become. We can no longer regard the state as some ideal type or unchanging essence. Rather, we must view it as a fluid outcome of processes of place construction in which the different moments of the relation to nature, production processes, social relations, technologies, mental conceptions of the world, and the structures of daily life intersect within a bordered world (a territorialized assemblage) to make a fluid entity into a solid “permanence” of social power. From this standpoint some rigid political oppositions start to dissolve (much as they do in the works of Sparke and De Genova). For example, the antistatism that founds much of anarchist politics has to be called into question. Anarchists, particularly of the social variety, are deeply interested in place construction. M. Bookchin’s vision, as we have seen, of “a humanly scaled self-governing municipality freely and confederally associated with other humanly scaled, self governing municipalities” is exemplary of an “anarchic vision of decentralized communities, united in free confederations or networks for coordinating the communities of a region, [that] reflects the traditional ideals of a participatory democracy in a modern radical context.”26 Bookchin is proposing a particular form of place construction to displace the nation-state, but he cannot avoid encountering all of the paradoxes and contradictions that arise in all forms of place construction, no matter whether organized by autonomistas, social anarchists, Maoists, city corporations, developers, or dictators. While the “withering away” of a particular kind of place-formation called the modern capitalist state may be a worthwhile project, the withering away of all forms of place-construction is inconceivable. Geographical theory not only helps dissolve false oppositions, such as that between state and civil society, but also helps release political energies and the political imagination to examine afresh the whole issue of the most adequate form of territorial organization of human societies to meet specific socio-ecological aims. It poses key questions head on and so helps us avoid the more egregious blunders of place construction while identifying the requisite tools to reconstruct places in an entirely different image. The mere concept of a Mexican Chicago is, for example, one place to start, as is the view that nothing short of a radical geographical reconfiguration of our urban systems is needed if we are to do anything serious about energy use and climate change.
Constructing Geographies
Writings of the Abrams and Mitchell sort betoken a crisis of place construction in the contemporary world system, one in which a narrow absolute definition of a place dubbed a state makes less and less sense. This crisis is rendered explicit in the work of Sparke and De Genova. Under the rules of geographical theory, this crisis in place formation is simultaneously a crisis of spatio-temporality as well as of socio-ecological relations. For states as entities to go to war with each other becomes irrelevant because if they do, as in Iraq, they immediately find themselves embroiled in complicated relational rather than simple territorial struggles. The Iraq invasion was, among other things, an example of U.S. political and military leaders thinking in terms of a spatio-temporal structure that was anachronistic, that is, absolute. The parallel with Kern’s account of the outbreak of World War I, when statesmen failed to notice that a new spatio-temporal order had emerged and so failed to prevent the headlong rush into war, is only too exact.27 Around 1910, wrote Lefebvre in retrospect, “a certain space was shattered.” This was “the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communication. . . . Euclidean and perspectivist space have disappeared as systems of reference, along with other common places such as town, history, paternity, the tonal system in music, traditional morality and so forth.” This was the moment that Yeats recorded in his famous and these days oft-cited lines: “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” This was the era of which James Joyce later wrote, “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.” In this context the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, desperately seeking “for orientation in a world without secure coordinates,” shifted his representations of space and substance “from the naturalistically solid through the impressionistically fluid to the abstract and geometrically static.”28 This was the shattering world that was put back together in absolute terms by the Treaty of Versailles, only to be shattered again, most symbolically by the break-up of the state of Yugoslavia, offspring of Versailles, in the 1990s.29
After 2001, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz persuaded Bush to a political and military strategy that failed to acknowledge the new spatio-temporal and socio-ecological order that came into being after 1990 or so. Not only did they commit a major categorical mistake in attacking a relational problem (called terrorism) in crude absolute terms, but they also failed to see how the rapidly shifting dynamics of geo-economic power and socio-ecological relations was radically altering geopolitical relations on the world stage (four important instances being the end of the Cold War, the rise of China as an economic power, the consolidation of much of Europe around a single currency, and the pressures emanating from a raft of global ecological problems). The seemingly solid reifications of states constructed in earlier times came under stress and in some instances actively dissolved (as in the cases of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia). Responses that sought to strengthen the older reifications (by, for example, erecting fences along borders and creating barriers to open movement) appeared more and more politically pressing just when they became more and more futile in the face of burgeoning practices of neoliberal free trade, hypermobility of everything (including people), the shifts in relative space-time relations accomplished through revolutions in transport and communications, and the plain fact that so-called negative externalities (pollution and environmental degradation problems or new diseases like HIV/AIDS) do not stop at state boundaries. Political struggles have been displaced from the fixed territorialities of the absolute to unstable relational realms that cannot easily be controlled, patrolled, and disciplined. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization within the global economy have resulted.
While this situation holds out the promise of freedom from those prior disciplinary constraints (including those over individuals) historically and geographically exercised by capital and the state in absolute space and time (and this increase in freedom is surely to be welcomed), it also poses the dangers of overwhelming instabilities, clashing fealties, disruptive memories, multiple loyalties, and cascading violence. Reterritorialization, as we have seen in the former Yugoslavia and East Timor, is not necessarily a peaceful process (though, with the exception of Chechnya, it was surprisingly pacific in the case of the former Soviet Union). In the face of this, we now see a revival of attempts to reconstruct a disciplinary world order. But it is clear that raw militaristic domination of the U.S. imperial sort is bound to fail and that the collective power of NATO cannot prevail even in Afghanistan. While a balance of power between regional centers mediated through coordinating institutions has a better chance of success, the rapid relative shifts in transport and communications, coupled with rising tides of nationalism, regionalism, and competition for basic resources (energy in particular), put the prospect of any steady-state equilibrium in geopolitical power relations at a low level of probability at the very moment when the socio-ecological and spatio-temporal crisis in place formation (for example, urbanization) is rapidly deepening. Against this, a global system of cosmopolitan governance and ethics, based on a federation of independent states (as Kant envisaged) seems more attractive, but it is disturbing to see the idea of the state, construed and reified as an absolute entity (and so depicted on the map of the world), being brought back in as a crucial stabilizer. Nussbaum’s surprising (though very Kantian) rehabilitation of the traditional nation-state and Appiah’s insistence upon a rooted cosmopolitanism are indicators of this trend. Such a questionable response is to some degree understandable when it seems as if the main left alternative in active play is some form of global antistatist anarchism (with some of its roots in the libertarian side of neoliberalism).
The geographical theoretical question is therefore this: what is the space and time of the contemporary state, and what kind of place called a state is it now possible and desirable to construct? In examining this, the theory of spatio-temporalities and of place formation earlier outlined provides a point of departure. The absolute qualities of the state, as these have formed historically and geographically, are not hard to document and to critique. We know them well even as some of them weaken. In the realm of material social practices, there are physical borders to be negotiated, while in the sphere of representation cartography continues to play a vital role in supporting the illusion of the state as a clear-cut entity in absolute space and time. The map of the world divided into states that emerged from the sixteenth century onward is still with us, and these representations have been made real by cadastral surveying and the translation of cartographic representations into physical borders on the ground through the kinds of practices that Mitchell describes. Within such physical territorial frames, it became important to build relational solidarities, through the invocation or construction of collective founding myths and cultural forms that celebrated the idea of nation. The Treaty of Westphalia that set up the European state system could not have functioned without such materializations and reifications, nor could notions of state sovereignty be defined in the form we now know them without also building relational solidarities, albeit within the absolutist territorialized frame. But, by the same token, clashes over state sovereignty and interstate wars would not have taken the form they did, absent such reifications and their parallel lived relationalities of identity, loyalty, and fealty to the state. Wars were, in effect, material manifestations of that state fetishism of “material relations between peoples and social relations between things.” States went to war with each other as if they were (or their rulers imagined they were) distinctive social entities endowed with powers and vulnerable to threats (what can it possibly mean to say that the security interests of this or that country are under threat?). But it was only under these fictional but reified conditions that the Kantian cosmopolitan proposition concerning the right to hospitality when crossing borders could also arise. Kant’s vision of a world federation of independent republics (or, for that matter, Bookchin’s vision of a confederation of self-governing municipalities) is grounded solely in absolute space and time. How the absoluteness is lived (as security, confinement, governmentality, domination, exclusion, or exile) also becomes a critical historical and geographical question.
But what of the relative positionality of the state? The porosity of state borders with respect to money, commodity, and people flows, as well as flows of information and cultural habits (to say nothing of physical processes of circulation of air and water), perpetually undermines the idea of the state as a sealed entity, forcing the various state apparatuses to negotiate with other state apparatuses and entities over conditions of circulation and exchange that perpetually escape absolute controls. Tariffs and trade agreements, diplomatic missions and alliances, negotiated flows and staged cultural exchanges, and sharing agreements and joint responsibilities toward, say, air and water pollution or excessive resource extractions postulate the state as a geopolitical and geo-economic fact in the uncontrolled and unstable relative space-time of the world market and of the global ecosystem. Cross-border institutional arrangements arise that put limits on absolute sovereignty but also tempt or in some cases even impel imperialist practices. If, as Woodrow Wilson noted, the U.S. state has to follow exchange value wherever the merchant and financier may go, and then subsequently deploy its powers—diplomatic, military, moral, and economic—to assist if not lead the commercial assault upon other places and states, then struggles over positionality in relative space-time move to the fore as a guiding if not formative aspect of what states must become. States are, in effect, increasingly defined through the machinations of interstate struggles in relative space-time.
The relational idea of the state (and even more so the relational idea of the nation) may get converted into thing-like terms (in absolute space and time). But the state may then become a nexus of social cohesion with all manner of material, cultural, and social effects. The dialectical relation between different spatio-temporalities works both ways (as Mitchell implies in his discussion of how the state becomes a transcendental and immaterial object). Within the territorial Cartesian frame that British imperial rule imposed on India, for example, a nationalist movement subsequently elucidated and constructed powerful myths of nationhood from the nineteenth century onward. These Hindu myths served to consolidate the sense of territorial bonding between a great diversity of peoples and gave a powerful sense of what the Indian state (originally defined by an outside colonial power) could be as both a meaningful entity and as an object of veneration, affection, and fealty for indigenous populations. The effect of partition in 1947 seems to have consolidated such nationalist feelings in many parts of the subcontinent, thus enabling the Indian state to appear as a coherent structure. This permitted centralized power to consolidate and function in a situation of intense, uneven geographical development as well as linguistic, economic, and cultural diversity. Relationalities subsequently worked to consolidate the new territorial division known as the Indian state, for which, at least according to S. Kaviraj, there continues to be popular respect in most (though not all) parts of India in spite of all of the obvious failings on the ground.30 In effect, a certain kind of relationality is constructed in the service of consolidating that absolute disciplinary power of the state that in turn creates a condition of possibility for capitalism to function within a certain field of constraints and supports. In those spaces of India, such as the northeastern states, where relationalities have not been successfully implanted, then zones of violent conflict emerge (such as the Naxalite movement and its successors). While Nicos Poulantzas erroneously erects such phenomena into a theoretical principle by narrowly defining the state as a contradictory site of social cohesion, he was not wrong to identify this as one of the more common outcomes of the process of place building that has underlain the construction of actual nation-states in recent times. That the absolute power of the state can also hinder rather than facilitate free forms of capitalist development is also easily demonstrated (as in the case of India before neoliberalization).
But relationalities are unstable. One major criticism of the Bush administration is that it has so undermined the image of the United States as a beacon of liberty and freedom, and so diminished the moral authority of the United States on the world stage, that the United States as a political entity is no longer capable of projecting the same symbolic power and thereby exercising the global leadership it once had. The internal divisions generated between, for example, so-called “red” and “blue” states highlight internal contradictions at the expense of social cohesion (though not, it should be noted, in a way that hinders capital accumulation). Image, moral authority, nationalism, and social cohesion are relational (immaterial) terms, and the astonishing speed with which they can change is well illustrated by the case of the United States. When Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, rather than the Statue of Liberty, become the symbol of what the U.S. state stands for, then something very important has happened in the immaterial relational realm that must have wide-ranging objective consequences. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States will almost certainly have a major impact upon the moral authority of the United States throughout much of the rest of the world (which is probably why so many segments of corporate capital supported him). The astonishing rapidity with which seemingly solidaritous states can disintegrate also speaks to the inherent instability of relational notions of loyalty and belonging.
The state, viewed from the standpoint of geographical theory, is a dialectically constituted construct, a “relative permanence” caught between absolute, relative, and relational definitions, between material social practices, representations, and ways of living. It is the outcome of distinctive processes of place making caught up in an interactive politics of territorialization. The dialectics of socio-ecological change, operating across and through the diverse moments of technologies (of administration and governance in particular), mental conceptions, social relations (both of class and bureaucratic hierarchies), productive apparatuses within a fictive national economy, relations to nature, and the politics of daily life, underpins contingent and geographically uneven processes of evolution of state apparatuses. The dialectics of the various moments within the assemblage of the state unfolds within a framework of internal and external, uneven geographical developments only partially sealed in by state borders. While the state appears as a coherent entity endowed with an autonomy of action (in relation to the economy and civil society, as well as to other states), the state is always a contingent being (thing, concept, idea, and image), an internal relation within some greater whole, subsumed under the conditions of possibility of its geographical situation, perpetually subject to destabilization.
Geographical theory has relevance far beyond the critical examination of definitions of the individual and the state. Concepts such as city, region, neighborhood, and community can all be similarly elaborated upon. In exactly the same way that the concept of the state has been questioned these last thirty years, so has the concept of the city (even to the point where some analysts, as with the state, want to abolish the use of the term to describe any kind of material entity, though most would concede it should be kept alive as an idea). Conversely, communitarianism as a political theory in the absence of geographical theory makes absolutely no sense, even as political theorists like Putnam and political philosophers like Walzer struggle to articulate their conclusions without it. Geographical theory explains why such sentiments arise, but then resurrects the concept of the community or the city, on a par with that of the state, as a much more complicated geographical term. When, for example, Victor Hugo, in voluntary exile in the Channel Islands during the imperial rule of Louis Bonaparte, was asked if he missed Paris, he simply replied that “Paris is an idea” (thus invoking his positive internalization of a relational conception of Paris that he always carried with him), but that he had “always loathed the Rue de Rivoli” (thereby signaling his objections to the absolute spatial form then being imposed upon Paris by Haussmann).31 We all, I think, can appreciate what Hugo meant.
Liberating Spaces
The short answer to Nussbaum’s question, we may conclude, is that geographical theory has to be incorporated as a foundational part of any curriculum designed to support moves toward a more adequate form of cosmopolitanism. Liberating ourselves, for example, from the narrow confines of that absolute theory of space and time which grounds bourgeois authoritarianism is a vital first step toward freeing up our conceptual world, and so helping to define a broader terrain of “conditions of possibility” for progressive action. A profounder appreciation of how place construction and the socio-ecological dialectic work is likewise a necessary precondition for more thoughtful explorations of alternatives that go beyond the vulgar antistatism that characterizes a goodly portion of the contemporary left. Critical engagement with foundational concepts of social and legal theory can also reveal much. The secret geographical chains—the ruses of geographical reason—that bind our imaginations and our capacities for action are both powerful and subtle (in part because they are so obvious and banal). Such barriers to a more realistic pursuit of greater conceptual freedom must be dismantled.
But the recent questioning of concepts such as “individual,” “state” and “city” signals, in addition to the cascading interest in theories of relationality throughout the social sciences and the humanities, a general crisis of spatio-temporality, of place construction, and of socio-ecological relations within the global order that needs to be confronted directly and understood for what it is. This is the central question for geographical theory to address and for social theory to embrace. Failure to recognize its significance both within academia as well as in the corridors of power is intellectually inexcusable and politically dangerous. This immediately poses the question of the nature and form of the dominant socio-ecological processes involved in place construction or, put another way, who (individuals or collectivities) has the power and influence to so shape relational meanings and relative positionalities as to bring into being (reify) a particular kind of place upon the ground in absolute space and time? The consequences of such reifications for how we live our daily lives and construct our own futures are profound.
This leads us, finally, into the murky realms of actually existing left politics in general. What is remarkable in these times is the hegemony on the left of some version of relational politics. This is shown by the popularity of texts such as Hardt and Negri’s Empire, by the strong impact of John Holloway’s Changing the World without Taking Power, and by the writings of a “new wave” of radical philosophers, such as Badiou, Rancière, and Žižek, together with the popularity of relational thinkers such as Benjamin and Deleuze.32 There are, of course, marked differences between these thinkers, but what they all have in common is a certain fidelity (as Badiou would put it) to “the event,” the “moment,” and the prioritization of process over the concreteness of things (becoming is all, says Holloway, and being is nothing; while Badiou, in the absence of contemporary events of any note, resorts simply to the purely relational idea of fidelity to the fidelity as the core of contemporary political possibilities, though in his most recent formulations he argues for fidelity to “the communist hypothesis”).33
This relational positioning is undoubtedly liberating in fundamental ways. For example, it permits Badiou to construct devastating critiques of contemporary political practices and Holloway to emphasize the power of doing, the salience of process, and the political power of labor to transform the world. But critical geographical theory would indicate that the pure prioritization of the relational (particularly when coupled solely with the Lefebvrian notion of “the lived”) is profoundly mistaken. It leads right back into that narcissistic, self-preoccupied world that Carl Schorske so effectively describes in fin-de-siècle Vienna, in which transcendence trumps actual political engagement, let alone the concrete issues of political organization and strategies.34 The insights and inspirations derived from relational thinking may be fundamental, but they remain politically irrelevant until they can be reconnected to the way human beings relate and conduct their daily lives through material practices in the absolute spaces and times of, say, urban life and through the relative space-times of all forms of exchange (social, cultural, and ecological, as well as economic). The relational critique of absolute forms (such as the state) may be entirely justified, but the solution to the problem cannot be to “conceptualize the state into oblivion” or, as Holloway does, to treat every completed thing as a reification from which we are by definition alienated and which, therefore, should not even be considered as relevant to political struggle. In this way, Holloway wishes away all the tangible problems that arise in the production of spaces, places, and nature, thereby producing a theoretical framework that is every bit as deracinated and abstract as that conceived of in Locke’s liberalism. To take his ideas literally would mean, for example, paying no mind whatsoever to what kind of urbanization we actually build around us. Put simply, walls, doors, and bridges matter, and how they are configured makes a lot of difference to how we live our lives. While “urbanization without cities” (to cite a Murray Bookchin title) may sound a good idea as a counter to the alienations of contemporary capitalist urbanization, it does not resolve the problem of how to make tangible the urban geography of our emancipatory dreams. Furthermore, to be dismissive of all forms of organization, institutionalization, and territorialization (including the much maligned state as a specific but distinctly malleable kind of geographical construction) as somehow either irrelevant or inherently repressive is to cut off the routes to any kind of ameliorative, let alone revolutionary, political practice. It is, I must emphasize, the dialectical movement across and through the different dimensionalities of space-time (absolute, relative and relational) and the intersecting moments (of technologies, social relations, processes in nature, mental conceptions, production [labor] processes, and everyday life) entailed in environmental transformations that really count in the theory of place construction. To refuse the practice of that dialectic by ignoring it is to refuse to confront “the conditions of possibility” for a truly transformative revolutionary politics. While it is possible to reaffirm the “communist hypothesis” ideally, as does Badiou, it is also possible to do so through a thoroughly grounded historical geographical materialism, as I have sought to show in a new introduction to The Communist Manifesto.35
The bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels so convincingly show, arrived at its own distinctive form of cosmopolitanism (now represented by the frequent flier corporate and business elite, the global accountants and consultants, the employees of international institutions, professional and technological elites, and the like) by revolutionizing the geography of capital accumulation. It built radically new relative spaces of transport and communications, facilitating rapid motion of commodities, money, and people, around a relational form of labor value (represented by the various money forms). It created new places that carry ancient names like Beijing, London, Rome, New York, Cairo, and Frankfurt, as well as relatively new places, such as Singapore, Mumbai, Shanghai, Durban, Saõ Paulo, Los Angeles, Shenzhen, Dubai, and the like. The bourgeoisie produced spaces and places in its own image and according to its own distinctive needs and in so doing launched a socio-environmental transformation of planet earth (both intended and unintended) that is simply astounding to contemplate. We live in a totally different geographical world from that which existed 500 years ago. Everyone has been and still is forced to adapt to these rapidly changing space relations, place constructions, and environmental transformations, all the while striving to construct counter-spaces and–places, the better to cope or to actively resist. Cosmopolitanism of the contemporary bourgeois sort was not, therefore, simply an idea that arose out of nothing. Rather, it was an ideology that arose out of these multiple geographical transformations that began as long ago as 1492 if not before. The rise of an alternative, oppositional, and far more egalitarian cosmopolitanism likewise demands that attention be paid to the prior transformations in the geographical conditions of possibility for such political ideals not only to be realized but even to be fully formulated. If a subaltern insurgent cosmopolitanism is to take hold, it must contemplate no less a radical transformation in its geography than that which the bourgeoisie collectively accomplished.
To understand geographical theory in all its fullness is, undoubtedly, a daunting intellectual task. But, as the great nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus wrote in an open letter to his anarchist comrades toward the end of his life: “Great enthusiasm and dedication to the point of risking one’s life are not the only ways of serving a cause. The conscious revolutionary is not only a person of feeling, but also one of reason, to whom every effort to promote justice and solidarity rests on precise knowledge and on a comprehensive understanding of history, sociology and biology” as well as the geography to which he had dedicated so much of his life’s work.36 Or, as Locke, Kant, and Nussbaum might all agree to put it, without an adequate knowledge of geography, not only will we fail to understand the world around us and undermine our cosmopolitan quest for universal justice: we will forego all possibility of revolutionary politics for a relational dream-world of narcissistic transcendentalism, of perpetually unfulfilled desire, at the very moment when “spaces of hope” are opening up all around us for the taking and the making. If our geography has been made and remade again and again by human endeavor, then it can be remade yet again to accord more fully with our political ambitions.