Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography

Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography Doreen Massey This paper explores the possibility that there may be commonalities between physical geography and human geography in emerging ways of conceptualizing space, time and space-time. It argues that one of the things holding physical and human geography apart for so long has been their relationship to physics as an assumed model of ‘science’. It is proposed here that not only is this an inadequate model of science but that it has led us astray in our inherited conceptualizations of both time and space. The urge to think ‘historically’ is now evident in both physical and human geography. The paper argues that this both forms the basis for a possible conversation and also obliges us to rethink our notions of space/space-time. key words space-time/time-space

complexity

emergence

physics envy

Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA revised manuscript received 1 June 1999

Connections This paper is a preliminary dip into deep waters. It will doubtless be taken to task on all sides. In a sense (although I would rather not be proven too horribly wrong), that might in itself not be too dismaying. For the argument presented here arises not only out of my theoretical interest in space(-time) but also out of another conviction. For a whole variety of reasons, the carving-up of the world and of scientific endeavour between disciplines has been experienced recently as increasingly untenable. One of the most well-established and best-fortified of these old divides within knowledge has been that between the ‘physical’ and ‘human’ sciences. Yet even that ingrained counterposition between so-called ‘natural’ and ‘social’ is increasingly being questioned, and my conviction is that if they are now up for reinspection and problematization, then geographers should be in a good position to make a leading contribution. In some areas they have long done so,

of course – one thinks of socialist environmentalism, for instance. Moreover, there is new work: that of Whatmore (1999) and Murdoch (1997) among others springs to mind. This paper takes a particular tack at the issue. It stems from the idea that there may be some questions that both physical and human geographers are concerned with, which we might, therefore, be able to debate together. There are, potentially, many such questions (including those that branch off from the one under consideration here – questions of realist philosophy, of the conceptualization of entities, of reductionism, of path-dependence, of questions of probability and indeterminacy, etc); this paper is a tentative foray in one direction, but a direction that is at the heart of our joint enterprise – the nature of space, and therefore (I will argue) of space-time. The immediate stimuli for this paper were articles from geographers working in fields very different (I had thought) from my own. They were Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone’s (1995) ‘Development of a geomorphological spatial model

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 261–276 1999 ISSN 0020-2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 1999

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using object-oriented design’ and David Sugden’s (1996) ‘The East Antarctic ice sheet: unstable ice or unstable ideas?’. The latter was David Sugden’s vice-presidential address at the 1996 RGS-IBG annual conference and in it he urged that his reading of the controversy surrounding the history of the Antarctic ice sheet carried ‘further implications for geomorphology in particular and for physical geography and geography as a whole’ (451). The present paper is in part an attempt to pick up that baton and to explore the connections to and implications for my neck of the geographical woods. Let me begin, however, with Raper and Livingstone’s paper. This is an argument for the importance of a concept of relative space in the representation/modelling of environmental problems. ‘[T]he way that spatio-temporal processes are studied’, they argue, ‘is strongly influenced by the model of space and time that is adopted’ (1995, 364). Traditionally, the authors argue, while environmental representations have been somewhat unthinking about the concepts of space and time that they imply and necessarily incorporate, they have in fact been dominated by ‘‘‘timeless’’ geometric methods focused on two dimensional planes’ (363). Raper and Livingstone’s aim is to disrupt this unthought assumption and to argue for a more self-conscious and ‘relative’ understanding. In doing this, they turn to ‘theoretical developments in physics’ (363) and in particular to Einstein and Minkowski. This allows them to do a number of things. First, it provides concepts that enable us to understand space and time as ‘dimensions that are defined by the entities that inhabit them and not vice versa’: space and time must be considered relative concepts, ie, they are determined by the nature and behaviour of the entities that ‘inhabit’ them (the concept of ‘relative space’). This is the inverse of the situation where space and time themselves form a rigid framework which has an existence independent of the entities (the concept of ‘absolute space’). (363)

Thus they distinguish between two approaches to the spatial modelling of environmental problems: the geometrically indexed (absolute space) and the object-oriented (relative space). Using the former approach makes the coordinate system . . . into the primary index of the spatial representation and dictates much of the representational structure of the environmental problem of interest.

Doreen Massey In the object-oriented approach the environmental scientist must declare the nature of the real-world entities identified first: their characteristics and behaviour structure the spatial representation. (360)

(The implication of this is, of course, that the GIS folk have to receive the spatio-temporal framework from the application domain, rather than, as heretofore, themselves being in a position to decide it.) Second, this approach to space-time enables the conceptualization of entities themselves as a set of ‘worlds’ (365), where each world has its own four-dimensional reference system. ‘Time’, they write, ‘is a property of the objects’ (366). Third, and implicit in all of this, is that for the kind of work that Raper and Livingstone are addressing, it is necessary to think not in terms of space and time separately, but in terms of a four-dimensional space-time (364). All of this was, for me, totally engrossing. It rang many bells with my own work, and that of many others, within human geography. We, too, have been struggling to understand space (and spacetime) as constituted through the social, rather than as dimensions defining an arena within which the social takes place. We too have tried to consider the idea of local time-spaces, time-spaces specific to the entities with which they are mutually constitutive. Thrift’s (1996) explorations in rethinking theory and space together and Whatmore’s (1997) proposals for relational thinking are prominent examples, as is much of the work that draws on the writing of Bruno Latour. The new Open University course on Understanding cities tries to conceive of cities as open time-space intensities of social relations, themselves encompassing and interlocking a variety of sub-time-spaces of different groups and activities. In brief, a number of human geographers are now trying to rethink space as integrally spacetime and to conceptualize space-time as relative (defined in terms of the entities ‘within’ it), relational (as constituted through the operation of social relations, through which the ‘entities’ are also constituted) and integral to the constitution of the entities themselves (the entities are local timespaces). Sometimes it can make your head hurt to think in this way, but as Raper and Livingstone argue (1995, 364), ‘the way that spatio-temporal processes are studied is strongly influenced by the model of space and time that is adopted.’ In other words, it matters; it makes a difference. Moreover, this way of conceiving of the world is coming onto the agenda in wider debates within

Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography

the philosophy of social sciences. Perhaps most evidently, there are resonances here of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984) ‘events’ and ‘becomings’ – see the definition of ‘entities’ above (although I would argue that their formulation is a lot better on time than it is on space). And, of course, the project of reuniting space and time, and freeing ourselves from the debilitating separation of them that we have inherited, primarily (though not only) from Kant, is one now being taken up by many writers (see, for instance, Massey 1992 and references therein). Unwin (1993), in the resounding coda to his book, argued for a reunification of geography precisely around a reconceptualization of timespace. Indeed, rather than arguing for a reprioritization of space (in a kind of competition with time), we should perhaps be arguing for a unified understanding. As Larry Grossberg has written: ‘The bifurcation of time and space, and the privileging of time over space, was perhaps the founding moment of modern philosophy’ (1996, 178); in a footnote, he adds, ‘the crucial issue is the separation of the two’ (187). Now, even at this level of generality, it was clear to me, on reading Raper and Livingstone, that there were also differences of emphasis between their approach and mine. Thus, to give one example, they focus their conceptualization on ‘entities’, while it is perhaps more usual in the debates of which I am aware in human geography to focus on the mutual constitution of relations and entities, along with space itself. Their approach is explicitly ‘object-oriented’ and the objects come before the space-times. For me it is easier and more helpful to understand entities and space-times as being constituted in the same moment and as that in itself happening through the relational constitution of them both. This kind of relational understanding of space and of entities/objects/identities is gaining increasing currency within human geography. It is now quite frequently argued that (social) spatiality and entities such as ‘places’ are products of our (social) interactions. The implications are numerous and range from a querying of the tendency to see space as necessarily divided into closed and bounded regions – a querying which would augment this with a focus on interconnections – through to the more general assertion that we have a responsibility for the spatialities through which we live and construct our lives. It is an approach that opens up questions of the supposed ‘essences’ of places, along with notions of authenticity bound

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up in such ideas as ‘quintessential Englishness’ and more general forms of exclusivist nationalisms and parochialisms. But to register these points is not at all to attempt to distance myself/ourselves from what is happening in Raper and Livingstone’s part of geography. Rather it is to suggest that what we have here is the potential for debate and discussion, together. Maybe there are questions and debates, and even some tentative ‘answers’, that different parts of geography have in common.

‘Science’ and physics envy There was, moreover, another aspect of Raper and Livingstone’s paper that rang bells with me as a human geographer. As I said, they turn to physics for stimulation in the development of their approach. In this they are adopting a strategy – of referring to a ‘harder’ science – that is common across the subspecialisms within geography (and indeed beyond). Cultural geographers may cite chaos theory, urban theorists turn to formulations from quantum mechanics, anyone arguing about the nature of knowledge might draw on the thinking of Heisenberg. Two things in particular interest me about this phenomenon: on the one hand how we do it (that is, the terms on which we make the appeal) and on the other hand the intellectual history of why we do it. It is my opinion that, at least in some cases, this habit of referring to physics bears witness to an implicit imagination both of a model of science and of a particular relationship between the disciplines. It is an imagination that physical and human geographers share, even though in the latter case it is less explicitly held and would probably be denied if openly challenged (as I am challenging it here). Moreover, I want to argue, it is an imagination which, while it may be shared by physical and human geographers, nonetheless serves to hold us apart. Raper and Livingstone are careful about the nature of their reference to physics. They are aware of the need to define the limits to validity of the claims they are making, and remain consistent with the arguments of physics in accepting that concepts of absolute space may be suitable for some spheres of geographical work (they cite landresource management as an example). This is not, then, a general proposition about the applicability

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of concepts of relative space. Their point is that ‘there are arguments for the use of a ‘‘relative space’’ approach in the study of environmental problems’ (1995, 363).1 Moreover, they turn to physics on defined terms: that it has ‘expanded the range of concepts available’ (363). In other words, it is treated as a provocation, a stimulus to thought. In this, however, they are quite different from some others, in both physical and human geography, who turn to physics as a kind of higher authority, as a source of unimpugnable truth. It is what I call the reverential reference: if ‘physics’ says so, who are we to disagree? Such an attitude is, of course, built upon implicit understandings that lie deep within us, as both intellectuals and ‘ordinary citizens’. There has developed over the last few centuries (building on even older foundations) an acceptance of a hierarchy among the sciences, between the disciplines, and between forms of knowledge. It operates both in general and with great precision. Within the standard disciplines, physics is at one end and (say) cultural studies and the humanities at the other. Neoclassical economics has striven to distinguish itself from other social sciences and to give itself as much as possible the appearance of a physical (hard) science. Physical geographers on occasions think they are ‘more scientific’ than human geographers, where the term ‘scientific’ conjures up images of the status and worth of the knowledge acquired. And yet, while the physical geographer might feel this way about the human, the feelings are reversed when they turn to face the other way. Thus Frodeman writes of ‘the ‘‘physics envy’’ that geology sometimes seems to suffer from (ie the sense of inferiority concerning the status of geology as compared with other, ‘‘harder’’ sciences) . . .’ (1995, 961). And in a different discipline altogether, that of biology, Steven Rose deploys a very similar language to argue that his discipline is often ‘said to suffer from a sense of inferiority, of ‘‘physics envy’’ (which may perhaps be why these days many molecular biologists try to behave as if they are physicists!)’ (1997, 9).2 This is an envy that is deeply embedded, and it provides an implicit grounding for references to the authority of physics in many a part of geography. There are many reasons to contest this assumption of authority. Most evidently, the established status of physics, of its methodology and its truthclaims, is based on an image of that discipline that is now out of date. Physics itself has moved on.

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There is a particular contradiction here: many of our appeals to physics these days are in fact to the new views of the world coming out of quantum mechanics and more recent developments. This is quite acceptable when the reference takes the form of pointing to a stimulating new idea or a potential analogy. But when it takes the form of a demonstration of proof simply through appeal to a higher authority, the irony is that that authority was established in relation to, and in the days of, a much older form of physics. We need, then, to be circumspect about the nature and status of our references. In human geography and related disciplines, for instance, what precisely is the status of appeals to quantum mechanics or chaos theory? What, really, are the grounds for evocations of fractal space? As provocations to the imagination they may be wonderfully stimulating; as implicit assertions of a single ontology they need justifying; as invocations of a higher, truer science they may be deeply suspect.3 There are, moreover, further reasons for caution. It is rare, for instance, that one can legitimately or unequivocally appeal to ‘recent developments in physics’ in proof or demonstration of an argument in another field, for such developments are often themselves the subject of fierce debate. In my own work on the reconceptualization of spatiality in ways adequate to face up to some of the problems posed by modern times, I have also found myself exploring debates about temporality. Indeed, not only would I argue that we need to think in terms of space-time/time-space, but also I would propose that any conceptualization of space has a (logically) necessary corollary in a particular ‘matching’ conceptualization of time. The fact that people often work with ‘unmatched pairs’ is, I maintain, the source of a number of the difficulties that scientists of all sorts have frequently faced in this matter. The concept of space for which I want to argue is one that holds that space is open and dynamic. That is (and given what was said above about space-time), ‘space’ cannot be a closed system: it is not stasis, it is not defined negatively as an absence of temporality, it is not the classic ‘slice through time’. Indeed, the closed-system/slice-throughtime imagination of space denies the possibility of a real temporality – for there is no mechanism for moving from one slice to the next (Massey 1997). Rather the spatiality that I envisage would be open,

Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography

would be constantly in the process of being made (the relations yet to be established, or not) and would have elements of both order and accident (the latter deriving from the happenstance juxtapositions and separations which – I argue – are intrinsic to space). It would be integral to spacetime. That kind of understanding of space, however, ‘matches’ with a particular view of time: as irreversible and the vehicle of novelty. Now, I could appeal to ‘physics’ for corroborating witness to this argument; but I could also – being honest – find a physics that proposed quite the opposite point of view. And, within physics, I am not competent to judge. We must not, then, resort to tactics that in reality amount to picking out for quotation – and as ‘proof’ – one’s favourite, or most compatible, ‘harder’ scientist. I will not belabour any further all these arguments against the supposed scientific superiority of physics, save to make two brief points and one more extended one. First that, however ‘hard’ a science is, it is still the product of a process conducted within and influenced by a wider social context and the conditions and character of its own performance. The work of sociologists of knowledge, actor-network theorists and others is now too well known for this point to need further elaboration. Second that, wherever one finds oneself on this supposed ‘spectrum’ from physics to cultural studies, certain debates in which one is engaged seem to be shared with at least some of those both upstream and downstream. The work of Isabelle Stengers and of Marilyn Strathern comes to mind: neither of them geographers but both widely read by geographers. As a social scientist much preoccupied with essentialism, I find the debates within biology about the existence or not of ‘natural kinds’ (and, if they exist, debates about their conceptualization) to be both fascinating and unsettling (see, for instance, Goodwin 1995; Rose 1997). Arguments in number theory about the status of ‘natural numbers’ keep me equally riveted. Is there here a return to a Platonism which I, in my part of the forest, am struggling to be free from? The final and more extended point stems from the fact that there is a considerable literature denying the view of ‘physics’ (in classical mechanical guise) as the one true method of doing science and as the purest form of scientific knowledge. Both Frodeman and Rose argue this position, as do a host of authors in both geology and geomorphology. Thus Simpson (1963, 46), in a classic statement

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on the nature of geology as a science, argued the following: Historical science . . . cuts across the traditional lines between the various sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and the rest. Each of these has both historical and nonhistorical aspects, although the proportions of the two differ greatly. Among the sciences named, the historical element plays the smallest role in physics, where it is frequently ignored, and the greatest in sociology, where the existence of nonhistorical aspects is sometimes denied – one of the reasons that sociology has not always been ranked as a science. It is not a coincidence that there is a correlation with complexity and levels of integration, physics being the simplest and sociology the most complex science in this partial list. Unfortunately philosophers of science have tended to concentrate on one end of this spectrum, and that the simplest, so much as to give a distorted, and in some instances quite false, idea of the philosophy of science as a whole.

A whole host of issues clamour for attention in that quotation. To begin with, Simpson makes the very important point that the move along the spectrum from physics (nineteenth-century model) to sociology involves an increase in complexity. Physics’ focus on relatively simple systems, therefore, and especially the initial focus on the simple, timeless systems of classical mechanics, has been problematical for the development of other forms of knowledge. The assumption that non-simple aspects of the world were in principle reducible to simple systems (or, in terms of knowledge-production, would need to be if ‘scientific’ knowledge were to be gained from them), that they were really simple systems with too much ‘noise’ in them, prevented them from being addressed in their own right as complex systems. As is now being ever more frequently argued in a range of fields, the move from an assumption of simplicity to a recognition of complexity (with openness, feedback, non-linearity and a move away from simple equilibrium) can change the picture entirely, to the point of thoroughly undermining many of the conclusions arrived at through the analysis of simple systems alone. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) and Prigogine (1997) argue this point at some length, expanding it to make the wider observation that an overconcentration on simple systems might, at least on occasions, have led us thoroughly astray. With such arguments gaining an ever-wider hearing, it would seem that, at least within academe if not in more

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popular understandings, the higher status of branches of science that restricted themselves to simple systems might come in for further questioning. Perhaps disciplines that study ‘complex systems’ (from meteorology to sociology) can now lead the way. Certainly it is now increasingly argued that a number of different approaches can be taken to the analysis of any individual object of study. Richards (1990; 1994, for example) makes a strong and detailed case for this in geomorphology, enabling a move away from reductionism and a greater recognition of complex open systems and feedback effects. And Spedding (1997) proposes a new kind of question for geomorphology, one that gives priority to compositional relationships rather than to detailed process studies. Crucial to this is another implication of complexity – emergence: The phenomenon of emergence enables us to describe emergent forms sui generis. We don’t have to understand brain chemistry to understand language, even though the latter would not be possible without the former. (Sayer personal communication)

Similarly, in David Sugden’s analysis of the history of the east Antarctic ice sheet, two approaches are presented: the biostratigraphical and the geomorphological. The two approaches lead to very different understandings of the history of the ice sheet. The biostratigraphical approach appears to favour a history of dynamic change, while the geomorphological points to a more stable past. It is a difference in the analysis of history that has significant contemporary implications: each view implies a different prognostication of the potential results of global warming. In recent years, the biostratigraphical approach has had the wider currency. Sugden’s challenge is that interpretation of its data has ignored the broader geomorphological setting. This, he argues, is typical of a more general phenomenon: that geomorphology has, in recent decades ‘stressed short-term process studies and retreated from studies of landscape evolution’ (1996, 451). This, in turn, he relates to the traditional view that geology and geomorphology are a kind of physics manque´: Viewed in this light and driven by the aspiration to be scientific, it is perhaps understandable that geomorphology has stressed reductionism, short-term process studies and experimentation as the optimum route to knowledge. (451–2)

Doreen Massey

In other words, it has ignored the emergent phenomena: the landforms. And this in turn is related to time-span. Sugden’s paper demonstrates how an understanding of the longer-term historical geomorphology can lead to a different interpretation of the history of the ice sheet. Sugden’s aim (like that of Frodeman and Simpson for geology) is to argue that geomorphology must be understood not as a discipline that is an imperfect physics but rather as a complex and synthetic science that combines within itself attention to ‘timeless’ processes and understanding of historical ones. Certainly what the argument as a whole implies is that any comparisons between physical and human geography on the basis of ‘scientific status’ need to be laid aside. Rather, we should put in a claim for their both being sciences of the complex and the historical, which are badly served by looking to (an anyway now misconceived notion of) physics as a model. This does not mean that no assumptions of timeless processes may be made; even in the social field such assumptions may on occasions be innocuous. But both physical and human geographers need to be cautious about their references to so-called harder sciences and a good deal more rigorous about the terms on which such references are made. Being self-critical in that way, by wrenching ourselves away from all vestiges of that old imagination, we might find at least a few elements of a common ground: that both physical and human geography – at least in large measure – are complex sciences about complex systems.

Historical time Simpson, in the quotation cited earlier, not only makes a distinction between simple and complex systems and sciences, but also relates it to a further distinction – between non-historical and historical. This is a fundamental connection. One of the keys in this debate, certainly amongst geologists and geomorphologists, is the distinction between processes (and thus forms of explanation) that are timeless and those that are time-bound. (Different terms are sometimes deployed in this distinction: Simpson (1963) uses immanent and configurational, Bernal (1951) immanent and contingent.) There are also intermediate cases, such as equilibrium systems (see below). But the crucial point here is that time-bound processes are historical in

Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography

the full sense that they develop a future that is open. Now, I want to argue that there are implications here for the way in which we understand time itself. Moreover, given my earlier proposition that any conceptualization of the nature of time will have implications for the conceptualization of space, I want to propose that there are also, hidden within this debate, implications for how we think about space and spatiality. In other words, our relationship to nineteenth-century physics has misled us not only about simplicity/complexity but also about our concepts of time. This has had effects in both natural and social sciences. It has also had reverberations for how we conceptualize space. So, if we could overthrow some of our (shared, if different) fascinations with nineteenthcentury physics we might also be free to reimagine space/space-time. Frodeman provides a good place from which to begin. As David Sugden does for geomorphology, Frodeman proposes for geology that it be accepted as an historical science.4 Although he does not spell this out, what is at issue here is the nature of time: timeless processes do not generate a notion of open historical time. In other words, behind the long-established status of ‘physics’ (largely in the guise of classical mechanics) as the scientific discipline par excellence has been an implicit assumption about time that deprives it of its openness; reduces its possibility of being historical. This has been reflected in the complex relationship between ‘science’ and philosophy. Frodeman argues that, in the case of geology, this relationship has been distant (geologists being impatient with philosophizing and philosophers not seeing anything of serious import within geology). However, he argues that this lack of dialogue has been set against a mutual commitment (and admiration) between science-as-physics and philosophy-aspositivism.5 Such philosophy, especially in its early days and in the writings of people such as Carnap (1937), maintained that science was the only road to knowledge and that there was only one true scientific method; it committed itself to (its understandings of) objectivity, the empirical method and epistemological monism (which essentially incorporated a reductionism-to-physics). Such an approach can not admit ‘the fully historical’ into the realm of the scientific. In spite of subsequent debates, and later writings such as those of Kuhn,

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this relationship of mutual admiration, Frodeman argues, remained long undisturbed. It was little wonder that so many disciplines developed a form of physics envy. Other philosophers and branches of philosophy have, however, long struggled against these formulations, largely developing in opposition to a reduction of ‘knowledge’ to a narrow interpretation of science. The impulse for much of this latter investigation was the double argument that, on the one hand, ‘science’ was not the only – nor even necessarily the best – way to gain knowledge of reality and, on the other hand, that there is no one best scientific method. Frodeman wishes to inject more of this stream of philosophy into geology: to abandon the search for general timeless laws for everything (see also Simpson 1963) and to turn to the development of a specifically historical approach. This issue of history is crucial. Frodeman points out that time has been absolutely central to the development of these critical strands of philosophy, but he does not develop the point further. In fact, consideration of time was central to such philosophies precisely because the classical science of the day evoked timelessness. This was the case not only in the concept of fully timeless processes, but also in closed equilibrium systems, where the future is given, contained within the initial conditions – it is closed. This flew in the face of what these critical philosophers knew of the world. A long history of the development of ideas about time was set in train. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) analyse this history in detail. They point to a whole string of philosophers, from Hegel through Heidegger to Whitehead, struggling against what they feared were the wider implications of the epistemological and ontological claims of the then currently dominant forms of science. Diderot, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead and Bergson all ‘attempted to analyse and limit the scope of modern science as well as to open new perspectives seen as radically alien to that science’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 79–80). Central to their struggle was the argument that time must be fully open-futured. Bergson was crucial here: for him, time was about the continuous emergence of novelty, ‘To him the future is becoming in a way that can never be a mere rearrangement of what has been’ (Adam 1990, 24). The ‘hard sciences’ were obdurate, however. Prigogine and Stengers (1984, 16) argue that this

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difficulty of getting ‘science’ to recognize a fully historical temporality ‘led to discouragement’. As they put it, at that historical moment the choice seemed to be either to accept the pronouncements of classical science or to resort to a metaphysical philosophy. Bergson (along with Whitehead and others) took the latter route. One result of this, which I believe to have been both utterly devastating and at the same time foundational for much subsequent philosophical and social thought, was that as a consequence of these philosophers laying claim to the essential creativity of time, space – postulated as the intuitive opposite – came to be seen as the realm of the dead. For Bergson, ‘space’ became associated with the science with which he was embattled. If such science ignored time (the open temporality that he was struggling to assert) it must therefore be ‘space’ (a leap of ‘logic’ that I find totally untenable, but you can see why it happens). Further, he interpreted the very process of scientific production as one of ‘spatialization’ (ie of taking ‘time’ out of things). Indeed, representation as a generic activity became associated with the spatial, an association that lives on strongly to this day. For Bergson, ‘the rational mind merely spatializes’; he thought in terms of ‘the immobilizing (spatial) categories of the intellect’ (Gross 1981–82, 62, 66): For Bergson, the mind is by definition spatially oriented. But everything creative, expansive and teeming with energy is not. Hence, the intellect can never help us reach what is essential because it kills and fragments all that it touches . . . We must, Bergson concluded, break out of the spatialization imposed by mind in order to regain contact with the core of the truly living, which subsists only in the time dimension . . .6

I want to propose that this engagement between ‘science’ and different branches of philosophy (and thereby also social sciences) both has been genuinely two-sided and has had deep implications for how we think about space. In the era of classical science – and on the issue of time – social science and philosophy were clearly reaching for questions that the dominant natural scientists of their day simply did not grasp. These early so-called harder scientists could with benefit have listened to and learned from philosophers and social scientists. Moreover, the reasons that they did not learn, or in some cases that they resisted so fiercely the questions and arguments of certain critical philosophers, were both scientific (according to the lights

Doreen Massey

of their day) and social (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; see also a number of other accounts, such as Toulmin 1990). However, this troubled relationship also influenced the course that was taken by (some) philosophical and social theorizing. One example is the assumption mentioned above: that there is a relationship between space and representation. To ‘represent’ was (and still often is) understood as being to ‘spatialize’. This assumption runs as a guiding thread through Laclau’s (1990) later work on the philosophy of radical democracy; it is asserted without further explanation by de Certeau (1984); it reverberates throughout much of structuralism. Even one of the strongest protagonists within our own discipline of the importance of the spatial takes this view: Any system of representation, in fact, is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flow of experience and in so doing distorts what it strives to represent . . . (Harvey 1989, 206)

There are two things going on here: first the argument that representation necessarily fixes, and therefore deadens and detracts from, the flow of life; and second that this process of deadening is equivalent to ‘spatialization’. The first proposition I would not entirely dispute, though I shall go on to modify the form in which it is customarily couched. However, it seems to me that there is no case at all for the second proposition: that there is an equivalence between space and representation. It is one of those accepted things that are by now so deeply embedded that they are rarely if ever questioned. I would argue three things and pose one question. First argument: that this now-hegemonic equation of space and representation in fact derives from nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury battles over the meaning of time (as argued above). This may be why, historically, representation has come to be equated with spatialization, but in fact such terminology is both mistaken and actively harmful. Second argument: that representation may indeed ‘fix’ and ‘stabilize’ (though see below), but that what it so stabilizes is not simply time but space-time. And third argument: that this historically significant way of imagining space/ spatialization not only derives from an assumption that space is to be defined simply as a lack of temporality (holding time still) but also has contributed substantially to its continuing to be

Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography

thought of in that way. It is, however, a totally inadequate conception of space. The question is this: given this association of space with representation, and the characterization of space as immobility, what options are there for representing space itself for cartography, for GIS, to develop a form of mapping that – although representation – does not reduce space to a dead surface. How can it be brought alive? This is an issue influenced both by the techniques available and by conceptual stance, and it is addressed by Raper and Livingstone (1995, 362): the problem ‘concerns the representation of a continuous reality using discrete entities’; the issue, in other words and in my terms, is not the spatialization of the temporal (the dominant view of what representation is all about) but the representation of space-time. And the representation of space-time is itself an emergent product of the conceptualization of the spacetime entities themselves. Deleuze and Guattari address this by challenging the notion of representation. For them, a concept should express an event rather than an essence. In Allen et al (1998), we were aiming to reconceptualize the region in this way – our object of study was ‘the-south-east-inthe-1980s’ – what Deleuze and Guattari might call an event, and what we would call a time-space. Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 23) go further, however, and argue against any notion of a tripartite division between reality, representation and subjectivity: ‘Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders.’ Here representation is no longer stasis, but an element in a continuous production; a part of it all, and constantly ‘becoming’. In geography, Thrift’s (1996) explorations in nonrepresentational theory are pushing in a similar direction. But to return to the main argument: all this misreading of space, I would argue, came about because of social scientists’ and philosophers’ reactions to natural science’s intransigence on the matter of time. It was as a result of science’s intransigence that some philosophers sought a way around its propositions. The argument here is that these lines of development can now be rethought. As I have argued, the culture of reverence for physics is being (or needs to be) undermined. Not only is the (classical mechanics) image of physics an outdated one, but the validity of historical sciences, in their own right, is being more properly recognized.

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Moreover, there is a further point: that debates within physics itself are now challenging the arguments about temporality even there. What Prigogine argued in much of his early work in chemistry and physics, and now Prigogine and Stengers argue more broadly, is that natural science itself is changing (must now change) its own view of time – that the new reconceptualizations of physics lead towards the recognition of an open and fully historical notion of time. So natural science must change, and is indeed beginning to do so: The results of non-equilibrium thermodynamics are close to the views expressed by Bergson and Whitehead. Nature is indeed related to the creation of unpredictable novelty, where the possible is richer than the real. (Prigogine 1997, 72)

But what this in turn means, of course, is that the science against which Bergson and others constructed their ideas no longer has to be combated . . . the limitations Bergson criticized are beginning to be overcome, not by abandoning the scientific approach or abstract thinking but by perceiving the limitations of the concepts of classical dynamics and by discovering new formulations valid in more general situations. (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 93)

This must also mean that, insofar as it was influenced – as it must have been – by the battle it was waging at the time, Bergson’s own formulation can now itself be reworked. In other words, we are not obliged to follow his conclusions about space. Moreover and finally, and in case you were tempted to point to an inconsistency here, my citing of Prigogine (Nobel Prize winner in a hard science, etc) is not done in the manner of reference to the unimpugnable authority of ‘science’, for there are as many fierce debates among scientists about these matters as there are amongst philosophers and social scientists. Rather, it is simply to demonstrate that we no longer have to battle against a ‘science’ that appears monolithically to say the opposite.

Imagining ‘history’ in physical and human geography Some of this thinking is already well established within physical geography. Barbara Kennedy (1992), for instance, has reflected on the history of geomorphology in this light. She argues that

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the influence of Strahler’s (1952) and, more particularly, Chorley’s (1962) advocacy of a dynamic as opposed to a historical approach to geomorphology (that is, in the terms previously used here, their emphasis on immanent processes, equilibrium and timelessness) has had a number of effects that should now be questioned. Thus, she argues, it has encouraged the emergence of a history of the discipline as the gradual comingto-dominance of that ‘scientific’ (as opposed to historical) approach to analysis. She argues: All this has led, as is almost inevitable, to a ‘folk’ view of the history of the subject emerging, in which the triumph of the ‘dynamic’ approach is shown to be foreshadowed by the prescience of selected forerunners: at its worst, this vision leads to a simple succession of triumphant, dynamic ‘goodies’ and Hutton begets Playfair, begets Lyell, and so forth. (Kennedy 1992, 232–3, emphasis in original)

The first thing Kennedy does is question that teleological interpretation of geomorphology’s history.7 Her second argument is even more central to the concerns of this paper. Chorley took the principles of mechanics as the blueprint for the scientific development of the discipline, opposed these principles to those of historical analysis, and neglected the latter. Kennedy’s argument (which draws on Prigogine and also more widely on chaos theory and the study of non-linear systems – ie post-mechanical physics and chemistry) is that the separation between these approaches is, perhaps, more fluid than has often been supposed. The complexities – and indeed sometimes the irony of the complexities – of this evolving debate are brought home by John Thornes’ proposals for an evolutionary geomorphology (Thornes 1983). He takes up the challenge of the ‘renewed interest in the long-term behaviour of land forms’ (225) and argues that interest and emphasis in geomorphology are shifting from the observation of equilibrium states (that is, in the terminology of this paper, closed systems with no true historical time); his aim is to gain new insights into ‘historical problems’ (234). The approach he adopts, however, is rather different from that advocated by Sugden for geomorphology, or by Frodeman for geology; his proposal is to shift, from the observation of equilibrium states per se to the recognition of the existence of multiple stable and unstable equilibria, the bifurcations between them and the trajectories connecting them. (234)

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In other words, his aim is to draw on recent developments in theories of dynamical systems that open up temporality in a more genuinely historical way. And, indeed, he draws on the work of, among others, Ilya Prigogine. What Thornes is doing, in other words, is again drawing on a supposedly ‘harder’ science for insight into the complexities of his own. What we have here is physics and maths (or, in general, a range of ‘harder’ sciences) as themselves historical. As we have seen, there is nothing wrong with drawing on such disciplines so long as the terms of the relationship (analogy? provocation/ stimulation? direct translation? simple reverence?) are made clear and adhered to. Taking up Prigogine and others’ work on far-fromequilibrium systems, and the potential for the production of ‘order out of chaos’, Thornes can draw important conclusions about potential instabilities and landscape sensitivity: when a system is close to a stable equilibrium (such as pediplain), random fluctuations in the environment may have little consequence, whereas if the system is at or close to a bifurcation point, then small fluctuations can have dramatic effects. This is what is meant by landscape sensitivity. (231)

However, the wider propositions about knowledge within which Thornes is working are also interesting. In the abstract to his paper, he writes that the renewed interest in the long-term behaviour of landforms ‘should be soundly based in theory rather than inferentially based on historical studies’ (225). And later he writes of ‘the lack of any accepted theoretical (as opposed to historicinferential) model of long-term geomorphological behaviour’ (225). Now, there are certainly particular issues of historical inference in geomorphology, given the very long-term nature of the processes it studies. Nonetheless, it needs to be acknowledged that ‘theories’ also involve inference. Newton ‘interpreted’, and in his interpretations was influenced by the wider social movements and conditions of his day. On the wider canvas, both ‘immanent’ and ‘configurational’ processes are studied in historical contexts. Here, then, is a further blurring of the distinction to add to that already drawn out by Kennedy. Moreover, Thornes’ notion of ‘theory’ seems to be confined to the abstract/formal and mathematical. But ‘theories’ can apply to the historical too. Finally, it must be noted that what we have here in Thornes’ work is

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history as in non-linear dynamical systems. I shall return to this point in a moment. What is particularly interesting, however, about these developments in geomorphology is that in one way or another they are all rethinking the concept of time and their relationship to it. Whether it be through an emphasis on a more qualitative historical science, or via an analysis of the potential bifurcations in the paths of complex dynamical systems, the implication is that time is truly open-ended. One of the reasons I personally find this so interesting is that I believe a similar shift has been underway in the social/human sciences, or at least in parts of them. And this is in spite of the fact that these sciences – or most of them – would have planted themselves firmly in the camp of the historical. For there is, of course, history and history. There are different ways of imagining history which imply distinct conceptualizations of time and temporality (and, as I shall go on to argue in the final section of this paper, space and spatiality). First of all, of course, it is necessary to note the many attempts by human geographers to model themselves on Newtonian physics. Notions of timeless processes were integral to much of the modelling work of the 1970s. And the closed times of closed equilibrium systems have also figured prominently. In the human sciences more widely, it has been the development of neoclassical economics from the 1870s to the 1900s (and still going strong today) that has provided the iconic example of an explicit physics envy that referred (and refers) itself to the physics that was dominant in the nineteenth century. There have, however, been ways in which ‘history’ has been imagined in the social sciences, which have themselves been problematical. Thus, many of the great ‘modernist’ understandings of the world implicitly drew upon, and thereby established as unthought assumptions, a highly particular conceptualization of time, of space, and of the relationship between them. The aspect of this that is most significant for the present argument is their habit of convening space in temporal terms. When, in economic geography for instance, we use terms such as ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, we are effectively imagining spatial differences (differences between places, regions, countries, etc) as temporal. We are arranging differences between places into historical

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sequence. All the stories of Progress, of Development, of Modernization (such as the movement from traditional to modern), of the Marxist progression through modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism) and of many formulations of the story of ‘globalization’ (see Massey 1999) share a geographical imagination that involves this manoeuvre: it rearranges spatial differences into temporal sequence.8 Such a move has enormous implications: it implies that places are not genuinely different (I shall discuss below what I mean by this) but simply ‘behind’ or ‘advanced’ within the same story; their ‘difference’ consists only of their place in the queue. This, then, is a powerful (in the sense of frequently hegemonic) imaginary geography which – ironically – serves to occlude the real significance of geography. It obliterates, or at minimum in its muted forms reduces, the import and the full measure of the real differences that are at issue. So what is ‘real difference’? I want to argue that a full recognition of difference would understand it as more than place in a sequence, for understanding difference as place-in-a-sequence is, after all, a kind of temporo-spatial version of that understanding of difference that sees others as really only ‘a variation on myself’, where ‘myself’ is the one constructing the imagination. So the countries of, say, the South of this planet (in these modernist imaginations of progress emanating on the whole from the North) are not really different – they are just slow versions of us. In contrast to this, a fuller recognition of difference would acknowledge that the South might not just be following us; that it might, rather, have its own story to tell.9 A fuller recognition of difference would grant the other, the different, at least a degree of autonomy in that sense (where relative autonomy does not mean a lack of interconnection – some stories are more overarching than others, for example – but rather the absence of a teleology of the single story). In other words, a fuller recognition of difference would entertain the possibility of the existence of a multiplicity of trajectories. Now, to anticipate somewhat the argument of the final section, it is also the case that for there to be multiple trajectories – for there to be coexisting differences – there must be space, and for there to be space there must be multiple trajectories. Thus, I want to argue, a more adequate understanding of spatiality for our times would entail the recognition that there is more than one story going on in

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the world and that these stories have, at least, a relative autonomy. The important point for the moment, however, is that not only do these modernist narratives suppress the full import of the spatial but they also have a very ambiguous relationship to time. They are tales of progress and change, and of the irreversibility of time; they are historical in that sense. And yet they are also stories in which the future is already foretold (progress, development, modernization, socialism, globalization). This is what Ernesto Laclau has dubbed a grand closed system where everything that happens can be explained internally to it ‘and everything acquires an absolute intelligibility within the grandiose scheme’ (Laclau 1990, 75). This is not the ‘time as the continuous emergence of novelty’ proposed by the likes of Bergson; the way of becoming that is never a mere rearrangement of what already is. Now, what has been emerging in recent years in some parts of political philosophy and the social sciences is an attempt to recapture that notion of the genuine openness of temporality. In different ways, this attempt to think a radical openness is integral to the projects of Deleuze and Guattari (see, for example, 1984) – their imagination of nomadism, for instance – to thinking around queer theory (see, for instance, Golding 1997) and to the reworkings of Marxism through a grounded Gramscianism and through radical democracy (see Laclau 1990; Mouffe 1993). There are fascinating similarities here to what Barbara Kennedy is arguing within geomorphology with her distinction between ‘sequence’ and ‘progression’. The latter – the progressionists (Lyell, Dana, Horton) – she argues, studied the past not to see ‘how we got here from there’ but to see how ‘we must get here from there’ (Kennedy 1992, 247, emphasis in original). In contrast, Hutton, Darwin and Gilbert viewed the present as merely one of all possible worlds. These latter, she argues, saw ‘history as sequence’ (247–8). There are connections here, if only distant and tentative, with some of the arguments of radical democracy. In heterodox economics, the development of institutional and evolutionary approaches also entails a shift towards a historical concept of time. And in a different vein, but in a direct parallel with the arguments of geomorphologists such as Thornes, economists such as Krugman and Lawson are drawing in part on the new theoretical mathematics and physics of complexity. Many of these projects are integrally

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conceptual and political. Imagining time as truly historical not only influences how we analyse the past; it also implies, when we turn to look the other way, that the future (though inevitably influenced by the histories that have led to today) is also radically open. But if an open historicity is once again on the agenda in both physical and social sciences, there are still questions as to quite what this means. John Thornes’ non-linear dynamical systems open up to history in a very different way from Frodeman and Sugden’s stress on more narrative approaches. And – the big question – is the political openness of the future held up to us by radical democracy and queer theory (a societal level of ‘free will’, making our own histories though not, of course, in circumstances . . . ) . . . is this element of ‘free will’ in some way equivalent to (or ultimately subverted by?) the ontological indeterminacy postulated by some versions (eg Prigogine and Stengers’) of far-fromequilibrium systems thinking? There are two major questions here. The first concerns both the way we think about knowledge and questions of ontology. Some authors seem to be proposing that we can now all meet in a new, single (and necessarily ‘mathematical’?) ontology that has validity across inorganic, biological and sociocultural fields. Prigogine’s arguments, which I have cited earlier, could be used to support such a naturalist position. Anti-naturalists would take a different view and assert most strongly that human and natural sciences are dealing with fundamentally different spheres: that the possibility of intentionality, meaningfulness and self-reflexivity is restricted to the human. There is a more complex position, which would argue that there may well at some level be ontological commonalities, but that these are articulated in distinctive manners in different spheres and, moreover, that this distinctiveness is a phenomenon of emergence. Thus, although humanly meaningful phenomena may not be reducible to the phenomena studied by the natural sciences, they may be emergent from them. There may be real similarities in the abstract pattern of functioning of the inorganic, the biological and the sociocultural, but in each sphere it is necessary that we specify the actual, particular, ‘mechanisms’ through which this functioning occurs. This ‘qualified naturalism’ is, it seems to me, something like the position of Deleuze and Guattari with their ‘bodies-without-organs’ and their ‘abstract

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machines’, and of Manuel de Landa’s A thousand years of non-linear history (1997). The issues are enormous and I make no attempt to address them fully here (at the moment of writing this final draft I think I am a qualified naturalist!), but the distinctions are important for a major theme of this paper: our relationship to each other as physical and human geographers (and – what I have argued earlier has been one of the issues previously holding us apart – the relationship of these two parts of our discipline to ‘harder’ sciences such as physics). Earlier in this paper, I argued that we must be both self-aware and precise about the terms by which we refer to other sciences such as physics. We may turn to them as a stimulation for new ideas, or for a direct translation of their models into ours, or out of simple reverence. The anti-naturalist might legitimately do the first; the full-blown naturalist is entirely justified in doing the second; the qualified naturalist must be careful to distinguish between the generalities and the specifics, and must present an account of the latter.10 What none of these positions warrants, however, is a turning to ‘a harder science’ out of simple admiration for its ‘hardness’ – the reverential reference. It would be ironic if we were to escape from ritual obeisance to Newtonian mechanics as a model for all knowledge, only to adopt precisely the same genuflecting attitude towards the ‘new’ physics of the twentieth century. Rather, we should be pleased that physics has in some of its parts become more like the complex and social sciences in other areas of knowledge.11 Ideas in philosophy can feed through to physics as well as vice versa, insights from the social sciences can be helpful in biology . . . Perhaps we should all have more confidence in our own fields of endeavour, as well as in the links between them.

And so again to space What I want to argue finally, however, is that all these movements towards a reconsideration of the nature of time/temporality/historicity necessarily carry with them a requirement to reconsider how we think about space. I can spell out the argument here in the abstract, but it is nonetheless an argument drawn from my thinking within my own field of human geography. My question is how this might relate to reconceptualizations of spatiality

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going on in other parts of geography: geology, geomorphology, GIS and so forth. In contrast to the prominence of time and historicity in the debates that I have explored so far, space has had a very low profile. It is denigrated as a simple absence of history and/or not accorded the same depth of intellectual treatment as time. The arguments about opening up Newtonian-science models focus overwhelmingly on historicity. Most of the developments documented above call for more explicitly historical sciences. Yet ‘initial conditions’ are geographical as well as historical. We must be spatial, as well as historical, sciences: indeed, this must be an implication of thinking in terms of space-time (see also Spedding 1997). Yet the widespread development of evolutionary approaches in a number of fields concentrates on thinking history, but not geography (see Martin’s (1999) very pertinent critique of this in economics): ‘what economists have failed to recognize is that the notion of ‘‘path-dependence’’ that they now emphasize is itself place-dependent’ (Martin personal communication) (Sugden’s analysis of the ice sheet seems to me to imply precisely this point). And in philosophy, both Bergson and Laclau, while rigorously retheorizing time, relegate space to a kind of residual category of stasis. They end up with an incompatible pairing of space and time. What I want to argue is that all these retheorizations of time, and all this insistence on the openness of true historicity, in fact require (for philosophical compatibility) a parallel retheorization of space. For history to be open, space must be rethought too. Let us go back for a moment to Bergson, whose position that temporality must embody open creativity has so much in common with many of the arguments being put forward today by philosophers and social scientists (and, as we have seen, also natural scientists). Indeed, Bergson is an important source for a number of these theorists – see Ho (1993) and Deleuze and Guattari (1984). For Bergson, as we have seen, temporality is essentially open-ended: this is time as the continuous emergence of novelty; time as a way of becoming that is never a mere rearrangement of what already is. Without emergence, urges Bergson (and others), there is no time. Sensu lato, I would agree with this proposition. It does, however, in turn raise further questions. Why is there this ceaseless emergence? How does it happen? One source that would seem not to be

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compatible with notions of the openness of history would be that things somehow change in themselves (through the immanent unfolding of some unitary undifferentiated identity), for in that case the terms of change would already be specified in the initial conditions. The future would not be open. Rather, in order to retain an openness of the future, temporality/time has to be conceived (just as I am suggesting space should be) as the product of interaction, of interrelations. Adam (1990) contains extended discussion of this way of thinking about time, and of the many theorists who argue for such an approach to its conceptualization. Bergson once asked himself the following: What is the role of time? . . . Time prevents everything from being given at once . . . Is it not the vehicle of creativity and choice? Is not the existence of time the proof of indeterminism in nature?

‘Indeterminism’, here, stands precisely for creativity and the possibility of ‘free will’ and, in more recent parlance, politics. How are we to think of this statement? Well, it is certainly possible to allow that time may be the vehicle of change. However, the fact that time may be the medium within which change occurs (or, more radically, that change-through-interrelationality is one of the mechanisms in the creation of temporality) does not mean that it is its cause. Time cannot somehow, unaided, bootstrap itself into existence. Nietzsche once mused that ‘only difference . . . can produce results that are also differences’. In other words, there must already be multiplicity – to enable the possibility of interaction – for change to be produced as a result. And for there to be multiplicity there must be space. In other words, we must, as was indicated earlier, rework Bergson’s logic, and rewrite him thus: for there to be difference, for there to be time . . . at least a few things must be given at once. To pick up an earlier argument of this paper, the leap that Bergson seems to have made is to go from the proposition that not everything is given all at once to an assumption that therefore only one thing is given at once. Moreover, he would seem to have done this in consequence of his engagement with a particular notion of ‘science’. But the real result of this argument is that time needs space to get itself going; time and space are born together, along with the relations that produce them both. Time and space must be thought together, therefore, for they are inextricably inter-

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mixed. A first implication, then, of this impetus to envisage temporality/history as genuinely open is that spatiality must be integrated as an essential part of that process of ‘the continuous creation of novelty’. Such an effectively creative spatiality cannot, however, be just any kind of (way of thinking of) space. This cannot be ‘space’ as a static crosssection through time, for, as we have seen above, this disables history itself. Nor can it be ‘space’ as representation conceived of as stasis, for this precisely immobilizes things. Nor can it be ‘space’ as a closed equilibrium system, for this would be a spatiality that goes nowhere, that always returns to the same. This cannot be ‘space’, either, as any kind of comforting closure (the closures of bounded, ‘authentic’ places), for these would also run down into inertia. Nor can it be space convened as temporal sequence, for here space is in fact occluded and the future is closed. None of these ways of imagining space are conformable with the desire to hold time open. Rather, for time genuinely to be held open, space could be imagined as the sphere of the existence of multiplicity, of the possibility of the existence of difference. Such a space is the sphere in which distinct stories coexist, meet up, affect each other, come into conflict or cooperate. This space is not static, not a cross-section through time; it is disrupted, active and generative. It is not a closed system; it is constantly, as space-time, being made. Now, I can see what all this means in my neck of the woods. I have an idea of how it means we must rethink globalization, reimagine regions/places/ nation states, reconceptualize cities. Those thoughts are emerging in other books and papers, by myself but also by many others besides. But does it bear any relation to ways of thinking about space in other parts of the geographical forest? Do you have similar debates? Can we talk?

Acknowledgements The first person I would like to thank is Roger Lee, whose concern during his editorship to see this journal as a forum for debate in both human and physical geography provided an early encouragement to try my hand at developing an argument that might link them. I would also like to thank the participants in a seminar at Birkbeck College, where I first presented some of these ideas. Conversations with colleagues, and comments on

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earlier drafts, have been extremely generous. I should particularly like to thank David Sugden, Andrew Sayer, Keith Richards, Stephan Harrison, John Allen, Steve Pile, Barbara Kennedy, Nick Spedding, Rob Inkpen and Ron Martin. Their positions did not by any means coincide, but it is – perhaps – interesting to note that in all the many and multifarious comments made and opinions expressed there was no simple divide between those who might be thought of as human geographers and those who might be thought of as physical.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Thus they write that: Whilst much of the work of mathematicians and physicists such as Minkowski and Einstein is relevant only at extreme scales or velocities, notions such as relative concepts of space and time are pertinent to environmental science. (364) I have to say that at least one of the geomorphologists with whom I have discussed the present paper quite disagrees with this point! Incidentally, but not coincidentally, the concern of Rose’s book is not only to deny this customary subordination of complex sciences (or sciences of the complex) such as biology, but also to understand organisms and – crucially – their trajectories in and constitution through time and space. Here is detectable the crucial link – picked up again later in this paper – between complexity and emergence. The book Intellectual imposters by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) appeared while I was writing this paper. Although their own epistemological position is thoroughly naive, it has to be said that many of the social scientists whom they quote (and mock) do seem to have been not only flaunting a halfknowledge of natural science, but also indulging in an implicit ‘reverential referencing’ that stands in total contradiction to their wider positions. Frodeman’s most general aim, like David Sugden’s and my own, is that intellectual communities should talk to each other. He says of his article, Its overall goal is political, in the sense that I hope it encourages conversation between intellectual communities who have much to say to one another, but who too often are estranged. (1995, 961) Frodeman actually uses the term ‘Analytical Philosophy’ here, and distinguishes it from a philosophy critical of this tradition that he calls ‘Continental Philosophy’. I have dropped these terms because, as was evident from a number of comments on an early draft of this paper, they generate more confusion than clarity.

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6

Gross is here compressing the arguments of Bergson’s Time and free will and Matter and memory. 7 As Kennedy remarks, such a process is ‘almost inevitable’. This is not a process peculiar to geomorphology or physical geography. The production of such histories, the need to be aware of the tendency and to question it, is again something that we all share. 8 It might be interesting to investigate whether there is any relationship between this manoeuvre and Bergson’s (and others’) interpretation of difference as temporal change. Also, I have wondered a lot, though inconclusively, about whether there are any connections between this temporalization of space in social sciences and the ergodic hypothesis in geomorphology, where an attempt is made to explain distributions in time by recourse to distributions in space (Thornes and Brunsden 1977, 23; Thorn 1982). My feeling is that there is probably no ‘connection’ in a historical or theoretical sense, though it is tempting to see one. 9 The work of some post-colonial theorists, such as Spivak and McClintock, has been important in establishing this argument. 10 Deleuze (1995) was asked in interview about his own use of concepts from contemporary physics. His reply is too long to quote here, but is interesting for trying to negotiate a relation of connection without a ‘specious unity’ (30). Interestingly, too, he takes up the cases of both Prigogine and Bergson. On the former he points out that the concept of bifurcation (used in our field both in formal modelling and in more philosophical and empirical enquiry) is ‘a good example of a concept that’s irreducibly philosophical, scientific, and artistic too’ (29–30). He also argues that philosophers may create concepts that are useful in science: ‘Bergson profoundly influenced psychiatry’. And, most importantly, ‘no special status should be assigned to any particular field, whether philosophy, science, art, or literature’ (30). 11 And anyway – a point which gives me pleasure and illustrates the wider argument – some of chaos theory had its earliest beginnings in meteorology; physicists were quite slow to take it up (Gleick 1987).

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