What’s shifting?

In ‘Topological twists: Power’s shifting geographies’ John Allen both provides a challenge to existing ways of thinking about space and power, and begins to offer an alternative way of thinking about these issues. The article is, as ever with Allen’s writings, clear, well-argued and provocative. It makes a call for a more nuanced and plural spatial sensibility in understanding the contemporary workings of power – a claim that is hard to disagree with. Its criticisms of work such as my own Terror and Territory (2009), and writings by Neil Brenner (2004) and Saskia Sassen (2006), are generally appreciative and more inclined to pull the work further than it goes, rather than fundamentally disagree or unfairly caricature.

I have several points of response to the arguments being made. These concern the understandings of geometry, topology/topography and territory. In general, these responses are not to challenge the claim that our ‘conventional geometric descriptions are now, for better or worse, somewhat exhausted as a spatial vocabulary of power’, but rather to contest the follow-up suggestion that it is odd that ‘many of those who work with the conceptual tools of territories and borders, boundaries and scales, are among the first to acknowledge that, yet fail to exploit the complex insights gained’. The first is difficult to disagree with, but it is hard to see who would actually assert the opposite, which thereby risks its being banal; the second is questionable and, I think, inaccurate, at least in terms of the people mentioned.

What is meant by geometry? It is used extremely loosely here, but Allen seems to assume at base that this is a straightforward term, when it is anything but. Geometry undergoes several fundamental historical shifts, but there is a crucial difference between Euclid and modern geometry (from Descartes at least, but many others). The idea of ‘Euclidean space’ is profoundly unhistorical, and there is a reference to the ‘fixed spatial trappings of Euclidian geometry’ as something we are trying to get beyond. Yet Euclid’s geometry is not calculative in the same way as modern understandings, and coordinates are Cartesian, not Euclidean, so some more detail here would be useful. It might be interesting to think more about whether geometry is meant to imply bounded shapes, sizes or spaces; or whether it is calculative, concerned with points and their connections. Distance is a key issue here: is it relation or length? It is telling that, as elsewhere, there are never actually any references to the geometrical thinkers themselves (i.e. Descartes, 1954; Euclid, 1956), but rather there is a unproblematic acceptance of the story geography has inherited from the tradition. Non-Euclidean geometry certainly breaks with some of the axioms of Euclid, and this would of course be transformative of any subsidiary understanding of ‘space’, but again the detail is lacking. Geographers would do well to look at the work of people like Klein (1992) and Lachtermann (1989) who have examined some of the historical aspects of these questions. Similarly Leibniz needs to be interrogated rather more specifically: it is all-too-common to take Deleuze’s book on him (1993) as actually representative of his ideas rather than looking at what he actually wrote himself.

Rather than the claim that Brenner and I ‘push up against the limits of conventional geometric thinking, yet curiously neither actually seems to see beyond it’, I would certainly argue that I want to take the idea of geometry as a thing that needs to be questioned. There is an extensive discussion of related issues in my 2006 book on Heidegger and the politics of calculation, especially in the long discussion of Descartes and geometry, including the notion of measure. A related point is the way that ‘power geometries’ is used as if Brenner, Sassen and myself sign up to this analysis. But the real origin of this term is Doreen Massey (1993), who is largely silent here (despite the references). Equally, given what Brenner and I have written about Sassen (in 2009), this linkage seems problematic (though undoubtedly flattering). Brenner and Jessop have, in recent works, tried to think through how scale alone, or territory, place or network alone, are inadequate, and that it is only thinking these through in plural, combined and overlapping ways that is adequate to the complexity of such issues. Their Society and Space article with Martin Jones is therefore a key missing reference (Jessop et al., 2008).

Similarly, topology and topography are rather vague as terms. Jeff Malpas’s (1999, 2007) work might be helpful in clarifying some of the theoretical aspects at play here. If topography is ‘flat’, how does this relate to, on the one hand, arguments for a flat (non-scalar) ontology (a misnamed project, but one that is widely cited nonetheless), and on the other arguments for a more vertical, volumetric sense of territory? There is a proliferation of new ways of thinking being offered here, in terms of developments from social theory and combinations of existing approaches, but the precision of terminological formulations tends to be lacking and the history of the concepts deployed entirely absent.

There is, for example, a tendency here to accept a definition of ‘territory’ as a bounded space, as topographical, which is then criticized. But if territory is understood rather differently, or as historically produced, of which bounded space is a particular rather than fundamental determination, then the criticism is on less secure ground. As I have tried to argue elsewhere (Elden, 2005, 2010), boundaries are an outcome of a concept of territory, rather than its condition. Indeed, it is questionable that the kinds of positions described were ever actually the case, so that to point out their inadequacy in light of recent developments is pretty unremarkable. There were certainly some poor theorizations of territory out there, but we need to ask if there are developments in the practice, or in the sophistication of the theories we use to understand it. Described in the way that they are, it seems obvious that topological approaches are more fruitful than topographical ones; but this way of describing is obviously inherently biased in favour of the latter, because the terms of debates are those taken from it. There is very little effort made to textually specify the approaches that are being criticized except in terms of recent works that – as Allen acknowledges – are not bound by their assumptions and even seek to challenge, understand and transcend them.

I confess that I am puzzled by the criticisms of my work, and think that occasionally it risks confusing an object of analysis with a mode of approach. To be truly adequate as a criticism, the limits of territorial thinking would need to be worked through in terms of the inadequacy of my analysis, rather than the weaknesses of a supposed model derived from it in relation to a different question. I am not trying to propose territory as an explanation, but rather to suggest that territory is something that needs explaining. (This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I sharply distinguish between territory and territoriality, since the latter is all too often proposed as a mode of explanation.) I, therefore, do not think my work ‘remains trapped by the territorial distributions of power’; rather it is an attempt to understand them. Importantly, it aspires to understand them conceptually, politically and historically. Brenner’s New State Spaces (2004) does not really have – as he has acknowledged – an adequate theory of territory. But more recently he has been trying to think this through in more detail, and is moving away from any sense of it as a bounded static container. In general terms, I think that it is pretty clear that neither my work, nor Brenner’s in New State Spaces, is an attempt at building a general theory of spatial practice. Rather our work is an attempt to allow the object of analysis to dictate the way in. (The opposite might be said of Jessop et al., 2008, but that attempts to combine approaches, rather as Allen's piece does.) As such, the criticisms are in danger of missing the point. More fundamentally, perhaps, Terror and Territory does try to show, in Chapter 2 particularly, the limits of network thinking in addressing the kinds of concerns. On a different understanding of territory, not simply as a bounded space, but as calculative space, networks do not exceed this analysis. Networks are connections of points, that are within, between and across territories. I equally do not think that I actually claim or suggest that territories ever did, or currently do, ‘enclose all the political relationships which produce them or simply extend themselves to bridge the gap between “here and there”’.

It is therefore difficult to understand the claim that in my work ‘spatial twists … are invariably subjected to a preconceived spatiality, albeit one increasingly elaborate in its geometry’. Rather I think that this spatiality, even understood as territory, emerges from the analysis, rather than the other way round. This is certainly the aspiration of my more historical approach. Yet Allen wants to propose a different spatiality, topology, as if that were the way to understand things, without historical specificity. Does topology not also have a history? What sorts of institutional and intellectual positions made its emergence possible?

In general, there is definitely agreement that the approach to be taken should emerge from the questions asked, rather than being defined in advance. There is a wide range of political and spatial questions that need explanations which are more adequate than many of those geography has, has inherited, or has taken from other disciplines. My question is whether it is the object of analysis that is shifting, or our way of understanding it. It may be both, but the historical-conceptual weaknesses of the account offered here make it difficult to tell. A more conceptually nuanced and historically sensitive mode of analysis would render the kinds of claims being made here considerably more circumspect. I am nonetheless grateful to John Allen for his provocative article and to the editors of the journal for the invitation to respond.