Human geography: Not ending but worlding the modern subject in new ways

Shawn Bodden's (2025) ‘Working through our differences: Limits of ontology in the ordinary lives of critical geographical theory’, heuristically delineates between ‘relational’, ‘non-relational’ (or ‘negative’), and ‘ordinary’ geographies. Whilst Bodden's favouring of the ordinary makes an excellent contribution to the pragmatic tradition in geography, it is this heuristic framing which I find most thought-provoking. Rather than separate relational, non-relational, and ordinary, my commentary draws out how all three are illustrative of how geography today continues to expand the limits of ‘thinkability’, extending the world, of the modern subject. Suggesting that, rather than an ostensibly anxious atmosphere, contemporary geography's organising frameworks of reasoning reflect confidence in worlding the modern subject in new ways.

Before turning to the broader discipline, I illustrate this at a more specific level through Bodden's contemporary reading of their philosophical influence, Stanley Cavell. ¹ Writing largely in the last century, Cavell was the last great philosopher making the anxiety of the modern sceptical problem of what it is to know the other and the world an abiding concern. Before its eclipse by more confident developments, including the ontological turn and pragmatism, which downgrade or (dis)solve the sceptical problem. Today, there is greater self-assurance in making the other and the world obtainable. Illustrative, whilst Bodden makes geographers’ revealing the ordinary a repository of authority, a ‘therapeutic’ antidote to ‘metaphysical certitude’, for Cavell himself the metaphysical was precisely not certitude, but the ‘absence’ associated with the modern subject's sceptical doubt about other minds and the world (Cavell, 2010: 95 emphasis in original). Bodden invokes Wittgenstein's famous phrase about returning words from metaphysical to everyday use, but for Cavell (2010: 91–92, emphasis in original),

This is what I take Wittgenstein to express in saying ‘What we do is lead words back from their metaphysical to everyday use’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: §116), with the proviso that you might not, without reflection, or suggestion, tell when the metaphysical has intervened in our lives, as reported here for example: ‘I have seen a person … strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: §253). But we live in the everyday before words are returned; we live then in exile from our words, and the return is never at rest.

This is crucial for understanding Cavell's whole approach. To claim the other's pain (other minds) obtainable is, for Cavell, similar to claiming we can obtain the ordinary (the world) – both are metaphysical claims in Bodden's sense of ascribing certitude not there. However, as noted, Cavell himself invokes another understanding of ‘metaphysical’, as absence, inverting the stakes. Herein lies Cavell's originality: scepticism is the ‘discovery of the every day, a discovery of exactly what it is that scepticism would deny.’ (Cavell, 1988: 170; emphasis in original). This ‘what’, the everyday or ordinary, comes into ‘view’, is ‘discovered’, not as obtainable ground but through the sense of absence, alienation, loss, or exile invoked by the sceptical impulse. Cavell's whole project resurrected a 19th-century philosophical battle when transcendentalism was eclipsed by pragmatism. Cavell explicitly rejected how pragmatism gives too much authority to the ordinary. Instead, ‘American transcendentalism’, Thoreau's Walden, ‘the major philosophical text of my life’ (Cavell, 1988: 169), infused his ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (ibid. 170). This ‘approach’ finds the ordinary a ‘pervasive’ ‘scene of illusion’ ‘artificiality’ and ‘loss’; where, through the menace and power of scepticism, the ‘direction out’ is ‘along each chain of a day's denial’ (Cavell, 1996: 332).

By contrast, encouraging the geographer to make the authorising claim ‘ordinary’, Bodden makes Cavell ‘less a philosopher of scepticism than a philosopher of the human voice’. This is compared to ‘misreadings’ of Cavell ‘ending with an ontological scepticism of “other minds” and the world in general’. My work (Pugh, 2017) stands accused, but nowhere do I say this. Rather, I simply point out that, for Cavell, ‘the sceptic's turn to human sociality amounts to something like a confession, and a working through of these feelings of suspension and the illusionary qualities of the everyday (from which a sense of acknowledgment, self and wider social relations may recover, or otherwise)’. (Pugh, 2017: 38). ² Pragmatists, like Richard Rorty, also urged Cavell to downgrade scepticism, but Cavell's (2005: 159) typical comeback was ‘[n]ow the question becomes how its preoccupations could ever have seemed to express our fundamental concerns about our relation to the world and I and others in it’.

My point is that Bodden's ‘ordinary’ contributes well to pragmatism, but it also illustrates how contemporary geography possesses a certain confidence. Much debate today portrays anxiety about making the human voice and world available, from ever-extensive positionality statements to decolonialising methodologies. But underlying frameworks of reasoning are more self-assured. The world is available, whether through ‘relational’ approaches dissolving the sceptical problem, the human/nature divide (e.g. Haraway, 2016); approaches aesthetically revealing ‘non-relation’ (e.g. Rose et al., 2021); or Bodden's accessing of ‘ordinary’. Through geography, the modern subject is increasing the tools at its disposal, augmenting its limits, and extending thought still further into the world. Who would stay with the trouble of the modern subject today when we can simply adapt it? Perhaps, only someone not wishing to adapt, but seeking to end the modern subject and its world.

Before turning to the fundamental challenge this poses for geography as a discipline, it is worth noting Cavell cannot help because, obviously, he continued the modern project. Cavell made the absence associated with scepticism literally available, revealing and attuning us to it in modern literature and film: expanding the world of the modern subject. Here, Cavell could be roughly aligned with non-relational geographies, where there is a subtraction from the coherences of ontology and relation and an addition of an aesthetic awareness of non-relation and the non-ontological. Mitch Rose (2021: 119) illustrates, conceptually engaging the void to examine ‘how bodies not only interpret what they sense but also what they do not sense’. Non-relational and negative geographies are important developments. But currently most accept they only modify, not reject, relationality (e.g. Harrison, 2007: 591; Rose et al., 2021: 2–3). They reveal and attune us to both relation and non-relation as literal forces in the world. Thus, again, expanding the world of the modern subject.

The crux of my commentary is how different are relational, non-relational, and ordinary? Heuristically, all revise the modern subject or modern ontology through affirming and bringing the world or new ‘worlds’ into consciousness. How can geography move otherwise and not keep expanding, but end the modern subject?

The task is not easy. Since its early colonial beginnings, a key role of geography has been to survey, explore, and bring the world into view to redress modernity's problems. Today, the waning faith in modernity puts geographers precisely in this position again. The literal world is there for us, in its diversity and richness, from thinking with the Indigenous, to cyclones, forests, and the quantum realm, to correct the modern ontology. In this way, geography continues to be what we could call ‘additive’. There is confidence here too, not derived from modernity ending, but, to the contrary, from staying with a core principle of geography, that expanding further into the literal world is the way to redress modernity's problems.

Yet, I contend, recent work enables a distinct approach. Given the explosion of developments in critical Black Studies, it has become impossible to ignore that the foundation of the world, of modernity, of geography as a discipline, is not ontic in the way just described, but ontological: the violent rendering of the world into ‘being’ and ‘non-Being’. As Fanon said, antiblackness, the fundamental reliance of the modern subject upon the fungibility of the Other, is the world. Geographers might attempt to bracket off such concerns, saying ‘I don’t work on race’, but this misses the fundamental import of recent developments. David Marriott (2021) clarifies, antiblackness is rendered through the modern subject's anxiety about being reduced to nothingness, ending itself and the world; a world violently rendered and maintained through the modern subject's hierarchical allocating, judging, describing, and attributing of characteristics to the Other. Here we can understand the modern subject as the emergence of specific type of geographical subject, nurtured and clarified through the discipline of geography, which enrolls the Other in its world-making project. Taken in by the lure of the world in this way, geography keeps additively expanding the world of this modern geographical subject; from projecting human and decolonial rights to enrolling the more-than-human, and the Indigenous in relational care. The salient problem for those wanting to move otherwise is that geography works to maintain the situation at the fundamental ontological level. The ontic level, the literal world, is up for grabs, there for us to revise and adjust the modern subject and address modernity's problems. But the foundational ontological violence of our world remains intact. It is because of this that the situation is maintained: decolonializing methodologies result in further colonisation, anti-racism projects maintain antiblackness, positionality statements continue to appropriate, and so forth. This is not what Fanon meant by invention, the abolition of the modern subject and the world, where the stakes are more what we could call ‘metapolitical’.

The ‘Abyssal Geography’ I am developing with David Chandler seeks to intervene in these debates (Chandler and Pugh, 2023; Pugh and Chandler, 2023). In our book The World as Abyss we draw out how the Caribbean has become key for those seeking to refuse the modern ontology, where such examples as creolisation, carnival, and marronage have become widely enrolled as forces of opacity and suspension which disrupt ontological and relational capture (Pugh and Chandler, 2023). We could roughly align such approaches with recent developments in geography, where thinking conceptually with geographical forms like caves, sand, vortexes, voids, and the quantum realm, similarly seeks to trouble the obtaining hand of the modern subject. However, to underscore the distinctiveness of our abyssal approach, when these forces are read hermeneutically, as literally existing in the world, when they are still ‘worlded’, the abyssal approach shows us that we are returned to affirmative discourses of the subject and the world. A particular type of geographical subject is maintained. Moving otherwise, The World as Abyss draws out how the veil of modern ontological world-making leaves no hold, the ‘non-relational’ or ‘non-ontological’ has no property, beyond the limits of the constitution and ongoing extension of the modern subject into the world. This is perhaps less about a particular region, such as the Caribbean, than articulating a mode critique for engaging how geography substantiates and maintains the fundamental ontological violence of the world. An abyssal approach does not seek to add to or revise the world of the modern subject, but rather stays with the trouble of this ongoing violence, refusing the lure of the world. It is ‘metapolitical critique’: exposing how the modern subject, through such developments as the relational, non-relational, and ordinary, continues to expand its limits of thinkability and world itself in new ways.