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 of course – one thinks of socialist environmental-

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 disci-
plines has been experienced recently as increas-
ingly 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 reinspec-
tion and problematization, then geographers
should be in a good position to make a leading
contribution. In some areas they have long done so,
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 261–276 1999
ISSN 0020-2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 1999
ism, for instance. Moreover, there is new work: that
of Whatmore (1999) and Murdoch (1997) among
others springs to mind. This paper takes a particu-
lar 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 ques-
tions (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 arti-
cles from geographers working in fields very dif-
ferent (I had thought) from my own. They were
Jonathan Raper and David Livingstone’s (1995)
‘Development of a geomorphological spatial model
262
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 implica-
tions 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 connec-
tions 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 prob-
lems. ‘[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 envi-
ronmental 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’’ geo-
metric 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 develop-
ments 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 repre-
sentation 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 frame-
work 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 space-
time) 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 con-
stitutive. 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 rela-
tions, 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 space-
time and to conceptualize space-time as relative
(defined in terms of the entities ‘within’ it), rela-
tional (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 time-
spaces). 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 time-
space. Indeed, rather than arguing for a repriorit-
ization 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 exam-
ple, 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 con-
stituted 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 numer-
ous and range from a querying of the tendency to
see space as necessarily divided into closed and
bounded regions – a querying which would aug-
ment 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
263
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 discus-
sion, 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 imagina-
tion 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 land-
resource management as an example). This is not,
then, a general proposition about the applicability
264
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 hier-
archy 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 distin-
guish 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 pro-
vides an implicit grounding for references to the
authority of physics in many a part of geography.
There are many reasons to contest this assump-
tion of authority. Most evidently, the established
status of physics, of its methodology and its truth-
claims, is based on an image of that discipline that
is now out of date. Physics itself has moved on.
Doreen Massey
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 demon-
stration 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 pro-
pose 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-through-
time 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 juxta-
positions and separations which – I argue – are
intrinsic to space). It would be integral to space-
time. That kind of understanding of space, how-
ever, ‘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 argu-
ments 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 con-
ducted within and influenced by a wider social
context and the conditions and character of its own
performance. The work of sociologists of knowl-
edge, actor-network theorists and others is now too
well known for this point to need further elabora-
tion. 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 preoc-
cupied with essentialism, I find the debates within
biology about the existence or not of ‘natural kinds’
(and, if they exist, debates about their conceptual-
ization) 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 deny-
ing 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 geomorphol-
ogy. Thus Simpson (1963, 46), in a classic statement
265
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 sociol-
ogy 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 problem-
atical for the development of other forms of knowl-
edge. 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 fre-
quently 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 overconcen-
tration on simple systems might, at least on occa-
sions, 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
266
popular understandings, the higher status of
branches of science that restricted themselves to
simple systems might come in for further question-
ing. Perhaps disciplines that study ‘complex sys-
tems’ (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 geo-
morphology, enabling a move away from reduc-
tionism and a greater recognition of complex open
systems and feedback effects. And Spedding (1997)
proposes a new kind of question for geomorphol-
ogy, 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 under-
stand 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 geomor-
phological. The two approaches lead to very differ-
ent understandings of the history of the ice sheet.
The biostratigraphical approach appears to favour
a history of dynamic change, while the geomor-
phological points to a more stable past. It is a
difference in the analysis of history that has signifi-
cant 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
manqué:
Viewed in this light and driven by the aspiration to be
scientific, it is perhaps understandable that geomor-
phology 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 phe-
nomena: the landforms. And this in turn is related
to time-span. Sugden’s paper demonstrates how an
understanding of the longer-term historical geo-
morphology 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 geomorphol-
ogy must be understood not as a discipline that is
an imperfect physics but rather as a complex and
synthetic science that combines within itself atten-
tion 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 miscon-
ceived 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 assump-
tions 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 pro-
cesses (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 configura-
tional, Bernal (1951) immanent and contingent.)
There are also intermediate cases, such as equilib-
rium 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 mis-
led 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 nineteenth-
century 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 relation-
ship 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 any-
thing 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-as-
positivism.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 under-
standings 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,
267
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 formu-
lations, largely developing in opposition to a
reduction of ‘knowledge’ to a narrow interpreta-
tion 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 philoso-
phy, 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 condi-
tions – 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 perspec-
tives 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
268
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 unten-
able, but you can see why it happens). Further, he
interpreted the very process of scientific produc-
tion 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 ori-
ented. 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 genu-
inely 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 ques-
tions and arguments of certain critical philoso-
phers, 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 influ-
enced the course that was taken by (some) philo-
sophical and social theorizing. One example is the
assumption mentioned above: that there is a rela-
tionship 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 struc-
turalism. 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 ques-
tion. First argument: that this now-hegemonic
equation of space and representation in fact derives
from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century battles over the meaning of time (as argued
above). This may be why, historically, representa-
tion has come to be equated with spatialization,
but in fact such terminology is both mistaken and
actively harmful. Second argument: that represen-
tation 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 con-
tributed 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 repre-
sentation – 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 emer-
gent product of the conceptualization of the space-
time entities themselves. Deleuze and Guattari
address this by challenging the notion of represen-
tation. 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-in-
the-1980s’ – what Deleuze and Guattari might call
an event, and what we would call a time-space.
Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 23) go further, how-
ever, and argue against any notion of a tripartite
division between reality, representation and subjec-
tivity: ‘Rather, an assemblage establishes connec-
tions between certain multiplicities drawn from
each of these orders.’ Here representation is no
longer stasis, but an element in a continuous pro-
duction; a part of it all, and constantly ‘becoming’.
In geography, Thrift’s (1996) explorations in non-
representational 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 devel-
opment 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.
269
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 influ-
enced – 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 philoso-
phers 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
270
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 coming-
to-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 forerun-
ners: at its worst, this vision leads to a simple succes-
sion 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 his-
tory.7 Her second argument is even more central to
the concerns of this paper. Chorley took the prin-
ciples of mechanics as the blueprint for the scien-
tific 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 geomorphol-
ogy are shifting from the observation of equilib-
rium 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)
Doreen Massey
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-from-
equilibrium 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 interest-
ing. 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 historic-
inferential) model of long-term geomorphological
behaviour’ (225). Now, there are certainly particu-
lar 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 con-
ditions of his day. On the wider canvas, both
‘immanent’ and ‘configurational’ processes are
studied in historical contexts. Here, then, is a fur-
ther blurring of the distinction to add to that al-
ready 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
Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography
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 eco-
nomics 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 estab-
lished as unthought assumptions, a highly particu-
lar 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 arrang-
ing differences between places into historical
271
sequence. All the stories of Progress, of Develop-
ment, of Modernization (such as the movement
from traditional to modern), of the Marxist pro-
gression 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 fre-
quently 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 varia-
tion on myself’, where ‘myself’ is the one con-
structing the imagination. So the countries of, say,
the South of this planet (in these modernist imagi-
nations 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 recogni-
tion that there is more than one story going on in
272
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 argu-
ing 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 origi-
nal). 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 eco-
nomics, the development of institutional and evo-
lutionary 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
Doreen Massey
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 circum-
stances . . . ) . . . 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-from-
equilibrium 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 fundamen-
tally different spheres: that the possibility of inten-
tionality, 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 onto-
logical commonalities, but that these are articu-
lated in distinctive manners in different spheres
and, moreover, that this distinctiveness is a phe-
nomenon 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 function-
ing of the inorganic, the biological and the socio-
cultural, 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
Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography
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 relation-
ship 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 natu-
ralist 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 knowl-
edge, 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 . . . Per-
haps 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 argu-
ment drawn from my thinking within my own
field of human geography. My question is how this
might relate to reconceptualizations of spatiality
273
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 deni-
grated 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 docu-
mented 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 implica-
tion 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 geogra-
phy (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 analy-
sis 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 re-
theorizations of time, and all this insistence on the
openness of true historicity, in fact require (for
philosophical compatibility) a parallel retheoriz-
ation 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 crea-
tivity has so much in common with many of the
arguments being put forward today by philoso-
phers 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 emer-
gence 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
274
compatible with notions of the openness of history
would be that things somehow change in them-
selves (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) con-
tains 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-inter-
relationality is one of the mechanisms in the crea-
tion 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 pro-
duce them both. Time and space must be thought
together, therefore, for they are inextricably inter-
Doreen Massey
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 cross-
section 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 pre-
cisely 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 dis-
rupted, 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 encourage-
ment 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
Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and human geography
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 geogra-
phers and those who might be thought of as
physical.
Notes
1 Thus they write that:
Whilst much of the work of mathematicians and
physicists such as Minkowski and Einstein is rel-
evant 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!
2 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 detect-
able the crucial link – picked up again later in this
paper – between complexity and emergence.
3 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 half-
knowledge of natural science, but also indulging in
an implicit ‘reverential referencing’ that stands in
total contradiction to their wider positions.
4 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)
5 Frodeman actually uses the term ‘Analytical Philoso-
phy’ 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.
275
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 inevi-
table’. This is not a process peculiar to geomorphol-
ogy 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 connec-
tions between this temporalization of space in social
sciences and the ergodic hypothesis in geomorphol-
ogy, where an attempt is made to explain distribu-
tions 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 ‘spe-
cious 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 exam-
ple of a concept that’s irreducibly philosophical, sci-
entific, 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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