Situating Flatness

Our paper, ‘Human Geography without Scale’ (Marston et al. 2005), is developed in two parts: a critique that is immanent to scale, where we show that, even on the grounds of contemporary spatial theory, the concept is deficient; and a critique that is extrinsic to those grounds, where we make a contribution to an alternative ontology that does not rely on the transcendental abstraction of scale. The paper is of course about scale, but these alternately internal and external critiques mean that it is also in play with two different domains of spatial thought more generally. On the one hand, most theorists of scale have come to rely on Henri Lefebvre’s dialectical materialist approach to overcoming longstanding divisions between social and spatial ontologies. On the other hand, inspired by thinkers such as Deleuze, Latour and others, a small but increasing number of geographers are charting a different approach to space, one that is also materialist but poststructuralist and non-dialectical (Bonta and Protevi 2004). Our paper can be read as the latest salvo in the scale debates, but as this reply should make clear, it also speaks directly to widening differences in these theorizations of space in critical human geography. One does not have to be a Kuhnian to realize that any time a shift in dominant thinking takes place there will be ‘sides’ – and reading some of the comments on our paper reveals that this word is not too strong. Here we suggest that, in order to develop a more complete and analytically rigorous account of these differences, non-dialectical theorists of space will have to respond to a number of questions, the answers to which dialecticians have already filled in while developing their own approach to social space. These questions, which amount to something of an agenda for an alternative spatiality, include the following: