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Parallels between relational dialectics, assemblages, and complexity.
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As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian...
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... for example, the assemblage of ideas that have been gathered under the rubric of complexity theory, a topic that has recently been receiving attention in domains that range from physics to cultural studies, including geography (cf Law, 2004;Thrift, 1999). Table 1, column C, lays out some characteristics of complex dynamical out-of-equilibrium systems, as described by Ilya Prigogine (1996), illustrating a repetition of the parallels drawn between relational dialectics and assemblages, now extended to embrace this approach to complexity. Indeed, DeLanda (see also Bonta and Protevi, 2004) suggests that the methodologies of complexity theory are directly applicable to assemblages [although sociospatial theorists will note that the conceptualization of space ^ time associated with complexity shows closer affinities with dialectics, and with Massey's (2005) emergent relational space ^ time, than with DeLanda's scale-centric approach]. ...
Citations
... In this, geographers draw on a long history of relational thinking in related disciplines such as sociology, where, according to Emirbayer (1997, p. 287), "[r]elational theorists reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pregiven units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis". Jones (2009) locates the lineage of relational spatial thinking through Harvey's (2009) spatial dialectics (see also Sheppard, 2008) back to Leibniz's non-Euclidean philosophy; in contrast, absolute space is more characteristic of Newtonian philosophy. Quoting Callon and Law (2004, p. 6), Jones argues that thinking relationally "is an empowering perspective. ...
The distinction between everyday life and work is gradually diminishing, as productive capacities are increasingly hard-coded into quotidian activities bearing little resemblance to colloquial understandings of “work”. Digital labor research has made important contributions to our understanding of these processes and their attendant relations, inequalities, and implications. However, this body of research has insufficiently attended to the spaces through which this labor takes place. On the one hand, most research foregoes the spatial forms and relations through which the labor occurs. On the other hand, when the spaces of digital labor are considered, it is usually done through its “absolute” spaces that rely on Euclidean geometries. In this chapter, I argue that a relational spaces framework is needed to advance understanding of digital labor. A relational framework conceives of actors and practices as constituted through networks and connections, and space as produced for phenomena like digital labor. With relationality, digital labor is not confined by nation-state boundaries nor as occurring only at a simple location on the globe, but instead as constituted by intertwined positionalities that span the globe. A relational spatial framework also enables an analysis of digital labor as immaterial, cognitive, attentional, and symbolic labor, rather than as a discrete, remunerated act.
... This "relational turn," prominent in sub-disciplines like economic geography (Bathelt & Glückler, 2003;Yeung, 2005) and thematic work such as geographical relational poverty studies (Lawson & Elwood, 2014;Elwood et al., 2016), highlights the importance of complex intersections among social actors, institutions, processes, and practices that effect change in society, space, and environment (Yeung, 2005). Its roots lie in geography's move away from mechanistic spatial science and toward Marxist radical political economy in the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized dialectical social relationships as critical to understanding capital accumulation, class struggle, and uneven development across space (Harvey, 1996;Sheppard, 2008;Smith, 2008Smith, [1984). ...
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espouse neoliberal solutions. Political ecologists have approached EG more critically with the conceptual tools of neoliberal natures, environmental regulation, and eco-governmentality. In this article, we contend that these conceptualizations, while theoretically rich, are limited in their capacity to capture a diversity of governance contexts, processes, and actors and to drive both scholarly analysis and radical change. Thus, we put forward a conceptual framework of relational environmental governance (REG) that captures the dynamic and unequal interactions among heterogeneous human and non-human actors by which socio-ecological arrangements are structured, controlled, and transformed. Drawing from a variety of relational traditions, the framework comprises four key "moves" related to i) ontological understandings of EG processes as full of unequal power relations and heterogeneous actors, ii) epistemological privileging of intersections among racialized, gendered, queer and/or alternative or Indigenous knowledges in EG processes, iii) methodological emphasis on conducting research relationally with diverse EG actors, and iv) a praxis of engagement with EG processes to change how socio-ecologies are controlled and address crises of sustainability.
... Toplum ve doğa birbirinden ayrılamaz ve diyalektik bir şekilde birbiriyle ilgilidir. Diyalektik düşüncede mekân açık uçludur; yeni etkileşimlerle yeni mekânlar ortaya çıkmaktadır (Harvey, 1996;Gregory, 2000;Sheppard, 2008). Harvey'in belirttiği gibi (1996), diyalektik içinde çelişkileri barındırmaktadır. ...
... We will try to synthesize the human and materiality mentioned in the previous paragraphs from two points. First, we can define the intersections and interactions between human and materiality as (III) relational dialectics, as Sheppard (2008) puts it. In the dialectical structure, human and materiality interact and this is how space emerges. ...
... Society and nature are inseparable and dialectically interrelated. In dialectical thought, space is open-ended; new spaces emerge with new interactions (Harvey, 1996;Gregory, 2000;Sheppard, 2008). ...
Bu çalışmada, mekânsal bakışın ne olduğu; onu oluşturan bileşenler; teorik yaklaşım ve paradigmalara göre şekillenen mekânsal bakış açıları ele alınmıştır. Coğrafi disiplini tanımlayan en önemli unsur mekânsal bakıştır; çünkü mekânsal bakışın kavranmasıyla coğrafi çalışmalar daha sağlam bir temele oturur. Coğrafyada yaşanan ve yaşanması muhtemel bütün fiziki ve sosyal olgular mekânsal bir odakla ele alınıp incelenmektedir. Bu mekânsal odağı daha iyi analiz edebilmek için teorik çerçevelere, kavramlara ve yaklaşımlara gereksinimimiz vardır. Çalışmada, değişmez bir mekânsal bakış açısının olmadığı vurgulandıktan sonra mekânsal bakışı oluşturan bileşenler ele alınmıştır. Bu bölümde materyalitenin (maddenin) mekânsal bakış açısını oluşturma sürecinde daha önceleri yeteri kadar önemsenmediği; ancak materyal olanın sanıldığından çok daha etkin bir şekilde mekânsal süreçlere müdahil olduğu vurgulanmıştır. Teorik çerçevelerle şekillenen mekânsal bakış açıları ele alındıktan sonra sonuç bölümünde materyaliteyi önceleyen; ancak materyaliteden etkilenen sosyal dünyayı gözden kaçırmayan mekânsal bakış açılarına daha fazla ihtiyaç olduğu savunulmuş ve coğrafi disiplin için bu yönde gelişen mekânsal bakış açıları önerilmiştir.
... Rather, through his applied agronomic studies, Cabral reworked dialectics in more relational and less teleological, unilinear, determinist, binary, and orthodox manners that pre-dates similar recognition in geography by decades (Sheppard 2008). Cabral knew no capitalism outside of colonialism, racism, and the environment (cf. ...
The agronomic writings of influential theorist and independence leader Amílcar Cabral contain a hitherto underappreciated dialectical approach that is environmental, nonreductive, spatialised, nonteleological, and anticolonial, with significance for geographies that are simultaneously critical, physical, Southern, Black, African, and decolonial. Cabral's interests in socionatures—and especially colonialism and the state—emerged from childhood in colonial Cabo Verde. His undergraduate thesis examines dialectics of soil erosion and agrarian structures in Portugal, amidst his politicisation and anti‐colonial networking. He developed his dialectical approach spatially as he conducted Guinea‐Bissau's agricultural census and advanced beyond methodological nationalism and evolutionary stagism by emphasising colonial connections (colonial state mechanisation and export crops in African agrarian systems). These insights and concerns shaped and were shaped by his work on warehouses, Angolan plantations, and broader post‐1960 liberation struggles to suggest that a rural guerrilla strategy was possible and necessary in Guinea through dialectical engagements with diverse peasantries and international support.
... Complex dynamical systems capture the uncertainty and contingency of temporal change, embrace out-of-equilibrium dynamics, bifurcations, and paths not taken (and forgotten), and the enduring effect of minor events (e.g. the well-known "butterfly effect": Lorenz, 1969). They are consistent with dialectical ways of making sense of the world (focusing on relations shaping entities, rather than entities as stable categories; Harvey, 1996), they are amenable to mathematical modeling, and they align with the assemblage-theoretical approach recently popular among cultural geographers exploring the new materialism (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011;DeLanda, 2006;Sheppard, 2008). Furthermore, replicating a core principle of spatial theory, complex dynamical systems are co-constitutive of the spatio-temporal domains structuring their operation (Prigogine, 1996)-a spatio-temporal dialectic (cf. ...
... Marx was fascinated by mathematics, and there is a strong tradition of mathematical Marxism-tellingly, largely outside geography (but see Sheppard and Barnes, 1990;Webber and Rigby, 1996). Quantitative modeling of complex dynamical systems is consistent with both dialectical thinking and assemblage theory (Sheppard, 2008), and spatial analysis can be feminist (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2018;Kwan, 2002). ...
Anthropogenic global heating is accelerating, with dramatic implications for the long-term prospects of humans and many other species, underwritten by the logics of Euro-centric capitalism compounded by the colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and commodification of nature that has accompanied it. Nationalism is re-emerging, as are socio-cultural divisions within national societal assemblages. Global capitalism faces a series of crises stemming from the consequences of these relations. Critics are quick to argue that non-capitalist alternatives can advance socio-ecological justice, but how? Geography is ideally suited to making sense of this conjuncture, critiquing the processes facilitating its emergence, and realizing alternatives. Yet we are far from achieving our potential, caught up in our own philosophical, ideological, and substantive silos. I argue that five priorities must be taken up if geographical thinking is to be suited for the present moment. We must be more historical in our thinking (integrating the temporal with the spatial). We must pay more attention to the macro-scale: to how local events are complexly bound-up in spatially differentiated planetary processes? We must be socio-ecological: incentivizing productive collaboration across earth science, social science, and humanities sub-fields. We must deconstruct our disabling quantitative–qualitative methodological divide, incentivizing training in multi-methods. We must work harder to diversify the perspectives and socio-spatial positionalities incorporated into geographical thinking to decenter White male, Anglophone, and settler geographies. Excitingly, the potential for all this exists within Geography today.
... As such, plasticity is an ontology that can be deployed to examine contemporary regions through time as both a dynamic and/or inertial enduring 'physical artefact' (Harvey 1996, 417); critically for how the past is complexly retained within its present form, and for how this process both shapes and is shaped by how we think about the relational 'bundle of resources constituting possibilities as well as barriers … for creative social change' (Harvey 1996: 417). In this sense, the 'malleable real' (Gratton 2014, 184) relationality implied by plasticity is dialectical, opening up 'all sorts of possibilities that might otherwise appear foreclosed' (Harvey 1996, 12), but such senses of possibility are also deeply embedded spatially and temporally (see also Sheppard 2008). ...
This article is published as part of the Geographical Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue based on the Vega symposium: ‘Bounded spaces in question: X-raying the persistence of regions and territories, edited by Anssi Paasi.
ABSTRACT
This paper firstly delimits a ‘new new regional geography’ centered on whether regions can be seen as relational and networked or/and territorial and scalar concerns, and beyond this, what relationality and its various topological twists means. Debates have sought ways forward by seeing regions as assembled temporary permanencies and how regions are formed and then endure despite conditions of continual change. The paper engages specifically with Allen’s (2012) notion of a ‘more than relational geography’, which questions what kind of regional entities are being made and sustained. The paper secondly advances this via notions of ‘plastic space’ to take forward debates on a more than relational geography of regions, where regions are flexible but not totally arbitrary, constrained by contextual realities forged in and through time as the plasticity of institutional combinations. Malabou’s plasticity ontology is deployed to raise important questions on the limits to seeing the regional world through always elastic deformations and the stretching of objects and relations, which can lead to thrown-together topological vagaries.
... In the field of human geography, few authors have brought together elements from assemblage theory and CAS. Sheppard (2008) provides a useful overview of parallels found in relational dialectics, assemblage and complexity theory, and Bonta and Protevi (2004), while not explicitly looking at assemblage theory, offer a rich exploration of some close linkages between complexity theory and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Briassoulis (2017a) draws on both AT and CAS-or social-ecological systems-in her conceptualization of "response assemblages," which triggered a controversial discussion about connecting AT to or embedding it within what Head (2017, p. 204) describes as "something conceived in a completely different ontology." ...
In human geography and beyond, assemblage thinking has increasingly gained attention as a perspective from which to investigate the emergence and dynamics of more‐than‐human entanglements. Similarly, in the interdisciplinary field of social‐ecological systems analysis, theories of complex adaptive systems have been employed to investigate how social and ecological dynamics and actors interact with each other on different scales. Nonetheless, despite the success of these conceptual perspectives in their respective research fields, there have been few attempts so far to bring these theoretical strands together to explore their common ground and investigate how they could cross‐fertilize each other. This contribution seeks to address this gap, by investigating the ontological compatibility of these two approaches and exploring the potential for meaningful syntheses that could be utilized for integrative research—combining perspectives, approaches, and methods taken from social and environmental sciences for the analysis of human‐environmental relations. Based on a comparative discussion of four selected “guiding principles” found in assemblage thinking and complex adaptive systems, namely, socio‐nature, emergence/historicity, relationality, and self‐organization, we find not only significant common ground between the two perspectives but also discrepancies that may be utilized for cross‐fertilization. In particular, we argue complex adaptive systems would benefit from a deeper engagement with society‐nature theorizations found in the assemblage literature, while assemblage thinking could borrow from complex adaptive systems to broaden its conception of how elements relate to and co‐function with each other.
... This case study uses the methods and terminology of assemblage theory to understand how privileged renters responded to the sale of Stuyvesant Town. Assemblage theory is based on an epistemological commitment that proposes complex urban systems can create unpredictable results because of the specific elements of a given case (Allen, 2012;Karaman, 2012;Sheppard, 2008;Baker & McGuirk, 2017). This approach is also valuable because it recognizes that socio-economic relationships can seem stable and yet are always capable of being altered by the introduction of new components. ...
Recent debates question whether assemblage urbanism provides an appropriate framework for addressing the housing question under late capitalism. On one side, proponents note the capacity of assemblage to reveal the complex emergence of events, places and processes, whereas critics argue assemblage accounts provide deep empirical detail but avoid engaging with political economy. This paper addresses such criticism through an assemblage account of local activism in the context of ownership changes that threatened the rent-regulated Stuyvesant Town neighbourhood in Manhattan. We adopt an assemblage methodology to examine this case of privileged tenant activism and find that it provides an additive lens for understanding the networks of relations that influenced the community during the mid-2000s. Noting that assemblage and the financial ecologies approach are similar in their attendance to relational thinking, we describe how these approaches can be used in conjunction to better understand the linkages between housing and financialization.
... Allen, 2012;Cox, 2013a). In particular, the concept of causal power exercised through generative mechanisms in critical realist thinking has thrown into sharp relief the fundamental relationality in cause and effect in socio-spatial dynamics (Hudson, 2003;Sheppard, 2008;Varró, 2015;Yeung, 2005). As argued by Sayer (2012: 184; original italics), even such a relational/networked conception of space and place must explain 'what it is about the relata and the relations that make things happen'. ...
Speaking directly to economic and political geographers working on uneven development, this article critically examines the deployment of two key concepts, mechanism and process, as analytical tools for causal explanation in geographical analysis during the past two decades. Drawing upon critical realism to develop a theory of mechanism, this article clarifies the conceptual distinction between mechanism and process. Whereas process is conceived as a contingent change in the sequential series of entities and their relations, mechanism serves as a necessary relation to connect an initial causal condition with its particular socio-spatial outcomes in context. This analytical distinction between a contingent process of change and a necessary mechanism for an outcome requires a careful specification of the concrete outcomes to be explained and the working of various mechanisms. Illustrating my case through existing studies of neoli-beralization and, briefly, path dependence, I argue that there is a tendency in the literature to conflate mechanism and process in different meso-level theories of socio-spatial change. This conflation, in turn, distorts the causal links in core concepts and reduces their explanatory efficacy in accounting for uneven development. Rethinking mechanism and process can therefore help revitalize systematic explanations of uneven development as one of geography's core intellectual projects and contributions to the social sciences ; it can also allow geographers to engage more productively with the rapidly growing mechanistic thought in analytical sociology, political science and the philosophy of social science during the past two decades.
... Therefore it is important to first show how both philosophical discourse and selective data from neuroscience have been used to construct speculative and hyper-deterministic claims about the nature of the political before moving on to suggest an alternative manner in which the relation between philosophy, geography, and the practice of politics might be considered. Finally, this mode of presentation is also useful in that dialectical thought has been rejected by some of the poststructuralist thinkers who have influenced the perspectives under consideration (Sheppard, 2008). By showing how dialectics can be used to mediate between the extremes of two very different approaches, I hope to demonstrate how it remains a useful tool of analysis for geographers and other social theorists. ...
... As Gramsci (1996: 190; Q4, §41) puts it, 'thought cannot be separated from being, man [sic] from nature, activity (history) from matter, subject from object: such a separation would be a fall into empty talk, meaningless abstraction'. The dialectic is here understood as an active, relational unity involving reciprocal subjective and objective dimensions, i.e. forms of objective and subjective determination, rather than as an external relation between two elements (see also Doel, 2008Doel, : 2631Sheppard, 2008). 6 Put another way, Gramsci 'rejects a subjectivist conception of the world that ascribes to consciousness capacities of direction and decision that are in fact only realised in dialectical relations as well as the metaphysical materialism that would see subjects as controlled by immutable laws from the outside' (Thomas, 2009a: 333). ...
Inspired by philosopher Peter Hallward’s call for a renewed focus on political will, this article examines its conceptualization within three areas of the discipline: non-representational theory, post-politics, and Gramscian geographies. Non-representational theorists draw attention to the role of affect in shaping political life, but have little to say about conscious collective volition. In contrast, post-politics scholars offer an extensive vocabulary for understanding political will as a prescriptive form of agency, but risk confining the political to an abstract, regulative idea. Meanwhile, Gramscian geographies’ dialectical approach to political will can complement both by mediating between extremes of objective and subjective determination.
