ABSTRACT
Soja (1989) argues that up till now time and history have occupied a privileged position in critical theory while, as Foucault puts it, ‘Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic’ (quoted in Soja 1989:4). Thus capitalism itself has been treated as a historical, but only incidentally geographical, process, the geography of which, when seen at all, has been recognized only as an external constraint or as an almost incidental out-come. Geography, for Marx himself, was little more than an ‘unnecessary complication’. At the same time, as Soja notes, modern geography itself was ‘reduced primarily to the accumulation, classification and theoretically innocent representation of factual material, describing the “areal differentiation” of the earth’s surface-to the study of outcomes, the end products of dynamic processes best understood by others’ (Soja 1989:36-7). Soja’s own project involves the recognition of the fundamental distinction between space per se-space as a given, natural backdrop to human affairs-and the created space of social organization and production-the ‘second nature’ which is the proper object of a materialist interpretation of spatiality.
