ABSTRACT
Modern spaces - traditional language? Today, a 'globalization' or 'disembeddedness' of life-worlds in modern societies is almost a discursive common place. A new 'distanciated' order seems to be emerging, accompanied by a decline of the relevance of the spatial dimension. New concepts of 'polythetically overlapping' scapes with 'fractally shaped cultural forms' (Appadurai, 2000, p. 46) are being proposed as the appropriate con-
temporary socio-spatial ontology. At the same time, territorially defined regions - as well as spatial (and cultural) entities in general - are being claimed to be either residuals of a lost geographical reality, or suspected of being rhetorical expressions that hide a certain political strategy. Thus, sociogeographic objectives in the wake of the so-called 'cultural turn' have become more and more involved with the question of how to represent the contemporary disordered order in a more adequate way (Appadurai, 2000; Bhabha, 2000), and the simplest answer seems to be to avoid the traditional essentializing of geographical semantics. But this discourse of 'adequacy' in a 'detraditionalised' world (Habermas, 1985; Heelas etal., 1996), as we argue, has to be questioned given the ways we talk about space: Are we able to simply avoid traditional geographical terms and speech patterns? Do we (yet) have a language (and imagination) to express spatial disembeddedness? And if not, while following the constructivist assumption underlying the everyday 'making of geography' in action and speech (Werlen, 1993, 1997), how 'new' can the linguistically performed spaces get, if-as has been suggested (Natter and Jones, 1997) - we still use a traditional 'conservative' essentialising grammar and vocabulary? As Zierhofer (2002, p. 1357) notes, well-established categories cannot simply be declared as 'wrong', since this would lead to a blindness regarding their validity and function in everyday practice. Rather, as we suggest, research efforts should take into account the significance which traditional concepts of regions as essential and bounded entities (still) achieve in both mediated and face-to-face communication - even under so-called 'globalized conditions'.
