ABSTRACT
‘The “fetishism of space,”’ wrote James Anderson (1973, p3) in a highly influential argument, ‘is the geographer’s particular conceit’. The critique was aimed at a scientific geographical tradition that drew increasingly sophisticated and abstract depictions of spatial forms and relationships, but that often confused spatial form for social cause. It explicitly adapted Marx’s critique of ideology embodied in the notion of the fetishism of commodities. According to Marx, the substantive social relations between different groups of people working under different conditions to make specific commodities is obscured in the purely quantitative relationship between the different prices of the commodities; the relationship between people comes to appear as a relationship between the things themselves. That is, the commodities themselves, material or otherwise, are fetishised. According to the spatial corollary, the social relations between people come to be represented as the relations between places; here, the places become fetishised. A popular illustration might involve poverty: to the extent that social analysts explain poverty as resulting from where people live – ghettoes reproduce poverty – rather than focusing on its social causes in terms of class, race, gender and other social and political relations, spatial fetishism disguises social causes. A related if more contemporary example is the so-called spatial mismatch thesis. According to this argument, concentrations of unemployment are explained in terms of a ‘spatial mismatch’ between the location of jobs and the location of able workers, rather than as a result of social differences. Not least because of Anderson’s critique, emerging radical geographies have long conceived their task as an exploration of the dialectics of space and society in a way that would simultaneously respatialise social theory (and in the process reveal much about social and political relations) and, at the same time, socialise the spatial discourse of geography. The point was to recentre geographical space politically without, at the same time, falling foul of the fetishism of space.
