The Dictionary of Human Geography

to Lefebvre’s reading of Marx as they do
Harvey’s: hence Soja (1980, 1989) proposed
a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (see alsotrialectics)
and Shields (1999) described Lefebvre’s work
as a ‘spatial dialectics’. Other writers, indebted
in different ways to different historical materi-
alisms, have shown how other geographical
concepts may also be approached dialectically:
thus Pred (1984) emphasized the dialectics of
placeand practice; Mitchell (2002a) traced a
series of ways in whichlandscapemay be
interrogated as a dialectical formation; and
Castree (2003b) examined the prospects (and
problems) of treating what he called ‘naturein
the making’ dialectically.
In Harvey’s own writings, as elsewhere, dia-
lectics functions as both a mode of explanation
and a mode of representation (Castree, 1996).
representationis not confined to writing, of
course, and there has been considerable inter-
est in combining the textual and the visual
in the tense constellations of what Marxist
cultural critic Walter Benjamin called thedia-
lectical image. Historical materialism is rich
with close readings of Marx’s canon – attend-
ing not only to what he said but how he said
it – and it was famously claimed that Marx’s
words are ‘like bats: one can see in them both
birds and mice’. In human geography, how-
ever, this attentiveness to the slippery subtle-
ties of language and to the powers released by
words has occasioned a series of reflections
that have taken many critics a considerable
distance from Harvey’s own base in historical
materialism. Thus Olsson (1974) argued that
the categorical paradigm fails to recognize the
interpenetrations of form and process, subject
and object, so that its propositions reveal more
about the language we are talking in, whereas
‘statements in dialectics will say more about
the worlds we are talking about’. Olsson’s sub-
sequent work has taken him far from Marx
and into a sustained interrogation of Western
philosophical thought (Olsson, 1980, 1991,
2007). To be sure, ‘words’ and ‘worlds’ are
connected, as Olsson (and for that matter
Harvey) constantly accentuate, and in order
to explore the ways in which they are folded
into one another, a number of human geog-
raphers have made two further moves. One
has been to follow the linguistic turn in the
humanities and social sciences, and so chal-
lenge the metaphysics of binary oppositions
on which classical dialectics depends
(Doel, 1992, 2006: see alsodeconstruction).
Another has been to take seriously Harvey’s
emphases on materiality, practice and trans-
formation, but to develop these through

an avowedlynon-representational theory.

Here too, the accent is on practices, and on

the provisional and the incomplete, but

Whatmore (1999b, p. 25; see also 2002a) insists

that dialectical reasoning is ‘insufficiently

radical’ to convey the sensuous openness of

‘world-making’: there is thus a studied refusal

to render processes through binary opposi-

tions or to convene them within a plenary

totality. But some perceptive critics have won-

dered whether, in practice, this agenda (its

‘relational ontology’) really is so different from

the approach practiced by Harvey and others

(Demeritt, 2005). dg

Suggested reading

Demeritt (2005); Harvey (1996, pp. 48–57);

Sheppard (2006).

dialectical image A leitmotif in the work of

Walter Benjamin, the dialectical image is best

described as an aesthetics of historical mont-

age, or as a method for disrupting a linear or

progressivist logic of history and historical

understanding. Opposed to all forms oftele-

ologyand totality, the dialectical image rests

on a spatio-temporal paradox. On the one

hand, allimagesmust be torn from their imme-

diate contexts and their chronological move-

ment ‘frozen’ in order to become legible.

On the other,dialectics, in both the ancient

sense of continuous disputation and the

Marxian theoretic of contradiction, works to

ensure constant mobility and mutation. So

understood, the dialectical image reconfigures

the relationship of the past to the present.

Refusing all temporal continuity in which the

present illuminates the past or the past casts

its light on the present, the dialectical image

constitutes the scene in whichtimeandspace

are out of joint; in which the ‘then’ and now’,

like the ‘here’ and ‘there’, combine in an

explosive flash or ‘constellation’. From this

emerges a cognitive shock, without which

rigorous conceptual thinking cannot occur.jd

Suggested reading

Benjamin (1973, 1999); Buck-Morss (1989);

Dubow (2007).

diaspora A scattering of people overspace

and transnational connections between people

and places. The term was first used to describe

the forced dispersal of the Jews from Palestine

in the sixth centurybce, and often continues

to refer to forcedmigrationand exile. More

recently, and particularly since the 1990s,

diaspora studies have come to encompass

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DIALECTICAL IMAGE