The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_P Date:1/4/09
Time:15:20:46 Filepath:H:/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-9781405132879/appln/3B2/re-
vises/9781405132879_4_P.3d

versions ofmarxismthen also entering the

field.humanistic geography in particular

turned to phenomenology to redress abstract

notions of people and places. This ‘geograph-

ical phenomenology’ focused variously on

everyday practices, human agency, move-

ment, place, and social and environmental

ethics (Relph, 1970; Tuan, 1971; Buttimer,

1976; Entrikin, 1976). Phenomenology was

seen as a philosophical and methodological

approach that was attuned to human subject-

ivity, and its proponents read in its claim for a

return to ‘the things themselves’ – an argu-

ment at once opposed to scientific abstrac-

tion and in favour of a more direct social

geography of everyday lives and lifeworlds

(Casey, 1993).

In a major critical intervention, Pickles

(1985) forcefully questioned these subjectivist

readings of phenomenology. Pickles argued

that ‘geographical phenomenology’ had over-

looked Husserl’s and Heidegger’s critique of

both objectivismand subjectivismin science as

remaining in what Husserl called ‘the natural

attitude’. The real crisis of the European sci-

ences was not that they treated the everyday

world in overly abstract ways, but that they

failed to recognize that their claims toobject-

ivityin the natural attitude had always to be

clarified and situated in terms of their consti-

tutive regional ontologies (seeontology).

Werlen (1993 [1988]) subsequently elabor-

ated such a regional ontology of everyday life

and social action through a close, creative

reading of the constitutive phenomenology of

Alfred Schu ̈tz (1899–1959).

Seen thus, phenomenology is not analter-

nativeto the abstractive tendencies of science

but a necessarycorrelateto it, seeking as it does

to ground the relationship between scientific

and the pre-scientific, the theoretical and the

everyday, in a carefully prepared and reflective

ontological analysis. Phenomenology ‘does

not subscribe to a ‘‘standpoint’’ or represent

any special ‘‘direction’’; for phenomenology is

nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as

long as it understands itself. The expression

‘‘phenomenology’’ signifies primarily ameth-

odological conception. The expression does not

characterize the what of the objects of philo-

sophical research as a subject matter, but

rather thehowof that research. The more

genuinely a methodological concept is worked

out and the more comprehensively it deter-

mines the principles on which a science is to

be conducted, all the more primordially is it

rooted in the way we come to terms with the

things themselves, and the farther is it

removed from what we call ‘‘technical

devices’’ though there are many such devices

even in the theoretical disciplines (Heidegger,

1927, p. 27: seemethodology).

It was precisely the fact that the sciences had

forgotten their own histories of concepts and

approaches (cf.genealogy) that led to the

need for phenomenology to clarify the regional

ontologies of the sciences, knowledge pro-

duction and the lifeworld. In Pickles’ view,

phenomenology is concerned not first and

foremost with individualized, subjective geog-

raphies, but with the ways in which phenomena

are constituted as intentional objects through

complex historical and social processes of dis-

tanciation, thematization, abstraction and for-

malization (and sometimes mathematization)

that constitute meaning-making in its many

forms. Phenomenologists are, therefore, always

interested in the constitution of the specific

objects, with their relational nature as objects

of consciousness, intention or meaning, and

with the lifeworld context that always escapes

all thematization but is the precondition for any

such thematization. The task of phenomen-

ology in this sense is not to assert the priority

of the everyday world over the world of science,

or of place over abstract spaces, but to under-

stand through ontological investigation how

each is constituted in various historical projects

of abstraction and thematization (see also

Gregory, 1978b).

By the 1990s and 2000s, new directions in

geographical thought led to even more

expanded readings of phenomenology in

post-positivist geography. Phenomenology

was renewed by a growing interest inpost-

modernism andpost-structuralism,par-

ticularly in ways in which anti-essentialist

writings questioned what Jacques Derrida

called phenomenology’s residual onto-

theology: its specific commitments to

particular interpretations of foundationalism,

rationalism, and subject. More recently,

growing interest amongst human geographers

in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Michel de

Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,

Jean-Luc Nancy, Gayatri Spivak and others

has led to an appreciation of the ways in which

these thinkers have adapted phenomeno-

logical thought to new ends, and the advance

ofnon-representational theoryin human

geography has also been achieved in part

through a reading of various forms of (post-)

phenomenology. jpi

Suggested reading

Pickles (1985).

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 529 1.4.2009 3:20pm

PHENOMENOLOGY