The Dictionary of Human Geography

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geographers to provide a rigorous account of

the implications ofexistentialismandphe-

nomenologyfor understanding humanspati-

ality, and these themes have re-emerged in

later thematizations of space (e.g. Strohmayer,

1998). The second is a persistent interest in

concepts of space that are markedly less

orderly than those of spatial science and its

successor projects, sometimes through read-

ings of outlaw Marxists such as Walter Benja-

min (Latham, 1999; Dubow, 2004) and

sometimes throughpost-structuralism: the

most influential figures here have been Gilles

Deleuze, Michel Foucault (Crampton and

Elden, 2007) and Jacques Lacan.

Taken together, contemporary theorizations

of space in human geography (and beyond)

share the following features:

(1) The integration of time and space. Conven-

tional social science privileged the first

term (so that time was seen as change,

movement and history) while marginal-

izing the second (so that space was seen

as the site of stasis and stability). Human

geography has abandoned the project of

an autonomous science of the spatial,

rejected conceptions of space as the

fixed and frozen ground on which events

take place or processes leave their marks,

and is now exploring the mobile, proces-

sual fields of ‘time–space’ (May and

Thrift, 2001; see time-geography;

time–space compression; time__space

expansion).

(2) The co-production of time and space. Time

and space are not neutral, canonical

grids that exist ‘on the outside’, enfram-

ing and containing life on Earth, but are

instead folded into the ongoing flows and

forms of the world in which we find our-

selves. Thus Thrift (1996; see also 2008)

introduces the idea ofspatial formations

to figure a sensuousontologyof prac-

tices and encounters between diverse,

distributed bodies and things. This is a

thoroughlymaterialistaccount, but it

operates through an analytics of the sur-

face rather than the ‘depth models’ of

mainstream Marxism, and it refuses

the oppositions between ‘culture’ and

‘nature’ on whichhistorical material-

ismis predicated. Time–space emerges

as a process of continual construction

‘through the agency of things encounter-

ing each other in more or less organized

circulations’ (Thrift, 2003, p. 96). Simi-

larly but differently, Rose (1999b) draws

on feminist theory, and particularly the

work of Judith Butler, to insist that space

is not a pre-existent void or ‘a terrain to

be spanned or constructed’: it is instead

‘a doing’, aperformance.

(3) The unruliness of time–space. Both spatial

science and conventional social theory

made too much of pattern and systema-

ticity, labouring to solve what they called

‘the problem of order’, without recogniz-

ing the multiple ways in which life on

Earth evades and exceeds those orders.

The sense of partial ordering and incom-

pletion is focal to many contemporary

theorizations. To be sure, space is not

infinitely plastic: ‘certain forms of space

tend to recur, their repetition a sign of

the power that saturates the spatial’

(Rose, 1999). And yet, while modalities

of power often work to condense particu-

lar spatialities as ‘natural’ outcomes

through architectures ofsurveillance

and regulation, Massey (2005) insists

that space is not a coherent system of

discriminations and interconnections, a

grid of ‘proper places’. She argues that

space necessarily entails plurality and

multiplicity. Hence spatial formations in-

volve (and invite) ‘happenstance juxta-

positions’ and ‘accidental separations’,

so that time–space becomes a turbulent

field of constellations and configurations:

a world of structures and solidarities, dis-

ruptions and dislocations that provides

for the emergence of genuine novelty.

‘Emergence’ is not necessarily progres-

sive or emancipatory, of course, and the

argument may also be put in reverse:

contemporary spaces of exception (see

exception, spaces of) trade on paradox-

ical orderings of space whose very ambi-

guity is used to foreclose possibilities

forpoliticalaction.Either way, however,

far from space being ‘the dead’, as one of

Foucault’s astringent critics once

claimed, it is now theorized as being

fully involved in the modulations of ten-

sion and transformation.

(4) The porousness of time–space. Constella-

tions of power and knowledge are typic-

ally elaborated through a spatial system

of inclusions and exclusions, most gener-

ally through the demarcation of a ‘space

of the Same’ from which ‘the Other’ is

supposedly excluded (cf. imaginative

geographies). A common critical re-

sponse to these measures is to call these

b/ordering processes to account – to

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