Subjectivity grounds our understanding of
who we are. It also grounds our claims to
geographical knowledge. All geographical
knowledge, whether it is spatial science, behav-
ioural geography,Marxist geography, feminist
geography or cultural geography, presupposes
some theory of subjectivity. Different theories
of subjectivity prompt different geographical
knowledges. To put it crudely, ‘doing’ geogra-
phy means ‘doing’ subjectivity (and vice versa).
It is not surprising, therefore, that since the
late 1960s and early 1970s geographers have
shown a keen interest in the relationship
between subjectivity and space.
Pile and Thrift explain: ‘By the early 1970s,
geographers had begun to experiment with
different models of (what was then called)
“man”. These models of subjectivity were pri-
marily drawn from the disciplines of cognitive
psychology, political economy and philosophy’
(1995: xii). For example, David Harvey in Expla-
nation in Geography(1969) offered up behavi-
oural geography as a corrective to the inert,
lifeless mathematical models used in systems
theory.
In the 1970s, humanist geographers also
offered up new models of subjectivity. For
example, Torsten Hägerstrand rejected a
Cartesian separation between mind and body
to explore subjects’ ‘lived’ time-space geo-
graphies. Hägerstrand, and other humanist geo-
graphers,imagined subjects to be self-knowing,bounded and unique individuals. It was
thought that subjectivity was contained within
the body, which confined it and bound it as
separate from what was outside, different and
other (see Longhurst, 1995, and Rose, 1993,
on the masculinist imperative inherent in this
understanding of subjectivity).
In the early 1980s, Nigel Thrift explicitly
addressed the issue of subject formation.
Thrift (1983) did not fall on the side of either
structure (that circumstances decide what
people do) or agency (that people choose
their own paths) but attempted to understand
the subject in terms of both structure and
agency. In the 1990s, the terms of debate on
subjectivity were recast yet again. Geographers
began to focus not on the structure/agency
debate but on discourse and representation.
Cultural geographers, as well as others
drawing on poststructuralist thought, began to
examine some of the ways in which subjectiv-
ity and space can be understood as simultane-
ously real, imaginary and symbolic (Duncan,
1996; Keith and Pile, 1993; Pile, 1996; Pile and
Thrift, 1995). One of the attractions of this
approach for cultural, feminist, postcolonial
and other critical geographers was that it
offered a new way to begin to understand
power relations. Poststructuralist theory led
us to reject notions of a coherent subject,
arguing that the many cultural, social, political
and psychical processes that continuallySection 5
PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES Edited by Robyn Longhurst
Introduction: Subjectivities, Spaces and Places
Robyn Longhurst
Section-5.qxd 03-10-02 10:38 AM Page 283