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Ontological repositionings within human
geography over recent decades have largely
been a response to the scientific ontology of
highmodernism, the belief that the world is
transparently knowable to the knowledgeable
observer. This approach, best exemplified by
spatial science, is articulated through the
philosophy ofpositivismand its derivatives:
given enough information about objects and
events in the world, it is possible to derive a
series of scientificlawsthat account for or
explain them. Such positions are predicated
on the ontological assumption that the uni-
verse is a closed system whose movements
are determined by a finite (albeit complex)
set of causal forces and, further, that the ob-
jects making up the world are discrete, stable
and categorizable (Dixon and Jones, 1998).
This reading also holds that both the general
laws pertaining to causal forces and the es-
sences or forms that demarcate discrete ob-
jects are themselves real and objective parts
of the world ‘out there’, awaiting discovery.
behavioural geographyandhumanistic
geography, though sometimes falling back
into versions of positivism, provided a critical
response to these objectivist claims by
gradually incorporating insights from non-
positivist philosophies includingphenomen-
ology, and by paying particular attention to
the importance of variations in perspective pro-
duced through the experience, perception and
lifeworldof the individual. Here, ontology is
a matter of ‘being-in-the-world’, wherein the
world reveals itself through the phenomena of
experience. As such, theobjectivityof positiv-
ism is replaced by an experiential subjectivism.
This difference has often framed the distinction
betweenspaceandplace(Entrikin, 1991).
The hints of perspectivalism within human-
istic geography in particular found fuller
fruition withinfeminist geographies, which
critiqued spatial science for masking a mascu-
linistepistemologyunder the name of ontol-
ogy (seemasculinism). While rarely making
explicit ontological statements, the partial
and situated standpoints of feminist theory
(cf.situated knowledge) were not inconsist-
ent with a Leibnitzian ontology of proliferated,
situateddifference. Perhaps most import-
antly, this resulted in the ontological notion
ofrelational space(Massey, 2005), a conceptu-
alization of co-productivespatialityemerging
with the mobile and mutable interactions be-
tween space and the humansubject. Such
entanglements point todialectics(Harvey,
1996), an ontology ofinternal relations
rather than external relations. In contrast topositivism, therefore, dialectical thought re-
fuses discrete objects and events as things ‘in
themselves’, and with this denies the separ-
ation of phenomena from experience, theory
and politics. An ally in this mode of thought is
the philosophy of criticalrealism, an ontology
of levels aimed at understanding the causal
powers of necessary and contingent social
relations (Sayer, 2000).
With the advance ofpost-structuralismin
human geography, ontology and its cousin
metaphysics were increasingly critiqued as a
series of epistemologicalconstructs mired in
cultural, political and, most importantly,
linguistic and discursive imaginaries. Thus,
the ontological distinctions formed in key
geographical binaries such as nature–culture,
order–chaos, time–space and individual–
society could, under this epistemological cri-
tique, be called out as false dichotomies that
reflect more the Western bias of either/or-ness
than any serious reflection on the social con-
struction of such categories. While the post-
structuralists never denied that there was a real
‘out there’ in the world, they denied that it was
possible to know it through some form of dir-
ect, pure experience (Deutsche, 1991). By this
point, ontologyitself became a target: the
‘real’ world, it was argued, was shut out from
the observer by virtue of the very knowledges
that constitute the ‘observer’ as such, as well
as by the culturally inflected modes ofrepre-
sentationat hand to describe it. In a similar
vein, human geographers influenced by post-
structuralist renderings of psychoanalytic
theory, particularly those arising out of the
work of Lacan and Zˇizˇek, drew from sugges-
tions that immersion in language and symbols
makes access to the ‘Real’ impossible.
Despite the aversion to ontology during the
epistemological turn of the 1990s, however,
interest in the topic has re-emerged in human
geography in large measure through the grow-
ing popularity of the works of Gilles Deleuze.
Drawing largely upon Baruch Spinoza,
Deleuze (1994) creates a ‘flat’ ontology of
‘pure difference’ by theorizing becoming,
multiplicity and differentiation as ontologic-
ally antecedent to the traditional foundations
of being, categoricality and sameness, thereby
rejecting long-held conceptual centrepieces.
Here, being, models, structures and categories
are not the stuff of ontology proper, but
are rather the results of the way that thought
deals with difference and continuous differen-
tiation (i.e. by producing orders of similitude).
Deleuzean ontology is not a search for
transcendental objects, structures and formsGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_O Final Proof page 512 30.3.2009 7:51pmONTOLOGY