(re)construct the subject, make self-awareness
and self-fashioning impossible (see Soper, 1986,
on the differences between humanist and anti-
humanist conceptions of the subject). Alcoff
(1988) argues that it was Freud’s initial ques-
tioning of the coherent and bounded subject
that lay the ground for later rejections of it.
Currently, ‘the subject’ is a term often used
to refer ‘to the individual human being/agent,
accenting both physical embodiment and the
range of emotional-mental processes through
which it thinks its place in the world’
(McDowell and Sharp, 1999: 267). These days
understanding the subject and subjectivity
involves the negotiation of a whole series of
interconnected terms such as the body, the
self, identity and the person (Pile and Thrift,
1995). These terms ‘are usually equivocal,
often ambiguous, sometimes evasive and
always contested’ (1995: 6). Pile and Thrift,
therefore, caution against attempts to provide
precise definitions, preferring instead to pro-
vide ‘a preliminary feel for the lie of the land’
(1995: 6).There is little doubt that the debates
about the subject and subjectivity are incredi-
bly important. As Johnston et al. (2000: 802)
point out, they are also vast and difficult to
summarize. There are ‘forests of literature on
the subject’ (Pile and Thrift, 1995: 1). In this
introduction I can do little more than cut one
narrow path.
Elsbeth Probyn begins her chapter by pos-
ing the question: ‘what is subjectivity?’ She
makes the point that often subjectivity and
identity get used interchangeably. Probyn,
however, uses the term ‘subjectivity’ because it
relates to the concept of the subject which,
she argues, relates to the idea of ideology. She
describes the French philosopher Louis
Althusser’s understanding of ideology as
actively constituting or interpellating indivi-
duals as subjects. His understanding ‘compels
us to consider closely the material contexts
which allow and delimit our individual and
collective performance of selves’. Althusser’s
theory of the subject, explains Probyn, allows
for this engagement with space and place, it
allows us to examine ‘the spatial imperative of
subjectivity’. This ‘spatial imperative of subjec-
tivity’ is a major theme in the chapters that
follow.
Alastair Bonnett and Anoop Nayak, Michael
Brown and Larry Knopp, and Liz Bondi andJoyce Davidson all attend to the intellectual
trajectories that develop the relationship
between aspects of subjectivity and space,
seeing this as an important aspect of cultural
geography. The argument is mounted that all
forms of spatial thinking presuppose some
theory of subjectivity and that, conversely, all
forms of subjectivity presuppose some theory
of space.
Brown and Knopp argue ‘a variety of sub-
jectivities are performed, resisted, disciplined
and oppressed not simply in but through
space’. Bonnett and Nayak make a similar
point but link it to race and ethnicity. They
claim: ‘To speak the language of race and eth-
nicity is, very often, to talk geography.’ It is
impossible to use terms such as ‘Asian’,
‘African’, ‘European’ or ‘western’ without talk-
ing about territory, space and place.
Bondi and Davidson note: ‘some important
studies in cultural geography have argued that
people and places are imagined, embodied and
experienced in ways that are ... radically and
inextricably intertwined with each other’.They
cite Davidson (2001), Kirby (1996) and Nast
and Pile (1998) as examples of work in which
subjects and environments are treated as
mutually constituted (also see Grosz, 1992).
Bondi and Davidson explain: ‘To beis to be
somewhere, and our changing relations and
interactions with this placing are integral to
understandings of human geographies. More-
over, gender is inscribed deeply within these
processes.’
All this is to suggest not that subjectivity
can be mapped onto a fixed space as though it
were a backdrop, but that the ‘subject is
mapped, and maps, into interminable dimen-
sions of power which subsist at all points’ (Pile
and Thrift, 1995: 44). Subjects are ‘entangled’
(see Sharp et al., 2000) in multiple power rela-
tions that are simultaneously real, imagined
and symbolic. These power relations may be
differentially organized through varying rela-
tions of race, sexuality, gender and so on, but
in all instances they are written on and
through the subjectivities and spaces under
discussion.
Given that subjectivity cannot be plucked
from the spatial relations that constitute it, it
is hardly surprising that a vast array of places
and spaces, at a range of different scales, is
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