Rethinking Social Relations: Towards a Different Phenomenology of Places

Abstract

So-called phenomenological approaches to the understanding of social and spatial relations usually deal with these in terms of ‘mental space’, ‘existential space’, ‘social space’ and so on. These modes of space are regarded as ‘subjective’, ‘soft’ and short on the ‘hard’ mathematical, geometric or objective properties that give spatial analysis a rigorous analytical capability. I argue here that this misrepresents and misunderstands a central principle of phenomenology and overlooks phenomenology’s potential to objectively map us in our world. In its essence phenomenology is founded on the relation of intentionality. It is not necessarily about an interior mentality at all but about a subject-object relation in the world. The model that says there is an interior subjective or imaginative realm on the one hand and an exterior objective, physical or real one on the other, between which relations must be established for human knowledge or action to be produced, is replaced by one in which a perfectly real subject at one end of an intentional relation is connected to a perfectly real object at the other. A different phenomenology of places would be about how these relations between subjects and objects are structured and intentional knowledge and action mediated in the world. It would be about the environmental relation where the notion of ‘environment’ is captured in the relations between intentional subjects and the objects of those subjects’ attention and intention. I argue that this is eventually about how we order and construct human ‘worlds’ technologically and spatially so that we may effectively inhabit and use them. These ‘worlds’ exist as whole networks of subjects and objects, in part-whole, mutually constitutive, relations with ‘worlds’. The translation of the intentional relation into geography and urbanism involves us in an historical process of the construction of metageographical structures through which subjects establish and order their knowledge of and practices in the world. Enclosures, divisions and connections made by us in the world have shaped these structures and established the geographical and urban frames of our lives. This requires us to understand the human world as an historical construction, an anthroposphere, of regions and places, as equipment for framing our knowledge of the world and our local and translocal actions in it. I start by looking critically at social relations as these are imagined today, finding their origins in an Enlightenment metaphysics which bifurcates nature into mental and corporeal realms, and suggest an alternative founded in this reassessment of phenomenology. This alternative centres our attention on the anthroposphere as a construction, and a topological ‘structure of places’, organised as a layering of places and infrastructural ‘grids’ into a set of normative ‘levels’ which have a metageographical, intelligibility-giving and practice-defining character. ‘Structures of places’, ‘grids’ and ‘levels’ are perfectly objective and mappable and are proposed as the foundation of a new phenomenological urban and geographical model.