Economic Geography

Geography’s animal farm
In the 1970s many of the up-coming generation of geographers, especially in the
United States and the United Kingdom, felt there was something profoundly
rotten in the discipline. To cut a long story very short, they regarded it as exces-
sively complicit with big business, the state, environmental plunderers, or more
fundamentally patriarchy and capitalism. And they traced this to its ‘positivist’
philosophical underpinnings (though ‘positivist’ was never quite the right word).
The critique held that by reifying ‘empirical’ categories this in effect limited the
geographically thinkable to the concerns of dominant interests and ideologies. If
the apparently-obvious is all there is, any attempts to explain by reference to less
obvious forces (capitalism, patriarchy, ideology, Empire, etc.) are ruled out as
pseudo-scientific or quasi-mystical. Over the following two decades what many
claimed to be a Kuhnian paradigm change opened up wider research agendas and
techniques (and those concepts became respectable and researchable). But by the
1990s and 2000s, when my generation was settling in at geography’s command-
ing heights, while neo-liberalism was rampant both outside and within the acad-
emy, the new had become the old, the revolution had faded into an orthodoxy,
and geography was returning to business as usual – the delights of fetishising
place and space.
And this was once again rationalised by empiricism, albeit a re-vamped version.
This time empiricism drew on a depthless ontology of infinite points and lines,
networks, or performativities, waving a license signed by Deleuse and Derrida
(possibly a forgery). The new epistemological orthodoxy ironically disinterred an
idea from the most degenerate and dictatorial post-Classical phase Marxism: that
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John Lovering

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The new imperial geography
225
Truth is the discourse that favours the working class (but minus the working class).
‘All science is ideological, only we admit it, and we will not let the facts get in the
way of our favoured stories’ (Sayer 2000: 59). This ruled out the possibility of think-
ing space as hiding and reproducing capitalist or Imperial power even more
presumptuously than its white-coated number-crunching positivist predecessor.