Abstract
Milton Santos was a wide-ranging Afro-Brazilian intellectual whose primary contributions were to geography and development studies. Highly influential in Brazil and internationally—especially among American critical geographers—Santos has received less attention from American sociologists. The English translation of his final major work, The Nature of Space, promises to remedy that situation. Originally published in 1996 in Portuguese, then translated into Spanish in 2000, The Nature of Space is now finally available to English readers thanks to the work of translator Brenda Baletti. Sociologists have much to gain by giving it serious attention.
Perhaps the primary benefit is the all-too-rare opportunity to engage with a mind of such fertile creativity, wholly immersed in its subject and with little patience for the intellectual fashions and fads of the day. In the 1990s, that meant postmodernism, which Santos dismisses as unable to offer more than mere metaphor and description. The Nature of Space is more ambitious: it wants to capture reality in its totality, through the prism of academic discipline. “There is only one world” (p. 4). Santos’s discipline was geography, and the main effort of The Nature of Space is to articulate the fundamental concepts necessary to comprehend the central geographic object: space. At the highest level these are “systems of objects” fused with “systems of action.” Specified more concretely, Santos’s conceptual grammar includes “landscape,” “territorial organization,” “the territorial division of labor,” “produced or productive space,” “techniques,” “roughness” (rugosidade, a Santos original), and “content-form,” among others.
Following Santos’s reflections on these and other related categories is well worth the price of admission, especially for sociologists interested in making good on the discipline’s “spatial turn” to categories of space and place. But Santos is more than a theoretical geographer. He also was committed to what he calls “metadisciplinarity.” This is the disciplined reflection on the assumptions and paradigms of various disciplines, with a view toward, as Santos put it, transcending “truncated realities and partial truths without trying to philosophize or theorize our way around them.” Such transcendence, Santos cautions, in no way means escaping from disciplinary knowledge. Rather, the idea is that serious study of any disciplinary object will bring one into contact with related concepts from other fields, which must ultimately be brought together and “controlled” by the common material they seek to understand.
Santos practices what he preaches; and it is no surprise that his metadisciplinary thinking brings him into dialogue with numerous social theorists, as he aims to produce a “geographic contribution to the production of critical social theory” (p. 6). Pregnant observations about ideas from Durkheim, Simmel, Mauss, Parsons, Giddens, and Habermas, among others, course through the pages of The Nature of Space. Perhaps here especially sociologists have much to learn from the engagement by perceptive theorists from other fields with “our” foundational thinkers. For example, Santos notes that both Durkheim and Mauss considered the spatial formation of social categories to be fundamental to sociology, Durkheim with the notion of social morphology, Mauss with his idea of technomorphology. Santos begins his discussion of geographic space as a fusion of “systems of action” with “systems of objects” with an elaboration of Parsons’s theory of action, while at the same time arguing that non-spatial social categories like law or custom move from the realm of potentiality to actuality when they become realized in a concrete socio-spatial configuration. The notion of socio-spatial formation, moreover, constitutes Santos’s alternative to what he considers to be the more reductive Marxian notion of “modes of production.” Finally, in an intriguing but difficult proposition, Santos argues that Simmel’s distinction between form and content becomes untenable when objects are examined from a geographic point of view. From that perspective, there can only be “content-forms.”
These are all highly intriguing ideas, worth serious consideration and evaluation by sociologists, along with Santos’s original conceptual categories, such as “roughness.” This refers to the clumpy character of social processes and relations, as well as the residues from the past and local community practices that are not easily assimilated into globalizing and homogenizing processes. In addition, Santos’s reflections on sociologically significant ideas from a geographic angle may provide inspiration for new directions for sociologists to pursue. For example, The Nature of Space includes an extended discussion of events and networks, which may prove fruitful for those interested in eventful sociology and social networks.
The Nature of Space is a dense book. Clearly written, it deals with densely intertwined ideas from numerous angles. Santos also often intermixes his own ideas with reviews of many other authors’ discussions of similar subjects. This gives the reader a sense of the rich dialogues and conversation within which Santos operated. But for the reader less familiar with those conversations, the discussion can be hard to penetrate. The chapters where Santos speaks directly in his own voice to elaborate his concepts may travel most easily into the context of American sociology.
The introduction by Susanna Hecht provides helpful context, highlighting Santos’s upbringing in a poor family of elementary school teachers in the Brazilian “backlands” of Bahia (p. xi) and his path through Strasbourg toward becoming a close advisor to president João Goulart and winning the Vautrin Lud prize (the highest award in the field of geography). Clearly there is much more material here to develop, both in terms of the interpersonal, geographic, and political context for Santos’s intellectual development, and also the prior work that The Nature of Space builds on. We can hope that the present translation provides inspiration for further engagement in that direction, and more.