On pragmatism,assemblage and ANT: Assembling reason

I Introduction

Assemblage theory has been taken up extensively in geography (Muller and Schurr, 2016; Anderson et al., 2012; Muller, 2015; Smith, 2017; Dewsbury, 2011; McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b; Farias, 2011; Farias and Bender, 2010; Kamalipour and Peimani, 2015). It is part of a wider intellectual movement that is anti-foundationalist, emphasising process, emergence and immanence (DaLanda, 2016). Alongside this has been the growing influence of vitalism: the idea that organisms have a life force beyond their physical-chemical compositions. Also implicated is the extension of vitalism into materialism as new materialism, in which objects, materials, and substances can also be considered to possess vital forces of various kinds rather than being inert, unchanging ‘stuff’ (Bennett, 2010; Latham and McCormack, 2004). The idea of vital environments in which non-human elements act in certain ways can be seen as a re-articulation of long-standing environmental sensibilities in geography, as well as the development of ideas on relational and non-representational space (Allen, 2016; Thrift, 2007). Assemblage theory also connects to Actor Network Theory (although the closeness of this relationship is disputed; see Anderson et al., 2012; Muller and Schurr, 2016) and the idea of effects in human/non-human networks of actants (Latour, 2007). Going on alongside these developments are post-Cartesian critiques of the sovereignty of human reason, along with the decentring of human action and rationality from its former dominance in understanding action and effects. Action is distributed away from human subjects and their reflexivity and into networks of actants or assemblages, in which the driving force is affect in the form of distributed desire (or ‘will’). Affect may emanate from human bodies but is more a product of the co-constitutive properties of the emerging assemblage itself.

The material and psychoanalytical aspects (objects and affects) of assemblage theory and ANT are the ones that have been most developed in geography (Anderson et al., 2012; Muller and Schurr, 2016; McGuirk et al., 2016; Prince, 2016), owing more to poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches of continental philosophy than to pragmatism. Yet philosophical pragmatism had a direct influence on the original development of ANT and of assemblage theory. What I suggest in this paper is that these pragmatist strains have a special significance in progressing assemblage and ANT work in geography, and at the same time have wider implications for ongoing research beyond assemblage and ANT in human geography as a whole.

II Pragmatism in geography

A call for the development of pragmatist thinking is not alien to geography. There has been a growing amount of attention paid to pragmatism in geographical scholarship. The dominance of analytical philosophy and of Marxism in geography meant the earlier influences from Chicago School sociology in the 1920s and 1930s were eclipsed for most of the 20th century, with pragmatism being revived with developments in the 1970s and ’80s of humanistic geography and the exploration of human experience and intentionality (Ley and Samuels, 1978; Jackson and Smith, 1984; see also Barnes, 2008). Jackson and Smith (1984) looked at how pragmatism informed the ethnographic work of the Chicago School in taking social context and situated knowledge seriously. These departures influenced subsequent developments in social and cultural geography, especially in identifying more situated relationships between knowledge, practice and action and over methodological concerns in forms of critical ethnography as method in cultural geography (Cloke et al., 2004; Anderson, 2009).

Over recent years there has been a more direct and sustained engagement with pragmatism in geography. A themed issue on pragmatism and geography in Geoforum in 2008 identified how pragmatism’s anti-foundational, anti-dualistic thinking and its recognition of the situatedness and contingency of knowledge acquired through action particularly resonates with prevailing concerns in geography. It emphasised the significance of context and contingency in economic geography (Barnes, 2008); of democratic action in urban space (Bridge, 2005, 2008); and the significance of neo-pragmatists, such as Bernstein (1991, 2010), Shusterman (2000) and Rorty (1982), in connecting pragmatism with continental philosophy to provide a renewed geographical epistemology and methodology (Hepple, 2008). Furthermore, the significance of pragmatism for understanding space was explored in how it provides a relational understanding of space and place (Cutchin, 2008) and indeed (in terms of the focus of this paper) with pragmatism, non-representational theory, assemblages and actor networks (Jones, 2008). Allen (2008, 2016) took the topological idea of space developed by geographers and inflected it through pragmatism into an idea of power as contingent, situational and a shared experience. Conversely, he showed how the topological view is reflected back onto pragmatism to enhance its processual and relational idea of action. Engagements with pragmatism in geography have continued on a number of fronts: on space and radical democracy (Barnett and Bridge, 2013) and pluralist critique (Barnett and Bridge, 2017) on process pragmatism as a guide in ‘engaged’ geographical research (Harney et al., 2016); on ‘discursive’ economic and political institutions (Fuller, 2016); and on human habits and the environment (Dewsbury, 2011, 2015; Schwanen et al., 2012; Pedwell, 2016; Bridge, 2019). These contributions run alongside the growth of pragmatist thought in other social sciences such as sociology (Baert, 2005), in urban studies and planning (Hoch, 2019; Lake, 2017; Healey, 2009) and in environmental studies (Light and Katz, 1996; Weston, 1985; Norton, 1984; Minteer, 2012).

Whereas the presence of pragmatist thought has been felt across a range of themes in human geography, I believe some of the implications of this thought could be pressed much further. Indeed, the nature of geography as a discipline, with its focus on organism-environment relations, is ideally suited to this development. In this paper I want to illustrate this using the examples of assemblage theory and Actor Network Theory. I explore the pragmatist influences on assemblage and actor network theories and go on to argue how acknowledging the full implications of those influences starts to reshape these theories, and in particular their spatialities. I suggest that it points to a radically contingent and empirical (rather than transcendental) form of hyper-relational space, but one that situates (in a profound sense of that word) human experience and human reason, even allowing for human experience being relativised as just one component of the assembly/network within those spatial networks and assemblages. The differences a thoroughgoing pragmatist reading make to assemblage theory and ANT reflect, I argue, broader implications for progressing human geography more generally. First, though, I explore some of the philosophical resources that pragmatism offers by focusing on one particular pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey, and his conception of human-environment relations through his ideas of transaction, experience, situation and inquiry and how these relate to assemblage theory and ANT.

III Transactions, experience and situations in assemblages and actor networks

John Dewey (1859–1952) absorbed deeply the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution in his social philosophy. Darwinian naturalism reveals the contingency of human organic existence (in the arc of evolution) and the vulnerability of human activity and fallibility of human knowledge in negotiating a world ‘with a sense of dependence upon forces that go their own way without our wish or plan’ (Dewey, 1983: 200). It also reveals how human organisms are vulnerable to those wider forces because they are imbricated in them. Dewey’s idea of transaction captures the co-constitutive relationship between objects and organisms – indeed the term transaction is a revision of his earlier term, interaction (Dewey and Bentley, 1991 [1949]). Interaction, Dewey felt, might imply that the relationship was between finalised or complete objects and organisms. Transaction was a better term to convey the fact that the relationship was co-constitutive, in which both elements had effects, including objects ‘calling out’ or objecting to responses in human organisms: Dewey refers to ‘affectual and volitional objects’ (1981: 30; 1986a). Transactions involve a degree of co-constitution such that human organisms’ responses to a stimulus, such as an object, are not to the stimulus but into it (Dewey, 1896). No objects or subjects are finalised or rounded-out: they are contingent, and unfinished. Transactions are processual – and all phenomena (organisms and objects) are sequences of events: ‘every existence is an event’ (p. 63). ¹

Assemblage theory and ANT’s concern with emergence and with how objects and organisms are co-related was thus at the core of Dewey’s philosophy (involving a rejection of the subject-object dualism). Process, event, contingency, heterogeneity, connections and relations are all features shared with assemblage thinking (Anderson et al., 2012).

For Dewey, those complexes of transactions in which organisms are a part comprise experience. Experience is objective (rather than subjective) in the sense that it is comprised of transactions that are material-organic relations.

Experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience that is experienced but nature – stones, plants, animals, health temperature, electricity and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience: they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object – the human organism – they are how things are experienced as well. Experience reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to an infinitely elastic extent. It stretches. (Dewey, 1981: 12–13, emphasis in original)

IV Practical reasoning in assemblages and networks

Practical (as opposed to theoretical) reasoning involves the co-implication of organisms and objects. This is evident in the sequence of actions that Dewey identifies as inquiry (Dewey, 1986b). The antecedent conditions of inquiry are themselves material and ‘objectful’: ‘the biological antecedent conditions of an unsettled situation are involved in that state of imbalance in organic-environmental interactions’ (1986b: 110). Thus ‘the indeterminate situation comes into existence through existential causes’ (p. 111). Indeterminate situations are first felt, rather than thought. Affect itself is situational as it pervades the unique combination of materials and organisms that comprise the situation: ‘We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful’ (p. 109, emphasis in original). There are parallels here again between assemblage and situation in that both acknowledge that affect is non-individual and is distributed through the assemblage (Deleuze) or the situation (Dewey).

The early phases of action in problematic (uncertain, uncanny) situations draw on affect and the dispositional resources of the body (habits). Existing habits are the first resource to resolve encountered problems. They are in the form of ‘had’ (rather than ‘known’) knowledge or embodied intelligence. Initial interventions are mostly physical and phenomenal: to re-arrange the existences of the situation. As Dewey has it, ‘restoration of integration can be effected, in one case as in the other, only by operations which actually modify existing conditions, not by merely “mental” processes’ (Dewey, 1986b: 110) and, further, ‘resolution of the indeterminate situation is active and operational’ (p. 111). Furthermore, habits are not confined to individual bodies but are shared dispositions. These dispositions are loaded with material and non-organic relations: ‘functions and habits are ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former’ (Dewey, 1983: 15, emphasis added). Habits are not purely social or cultural but contain structures of the environment: they are material and ‘objective’ in that sense. In assemblage/ANT terms they are one aspect of a live environment that ‘lives’ through embodied habits.

If habitual responses are unsuccessful the problematic situation is pushed into more reflexive responses from humans and engages reflexive problem-solving (the mentalistic phase of action called ‘thought’). In ongoing transactions objects become events that are filled with meanings that depend on the context of the problematic situation: in how they problematize the situation for human organisms; in the way that they ‘object’ or oppose, or in what they ‘call out’ from humans. Nonhuman entities may present ‘propositions’ (Latour, 2004). A persistent problematic situation pushes the response into the mentalistic phase of action involving trial and error and experimentation in a form of controlled inquiry. This is a sequence of coordinated action and experimentation, not individualised reflection. What Dewey calls ‘the institution of the problem’ and the ‘problem-solution’ (1986b) are determined by context. The particular combination of elements in the ‘problematic situation’ helps frame thinking.

There are several aspects of the Deweyan idea of ‘thinking’ to consider here. First, reflective consciousness is a relatively specialised and restricted aspect of nature. The conditions that allow consciousness to exist have been limited over the sweep of evolutionary history. Furthermore, a good deal of what constitutes organic activity (including the activities of human organisms) is non-conscious. Ongoing activity, including responses to novel or problematic situations, involves psycho-physical responses that never reach the phase of action we might call conscious, let alone reflexive consciousness, or rational thought. Secondly, when ‘thought’ does occur it is not an individualised cognitive activity but rather ‘mind’ is socially shared and communicative, involving cooperation and conflict. Thirdly, thought is a later phase of action imbricated in practical activity, rather than being abstract pure cogitation. Thought is engaged to try to make an uncertain problematic situation clearer, less threatening, more stable, in order for activity to continue (Dewey, 1986b). Contestation and conflict are inherent in problematic situations, which are in part an objection by the environment, the objecting qualities of objects, inducing a clash of habits and, if it gets that far, competing arguments and justifications for ongoing action.

Pragmatism here is displacing and dispersing ‘thought’ into the networks of activity in which it is seen as being embedded. It is also emphasising the significance of embodied dispositions in ongoing human activity. This parallels the significance given to bodies and affect in assemblage theory (Thrift, 2007). At the same time, rather than displacing and dichotomising thought away from affect and embodiment (to privilege the former), a pragmatist approach sees these qualities as different phases of action of which temporality and, I argue, spatiality are defining qualities.

V The spatialities of practical reason

From this pragmatist perspective rational inquiry is not abstract reflection on an objective world but rather experimental intervention in the conditions of the world in the process of ‘clarifying’ or (temporarily) settling them. To the temporality of reason and its implication in unique situations I would add spatiality as part of this phenomenal intervention of reasoning. One is ratiocination which, rather than the calculation of equivalence or proportion in traditional ideas of rationality, is action in coordinating the situation. This involves the spatialised attributes of organic elements. As Dewey argues:

In contrast with lower organisms, the more complex forms have distance receptors…what is done is response to things nearby is so tied to what is done in response to what is far away, that a higher organism acts with reference to a spread out environment as a single situation […] an organism acts with reference to a time spread, a serial order of events, as unit, just as it does in reference to a unified spatial variety. Thus an environment both extensive and enduring is immediately implicated in present behaviour. (Dewey, 1981: 213, emphasis added)

The argument here is that reasoning is deeply implicated in contextual material-environment-organism transactions. The problematisations involved in reasoning do, however, start to discriminate the particular qualities of transactions. First, ‘[n]o inanimate thing reacts to things as problematic’ (Dewey, 1988: 179). The way that problematic situations feel (as situations, rather than individual ‘feelings’), the way that problems are instituted (in part materially conditioned) is also a result of human capacities for communication. Humans problematise ‘things’ when things act in certain ways (obstructing, confounding, objecting). However, although nonhuman organisms and objects have these effects, they do not take the perspective of others into account when acting (Jarolmack and Tavory, 2014: 69). In contrast, the social environment in which humans act is replete with mutual anticipations and perspectives. These have the effect of conditioning actions and binding in participants (even if in conflict). Human communication itself is a form of mutual perspective-taking and turn-taking as a form of performative action (as revealed in the pragmatics of communication, such as in Speech Act Theory; see Austin, 1962).

This more distanciated, worldly view of human action and experience, involving affect intensities and more distributed ‘thinking’ shot through with environmental structures, has been greatly enriched and expanded by neopragmatist philosophers, especially Bernstein (2010), Shusterman (2000, 2012), Rorty (1982) and McDowell (1996). Richard Bernstein (1991, 2010) was instrumental in opening up the channels between pragmatism and continental philosophy, in emphasising their common anti-foundationalism, but in also recognising the contribution of continental philosophers to a deeper understanding and acknowledgement of humans as subject to wider, worldly forces. Two illustrations of this come from John McDowell’s idea of the conceptual realm and Richard Shusterman on affect.

In Mind and World, McDowell (1996) drew on Wittgenstein to argue that the conceptual realm is not confined within the cogitating mind but extensive and continuous with nature. This unbounded conceptual realm, he argues, gives humans access to knowledge of a reality independent of them but in a world that also imposes rational constraints on them (McDowell, 1996; see also Bernstein, 2010). In a similar vein, in terms of affect, Shusterman argues against the passive idea of the body in science and the discursively defined body of cultural studies, to argue for a focus on the body through pragmatist somaesthetics, in which soma is a ‘living, feeling, sentient, purposive body’ (Shusterman, 2008: xii). Soma is not confined to the body but is more extensive and transactional (in Dewey’s terms) with the environment, involving habits which embed environmental structures (Dewey, 1983; see Bridge, 2019). Shusterman draws on Dewey’s idea of ‘body-mind’ (Dewey, 1981: 191–255) as a continuum rather than a dualism. The body exchanges energies with the environment ‘as much in process “across” and “through” skins as in process “within skins”’ (Dewey and Bentley, 1991: 119: see also Sullivan, 2001, for a pragmatist feminist interpretation). In terms of the concerns of this paper, Malecki and Schleusener (2015) explore what they see as the strong synergies (and distinctions) between Shusterman and Deleuzian thinking in terms of ‘affect politics’ (see Massumi, 2015).

VI Pragmatism, assemblage, ANT and geography

Before drawing out the implications of these pragmatist ideas of transaction, experience and situation for ideas of relational space in human geography, I look back at some of the original influences of pragmatism on assemblage theory and ANT to indicate how pushing these pragmatist principles further makes a difference to how these approaches are currently used in geography. It points to a more radically empiricist understanding of the spatialities of assemblages and actor networks, avoiding some of the more transcendental elements of assemblage theory in particular.

Pragmatism influenced ANT through Latour’s interpretation of the classical pragmatist William James’s idea of radical pluralism (James, 2012 [1909]; see also Marres, 2007; Latour, 2008; Koczanowicz, 2016; Hennion and Muecke, 2016). James’s pluralism ranged from metaphysics (an indeterminate pluriverse) through to forms of consciousness and experience across species (Goodman, 2012) in networks involving objects ‘[as] plural and open, an expanding tissue of heterogeneous realities, but connected loosely, “still in the process of making” as James nicely puts it’ (Hennion and Muecke, 2016: 302; see also Latour, 2008). Elsewhere Marres (2007) uses Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1984) to establish the significance of an issue-based approach to the formation of publics in complex social and material entanglements (or actor networks) in what she calls the socio-ontological aspects of Dewey’s philosophy – socio-ontological aspects which I explored further in the previous section of this paper.

In assemblage theory Deleuze’s idea of exteriority of relations (Deleuze, 1991, 2002) was again adapted from William James’s work (1977) to suggest that the objects or components of an assemblage have an autonomy which enables them to have relations outside the assemblage. In geography, Anderson et al. (2012) interpret this in as things being conditioned, but not determined, by their relations, and relations having autonomy from the terms related (see also Robbins and Marks, 2010). This opposes an organic view of relations being solely composites of the organic whole (interiority of relations). The point of this is to suggest a looser set of relationships both in terms of constant emergence of relations as well as the contingencies and transitions that assemblage theory emphasises. It also suggests how parts of assemblages can be flipped and inserted into other assemblages without a reconfiguration of the whole. This translates into spatial formations that can rapidly detach from certain contexts and recombine in others, such as, for example, in Muller and Shurr’s (2016) example of the global parental surrogacy industry. Madelrieux (2015), however, claims that Deleuze’s interpretation of exteriority of relations owes more to Bertrand Russell’s atomist ontology (that in turn supports Deleuze’s idea of pluralism) than it does to James. Following James rather than Russell, Madelrieux asserts, would have rendered relations of exteriority (or interiority) purely as an empirical question, rather than a transcendental and metaphysical claim that relations are necessarily exterior to their terms. Some assemblages may be more ‘interiorised’ in their relations than others. As we have seen from Dewey, some ‘problematic situations’, for instance, are characterised by a togetherness of components in a qualitative whole. Terms related in these cases are related through human experience and inquiry.

A second implication of the radical empiricism of pragmatism relates Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ideas of ‘territorialisation’ and ‘de-territorialisation’ (stabilisations/de-stabilisations of the assemblage). Bowden, Bignall and Patton (2015) explore how Deleuze and Guattari replaced classical pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1992, 1998) semiotics and signifier-signified relations with territoriality and de-territorialisation. Rejecting what they saw as the restrictions of linguistic presuppositions in Peirce’s work, they wanted to experiment beyond established strata of signification (of which the attempt to analyse normalises dominant relations). They also saw how minor interpretations can de-territorialise signs and can re-assemble in new territorialisations.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, this complex process of semiotic release and capture – of critical de-territorialisation and creative re-territorialisation – is the proper aim of pragmatic thought: ‘Experiment,’ they urge, ‘don’t signify and interpret! [Deleuze and Guattari] (1987: 141). (Bowden et al., 2015: 7)

Pragmatism gives a much more radically empirical reading of ideas of process, emergence, immanence and virtuality than those that have become more pervasive in geography. Emergence is central to Deweyan process philosophy (in common with assemblage thinking), showing qualities of immanence (Bignall, 2015; Pappas, 2008). Again though, pragmatism situates human experience in this emergent, immanent world. Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘virtuality’ (as the ‘thingliness’ of things – a tension between potential and realisation) captures the immanent potentialities of assemblages, giving them overall coherence. Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming is also about potential other states, part of the wider 20th-century critique of the metaphysics of presence in which his works sits. Dewey too rejects the metaphysics of presence as part of his overall critique of philosophy’s mistaken quest for certainty (Dewey, 1988; Garrison, 1999). His event-based processual philosophy is concerned with emergence, waxing and waning, beginnings and consummations, consummations that are in turn beginnings. The absence of essence, permanence and certainty points at the same time to possibility, contingency and potentiality. Events imply possible alternatives; presences suggest absences:

The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. (Dewey, 1981: 44–5)

…[we cannot render things] wholly present…or so completely present as to exclude movement and change. (Dewey, 1981: 384)

…there are at a given time unactualised potentialities in an individual [object or organism] because and in as far as there are in existence other things with which it has not yet interacted. (Dewey, 1991: 109)

In assemblage theory the distributed and extensive systems that cohere the assemblage are not cognitive and reflective but subconscious and unconscious desire in affect and emotion (as a form of will). Rather than the interiorised, symbolic, domesticated (familial) idea of the power of the unconscious in traditional psychoanalysis this is an exteriorised, generalised, machinic, materialised and productive idea of unconscious affect.

Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire…The rationality, the efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 399)

The emphasis on emotion and affect is reflected across human geography as a whole (O’Grady, 2018; Thein, 2005; Pile, 2010) influenced in various ways by critical theory and psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and a turn to embodied geographies. I have suggested how this distributed idea of affect and emotion is shared by pragmatism: material-organic ‘situations’ can be ‘fearful’, ‘doubtful’, ‘joyous’, desiring, but, from this perspective, affect too is continuous with distributed ideas of problematisation and reasoning. These are phases of activity in situations of ongoing life, comprising materials and objects, human and non-human organisms. They are not an ontological ordering ³ (in contrast with Deleuze, for whom ‘desire’ and its production is the key force). Affect is indeed distributed and situational but is also in a continuum with other phases of distributed action that include sub-conscious habit (again a more generalised, non-individual human disposition that contains environmental structures), as well as that phase of action known as thinking (social communication).

VII Pragmatism for geography

Geography has moved towards privileging these wider, distributed forces of affect but at the same time has held on to the traditional idea of reason – as cognitive, individual and instrumental: an exercise of sovereign will. In contrast, in more vital environments with a greater plurality of actants, pragmatism recognises the role of mind, reflection and reason as also more distributed across ‘situations’ and environments. In this way pragmatism offers the potential for geography to re-situate human reasoning in a more naturalistic register with a greater sensitivity to the environments and relationalities of thinking, in ways that philosophers of science have already discussed through ideas of ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘extended minds’ (Godfrey-Smith, 2002; Clark, 2008). This would help rebalance inquiry in human geography to take account of the effects of reflective and communicative action, alongside the current emphasis on affect and emotion.

Affect, thinking and habits are also subject to the wider forces of a nonhuman environment. Geographers have done much to acknowledge this worldliness, a world beyond humans, demonstrated in these ideas of assemblage, ‘vital’ or ‘more-than-human’ environments and post-human geographies. Environmental forces insinuate themselves into human bodies via habit routines that compose the body in various ways. These have been traced in geography through investigations of, for instance, landscapes of military drill (Dewsbury, 2015); long distance air travel (Bissell, 2015); transport planning (Schwanen et al., 2012); art encounter (Lapworth, 2015) and mindfulness therapy (Lea et al., 2015). Yet rather than a vitalist, there is also a pragmatist understanding of this worldliness (an environment at once ‘precarious and stable’; Dewey, 1981; see Rogers, 2012). Colebrook (2015) calls this an ‘inhuman pragmatism’: ‘a pragmatism that is not complacently for us’ (p. 264, emphasis in original) but subject to the multiple finitudes of the forces that encompass humans. She sees this as a pragmatism of genesis, which brings Dewey’s and Deleuze’s ideas closer together:

For Dewey pragmatism is a genetic enterprise that allows us to see both the intellect and emotions as abstractions from complicated response networks: humans emerge from a contraction of habits, which are stabilised from unthinking networks of relations. There is one sense is which we can tie both Deleuze and Dewey to a broad Nietzschean approach to thinking about all aspects of life in terms of forces, such that what one believes and what one does make sense only as an aspect of a plane of relations that goes beyond the self. (Colebrook, 2015: 258–9)

The consequences of pursuing a more thoroughgoing pragmatism in relation to ANT and assemblage theory is to further naturalise these approaches (with a radical empiricism) and also to set them in the context of the effects of human experience on networks of relations in emergent assemblages. This emphasis on transaction, experience and situation I think posits an idea of space that is hyper-relational (beyond the claims of ANT or assemblage theory) but at the same time identifies certain time-space orderings that come with the pragmatist idea of human experience. These have implications for progress in human geography more widely.

As we have seen, geographers have already travelled some way down the road of moving to a more pragmatist-inflected idea of relational space. Although not arguing from a pragmatist perspective, Massey (2005) argues that space is not prior to identities/entities but is a constitutive part of interrelations. It is not a container against which relations between organisms and objects are established or broken. For Massey ‘the chance of space’ is as a combination of purposiveness and contingency arising from simultaneous heterogeneity of objects and organisms, involving surprising juxtapositions and interactions. This focus on relations in conditions of uncertainty has a very pragmatist tone. From a pragmatist viewpoint I suggest that interrelations (transactions) are not purely topological (the key register of relational geographies); they are not simply the connections between formed objects and discrete organisms with these relations possessing different levels of intensity or action-at-a-distance. As well as not being prior to entities or organisms, nor is space simply composed of their interrelations but is part of their ongoing constitution. There are no nodes in the topology, only bundles of energy with fuzzy boundaries distinguished by different qualities of transactions. So, rather than being object nodes or organism nodes in a topology in which space is characterised by the configuration of their interrelations with different intensities, space is part of the constitution of the nodes. This relates back to Dewey’s (1981) claims about the organism being defined not by its constitutive elements and organic unity or integrity, but by its connections to other things (or more strictly ongoing events). We should see space as much more field-like, with blurred edges, but nevertheless where those edges/peripheries are radically open and contingent.

I think Dewey is pulling us towards an idea of space as field, or a series of overlapping fields, through his central idea of ‘situation’. As we have seen, situations are defined by ‘togetherness’ in which no constituent entities or organisms have priority but nevertheless where there is an overall operative unity or coherence. Situations or fields themselves are not like Venn diagrams or force fields but have transpositional qualities. They can be ‘extensive’ in space and ‘enduring’ in time, distanciated and loose, but then, as contingencies and interrelations interrupt the functioning of human organisms, this situation becomes problematic. The multiplicity of times and spaces of diverse environments of ramifying human experience are selectively compressed through inquiry into the problematic situation (distance-at-an-action) producing new virtualities and ramifying its effects (action-at-a-distance), making ‘other of nature’s precincts’ available’ (Dewey, 1981: 213). Diverse time-spaces are not just ‘folded’ (in Deleuzian terms), but rather ‘situated’ through the operation of human experience (socialised and embodied). Space acts as both background (extensive-enduring situation) and foreground (problematic situation). In some cases this may coincide with more traditional conceptions of space. Thus Cutchin (2008) argues powerfully for ‘place’ as a ‘situated problematic’. It is ‘localized and immediate in nature’ but ‘it must stretch with us. This is one of the reasons place is so hard to define and bound’ (Cutchin, 2008: 1565).

I suggest that place is just one manifestation of a situated problematic. There can be situated problematics that are ‘localised’, specialist and specific but are spatially distanciated (traced in many studies of the effects of globalisation for instance). Equally, there are ‘situated’ problematics that are a response to the emergence of specific problematisations at a particular place and time, that become extensive in space and time. Here there are connections to what one can see as the pragmatist strains of Foucault’s understanding of pragmatics of problematisation (Foucault, 1998; see also Koopman, 2011, 2018) and the way that problems become defined in discursive regimes operating in institutional forms such as public health (Foucault, 2006); criminology and penology (Foucault, 1977) and sexuality (Foucault, 1986). Foucault’s work also reminds us of the range of spatialities involved, from the extensive discursive institutional regimes themselves to the specificities of space corporealised in discursive analysis and confinement of bodies. There are rich possibilities for research in human geography in investigating space through the pragmatics of problematisation (Barnett and Bridge, 2017). This work also continues to develop the synergies between pragmatist and continental philosophy, a re-balancing that certain neo-pragmatists, such as Bernstein (1991), have long been calling for with some indeed favouring pragmatism, with ‘James and Dewey waiting at the end of the road which…Foucault and Deleuze are currently travelling’ (Rorty, 1982: xviii).

The emphatic space of problematisation leads to experimentation. Entities and relations in the problematic situation are manipulated in ways that are active and operational. Relations are adjusted and, because of its constitutive role, space is part of this experimentation. These spatial experiments have already been recognised in geography in various ways. From a pragmatist perspective, Allen (2016) shows how experiments with relations and interconnections (changing the topology) can give social movements temporary grips on power in a globalised world – directly connecting western clothing consumers to producers through anti-sweatshop campaigns, for example. Equally, he argues, spatial experiments can also draw together dispersed publics through shared experience (especially in relation to power). However, there is a further element to the relationalities of space beyond topologies which is the renewal of the experience of space through practice. The artist Olafur Eliasson celebrates the idea of the relationality of space through human communication but also through the experience of the actualisation of space (Jellis, 2015). This relates much more generally to ‘how people are related practically to the world, in different situations, by mobilising space’ (Lussault and Stock, 2010: 17). Using the French ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’, in which critique involves judgements that are situational, plural and dialogical, Lussault and Stock see the pragmatics of space seen as ‘a resource and condition of practice, mobilised in situations through “proofs”’ (p. 17): what they intriguingly depict as proofing space (as in experimenting, but also testing the resilience of, space, as strategy and justification). In this way spatial experiments are a constant feature of human life. I suggest this is a further element of hyper-relationality in which the topologies of actor networks or emergent assemblages are complicated by the plurality of sites of critique and ‘proofings’ of space. This does not necessitate acceding to the separateness of spatial ontologies (witnessed in the ontological turn in geography) but rather to acknowledge how space is proofed in everyday practice within different worldviews as well as between them. It is to acknowledge the contingent and provisional nature of space in human activity and the importance of dialogical engagement in judgement over that activity with critique as a proofing of space. Spatial pragmatics implicate co-constitutive relations in the contingencies of space which arise from problematisations. They involve spatial experiments and agonistic trials (or proofings) from plural sites of critique and experience. In this way they constitute the ingredients for more radically democratic projects (Lussault and Stock, 2010; Barnett and Bridge, 2013).

VIII Conclusions

The implications of a more sustained application of pragmatism to ANT and assemblage theory in geography are to suggest a more radically empirical pathway for human geography as a whole. It means moving away from more transcendental impulses in the discipline (illustrated in assemblage theory in ideas of exteriority of relations, (de)territorialisation, virtuality as immanent becoming). It also re-situates human activity in a more ‘vital’ environment. It both acknowledges the effects of acting things (human, nonhuman, objects) as well as the more distributed and environmentally embedded characteristics of experience, ‘mind’ and reason. This also helps rebalance contemporary geographical accounts of human action (with its current, more exclusive focus on affect and emotion) without resorting to Cartesianism. It also offers a provisional realism in acknowledging a worldly environment comprising forces that ‘go their own way without our wish or plan’ (Dewey, 1983: 200) with a renewed emphasis on problematisation and experimental action. Pragmatism here takes in aspects of the flatter ontology that has become more pervasive in geography, to the extent that humans are amongst other actants (to use ANT language). However, being part of a ‘problematic situation’ of which humans are one part, through problematisation, potentially involves transformation of the human organism (self and others) as part of resolution of the situation as a whole (a basis for radical democratic action). So, pragmatism offers geography a less hierarchical view of human nature (than Cartesianism or variants of idealism for instance) whilst acknowledging the distinctive traits of human experience and action at work in nature. Problematic situations (of which humans are the problematising part) have hyper-relational consequences in time-space (beyond topological space). This involves both action-at-a-distance as well as ‘distance (from the wider time-space situation)-at (or attending to)-an-action’. As a constitutive component of organism-environment transactions it involves the contingencies of situated spatial experiments. ANT and assemblage have started on this road of understanding situations. A fully pragmatist human geography could take this much further with renewed focus on a (more modest, relational, distributed) idea of human ‘reasonings’ through action.