The emergence of materialism in geography: Belonging and being,space and place,sea and land

Relationalism, space and sea

One of the earliest recorded occurrences of the term ‘emergence’ in the English language is that by the Irish novelist Henry Brooke, who in his epic poem Universal Beauty writes about the ‘Emergence’ of Venus ‘from the Deep’. The inference of Venus and the element of water in early references to emergence are not incidental. ⁷ Blamberger (2015: 12) writes that Venus ‘embodies both the idea of natural creative power and the emergence of form from chaos’. Michel Serres (2000: 122) borrows the originally Greek mythology from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura ⁸ and adopts it to explain that Venus ‘is not transcendent, like the other gods, she is immanent to this world, she is the being of relation’. He traces debates on emergence as genesis back to the archaic question ‘how forms [are] born from the formless’ (Serres, 1998: 26). The answer for Serres resides in the multiplicity of becoming from chaos, translated in the image of the dynamic ‘noise of the sea’ and the figure of the Venus – Aphrodite Anadyomene. The idea of emergence as relational, complex and always becoming, a subject to which I will return to shortly, rests on a favouring of an Epicurean worldview of contingency over Democritean models of atomist determinism. Debates on the term emergence seem historically to have been ‘grounded’ in this divide between determinism (Being) and contingency (Becoming), physics as static and physics as fluid, earth and sea. ⁹

Critiques of determinism were in fact the inspiration for the introduction of emergence in the natural sciences, where the term made its first appearance in the 1870s. The name was first coined by the literary critic George Henry Lewes in his unfinished Problems of Life and Mind (1875). The work, a multi-volume treatise on a philosophy of the mind, is widely remembered for its introduction of the term ‘emergents’ (McLaughlin, 1992). Lewes separated these sums from their constituent parts, or ‘resultants’. This epistemological distinction, already made (but not named as such) a few decades earlier by John Stuart Mill (1986 [1843]), suggested that emerged things should be understood as independent entities detached from their constituent parts. ¹⁰ The subsequent ‘British School of Emergentism’ (e.g. Alexander, 1920; Broad, 1925; Morgan, 1923) expanded upon such views and in the early 20th century posited the idea that practices and relations of interaction help facilitate the emergence of novel things with intrinsic qualities of their own. This echoed the famous Aristotelian (1998) anti-reductionist stance that emerged substances could not be said to be reducible to the qualities of emergence, although one could study these qualities and properties by analysing the substance that emerged.

One of the hallmarks of British emergentism is the subsequent idea that all is comprised of matter and organized in a hierarchical fashion moving upwards (by ‘vitalistic’ energies) to ever-greater levels and degrees of complexities. The result is a top-down, layered qualitative reality that is constitutive of and constituted by material roots of molecules and particles. Doubts over the metaphysical energy underlying the evolution and the introduction of quantum physics in the early 20th century meant that the school fell out of favour. This changed with the introduction of general systems theory and complexity theory, which helped shift the analytical scope of emergence thinking to other fields. Niklas Luhmann (1986) adopted the logic of emergence thinking in social system theory through his use of communication as an explanation for the concept of ‘autopoiesis’. The objective was, to quote Frederick Turner (1997: xxiv), no longer to merely understand ‘how higher, more active realities emerge out of the lower, more passive ones, but how to stop this happening when we do not wish it so’. Luhmann’s ideas about self-referential and autopoietic systems permitted theories of emergence to gain a foothold in the social sciences but also in the arts and the humanities.

The question of interaction and relations more recently inspired contemporary debates on emergence in the philosophies of Bruno Latour (2007) and John Law (Law & Hassard, 1999) among others. ¹¹ At the heart of this body of work we no longer find a focus on emerged things but an emphasis on the relations of emergence. Harman (2009: 158) writes that Latour ‘veers toward a functional concept of emergence: a thing emerges as a real thing when it has new effects on the outside world, not because of any integral emergent reality in the thing itself’. While this newer body of literature departs from earlier divisions between the material and the human worlds, focusing more on the interaction between than on the objects themselves, the theme of metaphysics is not entirely abandoned but rather enlarged and pluralized from a focus on the solely human to include also non-human actors and objects. ¹² Harman’s work (2009), which draw on that of Latour, follows on from the idea that the object is not replaced by the process of relation but rather that the object itself always is already in relation with other objects. Such an ‘object-oriented metaphysics’ remains true to an Epicurean tradition in which emergence does not necessarily start from a hypothetical Ur-position or place of beginnings but rather from within its own multiplicity. The question of ‘where’ this relation topologically is will be discussed in a later section.

The idea of emergence as an arising out of the water does therefore not readily translate into accepting that the emerging thing was already existent, hiding in the shadow or looming under the surface. Such an idea would suggest that something had already existed prior to the event of emergence but, because of a lack of light, was simply not sufficiently visible. It would reduce emergence to the sense of mere sight. By focusing too much on the figure of Venus, we forget that she is from and with the sea. She is both a ‘sea-relation’ but also free from this relation. The issue of how to account for this in-between position of virtual and actual raises the fundamental question as to whether or not material emergence can exist at all beyond the authority of perception, or, as Harman seems to suggest, if the perceiving Self shares an active and intimate relation to that which emerges. How does that which has emerged become recognized as emerged? In other words, how to account for the move from the virtual world of becoming to actuality as presence and being?

Brian Massumi’s work on emergence reminds us of Serres’ sea and perhaps provides us with a clue to answer some of these questions. Massumi (2002: 9, original emphasis) writes about a ‘field of emergence [which] is not pre-social’ but ‘open-endedly social’. ¹³ It is an ‘interaction-in-the-making. The term adopted here is relation’ (Massumi, 2002: 9). This field of pure relationality is characterized by the change, movement, indeterminacy, openness and potentiality of the material world. Massumi speaks of emergence as ‘a “two-sided coin”: it is one side in the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation)’ (2002: 35). It refers to and implies process rather than statis. He follows Whitehead’s emphasis on activity and change and cites Deleuze’s denial of a belief in a world of determined things to underpin the process and relationality that characterizes his understanding of emergence:

The world is not an aggregate of objects … To ‘not believe in things’ is to believe that objects are derivatives of process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive activity… The reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming. And where becoming has been, there is already more to come. The being of an object is an abstraction from its becoming. (Massumi, 2011: 6)

For Massumi a field of emergence refers to the ‘virtual’ world of transitional thought, ‘whose reality is that of potential – pure relationality’, in which boundaries have not yet taken shape and binaries of inside and outside are not yet determined (2002: 58). ¹⁴ Akin to Deleuze’s plane of immanence, a field of emergence helps Massumi to blur the material world with the world of perception by arguing that this relationship is exactly what helps constitute ‘actuality’ as that which is perceived as objectively present, manifest and emerged. Massumi relies also on Deleuzian ideas to explain that the determination of thinking towards emerged forms and shapes occurs through a process of sensory communication which functions as the ‘genesis of the definite … Determination is a necessary concept for the theory of expression: its problem is how determinate beings, or being-determinate, serially emerges … Thought does not reflect the real. It is real. It has a reality on a par with the world’s becoming’ (2005: xxxii).

Emergence is in all these examples considered to be a relational process of becoming. Rather than following a predetermined trajectory of linear development, relational theories also share the common idea that emergence does not follow a uni-linear historical path but that time unfolds in a contingent manner that is disrupted by an indeterminate multiplicity of conditions. Conditions of emergence are therefore said to be ‘one with becoming’ (Massumi, 2002: 10). It is easy to see how and why such conceptualizations of emergence as Latourian relationality and radical Deleuzian potentiality gain traction in debates on the ‘emergence’ of materiality in the discipline of geography (see e.g. Whatmore, 2006). The prospect of reality itself as a ‘field of emergence’, always moving, fluid, changing, over-coding older geographies, while creating newer ones is an alluring one pregnant with political promise. Materiality, the language of the physical world, is no longer only that which is transformed through social realities but also that which informs them. A re-materializing of geography allows for the potential of becoming ‘otherwise’, providing a venue for choice and change, while overcoming material determinism of a rooted metaphysics of being or a politics of belonging.

Arguments for the ‘democratization’ of relations, the ‘decentring’ of the subject and the ‘flattening’ of ontology, removing older, hierarchical claims to transcendence (including references to consciousness, Geist or Dasein), all practise the common idea that humans are not the sole producers of geographies, ¹⁵ no longer the sole ‘geo-graphists’. A post-human approach sees humans rather as co-producers on par with non-human actors and objects such as elephants (Whatmore & Thorne, 2000), prions (Hinchliffe, 2001), wolves (Philo & Wilbert, 2000), but also meat and vegetables (Roe, 2010), and hammers and ‘blades of grass’ (Harman, 2002). Writing on the process of the ‘Worlding’ in Sloterdijk’s Spheres project, a trilogy which itself is truly committed to emergence, the ‘non-representational’ geographer Nigel Thrift (2012: 143) notes: ‘The world is immiscible …: it is worlds, always, and these worlds are not all human since all entities can make links. There is no “universe as a whole”.’ Anderson and Wylie (2009) talk in a similar matter about materiality as ‘fields of possibility’ – a term that Massumi would probably have replaced by potentiality – that arise in a constant state of material ‘excess’.

Elsewhere Anderson and Harrison borrow Law’s (Law & Hassard, 1999) idea of a ‘relational materialism’ that is processual, disruptive, indeed, ‘non-representational’, and ‘orientated by and to an open-ended future’. The merging of materiality with Deleuzian ontologies allows for what Jane Bennett (2001: 104) so famously described as the enchantment of modern life through which ‘a new circuit of intensities form between material bodies’. Enchantment, Bennett explains, ‘is a precarious concatenation, it requires a delicate balance of forces, a set of fortuitous circumstances’ (2001: 104). Anderson and Wylie refer in their own project to a ‘materialist imagination’ derived from the similar principle that ‘matter potentially takes place with the capacities and properties of any element (i.e. earth, wind, fire, air) and/or any state (i.e. solid, liquid, gaseous)’ (2009: 319). They write that such an imagination is ‘thoroughly materialist’ in that there is no place for ‘properties of shape consistency and obduracy that are assumed to define the state of a solid or the element of earth’ (Anderson & Wylie, 2009).

The emphasis in such material geographies is less on the nature of order than it is on the question how any order of determinacy can exist at all. Indeed how can anything emerge in the fluid midst of so much flux and pure material presence? Where does this all ‘take place’? Or, differently put, what is left of the constancy of place when all materiality is said to be in constant state of change? Even the very category of space risks being conflated with materiality. ¹⁶ What happens to the ‘there’, the ‘here’, the ‘this’ and the ‘that’? By privileging Becoming over Being, relational theories seem to prioritize space over place. ¹⁷ David Harvey writes in thick brushstrokes that ‘those who proclaim … with Heidegger that “place is the locale of the truth of being” (though not of becoming!) are plainly mistaken. The only concept of place that makes sense is one that sees it as contingent, dynamic, and influential “permanence”, while being integrally contained within the processes that create, sustain, and dissolve all regions, places, and spacetimes into complex configurations’ (2009: 194). What perhaps ‘is needed’, to cite Malpas, ‘is a more careful analysis of the ontological underpinnings of the very concepts at issue’(2012b: 230). Such an analysis, one which takes seriously the construct of place, would need something earthly and stable alongside the ‘clamorous sea’ from which Venus arises. However a reintroduction of earth, soil, ground and terrestrial land – the classical components of geography – into discussions on the role of materialism brings with it a familiar set of challenges.

Ontology, place and land

Tackling the question of place – alongside the concept of space a foundational component of the geography discipline – is given its political history not without controversies. Place-oriented thinking, still at the heart of cultural, anthropological and humanistic geography (see for instance the influential work of Tuan, 1977, 2012), has, besides its obvious phenomenological qualities (e.g. Bachelard, 1969), also been the target of critique. Such criticism is often levelled at its historical associations with essentialism and its implication in conservative imaginations of ethnic, national and racial belonging. Its exclusionary boundaries are said to be drawn between and constitutive of all too familiar notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (see e.g. Harvey, 1989; Massey, 1994). ¹⁸ A prominent geographer notes that, while space is seen as ‘progressive and radical … place is the setting for social rootedness and landscape continuity … The case for place … has often been championed by nationalists, conservatives and believers in the importance of sacred places’ (Agnew, 2005: 83). At the roots of this tarnished reputation rests a different ontogenesis of emergence, not a fluid and more-than-human metaphysics of spatial becoming but one that is firmly rooted in the temporal constancy and authority of place in Being.

The controversial associations of this other definition of emergence are best explained by placing it alongside developments in 19th- and 20th-century Germany, where theories of emergence were translated as stories of beginnings rooted in specific locations, serving as evidence of belonging to a particular place. It is within this context that a ‘sense of place’ emerged which politically rooted identities to the soil (Boden) of place itself. Unlike the relational thinking of the British School of Emergentism, the German tradition sought to seek authority from an original metaphysics in which emergence came to be associated with social myths of origins (Ursprung) and Völkisch beliefs in destiny (Bestimming) and fate (Schicksal). German historicism helped towards the cementing of a collective cultural identity and the consolidation of a national consciousness (Toews, 2004). Central to this historical approach of German Emergentism was a widespread feeling of national belonging to a perennial place from a mythical past. Applegate (2011: 49, 51) notes that ‘[k]nowing place has been a way of knowing Germany for the many hundreds of years in which some concept of Germany existed … Place has been the most intimate form of national self-understanding.’ ¹⁹

In the Will to Power, Nietzsche noted that ‘German philosophy as a whole – Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest – is the most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness [Heimweh] that has ever been: the longing for the best that ever existed’ (1968: 225). His famous critiques (see e.g. Nietzsche, 1999) of such homeland longing, or Herkunfts-Hypothesen, anticipated the formulation of his own ‘history of the emergence of thinking’ (Entstehungsgeschichte des Denkens). It was, however, knowledge obtained from a mythical ontology rather than a genealogical epistemology that would come to define and dominate the meaning of emergence in popular political discourses around the concepts of Volk, Blut and Boden. The German term for ‘emergence’ was, in other words, used to describe and authorize the autochthonous and transhistorical myth of a coming into existence (Entstehung) of a German Volk from the soil itself.

This invocation of a mythical past was, as we know (see e.g. Cassirer, 1946), a unique and popular trait in Nazi propaganda, where it was embedded in a distinctive geographic longing for a homeland (Heimat) and a blood-determined belonging of a Volk to the soil (Boden). ²⁰ In ‘The Nazi myth’, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1990) explain how Nazism wrote all history on the basis of a single mythical concept. The myth of a German race, materially defined by blood (Blut), helped glue and constitute a total and totalizing worldview (Weltanschauung). They explain that the Nazi ‘myth in some sense becomes blood, and the soil from which that blood ultimately springs’ (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1990: 308). A German Volk is able to emerge from a racial soil as if a natural phenomenon. ‘It is the soil, the immediate nature of Germany that must be dreamed and “typed”, and with it the German blood’ (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1990, original emphasis). Mark Bassin similarly writes that ‘the Volk itself now became the “quintessential agent of activity and determination” to which the natural-geographical milieu was correspondingly subordinated and by which it was instrumentalized as nothing more than a “task, a goal and a purpose”’ (in Malpas, 2012a: 151).

The Nazi myth of emergence as the ‘will of nature’ itself (Hitler, in Malpas, 2012a: 309) takes emergence as pure, natural, undying, but also as an exclusionary process that is tied to land. This understanding of emergence as a metaphysically stable and teleological force of history is notoriously visible in the work of Martin Heidegger. Pizer notes that ‘[n]o modern philosopher has staked out more controversial positions on the principle of origin than Martin Heidegger’ (1995: 129). He is also ‘the preeminent theorist of that fundamental geographical concept we refer to by the word place’ (Harvey, 2009: 116). His understanding of place, as Ground (Grund) but also as soil (Boden), is, however, not as straightforward as that of some of his Nazi contemporaries: Völkisch but not necessarily racial, ontological rather than ontic, elemental, most certainly earthly.

Contrasting Nietzsche with Heidegger’s historiography, Bambach notes that the latter’s ‘Ursprungphilosophie was tinged by a chthonic longing for the soil of the homeland in its most political form’(2003: 49). The ground (Grund) and the soil (Boden) also play an important role in his ontological analysis in which he famously explained that Being grounds, but itself has no ground (Heidegger, 2006). ²¹ In the 1949 introduction to his earlier ‘What is metaphysics’ (1998 [1949]), Heidegger recounts Descartes’ famous image of the ‘tree of philosophy’ as a means to ‘ground’ his ontological difference:

The truth of Being may thus be called the ground in which metaphysics, as the roots of the tree of philosophy, is kept and from which it is nourished … As the roots of the tree, it sends all nourishment and all strength into the trunk and its branches. The root branches out into the soil and ground to enable the tree to grow out of the ground and thus to leave it. The tree of philosophy grows out of the soil in which metaphysics is rooted (1998 [1949]: 278).

The fascination for the relationship between soil and Being has led some critics to argue that it is rootedness, autochthony or groundedness (Bodenständigkeit) ‘around which everything else turns [in both Heidegger’s pre-War and post-War philosophy]’ (Metcalf, 2012: 49). ²² The emphasis on the soil occurs, according to Bambach, ‘through a double move: philosophically, through a retrieval of archaic thinking, and politically, through a re-territorialisation of a lost homeland’ (2003: 50). Both moves are highlighted in Heidegger’s reading of emergence and the importance he attached to a ground (Boden) which facilitates things to stand (Stehen) on and in. ‘Nothing is without ground’ but it itself is without ground. ‘If we were to ask about the foundational meaning [Grundbedeutung] of the word “Ground” [Grund] then we have already answered the question with the question itself, the ground refers to the basis, the fundamental on which something rests, stands and lies. We speak of foundational walls [Grundmauern], of a ground rule [Grundregel], of a ground principle [Grundsatz]’ (Heidegger, 2006: 156). Emergence refers for Heidegger, in other words, to a rooted standing (ständigkeit) but also to a more dynamic standing out (ent-stehen) and both of these meanings relate to claims to an original truth (Heidegger, 1976). To stand (stehen) means to authentically know and endure (bestehen) or, as Heidegger writes himself, ‘to know means being able to stand in the truth [Offenbarkeit]’ (1976: 21).

Entstehung refers to an arising (Ent-stehen), and has qualities and features of purity and permanency of a particular and authentic form of Being. It can present itself as a stable (standing) force outside history altogether different from mere ontic existence. Emergence occurs in that situated place from which history is made possible. It therefore not merely restricts the occurrence of events, but also enjoys openness for that which lies within it to appear at all. It allows for the process of ‘taking-place’ but retains its telluric commitment to the earth. If relationalists follow the science of the wave-born Venus, a metaphysical reading derives inspiration from Plato’s chôra, the undetermined place of creation or ‘the “nurse” of all Becoming’ (Plato in Casey, 1998). Whitehead explains that Plato’s ‘Receptacle imposes a common relationship on all that happens, but does not impose what that relationship shall be’ (1967: 150). It is the process of the rising out of chôra, the place of necessity (Ananke), similar but less earthly than ground, which Heidegger identifies as emergence (Entstehung) ²³ (Heidegger, 1976, see also Vallega, 2003: chapter 1).

Bambach, writing on Heidegger’s 1935 reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, shows how this conceptualization of emergence politically came to mean ‘that the possibilities for a Volk lie in its ability to negotiate the tensions in its tradition between what is permanently rooted in the earth [bodenständig] and how this permanent rootedness needs to be constantly repositioned within the newly emerging conditions that confront it’ (2003: 149). In light of the uncanny crisis of unhomeliness (Unheimlichkeit) and a crisis of forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) in the specific context of Weimar Germany, Bambach shows how Heidegger correlates Antigone’s faith with a German Volk desperate for its homecoming to a historical place of Being. Heidegger puts forward a reading of Antigone as ‘a kind of proto-Nationalist Socialist who strives to fight against the liberalism of the Weimar constitution … by embracing the time-honoured and eternal “law of the earth” (nomous chthonos)’ (Bambach, 2003: 296, cf. Elden, 1999). Antigone is retold as a fable about the ‘“spiritual decline of the Earth” [der geistige Verfall der Erde] and the dangers of modern techne … Earth is no longer chthonos, no longer capable of providing the roots necessary for autochthony’ (Bambach, 2003: 297).

The ground in Heidegger’s work performs a metaphysical function in both his earthly ontology and his politics. There is indeed, as Irigaray (1999) writes in another context, very little attention for the elements of air, fire or water. This stubborn adherence to terrestrial rootedness as truth and belonging should, as mentioned earlier, be contextualized in a specific political cultural of ‘geo-thinking’, where Raumdenken and Raumpolitik had already for long been a terrestrial practice. The term Geopolitik, born in the midst and it itself a product of this practice and way of thinking, still transcends many of the old associations to an understanding of a politics that is rooted in the earth. ²⁴ A notorious product of this tradition is Carl Schmitt (2006), who accepted the ground as the primary condition for the very possibility of what he defined as ‘the political’. It was on the ground on which lines were drawn that bounded the inside by excluding it from an outside, lines which separated Friend from Enemy and helped define the Us on the basis of an equally rooted Them.

The problem with the development of place is exactly this tainted association with bounded racial, national and other social determinisms. Emergence is in discussions on place rendered politically as a linear historical process that is rooted in a static and delimited concept of terrestrial location. As a consequence of an overdetermined focus on the authority of the soil as the sole place of genesis, the term loses a sense of fluidity and potentiality that characterizes the place of Serres’ sea. The earth becomes associated with authority (a grounded truth), a claim to truth and is thus instilled with a force which without disruptions or interferences temporally pushes things forward towards a predetermined destiny (Geschick). The emergent thing consequently grows, and blossoms (enstehen) as if homogenous, natural, stable and pure, akin to the idea of a flower, plant or tree rooted in a native soil. ²⁵

The well-known consequences of this conservative approach to emergence led discussions in critical geography to move away from place-based thinking towards a more discursive and reflective mode of analysis. ²⁶ Place came to be studied as a socially constructed phenomenon, which meant that the philosophical project of place as a metaphysically open, contingent and dynamic realm of possibility was paused. Recent discussions on the material turn in the discipline of geography and elsewhere brought back the possibility to return to questions over the birth and essence of materiality, and with it the issue of location, situation, or, in other words, place. However, as earlier discussed, this body of thought does not so much busy itself with the material nature of place, but rather makes an altogether more radical turn away from place, while moving towards a relational understanding of space. In this new approach, which prefers rhizome over roots, exile over home and water over soil, there seem relatively few opportunities for place to regain some of its original metaphysical allure as open-ended, dynamic and relational. The spatial response to the conservative materialism of place seems politically attractive but does not effectively tackle the problem of the ‘where’ of materiality. The last section of the article attempts to bridge my heuristically constructed divide between the two accounts of emergence by arguing for an elemental form somewhere in between Becoming (space) and Being (place).

Sea and land, relations and place

Serres (1998) describes the sea from which Venus, the ‘beautiful troublemaker’ (la belle noiseuse), arises as the noise, racket and chaos which disrupts and interferes. He notes that ‘the background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging’ (Serres, 1998: 13). Yet he makes clear that it is difficult to distinguish what causes this interference (Serres, 1998: 13): ‘Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged.’ Anyone familiar with the noise of the sea knows how difficult it is to extract and identify the exact moment a wave of turbulence is birthed and dies in the sea’s chaotic midst. The sea constitutes a dynamic place, one of ‘pure multiplicity’ devoid of noticeable forms, distinct shapes or predetermined rhythms, but it is also the medium that allows for sensible appearances and an order to emerge from chaos. It conceals forms and discloses them in equal measure and in interdependent fashion. The thing revealed emerges from the concealed background because of the productive relational quality intrinsic to the place of the sea, but it also never truly leaves this place of emergence. The thing revealed, the sea-born, is altogether distinct from the (noise of the) sea but will continue to harbour a relationship to it precisely because it will always remain part of it. An understanding of the turbulent sea-born therefore raises the ontological question of where it emerged from. The noisy and the distinctive, albeit ultimately always unknown, qualities of this sea place are central for understanding emergence as such.

Serres’ metaphysical sea resembles Malpas’ understanding of place ‘as a dynamic and bounded openness… [Place] is what allows for appearance and yet is not determined by it’ (2012b: 237, see also Casey, 1998). The sea is always more than the waves that it helps shape. The idea of the sea as a cosmic soup in which sensible things appear but also fade and disappear shares feminine attributes that are also noticeable in the place of chôra (see also Whitehead’s notion of a ‘pre-biotic soup’, in Deleuze, 2016). Serres plays with the name for sea (mer) as mother (mère), while Plato refers to chôra as the womb of motherhood (‘foster-mother of all becoming’) (Whitehead, 1967: 150). They are both said to be without proportion, shape or form and yet provide birth to things distinct, measurable but never separate from it. It seems no coincidence that Serres and the relationalists choose the sea instead of the land in discussions on how material relates, connects and disrupts in processes of de- and re-territorialization. Despite its lack of an association to roots, being the historical antithesis of firma terra, the sea lends itself as a historically less-encumbered and conceptually more-suitable Deleuzian rhizomatic category. We all come from the sea and are still part of it. The sea is not centred, hierarchically organized or genealogically rooted. Its noise does not follow linear movements of points on schematic trajectories but rather is defined by flows and irregularly sequenced moments of intensities. Deleuze and Guattari write for good reason that ‘the sea is perhaps principal among smooth space’(2004: 427).

Indeed, they call it ‘smooth’ space, but do they not really mean place when they associate it with heterogeneity, movement and, indeed, potentiality, or when they write that the sea has a ‘rhythm without measure’ (Deueuze & Guattari, 2004: 401)? They write that the sea needs to be ‘striated … to transform it into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant direction’ (Deueuze & Guattari, 2004: 427). Striated space is the space of capitalism: quantitative, homogeneous, bordered and imagined fixed like the ground. It is no coincidence that popular Nazi geographical imaginaries (e.g. Schmitt, 2006) distrusted the sea for its supposed nihilism, undetermined essence and its lack of orientation, boundaries and order. German metaphysics of place have historically remained firmly committed to the telluric authority of the ground.

The dispute between relational materialism of space and a metaphysical ontology of place seems to stem from a historical and political divide in which the former privileges the dynamism of the sea while the latter subscribes to the stability of the land. But what if the land and the sea could both be said to be concurrently relational and ‘platial’? The sea is a distinct bounded place with a diversity of distinctive elemental conditions and qualities (heat, pressure, density, etc.) that allow for the birthing of distinct objects and beings: corals, fish and shelves (etc.), which otherwise would not have the potentiality to emerge. The idea that it is a bounded place must be accepted if one considers the simple fact that a fish does not grow as a rooted plant from the soil of the land. It is only common sense that ‘[w]hen things are not where they belong, when they are out of [their] place, they cannot truly be themselves’ (Curry in Agnew, 2011: 322). There is a place in which fish emerge and that place is geographically situated as much it is bounded on the very condition of that emergence. In other words, the unique qualities of the sea-place form its borders and allow for the specific relations from which the very process of emergence becomes a potentiality. It is therefore the boundaries of place that allow for the very possibility of relations. Place is what Massumi calls the ‘field of emergence’, or, to revise Heidegger’s words, place is the no-longer exclusively terrestrial ground without a ground of itself. ‘The point is that place’, as Casey writes, ‘by virtue of its unencompassibility by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists. It is the limit inasmuch as there is nothing beyond the place of an actual occasion – except another place for another occasion … Place serves as the condition of all existing things’ (2009: 15). Without it, without the boundaries that make it a field of open-ended potentiality, one does not establish ‘a pure field of relationality’, but abolishes relationality as such (Malpas, 2012b: 239).

In other words, the construct of place needs to be separated from its associations to soil and ground. This is not to say that the earth is not a place. Indeed the soil might seem at first to be less relational than water, but any geologist would tell you that it is not. In fact, as one prominent geologist points out, ‘[t]he story of geology has been one of letting go of [the myth of] permanence …’ (Fortey, 2005: 32). This political error of thought comes forth from the historical tragedy of associating the earth to the stability of ground or rootedness, and sea to the fluidity and multiplicity of water. The previous section already described how the translation of the soil as Boden brought with it a racial culturalization of the earth. The materiality of ground became politically imagined to enjoy unchanging qualities and perennial authority. The earthly ground was, in other words, conceptualized as the natural Ur-place that existed before politics. Before the line, there existed the ground. Such a divisive line of thinking cannot easily be dismissed as a thing of the past, as the translation of earth as Boden continues to inform nationalist geographic imaginations, while constituting the very essence of territorial politics. The earth is popularly imagined as static, stable and only relational to the extent of surface, which is why it lends itself so well to politics.

A materialist geography should seek to philosophically re-appropriate the ground as a relational and fluid place. Rather than abandoning the ground altogether, a materialist approach should challenge ideas of it as a stable surface. It is the soil, an elemental quality of ground, which enjoys relational intensities that are not dissimilar to those we find in the water of the sea. Challenging the idea of land as unmoveable ground starts by acknowledging the complexity and movement of the soil of the earth. The geological and geophysical make-up of the earth is in constant flux as dust storms from the Sahara affect the shape and size of trees in Amazonian forests, while volcanic eruptions allow for the emergence of flora and fauna in both near and far-away places. The ground moves underneath and with it so do our feet. ‘Nothing seems to be at rest. The surface of the earth dilates and collapses; the seas rise and fall; further, the very continents move’ (Fortey, 2005: 33). The borders of politics are on the move, but politics itself remains committed to the myth of a stable land. Opening up the ground as a field of emergence, absolving surface of its historical authority, does not mean the same as disregarding the earth’s inherent platial qualities. Elephants are not born under water in the sea. ‘Here’ does not mean ‘there’. On the one hand, a relational materialist geography can only remain ontologically viable if it acknowledges that objects and beings ‘take place’, but, on the other hand, a metaphysical geography would require an opening-up of ontologies beyond the all-too-human ground. A situating of the ‘where’ of emergence can help the construct of place to again be taken seriously as a bounded field of relationality and potentiality.

Final thoughts

I have in an intentionally crude manner divided the debate on materialism in geography into two broad strands of thought. The subject of analysis chosen to distinguish these two branches was the concept and event of emergence. The first I identified considers emergence as a process of dynamic relations. In an oft-quoted remark, Amin writes that relational geography is ‘fighting’ against a ‘territorially bounded’ understanding of geography and is ‘interested in spaces of relation in which all kinds of unlike things can knock up against each other in all kinds of ways’ (in Jones, 2009: 488). To be sure, these said ways and their outcomes are unpredictable, meaning that any attempt to order space is doomed to fail. The emphasis of space as a process is a direct critique of the historical tradition within the geography discipline that sees materiality as a rooted and mapped category of place.

I have explored and contextualized this second approach to materiality so as to illustrate how the original conceptual richness of place came to be reduced and appropriated for a particular politics. Such a politics starts from a position that favours the terrestrial ground as the metaphysical site of emergence on which lines are drawn and identities take shape. This process of political ‘grounding’ of truth meant that emergence began to be associated with sentiments and claims of belonging and ownership. I exemplified this by looking at the development in 19th-century Germany, where the surface of the ground (Boden) was socialized and nationalized while social constructs of Volk and race were naturalized. Although extreme, this politicized understanding of place has remained central to the way we understand reality. Agnew writes how the socialization of place into a static entity ‘has become enshrined in much modern social science … This putting place in the past has made it next to impossible to argue the merits of place as a concept … Only as location, and that of diminishing impact, has the term kept up much of any significance’ (2011: 323).

What is needed then is a more dynamic and less socially reified notion of place. Rather than abandoning the question of place, the last section set out to find a middle ground between the absolute relationality of so-called smooth space and the original metaphysical quality of place. This is of course not a new approach but one that follows in the footsteps of existing critiques outlined in the work of Casey (1998), Malpas (2012a, 2012b) and others. Such lines of critique acknowledge the problem of older associations of place with land but also agree that relations of emergence have to occur in a ‘where’ and a ‘there’. The approach I have taken here and elsewhere (e.g. Nieuwenhuis, 2015) argues for an elemental ontology where the earth, air and water receive equal relational and platial powers. Such a move has, at a time of humanity’s growing impact on the world, become of increasing relevance. Environmental disasters, of both the incremental and spontaneous kind, occur in very real places, affecting them and altering them in specific ways that harm both animate and non-animate beings. Place also increasingly matters as a critique against the flux of capitalism. It can serve as a remedy against the distractions, interferences and displacements caused by the unrestful and distracting circulation of capital. Attention to the air one breathes, to the smell of mud and the sound of waves bursting against the coastline are not signs of conservative nostalgia but are symbols, affects and experiences informing radical ecological critiques against capital’s turbulent violence. They form the affects through which we connect to the very place that we call our world.