The anthill and the beam: A response to Elden

‘The space is first of all nomadic, a term which has the same etymology in Greek as the nomos “pasture”, the nomos “custom” or “law”, the nomizein “thinking”, the nemein “sharing”, and the “collective blame” which gave its name to the goddess in charge of avenging all hubris, namely Nemesis’ (Koch-Piettre et al., 2020: 7, author translation).

Is it possible to get away from the distinction between physical space and lived space, the former conceived as material, objective, and measurable, the latter as historical, subjective, and symbolic? In other words, is it possible to get out of the division of labour between physical geography and human geography? This is different from wanting to ‘reconcile’ or ‘work together’ the two branches of geography. My proposal is that a distinction must be made elsewhere between terrestrial space – which does not mean physical – and extraterrestrial space – which does not mean subjective. The argument may seem bizarre at first, but you have to have the patience to follow it for a minute or two.

The whole argument is based on the notion of limit – nomos in Greek. Here is a wooden beam; you can measure it with a tape measure; it measures 230 centimetres; its limit is at the precise place where the marks on the tape measure overlap with the limit of the beam. This type of limit is special in that it stops arbitrarily but could be extended ad infinitum: you could take a larger beam, or continue the measurement with your tape measure. The limit does not introduce any additional difference. It can be pushed back without difficulty.

Now take another case, for example, an anthill encountered during your walk: it too has a limit, except that it is of a very different principle. You could, of course, measure it with your tape measure, it would be 230 centimetres, but it is easy to understand that if it measured less or more, it would depend this time on the action of tens of thousands of ants. It cannot go on ad infinitum. Therefore its limit belongs to another kind; it is of the kind that requires the action of the living to constitute an interior different from an exterior and a kind of membrane between the two. It is a limit held from within. The beam, for its part, has neither interior nor exterior, it does not form (it no longer forms) an actively maintained membrane.

What can we get out of this contrast? Let us first note that we have here two senses of limit which do not correspond in any way to a distinction between objective and subjective: the anthill is as objective as the beam. The contrast is elsewhere: in the case of the beam, the action of measurement captures everything that matters (‘the beam is 230 centimetres’), whereas in the second case the metric measurement ‘the anthill is 230 centimetres’ says absolutely nothing about the difference in size between 210, 240, or 230 centimetres. This difference is no longer arbitrary, but depends on whether more or fewer ants are recruited or put to work, depending on external circumstances.

You will say that this is not surprising, since the beam is dead wood and the anthill is alive. I have therefore done nothing else with my example, except to distinguish between the mode of existence of inert things and that of living things. This throws no light on the difference between physical geography and human geography.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. First you will notice that we are not talking about ‘physical’ or inert objects, but about objects that have been alive and have died. Also note that the difference between living and dead does not overlap with the distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘human’. Then, this is the heart of my argument, ask yourself whether the spaces that the living encounter rather correspond to the first case or to the second.

In the past, the space of the living would have been conceived as a frame – the environment – and then the living would have been placed or introduced within that frame. But what happens if you now consider that the frame itself has been entirely shaped by the living in such a way that the oceans, the mountains, the atmosphere itself, and of course the climate, are to the living what the anthill is to the ants? This is the meaning of the Gaia hypothesis. If you admit this hypothesis, you must also admit that the only form of space and limits that we experience as living beings corresponds rather to the mode of the anthill than to the beam.

In other words, since we inhabit the critical zone of the earth, no one, neither human, nor bacterium, nor lichen, nor cow has ever, anywhere, had the experience of this famous ‘physical space’ that would be supposed to serve as a background, the background of the map, and on which would then stand out the activities of the living, and then again, above it, the ‘symbolic’ activities of humans. This sandwich or puff pastry is the illusion of those who speak of the earth as if it were in extraterrestrial space – which is true, of course, but only by the fiction of a map of the solar system where the movements would take place in an isotropic space that only makes sense through drawing and calculation.

This is where, in order to understand the argument, we must remember this result of the history of science: what is called physical space is the trace left by the instrumentation and must not be confused any more with what it takes the measure of than the map must not be confused, according to the famous expression, with the territory. The res extensa to give it the name given to it by the philosophers is not the bottom of the world, but the result of a progressive extension of the instruments of calculation. To say that it ‘extends everywhere’ is like saying that one can go by train everywhere – at least in Europe – yes, but always following the rails. Just as if there is no rail, locomotives do not move, so without the instruments, the calculation capacities allowed by the res extensa do not extend either. The famous physical space is within the only space experienced by the living, which is neither subjective nor ‘lived’, nor symbolic, but generated, engendered, maintained, enforced by living organisms.

Geographers have gone to great lengths to try to graft onto the physical space they called material, a symbolic, subjective, and human space that they called ‘lived’. But this meant forgetting that on earth, in any case, they are obliged to take into account a much larger number of living beings than humans alone, and that all these living beings together have each for their own account transformed the initial space – the planet earth of 5 billion years ago – into an intricate web of bubbles, spheres, scums (to use Sloterdijk’s vocabulary) from which no living thing can, in the literal sense, ‘come out’. We now have direct experience of this every time we are told that the last 10 years have been the warmest since measurements were taken; everyone now realizes that the atmosphere depends in part on human activity and that, therefore, when we look at the sky, we no longer measure a ‘physical’ distance in ‘kilometres’ but the dome of an enclosure that falls on us as if we had to react to keep it at the right temperature. Maintaining the blue sky is not a distance, it is a task.