525-

Classics in human geography revisited

N. 1983: On the determination of social action in space and time.

Thrift,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 23-57.

Commentary 1
This was the most cited article written by a human geographer in the period 1985-89 (62

citations) and ranks 24 on the list of ’major classics’, journal articles written between 1969
and 1989 (Bodman, 1995). In terms of ’raw’ citations, therefore, this relatively recent
article counts as important and potentially influential. It also shows up prominently in a
number of books that would not be included in the citation count. These include Agnew’s
Place and politics (1987), Entrikin’s The betweenness of place (1991) and Friedland and
Boden’s NowHere: space, time and modernity ( 1994) . It is usually cited as providing either a
critical review of the concept of ’structuration’ as this can be applied to the work of such
writers as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Derek Layder and Roy Bhaskar, or as
indicating the general rapprochement beginning in the 1980s between human geography
and social theory.
The article itself, however, is only partially a review of the structuration concept. It has
two other elements that do not appear to have elicited much interest. One is as a call to
empirical work on a ’new’ regional geography, examining geographically a number of
aspects of social action: personality and socialization, penetration and the availability of
knowledge, sociability and community and conflict and group ’capacity’. The other is as a
joint critique of structuration theories for their neglect of ’determination’ and of ’jumbo’
Marxism (associated by Thrift with the work of David Harvey) for its lack of a
nonfunctionalist account of class formation and class consciousness. Although my
(Agnew, 1987) approach to place and politics was inspired by both of these elements and
this, in turn, influenced Ira Katznelson’s Marxism and the city ( 1992), most citations show
little or no concern with them.
I have found the article helpful in my own work for four theoretical points that are made
very clearly. The first is the necessity in geographical research for a nonfunctionalist
rendering of the impact of social relations on individual and collective action. Without this,
’geography’ or spatial organization is either a mirror or background, it is never an intrinsic
part of social life. Another is the important distinction that Thrift draws between
compositional and contextual analyses of social action. Much more clearly than anywhere
else, the potential of contextual analysis for drawing out the ’flow of human agency’ is
made apparent, yet without abandoning the necessity to situate social action in the group
categories used, but typically reified, in compositional analysis. A third important point
made in the article is the difficulty facing the various structurationist schemes in the
absence of the insights to be garnered from Marxism (as a theory with a clear set of
ontological commitments) concerning ’determination’. A focus on the ’reproduction of
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labour power’ is suggested as a potential exit from the ontological indeterminacy of

structuration accounts. Finally, Thrift argues for the significance of ’region’ (or place) as a
setting in which social groups define themselves and create various capacities for social
action.
There are a number of features of the article that work against the general thrust of its
argument. These may well have thrown some readers off track and undermined the
article’s intellectual impact. One is the ambiguous spatiality of the piece. At one point the
term ’region’ is accorded an independent status (p. 38), yet later the reader is informed
that the region must not be seen as a place (p. 40). Certainly, not every locale or setting for
social interaction is spatially fixed or permanent, but most are. Indeed, most of the
examples used in the article show this to be the case, so why the ambiguity about place? A
second concerns the interpretation of Perry Anderson’s view that popular agency is a
relatively modem phenomenon (pp. 33-34) as if previous eras were ones of pure structural
determination. Surely Anderson’s point was not about agency tout court but about the
possibility of collective self-direction through class consciousness? If not, then the entire
endeavour of structuration is fatally flawed, if agency is only something that crops up now
and then. Finally, the focus on group conflict and struggle in the discussion of group
capacity-building misses the possibility that the penetration of knowledge and sociability
give rise under certain material conditions to local consensus or sense of a ’community of
fate’, in which all groups see themselves as in ’the same boat’, so to speak. The engagement
with orthodox Marxism, therefore, rather than, say, that Gramscian variety which
emphasizes the contingent creation of hegemonic consensus, may lead to a theoretical
determination but it is one that sacrifices empirical reach. Of course, this is exactly the
problem with ’jumbo’ Marxism that the article starts out to correct.
These criticisms are all very well, coming in 1995, 13 years after the article was written.
I can still remember reading the article shortly after it appeared in an excited and decidedly
uncritical vein! Even when read more critically, this is an article that will continue to be
cited simply because it was one of the first in human geography to address in a subtle and
sophisticated way a set of metatheoretical issues (concerning determination, agency,
subjectivity, discourse and contextuality) that will remain at the centre of the geographical
research agenda. I only hope that it will be cited more in the future for its original content
than for its status as a review essay.

Syracuse University John Agnew

Agnew, J.A. 1987: Place and politics: the geographical geography of modernity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hop-
mediation of state and society. London and Boston, kins University Press.
MA: Allen & Unwin.
Friedland, R. and Boden, D., editors, 1994:
Bodman, A.R. 1995: Sifting through the sediments: NowHere: space, time and modernity. Berkeley and Los
another look at ’citation classics’ in geography. Prog- Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
ress in Human Geography, forthcoming.

Katznelson, I. 1992: Marxism and the city. Oxford:

Entrikin, J.N. 1991: The betweenness of place : towards a Clarendon Press.
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Commentary 2
I want to start this commentary with a confession: after agreeing to write this piece it
suddenly struck me that I hadn’t read ’On determination’ since the early 1980s! For an
article about to be canonized in this journal as ’a classic’ this seemed a little odd,
troublesome even. After all, ’classics’ - regardless of citation counts - tend to be pieces
which we return to, which we reread, and which last, either because they in some way act
as a definitive statement on some issue or because they provide the impetus for novel, often

radical, departures. But as I reread ’On determination’ (some 12 years on from my initial
encounters with it) I found myself thinking that what makes this piece a classic isn’t really
about these things. Instead, ’On determination’ is a different sort of classic. For me it’s one
for three reasons.
The first of these reasons is personal, and I make no apology for highlighting this here
because my experience has been that it is frequently the connection with the personal
(however we define this) which serves to differentiate one piece of writing from the mass
outpourings of the knowledge industry. I read this article initially then (in draft form) in
1982, and again when the revised version appeared in print in 1983. At the time I was a
postgraduate and for me this was one of those special pieces, the sort which for some
reason(s) we all seem to encounter as graduate students. Indeed, I remember quite vividly
the full gamut of emotions which accompanied my first reading of ’On determination’:
excitement (here was a piece which was arguing for precisely the sort of research that I was
endeavouring to produce in my thesis); fear/tredpidation (in spite of being fully capable of
arguing for different readings of key social theorists, I was still beset by massive self-doubt
-
had I got the writings of the structurationist school sorted out and, more importantly,
would there be anything left to say that was worth saying after Nigel had had his say?!); and
relief (seemingly ’yes’ on both counts). For me, then, this is a personal classic, a piece
which will for ever be associated in my mind not just with the process of thesis production
but which in its arguments both legitimated the then outcomes of my own intellectual
journeyings and gave me some space to ’find a voice’.
Beyond the personal, though, there is a second, and particularly apposite, reason why
’On determination’ deserves to be seen as a classic. This is entirely contextual: more than
any other article of the time which I can recollect, this article, in location and content,
succeeded in encapsulating a key moment in the development of critical human geog-
raphy. Located as it is (auspiciously) in Volume 1, Number 1 of Society and Space, and
aiming as it did to explore in a highly provisional and programmatic way what a
nonfunctionalist social theory, which still retains a strong element of determination and a
commitment to the importance of human geography might look like, ’On determination’
reads to me now both as a microcosm of the objectives behind the launch of Society and
Space and as a summation of a then emegent consensus in critical human geography. This
was a consensus committed to social theory (rather than to cultural and/or literary theory),
to determination and to the primacy of Marxism (although interestingly much of this
article is concerned with Thrift’s reservations regarding the latter), to theoretically
informed empirical work (in which the problem of translation is all about producing
general knowledge of unique events) and to the analysis of the materiality of everyday life.
How times have changed! And indeed there can be no better indication of this than
Thrift’s own apparent abandonment of the structurationist-inspired project at some point
in the late 1980s.
’On determination’, then, is a classic because, to coin a phrase, it encapsulates a world
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we have lost. And in many respects I think it is this which accounts for my own failure to
look at it in the intervening years. But in rereading it I was struck too by the degree to
which the article unknowingly prefigures some of the key concerns of human geography in
the 1990s. For example, here we find (and in no particular order of priority) a plea for a
reconstituted regional geography; a focus on social action/agency which not only hints at
the turn to reflexivity but which also in terms of its advocacy of particular methods (diaries/
autobiographies/biography) is as pertinent today as it was then; an emphasis on contextual
analysis; and arguments for the centrality of time-space and spatiality to human geography
and social theory. ’Space and time are always and everywhere social. Society is always and
everywhere spatial and temporal. Easy enough concepts perhaps, but the implications are
only now being thought through’ (p. 49). That we are still working through this statement,
albeit in ways which are far removed from the central project of ’On determination’, is in
itself testimony to the classic status of this article. Moreover, that an article written in
1982, and one located so firmly in the debates of its time, should be so prefigurative is
perhaps even more salutory. Rereading ’On determination’ shows not just a world we have
lost but also how much we still owe to this moment in the development of critical human
geography and how much in (post) modernity we’re still connected to it.
Sheffield University Nicky Gregson

Author’s response .

It is rather peculiar experience to be asked to respond to comments on an article written

a
so long ago, even when they are so very kind. Does that ’Nigel Thrift’ still exist to take the
credit or the blame for this article? Not really. That said, I will try to outline the context of
the article’s production, a little of its subsequent history and why it is the history of a
misfit.
The article was chiefly written in 1981 and was the result of my readings of the work of
E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams (see also the review of their work in Thrift, 1983),
along with the Giddens of Central problems in social theory, the Bourdieu of Outline of a
theory of practice and the Castoriadis of L’Institution imaginaire de la société (large chunks of
which were translated in pamphlet form by the wonderful London-based anarchosyndical-
ist group, Solidarity). It was followed by three other articles which were meant to fill out
the programme outlined in this article (Thrift and Forbes, 1983; Thrift, 1985; 1986),
articles which should definitely be read together with it - and, for some reason, never are.
The article was written as a kind of call to arms, I suppose. Most particularly, the article
was a polemic concerning the dual importance of nonrepresentational theory (or the

theory of practice, as I then knew it) and the space of the subject, coded as a concern for
agency. But to make the room even to consider these subjects, the article also had to be
against two schools of intellectual practice which existed at the time, neither of which I
ever felt even remotely a part of. One was the kind of Marxist zealotry (which was precisely
the kind that Thompson and Williams would never have subscribed to) which was so sure
of its moral and political ground that it could see no other way. The other school consisted
of those who were against ’theory’ (however that might be; I have never understood how
this might be possible), in part because the only exemplar of theory they seemed able to see
was the kind of Marxism I have already alluded to and in part because they were simply too
11., ... ~ ... !, ..
lazy to do the work.
 529

Looking back at the article now, I am struck by two things. First, the way in which, for
me, the first part of the article on structureand agency and structuration theory was simply
a tag for what I had read thus far, a kind of theoretical commonplace book. Then,

secondly, the importance for me of the outline of a nonfunctionalist theory of social action
in space and time in the second part of the article. Ironically, I suspect it is the first part of
the article that has been most often referred to by the discipline, although it was the part I
was least concerned with, while the second part of the article has, until quite recently (see

Pile, 1993), been lost in the mists of time.

Put briefly, my main concern in the crucial second part of the article was with mapping
the subject. Yet, at this time, I still did not know how it might be done. But I think I was
lucky. Because of my reading trajectory I had stumbled across nonrepresentational ’theory’
at a comparatively early point in its history. And, in turn, I was able to apply this theory to
the question of the subject. I did not find this easy, of course. As John Shotter (1985)
pointed out in a subsequent critique of the article in Society and Space, I too often tried to
produce a representation of what could not be represented to the detrimient of what I was
trying to achieve. (In the final article of the four - Thrift, 1986 - I tried to take into account
Shotter’s critique.)
What is striking, of course, is the paucity of work in geography still on nonrepresenta-
tional ’theory’, or the subject. So, in one sense, this article was a bit of a disaster. It started
nothing. (Indeed, I was still trying to make many of the same points I made in this article in
debate with David Harvey in 1987.)
It is really only quite recently that a few of the myriad problems of representational
’theorizing’ have come to light in geography, for example in the nth article from cultural
geographers which likens the world to a text, or in the nth article trying to apply Lefebvre
to geography. (And I still think that it is debatable the degree to which many people in
geography really want to take on board the challenge of nonrepresentational ’theory’, since
the consequences are, to say the least, uncomfortable for the theoretical powers we can
claim and the background we think we are part of.) Again, it is really only quite recently
that the subject and subjectivity have become legitimate areas of geographical concern,
stimulated mainly by Foucault, feminism and psychoanalysis. (Even so, Steve Pile and I
had to go outside geography to obtain enough authors to inhabit a recent book on the
geography of subject: Pile and Thrift, 1995.)
Why should geography have taken so long to come to terms with areas of work which
other disciplines have been more aware of? I can think of three reasons. One is what I
perceive as a serious problem with the discipline. All disciplines undergo periodic changes
in intellectual direction. But it seems to me that only geography is quite so ’trendy’, and
consequently prone to such a high degree of intellectual labelling. Perhaps this is because
of the comparatively small size of the discipline; perhaps it is because, as Urry (1995) has
it, the subject is more than averagely policed; perhaps it is because geographers seem to
read quite narrowly, within their chosen label. Who knows? Whatever the case, the upshot
is clear. Geography has become a set of moving tableaux. A new subject appears. It is
labelled and feted. It becomes the passion of a whole cohort of postgraduates. Then the
cycle begins again. I think this was why this article proved to be something of a dead end:
when structuration theory went down the pan, nonrepresentational ’theory’ and the space
of the subject went with it, able to be recuperated only when they could be tied to a new
and upcoming label. The second reason is because nonrepresentational ’theory’ demands
a style of work which is alien to many geographers, one where ’theory’ is not ’applied’ in a

particular ’context’ but where the theoretical and empirical fold into one another in a
530

glutinous mixture of text and context, and facticity and fictionality. The third reason is
because geography, even now, still seems to feed on divides. For all the talk of
interdisciplinarity, there are still many people who seem to want to identify a space of
knowledge as ’historical’ or ’economic’, or ’social’, or ’cultural’, or what have you. (I have
always thought that these divides were false constructions, best left to one side.)
I hope that it is clear by now that, whatever else one might say, the article does not seem
to fit easily with conventional histories of geography. It does not fit because it was only ever
partly about structuration theory. It does not fit because much of it is about subjects which
have only recently started to be seen as important. And it does not fit because it is not an
economic or a social or a cultural or a political or a what have you piece. In a way, I
suppose I am quite pleased by that.
So what happened after? I have continued to pursue nonrepresentational ’theory’ and
explore the space of the subject, although increasingly influenced by a critical reading of
the poststructuralist and feminist literatures (as evidenced in the three linked articles
published in this journal in the early 1990s). As it should be, much of this more recent
work has been anchored in specific contexts, like the history of time consciousness, early
modem and contemporary consumption cultures, international finance and machinic
landscapes. Some of these later writings are now collected in Spatial formations (Thrift,
1995).

Nigel Thrift

Pile, S. 1993: Human agency and human geography
revisited: a critique of ’new models’ of the self.
Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 18,
122-39.
Pile, S. and Thrift, N.J., editors, 1995: Mapping the
subject. Geographies of cultural transformation. London:
Routledge.
Shotter, J. 1985: Accounting for place and space.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 4,
447-60.
Thrift, N.J. 1983: Literature, the production of culture
and the politics of place. Antipode 15, 12-24.
— 1985: Flies and germs: a geography of knowl-
edge. In Gregory, D. and Urry, J., editors, Social
relations and spatial structures. London: Macmillan,
330-73.
— 1986: Little games and big stories: the practices
of political personality in the 1945 general election.
In Hoggart, K. and Kofman, E., editors, Politics,
geography, and social stratification. Beckenham:
Croom Helm, 90-155.
— 1987: No perfect symmetry: a response to David
Harvey. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 5, 400-407.
— 1995: Spatial formations. London: Sage.
Thrift, N.J. and Forbes, D.K. 1983: Review essay. A
landscape with figures: political geography with
human conflict. Political Geography Quarterly 2,
247-63.
Urry, J. 1995: Consuming places. London: Routledge.