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  • The Nature of Space by Milton Santos
  • María Laura Silveira
    Translated by Liz Mason-Deese
The Nature of Space By Milton Santos, translated by Brenda Baletti Duke University Press (2021)

Several years after the publication of Por uma geografia nova (1978), in which Milton Santos carried out a rigorous critique of geography, defended the premises of a nascent critical geography and announced the continuation of an ambitious project of theoretical reflection on human space, the publication of A natureza do espaço (The Nature of Space) in 1996 crowned his extensive research, offering the most comprehensive and systematic elaboration of his theory of geographic space. Now translated into English, this work provides a fundamental framework for the global diffusion of this situated thought with a universal vocation.

The important technical, social, political, and economic transformations of the last three decades of the twentieth century, the excessive fragmentation of science, and his dissatisfaction with a geography that was either too empirical or too adjectival, led Milton Santos to deepen his analysis of space as a matrix of social life and to formulate new methodological questions.

In some sense, this book is a journey upstream of what could be expected from a theoretical text in geography, as the author starts from the real and not from an epistemological discussion. The important issue, he points out, is not to debate geography, but rather the being of space, its constitution, its ontology. Thus, he dedicates the first part of the book to those topics. Inherited structures, current processes, and tendencies are recognized based on categories extracted from the real that, at the same time, allow for elaborating and analyzing a discipline's object.

In that way, in dialogue with philosophers of technique, such as Simondon (1989) and Ellul (1977), Santos affirms that the being of contemporary space is technical and therefore technique is a constitutive category (Granger, 1993) that allows for empirizing time and space as historical phenomenon. [End Page 201] Thus it is necessary to understand technique as a milieu and as a phenomenon. As a milieu, technique is a set of relations, a fabric of spatio-temporal nexuses and things; as a phenomenon it requires going beyond appearances, the visible, to reach the invisible, the links, the relations. Particular techniques—such as agricultural or industrial techniques—so present in geographic and ethnographic description throughout history, would not lead to understanding the technical phenomenon, as that includes all of human activity, including uncovering technical and political actions.

In the author's conception, space is, today more than ever, a system of technical objects that does not exist without the actions that produce it and that make it function. Explaining the evolution of his own definition, the author proposes his current formulation: "space is formed by an indivisible, interdependent, and contradictory group of systems of objects and systems of actions, not considered separately but understood as forming a unique framework within which history takes place" (p. 35). That intrinsic nature of materiality and action reveals the mixed (Godelier, 1974) or hybrid (Latoir, 1991) condition of space's existence.

Once the object of geography is defined, the second part of the book presents the challenge of elaborating a meta-discipline. Notions of totality, territorial division of labor, and event are proposed as suitable content-forms for comprehending space. It does not seem sufficient to address space as a thing in itself, but rather in its process of becoming other, since, in Heidegger's (2012) words, it is not possible to compre hend being without the perspective of time. These constitutive concepts are meaningful divisions of the real that allow for analyzing space as hybrid in its process of permanent movement without mutilating or crystallizing it.

In dialogue with Whitehead (1971), Santos proposes extending time through the event, that is, as a vehicle of some technical and political possibilities of the period that are finally deposited in place. Events are the result of action and, therefore, there are no events without actors; but nor can there be events without material and immaterial forms, as those are its condition of existence. They are the matrix of time and space.

Through events, totality—the...

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