Scale and the Other

Scale and the Other:

embodiment, emplacement and infinity

Richard Howitt

Department of Human Geography

Macquarie University, NSW, 2109

AUSTRALIA

richard.howitt@mq.edu.au

telephone: +61-2-9850 8386

facsimile: +61-2-9850 6052

Paper submitted to Geoforum, May 2000

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Top, Abstract, Introduction, What sort of a thing is scale? Space, place, time and scale, Levinas, Scale and the Other, Embodiment and Emplacement, Eros: body, porosity and alterity, Nourishing Terrains: coexistence, otherness and scale, References.

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the concept of scale and its relevance to studies of culture. It brings into dialogue previously divergent discussions about space, place and difference and proposes an approach that treats time, space, place and scale as co-equal conceptual and/or analytical elements of cultural landscapes. It is argued that many philosophical debates about embodiment, emplacement and difference abstract a universalized notion of 'place', 'body' and 'self' which confounds and conflates scale issues and consequently confuses the dialectical interplay of 'time', 'space', 'being' and 'culture' across scales. The paper takes the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and the discursive communities around it as a philosophical entry point into these debates.

KEYWORDS:

geographical scale; difference; cultural geography; indigenous knowledge; embodiment; emplacement; other; Levinas

Attention to space is widely recognized as one of the characteristic shifts of recent social theory. Within geography, the parallel to social theory's 'spatial turn' has been the discipline's 'cultural turn'. In dealing with the sociality and spatiality of lived experience, the interplay of material, perceptual and cultural dimensions of experience has proved fertile ground across the social sciences in general, as well as within geography in particular. Increasingly sophisticated engagement with space, place and culture, however, has not been matched in treatments of geographical scale. Jonas (1994) made this point some time ago in an editorial plea for a more careful and considered use of scale in geography. His concern has been met with a considerable growth in explicit discussion of scale in geographical literature, and a veritable explosion in discussion of local-national-global relations (eg Adams 1996; Kelly 1997; Delaney and Leitner 1997; McGuirk 1997; Cox 1997; Howitt 1998; Jones 1998; Macleod and Goodwin 1999; Silvern 1999). Jonas’ concern about a general lack of "concepts capable of capturing the various nuances of scale" (1994: 257), however, retains considerable currency. This important concept remains poorly understood, carelessly applied and, given its importance in influential debates about globalization, localism and regionalism, surprisingly chaotic. For some commentators, a shift to spatialized language and metaphor suffices; to accommodate the spatial turn in social theory for others, acknowledging globalization as a shift in scale is as far as their discussion of scale goes. Naive conceptualizations of scale constrain our understanding of social relations. Constructions of identity, difference and power are always embedded in a "Scale politics of spatiality" (Jonas 1994), as well as in a geographical, historical and social context. In cultural studies, investigations of globalization that abstract 'the global' as if it were a thing in itself, obscure rather than illuminate the ways that scaled processes produce new relations within, across and between people and places. Discussions of place-making, sense of place and cultural landscapes, that proceed as if there were deep ontological tension between 'time', 'space' and 'place' often implicate geographical scale as some sort of mediator between abstract space and concrete place, but are similarly unhelpful. Indeed, such discussion often conflates the use of scale-as-abstraction and scale-as-metaphor (Jonas 1994: 258) in ways that redirect attention away from scale and back towards space and place and their social construction.

This paper explicitly considers the nature of scale and its relevance to studies of culture. It seeks to contribute to the conceptualization of geographical scale[1] by bringing into dialogue previously divergent discussions about space, place and difference and proposing an approach that envisions time, space, place and scale as co-equal conceptual and/or analytical elements of cultural landscapes, and, indeed, of complex geographical totalities generally. The paper argues that many of the philosophical debates about embodiment, emplacement and difference abstract a universalized notion of 'place', 'body' and 'self' which confounds and conflates scale issues and consequently confuses the dialectical interplay of 'time', 'space', 'being' and 'culture'. The paper takes the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) and the discursive communities around it as a philosophical entry point into these debates.

Levinas is rarely cited in cultural geography, although his writing and teaching anticipated many of the most prominent recent themes of the discipline. His indirect influence through Derrida (eg 1999), Irigaray (eg 1996) and aspects of cultural studies (eg Best 1997) and anthropology (eg Rose 1996) is wide, but there has been no serious consideration of his relevance to contemporary cultural geography. This paper seeks to address that gap, focusing particularly on issues of scale and difference.

For Levinas, the relationship of difference, between the self and the other, is foundational in human existence. It is this relationship, Levinas argues, that offers humanity a prospect for transcendence and individual and social responsibility:

in social relations the real presence of the other is important … The presence of the Other (Autre) is a presence that teaches us something" (1989 [1949]: 148).

Levinas represents relations between the self and the other in terms of an ethical imperative in which the face-to-face encounter develops terms for understanding our place in society. "Intersubjective space" that space in which one relates to the other(s) “is not symmetrical" (1989 [1947]: 48). He constitutes intersubjective space as a moral space. We occupy moral landscapes in which ethics (responsibility, reciprocity, proximity, collectivity and co-existence) frame and temper interpersonal, structural and political relationships. It is this, Levinas suggests, that distinguishes justice from charity (1989 [1947]: 48). Cultural landscapes, therefore, are simultaneously material and metaphorical.

Yet the economic relationship of 'possession', reduces the other, and in many circumstances the landscape itself, to the interchangeable facelessness of a market commodity. Rather than providing the nourishment we enjoy in social (and environmental) relations, the act of possessing opens up the prospect of also being possessed. When linked to the prospects of a place we call 'home', our 'place in the sun', and juxtaposed with the interests of others who resist our acts of possession, contested cultural landscapes confront us with the threatening, alienating aspect of alterity and the potential for violence (Levinas 1969: 158-162). For Levinas, the individual body offers a fertile metaphor for social relations. The hand, the face, the caress and Eros recur as motifs in which the scale of the body is used metaphorically to engage with the ontological implications of the politics of difference. The hand, for example, is an equivocal organ, offering both the threat of violence, of grasping, taking, acquiring, and also the prospect of more gentle and communicative touch, communication, comfort and caress - "the hand takes and comprehends [prend et comprend]" (1969: 161). The experience of being-in-the-world, then, of feeling at home in the complex cultural landscapes of lived experience, for Levinas, is inescapably concerned with this intersubjective space as it is constructed at multiple scales from the intimate to the metaphysical in time and space. Although he has received no critical attention from geographers, Levinas' language is strongly spatialized. Terms such as 'height', 'distance', 'movement', 'transcendence', 'space', 'dwelling' and 'infinity' appear often in his work. Although he offers no explicit consideration of the concept of geographical scale, Levinas does offer some valuable tools for refining our approach to this difficult concept.

Unlike many philosophers, Levinas did not relegate space to a role of absence or negation. Rather, he applied a very contemporary understanding of space as simultaneously a concept of separation and relation, an "empirical image of a spatial interval which joins its extremities by the very space that separates them" (1969: 175). This expression also reveals something of Levinas' view of totalities as abstractions and as realities. He is interested in relations "whose terms do not form a totality" (1969: 39), such as the self-other relation; and in totalities which implicate embodiment and emplacement. So, for Levinas, aggregation of the self and the other does not produce a new, larger singularity. The relationship, this alterity, is "produced in being" and is "irreducible to the distance establishe[d] between the diverse terms"; it is to be grasped as a relationship of movement in time and space - "as the traversing of this distance" rather than as an exercise of thought, analysis or documentation (Levinas 1969: 39-40, emphasis in original).[2] In these ideas of difference as a concrete engagement, as face to face encounter, as conversation, Levinas offers a view of embodiment, emplacement and place-making that opens new avenues for discussion of scale and its application as a concept in contemporary cultural geography.

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What sort of a thing is scale?

I do not take place to be something simply physical. A place is not a mere patch of ground, a bare stretch of earth, a sedentary set of stones. What kind of thing is it then? … [This question] suggests that there is some single sort of thing that place is, some archetype of Place. But whatever place is, it is not the kind of thing that can be subsumed under already given universal notions -- for example of space and time, substance or causality. A given place may not permit, indeed it often defies, subsumption under given categories. Instead, a place is something for which we continually have to discover or invent new forms of understanding, new concepts in a literal sense of ways of 'grasping-together. A place is more an event than a thing to be assimilated into known categories (Casey 1996: 26, emphasis in original).

In debates about the spatial turn in social theory, the cultural turn in geography and the spatial turn in cultural studies, there has been intense consideration of the relationships between space and place, time and space, and place and identity. Despite the heat and light created in these debates, there has been relatively little clarification of the nature and role of scale. For example, Casey (1998) provides a detailed philosophical history of ideas of place, but the term 'scale' is not listed in his index. In some formulations, space is contrasted with time as static and a-political rather than dynamic and the context of politics and change. In others, it is space that is dynamic, while place is static, nostalgic and conservative (see eg Massey 1992b, 1993b, 1994a, 1995). The spatial politics of cultural identity are deeply implicated in these debates, with much attention given to the way in which social and cultural identity is simultaneously and dialectically reflected in, inscribed upon and created by geography, history and culture.

If, as Casey suggests, place is better understood as an event rather than a thing, perhaps scale is similarly better grasped as an event, a process, a relationship of movement and interaction rather than a discrete thing. Despite its importance in the construction of influential things such as power, gender, being, identity and wealth (inter alia), it is unhelpful to think of scale as the sort of thing that has causal power in its own right. Swyngedouw (1997) offers a wide variety of terms intended to expand the vocabulary of scale[3], but ultimately remains unclear about just what sort of thing he thinks scale might be. In contrast, Agnew suggests that scale is simply a matter of "the spatial level, local, national or global, at which [a] presumed effect of location is operative" 1993: 251, emphasis in original), apparently considering this makes it clear just what sort of thing scale is. But this definition leaves unresolved what is meant by 'spatial level' and what the content of the adjectives 'local', 'national, and 'global' is - and why those particular scale labels (or spatial levels) should be privileged in the definition of scale. In Taylor's materialist framework, scale provides "a way of organizing the subject matter of political geography" (1982: 21). Taylor considers that there was little questioning or critical justification of this approach, and there was an implicit acceptance:

that the three scales - global, national and urban - are as 'natural' as social science's division of activities into economic, social and political. This spatial organization is simply given (Taylor 1982: 21).

Although Taylor goes on to question the uncritical application of these scales as an organizing principle, his suggestion that "the scale of reality is the global scale" (1982: 25), while the national scale is " the scale of ideology" and the local is "the scale of experience" leaves unexamined this question about just what sort of thing scale is. His more recent work (eg 1993) modifies this schema to "world-economy, nation-state and locality" (1993: 47), but leaves the nature of scale constructed within such terms unexamined. To get beyond the use of metaphorical scale labels as if they were ontological givens (see also Howitt 1993), the links between spatial organization and spatial experience in vision, movement, relationship, distance and action need to be explored.

Drawing on the work of 19th century perceptual psychologist William James, Casey (1991) opens up a promising discussion of depth and place. In particular he considers the work of Merleau-Ponty. Casey reviews the treatment of depth in Euclid, Descartes and Hegel, suggesting that because space is more than simply three dimensions of Cartesian representations, reducing experience of 'depth' to a measurement of (interchangeable) height, breadth or length is too simplistic and misrepresents the experience. "Space in general, and depth in particular, do not present themselves in any such well-ordered tridimensional way" (Casey 1991: 8). In this recognition that the dimension of depth is not simply a positioned account of a set of interchangeable spatial dimensions, Casey moves towards an engagement with scale, but stops short of consideration of these issues. But it is in the critical interface between the self and wider scales, the scale politics of identity, that we might begin to better conceptualize the relevance of scale in cultural studies.

Both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty see the visual realm as important. For Levinas the face of the other confronts us visually with the here and now of existence. For Merleau-Ponty it is the primacy of vision that marks humanity's way of being. For both, there is a strong linkage between the visual and the spatial. In The transcendence of words, Levinas discusses his view of space:

I recently saw an exhibition of paintings [in which] Lapicque creates a space that is above all a realm of simultaneity…. Space does not accommodate things; instead through their erasures, things delineate space. The space of each object in turn is divested of its volume, and from behind the rigid line there begins to emerge the line as ambiguity. Lines shed the function of providing a skeleton and become the infinite number of possible connections (Levinas 1989 [1949]: 146-147).

Levinas goes on to ask "isn't the spatial dimension of this game of erasures related to the visual dimension?" Indeed, it is. The notion of the here-and-now is explicitly temporal and spatial; it locates one in time and space. And this spatial dimension is about being-in-the-world. At intimate scales it is about embodiment; more widely, it is about horizons, emplacement, coexistence and simultaneity; most widely it is about infinity and transcendence:

To see is to be in a world that is entirely here and self-sufficient. Any vision beyond what is given remains within what is given. The infinity of space, like the infinity of the signified referred to by the sign, is equally absent from the here below. Vision is a relation with a being such that the being attained through it precisely appears as the world (Levinas 1989 [1949]: 147).

For Merleau-Ponty, the spatiality of vision emerges from serious consideration of depth as more than just a third dimension of space. Depth is not reducible to an alternative perspective on the other two dimensions of Euclidean space. It is depth that creates real-world spatiality. Casey suggests that Merleau-Ponty considers three things important in 'primordial depth':

First depth is not constructed but concretely given …

Second, depth is less a dimension than a medium in which the perceiving subject and the perceived world are both immersed

[And thirdly, depth] cannot be … measured - in paces, miles or any other unit of mensuration. Instead of being the kind of thing that yields to measurement, it is like an aura or atmosphere that resists precise specification (Casey 1991: 10-11).

For Casey, place provides a bridge between primordial depth as an abstraction and being in the world. He suggests that the two concepts (depth and place) are indissoluble. Constrained within an horizon, we envision "various things (materials, objects, events, people) existing in depth, that is to say, occupying various places in relation to the ultimate outer boundary region which we in term call the horizon (Casey 1991: 16, emphasis in original). The notion of horizon is, of course, contextually contingent. As a boundary of the field of vision, it implies an emplaced and embodied seeing subject. It changes with the subject's movement, or with the shift to another seeing subject.[4] By providing the medium through which perceiving subjects and perceived objects interact, depth and place create an enlivened spatiality. But it is precisely the irreducibility of depth to its Cartesian simplification as a third dimension of spatial measurement that creates the need for a scale lexicon and a conceptualization of geographical scale. The co-location of mutually perceiving subjects in cultural landscapes, with their institutional, environmental, economic and social complexities creates relationships that are always and complexly placed but are not place-bound.

In Merleau-Ponty's representation, depth (and its place in perception) becomes crucial to 'envelopment'. Casey critiques Merleau-Ponty's discussion for (a) failing to specify the relationship between primordial and objective depth, and (b) failing to explain the relationship between depth and the other basic parameters of spatial experience (eg movement and level). Casey seeks to resolve these concerns by exploring the way in which "place grants depth" (1991: 14). But Merleau-Ponty's discussion does explicitly link deal with space in terms that are consistent with more recent geographers' discussions (see below). For Merleau-Ponty:

Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible (1962: 243).

In exploring the issues of space and place in western philosophy, Casey is curiously and unhelpfully silent on 'scale'. Although he helpfully quotes J.J.Gibson writing that "A place is a location in the environment as contrasted with a point in space" (cited on p15), and considers the ways in which the horizon (as a relationally contextualised limit or boundary) provides a series of levels in which to anchor our perception of distance and depth in "the perceptual field bounded in the end only by the horizon and by the body" (p17), Casey leaves unexamined notions of scale and embodiment that might offer a further step along the path he lays out. His detailed attention to place as an experiential setting and space as an abstract notion shifts his attention away from the way in which things that are beyond the scale of immediate human experience are constructed, mediated and experienced. And yet, in the context of 'globalization' and other intensely scaled social, political and even environmental processes, it is precisely this set of issues that demands our attention and offers new insights into key questions.

By itself scale is not a producer of adjectival spaces (or places). It is not a uni-dimensional or single faceted element. No simple schema proposing an orderly ladder of scales from local to global is adequate to capture this complexity of the concept. But it is far easier to say what scale is not than to clarify what it is. It is useful to consider at least three interacting facets as constituting scale - size, level and relation (Howitt 1998).[5] Consideration of the ways in which scale is implicated as a structural element in spatial relations through the operation of wider scale influences on local processes. Competing notions of scale, for example, govern how spaces are bounded in different approaches to spatial structures of production, identity and consumption. On the one hand, the construction of virtually autonomous local spaces nested neatly within larger scale spaces constitutes and sets boundaries around ‘the local’ as if its extra-local linkages are genuinely external relations. On the other hand, more relational approaches set boundaries around ‘the local’ for analytical purposes, and always acknowledging that extra-local linkages are actually ‘internal’ relations that co-constitute ‘the local’.

Scale as size

For geographers, scale has been a matter of long debate. Early discussion focused on issues of scale as size - consideration of appropriate map scales for particular forms of analysis and presentation (eg Haggett 1965), and how to transfer conclusions drawn from analysis at one geographical scale to other scales or within a different spatial frame at the same scale (eg McCracken 1983). For Bird, establishing an appropriate scale for analysis involved taking account of "the amount of space under consideration" and "the numbers of people" (1956: 25). Haggett's approach to scale as size (1975: 16) suggests that concepts of scale imply a hierarchy of "orders of magnitude", with "the geographer's world" limited to a range of objects of study 10⁴ to 10⁹ cm. More recently Hudson (1992) has focused on map scales in a discussion of "scale in space and time" that acknowledges "scale [as] an important consideration in nearly all geographical studies", but limits its horizon to issues of measurement and maps. Holly (1978) noted the link between spatial and temporal scales, but retained an unhelpful separation between the scales he used.[6] Carlstein and Thrift use the terms size and scale virtually interchangeably, but note that in terms of scale issues, the notion of size has temporal, spatial and social aspects (1978: 257-258, emphasis added). Similarly, Parkes and Thrift (1978: 119-120) imply that scale is not simply interchangeable with size, when they suggest they "conceive society as a series of levels which act as mediators in the realization of place". In GIS, environmental and various quantitative analyses, scale issues continue to be predominantly treated as issues of size. In cultural geography, however, it is more often level rather than size that is at issue.

Scale as level

The idea of scale as level is often conflated with scale as size, with a common implication of nested hierarchical ordering of space. In this concept of scale, wider scales are understood to encompass greater amounts of complexity (divisions of labour, administrative reach, cultural diversity etc) and to achieve greater geographical scope. In some discussions, this idea of levels has been presented as layers, with each succeeding scale layer subsuming those below it (eg Storper 1988 168). McGuirk (1997: 481) suggests emphasis on scale as level often reflects acceptance of an "indisputable hierarchy of scales - global, national, regional, and local - in which processes, outcomes and responses can be categorised as originating at distinct and discrete levels". McGuirk rejects the necessity for this hierarchical foundation for the notion of scale, and advocates a framework in which scales mutually constitute each other and in which the production of scale and interscale relations becomes a matter for empirical investigation rather than theoretical assumption.

By adding the idea of scale as level to the notion of scale as size, it becomes clear that upscaling from 'local' to 'national' or 'international' implies not just larger areas, but a domain in which more complexity is encompassed by specified relations (in society, space and time). In some settings, for example in relation to governance, this reflects aggregation of functions - more is more complex, whether it is more people, more functions, more activities or more types of things. The distinction between scale as size and scale as level is perhaps best illustrated by the construction of 'nation' as a scale label. In the extreme cases of Singapore and the Russian Federation, the scale label refers to areas of entirely different size. While equivalence of administrative structure and complexity between all 'national' entities could not be supported, the scale distinction between the national scale of Singapore and the 'urban' scale of Brisbane or Chicago or Thessaloniki is more to do with 'level' than size.[7] What is clear is that relations that are constructed as 'national' not only encompass a wider range of functions and relations of more complexity, but also implicate those functions and relations in a wider geographical arena. For example, while local and sub-national regional governments may intervene in social policy and investment decisions in many ways, questions of international trade, foreign affairs and national boundaries are not within their ambit.[8]

Similarly, in understanding the implications of the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, the reconstruction of governance within new nation states confronts precisely these issues of contextualized geographies. If the reconstitution of the national scale in the territories of the former Soviet state are reduced to a despatialized politics of international relations, it becomes difficult to adequately grasp why Kazakhstan is different from Latvia; or why Russian relations with Chechnya might proceed differently to relations with Azerbaijan. Yet it is precisely in the interplay of geography, history, society and governance, in embodied and emplaced geopolitics at several scales, that these issues are to be understood, engaged with and responded to.[9]

Indeed, in many social science settings, scale refers more to level, scope and complexity than to any speciable spatial entity. In discussing, for example, the 'scale' of a research problem, a political issue or an environmental problem, the spatial extent of the concern often remains invisible. It becomes 'the unthought, the unseen and the unheard' in such constructions, although it exercises influence.[10] Yet, there remains a widespread commitment to hierarchical representations of scale as level. In cultural studies, this often leads to simplistic representations of globalization as imposing a developmental trajectory on people and places, and to a separation of fields of study as various scales (identity studies as local, industry studies as global etc).[11]

Scale as relation

Although most academic discussion of scale is limited to scale as size and scale as level, there is a growing literature discussing relational aspects of scale (Howitt 1993, 1998; Jonas 1994; Swyngedouw 1997; McGuirk 1997; Fagan 1995, 1997; Kelly 1997). Starting from an acknowledgment of the fundamentally metaphorical nature of scale labels, this literature considers that scale boundaries are better represented as interfaces, and that it is not only larger scale entities (global or national) that contain smaller scale entities, but that the larger scale entities are at the same time contained within smaller scale entities. If one constitutes scale as size, this observation would be at best paradoxical, even nonsensical. Yet it is clear that there is an inescapable dialectical link between, for example, national culture and individual values. The latter clearly contain, respond to, encapsulate, and are constructed from the former. Similarly, if one constitutes scale as level, the mutual embeddedness that Swyngedouw (1992, 1997) characterizes as 'glocalization' is all but incomprehensible. Any locality (local scale space) is constituted not only by things that are directly manifested within the locality, but also by cross-scale relations (eg Massey 1992a, 1993a, 1993b). These relations operate not just hierarchically, but also simultaneously; not just sequentially but also in different orders. It is clear that dialectical, relational concepts of scale are more appropriate in cultural research than previously influential categorical and absolute concepts. In the process, it also becomes clear that a shift in scale is simultaneously a change of both quantity and quality. A shift in scale produces consideration not just of more (or less) but also different.

So, how are we to answer the question of just what sort of thing scale is? It is an abstraction, and as Ollman (1993) observes, like any abstraction it will demonstrate elements of 'extension', 'level of generality' and 'vantage point'. It reflects facets of space, time, culture and environment. It has dimensions of size, level and relation, and is paradoxically simultaneously hierarchical and non-hierarchical. If social relations are always spatial (eg Massey 1984), if we are always both 'in place' and 'in culture' (Entrikin 1991: 1), then social and environmental relations are also always scaled. Scale, in other words, is simultaneously metaphor, experience, event, moment, relation and process. It is implicated in, and simultaneously implicates other core concepts in geography such as space, place and time. It is also deeply implicated in core cultural concepts such as identity, difference and subject, and in Levinas' core terms such as self, other, face, ethics and infinity. It is an abstraction that enables us to capture some of that paradoxical relatedness-but-separateness that Levinas referred to discussing economic relations (1969: 175), and to name and analyze them.

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Space, place, time and scale

In philosophical discourse and social science method, we have often witnessed a profound separation of time, space and place (the long debate about which precedes the other in human thought, which subsumes the others). One of the implications of this assumed separation is a common expectation that each of these fundamental concepts can be conceptualized as categorically distinct and independent from the others, and that theorization can proceed in a fragmented way. Yet, human existence is always geographically, historically and culturally contextualized. Identity (and otherness) is always and inescapably contextualized. It is also inevitably embodied, emplaced and scaled. As Massey (1984) has so eloquently explained, neither the spatial, the social nor the natural should or can be theorized by social scientists as independent of each other. They co-construct each other and must be understood as co-equal components of any sophisticated social scientific analytical framework. Similarly, the fundamental concepts building blocks of the geographical imagination and its application to the world, must also be understood as co-constituting each other, as co-equal elements of our conceptual framework. These abstractions each reflect and contain the others, and their separation is a matter of context and purpose.

Spatial, cultural and natural processes and relationships are always scaled. They are contextualized across space, between places, across and between times, within and between groups and territories. Addressing this co-dependency of concepts requires a commitment to accepting a radical contextualization, a commitment to taking context seriously as an ontological element rather than treating it as a superficially contingent element.[12] If one grasps the philosophical impact of radical contextualization it is apparent that cultural research must both investigate and debate rather than either assume or ignore the implications of geographical, historical, cultural, political and environmental context. In scientific discourse Einstein's theory of general relativity and Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy have insisted on consideration of space-time (contextual) relationships as constitutive of material phenomena across all scales. In practice, this has led to recognition that the field of science is not somehow disconnected from other human endeavour, but is intimately woven into human settings through (contextual) ethical, political, psychological and material imperatives.[13]

As Massey notes (1992b: 65) "space is very much on the agenda these days". But its conceptualization and relationship to place, time and scale are hotly contested issues. For Massey space is "constructed out of interrelations, as the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales" (1992b: 80), while place "is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location" (1992a: 12). But in much of the cultural studies discourse on 'space', the richly contextualized and complex notion advocated by Massey is reduced to a "neutral expanse", to "mere empty territory to be colonised and thus made over into enclosed places" (Best 1998: 7-8). Massey articulates a view of place where identity is a product, at least in part, of "positive interrelations with elsewhere" (which she calls elsewhere a "global", "non-parochial" or "progressive" sense of place (eg 1992a, 1993, 1993b, 1994, ch6). This contrasts to many notions of localised 'home' places, where security and identity is achieved by an imagined "reassuring boundedness" which includes "negative counterposition with the Other beyond the boundaries" (Massey 1992a: 12). In this formulation concepts of place, space, time, identity and the other are each implicated in the other concepts; these notions co-construct each other.[14]

In contrast to Massey, Harvey links space and time in terms of "time-space compression" (eg 1989). His formulation of space and place as "oppositions that contain the other" (1993: 15), confirms that "what goes on in a place cannot be understood outside of the space relations that support that place any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places" (1993: 12). Yet Harvey also maintains a paradoxical tension between space and place.[15] Harvey (1990: 421) suggests that "deep struggles over the meaning and social definition of space and time are rarely arrived at directly. They usually emerge out of much simpler conflicts over the appropriation of particular spaces and times." Elsewhere, he provides a commentary on "the problem of place" (1993: 4) which reveals how intimately place and scale are entwined. He identifies a range of words that "refer to the generic qualities of place", listing terms such as milieu, locality, location, locale, neighbourhood, region and territory. Other terms designate "particular kinds of places" - city, village, town, megalopolis and state. And others still, "have strong connotations of place" - home, hearth, 'turf', community, nation and landscape. In such formulations, place is constructed as a bounded space to be possessed, controlled and exploited. Fagan (1995) considers the processes of economic restructuring widely glossed as 'globalization' and notes the difficulty of reconciling political engagement with "the rootedness of local lives" (citing Hanson and Pratt 1995: 22) and the challenges of theorizing global restructuring of economic relations (also Fagan 1997: 198). In public policy, theorizing these scales as relatively autonomous leads to approaches that fragment the local from the global, the economic from the cultural, and the environmental from the social. Even where global-local interactions are prioritized, privileging the economic over cultural, social or environmental dimensions[16] produces policy fragmentation that reflects the failure to synthesize inter-scale relations. Nor is it sufficient to deal with this issue in terms of a reconfiguration of the nation scale in terms of regulation and regional policy (eg Swyngedouw 1992: 43-44), or to suggest that the global and local scales are "two ends of a geographic continuum divided by, but defined through, the national" (Lukes 1994: 617). The suggestion that the 1990s has produced flows (of information, migrants, trade etc) that are "decentering, despatializing, and dematerializing forces" that challenge "spatial sovereignties" with "new universals and new particulars being created by networks of transnational exchange" (Lukes 1994: 622) mistakes the rhetoric of hyper-reality for the substance of lived experience and the nature of cross-scale dialectics.

Much is made of 'local' and 'national' identity, and its implications for relations with others. Although it is often not explicitly considered, where scale is discussed, it is now commonplace to refer to it in terms of social construction. Scale, we are told, is constructed in and by social relations through regulation, governance, institutions, class and gender (inter alia). Kelly (1997: 152) considers the implications of social constructions of globalization for "alternative constructions and resistence". Through 'scale politics' (and the 'politics of scale') various institutional actors such as transnational corporations, nation states, trade unions, indigenous peoples' organizations, environmental groups, performers, community organizations and others manipulate geographical scale relations to pursue their interests.[17] In Kelly's case study from the Philippines, he identifies how "destabilizing the discourse of globalization provides a strong basis for resisting oppressive local practices" and simultaneously challenging "the discourses and practices which suppress their opposition" (1997: 152). Swyngedouw (1992, 1997) offers the neologism 'glocalization' as an attempt to capture the importance of constant change in the scaling of both material processes and discursive representations of those processes (see also Lukes 1994; Robertson 1995). Swyngedouw argues that "theoretical and political priority ... never resides in a particular geographical scale, but rather in the process through which particular scales become (re)constituted" (1997: 141). Although there is considerable agreement about the idea of 'social construction', I am far from convinced that there is clarity, let alone agreement, on what exactly it is that is being constructed in this way! Scale terms are often used casually and loosely, as if they are unproblematic, natural categories, not socially constructed and hotly contested assertions (eg Smith 1992, 1993). Local, national and global, in particular, are used, even by social constructionists, as if they were givens rather than complex elements of dynamic situations under construction, contestation and reconstruction.

Jonas points out that it is not just the scale labels and what they are intended to signify that are socially constructed, but also the scale of analysis itself and researchers' adoption of particular scales of analysis. In reviewing the adoption of the local state as an analytical scale frame in social research in Britain in the 1980s, he notes how:

the Conservative Party's domination of the national political arena and its focus on national economic policies created an opportunity for the Labour Party and the left to mobilize around local and metropolitan boundaries. This locality was not simply where change was being experienced, it had also become politically contested and was therefore contributing to that change (Jonas 1994: 258-259; see also Massey 1991).

This social construction of researchers' scale frame for social analysis is another element of radical contextualization that needs to be considered in deconstructing the nature of geographical scale as a metaphor, as an abstraction, and as a material phenomenon.

Another term posited as providing a link between space and place is landscape (eg Hirsch 1993). In providing a culturally-mediated relationship between foreground and background, between the ‘here and now’ of place and the horizon of space (Hirsch 1993: 4), landscape offers another metaphor for scaling cultural relationships and processes in space, time and place. Hirsch’s useful discussion considers the notion of landscape within the discursive space of anthropology. He considers Carter’s (1987) account of the colonial encounter in Botany Bay when James Cook’s expedition encountered/intruded into the cultural landscapes of Eora people. The different cultural logics engaged in that encounter (and subsequent reconfiguring of Australian landscapes) used contrasting narrative forms to contextualize people and landscape. For the European imperial narrative, exploration, discovery and settlement are the central tropes. The other might be unknown, but the human other was constructed as inherently inferior (capable of being known and dismissed) and the non-human other, however exotic and bizarre, capable of discovery, exploitation and subsumation to the European meta-narrative of conquest and accumulation (see also Blaut 1993; Rose 1997). Although the task of encompassing the ontological implications of this distant encounter for contemporary Eora people[18] is difficult, perhaps impossible, what is interesting for the current argument is that the Eora narrative for that landscape was the Dreaming. Although indigenous peoples’ sense of place is often glossed as exemplifying a localized world view, the Dreaming (which the anthropologist Stanner (1979) represented as ‘everywhen’) offers a scale metaphor which encompasses the infinite within the immediate. It mediates relationships across space and time at vast scales, while retaining an embodiment and emplacement that is concrete, local and specific. This ‘local sense of place’ gloss for non-European or non-academic ontologies just will not do. It reserves to the imperial, acquisitive European gaze the only cultural logic of multiple scales, reducing the question of scale in cultural relations to an underlying economic and political logic that is Eurocentric. Yet in the Dreaming, there is an ethical narrative that establishes a very different relationship between the here and now of place and the wider narrative of distant horizons of space, time and social and environmental order.

For Rose (1996), the Dreaming nurtures the landscape as a 'nourishing terrain'; country.[19] This term 'country' in Aboriginal English encompasses people (countrymen) and place (homeland); here and now and horizon; Dreaming and lived experience. Using Levinas' metaphor of 'nourishment', Rose writes an account of embodiment and emplacement that foregrounds the way in which place, identity and ontology are mutually constitutive. In discussing the Yolngu-matha language from northeast Arnhem Land, Christie (1992; also Christie and Perret 1996) offers a detailed insight into the way in which language shapes our experience and understanding of inter-cultural experience. Taken-for-granted categories such as 'plant/animal' or 'land/sea' are revealed in the encounter with Yolngu-matha speakers not as self-evident realities, but as culturally specific constructions reflecting ontological assumptions.[20]

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Levinas, scale and the other

This leads us more or less directly to Levinas and his consideration of otherness, lived experience and ethics. Although it is notoriously difficult to encapsulate Levinas' body of work in a summary statement (Davis 1996), it is clear that for him relations between time and space were intimate. They involve concrete engagement with implications for all subsequent abstraction. Theoretical knowledge and philosophical speculation had to be comprehended into social experience:

The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still and always a solitude…. [My book Time and the Other] tries to understand the role of time in this relationship: time is not a simple experience of duration, but a dynamism which leads us elsewhere than towards the things we possess. It is as if in time there were a movement beyond what is equal to us (Levinas 1985: 60-61).

Levinas' writing disrupts common binaries underpinning many problematic approaches to scale. It is often represented as paradoxical (eg Cohen 1986:9; Davis 1996). Even the self-other binary is disrupted to establish relationships between the self, the other-that-is-like-me and the entirely-other. Levinas grapples to establish terms for engaging with relationships between things whose coexistence is not reducible to a unity. In Time and the Other, Levinas asserts that "existence is pluralist". A plurality, he writes, "insinuates itself into the very existing of the existent" (1989 [1947]: 43). In grappling with the self-other relation, which is always contextualized "because we are always immersed in the empirical world" (1989 [1947]: 43), Levinas targets that which is, by convention, unscaleable, immeasurable and incomprehensible the infinite. But his starting point for this journey is instructive. Without seeking to accrete one scale upon another; without asserting a hierarchical structure, Levinas writes of infinity "I think the erotic relationship furnishes us with a prototype of it" (1989 [1947]: 43). Here again we see the paradoxical characteristic of scale being emphasized, with the characteristics of the largest scales becoming accessible through the smallest.[21]

In cultural studies, the shift between one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many is troubling. Once this shift is spatialized, it clearly implicates the notion of scales and scale shifting. The link between psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology, however, is not reducible to a measurement or a formula. While individuals, social formations and cultural groupings may be mutually influential, there is no pre-determined causal link between them. One simply cannot predict individual behaviour from the knowledge of social behaviour or cultural values, nor vice versa. Neither can one read off from large structures the details of small events and processes, whether past, present or future (cf Storper 1988). This conundrum leads to many studies that deal with different scales as autonomous spheres of social action. There are, for example, studies of the body as a site of production of identity, as a scale of analysis; just as there are studies that examine the neighbourhood, or the city, or the nation as a scale of production or analysis. In statistical analysis, the transfer of explanations from one spatial frame to another has long been acknowledged as fraught (eg McCracken 1983). Yet we do shift between geographical scales and sociological levels. Feminist scholarship and queer theory have facilitated a reconsideration of the body as a scale of analysis. Geographers have engaged enthusiastically with the challenges that arise from serious consideration of this spatial scale, but have generally avoided a shift to the metaphysical scale (the infinite), generally limiting their scope to global (cultural, economic) and planetary (physical, environmental) scale. But Levinas' traverse of this terrain, from erotic to metaphysical is enticing, and offers some valuable insights relevant to more concrete and conventional cultural and social analysis.

For Levinas, movement and its implied spatiality are central to the creation of meaning in human experience. Movement, the journey, the distance traveled, is always through cultural landscapes - nourishing terrains in which the self confronts the other[22]; spaces in which one is constantly confronted with glimpses (or more) of that which cannot be subsumed, that which is unfamiliar; places and peoples with pasts and futures; landscapes in which the subject feels simultaneously at home and vulnerable. Indeed, in the opening lines of Totality and Infinity, Levinas highlights this movement as fundamental to metaphysics, and also to the "unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence" (1969: 52):

[Metaphysics] appears as a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us, whatever be the unknown lands that bound it or that it hides from view, from an 'at home' which we inhabit, toward an alien outside-of-oneself, toward a yonder.

The term of this movement, the elsewhere or the other, is called other in an eminent sense. No journey, no change of climate or of scenery could satisfy the desire bent toward it. The other metaphysically desired is not 'other' like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell, the landscape which I contemplate, like, sometimes, myself for myself, this 'I', that 'other'. I can 'feed' on these realities and to a very great extent satisfy myself, as though I had been simply lacking them. The alterity is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor. The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other (1969: 33, emphasis in original).

Thus, the other and the elsewhere are implicated in each other, and their transcendence does not, in Levinas' view, involve a negation of the distance, of alterity, but its confirmation and maintenance. The relationship between the self and the other is not reducible to a single term, a common set of characteristics:

The absolutely other is the Other. He and I [sic] do not form a number … We are the same and the other. The conjunction and here designates neither addition nor the power of one term over the other. We shall try to show that the relation between the same and the other … is language (1969: 39, emphasis in original).

Language is a relationship with alterity. It permits conversation with the other across ostensible boundaries of difference, but does not subsume the other to the self; does not possess the other:

The relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question the world possessed. The relationship with the Other, transcendence consists in speaking the world to the Other (1969: 173).

This theme has been widely engaged with in cultural studies, in part because of the serendipitous English form - wor(l)d. In fiction, for example, Le Guin refers to the task of ‘writing worlds’ (1989; see also 1976). In cultural geography, too, this theme has engendered discussion and debate about the relationships between text and territory, word and world, representation and represented.[23] For Derrida (1999; also 1997, 1998) it is words such as welcome, respond, hospitality and friendship that offer the path to engagement with the other (and to democracy).[24] For Levinas, it is conversation and the face-to-face that are crucial, and which leads him to distinguish the act of speaking from its more enduring artifacts in writing:

Face and discourse are tied. The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse…. it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility which is this authentic relationship.

In discourse, I have always distinguished between … the saying and the said. That the saying must bear a said is a necessity of the same order as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations. But the saying is the fact that before the face I do not simply remain there contemplating it, I respond to it (1985: 87-88, emphasis in original; see also 1969: section III: 187-219; 1985: 42).

Levinas points out that social science's reliance on the written word has "accustomed us to underestimating the direct social link between persons who speak, and to prefer silence or the complex relations, such as customs or law or culture, laid down by civilization" (1989 [1949]: 148). Here we find ourselves drawn back toward more recognizable representations of scale politics and issues of place, identity and power. We might now, however, make this move with a very different view of otherness and difference. For Harvey, for example, "'difference' and 'otherness' is produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment and a proliferating geographical division of labour’” (1993: 6, emphasis in original). For Levinas, in contrast the difference (and the opportunities it creates for transcendence)[25] is certainly reflected in and in its turn reflects economic relations. However, it is also simultaneously metaphysical and corporealized in space. Difference is a relationship with infinity that implies a discursive space rather than a geographical scale, and in which the western notion of a bounded, individualized and constrained self is contrasted with a radically contextualized self.

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Embodiment and emplacement

In the social sciences, attention to the spatiality of social experience has opened avenues for reconsideration of the embodiment and emplacement of social experience. All too often, however, promising and enticing avenues have become detours and dead-ends through the reduction of complex phenomena to simplistic, often binarized, representations that obscure and reify rather than illuminate the issues at hand. For example, in glossing the increased reach of economic, political and cultural power and influence in the late twentieth century as 'globalization' and contrasting it to imperatives derived from 'the local', social science has risked radically misunderstanding and misrepresenting the multiplicity of relationships, forces and processes influencing social life.

McDowell (1996: 36) suggests that the concept of embodiment as:

a node in a set of fields variously structured by sets of social relations ranging from the global to the most intimate scale seems … to parallel the notion of place that is common in geographical work, while reminding geographers that questions of identity are not solely related to the smallest scale, to the body and the home or to the community, which is where too many geographers continue to place them. If we move towards a definition of both identity and place as a network of relations, unbounded and unstable, rather than fixed, we are able to challenge essentialist notions of place and being, of local, face-to-face relations as somehow more 'authentic'.

In some debates, spatialization of social science has been limited to the addition of the dimension of space to previously a-spatial approaches. Recognition of the uneven spatial distribution of various phenomena, and the measurement and representation of spatial difference, for example, added spatiality to analysis that might have previously been generalized as if national data represented socially or culturally homogenous spaces. For others, geography was to be introduced by place-based contextualization of various phenomena. Using case studies to illustrate the differences that space made to social processes that had previously been theorized as if space didn't matter, there was an explosion of place-based social research that revealed the diversity and complexity of social phenomena such as gender, race, culture and power. Careful research in diverse localities has also begun to illustrate the ways in which difference constructs particular spaces - in the process establishing the relationship between 'the social' and 'the spatial' as dialectical rather than determinist. Research in the 1980s and 1990s has greatly enhanced our understanding of and evidence for this dialectical relationship, but this is hardly a new insight. Indeed, not only was this a starting point for the Open University's introductory geography course in the early-1980s (Massey 1984), but it was a point made in the nineteenth century by Kropotkin (1885) and repeated many times since (see eg Stoddart 1987).

Both Benhabib and Rose tackle the issue of the bounded self in helpful ways for our effort to better comprehend the nature and implications of geographical scale. For Benhabib 1992 [1987]), it is the distinction between a concrete and a generalized other that offers a critical vantage point on modernist thinking about the relationship between the self and the other. From the modern tradition, she argues, we have inherited a “dichotomous characterization” (1992 [1987]: 280) of this relationship. From the standpoint of the generalized other, each and every subject is reduced to a generalized and interchangeable other which is equivalent to the self “entitled to the same rights and duties as we would ascribe to ourselves” (1992 [1987]: 280). In contrast to this:

The standpoint of the concrete other … requires us to view each and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution … [and to] confirm not only your humanity but your human individuality (Benhabib 1992 [1987]: 281).

In both standpoints, however, the other is defined only in relation to the self. In seeking universally relevant insights, this approach offers a “’monological’ model of moral reasoning” (1992 [1987]: 286). It is poorly equipped to deal with collective identities, pluralities and difference. Following Habermas, Benhabib advocates a communicative, or radically contextualized, basis for moral theory a relational-interactive theory of identity in which moral agents communicate with one another in actual dialogue (1992 [1987]: 288).

Rose (1999) offers another step away from the bounded self as the basis for moral judgment and understanding of the self-other relationship. She takes her readers into the loving relationships, the mutual entwinement that exists between people and country in many Australian Aboriginal ontologies. In her view one's identity and relationships in these cultural settings is not bound by the body but constructed in the interpenetration of bodies (human and non-human; past, present and future; here and not here) and places. The Aboriginal English term ‘country’ that captures this ‘matrix of relationships’ is an explicitly scaled concept. It is a matrix that is:

Small enough to accommodate face-to-face groups of people, large enough to sustain their lives, politically autonomous in respect of other, structurally equivalent countries, and at the same time interdependent with other countries (Rose 1999: 177).

Rose considers the complex ways in which the dominant western view of the self as coterminous with the body is completely inadequate for understanding Aboriginal views of the self:

… it would be a mistake to regard the boundaries of the person as coterminous with the body, and it would equally be a mistake to believe that if other people share a person’s body, that person is thereby violated. On the contrary, the persons achieve their maturity and integrity [their ‘self-realization' in some senses] through relationships with people, animals, country, and Dreamings.

Implicit in this construction of the person is the idea that places, trees, waterholes, Dreaming sites, and other animals are also subjects. Their being and becoming in the world exists in relation to other subjects, some of whom are human beings (Rose 1999: 179-180).

In other words, in the Aboriginal account reported by Rose, subjectivity, one’s sense of self (and implicitly one’s understanding of the Other), is not embodied within a particular body. Rather:

Subjects … are constructed both within and without; subjectivity is located within the site [and scale] of the body, within the bodies of other people and other species, and within the world in trees, rockholes, on rock walls, and so on (Rose 1999: 180).

In work in progress, Langton offers an account of Aboriginal philosophy which offers a further extension on Rose’s consideration of the ethical and political implications of this conceptualization of subjectivity. For the Bama people of eastern Cape York Peninsula, the world is understood as "a biogeography of human and non-human presences, some living and mortal, and some spiritual and ever-present" (typescript p20). Langton offers an account of how Bama ontology grasps the simultaneity of past, present and future in a sentient landscape, in which Bama "separate the human from the non-human in one domain only - the mundane; while in the sacred, all these essences and potentials are pre-existing in the primordial landscape behind the landscape - the sacred" (typescript p20). Drawing on astronomers' idea of "stars in the night sky as representation of the past, the present and the future", Langton suggests Bama encounter the 'Old People' in the landscape "just as stars are encountered in gazing at the night sky". By intertwining space and time in their sentient landscapes, Bama "perceive the spiritual presence of elders in the landscape as what has emanated through time since the demise of the ancestor and can now be understood, guided by the elders, as one perceives the place in the landscape where their being is represented by the spiritual enlightenment which the invocations of the elders quicken" (typescript p20-21).

Being, sociality, temporality and spatiality are co-dependent, intertwined. Embodiment and emplacement co-constitute each other in the encounter with the other that the self must have in order to exist. Being is being-in-place. It is also, inescapably being-in-time, and being-in-society. As Langton observes of Bama ontology, "space and temporality are intertwined as contingent dimensions of life … That which enlivens people and places also enlivens the dead as traces in the landscape and resides itself in places emanating expressions of power …" (typescript p21). For Levinas, "death is alterity" a relationship with difference that makes life meaningful and vulnerable. For the Bama death is a continuing and affirming presence of others whose existence in the landscape "is a source of power in place, which enlivens the subject" (Langton, typescript p24). "This mysterious contradiction", Langton notes, "is the ontological foundation of [Bama] subjectivity and the subject's place in the physical world as both a cultural and natural phenomenon" (p24).

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Eros: body, porosity and alterity

Heaven knows no frontiers

And I've seen heaven in your eyes.[26]

As already indicated, engagement with the other, for Levinas, is not an abstract notion. It is made real in the process of experience, of being-in-the-world, being-in-place. For many readers, it is precisely this difficult juxtaposition of concrete experience as an abstract notion that makes reading Levinas difficult. However, it is the experience, the need to both recognize and traverse the distance between the self and the other, the need to recognize that this is a separation that cannot be ignored, and that it is a separation that must be transcended, a separation that binds without subsuming, that matters for Levinas. This is particularly clear in his writing of that simultaneously most intimate and most transcendent relationship with the other, Eros. For example, in Time and the Other, Levinas write that:

the exteriority of the other is not simply due to the space that separates what remains identical through the concept, nor is it due to any difference that the concept would manifest through spatial exteriority. The relationship with alterity is neither spatial nor conceptual (1989 [1947]: 48).

In characterizing the erotic relationship as embracing this alterity, Levinas characterizes gender difference as "a formal structure", which is neither "a contradiction", nor "the duality of two complementary terms" which presuppose a pre-existing whole.[27] Eros differs from "possession and power" and is "neither a struggle, nor a fusion, nor a knowledge". It holds "an exceptional place among relationships". This so for Levinas because:

It is a relationship with alterity, with mystery, with what (in a world where there is everything) what is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there - not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity" (1989 [1947]: 50).

While Levinas unequivocally writes as a male subject in his discussion of Eros, he affirms the subjectivity of the other, and the reciprocity implicit in the relationship indeed, the ethical imperatives derived from his vision of the self-other relation, particularly from his discussion of the caress and fecundity, underpin his thinking. In responding to Levinas, Irigaray writes equally unequivocally as a woman, and in the process offers a startlingly beautiful and provocative glimpse of the embodied self. The sensory experience of touch, she argues, precedes the expression of abstract concepts:

Before orality comes to be, touch is already in existence. No nourishment can compensate for the grace, or the work, of touching. Touch makes it possible to wait, to gather strength, so that the other will return to caress to reshape, from within and from without, flesh that is given back to itself in the gestures of love. The most subtly necessary guardian of my life being the other's flesh. Approaching and speaking to me with his hands. Bringing me back to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, the other's hands, these palms with which he approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body and call me back to the remembrance of the most profound intimacy. As he caresses me, he bids me neither to disappear nor to forget but rather to, to remember the place where, for me, the most intimate life holds itself in reserve. Searching for what has not yet come into being, for himself, he invites me to become what I have not yet become (Irigaray 1986: 232-233)

The mystery of relations between lovers is more terrible, but infinitely less deadly, than the destruction of submission to sameness … Sameness, quantitatively polemical when it comes to its place, occupies my flesh, demarcates and subdivides my space, lays siege to and sets up camp on my horizon - making it uninhabitable for me and inaccessible for the lover (Irigaray 1986: 235).

So at this most intimate of scales, the hand to flesh, flesh to flesh intimacy of lovemaking, Irigaray provides a seductive glimpse of the relationship between space, place, movement and being that offers an unsettling illumination of issues of scale. Her consideration of porosity, mucous membranes, fecundity and penetration remind us that the most sacrosanct of imagined boundaries the boundary created by Hollywood around the individual, the self is meaningful only in relation to the other; and most meaningful in that moment of self-realization that derives from the face-to-face encounter with the unbridgeable gulf between the self and the other in lovemaking.

In the intimate scale of corporeality and carnal love “the most intimate mucous threshold in the dwelling place" (p 243) Irigaray offers a vision of coexistence which at wider geographical scales challenges humanity to overcome the terror of the unknowable other. In crossing that most intimate threshold, which she suggests we consider not as "a profanation of the temple" but "an entrance into another, more secret place", she sees a more revealing metaphor. In the mutual inebriation of lovemaking, she reveals the difference between fear and transcendence[28]:

where the beloved receives and offers the possibility of nuptials. An inebriation unlike that of the conqueror, who captures and dominates his prey [or one might add, the dwelling place of the prey, displacing them from their nourishing terrain, their place in the sun; opening the process of dispossession, alienation and conquest and the fear and loathing that accompanies it]. Inebriation of the return to the garden of innocence, where love does not yet know or no longer knows, or has forgotten, the profanity of nakedness. The gaze still innocent of the limits of reason, the division of day and night, the alteration of the seasons, animal cruelty, the necessity of protecting oneself from the other or from God. Face to face encounter of two naked lovers in a nudity that is older than, and unlike, a sacrilege. Not perceivable as profanation. The threshold of the garden, a welcoming cosmic home, that remains open. No guard other than that of love itself. Innocent of the knowledge of displays and the fall (Irigaray 1986: 243-244).

This coexistence is "neither an explosion nor an implosion but an indwelling. Dwelling with the self, and with the other while letting him/her/it go … Never finished. Unfolding itself during and between the terms of encounters" (Irigaray 1986: 252). And in following Levinas' distinction of pleasure from power, she emphasizes intimacy rather than animality as the key feature of the caress. The nature of scale implied in Irigaray's account is in the connection between the intimate and the infinite, between the physical and the metaphysical, the transcendence of space and place by the movement of lovemaking:

Caressing her to reach the infinity of her center, the lover undoes her, divests her of her tactility - a porosity that opens up to the universe - and consigns her to the regression of her womanly becoming, always in the future. Forgetful of the fecundity, in the here and now, of lovemaking: the gift to each of the lovers of sexual birth and rebirth (1986: 244).

Thus, as we glimpsed in the opening references to Levinas’ idea that the route to the infinite is through the intimate transcendence of the self, we can glimpse here the paradox of scale relationships in geographical thought. The most private and intimate of moments offers a window on the wider social and po