Huib Ernste

The Pragmatism of Life in Poststructuralist Times

In addressing the question of what might be next in human geography I endeavour to enrich the debates between Anglo-American poststructuralist and continental European action-theoretical approaches by bringing ‘life’ to the geographical subject. In contrast to established conceptualisations of the geographical self, I will introduce a conception of the self which mediates between the subject and the subjectified, between voluntarism and determinism, and between consciousness and corporeality. Through this reconceptualisation I do not pretend to provide final answers, but rather seek to initiate a new stream of thought.

Re-imagining spaces of (in)difference: Contextualising and reflecting on the intertwining of cities across borders

In his harmonious and appealing collected accounts on the modern city, James Donald claims that the way we live has a lot to do with the way we live together (p. xi, 1999). A city, he argues, ‘has always stood not only for the vanities, the squalor and the injustice of human society, but also for the aspiration to civilized sociation’ (p. xi). In this special issue, it is not the sociation of people within one city which is being debated, but the intent to find ways to gather and ‘cosmopolise’ people from two neighbouring cities. What is more, it concerns the sociation of citizens of two neighbouring cities across state borders. As this special issue presents a colourful set of special empirically rich case studies on efforts to aggregate various cities across borders, we were asked to scrub the surface of the various approaches put forward in this issue and when we felt necessary, to scrub against their grain. We express our gratitude to the editors for giving us this honourable task. We feel indebted to the various contributors in this issue, as they have given us an extensive body of information, insights and accounts on the making of bi-national cities, thus making our task of reflection arguably lighter than theirs. Their output was our input. Our epilogue embeds itself in the critical geographical debate that is focused on the denial of the opposition between reality and the immateriality of the city (see Donald, 1999). A city does not exist outside of the imagination, a city is made real through imagination. In principle then, creating one city out of two cities is merely a matter of boundless imagination. It is a matter of forgetting about scales, community or national borders or spatial fixations; it is a question of tapping into the ability and willingness to think the unthinkable. In this paper, we would like to scrutinise the current utopian dreamings and imaginations of crossing the border. Following Tourraine’s (2000) rhetorical book title ‘Can we live together?’, we particularly focus on the ‘together’ and on the word ‘Co’ in the images and imaginations of coexistence and cooperation between neighbouring cities. How is the strategic co-ing mapped out when constructing (the imagination of) a bi-national city? And how does this reimagining and reinscripting of the city relate to and unfold itself in current practices of citizens living in the imagined bi-national city? We start off by reflecting the complexity of the endeavours of objectifying cities, move onwards to reflect on current practices of reinscribing places across national borders and end by summarising our reflections on the potential of ‘co-ing’ cities across borders.

Rationality and Discursive Articulation in Place-Making

In the debate on action-theoretic and the poststructuralist approaches in human geography, the former relies on a theory of modernity; the latter, on praxis theory. Action-theoretic approaches rest on the assumption of the effectivity of various kinds of rational and deliberative decision-making and actions. Proponents of poststructuralist approaches, their critical stance notwithstanding, often tend to refrain from deliberative interventions and emphasize the structural aspects of discourse, especially power structures. Laclau and Mouffe (Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. Verso, London, 1985), by contrast, try to retain and restore the possibility of deliberative interventions in these discursive structures by inverting Foucault’s power/knowledge equation. The author of this chapter explores the extent to which this inversion reinstates responsible and rational spatial decisions and actions as a focus of research in human geography. Rationality could be reconstituted as a culturally contingent phenomenon, and critical geographical analysis could again contribute to concrete problem-solving, though in a culturally much more informed and embedded way than if one maintains critical distance.