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3
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS CAROLINAE
2006 GEOGRAPHICA, Nos. 1–2, PAG. 3–19
Investigating Hybrids and Coproductions: Epistemologies,
(Disciplinary) Politics and Landscapes
ALOIS HYNEK1
, NIKOLA HYNEK2
The Institute of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University in Brno1
Masaryk University, Department of Political Science, School of Social Studies,
Czech Republic / Department of Peace Studies, School of Social and International
Studies, University of Bradford, United Kingdom2
Abstract
This article investigates hybrids and processes of coproductions and their relevance for geography. The
examination consists of three levels, namely the level of philosophy of science and sociology of knowledge,
the level of scientiﬁc disciplines, and the level of theory, its object and empirical research; these levels serve
in turn as referential scopes for each part. The ﬁrst part shows how hybridization of various ontologies and
epistemologies – expressed in a resulting matrix – can and does equip the researcher with very different
images of what is out there and how we know about it. The second part focuses on interstitial spaces in
between disciplines. Two analyzed examples are political ecology and environmental security. The third part
subsequently elucidates ways through which disciplinary organization of knowledge (physical geography
vs. human geography) inﬂuences our perception of what constitutes their allegedly neutral objects of study
with regard to spatialization – landscapes vs. regions. In the ﬁnal part, a framework for an analysis of hybrids
and coproductions is designed.
Key words: hybrids, coproduction, ontology, epistemology, disciplinary politics, political ecology; environmental
security, landscapes; regions
Initial Insights and the Structure
Metaphors play a particularly important role in both natural and social sciences.
They enable us to “imagine” a concept, a model or a theory, rather than just merely
describe it through words and linear sets of propositions. When it comes to the enterprise
this article embarks upon, it can also be imagined through a metaphor. This
metaphor is based on the notion of three different levels, namely the level of philosophy
of science and sociology of knowledge, the level of scientiﬁc disciplines, and
the level of theory, its object and empirical research. These three levels represent
the scope of investigation. As far as the object of investigation is concerned, it will
be to explore hybrid systems and processes of coproduction that constitute them.
So what are hybrids and processes of coproduction and what do they signify?
Hybridization can be imagined as a deliberate effort to dissolute allegedly ﬁxed
4
boundaries between various artiﬁcially created systems which we tend to take, on
the basis of a predominant discourse or our common sense, for granted as separate
or isolated from one another. As a result, we end up having hybrids, i.e. non-linear
entities that are not based on causal, but constitutive relationships. The causal arrow
ceases to play its role of navigating us from an independent to a dependent
variable as entities are mutually constituted – existing together, no one ontologically
preceding the other. Examples of hybrids in this sense subsume hybrids created
by the dissolution of boundaries between nature and society, facts and norms,
ontology and epistemology, disciplines etc.
Fig. 1. Hybridization and hybrids (Forsyth 2003: 195).
The process of hybridization, i.e. the dissolution of artiﬁcial boundaries and linear
arrangements, is consequently itself a prerequisite for understanding processes
through and purposes for which hybrids are constituted. These processes are generally
referred to as coproductions. Sheila Jasanoff (1996: 393) deﬁnes coproduction
as “the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order.” One can invoke
Foucault’s notion of the power/knowledge nexus and the way how one shapes another.
Similarly, Bruno Latour (1993) analyzes the emergence of “quasi-objects”
on the interface between nature and society. Ecological facts and discourses require
for their existence political practices pertaining to environment and vice versa; put
it simply, they are mutually embedded, or in the terms of reﬂexive sociology, mutually
constituted.
As to the structure of this investigation, the ﬁrst part tackles the level of philosophy
of science and sociology of knowledge, namely shows how hybridization of
various ontologies and epistemologies – expressed in a resulting matrix – can and
does equip the researcher with very different images of what is out there and how
we know about it. The second part subsequently focuses on an interesting topic
5
(and the level) of disciplinary hybrids, i.e. interstitial spaces in between disciplines.
Although one could be tempted to see disciplinary hybrids as independent of the
inﬂuence of “disciplines-proper”, the reverse is true. The examples of political
ecology and environmental security were selected precisely because we believe that
these two disciplinary hybrids are at the same time excellent specimens of disciplinary
politics. That is to say we still ﬁnd ourselves in the situation of having two
largely isolated interdisciplinary hybrids, with the selection of one or the other depending
on whether one comes from the disciplines of political science/IR (environmental
security) or the disciplines of geography/ecology (political ecology), in
spite of a signiﬁcant substantive overlap between both of these hybrids. The third
part in turn deals with hybrids and coproduction on the level of theory, its object
and empirical research. The aim is to elucidate ways through which disciplinary organization
of knowledge (physical geography vs. human geography) inﬂuences our
perception of what constitutes their allegedly neutral objects of study with regard
to spatialization – landscapes vs. regions. In order to overcome such parochialism,
we consequently propose a hybrid object to be studied – cultural landscapes. As
the following part on spatialization points out, cultural landscapes are hybrids coming
into being by the coproduction of the physical-spatial and social-spatial. Since
the backbone of this article is a brand-new topic of hybrids and coproductions at
three different yet interconnected levels, our ﬁnal intention is everything but to
close and shelve this investigation. It is for this reason that the ﬁnal part is “in lieu
of conclusion” instead of conclusion-proper: its purpose is to design our own
framework for an analysis (and a subsequent, ﬁnal synthesis) of hybrid systems and
processes of coproduction.
Setting Out for a Sail: Ontology-Epistemological Matrix as a Propeller
This section tackles an often avoided level of philosophy of science and sociology
of knowledge. What is here meant by philosophy of science is a systematic
study of ontological and epistemological questions, which is in itself
closely connected to questions regarding one’s possibility of knowing about
the world as well as the role of knowledge in this process. The latter is the domain
of sociology of knowledge. It is argued that every empirical study ought
to be able to explicitly show its connection to this level, thereby avoiding the
danger of making implicit and therefore in many cases unsubstantiated and/or
contradicting ontological and epistemological claims. Since the scientist’s perspective
is always somehow anchored and derived from their stance towards
ontology and epistemology, this section primarily focuses on an explication of
this problématique. Possible ontological and epistemological positions are
summarized in a matrix that includes six different orientations/hybrids which
in turn create three schools of thought. Subsequently, each school is being exa-
mined.
6
Ontology, as the theory of being, usually comes ﬁrst. It poses the question of
“what is out there, in the world?” As to the word “world”, it signiﬁes, in line with
main argument of the article, the reality comprising hybrid sui generis biosocial
entities. Nevertheless, ontology per se is not sufﬁcient: one needs to ask a different
yet interrelated question “How do we know about it?” It is epistemology, or
the theory of knowledge, that deals with the role of science and scientist in the
process of knowledge construction – or discovery, depending on one’s epistemological
stance.
Fig. 2. The hybridization of ontology and epistemology, the ontological-epistemological matrix (inspired by
Marsh and Furlong 2002; Sismondo 1996: 6–7, 79; Ben-Ze’ev 1995: 50).
e p i s t e m o l o g y
non-constructivist (naïve) constructivist
1A. naïve empiricism
gig
1B. constructivist empiricism
mind-independence
2A. naïve realism 2B. constructivist realism
o
n
t
o
l
o
g
y
mind-dependence
3A. naïve interpretivism
-
4A. constructivist interpretivism
The actual matrix of 3 × 2 is ontologically based on the distinction between
mind-independence and mind-dependence. Whereas the former asserts that scientiﬁc
objects exist independently of the observer (mind-independence), the latter is
being centred on the notion of mind-dependence, i.e. the existence of scientiﬁc
objects as dependent on mind of the observer. As far as natural sciences are concerned,
a large number of researchers will ﬁnd themselves aligned with mind-independence.
As there will be shown, the realm of social sciences is the murky wa-
7
ters and many researches opt for mind-dependence. The epistemological
distinction in the matrix rests on the difference of whether knowledge is actively
constructed by scientists (anti-foundationalism) or whether scientists play in this
process a role of transparent translators with minimal power to intervene to
this process (foundationalism).
Positions 1A and 1B are empiricist ones. They are based on mind-independence
ontology; natural and social sciences are believed to be analogous. The observer
assumes an objective status and there is a widespread belief that an impartial observation
is not only possible, but even desirable since any projection of one’s values
threatens the entire research program. Empiricism is usually associated with quantitative
methodology, ‘hard data’, and ‘thin description’. The difference between
naïve and constructivist empiricism lies in sequence of research stages. While the
former unfolds through the formulation of a hypothesis, data gathering (induction),
their operationalization, analysis and generalization from which a theoretical model
is created and subsequently tested, the latter gives more epistemic power to scientists
and usually starts with formal deductive reasoning (a construction of a theoretical
model) and it is only then that the model is being empirically tested. (Marsh
and Stoker 2002; Sellars 1997; Ayer 1966)
In regard to the positions of 2A and 2B – naïve realism and constructivist realism
– it shares quite a few features with empiricism: it is premised upon mind-independence
ontology, sees natural and social sciences as analogous and the aim
of scientiﬁc conduct are law-like generalizations. Because of the above similarities,
some authors are wrongly led to conﬂating empiricism with scientiﬁc realism.
(e.g. Wendt 1999) However, the crucial difference stems from a competing
opinion of what can be observed and thus researched. Unlike empiricism which
claims that only observable entities can be objects of scientiﬁc inquiry, scientiﬁc
realism makes causal statements about underlying structures, even if these structures
are directly unobservable. Scientiﬁc realists give structures causal powers
and argue that positing their existence gives us the best explanation of action.
There is, however, also difference between naïve and constructivist realism (modern
critical realism in particular): while the former largely brackets the intervention
of the scientist in a research process, the latter acknowledges the fact that
scientists actively construct knowledge and thereto, agents and structures are
conceptualized as mutually constituted. (Wight 2003; Sismondo 1996; Sayer
1992; Giddens 1984; Bhaskar 1979)
The ﬁnal school of thought under the microscope is a broad church of interpretivism.
Interpretivism is simultaneously based on mind-dependence and anti-essentialism.
With regard to the former, such a claim has caused a lot of confusion;
some critics of this position in philosophy of science go so far as to claim that interpretivism
believes in the impossibility of the cat existing outside the discourse.
(Wendt 1999) In order to put things right, there need to be distinguished between
what John Searle (1995) calls “brute facts” and “social and institutional facts”.
8
Many interpetivists do not deny the existence of physical entities – i.e. brute
facts – independently on one’s beliefs. As for “social and institutional facts”,
such as the institution of money or marriage, or a cognitive biosocial hybrid of
a landscape, these can only be referred to when people intersubjectively believe
in their existence. That is why social or institutional facts depend on one’s beliefs;
they are mind-dependent. Similarly, anti-essentialism refuses the idea that
physical and social entities become objects of study because of their allegedly inherent
features.
As far as the epistemological axis of interpretivism is concerned, the position
3A – naïve interpretivism – needs to be dismissed since the combination of ontological
mind-dependence and epistemological non-constructivism is blatant contradictio
in adiecto. The position 3B – constructivist interpretivism – can be further
subdivided according to whether agents or structures possess greater relative weight
in one’s interpretation. The ﬁrst group can be labelled as ‘actor-based approaches’
and includes phenomenology, hermeneutics and Geertzian thick-description-based
ethnography. The centre of the focus is the meaning and interpretation of social
phenomena (for the employment in natural science, see Woolgar 1983). As Geertz,
following Max Weber, claims:
“The man is an animal suspended in the webs of signiﬁcance he himself
spun … Our formulation of other people’s symbol systems must be actororiented
– they must be cast in terms of the interpretations to which persons
of a particular denomination subject their experience … the ethnographer ‘inscribes’
social discourse, he writes it down. In doing so, he turns it from
a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an
account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.” (Geertz
1973: 5,14–15,19)
Geertz (1973: 21) carries on by suggesting that thick description is microscopic
– the locus of the study is not the object of the study: “anthropologists don’t
study villages, they study in villages.”
The second cluster subsumed under the banner interpretivism consists of structuralist
and post-structuralist approaches. Their research focus is usually directed at
constitutive discursive structures; somehow contrary to structuralism, post-structuralists
generally believe in inherently open and fragmented structural systems
where there is always space for change to occur. It is the latter perspective that underpins
our investigation. As in the case of the previous group, these approaches
are very heterogeneous and it is hard to make any far-reaching generalizations
about them. Post-structural approaches will be explored throughout the text, in the
ﬁnal two sections in particular, by an examination of the scholarship of Bruno Latour,
Michel Foucault and Edward Soja.
9
Getting (Disciplinary) Politics Involved: Political Ecology and Environmental Security
as Two Examples of Coproduction
Recent scholarship on the link between the realm of politics and the environment
is fragmented. The two most recognizable strands are represented by discourses
within the ﬁelds of political ecology and environmental security. A deﬁnitional
and conceptual analysis reveals, surprisingly, a signiﬁcant substantive overlap
between the two discourses. The obvious question is, then, why do we have two
substantively similar discourses? The explanation becomes clear when the disciplinary
afﬁnity of contributors to these discourses is examined. While political
ecology has emerged as a ﬁeld from the discipline of Geography, environmental security
can be seen as a ﬁeld going independent from its original conﬁnes of disciplines
of Political Science and International Relations. Disciplines thus play the
role their name suggests: discursive policing, or disciplining. (Foucault 1981)
The term political ecology can be understood in many ways. From the “managerial
perspective”, it is deemed to concern the social and political conditions surrounding
the causes, experiences, and management of environmental problems.
(Blaikie and Brookﬁeld 1987) Another account tends to conﬂate it with the term
“politics of ecology” referring to political activism and social movements embracing
Deep Green Environmentalism. (Atkinson 1991: 18) Finally, as Peter J. Taylor
and Brian Wynne (1979: 20) propose, political ecology should be seen as the politics
of the application of ecological science. However, none of the above perspectives
deals with notions of hybrids and coproduction. As a result, valuable insights
of science studies or science-policy are avoided. A deﬁnition compatible with the
aim of this article is provided by Tim Forsyth (2003: 4) who suggests that the term
“critical” political ecology “may be seen to be the politics of ecology as a scientiﬁc
legitimization of environmental policy.” Such a deﬁnition is highly relevant inasmuch
as it takes onboard the idea of socially-constructed science, be it constructivist
empiricism, scientiﬁc realism or interpretivism. It imagines nature, ecology
and politics as socially coproduced hybrids.
Reﬂecting on the term environmental security, an evolution of the term in the
sense we nowadays understand it can be explicated by focusing on the disciplines
of Political Science and International Relations and their intellectual development
after the Cold War. (for an overview of original scholarship on environmental security
in the 1980s, cf. Dalby 2002: 16–19) The subﬁeld of security studies has been
largely transformed from the realm almost exclusively dealing with the notion of
national security into the more diverse waters. The major transformation has consisted
in so-called “deepening” and “broadening” of security. With regard to “deepening”,
the referent point is no longer the nation state, but also individuals, communities,
or local/regional/global ecosystems. What is more, the “broadening” of
security studies leaves us with at least ﬁve different sectors – political, economic,
societal, environmental, and military- instead of an originally dominant military
sector. (Buzan, Waever and Wilde 1998; Krause and Williams 1997) As a result,
10
a distinct research agenda of environmental security has emerged. It can be pointed
out that environmental security directly challenges previously dominant ontology
of the nation state and is largely based on an ongoing anthropological turn, which
has opened up a larger canvass of questions appertaining to who is insecure and
what their sources of insecurity are. (Dalby 2002: xxiiii) Not only ontology undergoes
a signiﬁcant shift – epistemology does follow and reﬂects the fact that, in order
to understand a socially constructed production of danger, interpretive epistemologies
and methodologies need to be employed. (Duvall, Weldes and Laffey
1999)
Both portrayed discourses intersect in their attempt to investigate the connection
and interplay between previously separated scientiﬁc and political agendas. It is for
this reason that both of these agendas are here treated as socially constructed hybrids.
What is challenged is the perception that the realm of environmental politics
can be separated from assumptions and principles of environmental science or ecology.
The strategy of examining both agendas as largely independent stems from the
conviction that politicians do not need to understand the issue in its biophysical
substance. The fallacy of this point of view is to portray science as detached and
isolated from the realm of political practice, thereby avoiding the politics in the
creation of the science itself. (Forsyth 2003: 9) As Jasanoff (1996) points out, however,
the two are in fact inseparable, and her argument is encapsulated in the notion
of coproducing social order (through a political process), with its aim of creating
new societal norms, and knowledge (through a scientiﬁc process), with its simultaneous
objective of creating scientiﬁc facts.
Getting a Landscape Involved: Hybridization of Physical/Social, Culture and Spatiality
To begin with, a seemingly innocent question begs to be asked: What is a landscape?
Since the signiﬁer of landscape is used very broadly in various intersecting
individual, formal and generic meanings, both as a common word and a geographical
term, we suggest that an (open) list concerning potential meanings – or the signiﬁed
– will be more useful than a closed deﬁnition. The meaning of a landscape
can thus be associated with:
– Representing scenery.
– Observed territory in a single view.
– ‘Way of seeing’ rather than as an image or an object. (Cosgrove 1998)
– Human environment, human ecology (e.g. Barrows 1923; Haggett 1983), the
link of people and land.
– Pattern of landscape ecosystems at choric/regional level (Troll1939), i.e.
the complex of causal and reciprocal connections between biological communities
and their environment in a particular section of landscape, a unifying
approach to the natural science with social geography.
11
– Spatial product of socio-economic production, reproduction and consumption
– complex metabolism between the nature and the society.
– Territorial infrastructure is constructed as a vital organizational landscape to
facilitate social production and reproduction. Relationship between economic
production, social reproduction and political governance are reconstructed –
deindustrialization, urban sprawl, role of the cities ( from welfare to workforce),
cities (Taylor 1996) are replacing states in the construction of social
identities, social production rather than reproduction.
– Distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural (Sauer 1925): landscapes
are products of cultures and also reproducing them through time, cultural
region includes its matching landscape.
– Iconography, text (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), double encoding of landscapes
– wrapped in another representation (Crang 2001). Literary landscapes,
multiply mediated environments. Landscape as property (Cosgrove and Daniels
1988), owned by those beholding it; capturing and controlling the land
through representation of it as landscape in maps and in paintings – and
through fashioning landscapes on the ground using design and architecture.
The landscape then, far from being neutral and inert, has social and cultural
meanings, a symbolism – an ‘iconography’.
– Simulacra (Clarke and Doel 1994; Baudrillard 1988)
– Theatre, dramaturgy (Cosgrove and Daniels 1993)
– Land management framed by state and shaped by economy. (Blaikie 1985)
– How politics as policy of resource management, control over the environment
is discursively constructed. (e.g. Leach and Mearns 1996; Moore 1995)
– Implies a collective shaping of the earth over time, reﬂect a society’s – a culture’s
– beliefs, practices and technologies (Crang 2001), shape and shaping
the people living there, landscape is a bank of cultural memories.
– Regional personality or a genre de vie expressed in landscape (Vidal de la
Blache 1921), The Annales School.
– A palimpsest – landscape is the record of change, as cultural values change so
new forms is required (Crang 2001), includes past practices and knowledges,
series of layers – abiotic, biotized, biotic, anthropized, anthropic, noo-
spheric.
– Cultural landscapes as other spaces/places, e.g. regions are constructed both
materially and discursively, and each construction affects the other. (Allen,
Massey and Cochrane 1998)
On the basis of the above heterogeneity of potential meanings, majority of which
emphasize biosocial hybridity of landscape, this section argues that a landscape as an
object of study needs to be investigated by both physical geography and human geography,
and perhaps the best, by interdisciplinary employment of both simultaneously.
Consequently, the division that is sometimes being made between regions as objects
of study for physical geography and landscapes as objects of study for human geog-
12
raphy is seen as artiﬁcial and needs to be problematized as such. As the ﬁrst part of
this analysis suggested with regard to epistemologies and ontologies and the second
part in respect of the nexus between disciplinarity, politics and science, the boundary
between what is natural and social is – once again – precisely what is being contested.
In other words, once we accept that humans imagine, construct and intersubjectively
share representations of their living space, where, then, to draw the boundary
between landscapes and regions? Aren’t landscapes and regions just different
names for the same areas, depending on whether one approaches these areas from the
discipline of physical or human geography? Is there any justiﬁcation for the correspondence
between a shift from landscapes to regions (i) and a shift from hyperrural
to hyperurban (ii), as the Czech disciplinary practice of geography has suggested?
Fig. 3. Domains of Czech physical and human geography.
Physical and human landscapes have different geometry which is a reﬂection of
the discipline one uses to look at these areas. Whereas the geometry of physical
landscapes is premised upon landscape ecosystems as sites/tops, topochores, micro/meso/macrochores
with isotropic, gradient, vector and mosaic horizontal pattern,
the geometry of human regions rests, on the other hand, on nodal, formal and
vermicular patterns. We suggest that, in line with the overall argument concerning
hybrid systems with deconstructed boundaries, the best way of representing geographical
areas is to speak about cultural landscapes as intersections of physical
landscapes and human regions. By the same token, we maintain that cultural landscapes
can be as much rural as they are urban. As far as the disciplines are concerned,
this move means injecting still heavily physical-geography oriented landscape
ecology with a dose of human geography. The following ﬁgure demonstrates
this strategy on the example of cultural landscapes of the Czechlands:
13
The notion of landscapes and regions – and cultural landscapes as their hybrids –
is inextricably tied to the phenomenon of spatiality. Derek Gregory’s (2000) distinction
between four different senses of what spatiality represents is arguably the most
authoritative account and it further conﬁrms the difﬁculty to separate the human from
the physical: 1. In the existentialist tradition, as epitomized by Pickles (1985), spatiality
refers to places and spaces in our immediate experiences, to constellations of relations
and meanings we encounter during our daily practices. This tradition of ‘situatedness’
is close to Geertzian signiﬁcance of understanding the meaning within
a particular cultural context; 2. In the structural Marxist tradition, spatiality has the
function of identifying linkages and correspondences between social structures – i.e.
modes of production and/or social formation, and spatial structures. Spatiality can
thus be imagined as the dyad of presence-absence with regard to spatial structures
and participation-exclusion in respect of social structures; 3. In the neo-Marxist and
structuration (not to confuse with structuralist) tradition, Soja (1985) further unfolds
Lefebvre’s vision of spatiality and socially produced space by claiming that all space
is not socially produced, but all spatiality is. This argument feeds into Giddens’s
(1984) assertion that space has its own intrinsic nature as well as to his claims that in
human geography, spatial forms are always social forms and spatialities can thus be
considered spatial conﬁgurations of social life; 4. Within the post-structuralist tradition,
especially the part imbued with Deleuzian and Foucauldian thought, spatiality is
represented by ways in which particular subject-positions are constituted and particular
identities manufactured. It is the nexus of power/knowledge that assumes the
central position in these accounts. E. Relph thus (1981) uses the P/K nexus as a starting
point for distinguishing between four different sorts of space on the basis of our
Fig. 4. Cultural landscapes of the Czechlands/Czech Republic.
14
knowledge about space, as produced by different relationships one can have towards
places: a) pragmatic space organized by our bodily situation, b) perceptual space
based on observing through our intentions, c) existential space created by cultural
structures and our perceptions, and d) cognitive space through which we abstractly
model spatial relationships.Additionally, D. Harvey (1996) maintains that spaces and
times, or rather space-times, are not external coordinates, but are contained within
different processes that effectively produce their own forms of space and time.
This section has showed, by screening the four different lens of what spatiality
is, the impossibility of separating the physical-spatial from social-spatial. The purpose
of this section is analogous to Latour’s (1991, 1993) efforts to spell out his actor-network
theory, i.e. to problematize all the usual boundaries between things and
humans, culture and nature, tradition and modernity as well as inside and outside.
Fig. 5. Dichotomies, boundaries and hybrids (Latour 1993: 11).
An alternative take thus consists in the assumption that the world is a series of acts
of heterogeneous engineering, emphasizing the role of mediaries and intermediaries,
or hybrids. Having such a vantage point problematizes the act of a ﬁxed representation,
as the ‘reality’becomes a kaleidoscope of different representational modes. This
perspective also offers a better hold on interactions between nature and technology,
thereby providing a means of understanding space as both a producer and a product
of social order. Moreover, the cultural turn has blurred the artiﬁcial distinction between
the ‘economic’, the ‘cultural’, and the ‘political’, which all need to be understood
as different (analytical) parts/subsystems of the same whole.
In Lieu of Conclusion: Designing a Framework for an Analysis of Hybrid Systems
and Processes of Coproduction
Where does all this leave us? As the title of this section intimates, the function of
this part is not to close the investigation, but, on contrary, to keep it open. Therefore,
these lines can be read as a reﬂection on how to study hybrid systems and how to un-
15
derstand various processes of coproduction. So how can we study hybrids and processes
of coproduction? Our framework, introduced in this ﬁnal part, represents
a metatheoretical perspective that is designed to analyze this ‘reality’, or rather various
regimes and representations of reality in the fashion that would not impose artiﬁcial
‘blinkers’ on what is being studied. It draws its intellectual inspiration from Edward
Soja and Michel Foucault, though our framework ADDS A represents new
quality and heads to a largely uncharted territory. The inspiration by Soja stems from
his concept of “Thirdspace” (Soja 1996), which the author centres on the notion of trialectics
of being, i.e. the claim that the ontology of being can only be interpreted in its
interlocking entirety of spatiality, historicality and sociality. Thirdspace is a way how
to think about ‘reality’, it is itself a hybrid between mental and material spaces of conceived
and perceived space, but – at the same time – transcends both. (Soja 1996: 31)
Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract
and concrete, the real and imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable,
the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness
and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life
and unending history. Anything which fragments Thirdspace into separate specialized
knowledges or exclusive domains – even on the pretext to handling its inﬁnite
complexity – destroys its meaning and openness (Soja 1996: 56–57).
Moreover, Soja also underlines the importance of relations between space,
knowledge and power. The author here draws explicitly on Foucault’s space-centred
version of knowledge/power, known as heterotopias. Power is not viewed by
Foucault as a damaging, negative force stemming from some centres (the government),
but as ubiquitous medium through which a multiplicity of power relations is
being exercised at all levels. The function of knowledge is to legitimize this power:
as a result, power and knowledge constitute and further reinforce one another since
scientiﬁc discourses can be seen as sites of social power and rationalities to govern
(at all levels) as sites of semiotic power. (Foucault 1991; Gordon 1980) Heterotopias
can then be imagined as the P/K nexus which goes spatial. Foucault (1986)
differentiates heterotopias from utopias: while the former refers to completely unreal
spaces, the latter signiﬁes real spaces that are simultaneously real and imagined.
As Katz (2001) points out, Foucault’s heterotopias can be conceived of as reworkings
of space by forces of globalization and effects of technology.
“Lived space is heterogeneous, heterotopias are ‘real’spaces within social spaces
whose functions are different or even the opposite of others in landscape of
power. They juxtapose several spaces or sites that are ‘incompatible’, and so
‘function’ either to create a space of illusion that exposes the partitioned spaces
of everyday life as illusory, or to ‘create a space that is other’ as ordered as our
everyday spaces are ‘jumbled’, the latter is the heterotopia of ‘compensation.’”
(Katz 2001: 93–94)
16
These are the intellectual inﬂuences concerning our analytical framework: the
framework that ﬁrst analyzes in order to make a ﬁnal synthesis, comprising from
previously gained partial analytical insights.
Fig. 6. ESPECT & TODS: The framework for an analysis of hybrid systems and processes of coproduction.
The matrix of the model consists of six main poles through which ‘reality’ is often
depicted, though usually in isolation from one another: E(conomy)-S(ociety)P(olitics)-E(cology)-C(ulture)-T(echnology).
The strategy to arrange them in
a hexagon represents an effort to overcome this usual isolation and lack of interconnectedness
(i) as well as to emphasize the equality of each and every node (ii).
In other words, these poles, or nodes, are artiﬁcial subsystems which try to paint
‘reality’ through their own intellectual categories and tools. One needs to bear in
mind, however, that while science is rough, life is delicate and it is the practice of
writing that rectiﬁes this distance. (Barthes 1978) This is what the outer circle signiﬁes
– the wholeness, unity, or synthesis through a two-way rotation which implies
the need to overcome the dogma of six artiﬁcial points of view. The strength
of this framework in regard to the outer circle and its underlying hexagon is
grounded in the need to hybridize and thus synthesize ﬁndings of otherwise six isolated
subsystems into a single account; we constantly need to be reminded and
aware of the fact that phenomena out there are not created through isolated intellectual
subsystems, but are, in fact, coproduced. As far as the inner rhombus with
nodes T(emporality)-O(ppression)-D(ominance)-S(patiality) is concerned, it is
based on two sets of dyads (T × S; O × D) and its function is to explore simultaneously
spatial and temporal effects of power/knowledge nexus. The oppressiondominance
dichotomy can be spatially understood as the relationship between cen-
17
tre and periphery, and temporally as real and imagined lived space in between them.
It is also the case with respect to the rhombus that the unity and synthesis is being
sought – this effort is again inscribed through a two-way rotary mechanism of the
inner circle.
Finally, the inclusion of both the hexagon and rhombus into a single framework
reﬂects the necessity for the researcher of investigating ESPECT and TODS as parallel,
complementary and interconnected systems since it is not only through the
synthesis of nodes, but also through an examination of processes which coproduce
these geometric arrangements, that we can get a better grip on physical, social, and
imagined ‘reality’.
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Résumé
Zkoumání hybridit a koprodukcí: Epistemologie, (disciplinární) politika a krajiny
Předkládaný článek studuje hybridní systémy a procesy koprodukce a jejich význam pro disciplínu
geograﬁe. Zkoumání probíhá ve třech úrovních, konkrétně v úrovni ﬁlosoﬁe vědy a sociologie vědění, dále pak
v úrovni vědeckých disciplín a nakonec v úrovni teorie, jejích objektů a empirického výzkumu. Výše uvedené
tři úrovně následně slouží jako referenční rámce pro každou z hlavních částí článku. První část ukazuje
jak proces hybridizace rozdílných ontologií a epistemologií, jež jsou shrnuty do přiložené matice, mohou
a také skutečně vybavují výzkumníka velmi odlišnými představami o tom, co existuje a jakými způsoby se
toto můžeme dozvědět. Druhá část se zaměřuje na intersticiální prostory mezi existujícími akademickými
disciplínami. Za dva analyzované příklady slouží disciplíny politické ekologie a environmentální bezpečnosti.
Třetí část posléze objasňuje způsoby, s pomocí nichž disciplinární organizace vědění (fyzická geograﬁe vs.
humánní geograﬁe) ovlivňuje naše vnímání toho, co utváří domněle neutrální předměty studia týkajících
se procesu spatializace, tj. krajin a regionů. V závěrečné části je navrhnut analytický rámec pro studium
hybridních systémů a procesů koprodukce.