Putting the Self Back into Subjectivity
Drawing on elements from the history and epistemology of geography and the social sciences, the author poses and clarifies issues surrounding the current tendency among many Anglophone geographers to favor the use of the term “the subject” over that of “the self”. Earlier generations of geographers demonstrated only limited interest in matters of subjectivity when compared with the perceived need today among geographers to explore more fully the subjective to better understant territorial transformations. The author stresses, however, how much this new emphasis has taken different directions related to diverging interpretations of the autonomy of the individual, and how these different directions have been crystallized in the current usages of the self and the subject. The author questions if the current favoring the subject over the self by geographers may not lead to a limited, and to some extent impoverished, sense of the subjective in geography.