From Locality to Totality

At the heart of economic geography debates in Latin America on dependency theory was an immediate tension between those that focused on dependency and an undetermined marginalisation and those that instantly spotlighted that this focus on marginality in dependent societies was being set adrift from any mooring in relation to class contradictions.

It was Aníbal Quijano in Redefinición de la dependencia y proceso de marginalización en América Latina [1970] who argued that Latin American societies were structurally becoming marked by relations of marginality (access to this publication is so difficult, but we have uploaded a version for readers). Meanwhile, Ruy Mauro Marini in Dialéctica de la dependencia [1973] asserted that analysis identifying a “marginal pole” in Latin American societies was already drifting away from how class contradictions are polarised there. For Marini, social marginality cannot be treated as analytically separate from or accidental to the way in which superexploitation intertwines [entrelazan] with relations of dependency in Latin America. A tension has ever thus remained between postcolonial theories of economic geography and specific approaches to dependency theory. The former are marked by a call to assess marginality within the “coloniality of power”, stressing the always-local character of knowledge that is constitutive of the pluriverse. The latter are highlighted by an attempt to assess how increases in labour productivity intertwines with the greater exploitation of the worker to produce superexploitation, as a necessary condition within the totality of world capitalism.

It is this tension between locality and totality that we see configuring the contours of significant debate across postcolonial, poststructural, decolonial, constructivist and economic geography debates today, as discussed in more detail in our open access article in Progress in Human Geography entitled ‘Totality must be defended’. Across multiple theoretical traditions we argue that the notion of totality has come under attack from those who dismiss it as an authoritarian concept, a Eurocentric idea, or insist that it cannot grasp the inherently pluriversal character of everyday life. By contrast, we refute such arguments and make the case for an explicitly open notion of concrete totality that can combine both locality and totality as twin priorities. We argue that a conception of concrete totality is especially useful for understanding our contemporary conjuncture of crisis across debates in and beyond economic geography.

It was Georg Lukács who stated that ‘the primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science’. At its most simple, the concept of totality refers to the wider social whole beyond our immediate realm of experiences. This view thus rejects a substantialist understanding of the world that sees it as made up of discrete, self-contained entities that enter into external contact with one another, in favour of a relational perspective that emphasises ongoing processes of mutual, and self-forming constitution. Bertell Ollman would regard the philosophy of internal relations as the hallmark of historical materialism, which stresses that ‘things’ do not exist independently from the relations in which they are embedded. For example, the subtitle of the third volume of Capital (that Marx indicated would deal with totality) was entitled by Engels as, ‘The process of capitalist production as whole’. Totality thus links to a unique epistemological and ontological position in which constituent parts are defined in their wider relation to the social whole. This does not deny the specific role or function of a particular part, but rather it is always to embed elements within a wider logic to see how the general and the particular are formed. As the dialectical biologist Richard Levins states:

The parts of dialectical wholes are . . . points where properties of the whole are concentrated. Their relation is not more “interconnection” or “interaction” but a deeper interpenetration that transforms them.

For sure, relational comparison features across broad contours of human geography, postcolonial geography, or economic geography. But there are two common features to much of the literature:

1. First, the treatment of relations is based on a position of ontological exteriority meaning that the relations are always-already held as analytically separate and then only subsequently combined in an additive manner as inter-acting realms. Put differently, relational approaches in economic geography—that wilfully avoid a notion of totality—succumb to a philosophy of external relations whereby the world is logically made up of things external to each other that remain independent, atomised, isolated and static before related to one another as intersecting. The clearest example here is Jamie Peck’s conjunctural analysis in Variegated Economies focusing on economic transformations that are the multicausal outcome of intersecting, interacting, interdependent processes, forces and relations.
2. Second, the theorisation of relationality across this and other contributions in economic geography commonly evade or wilfully marginalise and silence the historical geographical materialist basis of dialectics at the core of relational thinking within a totality. Elements that are deemed ‘retrievable’ are recovered for ‘methodological injunctions’ within a hybrid and theoretically pluralist form of analysis. At best, the case for dialectics is made in economic geography as a form of methodological reconstruction of conjuncturalism ‘positioned purposively’ beyond Marxism, to cite Peck directly. Although this may offer initially appealing pathways for economic geography, the result is a focus on capitalist diversity adrift from the causes and consequences of economic differentiation across space.

In marginalising, excising, or silencing the notion of totality, our argument is that economic geography remains committed to analytical separatism (or a philosophy of external relations) as a method in mapping uneven development. Gestural manoeuvres to dialectics and relationality are commonplace but these are an ornamental relationality situated within a form of theoretical pluralism, based on the exclusion of historical geographical materialism. For these reasons, reinvigorating debates in economic geography on the variegated approaches to totality as a process of becoming and self-forming whole is an important contribution to the discipline of geography. Totality must be defended rather than caricatured into nothingness. The future-oriented agenda that we seek for economic geography and wider social science debate is therefore a deeper engagement with the standpoint of totality and historical materialist dialectics.

Karel Kosík in Dialectics of the Concrete some time ago advanced the notion of an open concrete totality as a structural, evolving, self-forming whole. Concrete totality emerges not as a result of independent facts in isolation but is constituted by parts in internal relation through a process of becoming. This standpoint of totality has nothing to do with holism, which hypostasises the whole over parts. Rather, it emerges in everyday life in capitalist society and can be understood as open and concrete without tearing that category from a historical materialist theory of history. The result for Kosík is an understanding of ‘the world in its particularities and in its totality’, based on praxis as an ‘openness toward being’. Contributing to the Korčula Summer School—a forum for critical, non-dogmatic Marxism held in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s involving inter alia Henri Lefebvre, Ernst Bloch and Lucien Goldmann—this standpoint on totality was sharpened by Kosík in the pages of the journal Praxis. Drawing from Antonio Gramsci, it was the philosophy of praxis that was seen as a gateway to concrete totality and the unity of diverse differences ‘in the process of becoming’. This standpoint of an open or concrete totality as a process of becoming is clearly gaining traction in new debates in geographical political economy, economic geography, and critical theory. Our article in Progress in Human Geography establishes a set of connections between thinkers that consider the conditions of structured and open totality to offer resources for exposing the organic totality of capitalism as a system in its links with locality.

To concur with David Harvey, ‘totality is perpetually in “the process of becoming”. It is therefore ongoing and as relevant today as it was in Marx’s time’. Our conclusion is that the dialectical rudder of an open concrete totality offers potentially fructifying resources to try to understand and transform the uneven development of capitalism and its crisis conditions.