Comrade Santos

I first heard of Milton Santos at Cornell University in the early 1990s, from my doctoral supervisor William W. Goldsmith, a student of urbanization and development in Brazil in close collaboration with left-wing Brazilian scholars. He once suggested that I’d be quite interested in Santos, whose books I could see on his shelves as I was groping around for a research topic. I sadly failed to take the not-so-subtle hint (‘Santos is a Marxist!’), perhaps because I was too dazzled and distracted at the time by Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Walter Benjamin. Little did I know what I was missing, especially on the theoretical front, as I eventually settled into a dissertation on the relationship between the production of space and the production of ideology, improbably conceived as (what Gillian Hart might generously regard) a relational comparison between Los Angeles, USA, and Colombo, Sri Lanka.

My second sighting of Santos, as a professor in the University of Toronto where he once observed at close quarters the vanguard of the so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography, was more recent and is even more embarrassing to recall. It was about four years ago in the company of a few exemplary Brazilian architects, planners and political economists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, many of them contributors to Teorias e Práticas Urbanas edited by Geraldo Costa et al. (2015). During our memorable exchanges on matters urban, rural, and political with special reference to Henri Lefebvre, an intimately familiar figure to my Brazilian interlocutors, I was reminded by them in no uncertain terms of the relevance of Santos's oeuvre to my own interests in space, ideology, and much else. On this occasion at least I knew what I was missing.

So, the opportunity to reflect on Santos’s ([1978] 2021b) For a New Geography and reconnect with my Brazilian friends is too tempting to pass up. To get to know Santos, in any case, it is better late than never. Being still no expert on the subject of Santos, however, it would be best for me to stay with my own experience of finally encountering him, the serendipity of which is both personal and political. The first and last word about it is crystal clear in my mind: in the pages of Geography, I immediately realized that Santos and I are comrades, as I readily recognized where he was coming from, and it seemed that he too somehow knew my story, although he was a Black man from the north-east of Brazil tuned into radical Francophone thought, and I a Sri Lankan immigrant in Canada with an eye for Marxist internationalism since teenage years. But what does geography have to do with that?

My patently ideological and admittedly belated identification with Santos was helped by what I had been reading just previously: the works of two virtually unknown but pioneering Sri Lankan Marxist political economists concerned with prospects of socialist post-colonial development, S. B. D. de Silva (1982) and G. V. S. de Silva (1988). No sooner than I cracked open Geography, I could not help but fantasize about the conversations these two de Silvas and Santos might have had (beyond the origins of their last names) had they met in person – on the endeavors of intellectuals, academics and civil servants committed to the revolutionary ideals of the Tricontinental tradition. The latter, of course, is the lodestar for my Sri Lankan role models as much as Santos, who is impressively nourished by its shining light throughout his remarkable intellectual itinerary, in Brazil and beyond, in not only France but also in places like Venezuela, Cuba, and Tanzania – where he did cross paths with such luminaries as Walter Rodney ([1972] 2018) in the legendary University of Dar es Salaam, when in fact Geography was in gestation. Indeed, without due respect for that militant-cosmopolitan and socialist-internationalist milieu – barely registered in the current North Atlantic academic fashion of ‘provincializing Europe’ in the name of some authentically Southern episteme – I would not be able to make sense of Santos.

Milton Santos is a Southern intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every Southern intellectual is Milton Santos. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary metropolitan wokeness regarding the periphery, even postcolonial and decolonial, is contained in these two sentences adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre ([1960] 1963: 56) – who is no stranger to Santos. Readers of Santos who expect him to play the role all too often assigned to celebrated academic subjects of peripheral provenance – in metropolitan programs of area or ethnic studies, for example, to discourse on the designated subject of, say, race – may be disappointed by his utter disinterest in claiming any automatic epistemic privilege premised on national, cultural, or any other such essentialist identity. What is abundantly evident in Geography, as well as in Santos’s ([1996] 2021a) companion volume The Nature of Space published nearly two decades later, is a claim not to difference but to universality – a plea precisely for a science of geography and space. This is the project he pursues in both Geography and Space by engaging a stunning array of thinkers from Aristotle to Ibn Khaldun to Marc Bloch to Walter Isard – not only geographers, but also natural scientists and human scientists, most notably philosophers. In what Susanna Hecht aptly calls Santos’s (2021a: viii) ‘deeply cosmopolitan and multilingual’ writings, most unmistakable is his disdain for well-policed borders – sectarian, disciplinary, and national.

Hence the question: how could a science of geography and space be produced by a Southerner from the backlands of Bahia, a descendent of slaves, without arrogating special spiritual powers to the peripheries of proverbial Europe? Santos's border crossings are conducted from a distinctly tiers-mondiste political standpoint and in the company of an unusually ecumenical collection of Marxist thinkers – not only Sartre, Althusser, and Lefebvre among other famous and infamous intellectuals, but also reputable politicians such as Georgi Plekhanov, V. I. Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin. Though unsurprising, it is refreshing in my line of work to see Santos devoting close attention to substantial revolutionary writers effectively erased by the postmodern provincialism of the imperial Anglo-American academy, such as the author of Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico, Marta Harnecker (1973). Many (maybe too many) non-Marxist scholars are also seriously and generously assessed by Santos, but always in relation to two basic questions. What is geography? What is space? With the steady guidance of Santos's socialist and anti-imperialist political perspective, well informed by his instructive Brazilian background and rich experiences in exile, it was above all the very nature and challenge of these radical inquiries into geography and space that lead him to the dialectical method and historical materialism.

Like every genuine thinker, Santos contributes to science by producing concepts. The ground for these is cleared in the first part of Geography: a review of the history of the discipline's distinct Francophone, Germanic, and Anglophone traditions, underlining their colonial legacies, alliances with ruling classes, pretensions to science, (dis)connections to other disciplines and methodological cul-de-sacs. In the subsequent sections of the book, Santos explores the triangulations of geography, society, and space in a truly original and wholistic way. The task for geography, he says, ‘is to define … [its] object … within the totality of knowledge’ (84): i.e., ‘space, and how it appears as a historical product’ (83). This for him involves the study of two intertwined relationships: one between time, history, and space; the other between nature and space, as it is historically mediated by social (economic, political, and technical) forces. Pivotal to this intellectual exercise is Santos's spatialization of the Marxist concept of the ‘social formation’ (153) and his consideration of the problem of transitions between modes of production, especially as theorized by Althusser ([1965] 2016) and his students in Lire le Capital. No less indicative of Santos's originality here is his adaptation of notions such as Lukács’s ([1923] 1971) ‘second nature’ and Sartre’s ([1960] 2004) ‘practico-inert’ into a series of novel conceptions – ‘dynamic inertia’ and ‘roughness’ of space (103), ‘socio-spatial formation’ (151) and ‘spatial time’ (161) – to demarcate the dialectical role played by social(ized) space in history. With all this and more, Geography and Space rank as radical and rare intellectual achievements, worthy of critical comparison with the seminal works of David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and reminiscent of The Production of Space by Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), who is insightfully read and graciously acknowledged as a kindred spirit by Santos.

Given the suggestive affinities between Lefebvre and Santos, the key concept responsible for Santos's greatest innovations in Geography as well as Space should come as no surprise: totality. ‘Geography’, Santos (2021a: 69) writes, ‘has been timid in its approach to totality’ and asks: ‘without the idea of totality, how would we explain that certain states get richer every day and others get poorer every day?’. So he devotes substantial space and time in both Geography and Space to this foundational philosophical category of historical materialism. Santos's prime theoretical contribution to both geography and Marxism is most palpable in these coruscating pages: a brilliant demonstration of the use-value of the notion of totality to the making of what Harvey terms ‘historical geographical materialism’. It recalls the novelty of the ‘faultless method for integrating sociology and history in the perspective of a materialist dialectic’ proposed by Lefebvre that so impressed and moved Sartre ([1960] 1963: 51–52) to say: ‘we only regret that Lefebvre has not found imitators among the rest of Marxist intellectuals’. Had Sartre read Santos, he surely would have saluted not just an imitator but an innovator.