Missing subjects

Abstract

This commentary engages with Kevin Cox’s (2013) “Notes on a Brief Encounter: Critical Realism, Historical Materialism and Human Geography.” Identifying a trajectory in historical geographical materialism that focused on the material social practices of everyday life fully attuned to the social relations of production and social reproduction of space, place, and nature, I argue that Marxist geography was perhaps less in need of the methodological corrective that Cox suggests critical realism offered. The rich empirical research associated with this strand of history in our field kept the ricochet between abstract and concrete in dialectical tension, exposing and examining some of the material social practices through which new structures are created, which is at the heart of what Cox wants to understand. Finally, I note a persistent silence. At the same time as the engagements between critical realism and historical geographical materialism were taking place in the 1980s—crystallized for some around the locality debates—feminist geographers were producing work that offered a different perspective on the `elaboration of new structures of social relations,' which Cox finds so resonant in critical realism. This scholarship was largely occluded in the debates between critical realism and historical geographic materialism, as it is again in the present piece, but it offers some powerful resolutions of—or productive struggles with—the contradictions of structure and agency, necessity and contingency, pluralizing and totalizing, or abstract and concrete that can haunt and confound those working in a critical realist or narrowly class-focused Marxist tradition.