Spatial descriptions of reality are a common occurrence in almost all social contexts. As the author of a classic monograph on the general concept of space remarked: “We are constantly reminded of the function of space when we use such expressions in ordinary language such as ‘everything has its place’ or ‘To which one are you referring, this one here, not that one there?’ The here, the there, the place refer to part of a spatial framework for knowledge about the world” (Sack 1980: 4). Spatiality thus appears as a universal mode of the differentiation of actors and objects by means of their objectification in everyday interactions. But also at the more abstract level of communication that one encounters when dealing with non-personal entities such as ‘the state’, ‘the market’, ‘the church’ or ‘the law’, spatial descriptions will appear – for example in the form of national territory, logistics networks, spatially designated places of worship or spatially demarcated jurisdictions: “Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries” (Quine 2004: 52) – they allow for the presentation of complex social assemblages in an easily understood way that leave little doubt about their ontological character or structural possibilities for interacting with them in a certain fashion. In other words, instead of opening space for contingency in the form of further analytical distinctions, they provide a possibility of fast generalization and normalization of everyday challenges in the form of what might be called “evasive imaginations” (Massey 2006: 90). One might furthermore encounter more complex descriptions of social systems as concrete, spatial realities; pretending, for example, “as if science were some huge Central Asian empire, governed by a formal and abstract bureaucracy, and protected by an intricate network of outposts at its borders” – to achieve a semantic approximation of the stability of academic orthodoxy, in this case (Rasch 2000: 15). Often, such spatial imaginations take the form of “ analogic naturalisms , which hold that the logic of human social systems can be understood as analogous to the operation of natural ones” (Deudney 1999: 28). This is a form of radical reduction of complexity that can perhaps most prominently be observed in early modern political geography or ‘geopolitics’, a mode of thought which sought to