In view of persisting and multiple ‘crises’, coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being satisfyingly addressed. In this paper I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches I aim to demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in ontologically different positions.