The Dictionary of Human Geography (153 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
11.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
post-Fordism
A set of production tech niques that are more flexible than those asso ciated with fordism and are used as part of flexible accumulation. The techniques have three main characteristics: (1) flexibility is emphasized both in the skills of workers (who may be part time to allow their flexible deployment as and when there is demand for a product) and in the functionality of machines that need to be reprogrammable and useable for producing a variety of different products; (2) vertical disintegration rather than vertical integration, as production relies on a close knit network of suppliers who can quickly respond to changes in demand; and (NEW PARAGRAPH) an emphasis on accurate and high quality final products because of the just in time production and the selectivity of consumers. Post Fordism is often said to have emerged in response to the crisis conditions of the 1970s, when Fordism as a mode of production and regime of accumuLation became unstable. However, others have pointed out that in real ity many of the techniques associated with post Fordism have existed since before the emergence of Fordism itself and were simply reinvented in the early 1980s (Gertler, 1988; Amin, 1994). Indeed, the term ?after Fordism? was used by Peck and Tickell (1994) in recog nition of the lack of a coherent set of principles underlying post Fordism and the way in which elements of both Fordism and flexible accumu lation often coexist in the production tech niques and strategies of firms. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For geographers, post Fordism is inextricably linked with the region or cLuster, because ofthe importance of aggLomeration and LocaLiza tion economies for flexible production. jf (NEW PARAGRAPH)
posthumanism
An intellectual and cultural style of work, evident in criticaL theory, architecture, phiLosophy and the social sci ences, that emphasizes the impurities involved in becoming human, oriented against a human ist tradition that has long been the dominant mode of understanding in the humaNlties and social sciences. Where humanism supposes that humans, with their capacities for ration ality, consciousness, ingenuity, soul, language and so on, stand at the centre of social action and can transcend the natural realm, posthu man work insists that all of these capacities are achieved with the help of many others (including non humans). Two related bodies of theoretical understanding are often used to make such claims (Braun, 2004a). The first draws upon new forms of vitalism (Watson, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , associated with readings of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, where matters as elusive as consciousness, mind, memory and other repositories often labelled quintes sentially human, are taken to be nothing more and nothing less than complex movements of matter. Some of this style of working has been taken up under the label of actor network theory. The second intervention draws more upon deconstructive traditions, and demon strates the impossibility of a purely human subject (Badmington, 2000). In the latter the human project, or anthropological machine as Agamben (2002) has called it, can be demon strated to be little other than an always partial differentiation of humans from non humans, frequently taking the form of human/animal distinctions. While the prefix ?post? can some times be read as describing a newly emergent historical condition, wherein a once pure human is increasingly in danger of being made extinct by the growth of prosthetics, genetic technologies, new reproductive tech nologies and so on (Fukuyama, 2002), such historicism misses the point. The contention is that the human and humanist project has always been a fraught and heterogeneous endeavour, involving more than human beings, even if the promiscuities have achieved new forms and intensities (Hayles, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . The result is a challenge to re imagine the social of social science and the human of human geography. It is also a politicization of many suppressed things once left at the margins of human debate. Posthumanism, positively spun, involves ?Mixing wild imagin ings with routine inventiveness, ... [herald ing] a politicisation of the technologies of life in which intellectual disputes and public con troversies become inextricably entangled in the event of food scares, organ harvesting, genetic profiling and any number of other (NEW PARAGRAPH) bio poLmcaL controversies? (Whatmore, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2004, p. 1360). sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Whatmore (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-industrial city
A city whose economic geography has passed from a dependence on manufacturing to an emphasis on service employment (see services). Typically, its dual labour market is characterized by a division between well paid private and public sector professional and managerial workers and lower paid service staff. The pattern of land uses and social areas in the post industrial city shows marked variations from the arrange ment in the classic concentric ring model of industrial cities (cf. zonaL modeL). The down town skyline is now marked by new invest ment in office towers, public institutions, arts and sports complexes, and restaurant and Leisure services. The brownfield sites of old industrial and transportation land uses around downtown have given way to waterfront redevelopment of condominiums and public leisure spaces, often the result of pubLic private partnerships. A number of inner city neighbourhoods have experienced reinvestment and gentrification as the hous ing market responds to the downtown Labour market of advanced services. New immigrants and the working poor are being displaced out wards to suburban sites, which have become the new focus of manufacturing and wholesal ing, adjacent to the airport and regional high way routes. The suburbs are diversifying in lifestyle and social status, and with the emer gence of satellite town centres (or edge cities in the largest metropoLitan areas) are assum ing a more urban status themselves. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The characteristics of the post industrial city extend beyond its population and land use features. Canadian studies indicate that the gender and family traits of post industrial cities differ from those with a manufacturing base, with smaller househoLds, a greater ten dency for gender equality in the workplace, and lower and later marriage rates (Ley, 1996). Lifestyle liberalism and higher levels of secuLarism are among distinctive attitu dinal and cultural associations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Though typically experiencing economic and population growth, the post industrial city faces significant challenges. Since the 1980s, neo LiberaL policy has tended to trade welfare services for entrepreneurial objectives (Harvey, 1989a), accentuating social and spatial polar ization (Walks, 2001). The emphasis upon (NEW PARAGRAPH) quaLity of Life considerations for the middle cLass might compromise provision of more basic services; for example, tax dollars expended on consumer attractions such as sports stadia could diminish the quality of life of more impoverished populations (Friedman, Andrew and Silk, 2004). Population growth and a large middle class labour market are often associated with challenges to housing affordability (see housing studies). Under investment in public transportation has heigh tened the dependence on the private car, lead ing to traffic congestion and severe air ponution episodes. And, as the Paris banlieu riots of 2005 demonstrated so keenly, subur ban sites may be a newly emergent zone of acute sociaL excLusion. dL (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ley (1980); Robson (1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-industrial society
A conceptualization of the changing conditions of economy and society in the global north, beginning approximately in the 1960s. The term was popularized by Daniel Bell?s immensely influ ential book (1999 [1973]), and has enjoyed widespread dissemination, though not always with the specificity that Bell intended. Post industrial society is concerned with an occu pational transformation in advanced societies as, with automation and outsourcing, employ ment moves increasingly to a white collar, ser vice profile, with specialized information and information technology playing a key role in the shaping of society and economy. Beyond this, some authors see an evolutionary process, with societies passing through discrete eco nomic and social stages from the harvesting of raw materials, to manufacturing, and finally to the provision of services aiding both con sumption and production. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Through the 1970s, several variations on the theme of post industrial society emerged. Influenced by the French student reaction against inaccessible state bureaucracies, Alain Touraine (1971) proposed that the hold ers of specialized information were becoming a privileged technocracy, extending control over growing domains of everyday Life. A second stream of work emphasized the holders of spe cialized knowledge as a new middle cLass of professional and managerial workers, though internally fragmented by their variable access to economic and cuLturaL capitaL and their location in the public and private sectors (Gouldner, 1979). A third track emphasized by Manuel Castells and his followers identified the role of information nodes and flows in the shaping of new social configurations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The dominant figure, however, has been Daniel Bell. Although concerned with occupa tional transformations to a service society, his thesis went considerably further, as he sought to trace the forward trajectory of advanced societies, using the paradigmatic case of the USA, in the three interlocking domains of social structure, politics and culture. He noted a potential non correspondence of the parts in this forward process, as, for example, a steadily more disciplined economy was tied to a steadily more antinomian culture. For Bell, a knowledge theory of value replaced a Labour theory of vaLue, and this opened up serious disagreement with Western Marxist theorists and more doctrinaire versions in Moscow (see marxism). By the mid 1980s, however, leftist critics were acknowledging the accuracy of Bell?s cultural and labour force projections (Wright and Martin, 1987). Nonetheless, Bell?s thesis, like all sociaL theory, was a child of its time. Published as the unpreced ented postwar boom was about to end, it is written from an overly optimistic and middle class perspective, where scarcity and conflict do not deflect a track of upward social mobiL ity. But it has proven a seminal paradigm for subsequent research, and its basic proposi tions are now part of the taken for granted world of contemporary social science. dL (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bell (1999 [1973]); Clement and Myles (1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-Marxism
Although the term ?post Marxism? is sometimes applied to diagnose the post Soviet era of geopoLitics, this chrono logical usage trivializes an intellectual ferment that pre dates the fall of the Berlin Wall by at least two decades. If calendar time is the touch stone, the year 1968 is a more precise marker of post Marxism. Moreover, intellectual ferment neither implies a cohesive intellectual project nor necessarily an identifiable body of theory. And so it is with post Marxism, which has instead become a convenient rubric for varying analyses of exploitation in capitaList societies that depart from the rigidity and exclusivity of class centred Marxist orthodoxy. The first explicit allegiance to a post Marxist agenda is found in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe?s influential manifesto for radicaL democracy, Hegemony and socialist strategy, where they declare: ?[I]f our intellectual project in this book is post Marxist, it is also post Marxist? (1985, p. 5). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In consort with other post Marxist scholars who follow or precede Laclau and Mouffe, a good part of this new enterprise concerns itself with the array of discourses that is, sign regimes allied to institutional apparatuses which constitute subjects and identities in dif fering and differentiated ways. Indeed, if there is a common thread to ?post Marxist? analysis, it is the insistence that there exists neither a sover eign, self present subject who can be recognized as the centre ofinitiatives and the natural holder of individual rights (as in liberal political theory: see LibeRaLism); nor a collective cLass actor that commands ontological primacy as agent of history (the proletariat in classical marxism). The subject is instead posited as radically incom plete or overdetermined in varying registers psychological (Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser), representational (Jacques Derrida, Jean Francois Lyotard, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) or social/political (Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, J.K. Gibson Graham). Connected to these disavowals is a series of others namely, rejecting a presumed primacy of the economic, cLass, historicism, totality and a predominantly union based labour or progressive politics. vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Callari and Ruccio (1996); Gibson Graham (2006b [1996]); Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Sim (1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
postmaterialism
A generously roomy term that is suggestive rather than definitive. The prefix highlights an historical discontinuity in cultural expectations surrounding the relation ship between society and the non human world. The term captures the elevation of aes thetic and quality of life concerns over issues of production and distribution. Coined by Inglehart (1977), it describes the growth of environmentaLism and the decreased domin ance of class based politics in the postwar era. Postmaterialism may be interpreted as an ?ecoLogy of affluence? that is distinguishable from the ?environmentalism of the poor?, whose ecological claims are rooted in the defence of livelihoods rather than quality of life (Guha and Martinez Alier, 2000). gb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Guha and Martinez Alier (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
postmodernism
An important architec tural, aesthetic and intellectual movement that flourished in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. It is easily (but mistakenly) conflated with its more philosophical contemporary, post structuraLism, as well as with the deeper currents (economic, political, social) signalled by its epoch defining cousin, post modernity. And though it is sometimes indis tinguishable from the intellectual trajectories of the other two ?posts?, most would agree to constrain it to the cultural sphere (see cuL ture). Uncertainty exists as to whether or not postmodernism has ended, but clearly the excitement and controversy it generated has for the most part abated. While there is evidence that its roots are older, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, many put postmodern ism?s apex alongside the popularization of video media and the televisualization of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s (or the politician?s digital counterpart, Max Headroom). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Broadly speaking, the thematics that char acterize postmodernism?s artistic dimensions were said to constitute either a break from or an extension of the desire of modernism to turn the everyday and the mundane into art. Perhaps the most important result of this (dis) connection was the effort to take art out of the hands of the rich elite (historically, the main consumers of art) by collapsing the distinction between ?high? and ?low? aesthetic forms. The notorious tendency of postmodernists to blend multiple media in one work was often accom plished by combining forms that had previ ously been dismissed as vulgar elements of popular culture and thus marginalized in art (NEW PARAGRAPH) as in, for example, comic books, advertise ments and graffiti. Modernist thematics often encouraged, if not required, reflection and contemplation about the layered meaning of a work, which was in some cases paired with the goal of faithfully recovering the artist?s intentionality. In addition, many modernist works highlighted themes of aLienation, increased mechanization and rationalization. Postmodernism, to the contrary, often cele brated pastiche, depthlessness, multiplicity, uncertainty and fragmentation. In the hands of some postmodernists, history became less a reservoir of facts awaiting excavation than a playground of potential appropriations in which authenticity, timeless values and fealty to the truth were mocked by unceremonial gestures towards nostalgia. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Postmodern architecture concretized these concepts in the built environment. In contrast to modern architecture?s allegiance to func tionality and its dismissal of ornamentation (Relph, 1987), postmodern designs were playful if not exuberant, aimed at creating confusion by overlapping and juxtaposing in contiguous spaces many different aesthetic styles. As in art, postmodern architecture was to pillage rather than revere history, borrowing elements such as Greek and Roman pillars and embellishing facades with touches of Art Deco. Postmodernism?s exchangeability of parts implied a relativistic approach to mean ing, one that denies centres, or ?depths?, of understanding (see reLativism). Even the popular reflective windows of the 1980s were, according to Harvey (1989b), a flippant response to profundity, a refusal of a deeper inside that turns the gaze back upon the viewer. (NEW PARAGRAPH) That these architectural forms appeared alongside gentrification and a raging con sumerism in the 1980s and 1990s was not lost on human geographers, and for the most part their reaction was unfavourable. Harvey?s (1989b) critique of the condition ofpostmod ernity famously first situated postmodern urban forms within a set of deeper economic and political transformations (notably from fordism to post fordism or fLexibLe accu muLation), and then explained what he regarded as the cultural ?response? (depthless ness, relativism, the ransacking of history etc.) as the surface level outcome of dislodged sens ibilities produced by time space compression under late capitaLism. Among the spaces read as signs of a distinctively postmodern spatiaL ity were Baltimore?s revitalized harbour (Harvey, 1989b), Los Angeles?s Bonaventure Hotel (Jameson, 1984), New York?s South Street Seaport (Boyer, 1992), and Los Angeles and Orange counties, in California (Soja, 1989, 1992). Whether indicted for pre senting false history, structuring space for maximum surveiLLance, or attempting pur posefully to disorient, each were tied in one way or another to the excesses ofpostmodern ism. As Sorkin (1992b, p. 4; see also Goss, 1993) put it in describing Canada?s West Edmonton Mall, ?Mirrored columns . . . frag ment the scene, shattering the mall into a kal eidoscope of ultimately unreadable images. Confusion proliferates at every level; past and future collapse meaninglessly into the present; barriers between real and fake, near and far, dissolve as history, nature, technology, are indifferently processed by the mall?s fantasy machine.? Another part of the urban under belly of postmodernism was its socio spatial segregation, denounced by Davis (1990) as ?Fortress LA? (1992), and described by Dear and Flusty (1998) as alternating between (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dreamscapes of Privatopia and the Carceral City?s Mean Streets. As Smith (1996b) was to make clear within the context of gentrification more generally, the new spaces of the ?revanchist? city were not simply drawn by capitaL, but were forged out of an unholy alliance between it and the state. Looking back on these dreary accounts of postmodern urbanism, it is hard to remember the demo cratically minded intentions of one of its most influential progenitors Robert Venturi who reacted against the sparseness of orthodox modernism by collapsing the distinction between high and low architecture in his fam ous book, Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenor, 1972). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Postmodernism elicited several different responses in human geography. As the fore going suggests, many of the first responses were influenced by postmodernism in archi tecture and planning (rather than literature or the creative arts more generally). Some saw in postmodernism?s attention to difference and specificity an opportunity to revive and re fashion humanistic geography as a form of irredeemably critical and affirmative LocaL knowledge (e.g. Ley, 1987, 1993, 2003a), while others saw an opportunity for a far more theoretically ambitious, insistently radical reconstruction of human geography writ large (Dear, 1986, 1988; Dear and Flusty, 2002). Many of these discussions were inspired in some measure by experiments in urbanism on the west coast of North America, notably Los Angeles and Vancouver, and they fostered the emergence and identification of a Los angeles school. One of its principal protag onists was Edward Soja, who straddled the (NEW PARAGRAPH) fields of geography and planning. Unlike Ley and Dear, however, he had a much more positive view of historicaL materiaLism and of the (crucial) possibility of its spatialized reconstruction through a critical engagement with postmodernism (see Soja, 1989). Against this, however, as noted above, Harvey (1989b) mobilized his own historico geographical materialism as a vigorous critique of postmodernism and postmodernity. These more architectonic versions of postmodernism as critical project (Soja) and critical object (Harvey) were roundly criticized by feminist geographers in particular for their insensitivity to difference. These critiques were part of a growing interest in post coLoniaLism and post structuralism that soon eclipsed post modernism in human geography and beyond. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Today, the hullabaloo over postmodernism has waned, but it manages to live on in some contexts, including not only architecture but also, strangely enough, reLigion. Part philosophical engagement inspired by post structuralists such as Jacques Derrida (see Caputo, 1997; Caputo and Scanlon, 1999), and part a cultural wave of new Age, Eastern mysticism, this latest reconfiguration of post modernism is paired against a disbelieving modernism, elements ofwhich (see table) have been deployed in epic battles against religion. (NEW PARAGRAPH) How the religion postmodernism nexus will evolve remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: whether we are in a state of modern ity or postmodernity, it will not take long for contemporary culture to construct nostalgia for postmodernism, making pastiche out of it as it did to everything else, serving up ironic quotations of the movement that gave new meaning to the term ?irony?. kwo/jpj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dear and Flusty (1998); Harvey (1989b); Jameson (1991); Ley (2003a); Soja (1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

Kill Whitey by Keene, Brian
The Wraiths of War by Mark Morris
Destined by Harrell, Jessie
Sedulity (Book One) Impact by Forsyth, David
The Christmas Baby Bump by Lynne Marshall