The Dictionary of Human Geography (154 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
9.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
postmodernity
Not to be confused with the cultural and aesthetic movement postmod ernism, postmodernity refers to the contem porary historical period that arguably closed the door upon modernity. The advent of the historical era and its associated artistic move ment occurred during roughly the same period (the mid to late twentieth century), but the driving forces of postmodernity oper ate at a longer time scale than do those of postmodernism (particularly now that the cul tural form is into its dotage). While modernity was characterized by an insistence upon the possibility and knowability of ?Truth?, post modernity replaced its foundationaL assump tions of solvability in scientific enterprises (see science), universality in ethical imperatives (see ethics) and transcendence in the essence of things (see ontoLogy) with uncertainty, singularity and immanence. For better or worse (and it has certainly been both), the defining elements of postmodernity arose from a series of major transformations in the social, economic and political understandings about the how the world is materialized and experienced (Jones, Natter and Schatzki, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Intellectually, postmodernity is generally considered to be a period initiated by a thor ough rupture in the history of Western thought, with its confident allegiances to what Jean Francois Lyotard (1984) called ?meta narratives? grand theories of society and human progress. These were thoroughly cri tiqued and often rejected by postmodernity?s more philosophical wing, post structuraLism, which was a concurrent response to structur aLism and its endless proliferation of binarized power relations. Post structuralism quickly extended its critical scope to the hegemonic conceptual cornerstones ofWestern modernity, sometimes even back to their foundational the orizations in Greek philosophy. More broadly, postmodernity?s historical break might be loosely described in terms of an avoidance of theoretical absolutism, an investment in epi stemological constructivism (sometimes bas tardized and mischaracterized under the slogan ?everything is relative?: cf. relativism), a celebration of difference, a fascination with open systems and a devotion to complex rela tions of power (for a review of key thinkers, see Best and Kellner, 1991). Its rise alongside the information age inflects it away from moder nity?s faith in our ability to accurately and adequately represent the world, and for some, such as Jean Baudrillard (1993), postmoder nity?s products are not simply bad reproduc tions but ?simulacra?, copies taken as more real than the reality that they represent (see repre sentation; simuLacrum). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The uptake of these notions was in great part a response to the horrors that attended the rise of fascism and the hoLocaust. Often read by members of the postwar Frankfurt School (see criticaL theory) and later by post structuralist thinkers as the logical cul mination of the worst parts of modernity and as the political crisis to which all future ethico political thought must respond, these events effectively signalled the end of an era. As post modernity has progressed, its central ideas have been adopted and adapted for both pro gressive and quite cynical, reactionary ends. (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the late 1980s, it appeared that postmod ernity and postmodernism were co extensive, and indeed the intellectual fashions of the for mer fed the cultural currents of the latter. The geographer David Harvey sought to explain these connections in his 1989 book, The con dition of postmodernity (see also Jameson, 1991; (NEW PARAGRAPH) Soja, 1989). A testament to the broader importance of both ?posts? across the intellec tual and popular landscape, the book was wildly successful inside and outside human geography, making Harvey one of the most well known Anglophone theorists of the twentieth century. The argument draws primarily from Harvey?s reformulation of poL iticaL economy as an explicitly historico geographical materialism, and situates both postmodernity and postmodernism within the transformations of space and time (or, rather, time space) brought about by the latest stage of capitaLism, which began to take on a new shape in the 1970s. As Harvey explained, the age of postmodernity was characterized by a series of growing crises in capitalism, the results of which heralded a shift from a rela tively stable set of production relations, ford ism, exemplified by the capital state labour contract sealed by the New Deal in the USA, to the contemporary era of post fordism. When that contract expired under the weight of international competition for low wages, Western capitalists responded with just in time production, a credit based economy, and the spatial fixes of capital relocation and fresh market penetration. The new economy?s spatial, technological and labour processes had become, under the regime of fLexibLe accumuLation, more nimble and quicker to change. Harvey?s argument was not, however, to draw a direct line of causality from these disruptions in the economic sphere to postmo dernity?s seemingly similar loss of moorings in the intellectual domain. It was, rather, to couple these transformations through shifts in the ?experience of space time?; as he put it, economic change led to time space com pression, which dramatically redrew our cog nitive maps of the social order. Into this confusion arose postmodernity, the result of a profound disenchantment with modernity?s long held matrix of certainty and order. For its turn, postmodernism was simply a cultural blip, an ephemeral reaction in art and archi tecture to the deeper anxieties brought forth by postmodernity (for an extended discussion, see Gregory, 1994, Part III, esp. pp. 406 14). (NEW PARAGRAPH) From Harvey, it follows that we should not welcome postmodernity as a new, emancipa tory era that moves us beyond a confining, stodgy and conservative modernity, but see it rather as a description of forces that are deep, complex and surprising. And since 1989, arguably, things have intensified: the collapse of communism, massive consumption and even larger looming crises fuelled by speculation, a troubling expansion of the privatization of state functions, high levels of economic inequality alongside increased racial and ethnic tensions, and a neo liberal excitement for free markets for capitaL but sealed borders for labour (see neo LiberaLism). Meanwhile, all of these markers of instability are smoothed over with a blind, middle class nostalgia for a media invented image of modernity, democracy and white heteronormativity. Meanwhile, the export ation of cowboy capitalism to the global south serves to hide exploitative production prac tices and their associated environmental con sequences from the eyes of Northern consumers, while simultaneously exporting jobs and hardening borders. Finally, capital ism has had its own hand in the selective deconstruction of the notion of property, par ticularly in spaces in the South where indigen ous rights are repeatedly trampled or simply ignored as opportunistic state leaders and cor porations collude to exploit local resources in the name of the global consumer. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Within all of this we might find some opti mism in the postmodern character of new sociaL movements and alternative forms of political organizing, both of which have seen radical transformation in the late twentieth century as the union based strategies of Fordism gave way to the post NAFTA emer gence of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico. To the extent that postmodernity is associated with flexibility, so too goes resistance. Characteristic of the contem porary scene are roving protests against neo liberalism sparked by the successful disruption of the worLd trade organization meeting in Seattle, Washington in 1999; the emergence of hundreds of globally linked collectives of indi genous peoples, operating under a common proclamation of rights while preserving the singularities of their different political projects; and the widespread attraction of youth across the world to the ?new anarchism?, to minor theory, to grassroots eNvironmeNTalism, to living beyond racial and national identifica tions, and to sexual freedom. These contrast markedly to mobilizations under modernity, which insisted on coherence in political ideoL ogy and uniformity in goals for change (think global proletariat) often topped off by rigid organizational hierarchies. In their place, and taking cues from many post structurally inflected approaches to feminism, anti racism, queer theory, anti statism and anti capitalism, are thousands of collectives geared to produce radical change from the (NEW PARAGRAPH) perspective of difference. Contemporary activ ists produce a continuously unfolding multi plicity of small, terminal actions that constantly work at ?expanding the floor of the cage? (in Noam Chomsky?s words) within which we currently find ourselves. kwo/ jpj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gregory (1994, pp. 406 14); Harvey (1989b); Soja (1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-normal science (PNS)
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1993) contend that a new form of science is needed when ?facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent?. The figure shows that where ?decision stakes? and ?systems uncertainties? are low, there is routine Kuhnian science (see paradigm): when both are moderate, we have consultancy, which copes with uncertainty by working within tolerances and by profes sional judgement. But with high stakes and high uncertainty (the ?post normal? condition), policy has to be implemented before the evidence is certain (cf. risk society). This requires new ways of working based on an ?extended peer community? (all those affected by an issue who are prepared to enter into dialogue) and ?extended facts?, which include anecdotal evidence, confidential information, local knowledge and ethical commitments. As such, PNS aims to provide a coherent frame work for participation in decision making, which includes tools developed by Funtowicz and Ravetz to manage and communicate uncertainty and to allow for the qualitative assessment of quantitative information as pro vided by the NUSAP website (http://nusap. net/), and that goes beyond confirmatory data anaLysis. As such, it provides an antidote to nihilistic relativism about facts, values and reality. Saloranta (2001) shows how PSN can be used in the climate change debate. kj (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-socialism
The various complex polit ical and economic transformations occurring (particularly after 1989) in the former socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It signals an historical break with models of social and economic development organized around a centralized bureaucratic state socialist project, a com mand economy, and the demise of the geo political hegemoNY of the Soviet Union over its satellite states. There is still debate about whether Chinese market socialism can be thought of as post socialist with its opening of markets to foreign investment and export markets, and the expansion of private owner ship in an economy still strongly controlled by the party state. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Post socialism is also a description of a reorientation in a broader epistemoLogicaL and political structure of thought. Along with other similar ?postings? (such as post modernism, post structuraLism and post coLoniaLism), post socialism has signalled a conceptual break and has initiated a series of thorough going theoretical transformations of socialist thought, as these others had with modernism, structuraLism and colonial thought. With its enormous geographical scope and the depth of its impacts on regional and global economies, post socialism has also reshaped the intellectual and institutional practices of many of the social sciences (e.g. the perestroika movement in political science, post marxism and rethinking marxism in eco nomics, poLiticaL economy and geography, and the resurgence of anarchist thought and practice in sociaL movements and global just ice movements). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite the salience of the historical changes wrought after 1989, post socialism retains the binary nature of its origins. On the one hand, it represents one of the deepest politico philosophical breaks of the twentieth century, the break with sociaLism and the return to the market ideoLogy of Friedrich von Hayek. This break has fuelled the resur gence of neo LiberaLism in former socialist states, particularly by the Bretton Woods organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. In this view, there is no alternative for reform societies but to privatize their econ omies, democratize their polities and liberalize their societies. De communization must accompany structural adjustment, shock ther apy and the building of open markets. On the other hand, post socialism has also been a political theoretical movement of socialist and social democratic thinkers deeply con cerned by the shocking deepening of social and economic inequalities produced by struc turaL adjustment and shock therapy, yet optimistic about the possibilities of what Jacques Derrida called ?democracy to come? (Derrida, 1994). For such scholars, the tech nocratic implementation of shock therapy and the dire consequences for regional economies and livelihoods has been a cause for serious concern. From this perspective, the social and geographical contingencies of state socialism are matched by the deep complexities and contradictions of post socialism (van Hoven, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In response, geographers have expli citly challenged the dominant transition framework that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to or depart from the blueprints of already existing capitalisms. In their place, they have focused on the diversity of ?actually occurring post socialisms? (Grabher and Stark, 1997; Pickles and Smith, 1998). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With accession to the European Union, the geographies of post socialist Central and Eastern europe have become ever more focused on issues of regional and institutional integration, the creation of common eco nomic spaces, and issues of immigration and Labour market change. Here, post socialism finally comes to mean something it probably ought to have meant much earl ier; the process of regional change wrought on both sides of the Iron Curtain. jpi (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hann (2002); Pickles (2007); Rainnie, Smith and Swain (2002); Smith (2004); ZZizek (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
post-structuralism
A post 1960s intellec tual movement that countered the perceived rigidities, certainties and essentialisms thought to characterize structuralism. Yet post structuralism has always been indebted to its predecessor, to which it is tied in productive ways (hence ?post ? and not ?anti ? structural ism). Post structuralism was developed first in phiLosophy and later took hold in literary theory and criticism (see cuLturaL turn). Its birth is usually marked by a 1966 conference paper by Jacques Derrida (republished in 1978; also see Derrida, 1979). Other key figures and contributions include Foucault (1972a [1966], 1978 [1976], 1980b), Barthes (1977), Spivak (1988), Butler (1990, 1993a), Baudrillard (1993), Latour (1993), Bhabha (1994) and Badiou (2005). Often conflated with postmodernity and postmodernism, post structuralism, while always in the mix of these theoretical and cultural currents, is more contained, analytic and philosophical. It has been, and continues to be, profoundly influential in the humanities and critical social sciences, and is noteworthy for under writing many of contemporary human geo graphy?s engagements with actor network theory, feminism, post coLoniaLism, post deveLopment theory, posthumanism, post marxism, psychoanaLytic theory, queer theory and subaltern studies. Its influ ence, direct and indirect, is felt in nearly all branches of human geography, though not without critics and dissenters, especially among humanists and Marxists (cf. human ism; marxism). Its primary effects can be felt in four theoretical shifts since the 1980s: (NEW PARAGRAPH) A rethinking of the relationships between the production of space and its representation, especially through reconfigured concepts of cuLturaL landscape and landscape, but also in other sites of text and textuaLity, such as literature, fam, the media, music and so on. (NEW PARAGRAPH) New concepts of what power consists of, where it is ?located? and how it operates. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A destabilization of foundationausm, leading to post foundational accounts of identity and difference (including cri tiques of standard categories in social science, such as cLass and deveLop ment), a questioning of the binary be tween cuLture and nature, and a suspicion towards older and less reflexive understandings of objectivity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A somewhat more recent reversal of post structuralists? tendency to privilege epistemoLogy over ontoLogy in ac counts of social life. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Jacques Derrida?s version of post structuralism is fundamental to the destabiliza tion of meaning that lies at the heart of the concept. He began with the recognition that any structure relies upon a centre, an organizing principle (e.g. God, the individual, truth, objectivity), around which the remainder of the structure is constructed. Derrida then famously unhinged the centre from its effronteries of self actualization and independence by asserting its relational constitution with an ?other?, an out side periphery that is the raw material for the centre?s construction. In helping forge the iden tity of the centre through a process of negation (i.e. not ?other?), this ?constitutive outside? is said to leave its ?trace? within the centre, high lighting their co dependence and providing the entry point for the post structuralist method of deconstruction, a form of analysis that dem onstrates the reliance of the centre on its excluded other (cf. discourse analysis). Derrida?s main contribution in human geog raphy has been to help undo the security of traditional binaries, such as objectivity/subject ivity, space/pLace and nature/culture. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foucault?s brilliant contribution to post structuralism was to trace the historical evolu tion or geneaLogy of socially constructed categories and to ask in whose name and in what contexts certain objects became associated with certain categories. His work typically linked analyses of the interrelated production of insti tutions (hospitals, prisons: see carceral geog raphies; panopticon), scientific and political discourse (see criticaL geopoLitics) and their subjects (see discipLinary power). Further, it led him to envision capillaric rather than fixed sites of power, which operates as a difference naming and boundary drawing effect of dis course. Probably the most influential of the post structuralists to date, Foucault?s impact on studies of space have been plentiful: in stud ies of govERNmeNtALitY (counting and placing bodies), identity (naming bodies in terms of race, deviance, health etc.) and sexuality (controlling bodies and populations: see bio power), as well as in post structuralist studies of landscape, where discourse and space meet, and where the operation of power is concretized (see Crampton and Elden, 2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH) feminism has a complicated relationship to post structuralism. On the one hand, Butler, within the context of feminism and queer the ory, described the production of the human subject as a matter of performance, signs acted out upon through iteration and citation the bodies of individuals. Like Foucault, Butler rejects any notion of an innate subject, suggesting that performativ ity is a matter of approximating idealized ima ginaries of gender, and of resisting or even satirizing such ideals. (Geographers have mostly taken up performativity by insisting on the context specificity within which iden tities are formed.) On the other hand, some feminists have not welcomed the destabiliza tion of identity that post structuralism her alded, noting that the rise of anti essentialist thought was curiously coincident with women?s successes in demanding a voice based on sex and gender (see Nicholson, 1989). In any case, a number of concepts and debates within feminist geographies are intimately tied to the rise of post structuralism (see aLterity; body; difference; essentiaL ism; identity; positionaLity; subjectivity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The above thinkers have an aversion to metaphysical or ontological speculation, and so it has been said that, in their tradition of theorizing, epistemoLogy trumps ontology (Dixon and Jones, 1998). But Deleuze (NEW PARAGRAPH) never refrained from attempting to develop a thoroughgoing post structuralist philosophy that incorporated ontology. Central to this and what makes it possible to consider Deleuze a post structuralist was his rejection of all conceptions of the world that relied upon transcendental or ideal objects, such as essences (see also minor the ory: see Katz, 1996). Instead, he describes an immanent universe of force and affect, one that organizes itself according to the matter (literally) at hand. Thus, things in the world do not correspond to a set of ideal forms, but are instead singular products of continuous material differentiation. Thought by its very nature, but particularly so under modernity retrofits objects and relations into categories and orders of similitude, and thus keeps the thinker at a conceptual distance from the ?pure difference? expressed by the material world. As his is an approach that often has more in com mon with compLexity theory than diaLect ics, Deleuze too has been controversial among some post structuralists and many Marxists. Together with his colleague Felix Guattari (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), he devel oped a rich spatial vocabulary populated with concepts such as assembLage, nomadoLogy, rhizome, (de)territorialization, smooth and striated spaces, and the like (Bonta and Protevi, 2004; see also Doel, 1999). kwo/jpj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bonta and Protevi (2004); Butler (1990); Crampton and Elden (2007); Doel (1999); Fou cault (1980); Harrison (2006); Murdoch (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

To Protect His Mate by Serena Pettus
Have a Little Faith by Kadi Dillon
The Precipice by Paul Doiron
Casanova by Medina, Edward
The Mysterious Mr. Heath by Ariel Atwell
The Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson
AWAKENING (Alfonzo) by Frank, S.W.
A Bad Day for Mercy by Sophie Littlefield