How Space got its groove back:

1. How Space got its groove back: Geography and Poststructuralism Deborah Thien University of Edinburgh dthien@geo.ed.ac.uk

2. SPACE? • Doreen Massey (1992: 66) argues that a discussion about what “space” is “never surfaces [within geography] because everyone assumes we already know what the term means”.

3. Lecture Outline • Review of three taken for granted understandings of space • Introduction to poststructuralism • Discussion of three ways in which geographers have made use of poststructuralism to reformulate notions of space

4. Space: 3 dominant dualistic understandings • Timeless space • Meaningless space • Empty space

5. Timeless Space • Space versus time

6. Meaningless space • Space versus place Yi Fu Tuan (1974) Topophilia Edward Relph (1776) Place and placelessness Mark Augé (1995) Non-places

7. Empty Space • Absolute versus relative space

8. Criticisms • (Timeless) Space is static • (Meaningless) Space is divorced from human meaning and human life • (Empty) Space can be contained

9. Poststructuralism • Some important aspects: • Not identical to postmodernism • A reaction against structuralism • Emphasis on fluidity • Emphasis on subjectivity • Emphasis on relationality

10. Not identical to postmodernism, but related • “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity… of juxtaposition … of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment … when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (Foucault 1986).

11. A Reaction against Structuralism and Emphasis on Fluidity • A movement away from ‘fixing’ and ‘bounding’ identities and places • Deconstruction: identifying differences in meanings • A challenge to the dualistic understandings of space • An insistence on the fluidity and dynamism of identities (subjectivities) and socio-spatial relations

12. Subjectivity • Subjectivity: being and becoming a subject • "Subjectivities are not abstract entities; they are always conducted in situ" (Probyn 2003: 293).

13. Space as relational • Instead … of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated movements in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent (Massey 1997: 322).

14. Poststructural reformulations of Space • Paradoxical space • Geographies of subjection • Emotional geographies

15. Paradoxical Space • Moves away from “knowable” space to challenge the “transparent space” of “social-scientific masculinity” (G. Rose, 1993: 40) • Space “is practised, a matrix of play, dynamic and iterative, its forms and shapes produced through the citational performance of self-other relations. Which is not to say that space is infinitely plastic. Certain forms of space tend to recur, their repetition a sign of power”. (Rose 1996: 59)

16. Geographies of subjection • The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (1996) J.K. Gibson-Graham • Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. • “If capitalism/man can be understood as multiple and specific; if it is not a unity but a heterogeneity, not a sameness but a difference; if it is always becoming what it is not; if it incorporates difference within its decentered being; then noncapitalism/woman is released from its singular and subordinate status” (Gibson-Graham 1996: 44).

17. Emotional Geographies • 'acknowledges the emotions "as ways of knowing, being and doing in the broadest sense; and using this to take geographical knowledges...beyond their more usual visual, textual and linguistic domains" (Anderson and Smith 2001: 8).

18. Geography transformed From “maps and chaps” to “the sexiest academic subject of them all” (Terry Eagleton 1997).

19. How Space got its groove back: Geography and Poststructuralism Deborah Thien University of Edinburgh dthien@geo.ed.ac.uk