Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science

by Marcus A. Doel

This ambitious and original work is the first sustained attempt to integrate poststructuralist thought with the considerable insights of critical human geography. Marcus Doel seeks not to make conventional approximations of poststructuralist concepts but rather to rethink and to rewrite the world through them. His goal is to refound spatial science as a discipline integrated with the social and natural sciences_replete with human attributes of value, meaning, feeling, fearing, and creating_and shaped by the Odiabolical artsO of thinkers such as Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Lyotard. New geography, this book shows, has once again become possible. Doel draws out and develops the inherent spatiality at the heart of postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, fashioning a virtuosic and thought-provoking account of the fundamental difference that space, place, context, and milieu make to how we understand and engage with the world and others around us. Developing the radical consequences of his approach across a range of accessible examples, from film to quantum mechanics, he vividly demonstrating the transformative and enlightening qualities of his argument. Through its goal of reshaping the nature and practice of geography, Poststructural Geographies will interest all critical geographers, and its ambitious theoretical agenda will make the book essential reading across cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Marcus Doel is Professor of Human Geography, Head of the School of the Environment and Society, and Co-director of the Centre for Urban Theory at Swansea University. He is the author of Poststructuralist Geographies (Edinburgh University Press), and has written widely on poststructuralism and space.