The Dictionary of Human Geography

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the role of information nodes andflowsin the

shaping of new social configurations.

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 alabour

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 allsocial 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 socialmobil-

ity. But it has proven a seminalparadigmfor

subsequent research, and its basic proposi-

tions are now part of the taken-for-granted

world of contemporary social science. dl

Suggested reading

Bell (1999 [1973]); Clement and Myles (1994).

post-Marxism Although the term ‘post-

Marxism’ is sometimes applied to diagnose the

post-Soviet era ofgeopolitics, 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 incapitalistsocieties

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 forradical democracy,

Hegemony and socialist strategy,wherethey

declare: ‘[I]f our intellectual project in this book

ispost-Marxist, it is also post-Marxist’(1985,

p. 5).

In consort with other post-Marxist scholars

who followorprecede Laclau and Mouffe, a

good part of this new enterprise concerns itself

with the array ofdiscourses– that is, sign-

regimes allied to institutional apparatuses –

which constitutesubjectsandidentitiesin 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 of initiatives and the natural holder

of individual rights (as in liberal political theory:

seeliberalism);noracollectiveclass-actorthat

commandsontologicalprimacy as agent of

history (the proletariat in classicalmarxism).

Thesubjectisinsteadpositedasradicallyincom-

plete or overdetermined in varying registers –

psychological (Jacques Lacan, Louis

Althusser), representational (Jacques Derrida,

Jean-Franc ̧ois 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,

totalityandapredominantlyunion-basedlabour

or progressive politics. vg

Suggested reading

Callari and Ruccio (1996); Gibson-Graham

(2006b [1996]); Laclau and Mouffe (1985);

Sim (1998).

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 societyand 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

environmentalismand the decreased domin-

ance ofclass-based politics in the postwar era.

Postmaterialism may be interpreted as an

‘ecologyof 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

Suggested reading

Guha and Martinez-Alier (2000).

postmodernism An important architec-

tural, aesthetic and intellectual movement that

flourished in the latter quarter of the twentieth

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POST-MARXISM