The Dictionary of Human Geography

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(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 humanitiesand critical

social sciences, and is noteworthy for under-

writing many of contemporaryhuman geo-

graphy’s engagements withactor-network

theory,feminism,post-colonialism,post-

developmenttheory,posthumanism,post-

marxism, psychoanalytic theory, queer

theory andsubaltern studies.Itsinflu-

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:

(1) A rethinking of the relationships

between theproduction of spaceand

itsrepresentation, especially through

reconfigured concepts of cultural

landscapeandlandscape,butalsoin

other sites of text and textuality,

such asliterature,film,themedia,

musicand so on.

(2) New concepts of whatpowerconsists of,

where it is ‘located’ and how it operates.

(3) A destabilization offoundationalism,

leading to post-foundational accounts of

identityanddifference(including cri-

tiques of standard categories in social

science, such as class anddevelop-

ment), a questioning of the binary be-

tween culture and nature, and a

suspicion towards older and less reflexive

understandings ofobjectivity.

(4) A somewhat more recent reversal of

post-structuralists’ tendency to privilege

epistemology over ontology in ac-

countsofsocial life.

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/placeand nature/culture.

Foucault’s brilliant contribution to post-

structuralism was to trace the historical evolu-

tion – orgenealogy– 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:seecarceral geog-

raphies;panopticon), scientific and political

discourse (seecritical geopolitics) and their

subjects (seedisciplinary power). Further, it

led him to envision capillaric rather than fixed

sites ofpower, which operates as a difference-

naming and boundary-drawing effect ofdis-

course. Probably the most influential of the

post-structuralists to date, Foucault’s impact

on studies of space have been plentiful: in stud-

ies ofgovernmentality(counting and placing

bodies), identity (naming bodies in terms of

race, deviance, health etc.) and sexuality

(controllingbodiesand populations: seebio-

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).

feminismhas 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

subjectas a matter ofperformance, signs

acted out upon – through iteration and

citation – the bodies of individuals. Like

Foucault, Butler rejects any notion of an

innate subject, suggesting thatperformativ-

ityis 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

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POST-STRUCTURALISM