the writings of Foucault, who read the accepted
history of western progress against the grain and
in this way uncovered the ‘blind’ spots of scien-
tific discourses: the ‘normalization’ of western
cultures here goes hand-in-hand with the creation
of abnormal or non-normal ‘others’ – the sick,
the homeless, those without work, the sexually
perverted and so on.
Both themes have arguably been rendered
most susceptible to cultural analyses in the work
of Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Homi Bhabha
(1994). What emerges as a key, if often over-
looked, theme is a new centrality accorded to the
construction and maintenance of communities.
‘Knowledge’ and the scientific communities it
created are but one example amongst many of
how the notion of a ‘community’ came to be con-
structed in the wake of modernity. The notion of
‘common sense’ developed earlier is again cru-
cial in this respect in that it represents a shared if
mostly unexamined communality at the heart of
many communities. A ‘cultural’ trait itself, the
discursive construction of communities around
such shared – and culturally highly relevant –
notions as ‘fact’ (the scientific community),
‘representation’ (the political community), ‘the
public’ (the civic community) or ‘wants’
(economic discourses), became a legitimate area
of research (Mouffe, 1993). This deconstruction
of the discursive unity underlying various com-
munities across the scales radicalized the very
notion of culture as a recognizably unifying set
of practices. In this, the study of culture followed
a lead originally initiated by the Frankfurt School –
whose pessimistic interpretation of modern
knowledge was increasingly reconciled with the
notion of ‘culture’ as lacking in clear direction
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979). The link
between discursive construction of communities
and history in the work of Walter Benjamin in
particular was to prove of singular importance
within the field of cultural studies, broadly
conceived (Benjamin, 1999).
Just as important, however, was the price
incurred by a particular radicalization of ‘the cul-
tural’ in its linguistic manifestations during the
last two centuries: the (analytically rigorous)
acknowledgement that ‘knowledge’ might vary
geographically was often but a first step up the
ladder of relativism. Unable or unwilling – in the
words of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961) – to ‘for-
get’ the ladder once it had served its purpose,
cultural and other scientists suddenly found
themselves facing the contingency of not merely
the phenomena under investigation but also the
claims to knowledge that they presented to the
wider world. In short, cultural scientists of many
persuasions were surrounded by a phenomenonmany saw fit to label ‘postmodernism’ (Bertens,
1998; Dear, 2001). ‘Postmodern’ cultural geo-
graphy, although not a term commonly used by its
practitioners, placed a particular emphasis on the
plurality of cultural knowledges, rather than on a
unity of knowledge created through the invoca-
tion of the term ‘culture’ – an impulse that was
very much alive in cultural geography until the
late 1970s. Others still saw the acknowledgement
of relative knowledge less in terms of a departure
from ‘modernity’ as such. Interpreting the stabil-
ity traditionally provided by univocal forms of
representation as a structural component of
knowledge in general, this second group inter-
preted the move towards localized or otherwise
situated types of knowledge as a departure from
‘structural’ forms of knowledge production,
advocating ‘poststructural’ approaches instead
(Doel, 1999).
For readers interested in cultural ‘spaces of
knowledge’, the difference between the two posi-
tions outlined above is important and needs to be
spelled out in greater detail. While culturally sen-
sitive approaches to the construction of science
are strictly speaking compatible with a postmodern
point of view, they do not square easily with a
denial of structures per se. At bottom, the differ-
ence attaches to a different interpretation of
‘materiality’ and thus of the status of ‘culture’
amongst the sciences. While a ‘postmodern’
view interprets the recognition of ‘culture’ as a
change in the real makeup of societies – a view
easily compatible with the development of
‘multicultural’ societies and the increasing
obsolescence of other non-local forms of
interpretation such as colonialism, Marxism or
Fordism – the denial of structures refocused
attention on the purely epistemological realm.
The resulting wavering between ontological
and epistemological claims has left a clear mark
on the study of ‘culture’. Expressed perhaps most
succinctly in the doubts raised by Don Mitchell
(1995), the resulting tension is very much present
today. On the one hand, the acknowledgement of
the key role of ‘culture’ has left an imprint on all
those intellectual developments that seek to
localize powerful discourses, from postcolonial-
ism (Barnett, 1998; Said, 1993; Sidaway, 1997;
2000) to post-Marxism (Gibson-Graham, 1996;
Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) and post-Fordism
(Amin, 1994). On the other hand, ‘culture’
continues to serve discursive strategies that
unearth the relativity of claims to understanding.
According to some observers, both strands of
inquiry can be seen to converge upon the role of
‘resistance’ as a cultural expression of both the
‘positive’ existence of something and the ‘nega-
tive’ disruption to ‘common sense’ it creates526 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch28.qxd 03-10-02 11:07 AM Page 526