Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social TheoryWritten by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space. |
Contents
History Geography Modernity | 10 |
Spatializations Marxist Geography and Critical Social Theory | 43 |
The Sociospatial Dialectic | 76 |
Urban and Regional Debates the First Round | 94 |
Reassertions Towards a Spatialized Ontology | 118 |
Spatializations A Critique of the Giddensian Version | 138 |
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Common terms and phrases
Angeles assertion become capitalist capitalist city capitalist development Castells central centre century conceptualization concrete consciousness context core County crisis critical human geography critical social theory critique cultural debate defined differentiation division of labour downtown empirical Ernest Mandel existential expansion exploitation fin de siècle Fordist Foucault geographically uneven development geography of capitalism Giddens Giddens's global Harvey Henri Lefebvre historical geography historicism history and geography human geography ideology increasingly interpretation landscape Lefebvre Lefebvre's Mandel Marx Marx's Marxist geography materialist Modern Geography nodality ontological organization periphery political economy postmodern postmodern geographies production of space radical reassertion of space relations of production reproduction Sartre sectors simultaneously social and spatial social production social relations social science society socio-spatial dialectic spatial division spatial problematic spatial structure spatiality of social specific superprofits surplus-value temporal territorial theoretical tion transfer of value transformation unequal exchange urban and regional urban sociology Western Marxism
Popular passages
Page 6 - [w]e must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology