Lost Geographies of Power E-Book

John Allen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 486

Beschreibung

This original study explores the difference that space and spatiality make to the understanding of power. * * Explores the difference that space and spatiality makes to an understanding of power. * Moves forward the incorporation of ideas of space into social theory. * Presents a new understanding of the exercise, uses and manifestations of cultural, economic and political power in the second half of the twentieth century. * Illustrated with cases and examples.

Leseprobe

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Lost Geographies

Situating Power

From Spatial Vocabularies of Power…

…to Power’s Spatial Constitution

Part I Spatial Vocabularies of Power

2 Power in Things: Weber’s Footnotes from the Centre

Power as a Capacity

Domination as a Mode of Power

Centred Powers, Distributed Capabilities

Out-of-Scale Images

3 Power through Mobilization: From Mann’s Networked Productions to Castells’s Networked Fictions

Power as a Medium

Resource Mobilization and the Production of Power

Powers of Association

Mobilized Powers, Stretched Resources

Network Fictions

4 Power as an Immanent Affair: Foucaulf and Deleuze’s Topological Detail

Power as a Technique

Diagrams of Power

Governing the Self

Immanent Powers, Dispersed Technologies

Topological Detail

Part II Lost Geographies

5 Power in its Various Guises (and Disguises)

Opening Up Power…

… And Narrowing it Down

Power in Name Only, or Mistaking Resources for Power

Recognizing Power, or Living Up to Weber and Arendt

Arrangements of Power

6 Proximity and Reach: Were there Powers at a Distance before Latour?

Powers of Reach

Government as Far-Reaching Authority!

Domination in Real Time

Power at a Distance!

7 Placing Power, or the Mischief Done by Thinking that Domination is Everywhere

Lefebvre’s Smothered Spaces

Closed Worlds and Open Walls

In the Presence of Power

A Mutual Presence

Placing Power

8 Conclusion: Misplaced Power

Topological Findings

The Whereabouts of Power

Bibliography

Index

RGS-IBG Book Series

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Book Series provides a forum for scholarly monographs and edited collections of academic papers at the leading edge of research in human and physical geography. The volumes are intended to make significant contributions to the field in which they lie, and to be written in a manner accessible to the wider community of academic geographers. Some volumes will disseminate current geographical research reported at conferences or sessions convened by Research Groups of the Society. Some will be edited or authored by scholars from beyond the UK. All are designed to have an international readership and to both reflect and stimulate the best current research within geography.

The books will stand out in terms of:

the quality of researchtheir contribution to their research fieldtheir likelihood to stimulate other researchbeing scholarly but accessible.

Published

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years

David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Globalizing South China

Carolyn Cartier

Lost Geographies of Power

John Allen

Forthcoming

Geographies of British Modernity

David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Domicile and Diaspora

Alison Blunt

An Historical Geography of Science Outdoors

Simon Naylor

© 2003 by John Allen

350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148–5018, USA

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton South, Melbourne, Victoria 3053, Australia

Kurfiirstendamm 57, 10707 Berlin, Germany

The right of John Allen to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2003

by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, a Blackwell Publishing company

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Allen, John, 1951–

Lost geographies of power / John Allen.

p. cm. – (RGS-IBG book series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–631–20728–7 (alk. paper) – ISBN 0–631–20729–5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Human geography. 2. Power (Social sciences) I. Title. II. Series.

GF50 .A453 2003

303.3–dc21

2002071211

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10/12 pt Plantin

by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom

by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

For further information on

Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS/IBG Book series publishes the highest quality of research and scholarship across the broad disciplinary spectrum of geography. Addressing the vibrant agenda of theoretical debates and issues that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions will provide a synthesis of research, teaching, theory and practice that both reflects and stimulates cutting-edge research. The series seeks to engage an international readership through the provision of scholarly, vivid and accessible texts.

Nick Henry and Jon Sadler

RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Acknowledgements

Books, especially ones with geography in the title, are the product of many connections, collaborations and friendships. If I said that this book was a collective venture, I would not be far wrong in terms of the conversations, ideas, provocations and flights of fancy that have crossed my path in the course of writing it.

As a head of department at the Open University for the best part of the last six years, I can safely say that I have learnt little about the nature of power from that experience and so have had to look elsewhere for inspiration and insight. I found that through the ample comments on earlier drafts of the chapter materials, invitations to write, and seminar presentations at various university departments, and so I wish to extend my thanks to all those who have helped me with my efforts: John Agnew, Ash Amin, John Clarke, Allan Cochrane, Chris Hamnett, Nick Henry, Steve Hin- chliffe, Alan Hudson, Roger Lee, Andrew Leyshon, Doreen Massey, Joe Painter, Chris Philo, Steve Pile, Michael Pryke, Jenny Robinson, Andrew Sayer, David Slater, Kristian Stokke, Grahame Thompson, Nigel Thrift and Jane Wills.

I have also gained much over the years from just being a part of the Geography Department at the Open University, especially from the many exchanges with colleagues and research students – with their obsessions and wide-ranging interests – and not least from their companionship and humour (often it should be said in response to my ideas).

On a more practical level, thanks are also due to Sarah Falkus and Angela Cohen at Blackwell Publishing for their encouragement and advice in preparing this book for publication. I am also in debt to Jan Smith and Sylvia Laverty at the Open University for their professional secretarial support, the value of which is inestimable in a climate where such support has all but disappeared from academic circles.

Finally, thanks go to Jo Foord for her generosity with both ideas and time, as well as the encouragement she has given me when I flagged. That just leaves me to acknowledge my relationship with Jack and Adam, my two sons, who by being themselves gave me something beyond power: a sense of what matters.

John Allen

1

Introduction: Lost Geographies

It might seem odd to suggest that geography is something that we can lose. It may seem even odder to suggest this can happen around power and its relationships, especially as geography and power seem to run together in so many ways. The connection of geography with power, if one thinks about it, is pretty much a familiar one. Most political disputes over land and territory, in Europe and beyond, where borders have been torn up and redrawn by coercive states or countries subjected to the dominant force of neighbouring governments or ethnic groupings, have geography at their core. Closer to home, the gated communities which have sprung up in major cities to enable the affluent to live behind high walls and electronic gates are an integral mix of geographical and economic constraint. Then there are those unsettling moments when you find yourself on the receiving end of a blunt decision or insensitive instruction taken by some far-off government agency or impersonal corporation and can only begin to wonder where such powers at a distance really come from, let alone who lies behind them. Or the times, in a public space perhaps, where you are made to feel that your every movement is under observation, subject to surveillance of some kind, yet are quite unable to say whether this is actually happening or that anyone is really directing things.

Yet the argument of this book is that however familiar the association of geography with power, we have lost the sense in which geography makes a difference to the exercise of power. For all that someone like the French philosopher Michel Foucault might have told us about power turning up more or less everywhere because it comes from everywhere, the landscapes of power that are familiar to us have, to my mind, limited rather than extended our understanding of power. In a world where it has almost become commonplace to talk about power as networked or concentrated, distributed or centralized, even decentred, deterritorialized or radically dispersed, it is all too easy to miss the diverse geographies of power that put us in place.

As I see it, power is not something that is simply extended over short or long distances, or something which radiates out from an identifiable central point, or something which engulfs places in ways that are all pervasive. Power is not some ‘thing’ that moves and it does not traverse and transect places or communities, so that we may be forgiven for thinking that it is all encompassing. Power, as I understand it, is a relational effect of social interaction. It may bridge the gap between here and there, but only through a succession of mediated relations or through the establishment of a simultaneous presence. People are placed by power, but they experience it at first hand through the rhythms and relationships of particular places, not as some pre-packaged force from afar and not as a ubiquitous presence. The diverse geographies of power that I wish to foreground work through relations of proximity and reach to bring the far-off into people’s lives and also to make the close-at-hand sometimes feel remote.

It is this grasp of what geography can do that has been lost, or rather perhaps I should say it is this particular geography of power that is waiting to be understood for the first time.