Poststructuralism

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, geographers, following the broader trends occurring in social theory, called into question the theoretical suppositions of the major paradigms of spatial science, humanism, structuralism, and realism in geography. Geographers, particularly social and cultural geographers, became concerned with the broader “crisis of representation” in the academy, which suggested that all representations occur within the context of power relations and that those relations artificially construct boundaries around geography's objects of analysis. Thus, poststructuralist geographers questioned the boundaries that separated key concepts in the field, such as objectivity and subjectivity, nature and culture, and authentic and inauthentic, refusing to privilege either side of these binaries. These critiques appealed to geographers interested in a variety of geographic areas of inquiry—both “traditional,” such as economic and political geography, and “nontraditional,” such as sexuality and body space geographies. In many ways, poststructuralist geographers have destabilized subdisciplinary boundaries and called into question the value of a purely “cultural” or “social” geography.

Poststructuralism emerged during the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others who became increasingly critical of structuralism's assumptions about the underlying[Page 376] mechanisms that structured social life. These scholars argued that the social world, which is mediated through language, has no essential set of characteristics. Instead, social categories are historically contingent and their meanings ebb and flow over time and space. The binary oppositions on which Western thought has also been pinned, such as object/subject and nature/ culture, are arbitrary; more important, the privileging of one side of the binary over the other is made possible only through the deployment of social power. This means that Western theorizations of object/subject relationships are based on a principle of either/or; that is, it is either objective or subjective. In this theorization, one side of the binary is also privileged over the other; objectivity becomes the foundational center, and subjectivity becomes the margin. Derrida argued, however, that these binaries are coconstitutive of each other. Instead of thinking of objectivity and subjectivity as an either/or proposition, it is better to think of these as operating in a both/and relationship. Simply put, objectivity cannot exist without its “other,” that is, subjectivity. So, the subjective is always part and parcel of any objective inquiry. It is only through the deployment of power that the objective and subjective are torn asunder and assigned separate meanings.

Poststructuralist theorists suggest that any set of binary oppositions always is in tension and can be deconstructed, interrogating how the hierarchies within the binaries came to be constructed as real, natural, and fixed in the first place. Resting at the heart of deconstruction, a preferred methodology for post-structuralists, is an interest not in a singular “truth” but rather in how truths, and the knowledges on which these truths are based, are socially constituted. In deconstruction, the object of analysis is the binary and how one side of the binary becomes the center while the other is maintained in the margin. Thus, excavating the relationship between center and margin opens up the possibility of destabilizing the artificiality of these binaries. Poststructuralists, such as Michel Foucault, have interrogated how particular locations become important sites for the organization and generation of social and spatial meaning. In Foucauldian terms, the clinic, as a location, privileges an objective rational science of medicine and gives hegemonic status to biomedical practitioners who define “health” and “illness.” This is possible as societies become interested in socially and spatially isolating mental illness in sanitariums, which is considered marginal to a rational economic actor in 19th-century Europe. This is done because people who are deemed mentally ill cannot function in an emerging capitalist society and therefore have no use value or exchange value.

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