Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science

This ambitious and original work is the first sustained attempt to integrate poststructuralist thought with the considerable insights of critical human geography. Marcus Doel seeks not to make conventional approximations of poststructuralist concepts but rather to rethink and to rewrite the world through them. His goal is to refound spatial science as a discipline integrated with the social and natural sciences—replete with human attributes of value, meaning, feeling, fearing, and creating—and shaped by the “diabolical arts” of thinkers such as Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Lyotard. New geography, this book shows, has once again become possible.
Doel draws out and develops the inherent spatiality at the heart of postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, fashioning a virtuosic and thought-provoking account of the fundamental difference that space, place, context, and milieu make to how we understand and engage with the world and others around us. Developing the radical consequences of his approach across a range of accessible examples, from film to quantum mechanics, he vividly demonstrating the transformative and enlightening qualities of his argument.
Through its goal of reshaping the nature and practice of geography, Poststructural Geographies will interest all critical geographers, and its ambitious theoretical agenda will make the book essential reading across cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.

Marcus Doel is senior lecturer in geography at Loughborough University. He has published widely on new theoretical directions in social, cultural, and
political geography.