Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The purpose of this paper is to use the work of Derrida in order to deconstruct the justifications and techniques associated with the quantitative revolution in human geography during the 1960s. The paper is divided into four main parts. First, the idea of deconstruction as proposed by Derrida is summarized. Second, the five justifications that have been proposed for the use of mathematics by early quantitative geographers are given—universality, logicalness, objectivity, simplicity, and precision. Those justifications, it is argued, act in Derrida's terms as ‘presences’ on which the logocentric system of mathematics is founded. Third, those five justifications are then deconstructed. It is argued that each justification is beset by a contradiction that, in turn, mitigates the realization of the final logocentric system of mathematics. Fourth, by way of a case study, one particular type of mathematics is examined, inferential statistics. It is suggested that inferential statistics is based not upon some final presence, but on a metaphor taken from eugenics. That metaphor, however, clashed with several existing ones within traditional geography with the result that it ultimately failed, a fact subsequently recognized even by the geographical proponents of quantitative methods.

In the wake of the Möbius spiralling of relativism and reflexivity, much of the theoretically inclined literature within human geography has turned to the motifs of difference and otherness as a possible basis for fostering a coming together and rapprochement of previously incommensurate theoretical-practices. Much of this effort has been undertaken in an explicit attempt to maintain political, moral, and ethical responsibility in the face of a dangerous slide into passive nihilism and indifference. In the first half of the paper I argue that the attempt to forge a universal currency which would enable difference to circulate freely within contemporary human geography is flawed for three interrelated reasons. First, by working through a libidinal economy of negation it forces difference to conform to the Same. Specifically, difference is captured as so-many standard deviations from the Norm. Second, this apparatus of capture is predestined to yield a state of confusion, imprecision, and indistinction which can only be contained within a quotation market. Third, by dwelling upon negation and appropriation, and through capturing difference within a normalized economy of the Same, the forging of a universal currency within a quotation market deprives itself of the ability to effectively affirm difference, otherness, alterity, and singularity in and of themselves. Such an affirmation would require an act of ex-appropriation, rather than one of appropriation. Consequently, by drawing upon the liminal materialism of a deconstructive experience, in the second half of the paper I explore four movements of ex-appropriation: radical passivity, destabilization on the move, telephony, and picnolepsy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethics of the event.

The limits of critique are politically significant. Such politics become examinable through deconstruction as a form of interested closure. To do this, however, it is first necessary to distinguish the Derridean deconstruction of writing from the purely literalist interpretations it is commonly but mistakenly given. The example subsequently used as an illustration of limited critique is a conference paper on the ‘Gulf War’ previously presented by the author in 1991. This paper drew on feminist psychoanalytic theories in order to critique the geopolitical effects of masculinist nationalism made manifest in the war. It is reprinted here and then reexamined in terms of its problematic production of truth through writing. This reexamination is pursued at three levels: by considering the conference paper's instrumentalisation of feminist theories and the questions this entails about male academics and feminism; by examining the dangers of normalisation inherent to the normative frameworks of psychoanalytic criticism; and by indicating some of the specific differences that were concealed as this form of criticism was brought to bear in an explanation of the chauvinism of the war. Although deconstruction is shown to offer a way of monitoring how critique risks erasing the heterogeneous through an inevitable essentialism, it is also argued that it is vital to come to terms with the political definition of such risks.

In the current beginnings of the mapping of the consumer society there is an evident tension between political-economic and poststructuralist accounts of consumption. It has been suggested that a philosophy of difference does nothing more than mimic a capitalist ideology of choice; that it represents a levelling of philosophy to the vulgar status of consumerism. The counterposition asserts a lack of tolerance to difference inherent in the rationalism of Marxism, which ultimately adheres to production as its central, stabilizing, metaphysical concept. In examining such ideas we seek to ground judgmental positions with respect to the political status of consumption (and of production) in notions of collectivity and action. To this end we provide a brief discussion of the history of consumer cooperation as a political force. More generally, by elucidating the political potentialities of different philosophical approaches, which present themselves as opposites, we hope to interrupt—interminably and retroactively—the development of a geography of the consumer society which is simply additive to existing geographies of the productive society.

In this paper I argue that the debate about urban and regional planning is polarised into two competing ‘discourses’ of town planning and political economy. I assert that the language and concepts of town planning continue to take precedence in both the field of practice and in teaching and research and that this is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. Town planners relegate urban and regional political economy to the periphery and place town planning at the centre. This is a conservative situation in that most town planning education places great emphasis on plans and very little on ‘how cities and regions work’. I recommend the abandonment of ‘planning’ education in favour of spatial political economy which might sit easiest in human geography.

The concept of locational avoidance is applied to the process of nonmetropolitan industrialisation by means of a periodisation involving two phases of locational avoidance. During the phase of Fordist mass production, certain labour-intensive industries decentralised to low-wage non-metropolitan areas to avoid locating close to other firms where there was a danger of wages subsequently being bid up. In the present phase, characterised by a tendency towards flexible accumulation, a new wave of more capital-intensive industries has sought out nonmetropolitan areas, again displaying a pattern of locational avoidance, but mainly in order to retain the human capital invested in their skilled labour force. This second dispersed arrangement of industry stands in stark contrast to the flexible production agglomerations that have been formed elsewhere in new industrial spaces during the same period, even though both were produced under regimes of flexible accumulation. A series of conjectures exploring these ideas is examined in light of the locational behaviour of firms locating in the Georgian Bay nonmetropolitan area north of Toronto.

In the light of the considerable biomathematical effort devoted to building models of the incidence of HIV and AIDS in communities, in this paper a multiregion specification is developed that includes a parsimonious cross-infection mechanism where high-risk and low-risk populations are distinguished by their promiscuity rates. The nature of this mixing is compared with some existing modelling formats, and some preliminary simulations are presented for the timing and spread of the epidemic in a sixteen-city global system.