Geography of things

From Geography

Both Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault came to a ‘geography of things’ because of their doubts against the great certainties of order, coherence, truth, and reason. All the phenomena, events, people and instituations are all imagined to lie on the same level. Foucault and baudrillard criticize this way of thinking. They suggest that the social world is a massy and disordering geography of fractal zones. No order or coherence. These fractal zones slip and slide under and over each other. It is no coherent geography but a geography of several things.

‘ We could perhaps develop a model of drifting plates, to speak in seismic terms, in a theory of catastrophes. The seismic is our form of slipping and sliding of the referential…Nothing remains but shifting movements that provoke very powerful rare events. We no longer take events as revolutions or effects of the superstructure , but as underground effects of skidding, fractal zones in which things happen. Between the plates, continents do not quite fit together, they slip under and over each other. There is no more system of reference to tell us what happened to the geography of things. We can only take a geoseismic view. (Baudrillard in Philo, C. (2000). Foucaults’geography. In: Crang, M. & Thrift, N. (Ed.) Thinking Space (p. 230). London: Routledge.)

References

• Philo, C. (2000). Foucaults’geography. In: Crang, M. & Thrift, N. (Ed.) Thinking Space (p. 205-238). London: Routledge.

Contributors

• page created by Jesper Remmen --JesperRemmen 10:06, 21 October 2012 (CEST)