Lost Geographies of Power

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by John Allen

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published March 2003, 352 pages, paper

ISBN 0631207295

Lost Geographies of Power offers an account of the difference that space makes to our understanding of power. The aim of the book is to unsettle the idea that power can be held, centred in people and institutions, and transmitted intact across the contemporary landscape. We have lost sight, in the everyday sense, of the ways in which proximity and reach, distance and mobility, place and presence, actually shift the register of power. We have lost sight too, certainly among geographers, of the diversity of power, that authority, coercion, seduction and manipulation are not one and the same thing, nor are they reducible to the business of domination. Drawing upon the work of social theorists who have implicated space in their reasoning of power, such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Michael Mann, Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, the author sets out their spatial vocabularies of power and highlights their limitations. Thinking spatially, the author turns to new purposes much that has gone before on power to demonstrate its intrinsic spatiality and diverse registers.

 "John Allen provides new maps of the spatiality of power. The wonderful thing is not just that some familiar accounts are revitalised, but also that new forms of understanding power are born" - Nigel Thrift

Contents

Contents. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Lost Geographies. Part I: Spatial Moments: 1. Power in Things: Weber's Footnotes from the Centre. 2. Power through mobilization: From Mann's Networked Productions to Castells' Networked Fictions. 3. Power as an Immanent Affair: Foucault and Deleuze's Topographical Detail. Part II: Lost Geographies: 4. Power in its Various Guises (and Disguises). 5. Proximity and Reach: Were There Powers At-A-Distance Before Latour? 6. Placing Power, or the Mischief Done by Thinking Domination is Everywhere. Conclusion: The Whereabouts of Power. Bibliography. Index.