Abstract
Some books hit a moment and, for whatever reason, ‘take off’, while others are ‘slow burners’ whose message only filters out over time, if at all. Lost Geographies of Power’s journey, I would say, has been closer to the latter than the former. The book was intended as a counter to the growing sense within human geography and sociology at the time, and indeed in parts of cultural studies and politics, that, as Harriet Bulkeley observes, ran the risk of assuming that ‘power is all of the same kind and everywhere’. The influence is obviously that of Foucault, even though, as a strict nominalist himself, he largely avoided that risk in his writings. If anything, Lost Geographies of Power was a plea for something that geographers do remarkably well; namely, thinking through the specificity and the particularity of relationships, in this case, between the powerful and the not so powerful. Geographers are not alone in undertaking this task, although they come into their own when they try to show not only how space makes a difference to something like the workings of power, but also that power itself is always of a particular kind.
This was the message that I had hoped to convey through the book and, as all three commentaries suggest, it was achieved with varying degrees of success. As John Agnew observes, the nuances of the geographies of power can be lost on some when the injustices and inequalities of the world are just that much starker in a neoliberal age of seemingly entrenched power and domination. Ten years on, though, as Mark Haugaard notes, the distinction between power as something that is held over others and the power to make a difference has caught hold, and it now seems possible to think about power as to do with the formation of a common will, as much as it is to do with bending the will of others. This is a nuance of sorts; one that points in the right direction and acknowledges that power can be forged through the very act of collective mobilization and association, as indeed the Arab Spring movement more than testifies. This is not to gloss over John’s point that there is still ‘a whole lot of domination going on’ out there; rather it is merely to signal the development of a more open, indeterminate approach to matters of power and social change (see Mann, 2011).
Perhaps more in hope than anything else, I would like to think that the message of Lost Geographies of Power may be more germane now than it was back in 2003. Mark talks kindly of the book being prescient, in that for instance a seductive logic of enticement and encouragement may be more at work today in the guise of Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power’ than hitherto, especially in the field of politics and international relations. Seduction, to my mind, is in fact one of the quieter acts of power that has come to the fore in recent times, precisely because such acts can turn an open-ended situation to particular benefit without recourse to more brash forms of power such as domination and coercion. There is a distinct institutional advantage to be gained from working through such quieter registers of power to shape the will of others, not least because they make up what John alludes to as the ‘power to’ hold hegemonic formations together that can be used to exclude others without them actually experiencing the ‘hard’, constraining edges of power. Gramsci’s notion of consensus as part of such a formation points towards such acts, but for me it is more useful to name the specific brush with power experienced than any general nomenclature.
There is indeed a sense in which our descriptions of power and its ordered geographies, as both Harriet and Mark intimate, no longer chime with our experience of them. The measured times and distances of the modern era no longer quite speak to the shared experiences of simultaneity created by the new communications technologies (see Castells, 2011), for instance, or the reach into the fabric of our daily lives that government departments now seem to be able to attain. Harriet draws attention to the topological geographies drawn upon in Lost Geographies of Power as a means to grasp some of these spatial shifts in the architecture of globalization and power, and, as she recognizes, in 2003 I was grappling with the language of what it meant to hold power at a distance or close at hand. In the second decade of the 21st century, I think we are perhaps less in awe of globalization than we once were and more curious to know its particularities, so as to be able to think through how power relationships actually compose the distances enacted and place certain constraining possibilities within reach (Allen, 2009).
Topology, for me, offers an approach more in tune with such spatial and temporal dynamics. Whether power today is more topological in its exercise, I am not entirely sure, but topological shifts in the mix of time-spaces embedded in the powers of manipulation or seduction, for instance, do seem to have subtly altered many of the ways in which leverage is achieved, whether that is in terms of how a sprawling corporation makes its presence felt at close quarters or how an NGO is able to fold distant harms into local campaigns with relative ease. In both cases, topology just seems to work better at grasping such practices, and, a decade on, what Lost Geographies of Power started I am hoping to fulfil by developing a vocabulary of spatial reach more suited to the contemporary moment (Allen, 2010, 2011).
Power and its geographies is not a topic that is going to go away anytime soon. If anything is classic it is the timeless, enduring interest that power holds for us as its dynamics change and shape our lives anew. In today’s more spatially ambiguous world, where the ‘power to’ hold things together often folds over into the ‘power over’ others, as I see it, there has never been a more pressing need to understand the more nuanced, topological twists of power at play, if only to know what it is that you are on the receiving end of.