Les pensées postmodernes britanniques ou la quête d’une pensée meilleure

Abstract

Cette étude, qui fait suite à celle du précédent numéro intitulée « La géographie britannique et ses diagnostics sur l'époque postmoderne », est consacrée à décrire le postmodernisme britannique en tant que mouvement de pensée et non pas en tant que démarche d'objectivation des caractéristiques d'une époque « postmoderne » (objet de la première étude). L'auteur aborde de manière critique la tentative de mise en place, au sein de la géographie britannique, d'une manière de « penser autrement », c'est-à-dire à distance du schème dual de la pensée moderne censé être à l'origine du principe de domination. La description de cette quête d'une pensée éthiquement « meilleure » prend en compte l'influence du courant post-structuraliste, principalement des philosophes français, pour fournir les principaux repères qui servent de clé d'entrée dans la plupart des textes postmodernes.This study which completes that published in the previous issue of the journal intends to describe the second aspect of British postmodernism as a trend of thought and no longer as an attempt to objectify the characteristics of a "postmodern" era (object of the first study). The author examines critically the attempt to establish within British geography ways of "thinking differently", i.e. breaking away from the dualist scheme of modem thought which is supposed to originate from the principle of domination. The description of this quest for "better" thinking takes into account the influence of the post-structuralist current, mainly imputable to French philosophers, in order to provide the essential needed means for understanding most postmodern texts

Review Essay: A Sisyphean Task: Deconstructing Border Theory and Foreign Policy. A Review of Bulley's Ethics as Foreign Policy and Vaughan-Williams's Border Politics

“…As did many francophone geographers, I encountered Derrida and so-called French theory through the writings of Anglo-American geographers, and I've been struck by the differences between both the feel and the reception of the work of the same philosopher in the two linguistic settings [see, for example, Dupont's disillusioned observation about Foucault in Antheaune et al (2004, page 19)]. This makes the construction of Derrida and poststructuralism in Anglo-American social science a fascinating object [see the lively debate on postmodern geography and poststructuralism among French geographers in L'espace ge¨ographique (Antheaune et al, 2004;Chivallon, 2004;Colignan and Saszak, 2004;Guer 2004) and the efforts of the French geographer Christine Chivallon (1999a;1999b) and the Anglo-Swiss geographer Juliet Fall (2005;2007) to explicate this contextual divide]. This is not the place to do such analysis, nor to assess whether the approach should more adequately be labeled`Spivakian deconstruction' after the translator of Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976).…”

Lost geographers: power games and the circulation of ideas within Francophone political geographies

“…For example, in his review of Yves Lacoste's work -the selfproclaimed Doyen of the revival of French geopolitics -Hepple noted that the different role of theory appears a divide that seems hard to bridge: 'for the Anglophone, the French geographers' neglect of their local post-structuralist social theorists seems perverse; on the other side, one suspects [they] are quite amused by this appeal of French social theorists, which they may well see as an ivory-tower distraction from serious geopolitical analysis (and possibly from serious politics too)' (Hepple, 2000: 294). What Hepple fails to note is that in France these key authors would not even be called or considered poststructuralist at all, since labels and badges of belonging of this kind are largely absent (Chivallon, 2003)! The main crux of Hepple's comment, of course, is that, while Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and others were becoming unavoidable in universities within the Anglo world, 'their names were being systematically eclipsed in France' 3 (Cusset, 2003: 22).…”

“…In comparison to British or North American contexts, the French geographical world is like a small family within which -as one geographer put itil faut montrer patte blanche (Chivallon, personal communication, 2005), that is to say that individual acceptance is obtained by demonstrating one's worth, as in many exclusive peer groups, as well as by conforming and not sticking out too much. Paradoxically, however, or maybe in consequence of this hierarchical system, 'belonging' to a particular school of thinking is not highly regarded in France -in contrast, I would suggest, to the Anglo world -and instead being 'outside' and 'unclassifiable' is valued (Chivallon, 1999;personal communication, 2005;Lévy and Debarbieux, personal communication, 2004). Anything identified as jargon is savagely frowned upon.…”

“…does not nurture a broad dialogue with the Anglo-American ('international'?) geographical universe, although it continues to exert significant influence on a number of European geographies' (Minca, 2000: 286; see also Staszak, 2001;Chivallon, 2003;Besse, 2004). Yet, partly in response to Minca's brackets, I am happy to follow Paasi in arguing that what passes as international science is often nothing more than national science from the 'core' of Anglo-American academies (Paasi, 2005: 770).…”

Réflexion autour de la dimension spatiale des processus normatifs

“…Compris comme acte de résistance face aux incertitudes de la modernité, il est pensé comme une configuration à partir de laquelle maîtriser le monde et construire la confiance redevient possible (Bourdin, 2000). En France, ce désir de réancrage trouve un véritable écho dans les sciences sociales qui n'hésitent pas à évoquer l'émergence d'un « nouveau paradigme du territoire », sorte d'« antidote postmoderne » (Bonnemaison et Cambrezy, 1996) 12 Dans une société marquée par l'héritage territorial de l'État-nation, habiller les nouveaux territoires politiques de vertus socioculturelles fait courir le risque de conforter une acception particularisante qui lierait de manière consubstantielle une organisation territoriale et une forme particulière du lien social : celle de la communauté solidaire qui impose les notions de cohésion, de stabilité et de reproduction sociale (Chivallon, 1999). Une lecture holiste des rapports entre le social et le spatial qui masque non seulement les tensions et les rapports de pouvoir inhérents au jeu social (Veschambre et Ripoll, 2002), mais constitue également une contrainte pour l'inventivité normative des acteurs ordinaires.…”