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| POST-STRUCTURALIST DISCOURSES AND SOCIAL THEORIES: MICHEL FOUCAULT AND HENRI LEFEBVRE |
| QIAN Jun-xi |
| (Human Geography Research Group, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, Scotland, UK |
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Abstract This review article summarizes the works of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre from the perspective of poststructuralism. It shows that poststructuralism is an epistemological approach emerging first amongst Francophone social theorists and aiming at overturning the bounded understandings of subjects, objects, identities and relations. This perspective is undergirded by two analytical tools: the technique of deconstruction which is employed to dismantle binary oppositions; and the re-conceptualization of identity which rejects pre-established categories and highlights the contingency and fluidity in the construction of meanings and identifications. Poststructuralist thinking contends that different domains in a social or cultural structure are mutually constitutive and mutually productive. It also rejects universal discourses, à priori categories and bounded identities which haunt structuralist analyses. With such a theoretical framework in mind, this article attempts to show how poststructuralism informs the works of Foucault and Lefebvre and helps them to open up the vision of a dynamic, complex and fluid web of social relations and cultural meanings. Both Foucault and Lefebvre reject neo-Kantian and Neo-Cartesian ways of thinking which are committed to the pursuit of absolute truths and favour the separation of self-identity from the social world. In Foucauldian terms, power is not a possession to which the access is determined by a pre-established hierarchy of social identities. Rather it is dispersed in a capillary system and constitutes a micro-physics of power. Dominant knowledge defines social identities and shapes human subjectivities. Furthermore, the capitalist relations of production also produce new configurations of spatial relations. It produces differentiated urban spaces to buttress the circulation of commodities and the accumulation of capital. This article concludes by advocating a new imagination of space and spatial relations informed by the insights from existing poststructuralist analyses.
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Received: 20 October 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
