BOOK REVIEWS 495

changing patterns”. The spatial distribution of power is, in Taylor’s words, an

“empirical concern”, whereas in his explanation of processes of change he uses the
theoretical framework of Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. Appended to the stan-
dard political economy analysis is a social constructivist study of “geopolitical codes”.
Taylor tries to square the social constructivist perspective with the theoretical tenets of
world systems theory, while clearly privileging the latter. This is unfortunate. Taylor
never questions the social construction of spatially de$ned concepts of state power and
national interests. The conflation of two different theoretical traditions is at best
problematical and leads at worst to tautologies like the following: “Such [geopolitical]
codes are inevitably geographical because they must encompass variations in the
valuation of foreign places”. Taylor even goes so far as to argue that geopolitical codes
themselves are spatially bound because they revolve around the definition of interests of
national states. But this definition presupposes a national/territorial notion that social
constructivists want to question. The various national codes are put together to
relatively stable geopolitical world orders according to the Wallersteinian power
hierarchy of core and periphery: geopolitical codes emanating from the core are
rendered hegemonic and at the same time common-sensical.
In some respects, Dalby’s book continues where Taylor left off. Dalby’s analysis of the
geopolitical lore of the “Committee on the Present Danger” (CPD), which first went
public in 1976, exemplifies the continuing political contestation after the geopolitical
transition of 1945 had set the tracks for the Cold War World. Dalby’s discussion of CPD
discourse centers on the four intertwined themes of sovietology, power politics,
geopolitics, and nuclear strategy as they were put forward by prominent members of the
Committee, as, for example, the historian Richard Pipes and the strategic analyst Colin
Gray. However, missing from Dalby’s analysis are references to the broader political
and economic context in which the CPD could make itself so influential, like, for
example, how the interests of the military-industrial complex were severely threatened by
the prospect of successful arms limitations talks.
Dalby, too, employs a social constructivist position to point at the genuinely geo-
political assumptions of national security which the CPD claims as being inevitable and
“natural”. Following postmodernist work in literary theory, such as Said’s study of
Orientalism and Todorov’s account of Spanish colonization, and deconstructivist
strands in the International Relations literature, Dalby develops the theme of Otherness
in the construction of subjectivity and identity. His original contribution to this ongoing
discussion is the recognition of the linkage between national identity and spatial
exclusion of Otherness in conventional definitions of national security. Thus Dalby’s
critique of geopolitical discourse goes beyond Taylor’s rejection of the nexus between
geopolitics and “hard-headed” realism in foreign policy.
Subsequently their outlook emphasizes different concerns. Taylor is primarily inter-
ested in alternative scenarios for a renewed geopolitical transition after the end of the
Cold War, although some of his speculations, as for example his refutation of a possible
Japanese hegemony, reek a bit of geopolitical determinism. Dalby is more concerned
with developing a critical analysis of the role of geopolitical discourse. What he
somewhat unfortunately labels “critical geopolitics”, unfortunate because Dalby wants
to go beyond the traditional geopolitical notion of a spatially defined national security,
is an attempt to explore “the possibilities of alternative formulations of security with a
potential for social transformation”. A critical project like his, as recent events have
shown, can no longer be ignored by political geographers if they do not want to leave
geography to the generals.
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis ELISABETH BINDER

ROB SHIELDS,Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London.

Routledge, 1991. Pp. xiii + 334. E35.00)
This is an ambitious book. If at one level Shields’ task is to account for the decline of the
 496 BOOK REVIEWS

“red luv tub”, or to explain why Brighton is a good place for a dirty weekend, then his
purpose in doing so is rather more grandiose. The book seeks, in the words of its subtitle,
not only to outline some empirical “alternative geographies of modernity” but, also, to
set out a new theoretical framework for doing that geography. This involves doing for
“place” and “space” what others have already begun to do for “landscape”-
demonstrating that cultural meanings and power relations cannot be understood outside
the ways in which they are grounded in the creation of places and spaces. In short,
detailing the vital implications of these key geographical concepts in the tangled thicket
of cultural politics.
Achieving this means moving both beyond the way environmental perception studies
focus on individuals, and beyond realism’s geometry, towards the regularities of
intersubjective images of places embued with emotional content, mythical symbolism
and historical significance. From critiques of Bourdieu’s habitus, with its emphasis on
the centrality of everyday practice; Foucault’s dispositif, which links discursive and non-
discursive elements into regimes of power/knowledge; and Lefebvre’s Dialectic of Space,
which foregrounds the process of the production of spatial images and practices, Shields
distills the concept of Spatiulization-a social construction of the spatial formed of
discursive and non-discursive elements, practices and processes. Spatialization is the
mode through which geography is crucial to everyday life. It works as metaphor within
the Social Imaginary to spatialize the language of social divisions, and existing as layer
upon layer of hard reality as ideas become actions with concrete impacts on everyday
lives. It offers a way to deconstruct the systems of non-formal knowledges about places
and spaces (“place-images” and “space-images”): why certain places have enduring
associations with certain activities and emotional states. Spatialization becomes “a set of
algorithms”, normative codes linking discourse and practice, ideas and actions (so for a
“day out” it is easier to “think” Blackpool than Blackburn). These circulate within a
wider system of differences a cosmology of places whose meanings are set off against
each other, inside which communities form and social locations are differentiated (so
Blackpool is, in part, only Blackpool because it is not Blackburn). It is within this social
framework that action is orientated.
“Spatialization” is crucial to the claims that Shields wants to make about modernity
and about rethinking the social theory of agency and structure. His analysis of
modernity rests on a division between “civilisation” and “barbarity”, between the
rational and the libidinal, which is spatialized as a geography of centres and margins.
Four examples are elaborated: two “place-images”, Brighton and Niagara Falls, and
two “space-images”, the Canadian North and England’s North-South Divide. All are
Places on the Margin places left behind by the onrush of modernity. Places whose
marginality makes them symbolically central to modern culture.
The “space-myths” are straightforward. Shields shows how the “Southern” dis-
courses of a wild, uncivilised and, above all, authentic Canadian North, and of the
English North as “The Land of the Working Class” (through the grim realism of fifties’
cinema and the cosy community of Coronation Street), are central to “Southern” self-
definitions. Yet these images also have effects. They underpin “the enforced genocidal
poverty of North [Canadian] inhabitants” and the economic inequalities of the “North-
South Divide”.
The “place-myths” are more intriguing. Brighton’s position in modernity’s spatializa-
tion is rooted in relations of pleasure, liminality and the carnivalesque. It is a marginal
zone where the weight of social relations is symbolically lifted and the norms of high
culture inverted to celebrate the libidinous excesses of the grotesque body and the
periodic disruptions of official powers and knowledges. The genealogy of Brighton’s
transformations is traced in the regularities of its liminality: from littoral hospital to
pleasure beach, from razor-gangs’ turf to mods’ and rockers’ battleground, and, finally,
to being the ideal location for a brand of “dirty weekend” characteristic of the 1930s’
middle classes. Niagara Falls. liminal centre of North America, receives similar
 BOOK REVIEWS 491

treatment. Here emphasis is on the constant competition of discourses surrounding the

site; from associations with the authenticity of “Nature’s Goodness” to the vibrating
water beds and red luv tubs of a kitsch carnival of sex. As a place with no master
narrative Niagara is a self-parody, “post-modern” for at least two hundred years, a
place whose meanings can only sustain incorporation into the contemporary turn to
individualism.
A concern to recentre individual lives is also present in Shields’ rejection of the post-
structuralists’ radical decentring of the subject and his dismissal of Giddens’ duality of
structure and agency. Instead, drawing upon Michel Maffesoli, he suggests that the
individual be seen as “a node in a field”, a crossroads for flows of discourse, power and
desire. This is more Lefebvre than Foucault, so each “node” is unique and active, not
ridden over roughshod by discursive formations but able to go with or redirect the flows,
building a subjectivity from the materials available. This is “subjectivity in the ironic
mode”, the self as a self-consciously staged spectacle.
Shields gives a convincing account of the circumscribed creativity of the individual
and a demonstration of the importance of the conjunction between past and present
rewritten in terms of discourse, image and practice. There are, however, several
difficulties. First, the opposition of the rational and the libidinal, centre and margins. is
understood and used without any recognition that the very ontology of this divide is
gendered and racialised. Not to recognise this is to write geographies of the margins
which ignore those most consistently marginalised. Second, the case histories demon-
strate the immense difficulty of writing historical geographies of “subjectivity in the
ironic mode”. In Brighton and Niagara Falls creative individuals flicker only briefly
among the discourses which take centre stage. In the English “North” they are virtually
absent. Shields mentions, but gives no analysis of, “Northerners’ ” appropriations of
discourses about the North. They are permitted none of the carnivalising of authority so
central to his analysis of Brighton, but also so central to 1990’s images of “Madchester”.
This is, in part, testimony to the speed with which geography becomes historical
geography. If Coronation Street in the 1990s has become more a self-parodying carnival
of the grotesque than an edenic vision, and if Manchester, a city so symbolic of “The
North”, has recently exhibited both libidinal carnivals of pleasure and the convulsions of
“gun law”, then perhaps this is simply another wrinkle in their discursive genealogies.
Yet it also raises questions about the theory of history contained within the book. How
do place-images and spatializations change? Shields skillfully depicts shifts in discursive
formations, but the causes of these changes are often “external”: the Erie Canal, the
Industrial Revolution, mass tourism. He provides no systematic analysis of how changes
in practices concerning production and the state, which are “outside” the dispositives
with which he is concerned, connect to the discursive transformations which he dissects.
This needs more careful analysis of connections between capitalism, patriarchy and
modernity. Work is still necessary on the geography of the “centre” to complement
Shields’ rich geographies of the “margins”.
University of Salford MILESOGBORN

JEANGOTTMANand ROBERTA. HARPER(Eds), Since Megalopolis: the Urban Writings of

Jean Gottman (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Pp. xii + 294. $36.00 and $14.95 paperback)
A refugee from war in France, a precocious 26 year old Jean Gottmann arrived in the
northeast United States in 1942, began teaching at Johns Hopkins University at the
invitation of Isaiah Bowman, and spent much of the ensuring two decades commuting
up and down the east coast between Boston, New York, Princeton, Baltimore and
Washington. He commuted so much in fact that Bowman eventually fired him for
spending insufficient time on the Hopkins campus. But these eyes of a newcomer saw the