1st Edition
Direction and Socio-spatial Theory A Political Economy of Oriented Practice
Introduction
Part I: Foundations
1. Political economies of attention
2. Toward a political phenomenology of attention
3. The directedness of practice
Part II: Turning-in-the-world
4. Turning subject
5. Turning-as-relation: direction, alienation and montage
6. Turning and reification
Part III: Direction, socio-spatial theory and ethics
7. Occupation and directed practice: outline of a political economy
8. Visualizing directed social practice
Conclusion: ethics and directional responsibility
Biography
Matthew G. Hannah holds the Chair in Cultural Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research has addressed relations between constructions of space, power and state knowledge, as well as various aspects of social theory and historical geography. His previous books include Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth Century America (2000) and Dark Territory in the Information Age: Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s (2010).
"It has been a very long time since I have read a book as lucidly argued and learned as this one. Starting with the basic fact of human finitude and the simple notion that a human being can attend to only so much at once, Matthew Hannah proceeds step by step to reinvigorate and rework social-spatial theory -- an enterprise that has somehow underplayed what human attention implies for human being and becoming more generally. Hannah has an abiding concern with the irreducible embodiment of human being and he carefully shows what is at stake when contemporary capitalism places our embodiment under increasing strain. Hannah's intelligence is truly rare and the clarity with which he reveals it is even rarer. He is comfortable navigating a stunning range of scholarship, also seeming never to lose his way nor his purpose in underscoring the ethical dimensions of this project. This is a book for all geographers, all spatial thinkers and practitioners, indeed for anyone who is philosophically, ethically, and critically inclined. Direction and Social-spatial Theory is a terrific and marvelous achievement." George Henderson, Professor of Geography, University of Minnesota, USA
