So what do post-structuralist/cultural thinkers bring to the geography party? Well, I would suggest that you cannot understand the current global economic crisis and its spatial aspects (for one example) without applying ANT, particularly because of the increasingly hyperreal blend of human networks and machine/code space (Jones’ (2009) phase space) that continues to generate the crisis. Financialization theories (forgive me) don’t cover this, and if you read David Harvey’s 2010 book Enigma of Capital, it mentions cyber-space exactly once, as the ‘internet’, a mere conduit for capital – so much for structuralist critique.

Signifiers developed by the crisis such as ‘shadow banks’, ‘austerity’ and ‘technocrats’ require linguistic and semiotic analysis because these are memes that have developed spatially in response to specific stages in the crisis, socio-political amphigorics of no relevance to what they purport to describe; in this respect using Baudrillard’s ideas concerning simulacra are also useful. These are specific ways in which (as Simon Battersbury said) “the use of philosophical ideas, and continental philosophy and social theory in particular.. are used to understand and inform actual geographical problems.”