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representation that exists ‘alongside the world’ rather than on top of it. Such a framework does not necessarily need to altogether reject discursive analyses in favour of a ‘materialist’ approach, but rather asserts the latter as a ‘useful counter’ to the former (Bennett, 2004: 358). The object-oriented approach, and the wider philosophical movement of speculative realism more generally, points towards the limits of deconstructive, language-focused critiques. With respect to maps, the deconstructionist work of the early critical cartographers has been fundamental for
the world of consciousness: now no philosophical doctrine denies that the same images can enter at the same time into two distinct systems, one belonging to science, wherein each image, related only to itself, possesses an absolute value; and the other, the world of consciousness, wherein all the images depend on a central image, our body, the variations of which they follow. The question raised between realism and idealism then becomes quite clear: what are the relations which these two systems of images maintain with each other? And it is easy to see that
be the prime if not the only problématique of the study’ (1988: 14). On the other hand, however, appreciative critics have, nonetheless, suggested that Strange is ‘prevented from realising the full potential of her radical ontology’ (Tooze, 2000a: 287), that she wastes the opportunity to ‘challenge international relations theory at its very core’ (Palan, 1999: 128) and that she ‘closes the Pandora’s box that she has opened’ (May, 1996: 184). Indeed, there is even the suggestion that she herself invoked multiple forms of ‘realism’ so that her ‘work is torn by