|
Article Excerpt
This article questions the more exaggerated claims of a freestanding "spatial heuristic" in explaining, justifying and criticizing social practices, not least because the category of space remains undertheorized and conceptually indeterminate. Building upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Ernesto Laclau, and others, the article clarifies the category of space, showing precisely how and why it is important for understanding politics, subjectivity, and ethics. It calls for the envisaging of "spaces of heterogeneity" that are compatible with radical democratic demands for equality and a "politics of becoming," and that can form the basis of a poststructuralist conception of cosmopolitanism. KEYWORDS: ethics, politics, space, subjectivity, time, radical democracy.
**********
The face of the earth is continually changing, by the increase of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discoverable in all these events but force and violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of? --David Hume, 1993 (1)
It is widely acknowledged that our conceptions and experiences of space have changed considerably in recent times. They have been transformed by the development of new or more sophisticated technologies, such as the Internet, the jet plane, and the mobile phone, which bring things and people that were once distant closer, while simultaneously rendering others further away. An electronic version of an academic journal article available on the Internet and accessible on one's computer screen is far closer than the hard copy resting on the shelves of the university library, even though the source of the former might be many thousands of miles away. (2) Similarly, an out-of-town shopping mall reachable by motor car is widely perceived to be nearer than the local shop to which one can walk or cycle, even though the physical distance of the former far exceeds the latter. Air travel has made the cities and places of other countries more accessible to many citizens than the regions, towns, and rural areas of their own countries.
It is also alleged that alongside these altered subjective experiences correspond important objective changes in the character of space itself. Firstly, the globalization of financial markets accelerates economic exchanges, bringing spatially dispersed agents and institutions closer together to trade and invest, while intensely affecting social actors and processes across the globe. Secondly, the increasing mobility of individual capitals, which are able to relocate their firms in order to offset falling profits and/or to secure relative locational advantage, triggers an ongoing dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as competing social forces seek to fix the spatial positioning of plants and businesses. And lastly, the rapid development and spread of new technologies in the fields of communication and transportation has resulted in what Marx called the annihilation of "space with time," as once fixed and seemingly natural spatial barriers and boundaries--such as territorially delimited frontiers--are eroded by increases in the speed of sending material goods, information, and people. (3) "All that is solid melts into the air," Marx wrote famously in The Communist Manifesto, and his prophecy is as prescient as ever. In short, a whole host of phenomena, ranging from the weakening and porosity of national territorial boundaries, the actual and potential "globalization of contingency" in the form of global pandemics and the specter of environmental catastrophe, to the backlash of increasing territorialization as new forms of imperialism, international isolationism, political fundamentalism, ethnonationalist particularism, or projects for a "fortress Europe"--seek to reverse these trends, point to the increasing salience of changing conceptions of space and time in our contemporary globalizing world.
In social and political theory, the so-called "spatial turn" is equally well-established. Social theorists and political economists such as David Harvey, Bob Jessop, and Alain Lipietz employ concepts such as "spatial" and "spatio-temporal" fixes to explain the way crisis tendencies in the logic of capital accumulation are offset and displaced in the capitalist mode of production. (4) Urban social theorists such as Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Lojkine stress the spatial determinants of social and political processes, such as the provision of means of collective consumption. (5) The historian Benedict Anderson incorporates spatial dimensions of analysis into his account of the power of nationalist ideologies to forge political identities. (6)
There have also been efforts to connect reflections about space directly to politics. In For Space, for instance, Doreen Massey challenges the widespread "fact that space has so often been excluded from, or inadequately conceptualized in relation to, and has thereby debilitated our conceptions of, politics and the political," and then develops "an argument for the recognition of particular characteristics of space and for a politics that can respond to them." (7) Similarly, Margaret Kohn's Radical Space puts spatial concerns at the center of democratic theory by examining different sites of working-class and popular mobilizations in Western Europe. (8) She focuses on the creation of case del popolo ("houses of the people") as sites of resistance and transformative political practices in turn-of-the-[twentieth]-century Italy. For her, political groups created distinctive places to develop new identities and practices, while using such public spaces to democratize ever-widening sets of social relations.
And if these affirmed relations are not as stark as Henri Lefebvre's bold assertion that "Space is political," that is, "not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics," but "always ... political and strategic," then it is still regarded as integral for analyzing social reality and political practices today. (9) Viewed in this light, it is unsurprising that Hardt and Negri's widely discussed books Empire and Multitude put issues such as space, territorialization, and deterritorialization at the heart of their analyses. (10) In sum, it is fair to say that in contemporary political theory, at both the explanatory and normative levels of analysis, locutions such as "private and public spaces," "the conception of a plurality of political spaces," the public sphere as "a space of opposition and accountability," "quasi-public space," "spaces of resistance," "territorialization and deterritorialization," "public spaces of freedom," "dialogic spaces," and so forth, continue to flourish in our attempts to come to terms with the late modern condition. (11)
Despite this proliferating theoretical and empirical discourse, however, the precise meaning of the category of space has not been rendered more perspicuous. To the contrary, not only is there significant dispute about the different meanings of space, but there has been much debate about its importance for social and political analysis. In this article, I begin by considering these ambiguities and disputes, after which I endeavor to develop a category of space that can inform our understanding of social and physical space, while profitably addressing a number of pressing questions in contemporary political theory. I then explore the ethical and political implications of this conception by addressing a series of pressing concerns in our contemporary world. Here I focus especially on the construction of political boundaries, the inner composition of social space, and the question of political subjectivity.
(How) Does Space Matter?
Let me begin with two opposed accounts of space. On the one hand, Doreen Massey argues that
Geography matters in both its senses, of distance/nearness/betweenness and of the physical variation of the earth's surface (the two being closely related) is not a constraint on a pre-existing non-geographical social and economic world. It is constitutive of that world. (12)
In a later exchange with Laclau she goes on to claim that "Spatial form as 'outcome' ... has emergent powers which can have effects on subsequent events." (13) Indeed, the claims of Massey and those sympathetic to her project have been generalized into what Ed Soja calls a "socio-spatial dialectic," in which the "structure of organized space is ... a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations of production which are simultaneously social and spatial." (14) In a similar fashion, Anthony Giddens argues that "Space is not an empty dimension along which social groupings become structured, but has to be considered in terms of its involvement in the constitution of systems of interaction." (15)
On the other hand, other theorists strongly question the relevance, indeed the coherence, of Massey's claims, and they dispute Kohn's call for a "spatial heuristic," or David Harvey's project to construct a "historical-geographical materialism." (16) A strong version of this critique is put forward by Peter Saunders, who argues that social theory is "necessarily non-spatial in the sense that space is not and cannot be an object of theoretical inquiry. The search for a political economy theory of space, or a sociological theory of space, is a non-starter." (17) This critique is a variant of the argument from redundancy or triviality: The addition of the adjective "spatial" to "social relations," "social forms," or "social processes," or the qualification of any practice with the adverb "spatially," or indeed the verb "to spatialize," adds little or nothing substantive to our understanding and explanation of social phenomena. Saunders' strongly skeptical position is shared by theorists such as Michel de Certeau, Frederic Jameson, Ernesto Laclau, and Rob Walker, who in their different ways play down or are critical of the valorization of space. (18)
This basic division is characteristic of much reflection on space. Indeed, the dichotomy is often inscribed into the very accounts of space themselves. It is evident, for example, in the work of both Massey and Kohn. In these conceptions, the category of space is split between a stronger set of claims in which space is conceded "emergent properties" and "causal powers" that bring about social and political effects, and a much weaker position in which space refers to the specific "spatial contexts" and "spatial conjunctures" (or better, social contexts or structures) wherein social and political processes simply take place.
Exemplary in this regard is Kohn's intervention, which moves us directly to the political and normative/ethical aspects of space. On one side, her book is replete with claims about the determining power and function of space and spatial forms: "Space affects how individuals and groups perceive their place in the order of things. Spatial configurations naturalize social relations by transforming contingent forms into a permanent landscape that appears as immutable rather than open to contestation. By providing a shared background, spatial forms serve the function of integrating individuals into a shared conception of reality." (19) And Kohn goes on to isolate a number of distinctive, positive properties of space, which include the function "to initiate, maintain, or interrupt interaction"; to "encourage or inhibit contact between people"; and to "determine the form and scope of contact." (20) These reflections culminate in the advocacy of what she calls "a spatial heuristic," which "can illuminate domains of political experience that have hitherto remained obscured in a culture that emphasizes visual and linguistic knowledges." (21)
In other statements, space is simply the site or place wherein processes and practices take place. In this much weaker version of the argument, space is depicted as "a terrain of struggle for control over bodies, movement, labour, meaning and sociability," and the radical democratic project is enriched by looking "at the diverse places where politics takes place: festivals, town squares, chambers of labour, mutual aid societies, union halls, night schools, cooperatives, houses of the people." What is of interest in this version is a...
|
