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Introduction: geography and the reconceptualization of politics.

Article Excerpt
An introduction to a special issue, this article explores the form of the political founded upon spatial transformation: an enabling framework of recognition setting parameters for the sayable and unsayable. It points especially to techniques of discipline, repression, and exhibition through which control over space is maintained and to the ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox inherent in place. KEYWORDS: space/place; political; exclusion; differentiation; identification

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Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have argued that representations of space in much of the social sciences are "dependent on images of break, rupture and disjunction." (1) "The political" begins with the imposition of permanence onto an unhinged and fluid spatiality. This "permanence" outlines the form of "the political": It is made up of a series of transformative processes and imaginations that allow certain stability. "Permanences" thus sit atop space, denoting that a particular piece of space has been occupied (and that space generally is therefore discontinuous). (2) Permanences are clusters of imaginings, social formations of power, and relational networks that aggregate into place.

The boundarying of a piece of space and its internal ordering rest on acts of exclusion, differentiation, and identification. The occupation of a piece of space initiates a concept of the political as place-based. It thus initiates a political vocabulary of "break, rupture and disjunction" where internally ordered and boundaried places of the political are distinguished from other ordered and boundaried places. These places of politics become the starting point, Gupta and Ferguson continue, "from which to theorize contact, conflict and contradiction between cultures and societies." (3) The transformative process by which unhinged and fluid spatiality comes to be pockmarked by stable political places gives us a political vocabulary or a structure of recognition through which identities and encounters, and the conflicts and contradictions that emanate from them, are rendered intelligible.

This then is the form of the political founded by spatial transformation: an enabling framework of recognition that sets particular parameters outlining the sayable and the unsayable. For Jacques Ranciere, the political is, fundamentally, a spatial organization where perceptible identities are those that make sense to the way space is organized. For the form of the political to retain its purchase, what Ranciere calls the "void" and the "supplement" must not be counted. (4) The political is a way of counting elements that locates them in their "proper place." This is a way of defining forms of partaking in politics that works by, first of all, defining the modes or manner of perception within which forms of partaking must function. The political community is the aggregate of these forms of partaking.

For Ranciere, a place-bound politics is premised on a structuring of community where a form of "identificatory distribution (naming, fixing in space, defining a proper place) is an essential component of government." (5) This creates a sense of the visible and the sayable. Certain things and certain acts may be recognized as "political" and that which has no basis from which to speak or be seen is imperceptible. The maintenance of a place-based politics rests on the continuation of a system of recognition given by a particular purposive structuring of space. (6)

A central characteristic of a place-bound politics is, then, its claim to exhaustiveness. It works on the principle of saturation, where a space becomes filled by a particular mode of counting that identifies a political community. In this reading, place is the unproblematic repository of community. There is no place for "the void" or "the supplement," that which has no-part in the spatial organization of the...

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