Philosophy of Deconstruction and Spatiality | Essay | Geography

In this essay we will discuss about the philosophy of deconstruction and spatiality.

Essay on Deconstruction:

Deconstruction which has attained widespread recognition as one of the most important avant- garde intellectual movements in France and America, is essentially post-phenomenological and post-structuralist. In the history of contemporary deconstruction, the leading figure was Jacques Derrida, who published three books in 1973, 1975 and 1976.

Derrida was mainly concerned with the role and function of language, and was famous for having developed a process called ‘Deconstruction’. This is a method of reading a text so closely that the author’s conceptual distinctions on which the text relies are shown to fail on account of the inconsistent and paradoxical use made of these very concepts within the text as a whole.

In other words, the text was seen to fail by its own criteria; the standards or definitions which the text set up were used reflexively to unsettle and shatter the original distinction.

The method of deconstruction is connected with what Derrida called the ‘metaphysics of presence’. It was Derrida’s contention that Husserl, along with almost all other philosophers, relies on the assumption of an immediately available area of certainty.

The origin and foundation of most philosophers’ theories is ‘presence’. In Husserl’s case, the search for the form of pure expression is at the same time a search for that which is immediately present; thus implicitly, by being present in an unmediated way and present to itself, it is undeniably certain.

Derrida, however, denied the possibility of this ‘presence’, and in so doing removed the ground from which philosophers had in general proceeded. By denying ‘presence’ he was denying that there was a present in the sense of a single definable moment which, to him, was ‘now’. For most people, the present is the province of the known. By challenging access to the present, Derrida posed a threat to both positivism and phenomenology.

Having argued that a realm of the independent ‘signified’ does not exist, Derrida concluded, first, that no particular sign could be regarded as referring to any particular signified, and second, that we were unable to escape the system of signifiers. In combination, these combinations, however, imply that there can be no unqualified presence.

Phonocentrism-Logocentrism:

It is because of the assumption of ‘presence’ that a priority has been given to speech over writing. Derrida called it ‘phonocentrism’. Speech has been regarded as prior because it is closer to the possibility of ‘presence’. It is closer because speech implies immediately. In speech, meaning is apparently immanent, above all when, using the inner voice of consciousness, we speak to ourselves. In the moment of speech, we appear to grasp its meaning and we are thereby able to capture ‘presence’ as if the meaning was decided once and for all. Thus, unlike writing, which is hopelessly mediated, speech is linked to the apparent moment and place of ‘presence’ and for this reason has had priority over writing. For Derrida, phonocentrism is one of the effects of presence. Derrida’s attempt to ‘deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing was linked to the uncovering of the metaphysics of presence as a whole’.

Derrida had also criticised Saussare for prescribing that linguistics should be a study of speech alone rather than of speech and writing. This was an emphasis shared by Jakabson and Levi-Strauss, indeed by all semiological structuralists.

Derrida, however, suggested that this rejection of writing as an appendage, a mere technique and yet a measure built into speech— in effect, a scapegoat—is a symptom of a much broader tendency. He related this phonocentrism to logocentrism, the belief that the first and the last was the Logos, the World, the Divine Mind, the ‘self-presence of full self-consciousness’.

Speech is, however, thought of as remaining closer to psychic interiority than writing that symbolises interiority only at one remove. Writing does not seem to be so direct, so natural or sincere. Compared with speech, writing seems mechanical, second-hand, a transcript of speech.

Derrida argued that western philosophy has focused on speech, and emphasised the voice, while dismissing writing as a derivative form of expression. In this tradition, the phenomenological structure of the voice is regarded as the most immediate evidence of self-presence.

Besides being ‘phonocentric’, western philosophy is also ‘logocentric’. Derrida used the term ‘logocentric’ as a substitute for metaphysics in order to foreground that which has determined metaphysical systems of thought, their dependence on a ‘logos’. Western philosophy assumes that there is an essence, or truth which acts as the foundation of all our beliefs, hence there seems to be a disposition, a longing, for a ‘transcendental signifier’, which would directly relate, correspond, to a secure stable ‘transcendental signified’, i.e. ‘logos’.

Examples of such signs include Idea, Matter, the World Spirit, God, etc. Each of these concepts acts as the foundation of a system of thought and forms an axis around which all other signs circulate. However, Derrida argued that any such transcendental meaning is a fiction.

There are certain signified or meanings attached to such signifiers as Authority, Freedom, Order, which are highly valued in society. Sometimes, these meanings are thought of as if they were the origin of all the others.

Nevertheless, these meanings are not always seen in terms of origin; they are often seen in terms of goal, towards which all other meanings are advancing. Conceiving of things in terms of their orientation towards a ‘telos’ or end point—teleology—is a way of organising meaning in a hierarchy of significance.

Derrida called ‘metaphysical’ any thought system that depends on a foundation, a ground or a principle. First principles are often defined by what they exclude, by a sort of ‘binary opposition’ to other concepts. These principles and their implied ‘binary opposites’ can always be deconstructed. All conceptual oppositions of metaphysics, according to Derrida, have for ultimate reference the ‘presence of a present’.

To him, the binary oppositions of metaphysics include signifier/signified, sensible/ intelligible, speech/writing, speech (parole)/ language (tongue), diachrony/synchrony, space/ time, passivity/active. One of Derrida’s criticisms of the structuralists is that they have not put these concepts ‘under erasure’, that they have not put these binary oppositions into question.

It is known to all that ideologies draw up sharp distinctions between conceptual opposites such as truth and falsity, meaning and non-sense, centre and periphery. Derrida suggested that we should try to break down the oppositions by which we are accustomed to think and which ensure the survival of metaphysics in our thinking – matter/ spirit, subject/object, veil/truth, body/soul, text/meaning, interior/exterior, representation/ presence, appearance/essence, etc.

Derrida’s importance in this regard, however, lies in the fact that he suggested a method whereby one can subvert these oppositions and show that one term relies on and inheres within the other. He argued that ‘phonocentrism and logocentrism’ related to centrism itself the human desire to posit a ‘central’ presence at the beginning and end. The opposition between speech and writings, however, takes place within this pattern.

According to Sarup (1993), Derrida was attempting to subvert the logocentric theory of the sign. Traditionally, the signifier refers to the signified, that is, an acoustic image signifies an ideal concept, both of which are present to consciousness. In Derrida’s view, ‘the sign marks an absent present’ rather than present the object we employ the sign, however, the meaning of the sign is always postponed or deferred.

Derrida developed a concept which he called ‘difference’ and that referred to ‘to differ’—to be unlike or dissimilar in nature, quality or form— and to ‘to defer’—to delay, to postpone. Spoken French makes no phonetic distinction between the endings ‘-ance’ and ‘-ence’; the word registers as ‘difference’.

This undetected difference shows up only in writing. The concept of writing, then, is a challenge to the very idea of structure, for a structure always presumes a centre, a fixed principle, a hierarchy of meaning and a solid foundation, and it is just these notions which the endless differing and deferring of writing throws into question.

Language is the play of differences which are generated by signifiers which are themselves the product of those differences. Derrida attempted to incorporate into the meaning of ‘Difference’ the sense of deferring. Difference is itself endlessly deferred.

Metaphor:

The study of metaphor is becoming important as it is being realised that language does not simply reflect reality, but helps to constitute it. Attention is now being increasingly given to how rhetorical devices shape our experience and our judgements, how language serves to promote the possibilities of certain kinds of action and exclude the practicability. In the past, metaphor was often studied as an aspect of the expressive function of language; but it is actually one of the essential conditions of speech.

Language is essentially metaphorical, because metaphorical expressions are rooted in language itself. Derrida has shown that even philosophy is permeated with metaphor without knowing it.

An influential post-structuralist thinker Michel Foucault was particularly fond of using ‘geographical’ metaphors such as territory, domain, soil, horizon, archipelago, geopolitics, region, and landscape. He also made use of spatial metaphors—position, displacement, site, field. Similarly, Althusser also in ‘Reading Capital’ used many spatial metaphors such a terrain, site, etc.

Foucault said and/or suggested earlier that there has been a devaluation of space. ‘Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, and the immobile; time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity ‘life, dalectial’. But to talk in terms of space does not mean that one is hostile to time.

Althusser believed that the use of spatial metaphors in his work was necessary, but at the same time regressive, non-rigorous. Foucault, on the other hand, was more positive. He said that ‘it is through these spatial obsessions that he came to what he was looking for’ – the relation’s that are possible between power and knowledge.

Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transportation, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power.

Metaphors determine to a large extent to what we can think in any field. Metaphors can help to make and defend a world view. It is important that the implications of the metaphor that we employ or accept are made explicit and that the ways in which they structure our thought and even our action are better understood. Metaphors can be productive of new insights and fresh illuminations. They can promote unexpected or subtle parallels or analogies.

Metaphors can encapsulate and put forward proposals for another way of looking at things, for we can have increased awareness of alternative possible world through metaphor. Thus the metaphor is most often used by deconstructionists.

Deconstructive criticism takes the metaphoric structure of a text seriously. Since metaphors are not reducible to truth, their own structures ‘as such’ are part of the text. The deconstructive procedure is to spot the point where a text covers up its grammatical structure.

Derrida has provided a method of ‘close- reading’ a ‘text’ very similar to psychoanalytic approach to neurotic symptoms. Deconstructive ‘close-reading’, having ‘interrogated’ the text, breaks through its defences and shows that a set of binary oppositions can be found ‘inscribed’ within it in each of the pairs, private/public, masculine/feminine, same/other, rational/ irrational, true/false, central/peripheral, etc.; the first term is privileged. Deconstructors show that the ‘privileged’ term depends for its identity on its excluding the other and demonstrate that primacy really belongs to the subordinate term instead.

Derrida attempted to stress the point that it is not enough simply to neutralise the binary opposition of metaphysics. Deconstruction involves reversal and displacement. Within the familiar philosophical opposition there is always a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other, holds the superior position. The first move in deconstructing the opposition is to overthrow the hierarchy.

In the next phase this reversal must be displaced, the winning term put ‘under erasure’ (idea of ‘saus rature). Deconstruction, then, is an attempt’… to locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the un-decidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier, to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed’.

Derrida made closer and intensive study of many philosophers, and said that they had attempted to impose their systems of thought ignoring or suppressing the disruptive effects of language. His work draws attention to the ways in which language deflects the philosopher’s project. Derrida did this by focusing on metaphor and other figurative devices at work in the texts of philosophy. In this way, he underlined the rhetorical nature of philosophical arguments.

Deconstruction stresses the irreducibility of metaphor, the difference at play within the very constitution of liberal meaning. It should be remembered that deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected. It is an activity of reading in which texts must be read in a radically new way.

Derrida discovered a set of paradoxical themes at odds with their manifest argument. His method attempted to reveal how the privileged term is held in place by the form of a dominant metaphor and not, as it might seem, by any conclusive logic. Metaphor often disrupts the logic of an argument.

Deconstruction disarticulates traditional conception of the author and the work and undermines conventional notions of reading and history. Instead of mimetic, expressive and didactic theories of ‘literature’, it offers textuality. It kills the author, turns history and tradition into inter-textuality and celebrates the reader.

One of the main features of post-structuralist theory is the deconstruction of the self. In place of a unified and stable being or consciousness, we get a multi-faceted and disintegrating play of selves. With deconstruction the categories ‘criticism’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘literature’ collapse, borders are overrun.

The work, now called ‘text’, explodes beyond stable meaning and truth towards the radical and ceaseless play of infinite meanings. Critical writing, formerly analytical and coherent, becomes playfully fragmented.

The deconstructor’s method often consists of deliberately inventing traditional oppositions and making the play of hitherto invisible concepts that reside unnamed in the gap between opposing terms. In the move from hermeneutics and semistics to deconstruction, there is a shift from identities to differences, unities to fragmentations, ontology to philosophy of language, espistemology to rhetoric, presence to absence.

According to one recent commentator, deconstruction celebrates dissemination over truth, explosion and fragmentation over unity and coherence, undecidable spaces over prudent closures, playfulness and hysteria over care and rationality.

It is said that every boundary, limit, division, frame or margin installs a line separating one entity or accept from another; that is to say, every border marks a difference. The question of border is a question of difference. According to Derrida, ‘No border is guaranteed, inside or outside’. Applied to texts, this finding becomes ‘no meaning can be fixed or decided upon’. According to deconstructionists, there is nothing other than interpretation.

As there is neither an undifferentiated nor a literal bottom or ground the activity of interpretation is endless. It is also a fact that every text tends itself to deconstruction and to further deconstruction, with nowhere any end in sight. However, the supreme irony of what Derrida has called logocentrism is that critique, deconstruction, is as insistent as monotonous and as inadvertently systematising as logocentrism.

Deconstruction for Derrida is ultimately a political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought and, behind, that a whole system of political structures and social institutions maintains its force. But in practice it can be denied that his work has been grossly unhistorical and politically evasive.

Some people have said that deconstruction serves to indicate that our account of the world could be different, but that it cannot tell us how it would be different. Derrida seemed to believe that deconstruction is gradually able to shift the structure within which we operate little by little to modify the terrain of our work, and thereby produce new figurations.

According to Christopher Norris (1982), deconstruction is inimical to Marxist thought. In his view, the insights of deconstruction are inevitably couched in a rhetoric which itself lies open to further deconstructive reading. ‘Once criticism enters the labyrinth of deconstruction it is committed to a sceptical epistemology that leads back to Nietzsche, rather than Marx.’

Eagleton (1981), an English Marxist, for example, has argued that the main characteristics of deconstruction are that it rejects any notion of totality and that it is against privileging of the unitary subject. Deconstruction asserts that literary texts do not have relation to something other than themselves. Deconstruction, to Eagleton, is not only reformist but ultra-leftist too.

Norris (1992) argued that deconstruction has nothing in common with those forms of extreme anti-cognivist doctrine that would claim to have come out ‘beyond’ all distinction between truth and falsehood, reason and rhetoric, fact and fiction.

Nevertheless, Derrida had a continuing critical engagement with the truth-claims and ethical values of Enlightenment thought. Derridean deconstruction supports the Enlightenment critique even while subjecting that tradition to a radical reassessment).

Essay on Spatiality:

From the epistemological stand of geography viewpoint, the single most important contribution of post-modernism has been to connect the bias towards ‘historicism’ by putting ‘spatial’ at the centre of explanation, spatial dialectic alongside the historical dialectic. It is worth recalling that the last decades of the nineteenth century were an era of rising historicism and the parallel submergence of space in critical social thought. Foucault (1980) once said, ‘Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, and the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.’

However, Focault (1986) made the following observation, asserting the emergence of an ‘epoch of space’, contrary to what he said earlier – ‘The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, … history, with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever- accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world…. The present epoch will perhaps be, above all, the epoch of space.’

‘As we move closer to the end of the twentieth century….Foucault’s premonitory observations on the emergence of an ‘epoch of space’ assume a more reasonable cast. The material and intellectual context of modern critical social theory have begun to shift dramatically. In the 1980s, the hoary traditions of space-blinkered historicism are being challenged with unprecedented explicitness by convergent calls for a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination. A distinctively post-modern and critical human geography is taking shape, brashly reasserting the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought’.

‘Geography may not have displaced history at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic on the theoretical and political agenda, one which rings with significantly different ways of seeing time and space together, the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege….The development of post-modern geographies has progressed far enough to have changed significantly both the material landscape of the contemporary world and the interpretive terrain of critical theory. The time has come … for at least a first round of a responsive evaluation of these two changing contents of history and geography, modernity and post-modernity—one imprinted concretely on the empirical fabric of contemporary life (a post­modern geography of the material world), and the other treading through the ways we make practical and political sense of the present, the past and the potential future (a post-modern geography of critical social consciousness)’.

The reassertion of ‘space’ in critical social theory is an excuse of both ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstitution’. It cannot be simply accomplished by appending spatial highlights to inherited critical perspective and sitting back to watch them glow with logical conviction. The strangle-hold of a still addictive historicism must first be loosened.

Spatiality of Historicism:

The post-modern critical human geography first appeared in the late 1960s, but it was barely heard against the then prevailing temporal din. For more than a decade, the spatialising project remained strangely muted by the untroubled reaffirmation of the primacy of history over geography that enveloped both Western Marxism and liberal social science in a virtually sanctified vision of the ever-accumulating past.

Wright Mills (1959), in the late 1950s of the last century, had attempted to carry forward the historical contextualisation in his paradigmatic portrayal of the sociological imagination. His work provides a useful point of departure for specialising the historical narratives and reinterpreting the course of critical social theory. Mills maps out a sociological imagination that is deeply rooted in a historical rationality, that applies equally well to critical social science and to critical traditions of Marxism.

Mills (1959) says:

‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation of the two within society. This is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst….No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of this intersection within society, has completed its intellectual journey’.

It is clear that Mills attempted to draw an essentially historical imagination to illustrate the alluring logic of historicism, the rational reduction of meaning and action to the temporal constitution and experience of social being. However, ‘sociological’ imagination has been changed to ‘historical’ that seemed to be an expression of Mills’ disciplinary specialisation and socialisation.

The nominal choice personally specifies what is a much more widely shared ‘quality of mind’ that he claims should pervade, indeed embody, all social theory and analysis, an emancipatory rationality grounded in the intersection of history, biography, and society. To be sure, these ‘life-stories’ have geography too; they have milieus, immediate locales, provocative emplacements which affect thought and action.

The historical imagination is never completely spaceless and critical social historians have written, and continue to write, some of the best geographies of the past. But it is always time and history that provide the primary ‘variable containers’ in these geographies. This would be just clear whether the critical orientation is described as sociological or political or anthropological—for that matter phenomenological, existential, hermeneutic, or historical materialist.

The particular emphasis may differ, but the encompassing perspective is shared. An already-made geography sets the stage, while the wilful making of history dictates the action and defines the story line. It is important to stress that this historical imagination has been particularly central to critical social theory, to the search for practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo.

Historicism has been defined in three different ways by Raymond Williams (1983):

(1) Neutral—a method of study using facts from the past to trace the precedents of current events;

(2) Deliberate— an emphasis on variable historical conditions and contents as a privileged framework for interpreting all specific events;

(3) Hostile—an attack on all interpretations and prediction which is based on notion of historical necessity or general laws of historical development.

‘Historicism is an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination. This definition does not deny the extraordinary power and importance of historiography as a mode of emancipatory insight, but identifies historicism with creation of a critical silence, an implicit subordination of space to time that obscures geographical interpretation of the changeability of the social world and intrudes upon every level of theoretical discourse, from the most abstract autological concepts of being to the most detailed explanation of empirical events’.

‘This definition may appear rather odd when set against the long tradition of debate over historicism that has flourished for centuries. Even then, the main currents of critical social thought had become so spatially-blinkered that the most forceful reassertion of space versus time, geography versus history, had little effect. The academic discipline of modern geography had, by that time, been rendered theoretically inert and contributed little to these first reassertions’.

The French Marxist philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, and critical theorists, Michel Foucault and John Berger have been identified to have pioneered the development of post-modern geography, and whose assertive post-modern geographies have been largely hidden from view by their more comforting and familiar identification as historians.

The hidden history of spatialisation is actually illustrated and brought back into view by Henri Lefebvre. He was perhaps the most influential figure shaping the course and character of French Marxist theory from the early 1930s to at least the late 1950s. He became, after the 1950s, the leading spatial theoretician in Western Marxism and the most forceful advocate for the reassertion of space in critical social theory.

There seems to be a convincing basis for claiming that French Marxism, from the onset, was more inclined towards an explicit spatial perspective and theorisation than Marxism elsewhere. Throughout the twentieth century, French critical thought, whatever its primary source, preserved an ongoing spatial discourse in the contemporary post-structuralist and post­modernist debates.

Lefebvre’s spatial project, however, provides a new dimension about spatialised dialectic, an insistent demand for a fundamental change in the ways we think about space, time, and being; about geography, history and society; about the production of space, the making of history, and the constitution of social relations and practical consciousness.

Spatialised Dialectic:

Lefebvre (1976) says – ‘The dialectic is back on the agenda. But it is no longer Marx’s dialectic, just as Marx’s was no longer Hegel’s….The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity and historical time, or to a temporal mechanism such as ‘thesis- antithesis—synthesis’ or ‘affirmation—negation— negation of the negation…. To recognize space, to recognize what takes place there and what is used for, is to resume the dialectic analysis will reveal the contradiction of space.’

He also attempted to recontextualise Marxism in theory and practice. And it is within this recontextualisation that one can discover many of the immediate sources of a materialist interpretation of spatiality and hence of the development of Marxist geography and historical- geographical materialism.

Lefebvre’s theorisation of space cannot be summarised easily, for it is embedded in an extraordinary number of published works which touch upon every aspect of social theory and philosophy. In a response to the question as to how did he develop his interest in ‘space’, Lefebvre (1975) says – ‘The point of departure for me was the work of DATAR (Delegation a I’ Amenagement du Territorize et a I’ Action Regionale)—a new social and political practice emerged with the establishment of DATAR with the construction of the new town of Lacq-Mourenx in the Pyrenees Atlantiques)…..Something new was happening, an idea of spatial planning and practice was born….It was certainly an original French phenomena. I don’t know many other countries that have gone beyond the stage of financial planning in their budgets to actually planning their space.’

Lefebvre seemed to have concentrated attention on the characteristic features of the modernised capitalism that consolidated around the turn of the century in what he called a ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’, choreographed by the capitalist state—in essence, an instrumentalised spatial planning which increasingly penetrated into the recursive practice of daily life. Gradually, Lefebvre became concerned with ‘urban’, ‘urbanism’, and ‘urbanization’.

To him, urbanisation was a summative metaphor for the spatialisation of modernity, and the strategic ‘planning’ of everyday life that has allowed capitalism to survive, to reproduce successfully its essential relations of production.

The very survival of capitalism was built upon the creation of an increasingly embracing, instrumental, and socially mystified spatiality, hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion and ideology. What distinguished capitalism’s gratuitous spatial veil from the spatialities of other modes of production was its peculiar production and reproduction of geographically uneven development via simultaneous tendencies towards homogenisation, fragmentation, and hierarchisation—an argument that resembled in many ways Foucault’s discourse on heterotopias, and the instrumental association of space, knowledge, and power.

‘This dialectical, conflictive space is where the reproduction of the relations of production is achieved. It is this space that produces reproduction, by introducing into it the multiple contradictions—contradictions that must be analytically and dialectically revealed to enable us to see what is hidden behind the spatial veil’.

Lefebvre’s socially-produced space is a created structure comparable to other social constructions resulting from the transformation of given conditions inherent to being alive, in much the same way as human history represents a social transformation of time.

Finally, Lefebvre (1976b) says:

‘Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be purely formal, the epitome of rational abstraction, it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident on the landscape. Space has been shaped and moulded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is always political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.’

Heterotopia:

Michel Foucault made significant contribution to the development of post-modern geography, particularly critical human geography. His most explicit and revealing observation on the relative significance of space and time, however, appears not in his major published works – Madness and Civilization (1961) and The History of Sexuality (1978), but almost innocuously in his lectures, and in two of his revealing interviews – ‘Questions on Geography'(1980) and ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’.

In these interviews and lectures, Foucault clarified and outlined his notion/concept of ‘heterotopias’ as the characteristic spaces of the modern world, superseding the hierarchic ‘ensemble of places’ of the Middle Ages and the enveloping ‘space of emplacement’ opened up by Galileo into an early-modern, infinitely unfolding, ‘space of extension’ and measurement. Moving away from both the ‘internal space’ of Bachelard’s poetics (1969), and the intuitional regional description of the phenomenologists, Foucault focused attention on another spatiality of social life, an ‘external space’, the actually lived (and socially produced) space of sites and the relation between them.

Foucault says:

‘The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and history occurs, the space that claws and graws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another’ (1986).

These heterogeneous spaces of ‘sites’ and ‘relations’, called ‘heterotopias’ are constituted in every society, but take quite varied forms and change over time, as ‘history unfolds’ in its adherent spatiality.

He identifies many such sites – the cemetery and the church, the theatre’ and the garden, the museum and the library, the fairground and the ‘vacation village’, the barracks and the prison, the Moslem hammam and the Scandinavian sauna, the brothel and the colony. Foucault seems to contrast these ‘real places’ with the ‘fundamentally unreal spaces’ of Utopias, which present society in either ‘a perfected form’ or else ‘turned upside down’.

‘The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible….They have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory…. Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. The latter type would be the heterotopias, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain calories have not functioned somewhat in this manner’.

Through these aforesaid remarks, Foucault attempted to raise a powerful argument against historicism and against the prevailing treatments of space in human sciences. His heterogeneous and relational space of heterotopias is neither a substanceless void to be filled by cognitive intuition nor a repository of physical forms to be phenomenologically described in all its resplendent variability.

It is another space, actually lived and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time, the habitus of social practices. It is a space rarely seen for it has been obscured by a bifocal vision that traditionally views space as either a mental construct or a physical form.

To account for his innovative interpretation of space and time, and to clarify some of the often confusing polemics which were growing around it, Foucault turned to the current debates on structuration, one of the twentieth century’s most important avenues for the reassertion of space in critical social theory.

He recognised the development of structuralism as a different and competing vision of history and geography, a critical reorientation that was connecting space and time in new and revealing ways.

Foucault, as it appears, refused to project his spatialisation as anti-history, but his history was provocatively spatialised from the very beginning. This was not just a shift in metaphorical preference, as it frequently seemed to be for Althusser and others more comfortable with the structuralist label than Foucault. He has strongly emphasised the centrality of space to the critical eye, regarding the contemporary moment. His spatialisation appeared to be more demonstrative rather than declarative stance.

When asked whether space was central to the analysis of power, Foucault (1986) replied:

‘Yes. Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. It is said that Foucault persistently attempted to explore the ‘total intersection of time with space from the first to the last of his writings, and he provided and/or created an emerging perspective of a post-historicist and post-modern critical human geography.’

However, Foucault admitted that space has been devalued by philosophers and social critics for generations, and reasserted the inherent spatiality of power/knowledge and ended with a volte face.

He said to the interviewers:

‘… Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as a support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. When geography itself was concerned, I either left the question hanging or established a series of arbitrary connections…. Geography must indeed lie at the heart of my concern’ (1980).

It is at this stage, Foucault makes the comment made earlier on the post-Bergsonian treatment of space as passive and lifeless, time as richness, fecundity, dialectic. He takes an integrative rather than deconstructive path, holding on to his history, but adding to it the crucial nexus that would flow through all his works – the linkage between space, knowledge, and power.

He said – ‘The spatializing description of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power…. A whole history remains to be written of ‘spaces’—which would at the same time be the history of ‘powers’ (both of these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat’.

Like Foucault, John Berger has also dealt with the intersection of time and space in virtually all his writings. Symbolising his insistent balancing of history and geography, lineage and landscape, period and region, Berger (1984) opens this slim volume – A Question of Geography by stating ‘Part One is About Time, Part Two is About Space’.

The embracing themes follow accordingly – the first part labelled ‘Once’, the second ‘Here’ both necessarily touched by other. Berger (1984) condenses the essence of ‘post-modern geographies’ in a spatially politicised aesthetic.

To make his point, Berger (1984) turns to an analogous change in modern novel, a shift in the context of meaning and interpretation which hinges around the simultaneity versus sequence, spatiality versus historicity, geography versus biography. In doing so, he begins to set into place a train of arguments that define the post-modern turn against historical determinations and vividly announce the need for an explicitly spatialised narrative.

Berger (1984) joins with Foucault in pushing towards a significant and necessary restructuring ‘of critical social thought, a re- composition which enables us to see more clearly the long-hidden instrumentality of human geographies, in particular the encompassing and encaging spatialisation of social life that have been associated with historical development of capitalism. ‘Foucault’s path took him primarily into the micro spaces of power, discipline and surveillance, into the carceral city, the asylum, the human body, while Berger’s path continues to open up new ways seeing art and aesthetics, portrait and landscapes, painters and peasants, in past (once) and in the present (here).’ To crystallise and expand these spatial fields of insight and to attach post-modern critical human geography even more fearfully and explicitly to the instrumental spatiality of capitalism, the historical narrative must be re-entered at a different place and scale.

It is in the writings of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Berger that the geography of post-modernisation was most actually perceived although the links between them are not always direct and intentional, the intellectual trajectories of these three foundational post-modern geographers intersect in the contemporary deconstruction and reconstitution of modernity.

Convergence of Three Spatialisations:

Soja (1993) identifies three different paths of spatialisation that tend towards a creative convergence – post-historicism, ‘post-fordism, and ‘post-modernism’. The first of these spatialisations— post-historicism is rooted in a fundamental reformulation of the nature and conceptualisation of social being, an essentially ontological struggle to rebalance the interplay between history, geography and society. Here the reassertion of space arises against the grain of an ontological historicism. That has privileged the separate constitution of being in time for at least the past century.

The second spatialisation—post-fordism— is directly linked to the political economy of the material world and, more specifically, to the ‘fourth modernization’ of capitalism, the most recent phase of far-reaching socio-spatial restructuring that has followed the end of the long post-War economic boom.

The term ‘post- fordism’ is chosen to characterise the system of production marked by flexibility both of labour and machinery; by the vertical break-up of large corporations, by better use of links between firms so that subcontracting is increasingly used. Post- fordism is associated with agglomeration, which will simplify interaction between linked forms of economic activity.

Here too it can be argued that space makes a critical difference, that revealing how spatial restructuring hides consequences from us is the key to making political and theoretical sense of the changing political economy of the contemporary world.

The third spatialisation—post-modernism—is linked to a cultural and ideological reconfiguration, a changing definition of the exponential meaning of modernity, the emergence of a new, post­modern culture of space and time.

It is attuned to changes in the way we think about and respond to particularities—the perils and possibilities— of the contemporary moment via science, art, paleography, and programmes for political action. Post-modernism overlaps with post-historicism and post-fordism as a theoretical discourse and a periodising concept in which geography increasingly matters as a vantage point of critical insight.

The convergence of these three spatialisations is effectively exemplified in the work of Fredric Jameson. He captures the spatial specificity of the contemporary ‘Zeitgeist’ – ‘Post-modern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy, but has genuine historical (and socio-economic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansion of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics)….We cannot (therefore) return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which no longer ours … the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern’.

Jameson provisionally defines the spatialised model of radical political culture appropriate to the contemporary (post-modern) situation as an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’, an ability to see in the cultural logic and form of post-modernism an instrumental cartography of power and social control; in other words a more accurate way of seeing how space hides consequence from us. This spatio-temporal patterning plays a significant role in Jameson’s critique of reactionary post­modernism and a wide range of contemporary studies of post-fordist economic restructuring.

David Harvey (1969; 1973), the singular geographer who discarded his own defence of positivist geography in favour of Marxist interpretations (1973) mounted a post-modern critique of Marxist structuralism in his later works.

His comments (1985) are self-revealing of his intention to the focus on spatiality as against the prevailing historicism—’there has been a strong and almost overwhelming predisposition to give time and history priority over space and geography’. David Harvey (1982), however, has given a post-modern outlook to Marxist geography.

In Limits to Capital (1982), he reached out from the heart of Marxist geography to the wider realm of Western Marxism and modern critical social theory, presenting a demonstrative argument for a spatialised Marxism and a spatialised critique of capitalist development.

Looking back at the critical response to ‘Limits’, Harvey expressed his concern that most readers seemed to be somewhat confused over the message it was presenting. He said, ‘Curiously, most reviewers passed by … what I thought to be the most singular contribution of that work—the integration of the production of space and spatial configuration as an active element within the core of Marxist theorising.

That was the key theoretical innovation that allowed me to shift from thinking about history to historical geography and so to open the way to theorizing about the urban process as an active moment in the historical geography of class struggle and capital accumulation’ (1985).

Harvey (1985) further says:

‘Geographical space is always the realm of the concrete and the particular. Is it possible to construct a theory of the concrete and the particular in the context of the universal and abstract determination of Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation? This is the fundamental question to be resolved’.

Marvel Castells (1983) also seems to have expressed his faith in Lefebvre’s spatial project and says:

‘Space is not a reflection of society, it is society….Therefore, spatial forms at least on our planet, will be produced, as all other human objects are, by human object….At the same time, spatial forms will be earmarked by the resistance from exploited classes, from oppressed subjects, from dominated women. And the work of such a contradictory historical process on the space will be accomplished on an already inherited spatial form, the product of former history and the support of new interests, projects, protests and dreams. Finally, from time to time, social movements will arise to challenge the meaning of spatial structure and therefore attempt new functions and new forms.’

However, Castells falls short of the post­modern proclamation that it is now space more than time, geography more than history that hides consequences from us.

Similarly, Dorren Massey (1984) has observed that:

‘… understanding geographical organization is fundamental to understanding economy and society The geography of society makes a difference in the way it works… If this is true analytically, it is also true politically. For there to be any hope of altering the fundamentally unequal geography of British economy and society (and that of other capitalist countries, too), a politics is necessary which links questions of geographical distribution to those of social and economic organization.’

Neil Smith (1984) notes – ‘Geographical space is on the economic and political agenda as never before. The idea of the “geographical pivot of history” takes on a more modern and more profound meaning than Mackinder could have imagined’. Smith, as it seems, also strays consciously off the path of Marxist orthodoxy.

In spite of their admission of the significance of space over time, Harvey, Massey and Smith appear to be hesitant to engage deeply in the necessarily transformative deconstruction of historical materialism and its de-spatialising master narratives. But while historicism is shielded from a rigorous and systematic critique, there is a new confidence regarding the theoretical and political significance of space.

‘The emerging post-modern critical human geography must continue to be built upon radical deconstruction, a deeper exploration of those critical sciences in the texts, narratives and intellectual landscapes of the past, an attempt to reinscribe and resituate the meaning and significance of space in history and in historical materialism. Spatial deconstruction aims to ‘reverse the imposing tapestry’ of the past … exposing the dishevelled tangle of threads that constitutes the intellectual history of critical social thought…. Spatial deconstruction must therefore also be sufficiently flexible to parry the reactionary thrusts of historicism and avoid the simplistic defence of anti-history or, even worse, a new and equally obfuscating capitalism….Deconstruction alone is not enough, however…..It must be accompanied by … tentative reconstruction grounded in the political and theoretical demands of the contemporary world and able to encompass all the scales of modern power, from the grand strategies of global geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat’.