(All materials in this file are for the private research use of members of the Humanites and Social Science Federation of Canada only and in conjunction with the 1999 meeting of the Federation. Distribution or reproduction of any materials included in the file is strictly prohibited)
Postmodern Perspectives on Premodern Space
James W. Flanagan
Canadian Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities 1999
Université de Sherbrooke / Bishop's University
Sherbrooke / Lennoxville, Québec
4 juin / June 1999
The central attribute of modernity in international politics has been a peculiar and historically unique configuration of territorial space.
-- John G. Ruggie,
"Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,
International Organization 47 (1993) 144.
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, 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 an epoch of space.
-- Michel Foucault,
"Of Other Spaces,"
Diacritics 16 (1986) 22.
Social space has become a major focus for social theory over the past decade. Where once it was argued that space had not been taken seriously enough by sociologists, or had not been adequately theorized by human geographers, it is no longer necessary to make such a claim.
-- Kevin Hetherington,
The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopic & Social Ordering,
Routledge, 1997, p. vii.
The generative source for a materialist interpretation of spatiality is the recognition that spatiality is socially produced and, like society itself, exists in both substantial forms (concrete spatialities) and as a set of relations between individuals and groups, an 'embodiment' and medium of social life itself.
As socially produced space, spatiality, can be distinguished from the physical space of material nature and the mental space of cognition and representation, each of which is used and incorporated into the social construction of spatiality but cannot be conceptualized as its equivalent.
-- Edward W. Soja,
Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory,
Verso, 1989, p. 120.
1. Introduction:
The subject of this essay is critical spatiality and how it affects and enhances our understandings of the past. While a description of critical spatiality is implied in the quotations at the top of this essay, I postpone defining it in order that its meaning can begin to emerge from the textual and visual images of space presented below. In so far as possible, I hope to avoid problems inherent in using time-based media -- speech and writing -- to convey understandings of space by using spatial images to illuminate spatiality wherever possible. What I mean by critical spatiality, therefore, will unfold as we proceed.
The title, "Postmodern Perspectives on Premodern Space," might have been phrased interrogatively: "Postmodern Perspectives on Premodern Space?" or even "Postmodern Perspectives(?) on Premodern Space." A shift in mood would not imply doubt about the existence or value of critical spatiality. Rather, it would hint at avoiding many of the complex issues and discussions associated with the terms "postmodern" and "postmodernity." In the first place, by using "postmodern" for both "postmodernism" (a cultural form) and "postmodernity" (a historical period) which others distinguish, and by using the dual terms somewhat interchangeably, I do not imply a neglect or preference for either over the other (see, Eagleton 1996: vii). Instead, in spite of some blurring, the choice frees me from deciding which term is intended when others do not make the distinction themselves. Furthermore, for my purposes, the distinction is not important, and in fact it may not be important that what I say be perceived as postmodern or in fact be postmodern. I admit my partiality toward Jonathan Boyarin's description: "...'postmodernism' implies not a progressive supercession of the modern, but a critique from within that preserves the freedom of modernism while dismantling its progressivist pretensions to be the last and culminating word" (Boyarin 1994: 438). My interest is in how living in the midst of today's rapid and fragmenting cultural and social change affects the way we construct the past. Many describe this age as "postmodern," and I use the term because discussions of critical spatiality are often embedded in studies that identify themselves as such. I accept their authors' judgement without prejudice.
With premodern space, I am equally neutral and generalizing. In my own discipline religion specializing in Hebrew Bible and archaeology -- such space would usually refer to the B.C./B.C.E. world Before the Common Era spatiality. Then as in other ages we could speak of many kinds of spatiality. In this essay, I focus primarily on territorial space, but I hope to expose broader applications to spatialities of other kinds, periods, and places that preceded the era commonly referred to as "the modern." The range and diversity, however, constrains me from treating or testing each in detail.
There are several reasons for using the so-called modern period as a pivot and (for the most part) bracketing it from our discussions. First, spatiality in that time has been examined extensively in many of the works cited here. They can be consulted if fuller information is needed. Second, the impact of modernity's spatiality on Western society and history makes the era a watershed in space studies the epochal threshold (Ruggie 1993: 144) -- so that attention can be fruitfully directed before and after. And third, there is widespread recognition of "postmodernity's" responses to modernity and its spatial formulations, so much in fact that some describe postmodernism as a reaction to modernism (Soja 1989: 4-5).
All studies of human spatiality, critical or otherwise, must engage history and historical contexts, but doing so does not require resolving all chronological issues surrounding the precise beginnings and endings of historical and cultural periods. The details of those arguments have been widely rehearsed, and I accept that modernity probably began sometime between 1436 and 1895 -- between the invention of moveable type and the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. A number of starting points within that frame have been suggested (Toulmin 1990: 5) .
For its ending, few would accept architect Charles Jencks' specific time set in St. Louis, MO, at 3:32 p.m. on July 15, 1972 (Jencks 1991: 23). However, many would suggest a transition from modernity to late modernity or postmodernity sometime in the 1950s, 60s, or early 70s. In retrospect it is remarkable how many major and sometimes traumatic events between 1965 and 1975 affected our vision and lives. Politically the period witnessed the Vietnam War, Six-Day War, assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and student riots in Paris, Chicago, and at Kent State. Intellectually and symbolically, a number of less dramatic changes were probably significant, ranging from the development of ARPAnet and beginning of both cyberspace and Environmental Studies, to the adoption of a new Canadian flag and creation of several counter-establishment humanities academic presses in then less well-known universities in Sheffield, England, Waterloo, Ontario, and Missoula, Montana. Such episodes helped undermine the certainties, structures, symbols, and spatialities of the past. While these changes were not of a kind, their variety suggests that the West was experiencing profound changes that penetrated as far as the ivory towers of academia. Hence, without entering a Habermas-Lyotard type debate, I believe that it can be useful to compare and contrast perspectives that exist(ed) on either side of the modern period whenever its exact temporal boundaries are set.
2. Space as a Cultural Subtext:
Our attention is drawn to spatiality because space, along with time, is a cultural subtext, i.e., a fundamental cultural framework. The term is David Harvey's and Stephen Toulmin's who use it to capture and emphasize the underlying frameworks of a world-view (Harvey 1989; Toulmin 1990). Elsewhere, I have summarized their arguments for associating subtexts with specific eras, and I draw on those appraisals here (Flanagan 1995).
Subtexts are cultural presuppositions that are generally unexamined because they are assumed to be "the way things are." During the past decades, theorists and historians have argued whether these frames of reference have changed and are changing, and how such changes affect our view of the past. Toulmin would seemingly deny a distinct boundary between modernity and postmodernity, implying continuing subtexts and opting for a transformed "humanized" modernity rather than postmodernity (1990: 180). He does not see a definite break from the well-formulated spatial and temporal theories and practices that owe their existence to the organized worlds inspired by Descartes and Newton.
Although Harvey agrees with Toulmin that space is a cultural subtext and can be useful in assaying social and cultural shifts, he equates the transformation from modernity to postmodernity with a change in experiencing space and time. They are basic categories of human experience whose meanings, unfortunately, are seldom discussed (1989: 201).
I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective sense of time and space, against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions....we must recognize the multiplicity of the objective qualities which space and time can express, and the role of human practices in their construction. Neither time nor space, the physicists now broadly propose, had existence (let alone meaning) before matter; ...It is, however, by no means necessary to subordinate all objective conceptions of time and space to this particular physical conception, since it, also, is a construct that rests upon a particular version of the constitution of matter and the origin of the universe. The history of concepts of time, space, and time-space in physics has, in fact, been marked by strong epistemological breaks and reconstructions. The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes, and that it is only through investigation of the latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former. This is not, of course, a new conclusion (Harvey 1989: 203-4).
The quotation not only affirms the validity of examining spatiality as a means of grasping social, historical and cultural meanings, but it also introduces another factor that will be important as we proceed. Harvey contends that spatiality is constructed through social practice.
3. Transformations in a Space Age:
Although Harvey emphasizes the transformation from industrial "Fordism" society to the world in a post-Fordism age, we may cite other transformations in spatiality and social practices that many believe are equally obvious and are driving change in our own time. Some, in fact, associate these with the emergence of postmodernism (Castells 1996: 417-418).
Those changes have propelled the world into a space age and an age of globalization. No image captures the dual situation better than the photo of the so-called "Spaceship Planet Earth." From outer space -- as it was once known -- the image sears our consciousness with our own experience of contemporary space.
Spaceship Planet Earth
(Click on image to enlarge)
Human experiences of this global image have been studied (White 1987: 34). The results indicate two contrasting impressions depending on whether one has only orbited the earth or has escaped its magnetism and traveled to orbit or walk on the moon. The former group of astronauts are impressed by the globe's magnitude, seamlessness, and diversity. They describe one region at a time and comment on the rich variety as they repeatedly pass from day to night and night to day.
On the other hand space travelers sense their home differently. For the twenty-four who have orbited the moon and the twelve who have walked on its surface, it is the earth's smallness, unity, and relative insignificance against the backdrop of universe's millions of planets and constellations that dominate their memories.
The experiences, as well as the ongoing practices of the space programs of core nations, have transformed the world's spatial consciousness. These studies insist that all humanity has been affected, not merely the individuals who have been privileged to travel in space. Through television, remote sensing, computer simulations, and other modes of visual documentation, all who have access to these resources have been forced to reformulate their understandings of space. In this case, experiencing space, and living in the economies and societies that gaining that experience has created, has redefined the tools and language we use to describe our world and territoriality within it. It has forced us to recognize the subjectivity of our perspective because "up" is no longer different from "down," compass points are no longer the guarantees they once were, and outer space is "outer" to us only because we are somewhere else.
4. Transformations Contributing to / Caused by Communicating in a Space Age
The second and third images we may use to depict present-day spatial transformations were created by Kenneth Cox, Stephen G. Eick, and Taosong He (1996). They illustrate communications in cyberspace and the ethos we are constructing with the technology of the several electronic world wide webs.
Internet Traffic, February 1993
(Click to enlarge)
Much praise is bestowed on this technology for how it is transforming commerce, research, communication, and everyday living. No one can dispute the claims. We may go further by classifying internet resources are a "defining technology" whose impact is comparable to and shared with that Jay David Bolter attributes to computer technology: one that affects a culture well beyond the capacity of the technology itself.
A defining technology develops links, metaphorical or otherwise, with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model, or symbol. A defining technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining and exemplifying them in new ways to larger audiences' (Bolter 1984: 11).
Visualized internet traffic is a clear model and symbol of societies' social practices and experienced spatialities. But the claim for the internet and world wide web can be extended further. Not only does the technology "bring new ideas into focus," as Bolter's definition stipulates, it creates a "space of flows" that stands over against a historically rooted "space of places" (Castells 1996: 376-428), and it displaces the industrial age's defining mode of production with today's mode of information (Poster 1990). Following these leads, I contend that the cluster of practices and technologies we know as the Net are forcing a new social epistemology, i.e., the "mental equipment" (Ruggie 1993: 157) that is needed for understanding spatiality today. I could go further to note that the electronic technology did not begin the process and possibly is not the best metaphor or cultural symbol. If Renaissance art and the invention of single point perspective signals and symbolizes a breakthrough whose consequences are felt from artists' paintings to the bundling of territorial space (Edgerton 1975; Ruggie 1993: 159), then the symbolic equivalent of the age of unbundling is holography. This technology, following on two-dimensional cubism, shattered single point perspective. In a hologram, any viewer within the image's parallax can see an entire image in three dimensional splendor. As Renaissance painting allowed societies to focus on spatiality from a sovereign's perspective thereby nurturing territorial rule and boundaries, so holography breaks that monopoly and distributes its rewards evenly among all who can or care to observe. Spatial boundaries likewise dissolve.
These shifts make today's spatial subtexts especially powerful and important for understanding history and society -- past, present and future. The mutations affect the pasts we construct as well as the way we construct the past. Information and spatiality and visualization enter a new kind of organic synthesis. Society becomes visual informational space.
In spite of the positive characteristics of internet culture such as its decentralizing capability, boundary-transcending, and instantaneous transmitting, it has another spatial side implied above. As a dominant mode of information, it has an exceptional ability to affect knowledge and power, an ability that is currently hegemonic and unevenly distributed. Terry Harpold's description of the globe image captures this dilemma:
Shown here is one frame of an animation of Internet traffic between fifty countries via the NFSNET/ANSnet backbone during a two-hour period of the week of February 1-7, 1993. Each country with active nodes on the network is represented by a box-shaped glyph, positioned at the location of the country's capital, and scaled and colored to encode the total packet count for all links emanating from the country. The arcs between the countries indicate the flow of network traffic, with the higher and redder arcs indicating the larger flows. One of the most striking traits of this image is its dissymmetry: the greater part of the arcs and glyphs are traced on the upper-left field (roughly North and West), in relation to the equator and Greenwich meridian). Pinning the origins of the arcs to the capitals of countries under represents the actual geographical distribution of traffic, but it's clear that, apart from a few arcs converging in Pretoria, there is nothing much going in or coming out of Africa in early 1993 (Harpold 1999: para. 5).
Internet Traffic, 2-D Projection
(Click to enlarge)
The second arc map of the same traffic portrays the disparities even more clearly. Using a similar color-coding scheme applied to a 2D projection viewed on a variable vertical axis, the image demonstrates visually and vividly that anyone interested in society cannot ignore spatiality. History alone cannot account for or explain the conditions in the world.
Again the biases of the map must be remembered. The map depicts traffic in 1993 not today when the patterns are surely different (compare: http://www.mids.org/mmq/204/.htmldir/af.i.gr.c.html). In 1997, for example, measured on a per capita basis, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Antarctica -- in that order -- had the most internet host sites, while in the U. S., New Mexico was the most wired state (thanks to Los Alamos) with Washington, D. C., and Utah ranking second and third (Matrix Map Quarterly quoted by Starrs 1997: 201-202)..
Secondly, because arcs in the illustration emanate only from capital cities, the map reifies internal national uniformity and does not report uneven distributions that exist within those boundaries. And we cannot know whence the internet capacity and traffic emanate, especially in the lower and weaker spectra. It could be entirely from government offices or headquarters of international conglomerates and therefore not be truly representative of citizens' access to internet resources.
At the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, the map clearly exposes absences that existed in 1993. The outlines of national boundaries, for example in Central America, Africa, and portions of Eurasia, are stark illustrations of continuing disparities in resources. In fact, they implicitly demonstrate not only their own failing, but also the failure of nation-states and their underlying concepts and their efforts to distribute resources adequately in a global environment. Here modernist and postmodernist meliorist universalist aspirations fail together. The image portrays graphically that national boundaries, like internet traffic patterns, can be viewed as temporary "freeze-frame" attempts to stabilize societies and measure them territorially (see, Lewis and Wigens 1992). However, when such patterns are rigidly enforced in rapidly changing social, political, and cultural environments they can prevent the healthy fluidity that enabled many premodern societies to exist and thrive. Like its predecessors, this technology and its transformed spatiality do not innately avoid or overcome the hegemony and relationship among power, knowledge, and space that excludes some and includes others.
This review confirms what we already know about spatiality. Humanities and social science scholarship today intersect and exist in a milieu that is dominated by space, reconfigurations of spatial alliances, and reevaluations of spatial texts of all kinds. Serious minds are exploring the anthropology of cyberspace (Escobar 1994), architecture of cyberspace (Benedikt 1991), sociology of cyberspace (Turkel 1995), urbanology of cyberspace (Boyer 1996), and even a cyberdiocese with its own Catholic bishop (http://www.partenia.fr/). Each testifies to redefining spatiality based on the globalized social relationships that electronic technologies now sustain.
Cyberdiocese
http://www.partenia.fr
5. Critical Spatiality:
Geography's challenge is not limited to territorial disparities, as a superficial reading of internet "maps" might infer. Internet traffic patterns are indicative of other calibrations of inequality and discriminatory biases as well: gender, race, ethnicity, age, color, culture, etc. Therefore, proponents of postmodern critical spatiality hope to discover ways of hearing disenfranchised voices and bringing them into the conversations and activities we call society.
A word of caution is in order. If the attempt to overcome triumphalism rooted in modernity is to be successful, those efforts must be wary of becoming triumphal themselves. As we will see in Soja's proposal of "thirding-as-othering" this caution must be constantly remembered. To expect that one's claims are the "last and culminating" word would put one in the vice-grip that postmodernism labors to escape.
Critical spatiality attempts to face up to social and historical disparities by consciously trying to counterbalance nineteenth and twentieth century (over)emphases on society and especially on history. Emerging within "postmodern geography" and "postmodern cartography," critical studies on space and spatiality seek to reintroduce spatiality in an ontological trialectic that includes historicality, sociality, and spatiality (Soja 1989: 131-137; 1996: 70-76; also, Harley 1989). Like a surveyor's theodolite that is missing one of its three leveling screws, omitting, ignoring, or suppressing spatiality leads to imbalanced, distorted, and continually flawed understandings and practices in the real world.
Many lenses are available for penetrating surface appearances. "Landscape," "land," "place," "home," "geographical imagination," and other related concepts are all employed. They are brought into this essay when necessary but otherwise are not reviewed for the valuable information they could provide in a fuller study (e.g., Tuan 1977; Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995).
Much of the work in critical spatiality is inspired by Foucault's concept of heterotopias (1986) and Henri Lefebvre's monumental work, Production of Space (1991). Those beginnings are being extended in the writings of others including geographer Edward W. Soja (1989; 1996). My dependence on his writings will be obvious. Before summarizing and applying his theories, however, it will be helpful to cite an example to illustrate the importance of critical spatiality.
Soja draws heavily on literature of minorities and the marginalized individuals and groups, especially the writings of critics such as Cornell West, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and bell hooks. Edward Said's studies on Orientalism and its consequences are especially important for Soja, as they are for others (compare Boyarin 1994; Gregory 1995). The writers form a chorus speaking for occluded peoples and seeking an audience for their spatial claims (Soja 1996: 106-144).
Rather than following that lead, however, but in order to illustrate how critical spatiality works, I cite a case that many in this audience will know and have a sense of its poignancy. I would prefer a Canadian example, perhaps from stories of "The True North Strong and Free" (Shields 1991: 162-206), or from Solange Denis' 1984 confrontation of Brian Mulroney on the steps of Parliament, which he surely considered to be his own turf. However, my deficiencies in Canadian history move me to choose a scene from my own national background. I refer to Mrs. Rosa Parks and the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and all that meant for the Civil Rights Movement, African-American society, and U.S. history.
Rosa Parks, Montgomery, AL, 1955
(Click to enlarge)
Mrs. Parks' simple gesture of refusing to relinquish her seat to a white male in the front of a bus on December 1, 1955 ignited the American Civil Rights Movement. Hers was an action against long-term discriminatory practices that occluded her and all other black people from a particular space, and it was a catalyst for racial change in the U.S. The front of the bus was of course physically the front of a bus. It was a material space (Soja's Firstspace below). And the bus had been designed in such a way that the front was probably preferred over the rear because of comfort, ability to see, ease of access, etc. (Soja's Secondspace).
But these were not the issues that gave the front seats their meaning and significance. Culture, if you will, U.S. history, slavery, racial discrimination, and the bus being in a southern city meant that Mrs. Park and all African-Americans were by practice and policy marginalized, excluded, and denied access to that space. Her rights and dignity, indeed her entire life, were spatially circumscribed and controlled in such a way that we cannot understand the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. culture, or the trauma in our society if we ignore space and its meaning on that bus. Ironically, the space was simultaneously central and peripheral. Holding it was central to both the cause and the counter-cause. Holding its center also made it marginal, off limits, and out of bounds for those who did not hold it.
Yes, history was an issue, and so was society. But it was space and contesting it with a spatial practice that changed the course of life in America's southlands. Segregated praxis was overwhelmed by integrating action. It was spatial actions not just words that began the transformations known as the Civil Rights Movement. The same must be said for the strikes, marches, and sit-ins that followed in those painful years. Clear evidence, I propose, that spatiality is constructed through social practice and that there is a spatiality beyond Firstspace and Secondspace that we will discuss below. We must understand Mrs. Parks' spatiality, and understand it critically the same way we would understand her status not just historically, but critically historically. Critical spatiality is an important part of an ontological trialectic.
I use the story as another step in understanding postmodern critical spatiality. History and society are not understood if space is omitted. When we recall the scene, we visualize it. We imagine a bus, its rows of seats, and we know the meaning of being excluded from the front. The scene is polyvalent. It is about buses and public transportation, but in other ways it has little to do with them but a great deal to do with personal identity, and certainly with access to knowledge and power as well as space.
What is important is the question that the scene raises. If a geographer or cartographer or anyone born, raised, and living in that time and place wished to portray that society, would this scene have entered the record. The answer must be "most probably not!" The persons compiling the record would undoubtedly have been the same as those deciding where Mrs. Parks could not sit. They would appeal to history and society as reasons for maintaining the status quo. The interplay of the material Firstspace and social designer's Secondspace would continue unchallenged and unscathed. To repeat, power, knowledge, and space are obviously related.
6. Postmodern Geography:
My task is not to analyze racism in the U.S. or to make political appeals on behalf of marginalized people. Rather it is to propose a hypothesis about space, and this story is meant only to illustrate. To develop the hypothesis, I draw upon postmodern scholarship, mostly from geography and cartography, before offering examples of how the transformations discussed above can aid us in understanding the past. In this effort, I introduce a number of issues that many label ontological and epistemological, themselves problematical terms and categories. I surely do not pretend to address all these problems or answer all the questions they raise.
In three studies, geographer Edward. W. Soja set forth his views on critical spatiality as it pertains to postmodern geography (Soja 1989; 1993; 1996). His arguments are cumulative. In the first, he spells out the need for restoring spatiality to the status of equal partner with historicality and sociality (1989). In a later article, he describes the stages in the development of modernity that he presumes have led to the present condition of postmodernity (1993: 117-123). His most cogent and sustained arguments for critical spatiality, however, are found in his third study entitled Thirdspace (1996). Although he follows Lefebvre's studies on spatiality closely, in his third work, he moves beyond the former's Marxism in an effort to embrace the unvoiced and disenfranchised who are persistently excluded because their spatiality is ignored.
We have already referred to an ontological trialectics of being and need not linger further except to illustrate it as Soja does
: 
Soja 1996, Ontology
It is the balance among the three aspects of being that must be stressed, not the displacing of any by the others.
The three moments of the ontological trialectic thus contain each other; they cannot successfully be understood in isolation or epistemologically privileged separately, although they are all too frequently studied and conceptualized in this way, in compartmentalized disciplines and discourses. Here again, however, their third term, Spatiality, obtains a strategic positioning to defend against any form of binary reductionism or totalization. The assertion of Spatiality opens the Historicality and Sociality of human lifeworlds to interpretations and knowledges that many of its most disciplined observers never imagined, while simultaneously maintaining the rich insights they provide for understanding the production of lived space (Soja 1996: 72).
The trialectic ontology on its own, however, does not satisfy Soja's concerns. Again following Lefebvre, he proposes "thirding-as-othering" as a means of escaping the binarisms, dialectics, and opposition that lead to a "closed logic of either/or" that capture physicalist (materialist) and mentalist (idealist) geographers in a hopelessly closed, back and forth of mutually reinforcing exchange. The endless cycle is useless. In it geographers trade the material world and representations of it as if they were object and subject when in fact they are one and the same. Openness to "a third possibility or 'moment' that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination or an 'in between' position along an all-inclusive continuum" enables one to consider other spatialities (Soja 1996: 60). To introduce social spatiality produced through social practice, a trialectic epistemology of spatiality is proposed. This is clear from the example of the Alabama bus.
Social space is not a thing but a set of relations that are produced through praxis. Lefebvre had proposed such a trialectic when he outlined distinguishable, separate fields and modes of spatial thinking that he identified as (Lefebvre 1991: 38-39; Soja 1996: 66-67):
Soja' epistemology
(Click to enlarge)
Soja substitutes his own descriptions in this trialectic of spatiality, each with its own epistemology: Firstspace (perceived space), Secondspace (conceived space), and Thirdspace (lived space).
Firstspace epistemologies tend to privilege objectivity and materiality, and to aim toward a formal science of space. The human occupance of the surface of the earth, the relations between society and nature, the architectonics and resultant geographies of the human "built environment," provide the almost naively given sources for the accumulations of (First)spatial knowledge. Spatiality thus takes on the qualities of a substantial text to be carefully read, digested, and understood in all it details. As an empirical text, Firstspace is conventionally read at two levels, one which concentrates on the accurate description of surface appearances (an indigenous mode of spatial analysis), and the other which searches for spatial explanation in primarily exogenous social, psychological, and biophysical processes (Soja 1996: 75).
This is the space that has dominated geography. It is positivist, materialist, and becomes increasingly detailed with technologies such as Global Positioning Systems and landsat imaging. It is the space of the physical world, but can also be that of social entities that geographers study. Alone, however, it is fundamentally incomplete and partial (Soja 1996: 78). The boundary separating it from secondspace is blurred.
Despite these overlappings, Secondspace epistemologies are immediately distinguishable by their explanatory concentration on conceived rather than perceived space and their implicit assumption that spatial knowledge is primarily produced through discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial workings of the mind. In its purest form, Secondspace is entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies. This does not mean that there is no material reality, no Firstspace, but rather that the knowledge of this material reality is comprehended essentially through thought, as res cognito, literally "thought things." In empowering the mind, explanation becomes more reflexive, subjective, introspective, philosophical, and individualized (Soja 1996: 78-79).
Secondspace is the domain of artists and architects who present the world of their imaginations. It encompasses the cognitive maps which, in some cases, become substitutes for "real" maps that plot Firstspace. If Secondspace images were taken seriously, Firstspace would collapse into Secondspace as the latter becomes the substitute for the former.
Soja's description of Thirdspace is not as precise or detailed as the others. Like "Thirding-as-Othering," Thirdspace is a "strategic reopening and rethinking new possibilities" that shift from epistemology to ontology, an "ontological rebalancing act [that] induces a radical skepticism toward all established epistemologies" (Soja 1996: 81). Relating Thirdspace to Lefebvre's spaces of representation, he stresses political choice and lived space as strategic locations and places of resistance.
These spaces are also vitally filled with politics and ideology, with the real and the imagined intertwined, and with capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other material spatial practices that concretize the social relations of production, reproduction, exploitation, domination, and subjection. They are the "dominated spaces," the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized, the "Third Worlds" that can be found on all scales, in the corpo-reality of the body and mind, in sexuality and subjectivity, in individual and collective identities from the most local to the most global. They are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, and emancipation (Soja 1996: 68).
They are spaces/places filled with meaning, emotion, and struggle.
Places are constructed and experienced as material ecological artifacts and intricate networks of social relations. They are the focus of the imaginary, of beliefs, longings, and desires (most particularly with respect to the psychological pull and push of the idea of "home"). They are an intense focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings, and they are a distinctive product of institutionalized social and political-economic power (Harvey 1996: 316).
Thirdspaces, i.e., the lived spaces and spaces of representation, command Soja's attention. They (or it), he insists, have been lost or suppressed and need to be restored. The dialectic joining physical space to mental conceptions of it is inadequate and foreclosing. A trialectic that brings lived space into tension with the other two is required, and Soja believes that postmodernism is doing so. This is the space that I have attributed to Rosa Parks and to those who are excluded from the world's resources such as internet access. It is the spatiality that must be examined critically the same way scholarship has examined history and society in order to understand, as best we can, what happened in the past and is happening in our world today.
7. Postmodern Cartography:
The grasp that modernist or positivist geography held on space was paralleled and shared by cartography. Because much of the literary theory that permeated geography was slower in finding inroads into cartography, the assumed linkage between reality (Firstspace) and representation (Secondspace) continued longer to dominate cartographic thinking.
Since the seventeenth century, one of the goals of map making has been "scientific accuracy." The assumption about cartographers' ability and need to make mimetic images of earthly terrains -- physical, social, or otherwise -- tied the discipline to evolutionary meliorist expectations: as science, techniques, and instrumentation improve, so cartography will become more accurate.
During the past decade and half, however, with a move toward postmodernism and deconstruction championed by the late J. B. Harley and others, alternative epistemologies rooted in social theory rather than scientific positivism are being proposed (Harley 1989). As in postmodern geography, the "task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power and its effects in all map knowledge" (Harley 1989: 2).
Postmodernism, therefore, is challenging Enlightenment assumptions by exposing other rules governing the cultural production of maps (Harley 1989: 5). Maps, like other texts, disguise social contexts and impose their own hegemonies of power and privilege. This is accomplished first by the "rule of ethnocentricity," the tendency for societies to put themselves at the center of maps, and by the "rule of social order," the tendency of cartographers to use verbal text on maps as commentary in order to convey information and impressions about classifications and measurements of social and political factors beyond the physical or human landscape (Harley 1989: 6). These practices of selection, omission, commenting to establish hierarchies, and introducing symbols make maps rhetorical. Recognizing these traits, however, need not diminish a map's "reliability." Studying its rhetoric and knowing its perspectives and objectives assists users in understanding the world that produced a map by revealing the world the map produced, and vice versa.
8. Summarizing the Thesis:
The foregoing review illustrates a current shifting in conceptions of spatiality and the need to revisit data and interpretations in order to test them against the new developments. Several key transformations have been identified. Two strike me as fundamental; others are important either in their own right or as consequences of the first two.
Combining these two factors -- social spatial theory and global spatial praxis -- is essential and is occurring. The relationship is reciprocal and therefore difficult to disentangle. Postmodern spatial theory (itself borrowed from unspatial disciplines) is confronting vast and new spatialities and spatial practices. In turn, living in the age of space(s) demands and inspires new theories ("mental equipment") for coping and sharing in a postmodern world. This is my thesis and my entreaty.
Other developments outlined in my review relate to these fundamental changes:
9. Brief Illustrations of the Thesis:
My invitation to this conference asked me to address theoretical issues pertaining to space. At the risk of over-staying my welcome, I offer several very brief applications of spatial theory to literary and historical data. Here I can do so only with strokes of the broadest of descriptive brushes.
In the first application I borrow from work on postmodernism and medieval polity. I've already taken my first epigraph from John Ruggie (1993) as well as his claim that the modernist period is a territorial "epochal threshold" (1993: 144), that new "mental equipment" is needed in order to think about territoriality (1993: 157), and that single-point perspective is important for understanding modernist territoriality (1993: 159). I am not concerned whether his or others claims are correct or widely accepted within their own discipline. I cite the analyses because of the questions they raise and the attempts they make. They are similar to issues now rampant in my own fields.
10. Postmodern Spatiality in International Relations:
Ruggie argues that "the spatial extension of the medieval system of rule was structured by a nonexclusive form or territoriality" where frontier zones rather than firm boundary lines allowed mobility lost in modernist structures (1993: 151). Legitimacies were nested and overlapping. This concept of multi-perspective institutional forms, he contends, "offers a lens through which to view other possible instances of international transformation today" (1993: 172).
A process of unbundling and rebundling modernist territoriality is sweeping the globe today. It is underway not only in Western and Eastern Europe where we watch Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the European Union, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia grope for new bundles of sovereignty. In Canada, Nunavut and Quebec issues illustrate similar processes. But the process is also at work in the ethereal space of off-shore commerce, Asian "city-states" like Hong Kong and Singapore, Israel-Palestine peace efforts, and Africa where residual tribal alliances demonstrate that they were never fully suppressed or superseded. A striking example comes from Rwanda where news stories cite the use of gacaca, a forum of adjudication before tribal elders, rather than the state's judicial system for coping with the 130,000 alleged criminals from the nation's 1994 atrocities (NYTimes 4/25/99). The example could be matched by others from hundreds of sites around the world.
In many cases, such as Ruggie proposed, the search for paradigms by-passes the modernist era in search of premodern insights and models. In any case, such quests are not restricted to the recent or immediate past. Commenting on Ruggie's position and stating his own regarding the European Union, James Anderson also links today to the medieval period and to changes in spatiality.
Whereas the medieval-to-modern transformation involved sovereignty over everything, secular and spiritual, being bundled together in territorial states, we may now be witnessing an accelerated unbundling of territoriality, with for example the growth of 'common markets' and of various transnational (or, more strictly speaking, transstate) functional regimes and political communities not delimited primarily in territorial terms...
The medieval-to-modern transformation in sovereignty and territoriality has been linked to changes in the social experience and conceptualization of space and time. It is hypothesized that a contemporary modern-to-postmodern transformation, or the emergence of 'late-modern' political forms reminiscent of medieval Europe, is associated with similarly radical changes in how we are now experiencing space-time in conditions of accelerating globalization (Anderson 1996: 134).
The geographer goes on to argue that the modernist bundling of territoriality, sovereignty, and nationalism was in fact something of a historical anomaly. "The historical uniqueness of this modern system of rule is suggested by the contrasting variety, fluidity, nonterritoriality, or nonexclusive territoriality of premodern political systems" (Anderson 1996: 141). He continues to propose what might be called a cluster of qualities of postmodern "nested sovereignties" modelled on the overlapping authorities and hierarchies of the medieval era (Anderson 1996: 147-150).
11. Postmodern Spatiality in Studies on Ancient Israel:
Does any of this apply to the remote past, B.C.E. spatiality, and the Bible and ancient Israel? Yes! The process of bundling and unbundling territoriality and the shift from scientific accuracy to social theory models can both be documented in the studies on ancient Israel. More precisely, the shift to social models is enabling biblical and ancient historians to unravel territorial bundling, unbundling, and rebundling that transpired not only in antiquity but also throughout the long history of interpretation. Representations that bundle territory are evident in the long history of biblical cartography. The shift to social theory has occurred over the past two decades in a phased movement we call "social world studies" and "constructs studies" pertaining to biblical antiquity.
12. Cartography:
While it is useful for cartographers to distinguish early cosmological from later terrestrial maps, there is a sense in which both are images of perceived human experience, whether stated theologically or geographically. To that extent, they demonstrate a society's territorial perspective and spatial subtext. What I present is hardly a representative sample (fewer than 10 examples from an archive of thousands), but I offer several images in order to illustrate.
Among the earliest images of a political world is the famous map of Babylon now found in the British Museum. The identification card with the exhibit gives a "c. 500 B.C." date, while Stevens dates it to "the seventh or sixth century B.C.," and Horowitz states that it "can be no older than the 9th century," comparing it to a Shalmaneser III inscription (858-824) (Stevens 1980: 268; Horowitz 1988: 153; see Smith 1996: 209).
The tablet witnesses to both the rules of ethnocentricity and of social order. Babylon is at the center of the map, and texts explain various portions. Here it is sufficient to observe that while the image may be classed in the cosmic category, it is an early attempt to depict territoriality in the Babylon region , including some peoples and excluding others, and to express the maker's understanding of the earth and its limits.
The long development of projections of a spherical earth has been documented (Stevens 1980). Among the attempts are the rota terrarum or orbis terrae that depict three continents. The earliest extant example of what came to be known as T-O (terra-oceanus) mapping is Isidore of Seville's seventh century diagram in De natura rerum (Stevens 1980: 272). The dual processes of ethnocentricity and social ordering continued as T-O maps proliferated. In these Christian attempts to organize and theologize space, Jerusalem stands at the center. The association of this template with the stories of Noah's family, especially the Table of Nations in Genesis 49, and the reuse of Genesis in the second century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees is well-known.
We will return to these images below, but here we can note that attempts to interpret these maps literally with the positioning of the families of Noah's three sons each allotted a distinct portion not only imposes later historical criticism on ancient spatiality, it also confuses the spatialities Lefebvre and Soja seek to disentangle.
The mappae mundi such as the famous World Map of Richard of Haldingham in Hereford Cathedral is something of a zenith in cosmographical-theological territoriality. There the rules of ethnocentricity and social ordering overwhelm the viewer, demonstrating convincingly the almighty power and presence of the Christian deity. All the known earth is within divine grasp and control.
Ptolemy's Map
(Click to enlarge)
Ptolemy of Alexandria (date) is credited with shifting humans' gaze from the heavens more directly toward the earth and attempting to understand and plot physical geographical space in an organized mathematical way. Civilization suffered more than a millennium of cartographic amnesia while his second century advances lay dormant in the West only to be brought to light in fifteenth century Florence. From then onward, accompanied by advances in exploration, mapping became increasingly scientific and presumably accurate, leading this specialty in the direction of scientific accuracy along with the rest of cartography.
Although cursory and biased, this summary points out the prominence of religious perspective in the history of Western cartography. The tendency to blend spatiality with religious belief is evident, as is the fact that higher degrees of scientific accuracy in the modernist world do not barricade mapping against confusions caused by religious beliefs. As a consequence, and because social theory is ignored, greater sophistication in map making only enables those who ignore critical spatiality to augment their hegemony over knowledge, power, and space, believing their discovery of boundary lines charted as Secondspace are guided by history and Firstspace rather than religious tradition.
We can see this failure at work in Philip Alexander's mapping of Noah's family from the second century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees 8-9 using a later T-O template (Alexander 1982; 1992). Alexander supposes a drawing, i.e., a map, of the textual division of the earth among Noah's descendants has been lost from the manuscript tradition but that an original drawing upon the Ionian world map tradition and the Hebrew Bible had been included (1982: 197). He substitutes his own T-O drawing and claims,
If what we have argued above is correct, then the world map represents in an unusually concrete form the harmonization of the Bible and "science": the author of Jubilees interpreted the Bible in light of non-Jewish "scientific" knowledge of his day" (1982: 210).
Apparently caught in an impulse for scientific accuracy, Alexander collapses the cartographic tradition by combining earlier verbal images with later map forms. In a later article he moves closer to the social theory that might have saved him.
...[the author used] the principle of genealogy (derived from family and tribal history) to organize certain geographical data, viz., the nations of the world known to him. He arranges them in families, relates them in terms of descent from common ancestors, or from each other, and, by tracing them back to Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, integrates them into the narrative of sacred history (Alexander 1992: 980).
Here is a case where awareness of critical spatiality would assist and guide a scholar in a different direction. His later description casts the Jubilees material in terms of genealogy and segmentation. He comes close to grasping the fluidity that characterized ancient society, but does not seem to catch either the social or spatial implications of his own remarks.
Ralph W. Bauer's Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography (1995) resists scientific accuracy models and exhibits appreciation of social theory. His study corroborates Anderson's claims for fluidity and nonexclusive territoriality in Medieval society.
Brauer documents a number of maps that do not contain clear boundary markers or lines separating territories. In his view of Muslim geography, "border zones" existed where boundary lines did not. These were areas where the sovereignty of neighboring powers competed and overlapped at the outer reaches of the sovereigns' domains. His illustrations (Brauer, 1995: 29) show conical lines that overlap to illustrate that power diminishes in proportion to the distance from the power center (Figures 4 a-b). On the margins, neighboring powers compete and/or share "control." The maps represent the political reality on the ground.
It was demonstrated that in fact medieval Arabo-Islamic geographers, ... if they admitted the existences of political boundaries at all, did not conceive of the margins of adjoining individual states as sharp borderlines....geographers described all such borders in terms implying boundary zones of significant depth surrounding a core area of any given political entity within which its capital was located. Transition zones associated with external frontiers were shown to be occupied by a mixed border population differing in its composition from that of the core areas of these states (Brauer, 1995: 65).
A central polity's power diminished in proportion to a region's distance from the center, and the maps reflect this. Brauer insists, as well, that the geographical concept of transition zone was widely shared by the people of the time and was not restricted to the cartographers. Geographers between 820 and 1320 A.D., nevertheless, did not seem to have a concept of area, a lack that Brauer credits to the breakdown of communication between these specialists and Arabo-Islamic mathematicians of the day who were already using area as an abstract concept (Brauer, 1995: 67). From this he poses a query:
With these data we concluded that, in accordance with Ibn Khaldun's dictum, medieval Muslim states were indeed conceived of as being surrounded on all sides by boundary zones and hence lacked the sharply defined territory that would require border lines. Clearly, one could conclude that such states cannot have been conceived of as territorial states by the people of the time (Brauer, 1995: 67).
Although he does not develop his insight, Brauer strongly implies a linkage between boundary lines and state- or nationhood. In other words, as many others have argued, boundary lines are constitutive parts of nations, states, and empires, but are lacking in less centralized political structures. Boundaries are associated with a particular kind of knowledge, power, and spatiality so that in non-state environments spatiality bears a different meaning.
13. Social World and Constructs Studies:
These interpretations are borne out in studies on ancient Israel as well. There social world and constructs studies, as they are called, have introduced comparative sociological theory and data in order to illumine antiquity. Among the many advances during the past two decades, the most significant may be the realization that many of the stories and eras included in so-called biblical history arose from and reflect segmented social systems. Monarchical structures and ideologies certainly played a role later and left their mark on later formations of the traditions, but at best monarchical institutions existed for only a few centuries before they were ultimately and finally lost. In any case, today there is a decided tendency to date the texts centuries later than older forms of historical criticism had argued. The dates are not central to our discussion except in so far as they reaffirm the traditions long "premonarchic," "non-monarchic," or simply "segmentary" existence before centralized polities began to impose their centralizing territorialities and spatialities on them. Therefore, the social episteme that gave the traditions their shape and meaning was a segmented tribal ethos. However, rather than viewing the traditions in terms of "before-and-after" centralization, as if their embedded spatiality changed either immediately or totally under centralizers' influence, we may presume that the formative spatialities endured in the traditions and were only partially suppressed by the later spatialities of centralized polities. The medieval examples cited above confirm that this was the case in at least some of the region's cultures.
To say that a society operates as a segmented system is, according to Ernest Geller (1973: 4), to say two things. First, social order is maintained through balanced opposition instead of being enforced from above by a monopoly of force. Second, that units within the system -- families, tribes, moieties, etc. -- are apt to describe themselves by using kinship and/or territorial terminology. This description is strikingly simple, but when examined in the light of comparative ethnology, is also remarkably accurate. This is how segmented societies understand themselves, and this is how they operate. Fluidity abounds as social units' allegiances and conditions on the ground change with every shift in power or perceptions of power.
14. Spatiality of Segmented Societies:
In spite of abundant ethnography regarding segmented societies, comparatively little focuses on concepts of spatiality. However, one of the most widely quoted statements on tribal space -- in spite of its critics -- is geographer Robert Sack's study of human territoriality (1986).
Sack notes that in band and tribal societies "[f]amily, kin, and ritualized friendships provide the complex channel of reciprocity through which labor, resources, and products flow to equalize discrepancies and to share in times of emergencies" (Sack 1986: 57). Because of the organic linkage between peoples and their territories, the balanced opposition in segmentary antiquity is not between geometrically defined or delineated geographical spaces. It is between peoples and, speaking geographically, between territorialities they occupy because of the people there. Those can be places, thirdspaces, and lived spaces as outlined above. Territoriality is "the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area" (Sack, 1986: 19). The effort to exclude and control means, of course, that there are some who are included and other who are not. Hence, Sack can claim, "Territories are socially constructed forms of spatial relations and their effects depend on who is controlling whom and for what purposes" (Sack 1986: 216).
This description of a redistributive economy in segmented societies draws attention to a perception of spatiality -- in his terms, territoriality -- among such peoples. Classification by geographical area is unnecessary. People do not determine who is a member of their group and who is not by referring to territoriality. Instead, they reverse the priorities. They and territory are identified by membership in a group. By this Sack insists that members of segmentary societies perceive themselves are networks of alliances (i.e, reciprocal exchange groups) and not residents or custodians of territory. This is a different spatiality from that of peoples who see themselves as members of territories and states.
15. Applications to Biblical Examples:
Two sections of the Hebrew Bible have received disproportionate attention. Over the past forty years, the so-called Settlement stories in the books of Joshua and Judges have been mined and excavated for their every nuance and trace of historical information. Throughout a longer history, as we have hinted in discussions of cartography, Genesis, especially the Table of Nations in Genesis 49, has been central. We have already noted its place in the Book of Jubilees and in the T-O mapping tradition.
We cannot delve deeply into either text-cluster or the debates swirling around them, but in light of the theories and turnings toward them outlined in earlier portions of this essay, we can point toward several areas where further study should be beneficial.
In response to current intense and sometimes bitter arguments about the origins of Israel, Peter Machinist recently surveyed most of the passages that others examine when for or against settlement from outside Canaan. Without explicitly taking sides in the internal peasants' revolt versus the external invasion debates, he concluded,
In sum, the biblical story tradition of Israel entering as outsiders to take over Palestine should not be dismissed historically, despite the buffeting it has taken in the wake of recent study of Israelite origins....The pervasiveness of this tradition in the Hebrew Bible, and the multiple historical contexts in which it seems to occur there, suggest a protean adaptability to the problems and crises that ancient Israel had to face. Particularly crucial in this regard, as we may now see, was the sense of marginality and contingency inherent in the tradition ....This explanatory power of our story tradition, it may be added, did not cease with the end of the biblical period. As the Passover Haggadah makes clear, Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land; the desire is only that it should stay there and live an exemplary and prosperous life (Machinist 1994: 54; emphasis added).
Machinist's attempt to read the tradition faithfully can be applauded for its caution and thoroughness. However, when the same stories are reread not only in toto, as he has done, but also in light of critical spatiality, a different conclusion might be reached. The stories' historicity may or may not be in their content. They may or may not describe an external Firstspace. Leaving that issue aside for the sake of argument, they do (accurately and historically?) reflect the aspirations of marginalized social units. Taking Machinist at his word, these are stories of marginalized peoples who lived in the constant contingency of a segmentary society where alliances shifted quickly, often, and sometimes capriciously, and a society in which they do not hold the greater power. When their spatiality is allowed into the equation with historicality and sociality, the spatiality that is claimed and whose recognition is desired is the territoriality of a segmented society. It is "people space" not bordered territories. It is Thirdspace, the lived space of outsider peoples.
Moving from the settlement scenes to the Table of Nations in Genesis 49, a decided shift has occurred. (Within the religious tradition, I understand the move to be from earlier to later, i.e., that the social world of the settlement stories is earlier than that of the Table even though the order in which they are presented in the tradition is the reverse). A segmented tribal episteme survives, but the claim for marginality has been transformed into a presumption of centrality. The Noah figure (and the Israel he represents) is the central figure, the political constant and authority in a divine plan to encompass the world. The challenge, therefore, is to map and rank known peoples in their respective positions in a hierarchy of power, knowledge, and spatiality. We do not really know whether the authors thought they were describing what we have called Firstspace, Secondspace, or Thirdspace because we don't know precisely what they were writing against. Surely, the traditionalists thought themselves to be central and powerful, or wanted to be, but their claims may have arisen defensively from "the sense of marginality and contingency inherent in the tradition." If so, it would not be stretching the evidence to suggest that the Table of Nations, its reenactment in the Book of Jubilees, and its reuse in the cartographic tradition suggest that we should begin investigations to determine whether religious spatiality generally, and not just in specific instances, can be identified as Thirdspace.
I conclude that postermodern space is upon us. It is affecting our understanding of premodern space. We may learn from it, and we will live with it in our homes, offices, and institutions. It will be with us until post-post-modern space teaches us otherwise. And that process has begun.
Peter Lewis Campus, CWRU,
Frank O. Gehry, Architect
to be completed 2001
(Click to enlarge)
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