Spatiality

Robert Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136181870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the 'spatial turn' presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history.

Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing:

• An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization
• Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson
• Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of 'space'.

1 THE SPATIAL TURN

DOI: 10.4324/9780203082881-2

In a speech given in 1967, the French philosopher Michel Foucault made the following observation, and, in the decades that have followed, more and more critics have come to agree that our own historical moment is somehow the “epoch of space.” As Foucault announced,

[t]he 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 the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

(Foucault 1986: 22)

Although it would be difficult, and misleading, to identify a particular date or moment when this occurred, a recognizablespatial turn, in literary and cultural studies (if not the arts and sciences more generally) has taken place. One cannot help noticing an increasingly spatial or geographical vocabulary in critical texts, with various forms of mapping or cartography being used to survey literary terrains, to plot narrative trajectories, to locate and explore sites, and to project imaginary coordinates. A great many literary studies and academic conferences have been devoted to matters of space, place, and mapping, and the spatial or geographical bases of cultural productions have, in recent years, received renewed and forceful critical attention.

A number of factors have contributed to this spatial turn. The French literary critic Bertrand Westphal has suggested that the cataclysmic restructuring of societies during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Second World War led to the decline in the obsession with time, not to mention the abandonment of the image of history as a progressive movement towards ever greater freedom and enlightenment. He has argued that “[t]he concept of temporality that had dominated the prewar period had lost much of its legitimacy,” and “the weakening of traditional historicity, alongside the decoupling of time and progress, has made possible the valorizing rereading of space” (Westphal 2011: 14, 25). Critical theorists, historians, philosophers, and geographers certainly would now hesitate to proclaim much faith in the universal progress of history in the wake of such destruction, and a changing view of temporal movement may have opened the way to those who demanded that greater attention be paid to spatial concerns. Moreover, the postwar era called for a serious rethinking of what had come before, and a number of critics now viewed the pronouncements of the past with renewed scepticism. For example, the social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer examined what they identified as the “dialectic of Enlightenment,” whereby the most highly valued ideals of the Age of Reason could be shown to have disastrous and barbaric effects (Adorno and Horkheimer 1987). The Marxist geographer Edward Soja points out that the “despatializing his-toricism” of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century “occluded, devalued, and de-politicized space” (1989: 4), which effectively meant that the dominant, time-focused discourse of the prewar era served to mask the underlying spatial realities. After the two world wars, these spaces reasserted themselves in critical consciousness.

If the metaphor of time as a smoothly flowing river and the evolutionary theory of history as progressively moving from barbarism towards civilization could not be maintained in the aftermath of concentration camps and atomic bombs, other real historical forces also helped shape the heightened attention to space in the postwar era. Certainly the massive movements of populations—exiles, emigres, refugees, soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and explorers—disclosed a hitherto unthinkable level of mobility in the world, and such movement emphasized geographical difference; that is, one’s place, could not simply be taken for granted any longer. The traveller, whether forced into exile or willingly engaged in tourism, cannot help but be more aware of the distinctiveness of a given place, and of the remarkable differences between places. The displaced person is understandably more attuned to matters of place, or, as J.R.R. Tolkien once put it in a letter to his son, who was then serving in the Royal Air Force overseas during the Second World War, “I imagine that a fish out of water is the only fish that has an inkling of water” (see Carpenter 2000: 64). This may also be why so many of the twentieth century's great writers (Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, to name but a few) were sometimes strangers to the lands and languages in which they wrote. Referring to such writers, the cosmopolitan critic George Steiner has pointed out that “[i]t seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language” (1976: 11). Displacement, perhaps more than a homely rootedness in place, underscores the critical importance of spatial relations in our attempts to interpret, and change, the world.

At the same time, the geopolitical organization and disruptions in the postwar era called attention to the distinctively political essence of geography, as the forces of decolonization, as well as those of neocolonization, made clear that the spaces of the map were not uncontested. The very names by which we knew places such as Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, Burma or Myanmar, were revealed to be matters of immense ideological conflict, and the thoroughgoing intertwinement of history and geography in such contested regions brought home to many the vast inaccuracies and omissions caused by the previous neglect of spatiality or spatial relations in earlier scholarship and theory. For example, the French historian Fernand Braudel's massive study entitled The Mediterranean, employed what he called “geohistory” to emphasize the “history of man in his relationship to his environment” (1972: 20), and the reassertion of space as a concern in the human sciences has transformed our understanding of social history and criticism. Similarly, greater attention has been paid to spatial organization within, societies, including the purported divisions between rural and urban, and this has emphasized the degree to which geography conditions even the most mundane aspects of everyday life. The rapid industrialization of the so-called Third World, combined with, and, of course, closely related to, the apparent de-industrialization of the First World, has transformed both the geographical spaces and the ways in which such spaces are understood. The various phenomena and effects often brought together under the label globalization, have contributed mightily to the spatial confusion, which makes the clarifying overview afforded by mapping and other spatial practices all the more desirable.

Added to this increased mobility and geographic anxiety were revolutionary technological advances that served to suppress distance while also augmenting one's sense of place or of displacement. What the railways, the steam engine, and the telegraph did to nineteenth-century space and time, air travel, telephones, television, and eventually space travel and orbiting satellites, computers and the Internet did to spatiotemporal perception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All of this contributes both to the consciousness of one's place (i.e. one's sense of situatedness in space, as well as of spatial divisions, partitions, and borders) and to the almost unconscious overcoming of place via supersonic travel, synchronic telephone communication, or World Wide Web connectivity around the globe. The mass media's apparent saturation of society, as well as the permeation of almost every nook and cranny of the world by market forces or capitalism, has enhanced what the British geographer David Harvey views as the “time—space compression” in modern and postmodern societies, in which the processes of capitalism “so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (1990: 240). By the end of the millennium, it was possible to sense all the more strongly the truth of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s poetic observation that, with the constant revolutionizing of social conditions, “All that is solid melts into air” (1998: 54).

Facing such transformations in the so-called “real” world, artists and thinkers have responded in various ways, but one of the most significant and most recent controversial developments is the emergence ofpostmodernism. Postmodernism has been viewed as an aesthetic movement in art, architecture, and literature, and it has also been characterized as a historical period, a new way of thinking, or, in the American critic Fredric Jameson's words, a “cultural dominant” (1991: 4). Sometimes conflated with postmodernism, perhaps owing to the influence of Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition, (1984), is poststructuralism, a predominantly French philosophical movement which, continuing a tradition of anti-foundationalism and radical scepticism associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900) in the late nineteenth century, called into question not only those “truths” that had formerly been considered unassailable, but also the very means of arriving at truth at all: including the methods of philosophy, history, science, and geography. Just as philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze have provided innovative critiques of the traditional ways of understanding ourselves and our world, so geographers like Harvey, Soja, and J.B. Harley took their arguments seriously, reimagining their own fields and their ways of looking at society even as they felt empowered to consider more carefully the spatial dimensions of critical social theory. Postmodernism allied to poststructuralism, along with other related discourses, have together been instrumental in effecting this spatial turn. As the British cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove has put it,

A widely acknowledged "spatial turn” across arts and sciences corresponds to post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanations and about single-voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge.

(Cosgrove 1999: 7)

Faced with what Jameson has called “that new spatiality implicit in the postmodern” (1991: 418), literary scholars, social theorists, and cultural critics have given pride of place to spatiality in their researches.

Of course, the experience of space and place, the desire or need for mapping, and the self-conscious reflection on ways and means of achieving a more liveable sense of place, or a better map, are nothing new in human history. To the extent that human beings are “social animals”—Aristotle’s zoon politikon, — they are also spatial, animals, as well as animals that build things and tell stories. Yet the transformations of social space, which like history itself is a human endeavour but which is not made under circumstances directly chosen by its “makers” (see Marx 1963: 15), affect the ways in which humans operate in space, “use” space, and make sense of their various spatial and social relations. This changing role of spatiality in human history has real consequences for theory and practice. The spatial turn in modern and postmodern literary theory and criticism is an acknowledgement of the degree to which matters of space, place, and mapping had been under-represented in the critical literature of the past. The writers, critics and theorists whose work has directly or indirectly engaged with such matters in recent years attempt not only to remedy this former oversight, but to propose novel ways of seeing a world in which many of the former certainties have become, at the very least, uncertain. The spatial turn is thus a turn towards the world itself, towards an understanding of our lives as situated in a mobile array of social and spatial relations that, in one way or another, need to be mapped.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Although recent decades have witnessed a “reassertion of space in critical social theory” (Soja 1989), as well as a “spatial turn” in literary and cultural studies, it should not be forgotten that space has a much more extensive history. In a rather obvious sense, space has always existed, but I am interested in how literary cartography emerges and functions to make sense of the world in novel ways. In the next chapter, I will discuss in more detail the ways in which ancient and modern literature offered literary cartographies of the world system as their authors imagined it. Here I will examine one radical alteration in the way that space was perceived, before describing some of the developments in spatiotemporal theory that led up to the “spatial turn” in twentieth-century literary and cultural studies. This spatial turn is best understood as a re-emergence of spatiality in critical thought, for the history of perceptions of space and time from the early modern era to the present reveals a waxing and waning of spatial pre-eminence. It will help, therefore, to put things into some sort of historical perspective.

In the Renaissance or early modern period, several fundamental changes to the way the world was imagined occurred, and these had lasting consequences which would come to determine our own views in the twenty-first century. Among the most radical, perhaps deceptively so, was the development of linear perspective, which not only enabled more “accurate” pictorial representations in the visual arts but also occasioned a wholesale re-imagining of space and of human spatial relations. This is a crucial moment in the history of spaces. To the common-sense point of view, the idea that space and its perception even has, a history might seem eccentric. After all, surely human beings equipped with eyes, as well as the other sensory organs, have always had the physical means to experience space and place in more-or-less the same way? Yet the historical record discloses that people of different cultures and at different times have indeed perceived space differently, and the developments of new “ways of seeing,” to use the English art critic John Berger's phrase, radically alter our experience of space and place.

An interesting case in point can be found precisely in the development of linear perspective in art, architecture, and more generally the representation of reality itself. The American scholar Leonard Goldstein has argued persuasively that the development of linear perspective between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries is “a mode of representation specific to capitalism at a particular stage of its development” (1988: 135). As Goldstein sees it, space when ascertained according to linear perspective has three key aspects: (1) space is continuous, isotropic, and homogenous; (2) space is quantifiable; and (3) space is perceived from the point of view of a single, central observer. Goldstein goes on to argue that the emergence of early capitalist forms of private property and commodity productions entailed, or perhaps required, new ways of seeing space (1988: 20—21). Space could now be measured, divided, quantified, bought and sold, and above all controlled by a particular individual who, in theory, could be the sovereign ruler of all he surveyed. The relatively sudden shift from the more two-dimensional iconographic images of the Middle Ages and the deeper, more geometric threedimensional drawings of the Italian Renaissance reflected radical revisions to the customary ways of interpreting the world. In other words, it is not that the physical world or human binocular vision had changed, but that the newly forged social relations in the early modern period called for new ways of seeing.

But the new point of view, which includes linear perspective and mechanism as its method of investigation, is superior [to the earlier, iconographic mode] since it gives people a greater control over their environment, both physical and social, than previous interpretations of the world. The new, to put it a little differently, is the response to major changes in the social structure for which the old solutions are no longer adequate.

(1988: 151)

As Goldstein concludes, “[l]inear perspective, then, is an interpretation of the world” (1988: 151). Moreover, by positioning the viewer at a particular point in space, linear perspective also makes possible a new image of the individual. Although this is not quite the same as the bourgeois “individualism” that appears at a later stage of modernity, this is clearly the beginning of a process that will culminate in the identification of the individual subject as the locus and source of meaning.

The art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton has also argued that the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance was closely related to material changes in the social sphere. Edgerton points out that the discovery of the New World disrupted the older, medieval view of space, which had drawn from an Aristotelian view of spaces as finite and discontinuous. “Finally, in the fifteenth century, there emerged mathematically ordered ‘systematic space,' infinite, homogeneous, and isotropic, making possible the advent of linear perspective” (1975: 159). Edgerton goes on to note that the development of linear perspective in art, and especially in science or technology, went hand in hand with another technological breakthrough, the printing press:

It should not be overlooked that almost coincidental to the appearance and acceptance of linear perspective came Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type. Together these two ide...