The Spatial Turn

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Barney Warf, Santa Arias, Barney Warf, Santa Arias

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135972660
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences physiques
• Categoría: Géographie

Across the disciplines, the study of space has undergone a profound and sustained transformation. Space, place, mapping, and geographical imaginations have become commonplace topics in a variety of analytical fields in part because globalization has accentuated the significance of location. While this transformation has led to a renaissance in human geography, it also has manifested itself in the humanities and other social sciences. The purpose of this book is not to announce that space is significant, which by now is well known, but to explore how space is analyzed by a variety of disciplines, to compare and contrast these approaches, identify commonalities, and explore how and why differences appear.

The volume includes works by 13 scholars from a variety of geographical regions and disciplines. The chapters combine up-to-date literature reviews concerning the role of space in each discipline and several offer original empirical analyses. Some chapters are concerned with Geography while others explore the role of space in contemporary Anthropology, Sociology, Religion, Political Science, Film, and Cultural Studies. The introduction surveys the development of the spatial turn across the fields under consideration.

Despite frequent reference to the spatial turn, this is the first volume to explicitly address how theory and practice concerning space, is used in a variety of fields from diverse conceptual perspectives. This book will appeal to everyone conducting conceptual and theoretical research on space, not simply in Geography, but in related fields as well.

1
Introduction: the reinsertion of space into the social sciences and humanities

Barney Warf and Santa Arias

The geographical imagination is far too pervasive and important a fact of intellectual life to be left alone to geographers.

(Harvey 1995:161)

Human geography over the last two decades has undergone a profound conceptual and methodological renaissance that has transformed it into one of the most dynamic, innovative and influential of the social sciences. The discipline, which long suffered from a negative popular reputation as a trivial, purely empirical field with little analytical substance, has moved decisively from being an importer of ideas from other fields to an exporter, and geographers are increasingly being read by scholars in the humanities and other social sciences. As a result of the rebirth in scholarship in geography, other disciplines have increasingly come to regard space as an important dimension to their own areas of inquiry. Cosgrove (1999:7), for example, argues that “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.” Recent works in the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and art history have become increasingly spatial in their orientation. From various perspectives, they assert that space is a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena. In some ways, this transformation is expressed in simple semantic terms, i.e., the literal and metaphorical use and assumptions of “space,” “place,” and “mapping” to denote a geographic dimension as an essential aspect of the production of culture. In other ways, however, the spatial turn is much more substantive, involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction. Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen.

This volume charts this rise in spatial scholarship across several disciplines. We seek to explore how geographers have influenced other fields of scholarship and the many forms in which geography has motivated scholars to think spatially. With space and place at the center of the analytical agenda, geographical thought has arguably played a major role in helping to facilitate interdisciplinary inquiry that offers a richer, more contextualized understanding of human experience, social relations and the production of culture. Our goal in bringing together these authors and essays is to provide the reader with a sense of how space has entered into a variety of domains of knowledge. To be sure, as different disciplines have taken up geography in their own way they bring to bear their respective assumptions, languages, paradigms, applications, and examples about the meaning of the spatial. Thus, as the spatial turn has unfolded across the social sciences and humanities, the term has come to embrace an ever-larger set of uses and implications. But, conversely, space can serve as a window into different disciplines, a means of shedding light on what separates and what unites them. Because so many lines of thought converge on the topic of spatiality, space is a vehicle for examining what it means to be interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, to cross the borders and divides that have organized the academic division of labor, to reveal the cultures that pervade different fields of knowledge, and to bring these contrasting lines of thought into a productive engagement with one another.

To appreciate the spatial turn, it is incumbent to know something about the changing role of space in the social sciences and humanities. The following section briefly charts this complex issue, noting the rise of historicism under modern capitalism and its decline under postmodernism. Next, the chapter asks why is it that space should be so important to understanding the contemporary world, and offers insights gleaned from analyses of globalization, cyberspace, changes in identity and subjectivity, and environmental issues. Finally, the chapter concludes by presenting a brief synopsis of each chapter.

The fall and rise of spatiality

In the nineteenth century, space became steadily subordinated to time in modern consciousness, a phenomenon that reflected the enormous time-space compression of the industrial revolution; intellectually, this phenomenon was manifested through the lens of historicism, a despatialized consciousness in which geography figured weakly or not at all, or, as Soja (1993:140) defines it, as “an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralises the geographical or spatial imagination.” Typically, historicist thought linearized time and marginalized space by positing the existence of temporal “stages” of development, a view that portrayed the past as the progressive, inexorable ascent from savagery to civilization, simplicity to complexity, primitiveness to civilization, and darkness to light. a trend made most explicit in Whiggish accounts of history. Likewise, historicists such as Hegel, Marx, and Toynbee offered sweeping teleological accounts that paid little attention to space, human consciousness, or the contingency of social life. In the same vein, Social Darwinism usurped the original theory of evolution as contingent and open-ended, substituting it with a simplistic, racist, linear view of phyletic gradualism such as Spencer’s “survival of the fittest.” Orientalist thought structured the Western geographical imagination such that distance from Europe became equated with increasingly more primitive stages of development, conflating continents with races in terms that were hierarchically organized in terms of their degree of alleged degree of temporal progress. In this way did historicism eclipse space in the service of imperial thought: beyond Europe was before Europe (McGrane 1983:94), a theme articulated over and over again in modernization theory and its current neoliberal variants. All of these maneuvers robbed the understanding of social change of any sense of contingency, framing the past as a train of events leading inevitably to the present.

The reassertion of space into modern consciousness was a long, slow, and painful undertaking. In the 1920s, the Chicago School of sociologists and geographers attempted to inject space into urban analysis, a project that was poignant in its sensitivity to the experience of recent immigrants and the textures of ethnic neighborhoods and simultaneously doomed by its simplistic understanding of class, gender, power, and the world system. In the tumultuous 1960s, as Soja notes in his chapter, the seminal works of Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) and Michel Foucault (1972/1980) were critical in suggesting that the organization of space was central to the structure and functioning of capitalism as a coherent whole. Moreover, Lefebvre maintained that space must be understood not simply as a concrete, material object, but also as an ideological, lived, and subjective one.

It was the injection of social theory – specifically Marxism, initially via the works of David Harvey (1973, 1982, 1985, 1989, 1990, 2006) – that formed the centerpiece for a critical re-evaluation of space and spatiality in social thought. Social theory repositioned the understanding of space from given to produced, calling attention to its role in the construction and transformation of social life and its deeply power-laden nature. Freed from the frozen geometries of spatial analysis, the plasticity of space rose to the fore, its contingent creation as a central moment in the reproduction of social life. Harvey’s spatialization of Marxism, and concurrent Marxification of space, centered on the deep structure of commodity production and the conversion of commodities into money, generating a model of production and the labor process that shed light on its transformation of time and space. Landscapes, in this reading, reflected the logic of commodity production at any given historical moment, constituting a “spatial fix” or window of stability that enabled the process of commodity production to unfold unproblematically, at least for a fixed window of time. Eventually, however, capitalists as a whole are compelled to speed up the turnover time of capital, which is “the time of production together with the time of circulation of exchange” (Harvey 1989:229). The resulting need to “annihilate space by time” – to substitute one spatial fix with another – is thus fundamental to the operation and survival of capitalism, i.e., its ability to reproduce itself at ever expanded spatial scales and to accelerate temporal rhythms of capital accumulation. In this way, capitalism exhibits a fundamental contradiction between fixity – the need to stabilize production temporarily in order to realize surplus value – and motion, the need to annihilate old geographies in an act of creative destruction and replace them with new, more efficient landscapes amenable to more recent systems of production. Capitalists must negotiate (often unsuccessfully) the knife-edge between using up old spaces and creating new ones.

This line of thought was picked up and advanced by Ed Soja (1989, 1996, 2000), whose works repeatedly and emphatically insisted that the spatial could not be subordinated to time or the social. Thus, he maintains that social theory should rest on the triangular foundations of time, space, and social structure, each of which contingently structures and is structured by the others. Thus, Soja (1993) argues that the spatial turn has involved the end of historicism, which privileged time over space, and the reassertion of space into social theory. In a sense, this trend marks a return to Kant’s position that held the two dimensions to be of equal significance.

Similarly, Manuel Castells (1996, 1997), noting the pronounced degree to which postmodern capitalism relies on information as its primary resource, distinguished earlier information societies, in which productivity was derived from access to energy and the manipulation of materials, from later informational societies that emerged in the late twentieth century, in which productivity is derived primarily from knowledge and information. In his reading, the spatiality of postmodernism was manifested in the global “space of flows.” He notes, for example, that while people live in places, postmodern power is manifested in the linkages among places, their interconnectedness, as personified by business executives shuttling among global cities and using the internet to weave complex geographies of knowledge invisible to almost all ordinary citizens. This process was largely driven by the needs of the transnational class of the powerful employed in information-intensive occupations.

Increasingly, in the 1980s, the reassertion of space came to embrace various aspects of human subjectivity, everyday life, and the multiple dimensions of identity that are central to any coherent understanding of social life. Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration, for example, transformed the once-strict dualism of structure and agency into a fluid duality, in which individuals, forming their biographies in time and space through the routines of everyday life, reproduce and transform their social worlds primarily without meaning to do so. Everyday thought and behavior, the unacknowledged preconditions to action, do not simply mirror the world; they constitute it as the outcomes to action. Social structures and relations are thus reproduced, and hence simultaneously changed, by the people who make them; individuals are both produced by, and producers of, history and geography. Given this logic, space could no longer be seen simply as a backdrop against which life unfolds sequentially, but rather, intimately tied to lived experience. As Foucault suggests, space “takes the form of relations among sites” (quoted in Soja 1996:156).

Why space, why now?

The spatial turn is hardly the product of a few ivory tower intellectuals. Rather, this shift in social thought reflects much broader transformations in the economy, politics, and culture of the contemporary world. Such a view asserts that we cannot comprehend the production of spatial ideas independent of the production of spatiality, i.e., views of geography are only comprehensible by appeal to social and spatial context. Several forces have intersected since the late twentieth century to elevate space to new levels of material and ideological significance.

Contemporary globalization has undermined commonly held notions of Euclidean space by forming linkages among disparate producers and consumers intimately connected over vast distances through flows of capital and goods. Globalization is an annoyingly ambiguous term, however, and refers to a variety of processes that play out in different ways, from global cities to international trade to the internationalization of culture and consumption. Unprecedented volumes of immigration across national borders have increasingly confronted residents in many countries, particularly in Europe and North America, with issues of cultural difference. Tourism likewise allows for the selective appropriation of distant cultures and places. The media, increasingly under the control of a handful of robber barons, relay news and events across a global stage. The offshoring of many jobs from the developed world to the developing one has called attention to national differentials in skills and labor costs. International finance, a worldwide space of flows, global deregulation, and the decline in transport costs have all conspired to erode conventional geographic preoccupations with proximity. Far from annihilating the importance of space, globalization has increased it. Ironically, just as several pundits announced the “death of distance” and the “end of geography,” geography acquired a renewed significance in the analysis of international flows of information, culture, capital, and people. As neoliberal capital operates ever more effortlessly on a worldwide stage, small differences among regions become increasingly important. Moreover, as numerous scholars have shown, globalization does not play out identically in different places (Swyngedouw 1997); rather, context matters, and the incorporation of unique places into the global division of labor changes not only those locales, but the world system as well. Glocalization, therefore, is a two-way street.

The rise of cyberspace and the internet has also raised issues of spatiality in several fields. The internet, an unregulated electronic network connecting an estimated one billion people in more than 180 countries in 2007, allows users to transcend distance virtually instantaneously. Telecommunications systems have become the central technology of postmodern capitalism, vital not only to corporations large and small, but also to consumption, personal communication, entertainment, education, politics, and numerous other domains of social life. Indeed, for many people who spend a great deal of time in the digital world, cyberspace has become such an important part of everyday life that the once-solid boundary between the real and the virtual has essentially dissolved: it is difficult today to tell where one ends and the other begins. In allowing people and firms to “jump scale,” to connect effortlessly with others around the world at the click of a mouse, cyberspace has been instrumental to the production of complex, fragmented, jumbled spaces of postmodernity, all of which have called for mounting scrutiny. Similarly, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offer dramatic new means to analyze spatiality, even if these are often drenched in empiricist and positivist epistemologies. GIS, therefore, is not simply reflective of the new importance of space, but also constitutive of it.

Globalization, the international media, and migration across national borders – all reflective of one underlying transformation – have also entailed a profound shift in identity and subjectivity (e.g. Featherstone 1990; Robertson 1992; Gubrium and Holstein 2000). Rather than a fixed, unified identity that lies at the core of the modern self, for example, there are grounds for arguing many people, hooked into different locales via the internet, consist of multiple, shifting, even contradictory “selves” who lie at the changing intersections of different language games. Jameson (1991:14), for example, argues that “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.” In this context, increasingly, the notion of the autonomous subject standing apart from the world he/she observes has come under question, and in its place lie a greater pluralistic affirmation of cultural difference based on numerous axes of identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.).

Finally, the rapidly rising seriousness of global ecological and environmental problems has itself played no small role in elevating the significance of space. Issues that once could be understood and contained within relatively localized contexts, such as water pollution, are increasingly viewed as approachable only on a worldwide basis. Acid rain crosses national borders with ease. The enormous crisis of biodiversity unfolding across the world is inseparable from global patterns of habitat destruction, deforestation, and resource consumption. The gradual end ...