Space

Peter Merriman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000528565
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

Space is the first accessible text which provides a comprehensive examination of approaches that have crossed between such diverse fields as philosophy, physics, architecture, sociology, anthropology, and geography.

The text examines the influence of geometry, arithmetic, natural philosophy, empiricism, and positivism to the development of spatial thinking, as well as focusing on the contributions of phenomenologists, existentialists, psychologists, Marxists, and post-structuralists to how we occupy, live, structure, and perform spaces and practices of spacing. The book emphasises the multiple and partial construction of spaces through the embodied practices of diverse subjects, highlighting the contributions of feminists, queer theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and post-colonial scholars to academic debates. In contrast to contemporary studies which draw a clear line between scientific and particularly quantitative approaches to space and spatiality and more 'lived' human enactments and performances, this book highlights the continual influence of different mathematical and philosophical understandings of space and spatiality on everyday western spatial imaginations and registers in the twenty-first century.

Space is possibly the key concept underpinning research in geography, as well as being of central importance to scholars and practitioners working across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003004813-1

The Voice of Space

Figure 1.1René Magritte Voice of Space (La voix des airs), 1931 Oil on canvas 38 5/8 x 21 3/8 inches (72.7 x 54.2 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976 (76.2553.101).

I have often wondered whether an interesting article or book could be written about the cover images on academic books, especially those addressing spatial theory. While photographic images of recognisable sites or events frequently appear on books about place, landscape, and environment, it is not uncommon to see more abstract works of modern art on the cover of books on spatial theory. Paul Klee’s Uncomposed in Space (1929), M.C. Escher’s Another World (1947), René Magritte’s Les Promenades d’Euclide (1955), Lyobov Popova’s Representation of a Spatial Organisation (Construction) (n.d.), and Joan Miró’s Composition (1968) have all adorned notable volumes on space, spatiality, and spatial relations.¹ At times, more figurative images and impressionistic landscapes have featured on such covers,² but there is something about the abstract forms, geometric shapes, and expressionistic style of Cubist, Futurist, Surrealist and Constructivist paintings which seems to appeal to authors or publishers seeking to package or market texts dealing with space and spatial theory. This book is no exception. Its cover features detail from a painting – shown in Figure 1.1 – by the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte (1898–1967), one of at least four he titled La Voix des Airs (1931) – which has been variously translated into English as The Voice of the Wind, Voice of the Air, and Voice of Space (Calas 1967; Sylvester and Whitfield 1992, 1993).

Magritte repeatedly stated that viewers should not look for ‘symbolic meanings’ in his paintings, rather they should ‘grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image’ (Magritte, cited in Gablik 1970, p. 11). In La Voix des Airs (1931) we are presented with three spherical bodies elevated above a rolling rural landscape that features few signs of human activity, apart from a winding track. The landscape appears still, and the sky clear. The three globes or spheres are intersected by what look like equatorial indentations or lateral cuts, separating the bodies into two equal hemispheric forms. These smooth spheres seem artificial – somewhat other-worldly and alien – in this earthly landscape. Readers who are acquainted with Magritte’s oeuvre may recognise these spherical objects as grelots – mass-produced iron bells – which feature in many of his works from 1926 through to the end of his career (Calas 1967). A group of over-sized, regularly shaped, mass-manufactured objects appear to hang in the air, possessing a geometry, uniformity, metallic smoothness, purity of form, and ordered simplicity which appears out-of-place and out-of-scale in this landscape.³ The objects – and French title of the painting – suggest that this landscape may not be still. We are invited to imagine the sound of grelots – perhaps agitated by the wind – resonating through, giving voice, and lending atmosphere to the landscape, and in this and other works Magritte was quite clearly experimenting with spatial arrangements and Surreal juxtapositions – evoking, exploring, and subverting different understandings of space. When asked about the title of an earlier version of La Voix des Airs (1928) in correspondence with the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1947, Magritte stated that it ‘is indeed called The Voice of the Winds’ and that ‘one of my intentions, a conscious one, was to find a new sense of space’ (Sylvester and Whitfield 1992, p. 288).⁴ Surreal spaces reveal an unexpected ordering of events and things and, for me, La Voix des Airs highlights the performative and dynamic qualities of spaces, the materialities of many spatial formations, the production of seemingly generic, ubiquitous spatial forms, and the architectural construction, engineering and ordering of spaces. The painting points to the importance of non-geometric or more-than-geometric figurations and senses of space, multi-sensory aspects of spaces and spacing, the problematic binary of subject and object, the ephemeral atmospheres that can be generated through practices of spacing, and the politics of particular viewpoints, experiences, encounters and events. La Voix des Airs also hints at three interrelated themes and tensions which run throughout this book and are central to many past and present articulations and explorations of space and spatiality.

First, Magritte’s aesthetic explorations and experiments with space hint at the wide array of scholarly communities and creative practitioners who have engaged with or articulated senses of space and practices of spacing in their work, from physicists, psychologists, and geographers, to artists, architects, and dancers. In scholarly debate, ‘space’ has long been an important concept in academic fields such as philosophy, physics, mathematics, geography, and architecture, but there has also been more than a century of scholarly engagement with the concept in sociology, psychology, and anthropology and what may seem like quite different approaches are not always as separable or as unrelated as they first appear. What these different disciplinary interests reveal is that space is not simply an extended, dimensioned, or absolute realm that may be studied or measured in an objective manner by scientists, engineers, or architects. Subjective, imagined, hypothetical, lived and dynamic social, political, and arithmetic spaces (as well as material and geometric spaces), are now seen to be produced, performed, diagrammed, and experienced through a myriad of creative embodied movements, practices, and calculations, by a diverse array of practitioners. What’s more, such distinctions and divisions as subjective/objective, real/imagined, and material/immaterial are rendered problematic by both theoretical approaches to space and spatiality and the everyday practices by which we all produce, reshape, and perform spaces in our daily lives. Today, space serves as a keyword across a wide array of social science, humanities, natural science and physical science disciplines, with commentators having identified ‘spatial turns’ in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, cultural studies, history and anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s (Cosgrove 1999; Warf and Arias 2009; Withers 2009; Tally 2013, 2017; Merriman 2016a).

Second, the operation and deployment of ‘space’ as a fairly broad, flexible, and abstract concept – not least in the concept of ‘abstract space’ – can be taken as both a strength and a weakness. One criticism of ‘space’ is that it lacks the sense of distinct position, location, groundedness, materiality, emplacement, political purchase and bodily engagement that is frequently associated with concepts such as environment, landscape, place, milieu, region, territory, world, locale or site.⁵ Following this, some theoretical approaches to space have been criticised for enacting a withdrawal or decontextualisation of events from lived experiences and situated environments, but this is not the case with all figurations of space and spatiality, for example, with concepts such as ‘lived space’. ‘Abstract space’ has also been identified by some critics (particularly Marxists) as an historic formulation associated with the advancement of mathematics, science, and capitalism which trampled, effaced, and obscured individual experiences, values, and rights (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Smith 1984; Loftus 2015). In counterpoint to such views, abstraction can be taken to be inevitable, and I would affirm Derek McCormack’s (2013a) broader argument that abstractions can prove highly productive as well as destructive. Simplified, abstract (and sometimes geometric) conceptions of space underpin many western academic and non-academic approaches to the world, and arguably, it is these simple and abstract qualities which have enabled them to travel so successfully between the sciences and humanities.

Third, the importance, influence, and potential political utility of the concept of space lies precisely in its power to transcend disciplinary, philosophical, and methodological boundaries in ways that some other concepts – such as place – do not do as effectively. A long and varied history of spatial thinking – particularly in the physical sciences and mathematics – frequently underpins contemporary approaches to space and spatiality in the social sciences and humanities, and although some acknowledge and explore this lineage (e.g. Harvey 1969a; Smith 1984; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Bollnow 2011[1963]), others have ignored, critiqued, or placed these influences at a distance. In geography, this engagement with previous traditions was evident in the work of spatial scientists who envisaged ‘geography as geometry’ in the 1960s (Gale and Olsson 1979, p. xvi) and post-structuralists engaging with theories of non-linearity, complexity, relatedness and topology in the 2000s (Martin and Secor 2014). However, a residual scientific authority remains in much contemporary critical spatial thinking, with one prominent example being the metaphorical use and repurposing of a geometric language for radical ends in Doreen Massey’s influential call for ‘new power geometries’ in the 1990s (Massey 1991a, 1993a, 1999a, 1999c; Massey et al. 2009). The key point here is that new and emerging ideas about space in the physical sciences, natural sciences, arts, social sciences and humanities have a complex, interwoven, political history (Kern 1983; Bollnow 2011 [1963]; Henderson 2013[1983]; Handelman 2019). Why? In part, because geometric spatialities emerged from embodied spatial practices of farming, measuring, and military action (as well as attempts to manage and tax land ownership) and many of these practices still underpin our everyday lives, but also because, in previous centuries, the boundaries between these disciplines and practices have been more fluid, only becoming tighter over the past 100–200 years. Later chapters will explore these ideas in more detail, from the links between geometry and the emergence of linear perspective in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Edgerton 1976; Cosgrove 1985; Chapter 3), to the multiplication of spaces and perspectives in non-linear geometry, psychology and abstract arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Lewin 1936; Kern 1983; Kwinter 2001; Henderson 2013 [1983]; Chapter 8). The Surreal modernist spaces created and represented by Magritte in La Voix des Airs (1931) can, therefore, be situated in a longer and varied history of anti-perspectival, multi-perspectival and, at times, playful representations of events, spaces, and practices.

Defining Space and Spatiality

Space is a rather difficult concept to define. The geographer Neil Smith has even gone as far as to suggest that ‘it is a vague concept with a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory meanings’ (N. Smith 1984, p. 66). A glance at any dictionary confirms that there are many different uses of the term that are entangled with a diverse array of long-standing philosophical and scientific debates which pre-date the development of the English language. Thus, while the etymological roots of ‘space’ may lie in the French espace and espacer and Latin spatium and spatior, the English term also incorporates more delimited conceptions encapsulated in the German term raum (Gould 1981; Olwig 2002), as well as resonating with elements of ancient Greek thinking around the concepts of chōra (room, space, interval or receptacle), topos (place) and kenon (void) (Casey 1997). I will discuss some of this thinking in more detail in Chapter 2, but for now I want to introduce and outline some of the more dominant contemporary English-language understandings of space and spatiality.

In everyday parlance, space can function as a verb or noun. As a verb it may denote the separating, distancing, or spacing out of two or more things. In its Latin and French roots, and in medieval English, ‘to space’ could mean ‘to pace or walk’ or ‘to measure by pacing’, reflecting both a sense of the rhythmic, processual, embodied occupation or spacing of the world, and also the sense of measurement, extension, and geometry (earth measurement) which pervades many definitions of space (see Chapter 3)(OED 2017a). Space, here, is practised through physical actions such as building, measuring, moving, extending, and representing, but these physical practices are clearly also embodied, thoughtful, meaningful and subjective, hinting at the interconnection of practices of dwelling, producing, consuming, inhabiting and sensing space with practices of locating, separating, and measuring.

The noun space has a mu...