Thesis: To recover [spatiality] from the historicist devaluation, to make space visible again as a fundamental referent of social being, requires a rethinking not only of the concreteness of capitalist spatial practices but also of the philosophizing abstractions of modern ontology and epistemology (119-20).

   I. Materiality and Illusion in the Conceptualization of Space
 
   Definition/premises of spatiality:
1. Spatiality is a substantiated and recognizable social product, part of a "second nature" which incorporates as it socializes and transforms both physical and psychological spaces.

a. spatiality is socially produced and exists in both substantial forms and as a set of relations between individuals and groups.
b. Spatiality can be distinguished from the physical space of material nature and the mental space of cognition and representation, both are used and incorporated into the social construction of spatiality but cannot be considered as its equivalent. --
The assertion of (social) spatiality shatters the traditional physical-mental dualism and forces a major reinterpretation of the materiality of space, time and being. (120)
c. "Second nature"--Soja borrows Neil Smith's theory of "the social production of nature" to discuss "the social production of spatiality" (121)

2. As a social product, spatiality is simultaneously the medium and outcome, presupposition and embodiment, of social action and relationship.

c.f. Nicos Poulantzas defines the spatial and temporal matrices of capitalism, its material groundedness, as simultaneously presuppositions and embodiments of the relations of production (118-19).
 

 3. The spatial-temporal structuring of social life defines how social action and relationship (including class relations) are materially constituted, made concrete.

c.f. Soja's critique of the illusions of opaqueness or illusions of transparency in spatial theorization (122-26)

 4. The constitution/concretization process is problematic, filled with contradiction and struggle (amidst much that is recursive and routinized).

 5. Contradictions arise primarily from the duality of produced space as both outcome/embodiment/product and medium/presupposition/producer of social activity.

a dialectic process

 6. Concrete spatiality--actual human geography--is thus a competitive arena for struggles over social production and reproduction, for social practices aimed either at maintenance and reinforcement of existing spatiality or at significant restructuring and/or radical transformation.

 7. The temporality of social life, from routines and events of day-to-day activity to the longer-run making of history, is rooted in spatial contingency in much the same way as the spatiality of social life is rotted in temporal/historical contingency.

®ÉªÅÅGÃÒ

 8. The materialist interpretation of history and the materialist interpretation of geography are inseparably intertwined and theoretically concomitant, with no inherent prioritization of one over the other.

==> to make rational assertion of a social-spatial dialectic, a historical and geographical materialism, a space-time structuration of social life.

  II. Spatialized Ontology (the meta-theoretical discourse): on the Existential Spatiality of Being

1. Human beings alone are able to objectify the world by setting themselves apart, creating a gap, a distance, a space. This process of objectification defines he human situation and predicates it upon spatiality.
2. To be human is not only to create distances but to attempt to cross them, to transform primal distance through intentionality, emotion, involvement, attachment.
==>Martin Buber: human consciousness arises from the interplay of distancing and relation

Source:

• Soja, Edward. "Reassertions: Towards a Spatialized Ontology." Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso, 1989. 118-137.

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts ;
Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance  Spring, 1999