|
The Politics of Space
Provider: Kate Liu / 劉紀雯 |
Keith & Pile
|
D. Massey politics and time/space |
Soja on [spatial] politics of difference Homi Bhabha on the Third Space |
Politics of Location |
Keith
and Pile. "Introduction." Place and the Politics of Identity.
Eds. Michael Keith & Steve Pile, NY: Routledge, 1993
Major argument: ". . . simultaneously present in any landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space -- and these may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter-hegemonic cultural spaces.".(6) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
2nd—monopoly capitalism, figurative space stands in the place of absent causes. Space represents, and is represented by, distorted images of the real determinations of social relations. 3rd—multinational capitalism, its spatial logic is simultaneously homogeneous and fragmented, a kind of 'schizo-space.' . . . for Jameson, schizophrenia seems to have become the mark of the age: old loyalties of class or gender or race fragment, dislocate, rupture, disperse; new loyalties of class and gender and race interrupt, disrupt, recombine, fuse. No one is quite sure of the ground on which they stand, which direction they are facing, or where they are going. Under these circumstances, the subject is proclaimed dead; the agent of history no more. (p. 3) Following Lefebvre, Jameson argued that what is needed, in order to help recover the sites of resistance, is
![]()
![]() "We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology" (Soja 1989: 6)
‘geography and history of
capitalism intersect in a complex social process which creates a constantly
evolving historical sequence of spatialities’ (127) For Jameson, space is a template, while for Soja, such a geometrical conception of space is passive, fixed, undialectical and no longer appropriate. For hooks, both these perspective involve risks and danger which are directly political; for those who have no place that can be safely called home, there must be a struggle for a place to be. Her evocation of the margins is simultaneously real and metaphorical -- it defines an alternative spatiality: radical openness. A different sense of place is being theorized, no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer undialectical--because disruptive features interrupt any tendency to see once more open space as the passive receptacle for any social process that cares to fill it -- but, still, in a very real sense about location and locatedness. hooks -- "As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, 'the politics of location' necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision."
![]() Sharon Zukin: describing the manner in which landscapes of power may triumph over the vernacular.
critique: She time and again returns to an evocation of a singular immanent meaning which lies buried beneath the surface and awaits revelation. A scene is either 'landscape' or 'vernacular' . . .
his project appears to work on narrative and conceptual levels, with the notion of an imagined spatiality of disporic politics serving to mediate these tensions. At the level of historical narrative, the project stresses the international links between Black intellectuals through the last hundred years and more; … ..the diaspora invokes an imagined geography, a spatiality that draws on connections across oceans and continents and yet unifies the Black experience inside a shared territory. …a spatialization of Black consciousness … the diaspora is an invocation of communal space which is simultaneously both inside and outside the West. The outcome of such positioning is a form of cultural fusion; such syncretism produces diaspora-specific resources of resistance, … the spatiality of the diaspora is the ground on which momentary and ever-shifting lines are draw between inside and outside, oppressor and oppressed, the same and the other. These lines stress interconnection as much as distinction, but they produce a space in which identities are momentarily authenticated, on which what might be called arbitrary closure occurs. Rejecting both essentialized and depthlessless representations of Black identity, Gilroy's diaspora is the spatiality which contingently mediates Black authority, in the explicit knowledge that an imagined space of diaspora is located within global systems that not only make such claims context-specific, but also make communication through the myriad forms of cultural syncretism inevitable. [Bhabha's liminal form of cultural identification. ] Homi Bhabha on the Third Space
Intro. Part 2—The place of politics—Mapping The Satanic Verses
…identity emerges through difference, just as all object formation is always partial because always relational. This negativity is the source of what Laclau draws on extensively in a concept of the constitutive outside. This is the source of his well-known diagnosis that society can never be wholly constituted as an object of scrutiny, …
--the political (that which is contested) and the social (those practices that are sedimented in time and uncontested) define each other by their mutual opposition ‘The constitution of a social identity is an act of power and that identity as such is power’ (31) incomplete identity –dislocation 29 "every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outside which both denies that identity and provides its conditions of possibility at the same time. But this in itself means that the effects of dislocation must be contradictory. If on the one hand they threaten identities, they are the foundation on which new identities are constituted" (39). Relativism vs. politics of identity 31 Haraway "The alternative
to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining
the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics
and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is
a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally.
[1991: 191]" (31: underline added ) . ![]() "The Spaces that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics" Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper pp. 183-205
(external)
|