Philosophy: Society-Space
Philosophy: Society-Space
Susan M. Ruddick
Department of Geography
University of Toronto
100 St. George St.
Toronto ON
M5S 3G3
CANADA
Phone: 416-978-1589
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Philosophy: Society-Space
Keywords: assemblage, Cartesian, Deleuze, diffusionism, dispositif, Foucault, feminist, early Enlightenment, lines of flight, Marx, non-representational geography, paradigmatic city, paradoxical space, power geometries, social space, socio-spatial dialectic, socio-spatial formation, spaces of exception, spatial fix, states of exception, structured coherence, time-space compression
Glossary
fordism: A system of mass production and consumption that originated with Henry Ford, and led to stabilization of wage relations, guarding against overproduction or under-consumption through state entitlements, regulation of trade agreements and a culture of mass consumption.
keynesianism: A system of social entitlements that included unemployment insurance, health care, mother’s allowance and welfare, origination with Milton Keynes and instituted after the Great Depression of the 1930s in many industrialized nations.
neoliberalism: A strategy of governance that attempts as much as possible to reduce states responsibility for social entitlements and download responsibilities for care onto cities, communities, families and individuals.
postfordism: A globalized system of production and consumption characterized by the increasing use of robotics in production systems, externalizing uncertainties of the market to small time suppliers who produce on demand (just in time) and the marketing of specialized goods to globalized ‘niches’ of consumers.
poststructuralism: A movement in French continental philosophy centered on the destabilization of claims to truth and variously connected to the anti-humanist rejection of a unified rational subject; a rejection of binary oppositions; a view which sees knowledge as fluid, unstable and discursively produced rather than ideological.
Philosophy: Society-Space
Synopsis
Our conception of society-space determines the vantage point from which we critique and transform the social world; the subjects and processes we deem significant; and their relation to a social whole.Geographers engage four broad frameworks, pushing conceptual insights about space in each. In the first, a Marxist view of inequity, society-space is a structured coherence – a socio-spatial formation, whose territorial boundaries approximate politico-juridical boundaries. Geographers’ work on the socio-spatial dialectic, spatial fix, time space compression, have leavened understandings of the spatial dynamics in this approach. The second, postructuralist/Foucauldian, sees society-space as a strategic field. Space forms part of the technology of governance that constitutes subjects as normal/abnormal, legal/illegal, or through states of exception -- the enemy non-combatant, the illegal alien. In the third, post-structuralist/feminist, subjects negotiate doubled positions and paradoxical spaces – affording insights into larger societal constructs (gendering of public/private spheres; racialized peoples passing in a white world; transsexuals performance of sexuality). In the fourth, Deleuzian, subjects continuously transform themselves, hybridizing, engaging in acts of conjunction, connection, or collaboration with their milieu. Society-space is understood as stabilizing from the composite lattice of practices that form a kind of social machine – coding and channeling practices.
Philosophy: Society-Space
Introduction
When figures as divergent as conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and left leaning political philosopher Ernesto Laclau declare society is an “impossible object” we might ask -- why investigate the relationship between society and space? Surely the topic is so vast that when properly charted -- like Borges’ famous map drawn at a 1:1 scale -- so much ground is covered as to become practically and analytically useless. Moreover, the relationship between the two would seem a truism: societies create spaces that best express their needs; spaces in turn constrain or enable societal developments.
But how we conceive of this relationship subtends any attempts to understand, critique or transform, the social world. Beyond an exploration of unequal relations of power; of subjects constituted through these relationships; of the spaces through which such relations are organized -- our understanding of society-space, as a totality, determines the vantage point from which we understand the social world. It locates, both literally and figuratively, these delimited processes in relation to a social whole.
The precise object invoked their nexus; the structural and conjunctural processes that govern their relationship; and the nature of the relationship itself have been a matter of vexed debate. At times, the discipline of geography has been directly implicated in its constitution – as a tool of colonization, an instrument in military conquest, mapping and managing the configurations that constitute contemporary capitalism. And often in this role the discipline has been thought to be in a kind of theoretical slumber, more intent on idiographic or mathematized description than conceptual analysis and social transformation.
Over the past forty years, however, a heterogeneous cluster of approaches have emerged, marked first and decisively in the mid 1960s through early 1970s by geographers’ turn away from quantitative approaches, to Marxism and a range of critical frameworks that share a common (if internally contested) problematic. This problematic is organized around the recognition of persistent structural social inequities. It is marked by a conviction that space is complicit in the production and possible transformation of these relationships. And it is sustained by the belief that one should not merely analyze societies but attempt to change them – to create a more equitable world.
This shift was stimulated in part by social conflicts through the late 1960s through to mid 1970s: in the west, the rise of the civil rights, women’s and labor movements, riots in major American and European cities, the “problem of the ghetto”, and unrest abroad – protest over the Vietnam War, the repression of socialism in many South American regimes, protests against apartheid, concerns about the Cold War and possible planetary destruction. Past traditions in geography were either ethically untenable, to the extent that they contributed to social inequities, or conceptually incapable of explaining these circumstances. The momentum of this radical turn has been sustained by growing concerns over new global conflicts and deepening social inequities, manifest in the war on terror and the rise of neo-liberalism.
These approaches have draw on divergent philosophical influences, together loosely characterized as critical social theory, itself engaging a conceptual heritage dating from the Early Enlightenment. But scholars have not simply extended the principles of these thinkers, but revisited and refashioned them in relation to new contexts and new co-ordinates.
Within the field we can see four broadly defined conceptualizations of society-space. Each generates its own cast of supporting concepts and characters. Each privileges particular subjects and spaces as a vantage point from which society-space as a whole can be understood and transformed. Each bounds the object society-space in distinctly different ways. And each envisions distinctly different dynamics of transformation and change.
The first approach views society-space in terms of exploitative relations organized in a structured coherence – a social formation, whose territorial boundaries loosely approximate politico-juridical boundaries. It is rooted in a Marxist vision of social inequity. Societal relations are defined by exploitation – alienated labor -- and the appropriation of surplus value. Debates have focused on the logical primacy of particular unequal relations (classed, gendered and racialized) and their attendant spatialities (workplace, home, underdeveloped neighborhoods, regions and nations). Society-space is periodized by shifts in economic modes of production – from feudalism to capitalism, but also internally within capitalism from merchant, industrial, laissez faire, Fordist and post Fordist forms. Mechanisms for societal transformation are internal, generated in the logical unfolding of conflictual dialectical relations of struggle between those locked in antagonistic unequal relations.
The second approach sees society-space as a strategic field -- constituted through productive relations of governance -- an occupied zone in which struggles resemble the engagements of a war. Its philosophical underpinnings are most closely associated with the works of Foucault, but also Nietzsche, Heidegger and Clausewitz. Society, as Foucault declared, is ‘the continuation of war by other means’. Society strategises. Its prevailing logics are organized into dispositif, a constellation of discursive logics, which are enacted in everyday spaces, and through practices by which the abnormal are contained, controlled, excluded or policed. Populations are produced with specific characteristics and capacities –via the prison, the hospital, the school, for example. These forms of governance manifest as early as the 1700s as state’s interests shifted from simply guaranteeing peace within territorial boundaries, to additionally guaranteeing its population against uncertainty through mechanisms of security and normalizing disciplines.
For geographers this framework has been useful to explore the dynamics of contemporary neo-liberalism and the attendant subjectivities and spaces it engenders. Power in this view is productive and pervasive: it engenders specific regimes of truth and it produces specific subjects (the insane, the doctor, the criminal, the teacher, the student, the enemy combatant) even as it suppresses, limits and channels human activities and notions about what is acceptable or possible. The discursive logics that shape these subjects are only conjuncturally linked to economic concerns – techniques of governance do not follow economic logics in lockstep: they are adopted opportunistically, linked rather to the viability of the state. Mechanisms of societal transformation are genealogical: innovations arise through accident, improvisation and diffusion. Changes in the organization of society, in the patrolling of the boundaries of the norm arise in response to extra-discursive disruptions, events that cannot be contained or controlled by prevailing practices or internal logics.
The third and fourth see society-space as performative, an immanent field. It begins with the premise that society is fundamentally unstable. Stability is must be repeatedly secured through social practice. Its subjects are perpetually hybridizing, doubling. There are different explanations for the basis of this instability, but two variations are noteworthy.
In one approach, inspired by post-structural feminists, subjects are caught in structured instabilities – doubled positions whose conflicts they continuously negotiate (the woman who moves back and forth between public/private sphere; the slave who is human but treated as animal; the transsexual who ‘passes’ as one or another gender). The social field is conflictual, paradoxical. It is from the paradoxical or cramped spaces of their existence subjects gain insights into the constitutive dynamics of society-space as a whole and the possibility for liberation.
In the final approach, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, society is fundamentally chaotic: not an expression of disorder but rather continuous differentiation. Society flees, subjects are unstable, but only because they continuously transform themselves, engaging in acts of conjunction, connection, or collaboration with their milieu. Power relations can be oppressive or emancipating but the tendency towards emancipation is immanent to existence, it is not simply a reaction to conditions of oppression. Masses leak from classes, society is defined through its lines of flight, which are channeled, managed, conjugated and over-coded – sometimes returned to oppressive forms, at others building emancipatory capacities. Society-space – a relationship between the socius and the assemblage-- is understood as stabilizing from the composite lattice of practices that form a kind of social machine – coding and channeling practices.
The four frameworks presented here define broad tendencies within thinking about society-space. But they should not be read as intransigent camps. And although they are presented here in the historical sequence of their engagement within geography, they should not be read teleologically – as if each one, in the order of its appearance, refined, transformed and overthrew its predecessor (although the narrative is sometimes presented in this way: from Marxism through deconstruction to expressionism). They should be understood topologically – different transects through a shared field, lines of sight which alter our vision, obscuring some issues and surfacing others.
Geographers have engaged these frameworks to push the conceptual insights about space itself in the society-space couplet. This has required their jettisoning of much conceptual baggage: a Newtonian conception of space as inert, a container of processes, space subordinated to time; a Kantian understanding of geography which relegated the discipline to the status of pre-science, subordinated to history; a tendency invoke space merely as a metaphor, lacking materiality, simply a conceptual mechanism for thinking about struggles in an abstracted political field. All conspired not only to downplay the full promise of space in this configuration, but also to relegate geography to the status of pre-theoretical engagement, necessary, but nevertheless a precursor to scientific knowledge.
For astute spatial theorists, however, space has figured not merely as an object of enquiry, but a vehicle for thought, a means by which to think the new. The persistence of problematic objects and places that constitute an aporia, an inexplicable condition for contemporary theory, has been a prod to alternative theorizations. New understandings about social relations have been diagramed through spatialized concepts – not merely thinking about space but with space -- thinking space -- as Thrift and Crang have suggested in a book of the same name.
And geography itself has been transformed in the process. Up until the mid 1960s disciplinary borders within the social sciences were rigorously patrolled. A carefully constructed, if fragile, accord, constrained each discipline to work on its own piece of the social puzzle. To understand the shifting conceptualization of society-space through the lens of geography is also to understand geography’s emergence from narrow confines in the social sciences, a process accompanied by the blurring of boundaries between disciplines. In this spirit, the contributions that follow draw primarily from geography but also include the works of other scholars who have been geography’s closest conversants.
A Brief Look Backwards: Overcoming Newton and Kant
The iterative relationship between the spatial and social is by now so commonplace as to seem self-evident. But this insight has only recent returned to geography after a long conceptual slumber in the seductive embrace of mathematical description -- which enabled complex description of social or spatial processes, but little theorization, and as David Harvey noted, no strategy at the interface. Geography’s significant role in articulating of a concept of society-space, and its part in a larger spatial turn in social theory can best be appreciated through a brief historical detour.
Early geographers -- Simmel and Ratzel, for example, posited an iterative relation between society and space. Inspired by the rapidity of urban industrialization in the late 1800s, they counter-posed rural existence to the distinctive qualities of urban life – the latter blended and compressed, a locus where anonymity encouraged non-conformity in thought. But for the most part, geography was ruled by idiographic tendencies, detailed descriptions of specific places, which, while useful for exploration, colonization and conquest, were resistant to theoretical production.
By the 1940s normative and methodological impulses prompted a move away from even these early theorizations. Ratzel’s concept of lebensraum was discredited through its appropriation by the Nazi party: a development that, perhaps, propelled German geography at the end of WWII back to the safe terrain of idiography and description. The rising methodological hegemony of quantitative methods encouraged the revival of a Newtonian view of space as a container of social processes and a search for pure pattern and mathematical and geometrical expression of social processes in spatial form.
Social area analysis, at its zenith in post WWII quantitative geography, viewed human societies as an aggregate of myriad individual decisions, routinized and achieving equilibrium in distinct spatial forms. Under-girding this approach was a neoclassical economic model of rational choice -- perhaps suited to the economic and political stability following World War II, but ill equipped for what was to come afterwards. By the late 1960s social unrest began to trouble the implied equilibrium of this framework. For Anglo-American geographers, including David Harvey, the ‘problem of the ghetto’ remained resistant to quantitative explanations. Harvey’s Social Justice and the City was the first of a collection of transitional texts in geography, charting a course from the limitations of quantitative approaches to the possibilities of Marxism, setting a radical reorientation of human geography that has persisted to this day.
Society-Space as Structured Coherence
The turn to Marxism in the late 1960s and early 1970s compensated for quantitative geography’s weaknesses: class analysis provided the tools to explain social inequity; the concept of dialectically induced crisis, propelled by the conflict between capital and labor, offered a mechanism of societal transformation. The deductive power of the dialectic, moreover, compensated for the idiographic tendencies in descriptive accounts that had characterized earlier work in geography as well as the agnostic politics of quantitative approaches.
But for geographers, Marxism came with additional challenges. Marx himself had tended to ignore space entirely or reduce it, as Soja noted, to Hegel’s notion of space as a state-idea, remaining within the ‘simplifying assumptions of a closed national economy’. With Marxism this attitude shifted from mere indifference to active hostility. Beginning with the Second International and writings of György Lukács (considered founder of Western Marxism), attention to space was considered a fetish and diversion from class struggle. Under Stalinism, it was relegated (along with culture and politics) to the realm of superstructure, an irrelevant epiphenomenon.
Geographers countered this legacy with a frontal attack, arguing it was precisely the under-theorization of geography and space from Marx forward had impoverished radical political theory and practice. Early debates in Marxist geography revolved around how far one could push the significance of space without risking spatial fetishism or subordinating class struggle – a social struggle – to a spatial one. Hyphenated Marxisms (feminist, anti-racist et cetera) within geography were intent on challenging the explicit hierarchy of laboring forms within the Marxist framework – which privileged particular subjects (the white male Fordist worker) and their attendant spatialities (the factory in industrialized western countries) as the lynch pin of societal transformation.