Space and Travel in Philo's Legatio ad Gaium (original) (raw)
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Race and Social Analysis
I will focus on the concept of space presented and used by Boulanger (2017) in his article combining a Moscovician social representation theory (SRT) with Hermans' dialogical self theory (DST). I argue that the notion of space used is somewhat incongruent with Boulanger's (2017) argumentation due to its (the concept of space used) natural scientific bias, and would need to be reworked by relating it to a notion of place instead. I am first going to present Boulanger's (2017) notion of space in relation to Moscovici then stating some worries about it, and lastly, conceive the concept of dynamic space as related to a dynamic place as well. While space connotes a geometric shape, like a form of space, hence the natural scientific bias, as well as something separate and unalterable from the living beings and stuff occupying this space, the notion of place emphasizes the dynamic interplay of subjects and space. So, while I agree with the presented criticism of Moscovici, and the use of DST, I would also emphasize relating space and place as providing us with a more nuanced way of addressing dynamic spatiality by understanding every moment of positioning as a normative matter involving the spatial aspect of objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In general terms, subjects, by placing themselves or by being placed in a space, at the same time re-configure the whole space in which this placing is done. The last notion is more prone to be congruent with the dynamic notion of space needed to conceive the relation between subject and alter, than a separate and unalterable space.
The Question of Space: A Review Essay
Humanities, 2018
This article is a review essay which discusses the inter-disciplinary collection of essays edited by Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, titled The Question of Space: Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017). The book was published as part of the Place, Memory, Affect series, edited by Neil Campbell and Christine Berberich. As well as providing a detailed critical overview of The Question of Space, the article responds to some of the broader questions that the book poses in terms of the radical inter-disciplinary of space and spatiality, relating these firstly to ideas drawn from Henri Lefebvre's discussion of 'blind fields'. The review essay then goes on to question what we might understand by the so-called 'spatial turn' and whether this itself requires some rethinking in order to better take stock of the developments in and around the inter-disciplinary scholarship on space and spatiality. Following this, the essay engages more directly with the individual chapter contributions in The Question of Space, before drawing together some concluding remarks that speak to the concept of 'atmosphere' as an affective and phenomenological quality of space as experiential and embodied 'spacing'. 1. The Question of Blind Fields To pose space as a question—as the title of Marijn Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch's edited collection proclaims—is already to cast the problem of space and spatiality, and the inter-disciplinary confabulations that such a problem creates, to the foreground of consideration. As a problem (or set of problems) that demands the pursuit of a question (or set of questions), the question of space is at its most productive when those doing the asking resist the urge to provide a definitive answer. Those who are in the business of looking for an off-the-shelf answer would do well to steer clear of Nieuwenhuis and Crouch's illuminating collection of essays and instead hunker down in the comfort of more routine orientations towards 'space' as an object of study. That The Question of Space sets out to unsettle and cast a quizzical light on these more localised of well-trodden disciplinary precincts, makes it a timely and welcome intervention. The book's subtitle—Interrogating the Spatial Turn between Disciplines—clearly states its intent to confront the fugitive nature of space and spatiality as a discourse that, by definition, cannot be readily hemmed in without doing a fundamental disservice to an unfolding conversation that has rippled and inveigled its way across an increasingly diffuse field of practice. Space is as open and expansive, or as finite and restrictive, as the structures that are brought to bear on its study. A sense of this openness and exploratory impulse is threaded across the ten chapters of The Question of Space (twelve including the book's prelude and postlude), with each throwing its gaze partly back on the preceding chapter, inasmuch as any one elucidation of 'space' casts the other in a slightly different light, the colours and textures merging like those in the artwork adorning the book's cover (from a painting by Crouch).
Space, Postmodernism and Cartographies
1994
As the title suggests, this article will concern itself with contemporary attitudes towards space. What is less apparent, though, is the necessary relationship this will have with questions of subjectivity. I have spent many pages elsewhere examining this relationship 2 and shall only give a brief account of it here. The pressing question for this article to examine is the relevance of this discussion to the concerns of postmodernism. This essay will chart the movement between space, subjects and postmodernism. Space and Subjects The modern spaced-subject's story starts with Kant's Copernican Revolution. Just as Copernicus had marked the dawn of astronomical heliocentrism, so Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1787) announce the grounding of philosophical concerns within the bounds of a new a spatially constructed subject. (This is the accepted philosophical story anyway. That Kant was building upon a tradition of philosophical thinkers-Hume is the most famous example-is not the place for this article to contend.) What is most interesting about Kant's account is his integrating of the question of space and subjectivity. 3 Kant showed the ways in which a highly organised subject could be produced. But this is not a new subject. Hume, for one, had already identified the subject as the post-production addendum to the process of experiencing. Where Kant gleefully delimited this subject's boundaries with the aid of Rationality, it seems that Hue unhappily resigned himself to the stagnation of the subject through Habit (Hume 1982: 311-12). Subjective solidity has not always been beloved of philosophers. Schopenhauer's aesthetics tries hardest to dissolve that which produces individual subjects. Nietzsche provides many tirades against this subject. 4 Yet it is the Frenchman, Gaston Bachelard-writing one hundred and fifty years after Kant-who expands upon the space/subject construction in an attempt to enhance new forms of both. Bashelard's The Poetics of Space (1958) examines a range of human experience, as reported through the medium of poetry, in order to reach for that which defines the human subject. Unlike the phenomenologists, with whom Bachelard has always been associated-apparently with his approval-Bachelard's method was not to pare away at his area of study until its essence was exposed. Rather, he sought to amplify the examples of the poetic images he was interested in, to expand not inhibit the area on which he worked. For Bachelard the poetic imagination highlights the subject in its most creative capacity, and it is space that provides the best conditions for this creativity:
2012
For McLuhan, space is ‘perceived’, and hence always ‘functional’ or functioning within a world of human perception. Lefebvre meanwhile considers space more philosophically and materialistically. His is a logico-epistemological theory of space. For him, space is a product that can be ‘understood’ – space is absolute or abstract, descriptive or social, and therefore always has a level of meaning or intentionality. But neither theory makes much allowance for a gap that is meaningless, a gap that still affects the meaning and perception of space; a gap that is not assigned meaning by either the designer or the builder, but is the concern of both – that appears between drawing board and environment, the screen resolution and the physical realm. Henri Lefebvre theorises that representations of space are part of our experience of space, and not separate to it. He shows that representations function within a social production of space and therefore involve political intent. However, he is reluctant to theorise the gaps between his own dialectic. Marshal McLuhan meanwhile helps us understand that the way we experience representations of space effects the way we perceive real space – that whatever the intent, there is also a perception that is determined through the use of media. But while an apolitical perception of space is essential in order to understand its production, until it is re-grafted into the social production of space, it remains ‘simply physical events in an abstract sensorium’, of little value to sociologists or spatial historians. As time and space is compressed into Mcluhanesque hallucinogenic forms of cold media (in the electronic age), when translated into a continuous, multi sensual tactile space, mosaic gaps become gaping voids of meaningless space. A type of ‘para-space’ appears in practico-sensory space that is filled by either social mechanisms or institutional strategies (Michel Foucault) or user tactics (Michel De Certeau). Ulises Ali Mejias provides further support to new media’s mosaic nature, introducing the concept of a paranodal space resulting from a network logic that is biased towards low intensity interactions. And Alexander Galloway shows that the interface, as a simulator of the metaphysical, is an allegory to the social, where the gaps prove insulative and political. This thesis argues that a new concept of paraspace is necessary to understand the effect representations of space have upon the spaces they represent – a concept that plays a significant
3.1: Imagined Space and Lived Space, Alienation and Destruction, Singularity and Specificity
Powered by 'just there'-is never neutral and mappable. It is here that we find the critical potential of spatial theory. To fully understand this critical potential, it is helpful to consider the difference between the concepts of real, imagined, and lived space. Tim Cresswell's introduction offers a good overview, with a focus on the critical dimension in the theorizing of space. Let us begin by tracing his narrative on the differentiation between (what others called) real and imagined space. In the 1970s, he argues, humanist geographers articulated a critique of scientific approaches of space as an abstract, empty location (real space). They began to develop the notion of place to theorize the emotional significance places have for people (Cresswell 2004: 18-24). Cresswell shows how a good decade later, critical geographers-influenced by cultural studies-questioned the essentialism and exclusionary nature of many of these notions of place; the significance of a place is not the same for all its inhabitants; people of different classes, ethnicities, https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature\_and\_Literacy/Book%3A\_The\_Ideologies\_of\_Lived\_Space\_in\_Literary\_Te…
Space, Time and the Articulation of a Place in the World: the Philosophical Context
B. Richardson (ed.): Spatiality and Symbolic Expression. London: Palgrave, 2015
This chapter shows how philosophical approaches to space attempt to articulate a difference between homogenous scientific space and the spatiality of human existence. From Kant and Hegel through to Agamben and Balibar the question at issue is what it means to be spatially constituted as being which lives in space in an irreducible temporal manner. Space, so understood, is not something external to the self, but rather that in which human beings are immersed as corporeal beings. Places are shown to be historical spaces embodying memories and gesturing possible meaning. However, space as historical place can be exclusionary and increasingly human beings experience place as exiles. Taking a view over the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, it is shown that to be in place is to risk displacement, to dwell is to be amidst ruination, to move is to be moved, to be spatial is also to be subject to spatiality.
"The Dialectic of Space: An Untimely Proposal"
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020
The spatial dialectic is an important familiar phrase in critical writing, but it nonetheless needs continued elaboration and more working out as a concept. This essay proposes some fundamentals for thinking a dialectic that is unrelentingly spatial and unapologetically material. It first seeks to spatialize temporal logics like contradiction through the Hegelian concept of “material contradiction,” which is outside of time, language, and consciousness. It then tries to ponder the built environment as composed of overlapping material contradictions, multiple sites of praxes—past, present, and future—whence a spatial dialectic issues.