Space, Postmodernism and Cartographies (original) (raw)
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:
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