Against Jameson, Soja, hooks' need for location, Zukin (spatial immanence and liminal space), Spatial Relativism
Identity politics of place and spatialized politics of identity e.g. Gilroy's diapora 

 

Introd. Part 2.: The place of politics: Mapping The Satanic Verses

Laclau's radical contextualization and contingency 

Jameson suggests that there are three basic phases in the development of the spatial logic of society under capitalism.

Following Lefebvre, Jameson argued that what is needed, in order to help recover the sites of resistence, is

"a new kind of spatial imagination capable of combining the past in a new way and reading its less tangible secrets off the template of its spatial structures¡Xbody, cosmos, city, as those marked the more intangible organization of culture and libidinal economies and linguistic forms" (underline added; 1991: 364-5).

Both Soja and Jameson share a common concern for spatiality, partly because this term is designed to reinstate space at the heart of a dynamic conception of time-space relations. But Soja wants to locate his argument on different terrain from Jameson; while Jameson sees space as a process of distance, Soja would rather treat distance as a dialectic between separation and the desire to be close. This leaves the question of the individual's occupation of subject positions in a different conceptual place. For Jameson, the individual is to be mapped by the spatial specificity of their subject positions, in order to uncover the hidden human geography of power, but Soja's schema suggests that even this dynamic understanding of the situation is too solid: space is not an innocent backdrop to position, it is itself filled with politics and ideology.

 two illusions: The illusion of opaqueness has led to a concentration on concrete forms, where space is fixed, dead and undialectical. What is lost from view are 'the deeper social origins of spatiality, its problematic production and reproduction, its contextualization of politics, power and ideology' (124).

The illusion of transparency dematerializes space, it becomes an abstraction, a supposedly real representation of concrete forms: 'spatiality is reduced to a mental construct alone¡K'

¡¥geography and history of capitalism intersect in a complex social process which creates a constantly evolving historical sequence of spatialities¡¦ (127)

Jameson, Soja vs. hooks 5

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 strandpoint, 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."

Instead, it may be argued that simultaneously present in any landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space¡Xand these may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter hegemonic cultural practices. We may now use the term 'spatiality' to capture the ways in which the social and spatial are inextricably realized one in the other; to conjure up the circumstances in which society and space are simultaneously realized by thinking, feeling, doing individuals and also to conjure up the many different conditions in which such realizations are experienced by thinking, feeling, doing subjects.(6)

• "market" (the economic forces that detach people from established social institutions) and
• "place" (the spatial form that anchor [people] to the social world, providing basis of a stable identity)

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' . .  .

a fallacy of spatial relativism

identity politics of place and spatialized politics of identity
[the resistance of Docklands' people as an example]

Gilroy: diaspora 17-

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 throught the last hundred years and more; ¡K

..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. ¡Ka spatialization of Black consciousness

¡K 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, ¡K

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 idenity, 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. ]
 

Introd. Part 2¡XThe place of politics¡XMapping The Satanic Verses

16.  two routes: (p. 22)

1. track the evocations of the spatial, particularly the city as simultaneously real and imaginary, suggesting that Rushdie draws ¡K on a notion that the urban invokes a multiplicities of spatialities simultaneously present. [use Lefebvre]
2. traces the notions of impurity and hybridity which are so central to the novel and suggests that this leads us into an understanding of identities defined as much by what they lack as by what they include. [use Laclau]

¡Kidentity emerges through difference, just as all object formation is alwyas 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, ¡K

16. 28 ¡KLaclau draws implicitly on Lacan to work through the concept of identity formation set within these fields of (negative differences, being articulated through that which it is not (negativity in Laclau¡¦s terms) and through the historical moment of enunciation (referred to as contingency). Difference becomes located difference within a relational field: ¡¥what one gets is a field of simply relational identities which never manage to constitute themselves fully, since relations do not form a closed system¡¦ (20-21). ¡KThere is no identity outside of its context: ¡¥Identity depends on conditions of existence which are contingent, its relationship with them is absolutely necessary¡¦ (21).

--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 ¡Vdislocation 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 v.s. 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

  Soja on spatial politics

the differences between modernist identity politics and postmodernist identity politics
from resistance in binary structure to "empowering a multiplicity of resistances" (187)

Spatialized identity politics:

• hooks' marginality as radical openness
• Trinh Minh-ha's displacement "By actively displacing and disordering difference, by insisting that there are 'no master territories', one struggles to prevent 'this classifying world from exerting its ordered, binary, categorical power." (194)
• Diana Fuss "'We really only have the leisure to idealize the subversive potential of the power of the marginal when our place of enunciation is quite central' [Fuss 1991: 5]" (194)
• Spivak -- defends the position of the third world intellectuals; remapping;

  "Thinking synchronically, in the precise (spatial) circumstances of the present [postmodern] moment, Spivak positions herself as a bricoleur, a preserver of discontinuities, an interruptive critic of the categorical logic of colonizer-colonized, elite-subaltern, global-local, ... (195)


---

• Gillian Rose -- politics of paradoxical space