Closed Spaces: Can't Live with Them, Can't Live without Them

Abstract

Spatial assumptions, mostly taken for granted in mediated and face-to-face language use, both represent and constitute social reality. How, though, do their hidden logics work in detail? What are their respective imaginative effects and functions? And, in view of their involvement in discourses of discrimination, are they dispensable? By using the press coverage of the German reunification as a case study, I discuss the social embeddedness and maintenance of fairly traditional spatial concepts in general, and the Euclidean ‘container concept’ in particular on a theoretical level. In everyday social practice, it is argued, these concepts have both constraining and enabling implications. Their constitutive dimension, however, is often neglected in recent critical discourse animated by ‘new’ spatial imaginations such as flows, networks, folds, or rhizomes. In this respect, I argue that everyday ‘containerization’ surely (over)simplifies contingency and complexity. Yet, the ‘closed spaces’ still remain reasonable and to a certain extent, indispensable tools for making the world intelligible by identifying, organizing, and structuring complex phenomena. Hence, instead of only searching for new and ‘more adequate’ spatial representations, the everyday use of the ‘old’ ones should also remain a subject of thorough sociogeographic inquiry.