Lost in America

Abstract

There are two major illusions about space in the human sciences. The first one is that space is solid and concrete: everything in it is fixed, ready for description, dead, and undialectical. The other illusion, especially prevalent since the rise of historicism in the 19th century, is that space is only transparent and can be dematerialized into a pure ideation, a place of reference for the cycles and crises of history. Contra both those illusions, the postmodern position would be that space is both internal and external, attached to being in the world, what Heidegger calls the Aroundness of Being in the World (Heidegger 1962:134-148). It is also part of a structured, multilayered geography of regions nesting around a mobile individual or collective places or topoi constantly sedimented and in flux (Soja 1990:10-42). A middle position would be that, the reassertion of space in critical social theory notwithstanding, social space is not simply produced (Lefebvre 1974) as an endlessly open site of relations between physical forms and social practices tied to those forms, but it is the condition for the economic, social, and cultural pertinence of those sites to the practice of daily life. In other words, the first order of business, for both the historian and the geographer, is to understand how physical space becomes the social space of conflict and consensus, being continuously demarcated and erased, and marked again into domains, throwing into relief the processes of power mediating community and strife (Foucault 1980:77; Soja 1990:21).