Towards re-definition of space-ness in the post-mechanical age: Methodological notes

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe a model of the dynamics of constituting a living place that is peculiar to the material condition of humanity today and that lends itself to empirical studies of meta-development and sustainability of the human-made environment. The empirical point of departure is the novel character of contemporary knowledge and knowing and the shift it leads to from the transparent, perspectival space to networked quasi-objects, from design to meta-design. It is argued that the self depends for its ability to recognise itself primarily on collisions that suspend the flow of spatialised complexity. The sites of such collisions are superpositions of virtual and material interactions—spatio-temporal instabilities or warps. The structure of such collisions mirrors the mechanisms characteristic of the functioning of our techno-scientific civilisation and associated with different levels of measurement, embodiment, and organisation that pattern the human unconscious, the material and knowledge systems, the ‘lifeworlds’. This proposition expands the notion of the Schmarsow–Benjamin ‘elbow room’ (Spielraum) and gives a perceptual-empirical meaning to the self's ontology, to the ‘living place’ and its ‘sustain-ability’. The ‘elbow room’ may be viewed as a dynamic impact parameter – an effective existence radius of the self – as an assemblage of the self, place and interactive narratives binding them dynamically together.