The identity of a place does not derive from some internalized history. It derives, in large part, precisely from the specificity of its interactions with "the outside'.引自 A place called home?
On the one hand, there is the time internal to a closed system, where things may change yet without really changing. On the other hand, there is genuine dynamism, Grand Historical Time. In the former is included cyclical time, the times of reproduction, the way in which a peasantry represents to itself (says Laclau) the unfolding of the cycle of the seasons, the turning of the earth. To some extent, too, there is "embedded time", the time in which our daily lives are set. These times, says Laclau, this kind of time is space.
Laclau's argument here is that what we are inevitably faced with in world are "temporal"(by which he means dislocated) structures:dislocation is intrinsic and it is this -this essential openness-which creates the possibility of politics. Any attempt to represent the world "spatially", including even the world of physical space, is an attempt to ignore that dislocation. Space therefore, in his terminology, is representation, is any (ideological) attempt at closure. 引自 politics and space/time
The issue here is not the relative priority of the temporal and the spatial, but their definitions. For it is through this logic, and its association of ideas with temporality and spatiality, that Laclau arrives at the depoliticization of space. "Let us begin", writes Laclau, "by identifying three dimensions of the relationship of dislocation that are crucial to our analysis. The first is that dislocation is the very form of temporality. And temporality must be conceived as the exact opposite of space. The "spatialization" of an event consists of eliminating its temporality".引自 politics and space/time
For although in a formal sense it is the spatial which in Laclau's formulation is complete and the temporal which marks the lack (the abscence of representation, the imposibility of closure), in the whole tone of the argument it is in fact space which is associated with negativity and absence. 引自 politics and space/time
the argument is that the dichotomous characterization of space and time, along with a whole range of other dualisma which have been briefly referred to, and with their connotative interrelations, may both reflect and be part of the constitution of, among other things, the masculinity and femininity of the sexist society in which we live.引自 politics and space/time
one way of thinking about all this is to say that the spatial is integral to the production of history, and thus to the possibility of politics, just as the temporal is to the grography. Another way is to insist on the inseparability of time and space, on their joint constitution through the interrelationsbetween phenomena; on the necessity of thinking in terms of space-time.引自 politics and space/time
