Moreover, the issue is reinforced in Soja's book because we are given clues as to what he was trying to establish himself as. We are told, for instance, that the author once went for a trip around Los Angeles with Fredric Jameson and Henri Lefebvre. What are we to make of this information? Perhaps what is being communicated i s the sense o f an in-crowd, and the fact that the author may be part of it. Thus, Soja refers to Jameson: 'Fredric Jameson, perhaps the pre-eminent American Marxist literary critic' (p. 62). Jameson repays the compliment: 'that new spatiality implicit in the post-modern (which Ed Soja's Postmodern Geographies now places on the agenda in so eloquent and timely a fashion)' (1989, p . 45). Soja refers to Harvey: 'A brilliant example of this flexible halfway house of Lat... (查看原文)
The argument is that the need for the security of boundaries, the requirement for such a defensive and counter-positional definition of identity, is culturally masculine. Moreover, many feminists have argued against such ways of thinking, such definitions of identity. The argument is that we need to have the courage to abandon such defensive – yet designed for dominance – means of definition. Many feminists have argued for “thinking in terms of relations”. (查看原文)
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'. (查看原文)
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 wo... (查看原文)
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". (查看原文)
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. (查看原文)
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. (查看原文)
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. (查看原文)
“The spatial” then, it is argued here, can be seen as constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales, from the global reach of finance and telecommunications, through the geography of the tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within the town, the settlement, the household and the workplace. It is a way of thinking in terms of the ever-shifting geometry of social/power relations, and it forces into view the real multiplicities of space-time. It is a view of space opposed to that which sees it as a flat, immobilized surface, as stasis even as no more than threatening chaos-the opposite of stasis- which is to see space as the opposite of History, and as the(consequently)de
politicized. The spatial is both open to, and a necessary e... (查看原文)
